Is good for jobs always bad for recruiters?

August 28th, 2021 | Industry News

With specialist blogs and the Financial Times agreeing that this is a good time to be a job hunter, Recruit So Simple is asking whether that necessarily means that it’s a bad time to be hunting for employees.

There’s no doubt that the shortage of labour has driven up entry level salaries. The best recruitment CRM is well capable of tracking year on year or even month on month trends like this, and it’s borne out by a KPMG survey which shows that July’s starting salaries had been inflated by the highest rate for 24 years.

Online recruitment software helps companies beat the recruitment downturn

Brexit and the pandemic have both driven recruitment woes. One way that web based recruitment software is helping buck the trend is by reaching potential recruits where they are most easily to be found – in their own homes, in front of their own screens. The ability to automate processes that engage applicants such as posting blogs on LinkedIn or posting adverts on popular sites, can then be used to free recruitment consultants or HR professionals to engage online with those who respond – as fewer people are available for jobs and more people are cautious about attending big events like the traditional job fairs, this is a good route to both attract people and weed out the inappropriate applicants, giving employers both a larger pool of candidates and a better filtered one.

The British Chamber of Commerce says that 70% of companies are finding it hard to recruit employees. In mid 2020 this figure was just over 50%. The hospitality and building sectors are struggling most to fill vacancies. Welcome bonuses and flexible hours are just a couple of the strategies being used to try and solve the problem. Recruitment management software offers another potential route. Potential employees who aren’t fully skilled can be identified from an existing pool of registered candidates and offered training to get them to the required level, and older or already exited employees can often be enticed back with a combination of flexitime and ‘mentoring time’ which allows them to pass their experience on to younger workforce members as well as having a reduced but still invaluable workplace role – favoured ways of doing this include three day working weeks with an additional half day of mentoring or late starts and early finishes that allow people to avoid peak commuter times or engage with other roles such as helping with grandchildren.