Criteria Corp Blog

Finding and hiring the best candidates is highly competitive in today’s hiring landscape. About 73% of employers have been struggling to find the right candidates for their open positions, and this trend shows no signs of stopping – in fact, companies anticipate needing to hire even more people in 2019. 

In today’s hiring landscape, finding talented candidates with the right set of skills is harder than ever. After going through all the steps to source candidates, read resumes, administer assessments, interview candidates, and send out the offer letter, you still need your candidate of choice to say yes to your offer of employment. When jobs were scarce, you might have assumed that most offers would be followed up with an enthusiastic “yes,” but with job openings now exceeding the number of job seekers, you may have to put a little more effort into converting that candidate into your next star employee. Here are a few places to start:

Retirement isn’t quite what it used to be. While the average age of retirement for Americans is around 63, the number is rising, and that will have an impact on the current workforce. 

2018 was a difficult year for hiring, and 2019 is shaping up to be just as challenging. Earlier this year, the job market crossed the threshold into having more job openings than unemployed workers to fill them. Job seekers had more options than ever, which meant they also had the power to be a little more choosy with their next job opportunities. There were several consequences to this tight labor market – we saw a rising trend in candidates ghosting on interviews, and we also saw the growing importance of maintaining a solid candidate experience.

Technology, when used strategically, has the power to improve the hiring process in infinitely many ways. From speeding up the application process to enhancing the way we source and evaluate candidates, there are tons of HR tech tools out there designed to enhance our hiring efforts. But one often overlooked opportunity is technology’s ability to help companies hire a more diverse workforce.

Hiring can be exhausting. With so much pressure on hiring managers and recruiters to find great talent amidst an increasingly challenging hiring landscape, it’s easy to fall into a few bad habits. But the hiring process provides the opportunity to constantly improve and learn from each hire that you make, which is why we should never accept our bad habits as just “the way that it is.”

The hiring process is critical to the success of any organization, and so it follows that, as an employer, you’d want to take all the time you need to make the best possible hiring decision. From gathering information about your candidates to building consensus among your hiring team, you want to feel confident about the candidate you ultimately choose. But the time and deliberation you put into the decision should never come at the expense of a speedy and efficient hiring process.

2018 has been a particularly challenging year for hiring. Employers are finding it harder and harder to find the right job candidates for their open positions now that the demand for workers exceeds the number of people currently unemployed in the workforce. These challenges become even more salient when it comes to seasonal hiring.

 About three years ago, Criteria Corp made the decision to have a dog-friendly office. The decision wasn’t sudden or dramatic. It started with one or two people gradually bringing in their dogs, and it eventually turned into a more formal policy with tangible guidelines and rules. We love our dogs so much that we even started an Instagram account devoted to them!

Earlier this week, we hosted a webinar with HR Bartender’s Sharlyn Lauby where we discussed strategies employers can use to stand out in a candidate’s market. With unemployment at relative lows and hiring demand still on the rise, it’s becoming more and more challenging to attract and hire great talent for your team.