10 Recruiting Tips for Hard-to-Fill Roles

We no longer live in an era where finding talent is easy. The days of posting a job, sifting through the applications and making a quick hiring decision are long gone.

Today, you can't just hope to hire the best talent. You get to work for it. And work hard. With the changing dynamics in the recruitment industry, the time to level up your recruitment plan is now. After all, recruiting employees is no cinch.

In an era where everyone wants to hire the right candidates for their jobs, the competition in the HR world is fiercer than ever. When the going is already tough, how to find the perfect fit for some of the most challenging positions out there?

In this article, we will share some useful tips to find the ideal candidate for hard-to-fill positions. But first, let's understand why are some roles tough to fill as compared to others?

Why are some roles hard-to-fill ?

If you're serious about finding the right talent for your jobs, chances are you are keen to learn what makes a position difficult to fill. We can help you scratch the surface with insights sourced from the top industry research reports.

Here are some common reasons why certain roles are difficult to fill:

• Shortage of candidates based on the skills, qualifications, or talent required for the job
• Undesirable job location
• Recent corporate restructuring or negative reputation
• Company culture doesn't seem too promising to the applicants
• Weak employer branding
• Below market average compensation/benefits linked to the job
• Too short or too lengthy job description that fails to interest applicants

While the reasons why a job can get hard-to-fill may be many, you can always turn the tables. All you need is the right knowledge. Read on to find how you can hire top talent for the most difficult roles to fill.

10 Recruiting tips for hard-to-fill roles

Today's world offers an endless supply of talent, yet many HR professionals are still struggling to take advantage of that talent. It's time to think beyond the standard recruitment practices and start using the following tips to attract talent for hard-to-fill roles.

Here's what you can do to turn your recruitment challenges into opportunities:

Find Loopholes To Eliminate Friction

At times your existing hiring process needs a careful review to find loopholes that may make hiring difficult for some roles. It could be a longer-than-usual waiting in between interview rounds. Or lack of the right information to the candidates.

Collectively, these small loopholes make the job hiring a lot less smooth than what it should be. So, steamroll hiring bottlenecks and expedite your recruitment process by giving it a major overhaul.

Create A Strategy

Once you have eliminated friction from your existing recruitment process, it's time for a revival. Create a strategic recruitment plan that focuses on your hiring goals.

From the right job-posting platforms and active talent pipelines to the tools that make recruitment faster and more straightforward, there are several things you need to consider while finalising a recruitment strategy.

Build Your Social Media Presence

Armed with social media, organisations can hire people best suited for tough jobs. For example, by having a presence on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and staying relevant with interesting job promotions on all these channels, you can attract and network with prospective candidates.

Highlight your company's strengths on all these platforms and keep track of the key metrics that tell what works and what doesn't to improve candidate engagement.

Need some inspiration to build your social media presence? What Accenture does here is solid gold. Check Accenture’s different social media profiles to find out why it’s the perfect example of impressive employer branding.

Focus On The Job Description

A job description is one of the most critical elements of a successful recruitment process. To ensure that potential candidates don't scroll past your job content:

• Make it compelling
• Work with the hiring manager to understand the job's critical requirements, the experience, qualifications needed, and the benefits offered
• Use positive language in the description
• Show the prospective candidates why your company is the employer of choice by including links to your social media pages

Lean Into Employee Referrals

Give your hiring process a positive push with employee referrals. By requesting your employees for candidate recommendations, you get an additional (and much needed) tool to recruit for hard-to-fill roles.

Thus, make employee referral campaigns a part of your recruitment strategy and nurture your connection with your employees.

By making your employees your hiring buddies, you can quickly scale up your teams and bring in more qualified leads for potential employees.

And it's a cost-saving tool too. Imagine not having to pay external recruiters to find the right fit for a job! Wonderful, isn’t it?

Elevate Your Employer Brand

Employees today need more than fat paychecks and lavish perks. They seek a culture that aligns with their values, lifestyles, and long-term goals. And as a brand, you ought to give it to them.

Create a positive employer brand with growth and development opportunities, excellent online presence, social responsibility, and sustainability initiatives, and you are sure to attract candidates for those otherwise hard-to-fill roles.

That's because when you work towards standing out in the recruitment landscape, you deliver impressions that you care for your existing and future workforce. And that, there, is a lead magnet for top talent.

Also, don't forget the importance of positive communication throughout the recruitment process. Each interaction that you make with a candidate should leave them with a positive outlook towards your brand, no matter the hiring decision.

Remember, candidates these days have the power of social media to bring any negative aspect of your organisation into focus. And that's the last thing you would want while building a strong employer image to hire for hard-to-fill positions.

See how leading customer data platform Segment has built a strong employer brand with content that shows why it is a great place to work.

Leverage Internal Mobility

Sometimes when hiring goes awry, it's time to pump the brakes and stop wandering. You may need to look within the organisation to find what you have been searching in the outside world.

When you take the internal hiring route, you find resources that are already well-acquainted with your corporate culture and the way your business works.

Training and upskilling existing employees and preparing them to step up the ladder by taking up hard-to-fill roles is an efficient cornerstone for talent succession as well.

Go For Interim Staffing

If internal hiring isn't working for you and finding the right candidate through external recruitment practices seems like a far-cry, try interim staffing.

One of the best reasons to go for temporary staffing is that it keeps the work going on till you find the ideal permanent employee for the role.

It's also a fantastic tactic to test the waters and judge a candidate's caliber before making them permanent.

Hiring a skilled interim employee is also an excellent decision when it comes to training new or existing employees so that they can take up that hard-to-fill role with greater confidence, knowledge and skills.

Extend Your Talent Circles

Every company wants to win the war for talent. But only a few care to move beyond the traditional recruitment channels and extend their talent circles to achieve that goal.

Build a constant pipeline of talent by exploring networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. Dig into web groups, forums, and related sources to find talent.

Also, consider recruiting fresh talent to make the most of their out of box thinking and new ways of handling tough jobs.

Analyse, Tweak, Persist

While strategic thinking and branding can help your brand draw talent for hard-to-fill jobs, there's no substitute for continuous improvement.

Monitor your process regularly to find bottlenecks and modify your strategy as per the changing scenarios.

As Lawrence Bossidy said, "Nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day, you bet on people, not on strategies."

Examine the changes needed, make them, and keep at it. It's the roadmap to setting benchmarks with realistic compensations and perks. And that’s what will take you towards the employees you need for hard-to-fill roles.

Build your talent team like a pro

The takeaway from all these tips? HR people need to go the extra mile to recruit for those hard-to-fill roles. After all, these are hard-to-fill jobs!

So, you need to do more than you usually do to achieve hiring success with them.

Dive deeper into your processes to create a winning recruitment strategy for filling the most challenging jobs.

Think creatively. Network more. Focus on building a brand. And leverage industry insights to hire like a pro.

Feel free to reach out to Wiggli for an aide that can help you through the hiring process from start to finish and set yourself up for recruitment success.

Happy hiring!