Why is hiring the right employee so difficult?

Ten or twenty years ago, what and how did job seekers find jobs? They may look for jobs from newspapers, flyers, the radio, and from connections, but technology has now changed the game.

Today, the staff you hire will mostly be between 20 to 40 years old, a generation familiar with new technology. Everyone can access information quickly from their smartphones. Technology changes our habits, from watching TV to watching Youtube or streaming videos, from reading newspapers or magazines to websites and apps.

That is why brands are moving their marketing budget from traditional advertising to Google ads or social media. Why? Because the market has changed, the audience has moved to other platforms, and online advertising is cheaper, easy to monitor, and target-oriented.

It happens on the job seekers' side too. As the recruiter or company, if you are still looking for candidates using old methods, you will find it hard to get applicants and suitable candidates. Modern job seekers expect their job search experience to be:

• Fast. Job seekers expect fast responses, results, and updates from companies. If not, they will move on quickly.
• Convenient. Job seekers want instant and easy ways to know about vacancies and to apply to them.
• Accessible. Job seekers expect that all information about the job and company are available online and publicly, in their preferred language.
• Relevant. Job seekers want to only see jobs that match their interests and expect to know beforehand what are the benefits and flexibilities offered, the company culture and values.

A bad or low response to your vacancy may not be because no one is interested in your company but more likely you are not promoting the job in an effective way on the right channels to reach the right audience. Plus, as a recruiter, you have a time and budget limit for hiring.

What are the Recruitment Problems?

We’ve worked with many top employers in the hiring & recruitment process, and find that these are the most common problems faced by companies hiring in Malaysia:

• No Show. Your candidates don't come to the interview or don’t respond.
• Not Relevant. You don't get suitable candidates that match the job requirements
• No Applicants. You promote your job vacancy everywhere but get few or no applicants, wasting the money spent from your hiring budget.
• Wrong Hire. Hiring the wrong candidates means new employees resigning within 6 months.
• No Awareness. Your company isn’t well known and jobseekers don't know that your company has job openings.

What Are the Recruitment Solutions?

The hiring problems listed above can interrupt your focus on growing the business. However, you are not alone, as every company faces these same problems. Now, let’s focus on the solution.

Step 1: Define your Ideal Employee

Before you start hiring, identify your ideal candidate first. This is important because you'll hire, pay, and give them responsibilities in your company, therefore you need to know them and trust them.

• Who are they? Seniors, professionals, fresh graduates, interns from top universities, freelancers?
• Where do they live? Do you accept applicants from all over Malaysia or only from a specific region?
• What do they want? Does their expected salary match with your company salary budget? Do their career goals and values align with your company?
• What can they do? What technical skills, hard and soft skills, language skills, qualifications and certifications, are needed for the job?
• are they? How can you reach these people? What online platforms do they use and how do they search for jobs?

When you have the answers, keep them in mind as we continue. You can even use the above information to instantly search for candidate profiles, such as using AJobThing’s People Search tool that surfaces the top-matching profiles from our database of over 2million job seekers. Just save the profiles you’re interested in and contact the candidates at your convenience.

If you are hiring for multiple vacancies, don’t worry: bulk hiring services such as Sonar helps you fill up to hundreds of vacancies in a short time by using highly targeted digital recruitment marketing campaigns.

Step 2: Attract the right candidate

Now you understand the situation and know your target. The next step is getting an applicant to your job vacancy. As job seekers today are mostly young people familiar with technology, therefore the best media to reach them is the internet. Your job posting information must be accessible on all devices, along with every detail, alert and notification about the job, application, and interview.

The challenge is:

• Does your company have a website or app?
• Do candidates know about your website or app? How do they know you’re hiring? How will you attract qualified candidates to visit or download?
• If you post jobs on social media such as LinkedIn, is your brand popular enough and have a good reputation to get attention and gain trust?
• How effective is your job description?

That’s why using a recruitment platform like AJobThing helps you reach the right job seekers by posting your job to both localized job portals and international job websites such as LinkedIn.

Maukerja is the top choice for English and Bahasa Malaysia-speakers, while Ricebowl is preferred for English and Mandarin-speakers. Both are our websites with apps available on Android and iOS, used by around 8 million active job seekers to find jobs in Malaysia. By using AJobThing, you can leverage on our brands’ strong presence across social media and blogs with millions of readers, and WhatsApp groups based on job specialization and industry.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to writing job descriptions: for example, AJobThing offers more than 500 high-quality templates containing relevant keywords, common job requirements and benefits, which you can edit to your satisfaction.

Step 3: Use the right process

So you’ve posted the job ad, and you’ve got your first applicants. Now what? Keep in mind that a quality candidate will probably have several other companies interested in their profile. How can you stand out?

The first rule is to respond quickly. It’s normal for job seekers to apply to many jobs on various platforms, the recruiter who waits weeks to reply will miss out when the candidate already gets an offer from other companies. We know it’s time consuming to compose emails and organize interviews, so here are some templates you can use:

On AJobThing, managing applicants is a simple one-click process where you can even contact, shortlist, reject, and hire applicants in bulk. This makes it convenient when your job gets many applications. We will also send real-time notifications and updates to the job seeker so they know their application status.

We hope this information can help solve your recruitment problems and bring you to hiring success. For more expert advice on your specific hiring problems, click the button below to register with AJobThing and our recruitment consultants will get in touch: