Top 5 Reasons Companies Struggle to Hire Recruiters

Are you having trouble hiring recruiters? Most companies are. Here are 5 reasons most companies are struggling:

Budget

Most companies don't have the proper budget allocated to talent acquisition which winds up putting a high requirement load on each recruiter that you do have on staff. It’s impossible for recruiters to provide a high-quality experience for hiring managers or candidates if they are overwhelmed with a high number of requirements.

It also makes it difficult for the recruiters to take time off. In an era where awareness on mental health and burnout is at an all-time high, show recruiters that you are committed to them by capping their requirement load per recruiter to a reasonable number. For growth-stage tech, this could be around 6-8 openings at a time. For more info on how many openings should be assigned to a recruiter, please read How Talent Acquisition Teams Should Approach Hiring Plans

Bad Hiring Plans

Most companies don't invest enough time developing a hiring plan. Many of them forget to factor in capacity for backfill hires or they put an unrealistic time to fill or capacity standards into the hiring plan which can make the hiring plan useless in 6-12 weeks.

For more information on hiring plans, read our blog post: How Talent Acquisition Teams Should Approach Hiring Plans.

Company Culture Not Optimized for Talent Acquisition

There is a general lack of appreciation and understanding for the value that recruiters bring to the table. The past couple of years have been difficult for everyone. But particularly for recruiters as demand for their skill set plummeted at the beginning of the pandemic. And now there's a huge whiplash and many of them are burnt out due to skyrocketing demand.

You need to have a culture, policies, and structure in place to prove to them that you are creating a healthy work environment where they can thrive, and in some cases recover from burnout.

Missing Technology

Most recruiters lack the operational and technology tools and services they need to help them achieve their hiring goals. There is still a mindset going around that relationship-based sales is enough to scale talent acquisition but this is not the case.

In revenue functions, we see robust technology stacks and a data-driven approach. But many times this is lacking within recruitment departments. Recruiters want to work for companies that understand recruiting operations and are willing to invest in the right technology to compete in this hyper-competitive market.

Poor Company Branding

A lack of focus on company branding, employer branding, producing assets for candidates, and a general lack of focus on creating great experiences for candidates can scare potential recruiters off from your company. If your company doesn't understand how important branding and the candidate experience is, the best recruiters won't work for you.

For more information on building an employer brand, listen to episode two of the Talent Acquisition Trends & Strategy podcast. Megan Bowen, the COO of Refine Labs, joins us to discuss how to build an employer brand: