Companies hoping to hire the best and brightest workers often, understandably, place a lot of focus on applicants. What are their motivations? What are applicants facing in the job market? And so on. But it’s also important for employers to think about their existing staff within the recruitment function.
What challenges are they facing? How can companies keep their recruitment team happy and engaged?
Recruiters Feeling the Pinch
A new report from Hiretual titled “What’s the Demand for Talent Acquisition?” suggests some of the top challenges for recruiters in 2021. These challenges include longer recruiting life cycles, less responsive candidates, and more pressure from employers to hire more and hire faster. These challenges can obviously create a stressful and high-pressure work environment, which can cause problems for engagement and retention in this critical job function.
Moreover, the Hiretual report found that almost half of recruiters are not fully satisfied with their compensation. For the companies feeling these twin challenges most acutely, this creates a double whammy of potential retention challenges among recruiting staff.
But Hiring Environment for Recruiters is Strong
Fortunately, according to the report, business hiring needs have increased the broader demand for skilled talent acquisition leaders up by a factor of six compared to January, increasing the value of talent professionals, and providing significant leverage for career growth. In fact, the report shows that there were over 305,000 open job postings in the U.S. for recruiters and talent acquisition professionals as of September 2021. As with any job function, a high level of demand on the part of employers combined with a relatively low level of supply will always be a recipe for companies increasing compensation and other benefits as well as addressing key employee complaints to attract and retain staff.
The goal for companies in their recruitment process is to hire exceptional workers to fill key positions essential to the company’s broader business strategy. But it’s important to keep in mind that a key element to that process is the recruitment team itself. Understanding the challenges this team faces and what members of the team are looking for in their own careers can help businesses ensure that they’re well-positioned to hire and retain the best and brightest throughout their organizations.