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Here Is Why You Are Always Struggling To Find Strong Job Applicants

Your organization recently posted an open role and now you have a pile of applications ready for you to sort through.

You are ready to get this over with, move to the interview stage and close the position once and for all.

So you buckle down to create a long list of qualified candidates who will move to the interviewing stage.

But to your surprise that is not what you get. Granted you seem to have a lot of applications in that pile but none of them meets the criteria you are looking for. In short the quantity is there but the quality is certainly lacking.

This could be following a now familiar pattern with most of the open positions.

What could you be doing wrong? You think to yourself as you scan through the application of yet another candidate who doesn’t have the right qualifications.

Where are all the qualified candidates?

In this article I will take you through some of the things that you are probably doing and are to blame for not attracting the right kind of applicants.

1. You aren’t targeting passive candidates

Here is the hard truth; those highly sought candidates you are looking for are likely already employed. They are skilled, highly qualified and are already on an attractive paycheck.

Thus the reason why you will not find them perusing every job board out there and networking just to see what else is in the market.

But that’s not to say that they will brush off better opportunities that come their way.

They are passive job seekers which means that opportunities have to fall on their laps rather than them aggressively seeking new roles.

The traditional hiring process therefore of “posting a job and waiting for applications to stream in” no longer works on them.

It is therefore your job to make it easy for them to find you and then interest them with the role you are hiring for.

Reason being, even though a new role is not on their mind at this point in time, seeing a new opportunity that is in line with their career aspirations will trigger an interest.

2. Your only rely on traditional job boards

Since you are in recruitment, you’ve probably heard this a few times;

  • There is a decline in the hiring that is done through job boards
  • 85% of positions are actually filled through networks
  • A majority of available roles are never advertised

Well guess what? You aren’t the only one heeding to that advice. Your candidates  too are especially the qualified ones, meaning that job boards aren’t the first place they go to find new opportunities.

They will find other ways of learning more about your company as well as open job vacancies.

So if job boards have in the past served as your main way of sourcing for candidates, it’s about time you started adding some new tactics like recruiting via LinkedIn or social networks.

3. You don’t build awareness

Here is the brutal truth; if you are always finding it difficult to fill your roles in time simply because you are not attracting the right talent, there is a very high possibility that candidates don’t even know that your company exists, let alone that you are looking to hire for a certain position.

And it all comes down to one thing. You are not building awareness about who you are as a company, what you do and when you are hiring.

There are many companies out there that are competing for the same talent you want, and unfortunately it’s the big names and known brands hence the reason multinationals, NGOs and government will always attract quite a huge number of top-notch high flying applicants while you are left with the less qualified.

Unless you do something about it, they will continue to beat you every time you are looking to hire.

So how do you start attracting stronger applicants?

Now that you are aware of the roadblocks that are preventing you from attracting the right candidates, you most likely have one question bothering you; what can you do better?

The solution is that you need to get out there and find these candidates.

Rather than crossing your fingers and just hoping that the right candidate will stumble upon your job on your career page or a particular job board, why not outsource recruitment services for a fast and much comprehensive hiring process that takes the pressure off getting the right candidate?