Why Recruitment Teams Are Overworked

Never has so much been invested in talent acquisition

Understand how digital transformation, the increase in the number of professions and behavioral changes between generations are causing HRs to be racking their brains in search of innovation and rethinking their retention and human development policies and practices to alleviate team challenges of recruitment.

In recent years, we have witnessed significant changes in the market and in the way companies search for talent. Digital transformation and the continuous development of new tools and technologies have created a massive demand for technology professionals in different sectors of the economy, not to mention that not long ago, some of the so-called “professions of the future” did not even exist.

Community Managers, Digital Influencers, Talent Managers, Geneticists, Experts in Technology Experience, Processes, and People, Big Data Analysts and Engineering, AI, UI, and UX Designers, among others, are professions that are highly valued and in demand, are generating a movement across the recruitment market. Qualified people are NOT actively seeking new opportunities in the market. The market is DESPERATELY behind them.

In addition, the most recent generations, Y and Z, also bring a strong impact to this scenario. The profile of people of the new generation are usually more demanding with their activities and purposes, they are looking for experiences (personal and professional), they are more immediate and do not mind quitting in a short time and not creating bonds as our parents or grandparents did.

To assimilate and support all these changes in behavior and how, year after year, this has impacted recruiting teams, we brought a piece of a blog post from our friends at Xerpa, about a survey by Robert Half, which says “the rate of turnover has increased by around 38% in recent years. In Brazil, this number exceeds 82%!… The study involved 13 countries and contacted approximately 1,700 HR directors.”

Understanding the behavior of generations is critical to your recruitment strategy

The impact on recruitment teams and the competition for professionals

Recruitment professionals, making an honorable mention here for Tech Recruiters, are feeling all these movements that the new generation and new professions have caused in the market, so much so that, in partnership with other HR subsystems, they are squirming, thinking and rethinking branding, retention, and people training strategies to balance the teams’ equation.

The people who are already performing, the so-called “new roles of the future”, are constantly being sought by the market, especially by headhunters to offer them a job opportunity.

It's safe to say that these qualified professionals are no longer applying to traditional job sites, let alone entering their dream company's career page. Companies are frantically pitching these people every other day.

Job sites are increasingly losing relevance for corporate positions that require qualifications or seniority. However, it is not true to say that they have ceased to exist if you have a recruiting team in-house to screen hundreds or thousands of resumes, it can be a good source for operational or entry-level vacancies.

Still scouring the market for information about the permanence of technology professionals, we found an article about IT Turnover from Geekhunter, which says: “According to the Computerworld website, on average an IT professional stays at Amazon for one year, on Google the average length of stay is 1.1 year.”

Employer branding is very important, but only for a few!

What is your company's breath to fight with market giants? In such a competitive market, the recruitment force of companies now has, more than ever, a vital role in the operation of an organization, mainly driven by the technology market, which now requires an increasingly fast dynamic. Finding the best person in less time – a task that can only be performed by knowing many people, that is, maintaining a high volume of interviews, demands a team with seniority and size. Maintaining a recruiting force with these requirements today means high investment for organizations. In this sense, smaller companies will have to resort to other alternatives to meet their competitiveness in finding qualified people – in many cases with an external recruitment partner.

Integrate, train, develop, and…is the ROI of this strategy positive? It takes, on average, 6 months for a person in an initial position to be integrated, understand the company's processes and culture, and, at least, be ready to perform their activities.

Regardless of whether the strategies work or not, companies that have hiring challenges are seeing their turnovers skyrocket and therefore have been taking an active stance toward recruitment. This is the necessary effectiveness and dynamics that are possible through hunting (active recruitment).

What is Hunting and how can it be a key factor in companies' recruiting strength?

Starting in the opposite direction, passive recruitment (Job Posting) is nothing more than the famous job advertisement. The company advertises an opportunity and expects people to apply.

In active recruitment, a recruiting person makes direct contact with people who have essential characteristics for their position and invites them to the selection process.

Due to digitalization, an increase in the number of professions, and market demands, as we mentioned earlier, companies have sought to invest in the strength of their recruitment teams internally or in addition to an external recruitment partner.

When do companies typically turn to a recruiting partner?

• When expertise is needed to recruit a specific skill in a particular area or even geographic region;
• Seasonal demand — when there is a seasonal spike in hiring for a particular project or problem-solving.
• When there is a need to bring impartiality;
• For training a Jr. of the internal recruitment team in a given vacancy;
• To increase the scope of market mapping for a position, after all, hunting is done by connections;
• When market and company demands call for speed and assertiveness to implement a team, project, or corporate objective;
• When the internal HR team is extremely strategic and focused on personal development, they prefer to keep the BP team's focus on management support. For this, they delegate the mapping and selection of professionals, an activity considered more operational, to an external partner capable of intelligent support.
   

Conclusions: Stop waiting for the right person for your job to knock on your door.

 

Hunting (active recruiting) is essential for a high-performing recruiting team. Qualified people, for the most part, are not handing out CVs or applying for jobs on job sites. To reach them, it is necessary to reach them. The fact that they are not looking at the market, however, does not mean that they are not willing to listen to a proposal.

Some vacancies require certain technical knowledge or experience in a specific area of the market, through research techniques, headhunters are able to segment the searches, increasing assertiveness and the reach of people mapping.

When posting a vacancy on a job site, the tendency is to have a high number of profiles applying, requiring the time and effort of a strategic team of people to be dedicated to operational activity.

By directly accessing the ideal profile, the number of participants is much reduced and, at the same time, much more assertive, which allows reducing the hiring SLA (duration of the process) and thus freeing up the attraction team to focus on the interview process onwards, a key factor in getting the hiring right, after all, who better than HR itself to understand your culture and needs.

It is most effective for positions with high turnover. Some positions have a high turnover rate, for these, it is often unfeasible to invest in training and it is essential that the recruitment is efficient, because here, there is no time, to find an adherent person with the necessary experience for the function.

Beware, you may be investing time and resources in the wrong strategy. Recruitment teams should focus on analyzing the intersection of recruitment indicators, people development ROI, and turnover, to understand if the organization is throwing money down the drain and focusing on parts of the process that could be automated.

Many companies have invested a lot of time from their internal teams in screening, selecting, and validating out-of-profile people, while they could be investing in career development and management support policies to increase productivity and retain their teams.