Are there any disadvantages of traditional recruitment that make finding talent challenging? A friend of mine was looking for a job recently. After sending over 200 CVs within three months, he got frustrated. The positions he applied for were all entry-level, and he only chose those he knew he could be good at (either having prior experience or competencies). Yet, no responses came.
Then, at a family dinner, he mentioned his struggles. His father, a previous director of a big company, and his sister, a recruiter, gave him two different pieces of advice.
His father told him he should reach out to several companies aligned with his predispositions and ask for a job. As he said, that’s how he hired his best employees in the past – all he needed was the right competencies and motivation to learn.
His sister ridiculed the idea. She said that to make it, he needs to tweak his CV to include the right keywords recruiters or ATS would filter for.
Curious, my friend tried the second option. The result? Within a few weeks, he had three great interviews lined up – one at the company he had already applied to before.
What’s Going on With the Recruitment?
The pandemic undoubtedly caused a lot of disturbance in the labour market. Last year, the UN labour experts estimated that by the end of 2022, over 200 million people will be unemployed. Many of them, fair to say, with the qualifications and experience from the jobs they lost during the crisis. The lack of job seekers was far from the problem, too. In the UK, for example, at the peak of the pandemic, there were 506 applications for a single low-skilled position.
Even the people who had jobs were keen on finding new employment. The poll from August 2021 showed that 65% of the respondents were actively looking for another job.
And yet, a staggering 83% of SHRM respondents claim to have trouble finding suitable candidates.
My friend’s story, combined with the overall situation, sparked my interest. People are struggling to find jobs, and companies are struggling to find good candidates. Is the skill shortage entirely to blame across the board, or could it be that recruiters are unable to identify the available talent?
War for Talent VS Disadvantages of Traditional Recruitment
It’s undeniable that companies globally are having a hard time filling positions with the right people. Already back in 2015, 73% of Randstad respondents said that ‘war for talent’ was an accurate description of the business environment.
Fast-forward a few years, and the metaphor seems to remain accurate. In Denmark alone, 33% of all recruitments in 2021 were in vain. As of February 2022, the US had over 11 million job openings – and presumably no fitting individuals to take them.
Although 75% of HR professionals attribute their struggles to a skill shortage, there appears to be a disconnect between what recruiters want to find and what the methods they use show them.
Resumés And Talent Don’t Have Much to Do With Each Other
To keep pace with the ever-developing world, recruitment also undergoes changes. Nevertheless, these changes may not be substantial enough for the current demands. For 52% of hiring professionals, resumé screening, seen by some as a relic of the past, remains the 1st or 2nd most important evaluation method.
But can resumés be reliable when looking for talent? Or are they one of the disadvantages of traditional recruitment that stops candidates and companies from meeting their goals?
Does Talent Show on a Resumé?
Recruiters continue to claim they search for talent, yet 36% of them say that lack of experience is why they don’t find enough suitable candidates. Perhaps that’s because resumés don’t allow candidates to show talent – only past work experience and education.
Two elements that, paradoxically, aren’t even good predictors of future job performance, as proven by research. Yet that’s basically what resumés focus on.
Especially in the case of people looking for entry-level jobs, this method doesn’t seem valid at all. If the point of the first job is to gain experience, there simply won’t be any on their CV.
Even a candidate’s education shouldn’t be considered a strong or weak factor during recruitment in many cases. After all, people have various reasons for pursuing a specific degree. My friend from the story has a degree in religious studies and now is a high-scored employee of one of the world’s biggest IT companies.
We need to change the mindset and not let educational background determine whether a candidate has the right skills or competencies to succeed at a job. Mainly when nowadays people have endless options to gain skills without the help of university courses.
Shrinking Pool. Candidates Don’t Seem to Like Traditional Recruitment
When struggling to find suitable applicants, recruiters want to maximise their talent pool. Especially currently when companies don’t only wish to hire the best talent. They also want to align their efforts with corporate diversity goals. Sadly, that’s where another disadvantage of traditional recruitment enters the stage – it shrinks your talent pool.
As humans, we all have our preferences, and if something doesn’t live up to our expectations – we move on. When a product doesn’t satisfy your needs, you stop buying it. If you don’t like the service at a café, you find a new one. There are options, and we won’t hesitate to use them.
Recruitment is no different. If a candidate is not happy with your hiring process, you may never see them again.
A staggering 65% of candidates report that their most recent application process was frustrating. To make things worse, 30% of them decided to opt-out of the process for that reason.
And contrary to popular belief, it’s not the length of the process that irritates candidates the most. In fact, the Gartner report shows that the optimal time job seekers want to spend on an application is between 10-30 minutes.
The reason is that when a candidate is truly interested in a job, they want to prove their skills and competencies in the best way possible. Unfortunately, many feel that resumés don’t give them that option.
Over 50% of candidates name work samples as a form of skill assessment they’d like to see in the recruitment. Are companies good at satisfying that need? Not so much. According to Murray Resources, only 33% of surveyed employers say they use skill assessments when hiring.
Continuing to hold on to traditional recruitment can deter valuable talent from you and undermine your diversity goals. And it appears that some companies are becoming aware of the issue. 25% of respondents stated that the biggest challenge to recruiting more diverse people is the unwillingness among leadership to deviate from existing recruiting practices.
We now see a candidate-driven market where the voices of those you wish to hire should matter most. Failing to listen to those voices can cause serious problems for your bottom line, especially when competition isn’t slowing down.
Matching Skills Will Guarantee the Success – Right?
Recruiters want to hire people, yet they continue to assess them through the prism of a few paragraphs depicting a candidate’s past. Having the right skills is undoubtedly important, and if you manage to find a candidate who fulfils your requirements perfectly – great.
And yet, 11% of hires fail due to a lack of skills. Skills they were deemed to have to be hired in the first place. How could this be?
Most people look for a job out of necessity rather than pleasure. What happens when you become desperate? You may try to enhance your chances and tweak your resumé to look better.
In fact, it’s more common than we’d like to think. According to Zippia, 30% of the surveyed admitted to bending the truth or straight-up lying on their resumés to look more competent.
Every company wants to find a great candidate, and every candidate wants to find a good job. But if your recruitment doesn’t give fair chances to everyone to prove their talent, candidates may also not play fair with you.
When job seekers realise the only way to even get your attention is by giving you what you want to see (or what your ATS will look for), you risk ending up in a situation where you may not be getting exactly what you thought you were.
Moreover, over one-third of HR leaders report a general decrease in candidate quality. But what does it mean precisely? That fewer candidates have the required education? Or maybe instead of five years of experience, now more of them have only three?
Yet again, if your recruitment goal is to find the best talent, then your methods should help you see it. At Innoflow, we argue that resumés are one of the disadvantages of traditional recruitment that limit your ability to see the potential and competencies of many candidates. So how to fix that?
Alternative Method That Lets You Uncover Talent. Unbiased
Recruitment as we know it has been with us for a long time, and changing habits is far from easy. Nonetheless, there are alternatives recruiters can use to satisfy candidates’ expectations and increase the level of competencies among the final candidates, as reported by over 33% of our customers.
The alternative recruitment method we propose is case-based screening. It’s a form of skill assessment that allows your candidates to prove whether they have what it takes to perform the required tasks.
How does it work? A case (work sample) is crafted to suit the position you’re trying to fill in. For instance, if you’re looking for a marketing designer, candidates could be asked to create a visual for a marketing campaign fully customised to your organisation’s needs and expectations.
How does it compare to the disadvantages of traditional recruitment?
✅ All candidates can showcase their skills and competencies, not worrying that their resumé won’t be enough
✅ You get to test-drive a candidate and see what their talent looks like in action without relying on the self-reported description of skills
✅ You open your talent pool to people from diverse backgrounds as they won’t feel intimidated by a vast list of requirements
✅ Your recruitment will be unbiased. The only thing you’ll evaluate candidates on is their case solution (no access to personal information)
Everybody has talent, and we stand by this statement wholeheartedly at Innoflow. We strive to perfect a recruitment method that gives everybody a fair and unbiased chance at getting a meaningful work-life regardless of their background.
Bring your recruitment to the 21st century and offer candidates something very few other companies do. Be a breath of fresh air challenging the status quo of traditional recruitment and join on our journey to unleash the full potential of individuals and find the best talent for your team.
Should Recruitment Go Back to the Roots?
In the 1970s, slightly over 100 million people had post-secondary education. Now, it’s over 840 million. And while people are constantly raising their competencies, there’s a prevalent belief that we lack talented people to succeed in jobs. Perhaps the problem nowadays is that we put too much weight on proving skills with certificates and degrees, forgetting that talent and competencies don’t always show on paper.
It appears as if in the past it was easier to simply get a chance and make our way up. Now, to quote my friend from the introduction, recruiters almost force many candidates to fake it till they make it.
Jack Welch, the late CEO of General Electric, once said: ‘change before you have to’. Employers need to take this advice to heart and revise the disadvantages of traditional recruitment that can harm their position in the competitive market. Or miss out on talented individuals struggling to make you notice them.
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