Businesses that have managed to survive and thrive in 2022 have done a commendable job. With the new year just around the corner, employers must necessarily note that the modern job market now manifests several new complexities and trends. Understanding these hiring challenges is a critical element in the level of recruitment success businesses can expect in 2024.
From a looming global recession to changes in employee behavior, this blog explores some of the major challenges businesses need to face head on in order to make sense of the changing job market. Read on to find out more.
Table of Contents
Deciding When to Upskill/Reskill Workers VS Hiring Externally
When a key talent gap arises, businesses generally choose between one of two approaches. One is to promote an internal employee to a new role, after training them to acquire the necessary skills or experience for the role. The second approach is to hire an external candidate that already has the requisite skillset.
Deciding when to choose between internal and external hiring is always a tough decision, especially for centralized recruitment models. This decision is likely to become even more challenging in 2024.
On one hand, employers run the risk of training internal associates for a role that may not open up during their tenure. Conversely, they run the risk of hiring an external candidate after considerable effort when an internal employee with the right skillset would have been a much more efficient approach.
Unfortunately, there is no cheat sheet to help employers choose between the two models. Each instance will depend on circumstances unique to the business, the role, the workforce configuration, and of course, prevailing market conditions.
Offering Competitive Compensation and Benefits Plans
With employees exercising greater mobility amid remote and hybrid working models, businesses can no longer risk offering below-market compensation and benefits plans to their employees. With competitors in every niche becoming increasingly aggressive in their hiring practices, employers risk losing their best-performing talent to organizations offering a higher compensation and benefits mix.
In fact, instead of leveraging more innovative ideas for talent, many competitors cherrypick the employees they desire from other companies. To prevent losing their best workers, as well as incurring the additional hiring costs involved in replacing them, businesses need to reevaluate and readjust their compensation scales and benefits plans in line with what candidates need.
Creating Meaningful Candidate and Employment Experiences
Offering better employee and candidate experiences is no longer an optional exercise for employers serious about hiring success. The experience that candidates obtain during the hiring and onboarding process will increase hiring success and lower employee churn.
In fact, a great candidate experience can increase the average tenure along with the rate of successful new hires. This should not simply be limited to an employer’s own processes, but should also extend to third-party hiring partners like mortgage staffing agencies.
Finding a Balance Between Talent Needs and Payroll Expenses
On one hand, businesses cannot afford to let talent gaps exist for long; on the other hand, they cannot allow their talent needs to supersede the need to keep payroll expenses sustainable. Payroll expenses are among the most significant line items that businesses spend on in any given period. Each new hire represents a substantial increase to this already significant expenditure.
Hiring too many employees (or exceeding expenditure limitations) can quickly make it challenging for businesses to meet their payroll expenses. If this occurs, a business can quickly lose credibility among its current and future workers. This, in turn, makes it even harder to onboard new talent.
Even the best engineering staffing agencies will find it difficult to source new talent for such a firm. On the other hand, too few workers on the payroll mean a lower payroll expenditure, but can also mean that a business may have several talent gaps that could compromise its survival.
FAQs
How can recruitment challenges be overcome?
By understanding trends in the employment market as well as changing employee needs.
How do you keep up with recruiting trends?
By keeping in touch with stakeholders, getting feedback from employees, and engaging with candidates.
What are the keys to successful recruiting?
Evolving with changing needs and behaviors in specific talent pools as well as the broader global candidate market.