What are the bottlenecks in your recruiting process?

Starting the discussion, here's what Pouya had to say:

"Hi Community!

I was wondering whether you can share your thoughts, experiences and feedback on any recruiting process you have done yourself and saw a pain or have been in the funnel as a candidate?

I basically felt it myself once I was recruiting either cherry-picking the next game-changer in a little startup and once I tried hiring at scale. Both scenarios made me sick of finding job descriptions, scheduling from one interview to another, finding proper assessment (costly as well), or even having any data-driven flow of information together to help me shortlist candidates unbiasedly at speed. It was a complete disaster!"

Joining in, Nancy, who's got over 8 years of remote working experience, said:

"I could talk about bottlenecks in the recruiting process all day!

For smaller companies/startups, brand awareness is a huge bottleneck. I wish companies started focusing on their employer branding way earlier. It absolutely must happen before productive hiring can begin.

Take-home assignments and code challenges create such a bottleneck as well. Candidates who are full-time elsewhere do not have the time or interest in doing 4-8 hours of homework before they can even talk to someone. Especially for software engineering, I would love for hiring managers to take code samples in lieu of completing challenges. Most folks will have something on Github that is at least a little relevant to the position being interviewed for.

Indecisive hiring managers are probably the biggest bottleneck. They know they need help, but they don't know what to do, so they search and search for the "perfect" candidate, when they don't really know what that means. I ask hiring managers to create the 30-60-90 day plan before they create the job description. If they can articulate the business need for the position, it is much easier to write a job description, and identify the candidate that can actually help accomplish those business objectives.

I could go on, but these three seem like a good start. 😀If anyone ever wants to talk about recruiting or people operations, I'm happy to share more."

Pouya supported her argument saying, "Pretty right. Hiring managers are into a mission that knows little about it, though you can set up a better procedure or take a few software into account for a better analysis."

In another thread, Karthik, co-founder of Flexiple, also shared his thoughts: "Very pertinent topic for every startup - I think one of the most difficult things for startups is to attract and get the best talent to join their team. To be honest, more than the tech surrounding it, I have found the pure scarcity of such people to be quite frustrating.

Existing HR agencies act as just CV pushers rather than trying to solve the problem of a startup by finding the right talent. I think the tech around it is important, but the inaccessibility of the right kind of talent is the bigger problem, I think :)

Pouya agreed, saying, “Pushing CV and wrong Job Descriptions lead to mismatching keyword-based pipelines in startups and results are poorly analyzed. Recruiter consultants and external recruiters mostly are only focused on keyword matching and few poor boxes to be marked rather than giving value to the soft skills, passion and the energy itself.

The conversation continued as follows:

Karthik: Very well said Pouya. In fact, I have heard of candidates gaming this by writing keywords in their CVs in white font, just so that they get shortlists. On LinkedIn when tech recruiters reach out to me, I ask them to differentiate between random technologies and Lord of the Rings characters to know if they know what they are talking about :P.

Pouya: Hahaha! Can't argue. I've seen myself recruiters who were looking after Typescript programmers and rejected many JS developers :)))”