Companies are seeking to grow in 2019 but often technical hiring challenges can derail their expansion plans.
Hiring technical staff is necessary but they’re especially tough to recruit in this tight job market. Competition for strategic skills is so severe that some employers are stockpiling critical talent even if they have no position for them currently.
Technical Hiring Challenges
Studies over several years indicate many organizations have to deal with major technical hiring challenges when recruiting unique skills. A large majority admit to making a poor hiring choice. Nearly two-thirds had issues with their hiring practice. About half have underestimated just how difficult hiring would be.
What causes these technical hiring challenges?
A major factor in hiring struggles seems to be that many businesses don’t have internal personnel to do recruiting. Because of that, the hiring process defaults to senior executives, or even the business owner. But their time and attention is already fully engaged in other management responsibilities. Because of competing demands, hiring is frequently delayed. Here’s the mistake. Hiring isn’t considered as urgent as other daily operation problems. That’s sacrificing long term success for a short-term issue.
A team or company that runs short-staffed is a warning sign of productivity loss and burnout. Untreated, it results in eventual personnel resentment and turnover. To resolve this situation, a company often makes a spur-of-the-moment, quick hire – often the wrong person.
Unsatisfactory Technical Hires
When organizations don’t properly check backgrounds or carelessly evaluate applicants, wrong hires result. In one survey about 80% indicated their business had made a bad hire. Based on Glassdoor research, it’s even worse. A whopping 95 percent of employers surveyed disclosed they make hiring errors each year by recruiting the wrong employees.
Of course, thorough recruiting is not easy when you need help urgently. But you can’t rush to hire just anyone. That’s when you make the wrong choice. This forces you to reverse course. That means restarting the entire process, thus wasting even more time.
Consequences of an Unsatisfactory Technical Hire
And bad hires produce multiple problems for their employers:
• needless effort recruiting and training employees who don’t work out
• possibility of lost business
• lost productivity
• increased stress on the other team members
• the impression of the company gets stained
• lost confidence in managers’ skill in hiring good people
Technical Hiring Challenges – Not a Stroll in the Park
But what does it take to reverse these challenges? What’s the timeframe to correct the error and restore workplace stability? Let’s say you’ve hired the wrong technical or IT skill for the position. It generally won’t take too long to come to that conclusion – within 1-2 months.
But that’s just the first part of a four-month marathon. Here’s an estimated timeline to fix a bad hiring decision:
• Recognition of bad hire 4 weeks
• Assess and terminate worker 9 weeks
• Recruit and hire new employee 5 weeks
• TOTAL 18 weeks
That means about 18 weeks of added awkwardness for the workgroup, lower productivity and potentially damaged client interactions.
Hidden Technical Hiring Challenges Exposed
Unfortunately, hiring managers often make the same mistakes when they restart the hiring process. When they start over, they post the same outdated job description and assume the ideal candidate will respond.
And even when a candidate pops up, they check references and screen resumes using the same out-of-date tools. They then use the same interviewer who hired the wrong candidate the first time.
Also, they may again fail to observe applicants’ soft skills. On balance, poor soft skills account for more than one-third of bad hiring mistakes. Poor culture fit or personality conflicts often are the cause of hires that don’t work. Soft skills like leadership, communication and organization are increasingly important in today’s workplace. However, many hiring managers don’t yet realize this.
And in today’s tight hiring market, using a conventional recruitment process just won’t cut it.
Take into account the complete size of the hiring process. Then you can get your mind around the complexity of recruiting the right technical worker.
The Strength of a Technical Recruiting Firm
Increasingly businesses knock down technical hiring challenges by getting assistance from a technical recruiting firm. It helped them get the right talent needed for the position. An agency can recruit and move the candidate through orientation ready to ‘hit the ground running’ faster. And more importantly, it allowed the employer to focus on managing their business without wasting time.
Flexicrew Technical Services with the Solution
In February 2019, Flexicrew Technical Services won the Best of Staffing Award, providing superior service to their clients for the 3rd consecutive time – every year that they have been in business.
When using a reliable technical recruiting partner like FTS, employers:
• Reach more candidates
• Receive a replacement guarantee for every employee hired
• Maintain productivity of their team
• Save time and resources of current staff
• Add a standardized, professional employment process
Technical Hiring Challenges
Have technical hiring challenges? Contact FTS. We’ve been finding quality technical employees for businesses like yours since 2015.