4 Challenges Facing HR Departments Today

The HR landscape is rapidly changing. Regardless of the industry you’re in, as an HR professional you face certain challenges surrounding hiring and retention.

For companies hiring new talent or developing existing talent, staying on top of trends and best practices is more important than ever. Here are a few of the current challenges facing HR departments today.

Applicant Quality

While a significant challenge for many hiring departments is finding candidates, HR professionals are currently concerned with the quality of the applicants they’re seeing. Record unemployment has given candidates bargaining power, and many people are applying for jobs that may be above their abilities.

Because of the change in applicant quality, many HR pros have developed new methods for narrowing down the field of candidates. The gig economy and use of independent contractors, flexible working arrangements and remote workers are just some of the way’s employers are identifying high-quality applicants in a tight labor market.

Talent Retention

Often, finding candidates is only the beginning for HR professionals. After finding high-quality candidates and hiring the correct one, how do you get them to stay? There are many factors that go into an employee’s choice to leave, location, better pay, or advancement to name a few.

Companies can try to offset those factors through several methods. Workplace flexibility is one of the most sought-after benefits for employees. Especially for new parents, companies who offer the ability to balance work and family are in high demand.

When you can’t offer more compensation or if that isn’t the main motivator for your employees, look to flexibility to boost retention. Making sure your company offers distinct advantages over your competitors is a great way to maintain employees.

Diversity

Not only is diversity one of the main challenges facing HR departments, it’s also beneficial to creating a well-rounded team. Building an inclusive workplace isn’t simply about hiring candidates from a mix of backgrounds. Employees must feel valued and accepted in the workplace for diversity to succeed.

Fostering diversity in the workplace requires complete buy-in across the entire company, from HR personnel, recruiters and hiring managers focusing on diversifying the talent pool to upper management learning how to eliminate their personal unconscious biases.

Diversity is no longer a choice companies can make, organizational buy-in needs to be fostered for inclusion to increase.

Tech Implementation

Artificial intelligence is making large changes in every industry. For HR departments, AI and other new technology can help increase efficiency, but what about the rest of the organization? When implementing new technologies, HR departments have the job of making sure it helps the company.

The role of HR needs to go beyond transactions, strategies, and policies, and instead be a key player in the organizational design. Its function should be to maximize the effectiveness of an organization, chiefly, but not exclusively, through the people that work in it. Technology shouldn’t be brought in unless it helps people do their job better.

Build a Human Resources department that will overcome these challenges and set your company up for success. Reliable Resources is here to provide you with the best HR Staffing solutions on the market.

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