Recruitment Consulting - Its always filled with new challenges

As we always find it amusing how we keep on losing candidates at the last minute, how we are not able to find the right fit, how we are not able to make candidates aware about the exact job description is and more importantly we are not able to gauge what is in the mind of the prospective candidates. All we can agree to the fact that recruitment is a thankless job with a consistent probability of losing out candidate at every stage. Given below are the factors which i feel contribute to different challenges :-

Candidate Experience - The way candidates are treated during the hiring process mirrors the way they will be treated after hiring. The biggest challenge here is the co-ordination between recruitment consultant and the hiring company and subsequent challenges between the HR and business. Most of the candidates always complain about being "left in dark" in the process and are not fully engaged in the process.

Distorted information- If we just understand how the information flows , we would know how tough it is to get the right information to last mile connectivity

This may not hold true for some cases though wherein the stages might be less, but majorly this is exactly one of the fundamental reasons why these issues take place, our structure and capabilities are arranged in this way which may ensure that some of the critical information is not captured or communicated to the right candidate. Not only the information shared with the candidate, we also typically hear from the clients that we are not on right track of sourcing.

Everyone needs a rockstar - This is something which everyone strives for, how we can get a superstar in a CTC and experience constrained environment. The excitement of identifying a rockstar after cumbersome process of recruitment may be short-lived, as such super talents are in demand all over the market. As world is getting more complex, the technology is advancing, a decent performer may not get a look in for many enticing roles. to catch hold of that talent for a recruiter or a consultant may be challenging.

Turbulence of our industry - Our industry works on uncertainty, 100 positions are open at once, 50 suddenly go on hold, 25 have been internally identified and the fight for next 25 is a fight between multiple vendors. The process in itself is so challenging that we end up fighting fire all the time. the dynamics never support the vendors and more than our process and turn around time, there are certain things which are never in our hand. Nor recruitment companies can hire more people to support seemingly new mandates nor the current workforce is able to deal with this tremendous pressure

Exhausted market - In today's trend, when in-house hiring and referral structure has become extremely strong for the companies, the consultant usually find themselves hiring for a role which has already been scrutinized to an extent that finding fresh and deserving candidates become an extremely big challenge

Cutting through the clutter - Since, the talented and the deserving candidates are always less than the demand, there is always a challenge to pick them up from multiple recruiters who are breathing down their neck and hence it becomes a challenge for consultants to get the right people for that particular role. Not only does it is difficult to find people for this, but it recruiter negatively as well.

Internal branding of recruitment consultancies- (From consultancy to corporate) - If you ask aspiring recruiters in a consultancy about their next career move, lot of them would like to work for corporate sector ( they do not consider consultancy as a corporate company ). This is a fundamental issue which lot of recruitment vendors fail to address. Barring few consultancies, most of them are usually less structured, sales focused and are not keen to look at this business as the one with long term vision. It becomes a training center of talented resources who want to latch on to any opportunity that they foresee in the future. I would also say this doesn't hold for every recruiter but majorly that is where a top talent is lost.

In my next article, i will come up with the possible solutions to these problems and will like to hear from you all about regular challenges.

Hope this article makes sense !