Across many workplaces, employers, employees and job seekers are pointing fingers at one another regarding the challenges associated with hiring. This blame game can leave people on all sides wondering about the cause of challenges in recruiting and finding talent. But instead of placing blame, take a look at why hiring is getting tougher (backed by recent Indeed research), and explore how to simplify your hiring process.
Hiring Challenges: Who’s to Blame?
Although it’s easy to say that a labor shortage or low employment rate is causing the issue, the reality is that there are multiple factors influencing recruiting. Over 40 percent of managers surveyed by Indeed reported that a lack of skilled applicants is the top challenge.
But what they might be missing is that nearly a third of job seekers reported frustration with a lack of pay transparency in roles. Why waste time applying for a job that may not align with financial expectations? This disconnect is just one of the ways that employers and prospective employees are on different pages.
Here’s another: 56 percent of employers indicate that the toughest part of skills-first hiring is understanding the strategy and how to implement it effectively. A majority of employers in Germany and France have opted for a skills-based approach to recruiting, as skills often bring more value than other qualifications. Job seekers want to find jobs that value their skills, but employers are inconsistent when it comes to promoting and adopting this approach to hiring.
If you asked 100 job seekers, you’d likely hear an overwhelming majority report that employers are to blame due to poor transparency and unclear requirements. By contrast, employers would likely report frustrations with a lack of talent. If the two sides can come together, meeting the other halfway, things could get a lot easier.
Using the Right Tools
If you’re among the nearly 50 percent of employers using the same number of or fewer tech tools in hiring (compared to three years ago), you are putting your organization at a significant disadvantage. Automation in hiring can transform the process for everyone involved.
In 2018, approximately one-tenth of businesses were using recruitment tools with automation features for candidate screening. Just three years later, that number jumped to 45 percent of companies. But over half were still relying on manual or outdated efforts.
Automation in resumé screening reduces the time spent manually reviewing submissions by 75 percent. Plus, incorporating automation into your hiring process can help you hire up to 40 percent faster while improving precision.
ApplicantStack: Automation in Action
ApplicantStack offers automation that boosts hiring efficiency and helps you get in contact with applicants sooner. The texting integration enhances communication efforts, with text messages getting responses approximately 85 percent quicker than emails. Automating communication with triggered texts and emails also keeps candidates informed and engaged from the moment they submit their applications.
Plus, you can stay on top of compliance regulations, including federal and state laws associated with fair hiring practices, with an audit trail of all hiring activity. ApplicantStack can help you overcome the difficulties associated with hiring in 2025. Get started with a free trial and post your first job today!
Are your employees satisfied? The answer to that question may not seem like it has a lot of bearing on your recruiting process, but the reality is that employee satisfaction rates can definitely influence hiring. Read on to learn how focusing on satisfaction in the workplace can help your organization attract top candidates for open jobs.
Employee Satisfaction Rates: Breaking it Down
Employee satisfaction refers to the level of happiness team members feel about their workplaces. The term encompasses work-life balance, satisfaction with responsibilities, and the support offered by the organization overall.
When satisfaction rates are high, employees are more likely to stick around. Retention rates correlate directly with satisfaction and workplace morale, as well as productivity. Satisfied employees are typically more engaged in their roles and less likely to experience absenteeism. Plus, they’re profitable, particularly for high-functioning business units.
Investing in satisfaction can make a significant difference in performance and retention. It also impacts recruiting efforts.
The Link Between Employee Satisfaction and Recruiting
In today’s tech-heavy world, it’s easier than ever to learn more about working for a company before engaging in an interview or stepping foot inside of a building. Online review sites allow current and former employees to share their experiences, often anonymously. Few hold back from saying what they experienced and whether they believe the employer is a good one to work for.
Satisfied employees are more likely to have good things to say, which can boost your employer reputation. You could even see an influx of employee referrals when jobs open up, as your top talent can become brand ambassadors and recommend the company to people they know.
Employee referrals are among the best candidates, as they typically perform better and stay in their roles longer. When an individual is pre-vetted by someone with inside knowledge of company expectations, culture, and demands, they are more likely to come in with an understanding of what to expect.
Attracting Top Talent
Even if you can’t fill all open roles with employee referrals, a positive workplace atmosphere will still influence the candidates who find job postings and apply. Making efforts to keep existing team members happy can play a significant role in your recruiting efforts, as well as ongoing retention rates.
Using the right tools goes along with efforts to create a more supportive atmosphere. Make sure you have a way to track applications, manage candidates, and stay in touch throughout the process. These efforts will impact the candidate experience, another factor in overall satisfaction.
With ApplicantStack, you can create a better experience from the moment an applicant finds an open position. The platform is built with today’s employer in mind, with features that streamline every aspect of the hiring process. Plus, onboarding tools ensure that every new hire gets a consistent experience and can get up and running as soon as possible.
A strong reputation for employee wellbeing, work-life balance, and opportunities for growth make an organization far more appealing to talented individuals seeking a supportive work environment.
A shortage of skilled workers, coupled with low unemployment rates, has put extra pressure on hiring managers and recruiters over the last few years. On a global scale, 75 percent of employers report difficulty in finding the necessary talent, with millions of jobs going unfilled. As we move forward in 2025, it’s worth considering how your business can adapt its recruiting strategy to improve outcomes. Learn more about passive candidates and how they can fill those gaps.
What is a Passive Candidate?
A passive candidate is a worker who isn’t actively looking for a different job, but could be open to making a change if the right opportunity presented. According to a study performed in 2023, nearly 40 percent of the talent pool fits this criteria, representing a significant opportunity for employers. Typically, a passive candidate isn’t applying for new roles but could take one on with a little persuasion and appeal.
The Value of Passive Candidates
Passive recruiting focuses on finding and attracting candidates who aren’t actively looking. So you may be wondering, what’s the value?
This type of candidate may bring unique skills that you haven’t found in active applicants. Recruiters and hiring managers can search professional social media profiles for specific qualifications when seeking to fill roles that require specialized skills.
Another advantage of a passive candidate-focused hiring strategy is building a pipeline of candidates. When a role opens that aligns with the skills and qualifications of someone in that pipeline, you don’t have to start from scratch with a new job listing and a wave of applications. Instead, you can reach out directly to someone who you know could be a great fit.
Seeking a passive candidate with skills for the role may also require less training than choosing an applicant who will need to learn the position. You can reduce the time spent on hiring, which saves your company money.
Targeting Passive Candidates in 4 Ways
Since passive candidates are unlikely to be searching job boards for open roles, getting open roles in front of them requires a different approach. Explore six tips to incorporate them into your hiring efforts.
Identify current and future staffing needs
The first step in targeting passive candidates is identifying your company’s staffing needs. This concept includes both current needs and what may come in the future. Conduct a staffing assessment to identify existing and future gaps, then use that information to determine what skills and experience will bring the most value.
Look for candidates through various sources
When you have identified the hiring needs for your company and what the ideal candidate looks like, you can then start searching where that person spends their time. Do they use social media? Are they on a smartphone regularly, or would they be better targeted through more traditional outreach efforts? Maybe your employees already know this individual and could serve as a referral source.
Casting a wider net helps you reach more candidates and build a stronger talent pipeline. Look for creative solutions that help you get in front of people who could be good fits within your company.
Use creativity
Convincing someone to consider a career change, particularly when they haven’t been thinking about it, can be a challenge. Using creative methods and engaging messaging can help your efforts get noticed and increase response rates.
For example, you could put together a message about some of the unique perks or benefits available to employees to encourage people to open it and respond. Consider sponsoring in-person events, like happy hours or open houses, to provide more information about the organization and what makes it a great place to work.
Make the offer appealing
Before reaching out to a passive candidate, make sure the role you’re trying to fill makes sense in their professional trajectory. It’s unlikely that someone will make a significant change in their career for a lateral move (similar title, benefits, pay, etc.). Identify candidates who would be interested in making the change to benefit their professional lives and ensure that any offers extended are appealing and competitive.
Using ApplicantStack in Your Recruiting Strategy
As you consider how to attract talent and support the needs of your business, you may incorporate passive recruiting as part of your strategy. But without the right tools, hiring can take a lot of time, money, and effort. Bottlenecks also make it much more difficult to encourage passive candidates to come onboard.
Recruitment continues to be an ever-changing process, with trends and market shifts playing significant roles in the ease of finding and bringing on talent. Explore our first post in the 2025 recruitment trends series, which focuses on pay transparency and why it matters.
What is Pay Transparency?
Salary transparency (or pay transparency) refers to the practice of sharing details about compensation. Those details are typically shared with employees, as well as those seeking employment with an organization. Compensation information is important to jobseekers, as they can use the data to determine whether a position fits with their financial expectations and needs.
Some organizations opt to simply share salary data in job postings, while others provide more details around commission structures, increases associated with promotions, stock options, and bonuses. No law prohibits a company from providing this level of detail, but business leaders have shied away from being transparent around compensation in the past. Some did so to maintain flexibility around salary negotiations or to avoid internal conflict.
Another aim in keeping salary data private may be to attract a broader range of candidates to open roles. However, if individuals self-eliminate upon learning that the pay rate doesn’t match their expectations, going through the hiring process can be a waste of time and resources. Salary transparency from the start helps companies attract qualified and interested individuals who understand what to expect in terms of pay.
5 Reasons Pay Transparency Matters in the Workplace
Pay transparency is important to employees, as well as those seeking jobs. Some of the reasons for its importance include:
Building trust: When employees feel like they can trust their employer, the relationship becomes stronger. Employee loyalty tends to rise when trust is built.
Strengthening employee morale: When workers feel they receive fair pay for their work, they generally feel better about their roles. These feelings build morale in the workplace.
Improving collaboration: Transparency helps to foster a collaborative work environment with team members feeling that they are on an equal playing field with each other.
Promoting equity: Salary visibility allows company leaders to identify and address potential disparities that may occur.
Boosting employee retention:Retention rates skyrocket in workplaces where everyone feels fairly compensated and valued.
Salary Transparency Legislation
Various states have enacted pay transparency legislation, requiring applicable employers to provide some level of detail when hiring or preventing employers from asking applicants about past salary history. As of publication of this post, the following states have legislation enacted or slated to go into effect in the near future:
Alabama
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Hawaii
Illinois
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Minnesota
Nevada
New Jersey
New York
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
Vermont
Washington
Some laws require employers to provide salary data in job listings, while others include requirements around insights into future earning potential with an organization. Explore the laws in your state to ensure compliance.
With a better understanding of the importance of pay transparency and why prospective employees are looking for workplaces that promote it, you may be considering changes to your company’s processes. Explore how ApplicantStack supports transparency with options to incorporate salary ranges and other pertinent data when creating job postings. This applicant-tracking system is built for businesses of all sizes, helping to streamline recruiting and reduce the time spent on hiring efforts. Take it for a trial run today!
Hiring managers look at several skills categories to find the right person for an open position. Education and experience are often non-negotiable for skilled jobs, but many soft skills transfer across industry and management levels. These attributes can be equally important to finding the best candidate for the job. Consider some of the following qualities to look for in your next hire.
Ambition
Success has long been tied to the concept of ambition: the drive to get ahead and accomplish professional goals. For some, working long days, rarely using PTO, or taking on extra work tasks is a way to prove their ambition. But recent innovative thought on work-life balance suggests that ambition can be defined in other ways than just “doing more.”
Josh Klapow, a behavioral scientist and clinical psychologist, describes ambition as a state of mind. “Ambitious means action, energized, going after something. You can will yourself to be persistent. You can will yourself to dedicate your actions, but ambitious is an emotional experience.” Sussing out candidates who have focused ambition with an eye on balance can lead to less burnout and quick departures for the next big thing.
Confidence
Another of the qualities to look for in your next hire is confidence, which means knowing what you’re good at and believing that you have the skills to accomplish the tasks before you. It’s also a quality that can ebb and flow depending on the challenges of life. Consultant Kristy Hulse suggests that not everyone views confidence the same way; some would describe a confident person as lively and energetic while another would describe someone solid and steady. It can be useful to consider that potential candidates may demonstrate confidence in a variety of ways that may not fit within preconceived notions.
Problem-Solving
Candidates with good problem-solving skills can look at a situation from many angles, determine possible solutions, and find the best course of action for resolution. It’s a strategic approach that requires good organization to identify, brainstorm, and then, most importantly, implement the solution. Lots of problems can be mulled over and discussed ad nauseum, but a good problem-solver demonstrates follow-through to make sure the solution comes after the interrogation.
Dependability
Many modern employers have adapted to a more flexible or hybrid working schedule but that doesn’t eliminate the desirability of dependable workers. Dependability in the workplace includes showing up for work when expected, ready to get started on the day’s tasks. Dependable workers communicate problems or concerns clearly and timely to both managers and colleagues. They follow instructions but also can take initiative to meet deadlines according to company policies and core values. They demonstrate they can be trusted with sensitive information. Dependable people make better team members and collaborators by bringing trust and stability to working relationships.
Adaptability
According to a 2024 LinkedIn survey of the most desirable soft skills, adaptability is the top skill of the moment. Many companies are dipping their toes into the possibilities of AI in their workflow, but that can also reveal its limitations and where humans are most needed. To find the ways their talents are most valuable, workers need to be adaptable to changing job descriptions and tasks. Adaptability helps people avoid early burnout and explore how their job skills can contribute. Adaptability, says Aneesh Raman, is the way workers can have agency in a changing job world.
Generosity
In the workplace, generosity is different than making donations or giving gifts, making it worthwhile among the qualities to look for in your next hire. “The power of generosity,” according to Dr. Deborah Hecker, “causes a ripple effect. Giving with no expectation of return benefits the giver, the receiver, and people in the community.” In the workplace, that could look like giving sincere compliments for work well done. You may offer a listening ear or words of support to a co-worker during a difficult project. Generous people give credit where it’s due and share knowledge freely.
Work Ethic
Even an entry-level employee can bring a strong work ethic to the table. Work ethic describes the approach and attitude towards the value of hard work. A person can be highly skilled in their field but not demonstrate a strong work ethic, which can make them closed off to mentorship and instruction and a challenging collaborator. Someone with good work ethic shows dedication to the company values, offers support to co-workers, and takes responsibility for their tasks.
Leadership
Leadership does not have to equal upper management. BambooHR embraces a company core value of “lead from where you are.” In other words, employees at any level can demonstrate qualities of effective leaders like good listening skills, respect for others, being a good example, and projecting a positive attitude. Employees who show leadership ability may be recognized for future promotions.
Collaboration
The qualities of a good collaborator encompass almost all the soft skills on the list. The more skills someone brings to the team, the more robust the collaboration. Other talents of a good collaborator can include active listening skills with good nonverbal and verbal communication, the ability to compromise when opinions differ, to delegate tasks to share the load, and conflict resolution skills.
Candidates with a variety of transferable skills often prove to be the best kind of employees. When preparing to add to your team, consider focusing on some of these qualities to look for in your next hire. ApplicantStack can help you identify candidates with specific skills, as well as get your open roles in front of a wider audience of jobseekers. Explore how this applicant-tracking system can make hiring and onboarding easier and more efficient!
News about great employers travels fast in the modern online world. People who are pleased with their jobs are more likely to stay and invest their energy into the company’s success. A study by Columbia Business School looked at the public language of executives to suss out the value of employees compared to stakeholders and customers. Their findings suggest that “strategic importance of employees compared to other stakeholders” was vital to employee retention and satisfaction. So how can companies rethink their priorities to an employee-focused org? Consider the following six qualities of a great employer:
Recognition
Acknowledging good work has a powerful effect on employee morale, making it one of the top qualities of a great employer. According to a Quantum Workplace study, employers who offer formal recognition for good work have a 31 percent lower turnover margin than those without. Further, when you “reward employees for their contributions, they feel ownership and pride—and are willing to work just as hard on their next project.” An organized recognition program will be fair for all employees and encourage parity among those who give out the rewards.
There are various types of recognition, and different employees will respond according to their personality. It’s valuable to get to know employees so the recognition can match:
Public acknowledgement from a superior or co-workers
Anonymous card on the desk or mention in a company-wide communication
Feature on social media channels
Recognizing performance metrics is an obvious choice, but consider watching for other opportunities to acknowledge, like helping a co-worker or organizing a company event.
Promote Personal Growth
Recognition is a vital part of employee satisfaction, but it’s not all you can offer. Promoting personal growth means “identifying and nurturing potential,” says Tiffani Bova in Harvard Business Review, “giving employees the skills needed to grow.” She identifies a program at Unilever where employees joined a leadership development program where they identified future individual plans that aligned with company goals. After the workshop 92 percent of employees reported that “their jobs inspired them to go the extra mile.”
Other areas of personal growth can include physical and mental health initiatives, promoting creative hobbies outside work hours, or contributing to the community with service opportunities on company time.
Mutual Trust
Trust goes two ways: leadership and management of the organization trusts the employees and the employees trust that they are capable of solving problems and finding solutions within work tasks.
According to McKinsey, organizations with mutual trust as a core value give workers confidence that “leads to a 47% increased likelihood that employees will stay with a company and a 90% increased likelihood they’ll go out of their way to help each other.”
Work environments with mutual trust help employees feel heard and that their suggestions or contributions are welcome and valued.
Active Listening
Another of the top qualities of a great employer is building trust, and one important way to do so is by promoting a culture of active listening. Harvard’s Robin Abraham and Boris Groysberg suggest good listening requires a three-pronged approach:
Hearing, comprehending, and integrating the words and ideas spoken by another person without interrupting
Maintaining a compassionate stance and managing emotions such as anger or boredom appropriately
Giving physical cues that show you’re engaged: nodding, vocal agreement, and asking follow-up questions when appropriate
Compassionately hearing an employee’s suggestions or concerns can be enough to foster trust even if the outcome is different than they expected. This kind of respectful response shows that the door will be open the next time they want to talk.
Good Communication
Active listening is half of good communication skills; for the verbal and written half consider the following tips from Harvard’s Mary Sharp Emerson:
Clarity comes from knowing your conversational goals in advance (where possible), avoiding excess repetition, and using simple language without filler words.
Advance preparation is vital for consequential conversations like salary discussions, promotions, or conflict resolution. It can be useful to try and anticipate questions in advance in order to prepare your possible responses and determine where you may be willing to compromise.
Tone can set the stage for a productive or defensive conversation. Tone encompasses volume, intonation, and word choice. If you’re concerned the tone may not be received as you intend, written communication gives you a chance to read over and adjust tone where needed. Be aware that a joke to one person may not be funny to another, and some may never be appropriate for certain work conversations.
A company communication strategy can help avoid “I never got that email” confusion and worse. It can help define which tools get used for which types of messages: what is appropriate for a text message (and during what hours) vs. what should be in an email for multiple recipients. A company policy can help get the right info to the right people while avoiding excess messaging that begins to feel like noise.
Promote Positive Company Culture
Research suggests that employees who feel good about the work they do are more likely to stay with their employer, look for leadership opportunities, and feel satisfaction at work. Positive company culture plays a big role in fostering these feelings and contributing to overall productivity.
Small businesses just starting out may feel that it’s too early to start developing company culture, but consultant Jennifer McCusker says it starts on day one, and each employee has the opportunity to contribute to what the culture will be.
The first step is identifying your company’s core values, and then hold up every decision to make sure it aligns with them. If a core value is work-life balance, then you might ensure that employees don’t receive a text message or an email after hours. You may offer a flexible work schedule or remote work options. You may offer benefits that contribute to the overall health of your employees, like gym memberships or great healthcare.
A business is made up of many parts, but without good employees the productivity comes to a screeching halt. Companies of all sizes can find proactive ways to aid in retention and employee well-being, aligning with the top qualities of a great employer. Explore how retention rates start with the hiring and onboarding process. Take steps to ensure that your company processes are consistent and positive, including implementing ApplicantStack, a proven applicant-tracking system, and watch employees thrive.
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