Top 5 Headaches Today's Employers Face (And How You Can Address Them)

Employers (like myself) juggle hundreds of problems at any given time, and having a crowded head makes it much more difficult to accomplish the tasks at hand efficiently. While I've spent a great deal of time writing and speaking about hiring, I've never had to do it as quickly as I have in the past year. A high-growth company may be fun, but it makes hiring top talent that much more pertinent, and time-consuming.

Here are my tips for combating the biggest five headaches hiring managers face.

Nabbing Good Talent

This is most likely the top concern for any hiring manager: you get a bunch of impressive applicants when you post your jobs, but after you interview them, most of them turn out to be duds. By the time you have your job matching figured out and realize who your best candidate is, they've already found another job. And when 38 percent of employers report having the same problem, you know it's a trend.

At Red Branch, we know it can be a big problem and move as fast as we can to respond to applicants (we get at least two per day, which isn't bad for an agency of our size). In the fight to find the best talent, speed is everything. Get to candidates faster with the help of an applicant tracking system, and you'll be the first to recruit them.

Getting the Most Out of Employees

We're constantly working to increase productivity among our current employees, and I can admit that I've had more than my fair share of trouble with job matching. The thing that I've learned, though, is that sometimes employers hire people with the right soft skills, but the wrong hard skills, which leads to a pivot. Some 40 percent of HR reps are re-skilling employees, teaching them new skills and placing them into newer jobs.

While this is a pretty good fix, a better solution would be to match employees with the right job the first time around. In order to do so, we have a hard skill test for every new employee and attempt to assess culture via in-person interviews. It's not perfect, but along with regular reviews that ask the employee what more they could do in their role, make sure your employees are doing everything they can for your company.

Keeping the Good Ones Around

Next to hiring, retention might be the other biggest hassle to deal with. It's frustrating to know that 46 percent of your new hires could leave in as few as 18 months. Most often, this is because you made a hire on short notice. But the second-biggest reason (which happens about 34 percent of the time) is that companies make bad hires is because the employee simply "wasn't a good fit."

At our agency, we spend a lot of time up front trying to scare new hires out of the job. Why? Because I don't have the time for a cultural mismatch. I don't make my company something it's not to make the hire, even if I desperately need it. It's a waste of time and money. It may take longer to recruit, but trust me -- you won't scare the right candidate out of the job.

Improving Employee Morale

Morale is a tricky subject: it sneaks up on you, and it takes most employers a while to catch onto the effect of bad employee morale. It may not be the flashiest problem to have, but trust me: it's a real problem because it leads to just about every other issue on this list. Increased turnover? Check. Reduced revenue? Yep. Bad reputation? Eventually.

Morale is one of those things that you put on the back burner because it doesn't seen like that big of a problem at the time, and then it becomes a huge one. Whether it's because of bad job matching, a rotten apple getting to the rest of the company, or a bad reaction to stressful times, you need to check on morale as often as possible. We've "dipped" in morale a couple of times and while never catastrophic, we've had to let go of people who were poisoning the company mindset.

If we'd known during their interview just how much the bad hire affected those around them, we would have started screening a little better. More important, however, is making sure you don't unload too much of their work onto current employees, dipping their morale even further. Accept that you're going to be less productive with fewer people, and stick to the most key projects until you find someone new.

Keeping Everyone Honest

Micromanaging makes for bad bosses. I think everyone knows this, but they're just too afraid of what might happen if they don't keep tabs on what everyone's doing. They may also be fearful of what activities are taking place outside of their watchful eye.

Last year, 25 percent of companies suspected they would have to run an investigation on one of their employees' activities, especially those in the extractives, defense and pharmaceutical industries. When you suspect an employee of wrongdoing, you have to swiftly fire said employee, and find a new one.

How on earth do you screen for integrity? It's a problem I've yet to solve. Nearly everyone I've ever interviewed has talked a great game, but it's no guarantee they won't fudge their hours, steal a client or spend work time doing non-work related activities. Perhaps the best way to keep candidates honest would be to be more thorough about references, past work history, etc. And if you're hiring for a position where exploiting power could be a problem, don't let someone through the initial process unless they have solid references.

I'm hoping that by bringing these issues to light and sharing my experiences, I've inspired you to find your own solutions and maybe get through your next hire much more smoothly. There are many more problems in recruiting (trust me, there are), but these are the biggest issues I believe to be plaguing the job market as a whole. What are yours?

Author Maren Hogan is a seasoned marketer and community builder in the HR and Recruiting industry. She leads Red Branch Media, an agency offering marketing strategy and content development. A consistent advocate of next generation marketing techniques, Hogan has built successful online communities, deployed brand strategies in both the B2B and B2C sectors, and been a prolific contributor of thought leadership in the global recruitment and talent space.

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Comment by Steve Levy on August 31, 2015 at 11:46am

"Get to candidates faster with the help of an applicant tracking system, and you'll be the first to recruit them" - get to them fastest with a call or text...Newsflash - an ATS is NOT needed for engagement.

"I can admit that I've had more than my fair share of trouble with job matching" - Because job matching is for robots. We hire people to solve problems, we keep people by rewarding them and giving them "harder" problems.

"It's frustrating to know that 46 percent of your new hires could leave in as few as 18 months." - They leave more because of poor management than poor job matching, and even more often the management side claims poor culture fit when the real reason is one of communication & honesty.

"Morale is one of those things that you put on the back burner because it doesn't seen like that big of a problem at the time, and then it becomes a huge one." - Funny how many point to the employee as the source of the morale problem. These are two way streets; for all the ballyhoo about how companies screen for their precious culture fit, very few of these screeners are even remotely trained as psychotherapists and anthropologists who can professionally assess personality and gauge culture fit. Know what they're really doing? Injecting bias into the hiring process and calling it culture assessment. 

"How on earth do you screen for integrity?" - Unless you know the person well, or know their former workmates well, you don't. Integrity comes from being exposed to situations that test integrity over and over again. Even great people make dumb mistakes in their lives that if we took that one single event and blew it out of proportion we'd miss the potential in the person.

There are no shortcuts to hiring well. And it isn't easy...

Comment by Jatin Singh on September 1, 2015 at 2:01am

Nice blog for the employer to overcome the problems which will hinder the growth of the employee into the organization.

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