There are nearly two unemployed Americans for each of the 4.8 million job openings in the U.S., and yet many organizations still struggle to find the right fit for crucial talent needs.
In some cases, it’s a skills shortage and no candidate quite measures up. But in many other cases, it’s a recruiting shortage.
Many organizations currently lack the recruiting talent in house to find, connect with, and hire for their needs. It’s an epidemic affecting many organizations that find themselves unable to recruit for critical positions for a variety of reasons.
Diagnosing the Problem
For one, you might not have the resources needed to connect with the right candidates. Or maybe the limited crew that survived the 2008 layoffs doesn’t have the bandwidth to keep up with new demand. And sometimes the candidates you have to recruit are so rare and work in such specialized fields that you don’t have the right recruiting knowledge internally to effectively attract these candidates to new opportunities at your company.
These three challenges are pushing more organizations to look for outside help that can close the gaps in their recruiting while maintaining the lean teams and resources established during the recession. Here are the three biggest obstacles to meeting your recruiting goals and how some organizations are solving them using recruitment process outsourcing (RPO).
3 Ways to Solve Your Recruiting Headaches
1. Resources. Whether you’re in need of more in-house recruiters or could use better technology and tools for finding and enticing candidates, you’re starting with an immediate disadvantage in recruiting.
Without the proper resources, time and cost per hire will suffer, and the hiring process can be dragged out for months. By partnering with an RPO firm, many organizations have gained use of tools and processes that can build out a pipeline of candidates before they’re needed, and can pursue new avenues that should already be established, like recruiting through social media.
2. Bandwidth. Even if you have all the resources you need at your fingertips, are you prepared to quickly ramp up hiring if needed? Could you find 10 coders to expedite an unexpected project? Could you quickly onboard a dozen engineers to push a job back on schedule?
These kinds of requests can overwhelm most in-house teams and leave certain talent needs unmet. That’s when many seek out an RPO partner to add or subtract recruiters as needed and gain a much more elastic bandwidth that accelerates the process when hiring goals shift.
3. Recruiting knowledge. Sometimes the candidates your company needs are one in a million. Recruiting the kind of talent that’s working at the highest levels of their industry takes a certain specialty that you might not have in house. Indeed, the candidate you need might not even be looking for a job. But by tapping outside experts in an RPO firm who understand what makes these candidates tick and can speak their language, you can more quickly and effectively find the experts you need.
The new paradigm for in-house recruiting can leave deficits that delay hiring and add to the overall cost of finding and hiring the talent needed to push your company’s strategic vision forward. And while lack of resources, bandwidth, and knowledge can hamstring the recruiting efforts of even the most well-regarded employers, many organizations are now safeguarding against recruiting shortages by partnering with RPO firms to fill the gaps and quickly onboard even the most elusive candidates.