Top challenges within recruitment in Sweden, Q2 2021 – Part 1.

Over the last 50 days we spoke to 50 hiring managers all over Sweden on the topic: current challenges in recruitment. We were interested in understanding the recruitment industry from the actual participants’ point of view, and couldn’t find a better solution than actually speaking to them directly.

We started by asking them for the biggest challenge in recruitment of today, giving them no alternatives to choose from but their own gathered experience, and followed this up by listing 10 potential problems or challenges. We asked them to rank these problems or challenges with a number between 1 and 10, depending on how much of a challenge it was to them in their daily work.

In this series we’ll present the results of the study, see part 1 down below:

We began the interviews by asking the hiring manager for their main challenge of today when it comes to recruitment. Giving them no alternatives to choose from, the answers were in quite a wide spread – but not as wide as one could imagine. Here are the top answers:

The most common answer is not news in any way. Back in 2017, MRI published a study on the topic claiming that 63% receives too few qualified candidates through their ads. There are of course a number of solutions to this problem: hiring inhouse recruiters, working with employer branding or going to recruitment agencies. We wrote an article on how to choose between these.

When we then moved on to part 2 of the interview, we realized that the top answer was common known – confirmed by the results from the 10 challenges. The average answer to the statement”We receive too few qualified applications through our regular ads” was 6.7/10 and therefore the second biggest challenge of all listed. What this really tells us, is that it is not only a problem when it comes to lack of competence, but also: good applications that comes from ads posted through Linkedin and Arbetsförmedlingen are rare – in general.

What we also learned was that when it comes to handling the recruitment process, hiring managers and HR departments generally wants to handle the processes themselves, but feel that they lack time for the different tasks. If they were given the option to either handle the processes inhouse or outsource it, the absolute majority would go with the first choice.

Want to know more? Stick around for part 2!

See what industries we are covering

Subscribe to our newsletter.