Hiring in a ‘shortage’ industry? Here’s how you can build a robust candidate pool

It’s a common challenge for many major industries and employers: despite rising wages and the Great Resignation inspired shifts in the way we do business, finding, engaging and hiring qualified candidates is still a significant challenge. With each job post, you’re getting fewer and fewer applicants – too few to build a meaningful talent pool. Push through and hire anyway and you may wind up with performance, productivity and retention issues on your hands. Keep headcounts open for too long and you’ll likely fuel declining morale, burnout and turnover among existing employees. 

So, then, how do you hire the right talent in a shortage industry such as health care and assistance, accommodation, food services, and professional scientific and technical services? Or any market-specific vertical or functional role that has more open headcounts than job seekers? Start here. 

#1. Make it easy to apply

Simplifying the hiring process – and reducing time-to-hire – may help overcome competitive challenges. Not only will shortening hiring time reduce the internal resources needed, it can also provide a better candidate experience. This is key: faster hiring means that fewer candidates will drop out or be hired by other companies, offering you greater access to more (and potentially stronger) talent.

It’s also important that the candidate's experience is simple, intuitive and quick. To identify potential pitfalls, try applying for a role at your organisation. From the candidate’s perspective, you’ll be better able to assess any issues with the job post, level of requirements and screening mandates. If the role or next steps feel unclear or overly complex to you, potential job seekers probably feel the same way. This is a good opportunity to review the posts with your team and identify ways to attract more candidates while streamlining the next steps for engaged applicants.

#2. Offer incentives

Job seekers struggling the most during the pandemic are young people and long-term unemployed. For industries that don’t require a specific degree, offering tuition reimbursement may be a good way to attract talent. Other incentives that are proving effective include greater flexibility, such as work-from-home options and assistance to set up an office at home. 

The hospitality and mining industries are offering incentives like starting bonuses and subsidised private health cover along with paid professional development. Some employers are being even more creative with their incentives, with one company offering a personal assistant for shopping and dog-walking, while a veterinary practice offers overseas trips to new employees. 

#3. Look back to build a future-focused candidate pool

More than ever, building a strong, qualified candidate pool for your open jobs can be a challenge. By revisiting past and ongoing engagement workflows and best practices with your team and recruiters, you’ll be more likely to spot areas for improvement – an activity that may have been overlooked during the pandemic. Reimagining these processes for today’s increasingly competitive marketplace can help accelerate engagement and hiring.

#4. Consider your employer branding 

If your team is struggling to attract enough talent to build a meaningful candidate pool, take a step back to better understand why. Ask yourself:

• Is traffic to your team’s job posts declining?
• Is your response rate to job posts declining?
• What do your application starts look like compared to completions? Are people dropping out when they reach your screening questions?
• Is there a major drop-off between applicants and interested interviewees?

These challenges may hint at any number of problems, but most commonly:

• Failing to put job posts in front of the right audiences – i.e. relevant job seekers in your specific field or industry
• Unclear job requirements or excessive requirements that alienate even top candidates
• Lengthy assessments that don’t align with the specific role
• A decline in positive sentiment surrounding your brand – specifically, challenges to your desired employer branding that may be keeping candidates from searching your business and, ultimately, applying for open roles.

#5. Bring in third-party resources 

Finally, consider leveraging third-party resources to evaluate and analyse your job posts and placements to ensure they’re optimised for success. Get in touch with Indeed to identify next steps and ways; together, we can determine where your business is right now and, from there, create new benchmarks based on your current needs, KPIs and look-ahead plan.

These targeted deep-dives can help you continue to fill your candidate pipeline, attracting and activating top talent, even for hard-to-fill roles. With enhanced best practices and processes in place, your team will be well-equipped to overcome the most common hiring hurdles.

What comes next? 

For many HR leaders hiring in a ‘shortage’ industry, the last few months have represented an abrupt shift from ‘feast’ to ‘famine’ – and, not surprisingly, has put many organisations at a significant disadvantage as they strive to attract, engage and hire top talent. For many, even the simple act of building out a talent pool of sufficient depth has been difficult, especially for niche and/or specialised roles such as nursing and engineering. As a result, many HR and recruitment professionals have been forced to make difficult choices to balance immediate staffing needs with the desire for high-performing talent.

These hurdles, though, can be mitigated and, ultimately, overcome. The first step, though, is to understand what job seekers want and what they’re experiencing when they engage with your brand – and that starts the minute they encounter a job post. Ensure you’re projecting a positive, welcoming employee experience in your posts, application process, and overall employer branding and you’ll be well-positioned to attract talent, even in shortage industries.