Top 9 Challenges Startups Face Hiring Young Talent

Online ATS For Small BusinessFinding a candidate who meets the prerequisites of a given job and integrates well into the company’s culture is never easy. It is, in fact, one of the most grueling tasks involved in running a business successfully. And this whole situation concerning recruitment of talented employees gets even more complicated when it comes to startups. If your startup needs to hire talent in 2018, check out our free online ATS for small business recruiting. Recruiteze is the top seed in the market place for a reason. Read on to find out why.

Hiring Challenges

Talk to recruiters and HR professionals and they will tell you that even their best recruiting tools and strategies fail when it comes to finding talented candidates for newly established businesses. The reasons for the same could be variegated. It could be high initial recruiting costs that startups are generally not in a position to afford, incompetent hiring processes, or something else.

To throw some light on what goes wrong with startups when they are looking at hiring young talent, we have compiled a list of challenges that are faced by these young organizations.

1. Missing Natural Curiosity

What drives a majority of startups is the enthusiasm and curiosity of its team members in building a high performing and resilient organization. If the applicants are not driven by a natural desire to deliver their best performance in the workplace, it is the organizations in their nascent stage that are least expected to thrive amidst all the competition prevalent in the job market.

The desire to learn new things gives candidates that extra strength and willpower to accomplish even the most difficult tasks and help organizations scale greater heights. It is not an uncommon thing to find fresh recruits losing their interest in their job soon after they join their new workplace and become disassociated with the organization. There is nothing much that can be expected from such employees. They either affect the productivity levels of the company they work for or they quit making the employee turnover rate high.

2. Limited Amount of Resources

According to Kamal Karanth, Talent Specialist and Co-Founder at Xpheno, it is not possible for startups to make huge investments and deploy expensive technologies or procure high end tools available in the market as soon as they launch themselves in the market. The amount of resources available to them remains limited for a certain period of time. The same applies to hiring processes that are followed by these relatively young companies.

Unable to afford high fliers or market salaries, most of them limit themselves to their existing network even when they are entering a new industry. What they fail to understand is that their existing network alone will not suffice to attract and source market talent. They, therefore, remain at a huge disadvantage and are unable to reach out to candidates who are actually required for their business type and the work involved in it. Using our free online ATS for small business hiring is a great way to save money and resources. Start your free trial here.

3. Unstructured Hiring Processes

Unstructured hiring processes are one of the key challenges that remain unaddressed by most startups. There is no clarity on hiring and there is a long delay in the hiring processes that ultimately lead to a lot of frustration and disappointment for prospective recruits. More than often, there is a failure to offer a satisfactory/pleasant experience to prospective employees during the whole recruitment process. Even more, there is no success in effectively communicating what candidates will be gaining by joining their business and how it will help them accomplish their career goals. This is because there is no clear understanding of the company’s culture. Because of insufficient knowledge and lack of clarity, there is nothing to promote about company’s culture in communications that are carried out with prospective employees. That environment which allows the development of an understanding between the employer and employee is missing. As a result, startups lose out on many talented and deserving candidates that can, otherwise, prove to be an asset for their company’s growth.

4. Incompetent Hiring Staff

Young startups are mostly reluctant to make a full-fledged investment in their HR department or to hire the services of a professional HR consulting firm. Hence, the team members who are made to take up the role of a recruiter are not experienced in their job. They generally don’t have any focus on systematic hiring procedures. The result is they end up making influenced hiring decisions and recruit employees mainly on the basis of references. Their decisions don’t allow them enough time to test the knowledge and skills of candidates they hire. The proficiency of candidates in the job roles for which they have been hired becomes known only after they join their workplace, when it is too late for any hiring decision to be changed.

Furthermore, the staff members are not competent in negotiating salary with experienced candidates. Sometimes they give into unjust demands of the candidates and agree to offer salaries far more than the market value. And then there are times when they get into unnecessary bargaining efforts with candidates who are truly deserving and best suited to the organizational needs.

5. Poor Marketing

Another major reason why startups fail miserably in finding the perfect candidate for a given job is their poor marketing orientation. In order to cut down their marketing expenses, most of them restrict themselves to not invest in social media. They fail to realize this as an inexpensive way of attracting and sourcing talent and creating brand awareness. By drafting a unique and customized social media marketing strategy for their business, the founders can benefit in a number of ways. This includes enhanced online visibility for their brand, better employee and customer attraction along with many other things. It, therefore, makes sense for startups to invest their time and resources into social media marketing so as to be able to tap the potential their market has to offer them.

6. Offer Trading

In order to obtain a better CTC, candidates often indulge themselves in a practice of telling employers that they already have a few offers in hand and are looking for something more rewarding. If they have already obtained an offer letter from some company, they don’t hesitate to use it for their own interest. They display it to hiring managers so as to get a better CTC and fulfill their career desires. This, however, doesn’t do any good for the companies who after handing out the offer letter start counting on the candidate’s acceptance, thus reducing down their hiring processes only to find out later that that they have to start over because the candidate backed out. The reason could simply be the better CTC offer he/she managed to get by exhibiting an offer letter that was never put to its right use.

7. Getting Candidates with Desired Qualifications

According to Chirag Joshi (Marketing Head, Samco Securities), another major challenge startups face is the sourcing of candidates who possess the same domain experience they are looking for. Even if there are a few applications from candidates belonging to the same domain, those candidates ask for very high salaries that startups find it difficult to afford. Or, the applications come from candidates who are not at all trained or skilled at their job. They generally require a lot of training and skill enrichment, thereby, making the productive costs very high.

8. Finding Like-minded Individuals

As employers are realizing that the secret to running successful businesses lie in recruiting like-minded individuals, hiring has become even more difficult and time consuming.

By recruiting like-minded individuals, it becomes easier to communicate organizational goals to your employees and expect them to be loyal and committed towards your business. As a result, they deliver high performance and are of great help in accomplishing organizational goals.

The recruitment of like-minded employees is even more significant for startups as they stand in competition with already established companies. Therefore, in order to establish themselves as a brand, they need a dedicated team of employees who are willing to do everything it takes to make their organization a success.

9. Insufficient Assessment Tools

A majority of startups are not clear about their monthly, quarterly, and yearly targets. In a given scenario, it is not practically possible for a startup to set rational targets for its employees. Given that, it also becomes difficult to measure the performance of its employees. The employee appraisal and promotion mechanisms get negatively affected by this asymmetry of goals and purposes. Regardless of the tool used for assessment, the results that are yielded are far from being accurate. The use of less efficient evaluation methods, therefore, leads to dissatisfaction among sincere and high performing employees. As a result, they lose their interest in the growth of an organization they are working for.

Finally, it’s time for startups to invest time and resources in understanding the requirements of their business and change their hiring approach accordingly in order to survive in today’s skyrocketing competition. In order to be successful, they need to make targeted hiring their primary objective of all the recruitment practices that are carried out by them.

The Best Online ATS For Small Business Hiring and Recruiting

Recruiteze is a free ATS for small business hiring and talent tracking. There’s so many benefits to using our free applicant tracking system that I can’t list them all. The best option you have is to give a try! Click here to get started with your free ATS trail. iReformat allows you to format up to 10 resumes per month, for free! If you’re ready to take the redundant administrative work out of your daily tasks, start using our free recruiting software today.

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