The past few years have been challenging for companies. At the close of the Great Recession (aka The Global Financial Crisis) in early 2009, the market was exhausted. Several years of financial challenges had taken their toll, and businesses had to struggle just to stay afloat. As the economy started to recover, companies realized a new bull market had begun, and within a few years, the unemployment rate was down to a record low of 3.5%.

Then, in early 2020, COVID-19 rocked the world. As the virus spread, so did the challenges companies faced with staying productive. Companies adapted by sending employees home, funding new desks and devices for remote work, and making significant investments in technology to help their employees connect from anywhere in the world.

As the world started to open back up, we saw trends that became known as the "Great Resignation," and "Quiet Quitting" in response to the burnout and frustration many people were feeling working in isolation. Now, as we move towards a post-pandemic world, companies are faced with new talent acquisition challenges in 2024 and beyond.

2024 has been a weird year already. The Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) "Strike-down" of non-competes, Record inflation, War, Vietnam-era-like protests on University campuses, TikTok Bans, and huge fluctuations in the market and cryptocurrencies have left many company executives scratching their heads wondering what's next.

The biggest challenges in talent acquisition right now revolve around many companies' elimination of remote work, integration with AI, and navigation of the rapidly changing regulatory environment. Remote work and the use of AI in the hiring process have become more popular than ever, but this has also brought about concerns of bias and discrimination. Companies must carefully consider their talent acquisition strategies to avoid these issues while still utilizing the technology to improve efficiency.

Additionally, the FTC's ban on non-compete agreements has caused companies to re-evaluate their hiring and retention policies. This has resulted in increased competition for top talent, especially in highly specialized industries. Companies are also facing talent acquisition challenges when it comes to creating diverse and inclusive workplaces.

In response to these complex and multifaceted challenges, companies have been forced to rapidly adopt new initiatives to attract and retain top talent. These initiatives range from bumps in pay to meet the rising cost of living to implementing more flexible work arrangements and investing in diversity and inclusion training programs. 2024 has seen a huge rise in efforts to combat bias and ensure fairness in AI-assisted recruitment. Many companies are turning to more transparent processes and using tools like interview intelligence software to analyze and identify any potential biases in their hiring practices.

So now that you've seen what you're up against, let's talk about how to overcome talent acquisition challenges in 2024.

Challenges In Talent Acquisition

KornFerry recently posted their Talent Acquisition Trends of 2024 and they mention some interesting focus points for hiring this year. The return of empathy, AI, early hiring, and skills-based hiring among several other things. These are vast topics that experts are writing entire books about - so I would encourage you to dig more into them if you're so inclined, but here are some of the challenges of global talent acquisition to expect over the coming year.

One of the significant challenges in talent acquisition today is navigating the role of technology in talent acquisition, particularly the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). While these technologies can significantly enhance efficiency and provide insights that humans might miss, they surface concerns regarding regulation and ethical usage. A major fear is that without proper oversight, AI could exacerbate and perpetuate biases rather than eliminate them.

The movement towards automation in talent acquisition, ie. leveraging AI hiring tools, is transforming the recruitment process. This shift aims to streamline hiring workflows, yet it raises questions about the reduction in personalization and relationships in the hiring process. The challenge here is maintaining a balance between automation efficiency and critical elements like culture fit.

Data & Cyber Security also present huge hurdles as global income disparities increase, quantum computing comes to market, and other powerful systems that can overwhelm a system's security go online. With "hacking" the need for robust data protection is becoming one of the fastest-growing roles. And this will become even more important as we see personal and professional data intertwine

Remote work and the subsequent need for virtual hiring, training, and productivity tools have remodeled the workspace. This change has opened doors to a more diverse talent pool but also necessitates a proactive approach to ensure inclusion and engagement in a distributed work environment.

Diversity and inclusion efforts are being amplified- with companies now more than ever focusing on creating fair and objective hiring practices. The challenge lies in going beyond surface-level commitments to embedding genuine inclusivity into workplace culture.

Finally, the push for data-driven decision-making in talent acquisition highlights the importance of ensuring fairness and objectivity in recruitment processes. Companies are tasked with leveraging data to make informed decisions while being vigilant to avoid unconscious biases that data might conceal.

Many of these challenges will require companies to balance an awareness of the regulatory ecosystem with technology and human involvement. As with any phase of rapid adoption from the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution, there will be a period of learning as we navigate these new challenges and are able to put them to work in a positive and productive way.

Now, let's look at how talent acquisition tools can help you overcome these challenges and optimize your hiring process.

Talent Acquisition Software

At Pillar, we've been at the forefront of AI-powered hiring through the development of interview intelligence software. We've seen the backlash that companies like Google, Amazon, and others have faced as they've navigated the challenges of creating objective hiring processes- and we decided to take a slightly different approach. Using principles like structured interviews, skills-based hiring, and advanced analytics, our AI focuses on automating aspects of the interview process that limit bandwidth and are labor-intensive for hiring teams. We've also built our technology to work in an additive way to a human interviewer. Candidate assessments evaluate an individual's skills by analyzing tonal variations, micro-expressions, and other critical interview aspects. This process identifies the most suitable candidates based on their skills and experience. It aims to eliminate unconscious bias, ensuring that each candidate is assessed objectively. We believe this is the future of hiring.

Currently hiring teams report spending 2/3 of their time just getting candidates to interview. According to Yello, this accounts for up to 2 hours per interview over three to four weeks and takes between 10 and 14 hours per week. This is a staggering amount of time which is dedicated to a single task that could be automated. Highlighting these inefficiencies is not to suggest replacing human interviewers, but rather redirecting this time and energy into more value-adding tasks like building relationships with candidates and creating a diverse and inclusive workplace.

Other massively time-consuming tasks include manual data entry, candidate screening, and job posting tracking. This is where talent acquisition software can make a significant difference in streamlining processes and freeing up valuable time for hiring teams to focus on other critical tasks.

Talent acquisition software will play a pivotal role in hiring as the technologies get smarter and more capable. They offer the promise of streamlining the recruitment process, saving time, and lowering costs which make hiring more efficient and effective for organizations worldwide. But this doesn't mean we're out of the proverbial woods. The challenges faced by talent acquisition teams are evolving- with technology sitting at the heart of this transformation and potentially causing new problems and opportunities if left unsupervised.

This means the path forward will come with many hurdles. The rapid integration of AI and machine learning in hiring processes introduces a new layer of complexity that none of us have faced before.  Future strategies for talent acquisition challenges have to be faced and created as they arise. To overcome these challenges teams must remain agile, continuously adapting to leverage technology in a way that enhances rather than detracts from the human element of recruiting.

Challenges faced by talent acquisition teams could range from regulator pressures and labor shortages to hiring freezes and rising unemployment rates in 2024 - only time will tell. As we look towards 2025, the role of talent acquisition software in driving down hiring costs, as well as building diverse pools of talent to choose qualified candidates from will become more important than ever before.

In conclusion, these evolving challenges create opportunities for resilience and adaptability in hiring teams. They also make way for the development of new technologies that blend artificial intelligence and human insights to gather better data and offer better solutions. The road ahead is both challenging and exciting and it's an invitation to innovate, to break down the old barriers, and to build new solutions that lead to success in the future.

If you're struggling to create an effective and efficient hiring system that accounts for impact and diversity, book a demo to check out Pillar. We'd love to show you how interview intelligence can supercharge your hiring processes and save your team up to 14 hours per hire.