Many companies struggle to find great job candidates to fill open roles. While you may think this...
Hiring and retaining talent is critical to the success of any business. But competition for top talent is harder than ever. Recruiters and HR teams must continually overcome roadblocks, from communication gaps to skill mismatches, as they try to attract the best people.
We talk to hiring managers across the country and across industries, including healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, transportation, and staffing. By listening to their struggles, we’ve compiled a list of some of the most common issues that HR managers face. In this article, we’ll highlight five of the biggest challenges, along with highly effective solutions that can help you accomplish your hiring goals.
Table of Contents
- Why You Need to Understand and Address Hiring Challenges
- 5 Hiring Challenges and Their Solutions
- The Role of Compliance in 2025 Hiring
- How to Get Support During the Hiring Process
Why You Need to Understand & Address Hiring Challenges
The economy and job market, as well as hiring regulations, are all changing in 2025. The Trump administration has taken swift and drastic action on topics from immigration to tariffs. Companies are operating in an environment of uncertainty.
One effect of this appears to be an overall slowdown in hiring. In fact, aside from the pandemic drop in 2020, hiring rates haven’t been this low since 2013, according to a recent article. Now is the time to realize that there are many qualified candidates actively looking for work. You just need to find them.
It’s time to scrutinize your hiring process. Identify your biggest hiring challenges and weaknesses and address them. If you don’t, you’ll be wasting time and money on outdated practices. Addressing these challenges positions your company to hire the best talent.
5 Hiring Challenges & Their Solutions
Navigating today’s ever-changing business landscape is a struggle. You’re facing evolving candidate expectations, internal pressure to find people quickly, and macroeconomic issues over which you have no control.
As an HR professional, it’s crucial to have an informed strategy for talent acquisition. Developing that strategy means understanding these hiring challenges and finding practical solutions to overcome them.
1. Finding the Right Candidates
Filling your talent pipeline with skilled candidates isn’t easy. Traditional job postings aren’t enough to attract the right people — especially when some job sites are filled with fake listings and scams. It’s especially difficult in competitive industries like finance, IT, healthcare, and transportation.
The last thing you can afford to do is make a bad hire. To avoid that, your HR staff must know how to spot various candidate red flags. You don’t just want to hire someone; you want to hire the right someone.
What You Can Do
Job seekers evaluate companies just like companies evaluate job seekers. Increase your chances of finding the right person with these tasks:
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- Build your brand: HR teams should work with leadership, marketing, and communications departments to ensure the organization has a strong reputation and a clearly communicated mission.
- Network both online and in-person: Tap into professional networks and industry associations. Attend industry events. Be active on social media, particularly LinkedIn.
- Work with recruiters or talent agencies who specialize in your industry: Qualified candidates who haven’t found a good fit may decide to take temporary positions or work with recruiters. These can help open you up to a new talent pool.
- Recognize growth potential in a candidate: Rarely will an applicant meet every single requirement for a position. Look at the applicant holistically; they may have transferable skills that would help them succeed. Remember: Training and development are (or should be!) part of your culture.
- Running a fast background check: You can’t see every red flag up front. Ensure you have a fast, reliable background check solution so that every background check is completed quickly.
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2. Handling a High Volume of Applications
As we said earlier, the pace of hiring is the slowest it’s been in over a decade. Many people are applying for jobs. Plus, reductions in the federal workforce are increasing the applicant pool. Depending on the type of job you’re hiring for, you might find yourself flooded with applications within the first day or two.
The more applications you have, the more work it is to sift through them. This can slow down your process to the point where candidates may begin interviewing for other positions before you even respond to their submission. Quickly handling applications keeps those candidates in your pool, not your competitor’s.
What You Can Do
So, how can you and your HR staff deal with an influx of resumes without getting bogged down? Here are a few options.
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- Limit your posting window: Leaving positions open longer will only add to your staff burden.
- Use automated communication tools: Utilize tools that allow you to quickly send updates to groups of applicants.
- Use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS): Consider implementing or upgrading your ATS to automate tasks and standardize parts of the hiring process. An ATS can easily remove incomplete applications or those that don’t meet certain parameters, thereby reducing the number of applications to review.
- Streamline your review process: Where can you cut time? Maybe fewer rounds of reviews, or reviewing stages of applicants at a time?
- Create alignment on your team: Ensure you have alignment among your HR team, hiring managers, and business leaders. There should be a clear understanding as to what exactly you’re looking for in an applicant.
- Review the posting for next time: If you’re getting a high ratio of applicants who aren’t the right fit, you may benefit from a more detailed job description.
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3. Competitive Markets
You’re fishing for candidates in the same pond as a lot of other companies and recruiters. Sometimes, the competing organizations will have more resources than you or a more well-known brand. It may feel like all your best candidates end up working for other companies.
But remember that you are competitive too. You just need a way to show it to the candidates.
What You Can Do
Position your company to compete by:
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- Getting passive candidates interested: Some of the best candidates are not actively looking for jobs, but they’re in your network. Find ways to pitch a position by talking about things beyond compensation. You could highlight company culture, growth opportunities, and mission, for example.
- Ensuring your compensation package is satisfactory: In-demand candidates know their value. Before posting a job, make sure the compensation package is competitive. If it isn’t, candidates will take themselves out of the running.
- Communicating effectively: Candidates who feel respected and informed during the hiring process tend to assume they will be treated the same way once they are hired. Give them this good impression as early as possible.
- Minimizing time to hire: Talented job seekers may be applying to multiple jobs and interviewing with several companies. If your hiring process is slow, your preferred candidate might be scooped up by a more efficient competitor.
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4. Time & Resource Limits
You and your staff cannot work 24 hours a day. You have responsibilities besides focusing on hiring a single role. Being stretched too thin is one of the most common problems in all of HR.
If you’re overwhelmed, the hiring process will suffer, and you’ll lose quality candidates to competitors who are more responsive. To be successful, you need to make your hiring process as efficient as possible.
What You Can Do
First, assess your current situation and identify your biggest roadblocks. Think about where these tips can help you most.
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- Automate what you can: Implementing an ATS can help automate a lot of administrative work and help you track your hiring metrics. Using a background check service removes the burden of contacting schools and government agencies as well. There are many ways to automate your most tedious tasks!
- Streamline interviews: Reduce the number of interview rounds. Scheduling interviews can be a major time suck.
- Develop a talent database: Have a database of quality candidates from previous recruitment cycles. That way, you don’t always have to start from scratch to fill a role.
- Write clear job descriptions: Make sure your descriptions are clear about the role, the needed qualifications, and compensation. Being clear helps reduce the number of unqualified (and overqualified) applicants.
- Work to reduce attrition: If you are losing employees faster than you should, try to determine why. Is it management, pay, stress, or something else? Keeping employees longer can ease your hiring burden.
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5. Lengthy Hiring Process
A long, complicated hiring process leads to frustrated candidates who then remove themselves from consideration. It also causes you to lose candidates to other companies that move faster than you.
Whether the delay is caused by a single bottleneck or an overall slow and manual process, you need to address it. Leaving it as-is will only make you lose more good candidates over time, leaving you with a substandard workforce.
What You Can Do
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- Collecting data about your process: You need to understand how long it takes you to fill roles. How many days does it take from final selection to making an offer? How long does it take to go through interview rounds? By analyzing your process, you can uncover problems that are slowing things down.
- Having a consistent hiring strategy: Document your hiring process so everyone internally can see it. Fix any problems, then follow the improved process diligently.
- Using a candidate screening service: Background checks and verifications should be quick and accurate. That means using a technology-based solution like Cisive so you don’t have to do it manually.
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The Role of Compliance in 2025 Hiring
2025 has brought big changes in the employment world. Whether it’s changes in policies driven by the new administration or state-level changes to employment laws, compliance is a big topic. Here are just a few compliance-related items to be aware of:
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- Pay transparency: More states and cities are adopting laws requiring employers to disclose salary ranges in job postings.
- Minimum wage increases: Many cities in California, Washington, and New York have increased their minimum wage in 2025 as the cost of living keeps rising.
- AI laws in recruitment: States like Colorado and Illinois now have regulations governing the use of AI in recruitment and employee monitoring.
It’s essential that you have a compliance-first screening solution. It should spot red flags and keep you in line with the laws and regulations of every hiring location. Cisive’s solution offers exactly that. And, we educate you on compliance-related topics with in-depth thought leadership resources.
How To Get Support During the Hiring Process
Organizations across industries rely on Cisive background screening solutions to expedite the hiring process. We offer a single platform for background checks, drug screenings, I-9 compliance, post-hire monitoring, and business intelligence.
Our clients are often from highly regulated industries, including financial services, healthcare, transportation, and technology. We have deep knowledge of the regulatory and legal issues facing these organizations. Clients rely on our solutions when hiring for everything from entry-level roles to executive positions.
As your hiring teams face more challenges, Cisive can help integrate your talent acquisition processes. Above all, we are dedicated to providing the best customer support in the industry.
Streamlined Hiring With Cisive
The hiring landscape has shifted in 2025. Don’t get left behind using outdated recruitment processes.
Speak with a Cisive expert about how to solve background screening and hiring challenges for today’s world. Whether you’re trying to shorten your hiring process or discover candidate red flags to hire the right person, Cisive has your solutions.
