The world of work – a review of recruitment issues in 2023

January 17th, 2023 | Industry News

It might seem early in the year to be talking about 2023’s recruitment issues, but surveys from around the globe show that employers, and recruitment agencies, are facing the same problems:

Hiring concerns are global

75% of Canadian employers are expecting to have difficulty hiring staff this year. In the UK 80% of IT firms and 58% of general tech firms are reporting difficulties. Online recruitment software may help by spotting transferable skills that employers can hone to meet their organisational needs, but the issue of personnel shortages is not going away any time soon

Talent gaps are bridgeable but worrying

39% of American firms surveyed said they are experiencing a gap between desired hard skills and candidate CVs, while 31% of Canadian companies are stressing over the need to hire less well qualified candidates than they desire. This has three potentially negative effects:

1. a slower onboarding of candidates
2. competence gaps leading to lower organisational performance for a period of time
3. a knock-on effect for other positions, creating inequalities in pay and performance bonuses throughout the company.

Churn is ever present

Finding new candidates is crucial to organisational success in 2023 and recruitment website design is likely to be a key consideration. Slow loading sites, poor navigation, broken links etc will all send candidates in a different direction. Social media is also a significant factor: good multi-channel communication helps build confidence in a company. However keeping good candidates is as essential as finding them; good recruiting software helps stay in touch with potential talent preventing the best people from drifting away because they feel the process has stalled. Retirement is a concern here – with an ageing workforce, many companies are finding themselves losing large swathes of their employee group as they simply reach retirement age or even retire early as a result of increased workplace demands arising from the original employee shortfall.

Tech is up and down – and up and down

While tech giants like Twitter and Meta began the year with massive layoffs, the demand for qualified tech staffers is constant. A quarter of UK staff say they would be willing to retrain to work in the tech sector, seeing it as a route to better pay and more leverage around flexibility and workplace benefits, but this offers little comfort to employers trying to fill vacancies now. The best recruitment crm offers a potential solution, having the scope to explore candidates with passive or underutilised tech skills that can rapidly be rebooted to fill gaps in a tech or tech support department that is straining to cover its responsibilities.