The staffing industry in 2024 offers a complex yet hopeful outlook, marked by a cautious optimism and an ability to adapt to new trends. Despite ongoing challenges, the industry has shown resilience, countering earlier predictions of decline. The American Staffing Association (ASA) anticipates a moderate 2.1% revenue growth by the close of 2024, reflecting continued expansion, though at a slower rate than in past years.

The Rise of Flexible Work

A key trend reshaping the industry is the growing demand for flexible work arrangements, including remote and hybrid models. The ASA Staffing Playbook reveals that 44% of workers are willing to accept lower pay in exchange for greater flexibility, highlighting a significant shift in work preferences. This change reflects the increasing focus on work-life balance and provides businesses with the chance to tap into global talent pools. As a result, HR and talent acquisition managers must adjust their strategies to meet the rising demand for flexibility, bridging the gap between managers reluctant to adopt remote staffing and candidates seeking these opportunities.

Increase in the Gig Economy

Amid rising inflation, a substantial 58% of the U.S. workforce is pursuing additional income, driving the growth of the gig economy. This trend spans generations, including both Gen X and Baby Boomers, and has led businesses to increasingly incorporate freelance workers for greater agility and cost-effectiveness. The temporary staffing industry is well-positioned to benefit from this shift, providing flexible opportunities and fostering relationships with freelancers to maintain a reliable pool of skilled talent.

Technology and AI Integration

The integration of technology and artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming talent acquisition by enhancing automation and efficiency. AI tools are now widely used for candidate sourcing, resume screening, and setting nterviews, simplifying administrative tasks and allowing HR professionals to concentrate on strategic priorities. Additionally, technology supports smooth remote onboarding, helping new hires have better first days and offering HR and management automation tools that can sequence onboarding processes.

Upskilling and Reskilling Initiatives

Companies are encouraged to focus on internal talent development through upskilling and reskilling initiatives, providing employees with opportunities for career growth and advancement within the organization. This approach not only lessens the need for external hires but also boosts employee engagement and retention. By investing in skill development, organizations foster a dynamic, innovative, and adaptable work environment.

As organizations navigate economic uncertainties and technological advancements, the quest for talent acquisition and retention remains paramount. From attracting qualified candidates in a competitive market to embracing flexible work models and integrating cutting-edge technology, the path to building high-performing teams is multifaceted. By understanding and addressing the top recruiting challenges of 2024 head-on, businesses can position themselves not only to survive but to thrive in a rapidly evolving global marketplace.

This article explores the ten most common challenges facing HR and recruiters today and offers practical strategies to overcome them, empowering organizations to build resilient, diverse, and agile teams poised for success in the years ahead.

Top Recruiting Challenges (and How To Solve Them)

1. Attracting Qualified Candidates

What's more challenging than finding the right candidate for the job, right? If you're feeling the struggle, you're not alone: 77% of employers struggle to find qualified candidates. The right mix of hard and soft skills, alignment with company values, and personality fit is hard to some by.

General Tip

To attract top talent, focus on creating detailed, transparent, and compelling job descriptions that clearly outline the role's requirements, expectations, and benefits. Highlight what sets your company apart, such as its culture, growth opportunities, and values. Leverage modern recruitment tools like Lanteria HR to streamline your hiring process and broaden your candidate pool by advertising across multiple platforms and social media channels. A well-crafted job post paired with advanced sourcing technologies ensures you reach and engage qualified candidates effectively

Lanteria HR Solution

Attracting top talent is a multi-faceted approach, but it starts with clearly communicating job requirements

For more comprehensive search results, Lanteria's sophisticated sourcing system includes search with machine learning. It will scan numerous sources to provide you with the best prospects. Lanteria also offers a handy plugin that can import excellent prospects and all of their details into your database automatically.

Lanteria is designed for successful job marketing. You may publish your positions on numerous free and paid local and worldwide job sites with one click. You may also advertise your job vacancy on social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and others. 

2. Building a Strong Employer Brand

According to LinkedIn, a vast number of job searchers evaluate an employer's brand before applying for a position. They don't apply or consider your employment offer if they dislike what they see, even if they are unemployed.

You can recruit and connect with better applicants with a strong and successful employer brand. Employer branding makes it three times more probable for a company to tackle recruitment challenges. However, it's a lengthy process that covers everything from guaranteeing a pleasant applicant experience to marketing your organization's image on social networking sites.

It's a long-term, collaborative endeavor that demands you take time away from your regular responsibilities and gain approval from your coworkers.

General Tip

You must plan and build a comprehensive employer branding plan in order to develop your employer brand. You must convey a captivating message about your firm, demonstrate its culture, and entice prospects to join your team.

Establish a powerful employer brand so that outstanding prospects come to you instead of the other way around.

From the website to sharing the experiences or photos of actual workers on social media to developing stand-out LinkedIn Career Pages, there are many methods to create your brand on any budget. You may also construct a visually appealing, adaptive, and customized career site and career blog to showcase your employer brand and demonstrate to applicants why your firm is a fantastic place to work. You may also use these blogs and videos to allow your employees to express their stories about their jobs and hobbies.

The aim is to demonstrate how your firm can assist applicants in finding meaning and how they can advance in their careers. This is especially true if they conduct some research after you contact them or click on a link you provide them. They'll get a feel of what makes your firm special, which will encourage them to react.

Furthermore, you should always respond politely to negative and positive online reviews. 

Developing a solid employee referral program is another possibility. Nothing cuts through the clutter like someone you know informing you of a fresh job opportunity. Therefore, if a coworker were to inform an acquaintance of theirs about an opening in the company, you are more than likely going to receive a response. 

According to CR Magazine, 92% of individuals would consider changing employment if offered a position with a firm with a strong employer brand. The issue is that all of your rivals will be hammering the same eligible candidates with advertisements claiming to be the top employer. This is why employee recommendations are the way to go, as talented prospects usually place a higher value on their friends than on your recruiters.

Above everything else, be a great employer, and it will reflect on you.

Lanteria Solution

You can attract potential candidates through branding with the help of Lanteria. With Lanteria, you can construct your ideal career site. What's even better is that you don't need any technical or design abilities to set it up. Simply choose from a variety of stunning, customizable themes, and you're ready to go. 

You can also develop referral campaigns using our service. You may send tailored emails to your current workers asking them to propose outstanding prospects with just one click. Everything after that is automatic. To keep track of who suggested which applicant, Lanteria provides distinct affiliate links for you.

3. Reaching Passive Candidates

A challenge recruitment teams face is targeting the right talent who may not be looking for a job right now. As per a LinkedIn study, 70% of the worldwide workforce is made up of passive talent who aren't actively looking for employment, while only 30% are actively looking for work. The good news is that, according to LinkedIn, up to 90% of these passive applicants are keen to hear about new work possibilities.

However, you won't discover passive applicants checking out your career site or job postings because they aren't actually pursuing work. You must instead reach them via social media. According to a LinkedIn poll, almost half (49%) of all professionals follow firms on social media in order to keep informed about their jobs.

General Tip

You should start marketing your employer's brand using the power of social media. This does not imply just publishing your job opportunities on various social media platforms. You should also post stories, images, and videos that highlight and showcase your firm as a wonderful place to work, interact with people's social media comments and messages, and send them relevant email campaigns. You should also host various recruitment events, such as meetings, seminars, and other similar activities, as well as invite possible applicants to join.

This kind of continuous candidate interaction will be critical to recruitment success, and it may attract both active and passive candidates. Candidate engagement is a long-term strategy and practice of interacting with your candidates on a regular basis. Your objective is to spark potential employees' interest in working for your firm and keep them interested until the perfect position becomes available.

The Lanteria Solution

You can simply build email campaigns that keep your applicants interested and involved with Lanteria's CRM system. You may create customized campaigns for different groups of your talent pool and various phases of the recruiting process. You may also plan your email campaigns to ensure that the appropriate candidates see your message at the right moment. Moreover, sophisticated analytics will reveal which applicants have viewed and acknowledged your emails.

You may also use Lanteria to develop a unique landing page for your recruitment events and social media to distribute information regarding recruitment and job opportunities.

4. Reducing Candidate Dropoff

92% of candidates who start their job applications do not finish them due to complex and lengthy application processes.

General Tip

Simplify the application process by removing unnecessary steps. Implement skills assessments early in the process to engage candidates and provide timely and continuous communication about their application status.

The Lanteria Solution

Streamline the hiring process with automation workflows that keep candidates engaged. Create and send skills assessment emails, request certificates or references, and schedule interviews in a timely fashion all from our platform.

5. Eliminate Hiring Bias

A challenge that recruitment can also face is eliminating bias. According to research by the National Bureau of Economic Research, resumes with white-sounding names receive 50% more invitations for interviews than similar resumes with black-sounding names.

Unconscious prejudices are frequently the cause of many organizations' struggles to recruit and hire diverse personnel. Aside from meeting your legal duties to give equal opportunity, hiring objectively is excellent for business since it allows you to choose the best individual for the position without prejudice. As a reward, you'll have a more inclusive workplace. 

General Tip

Use a variety of techniques to eliminate prejudice from your hiring process. Educate all human resources staff and managers by providing diversity training to prevent prejudice from creeping into your recruitment process.

You might also want to consider posting your job openings on specialty job sites like DiversityWorking to attract a diverse pool of candidates. Other methods would be to make contact with diverse college and professional groups. You can also request diverse referrals from your current workers.

Make a point of emphasizing your company's commitment to diversity in order to attract diverse applicants on your employment site and social media accounts, post quotations, photographs, and video testimonials from your current diverse workers.

Implement objective recruiting approaches such as organized interviews and software that allows you to hire blindly. You can also do this by making your interviewing procedure more consistent. Make sure you ask identical questions to all of the prospects. You may then compare them using the same criteria and select the best prospects rather than ones that are just appealing.

Finally, make sure your interview panel is diversified. Including a broad group of individuals in your hiring process will help you identify unconscious prejudices and enhance your recruitment process's fairness and equality principles.

The Lanteria Solution

You may use Lanteria to highlight your company's diversity initiatives on your career site and write about them on your career blog. You may also design a custom landing page for each type of candidate you wish to target, such as previous servicemen and servicewomen, people with disabilities, ex-offenders, LGBTIQ persons, aged individuals, and so on. Aside from this, you can also locate diverse candidates with ease. 

You may conduct organized interviews and utilize scorecards to evaluate candidates impartially based on previously established criteria with Lanteria's Applicant Tracking System. You may also track and assess your diversity and inclusion indicators automatically. This thus reduces the risk of prejudice influencing your hiring choice. It also facilitates successful team cooperation by allowing recruiters to quickly exchange their thoughts and assessments of prospects via notes and comments, minimizing the likelihood of making an illogical recruitment selection.

6. Accurately Assessing Candidate Skills

Challenge: Sophisticated applicant tracking systems and AI tools cannot always verify candidates’ skills and their ability to apply them effectively.

Solution: Use skills assessment tools to test both hard and soft skills early in the recruitment process. Utilize recruiting services like Fabric Staffing who have recruiters that have years of experience in hiring within your specific industry.

7. Personalizing Candidate Communication

Challenge: 54% of candidates abandon the recruitment process due to poor communication from recruiters.

Solution: Automate parts of the communication process while maintaining a personal touch. Use templates and reminders for different stages of the application process to ensure timely and relevant communication with candidates. Good recruiters will always follow up without having to be asked.

8. Reducing Time to Hire

Challenge: The average time to hire was 44 days in 2023, making it crucial to reduce this duration to avoid losing top talent.

Solution: Set clear hiring timelines and empower hiring managers to make swift decisions. Use applicant tracking systems to efficiently manage and communicate with candidates. Look for recruiting partners that specialize in rapid hiring strategies like Fabric Staffing.

9. Reducing Hiring Costs

Challenge: The average cost per hire in 2023 was over $4,700, with additional costs if re-hiring is necessary due to a bad hire.

Solution: Promote internally and build referral programs to reduce hiring costs. Leverage modern AI hiring tools to identify the best candidates early and minimize resource expenditure on unsuitable candidates. Working with subscription-based staffing services like Fabric Staffing can reduce your hiring costs by 80%, compared to contingent firms.

10. Inconsistent Training for Hiring Managers

Challenge: Inadequate training for hiring managers can lead to poor hiring decisions and increased costs.

Solution: Provide regular training sessions on DEI best practices and legal compliance. Standardize the recruitment process to ensure fairness and efficiency. Work with multiple recruiting agencies and learn strategies that best fit your hiring environment.