Behind every successful business is a great team – that’s a fact! No matter how exciting your business idea is in theory, you cannot bring it to reality without good people.

This presents an obstacle, as hiring and retaining talented resource is the biggest challenge facing staffing industry. The staffing agencies across the country are doing their best to attract the right talent, but some challenges are too tough to deal with. Below we’ll discuss the top staffing challenges of 2018.

Low unemployment rate in the US –

Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said in an interview to CNBC “increasingly, businesses’ number one challenge will be a shortage of labor.” With unemployment rate in the US pretty low (ranging between 4 and 4.8%) in 2017, businesses are going to have tough time finding the talent they need for open positions. While job hunters have multiple choices, employers need to do all they can to make their job offerings attractive – and competitive at the same time.

Increase in cost due to shortage of talent –

According to 2016-2017 Talent Shortage Survey, 40% of global businesses report skill shortages, the most since 2007. Adding to that is the increased ‘time to hire.’ As you begin to recruit the right talent in this highly competitive market, you need to act fast. Overlooking this may lead to the candidate accepting another offer, thus leaving you to look for or settle to other resource (may be less qualified). Hiring delays can cost the staffing agency, hiring company, and employee a lot of money. Additionally, Employee Retention has always been and is one of the biggest challenges. Increasing your pay wages is the most effective way to gain an edge on your competition, and actually save your bottom line. Because the less you pay your employees, the higher your turnover rate – and the more you’re spending on searching, training and engaging all over again.

The restriction and unavailability of H1-B visa holders –

Compliance with immigration laws, especially those concerning H-1B visa workers, has long allowed firms to find and hire talent internationally. This is predominantly valued in conditions where there may not be a readily available pool of talent based in the U.S. market. Nevertheless, current restrictions on H1-B visa has affected staffing industry’s ability to attain its objectives. It has imposed huge challenge on the staffing industry.
Now the question is – How to get skilled resource? Can we get the job done with the candidates we need? How can we build these skills in new or existing employees? One of the straight answers to these questions is learning/training and development. If we can’t hire people with the required skill sets, we must train our in-house resource to have them. We should invest in educating existing assets rather than spending on hiring from outside.

Hiring Millennials –

Overtaking the Boomers, currently 1 in 3 Americans are now Millennials (also known as Generation Y). Attracting, hiring and retaining Gen Y is one of the major challenges. While things like rewards, career progression are undoubtedly important, Millennials are more enticed to organizations with purpose; they look forward to engage themselves in meaningful work – value comes before money, they are learners and want to grow, need flexibilities. Taking these characteristics into consideration, HR must refine their hiring techniques and stay connected with them on social media, where they spend maximum of their time.

Veteran Hiring Strategy –

Veterans are a great source of talent for civilian employers. Veterans bring distinct competences and valuable skills developed through real-world, high pressure experience. They also bring federal and state tax benefit to the employer. But hiring veterans is seen as the complex challenge among companies.

Recruiting veterans requires you to understand a veteran’s mind set and what they want when transitioning into the private sector. Recruiters must do their research – get advice on writing job descriptions, interviewing best practices and sourcing best practices for finding veteran talent, learn about their background, experiences and skills they carry, portals they access to search for job etc. Based on these findings, companies should devise their veteran hiring strategy unique to their organizational needs.

Every staffing agency faces its share of challenges. But you can be an exception by devising the best strategy to overcome these issues. The primary solution is to change with time, the earlier you mold your style, the better. Here are few steps you can take:

• List down all the existing challenges
• Point out the problems that could impose threat to your business in the future
• Create a plan to overcome these staffing issues
• Talk to your staff, tell them about the challenges, strategies to overcome it. In addition, take suggestions from them too
• Make use of technology to solve the problems, save time & money, improve productivity

Sources: Recruiteze, Staffing Industry Analysts, Recruiting Daily, Adecco

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