Hr Tech e Applicant Tracking System, Recruiting tips | 21 November 2023

Talent shortage: Inrecruiting’s solutions in facing it

The talent shortage, better known as the Talent Shortage, has reached a threshold not seen before in the past decade. By 2023, about 4 in 5 employers say they are having difficulty finding the qualified people they need. Talent shortage, as well as skills shortage, is a recognized problem now in every industry and challenges all HR departments. Among the various strategies we have tried to cope with it, in the area of technology, some features of Inrecruiting have been particularly appreciated by our clients. Find out about them in this article.

SUMMARY

What is talent shortage
Talent shortage: the problem and the causes
How to overcome the talent shortage?
Inrecruiting’s features to address the talent shortage
Other strategic retention and engagement solutions

What is talent shortage

According to a study conducted by Manpower Group, today about 77 percent of employers say they are having difficulty filling a vacant position in the company-more than double the number in 2013 (35 percent).

This figure shows that despite the presence of demand from companies, the mismatch with supply is severe. The talent shortage phenomenon refers precisely to this shortage of talent to hire and highlights the inability of the labour market to provide companies with qualified resources.

Increasingly, the term skill shortage is also used to refer to the skill shortage on the part of candidates, as well as the difficulty for companies to find resources with specific skills according to their needs.

A study conducted by McKinsey shows the current extent of the skill gap: 87 percent of companies, in fact, experience a skills shortage or expect to experience one within a few years.

A case in point is the IT sector in recent times where, despite the growing demand for qualified personnel, they are struggling to hire: to date, among the technical skills most sought after by employers are IT&Data (27 percent), but 78 percent say they still cannot find the people they need.

Talent shortage: the problem and the causes

But why is there a shortage of talent and skills?

Among the causes are certainly recent phenomena such as Quite Quitting, Great Resignation, changes related to digitization, technological innovation, but not only that. Other more circumstantial factors – related to the employee’s work life – may also contribute:

unsatisfactory benefits and wages
difficulty identifying with company policies that are distant from one’s values (e.g., little attention to issues such as diversity and inclusion)
fragile work-life balance
low job flexibility and openness to hybrid work
personal dissatisfaction and limited opportunities for professional growth

These are all elements that can cause employee engagement to falter and trigger episodes of corporate turnover with the effect of leaving additional roles in the workforce unfilled and requiring new hires that might be problematic anyway, especially if there is a lack of talent in a particular area!

How to overcome the talent shortage?

On the one hand, HR departments have to deal with the general lack of talent in the labor market; on the other hand, they are faced with the factors just mentioned that can only exacerbate the problem.

The most effective approaches to overcoming the talent – and skills – shortage focus on improving talent acquisition strategies and processes and engaging employees with targeted retention paths. Here are some examples.

Inrecruiting’s features to address the talent shortage

There is no doubt about the link between technology and talent shortage: while the lack of talent with specific technical skills within companies may be responsible for the poor integration of technology and automated systems, it is precisely the latter that could help solve the problem itself.

At the attraction stage and throughout the talent acquisition process, an Applicant Tracking System such as Inrecruiting offers useful features for recruiters in companies and Employment Agencies to streamline and automate many routine tasks. Here are the most valued and useful ones for addressing talent shortage challenges.

Placing job ads in multiposting.

It is known that posting a well-crafted job ad is no guarantee of receiving applications that fit the job description. The choice of channels is also important. Being able to spread your ad on multiple job boards, job sites, and portals – free or paid – and why not, even share it on major social networks, would be great as long as you don’t have to waste time rewriting and uploading the ad to each channel!

Inrecruiting accompanies the recruiter throughout the process of creating and writing the job ad, and the multiposting system amplifies its visibility by publishing it simultaneously on all channels integrated with our ATS (e.g. Indeed, Talent.com, LinkedIn, Monster, Infojobs, etc.), with one click.

The recent addition of the QR Code of ads supports HR teams in instantly sharing, even offline, the job ad and subsequent application directly from mobile, in branches of employment agencies, career days and other recruiting events.

Configuring application forms

When finding new resources is already difficult, you need to focus on simplicity to attract talent. Making the candidate journey enjoyable also means eliminating all those sources of “disruption” that can undermine the candidate experience.

Being able to configure application forms, ad by ad, thus setting up specific fields/questions that create a personalized candidate experience for the ad, is definitely a big plus.

In this way, the candidate who no longer has to deal with long forms that are unsuitable for the position sought or that require too much information already at a preliminary stage. In addition to these features, Inrecruiting provides an automatic application form completion system based on a proprietary artificial intelligence engine (Inda) that facilitates registration by the candidate, reduces the dropout rate, and shortens application time.

Artificial intelligence for HR

74.9 percent of companies that took part in the Future of Jobs 2023 survey will integrate artificial intelligence within the next 5 years.

A growing awareness of the support AI can provide in performing repetitive, manual tasks and refining sought-after outcomes. In the area of recruiting, technology such as Inda can be easily integrated into ATS Inrecruiting to enhance the operation of the software.

CV Parsing, semantic engine, and job matching are the features most valued by our clients because they automate the reading and screening of CVs, facilitate the search of candidates within the database, intercept the right candidate for a job advertisement, and vice versa.

An outstanding contribution is also made by the skills and job title suggestion system that helps recruiters address skill shortage, deepen the skill gap, and identify the skills possessed by candidates compared to those required in the ads (Skills gap Analysis).

Candidate search systems

What if the right candidate’s CV is already right before our eyes?

When the talent shortage is so acute, underestimating the potential of your own CV database is a real mistake because that is where the right candidate might be hiding. If you have posted a similar job ad before or had done so for another client, chances are the candidate is already within your DB.

An advanced search system has specific filters to customize your search, explore the DB, and find the right candidate. Inrecruiting offers several levels of search (simple and advanced), the ability to make use of Boolean operators to refine the textual search for keywords (found in CV files), and, finally, an easily integrated semantic search engine.

The latter finds within the CVs and other archived documents, all direct matches with the keyword used and also with its synonyms: in this way, if even candidates have included different terms in their CVs than those used by the recruiter (e.g., salesman or sales instead of commercial), they will still be included among the selection results.

Massive communication with candidates

When a new position opens in the company, it can be useful to signal the announcement to candidates. Inrecruiting allows you to do this with a system for mass communication specifically for creating and sending SMS campaigns and newsletters directly from the ATS. Whether it’s for interview reminders or notifying progress on the hiring pipeline, for more detailed official communication, or for sharing career paths designed specifically for certain job categories, Sendin is Inrecruiting’s most widely used tool for our clients to massively communicate with candidates.

KPIs and analytics

A good practice for evaluating the effectiveness of one’s selection strategies involves monitoring KPIs and processes. Inrecruiting offers a wide range of recruiting KPIs and metrics that are tracked in real time and are essential both for determining the overall usefulness of recruiting and for making immediate, data-backed decisions (data-driven recruiting).

What are the most effective channels to use? Where do the most applications come from? What is the average length of selection? How long do candidates stay at any given stage of the process? Are there any bottlenecks-these? These are all questions that can be answered in the HR analytics section of Inrecruiting.

We have answered some of these questions in Source of Hire 2023, the document that brings together the main and most effective sources of recruitment.

Download Source of Hire