According to the SHRM report “SHRM 2025 Talent Trends Report”, some recruiting problems stem from inefficient internal processes, such as a lack of succession planning and knowledge transfer, which create skill gaps within the organization and make filling positions even more difficult. [1] Additionally, qualitative research from Ohio University indicates that internal factors, such as ineffective coordination with hiring managers, demanding work conditions, and inadequate compensation budgets, are the main causes of stress and recruiting problems. [2] We wrote this guide for HR directors, talent acquisition managers, and recruitment agency owners who are ready to start fixing. Each recruitment problem below includes a root cause, measurable impact, and a direct action plan.
Do You Actually Have Recruitment Problems?
Before diving into new strategies or software, you need to identify where your pipeline is leaking. A recruitment checklist isn't just a "to-do" list; it is a diagnostic tool designed to uncover hidden inefficiencies that cost you time, money, and top-tier talent.
Recruitment Health Checklist
[ ] Time-to-fill exceeds 45 days
[ ] The offer acceptance rate is below 80%
[ ] Less than 30% of applicants meet the minimum job requirements
[ ] Candidate dropout rate between application and first interview exceeds 40%
[ ] You have no structured scoring rubric for screening calls
[ ] You cannot identify which sourcing channel produces your best hires
[ ] Your job postings have not been updated in over 12 months
[ ] Candidates receive no status update for more than 7 days at any point
[ ] You have no data on why candidates decline offers
If you checked three or more, your recruitment process has structural problems. Keep reading.
Category 1: Attracting Talent
Problem 1: Your Employer Brand Is Invisible
Many candidates research potential employers online before applying. A large majority of job seekers use social media and review sites such as Glassdoor to learn about a company’s reputation before applying. For example, up to 90% of active job seekers use social media to research employers [3], and about 83% are likely to base their application decisions on company reviews. [4]
Why this happens: Most companies treat employer branding as a marketing expense to cut and a PR project to delegate. Nobody owns it internally. There is no process for collecting employee stories, responding to reviews, or keeping the company's public presence up to date.
The fix:
Problem 2: Your Job Descriptions Are Filtering Out Good Candidates
The average job description was written in 2019 and has been copied and pasted ever since. It lists 14 required skills, demands "5-7 years of experience" for a mid-level role, and buries the salary range in the footer, if it appears at all.
Why this happens: JDs are written by hiring managers who list every skill they want the ideal candidate to have, not the skills the role actually requires. Nobody audits them after posting. A LinkedIn Gender Insights Report found that women tend to apply for fewer jobs than men, even when both genders view similar numbers of job postings, and when they do apply, women are more likely than men to be hired. To encourage confidence and increase application rates among all candidates, employers should write more clearly. Over-specified JDs do not raise your bar. They reduce your pool.
The fix:
Category 2: Process
Problem 3: You Are Drowning in Unqualified Applicants
The "Easy Apply" button on LinkedIn changed recruiting permanently. A candidate can apply to 200 jobs in an afternoon. They do. Your job posting for a Senior Data Engineer gets 800 applications. Forty are qualified.
Why this happens: Low-friction application processes attract speculative applicants. One recruiter spending 5 minutes per resume burns 67 hours on that single role. During those 67 hours, your three best candidates accepted offers elsewhere.
The fix: This is exactly the problem Manatal's AI Recommendation Engine was built for. The system scans incoming applications and your existing candidate database, then scores and ranks candidates against the specific requirements in your job description.
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Problem 4: Your Hiring Process Is Too Slow
The average time-to-hire across industries is 44 days. [5] The average top candidate stays available for 10 days before accepting another offer. Do the math.
Why this happens: unclear decision ownership and the lack of automation between steps. Hiring managers delay feedback. Interviewers miss scheduling windows. No one follows up on their own.
The fix:
Problem 5: You Ghost Candidates and Wonder Why Your Brand Is Suffering
Many candidates report not hearing back from employers after submitting a job application. [6] This particular recruitment problem compounds over time: each ghost makes your employer brand slightly worse, which increases candidate skepticism, which makes future recruiting harder.
Why this happens: Recruiters do not intend to ghost candidates. They just have many open applications and no automated system to close the loop.
The fix:
Category 3: Selection and Closing
Problem 6: Unconscious Bias Is Shrinking Your Talent Pool
Your screeners are pattern-matching based on familiarity. Top-tier university names. Familiar company logos. Names that sound like the last successful hire. It is often just replication.
Why this happens: Resume screening is an unstructured, high-volume task done under time pressure. When humans make fast decisions repeatedly, they default to pattern recognition.
The fix:
Problem 7: You Are Losing Candidates at the Offer Stage
An offer acceptance rate below 80% is a symptom. The actual problem is almost always one of three things: compensation is below market, the candidate received a competing offer, or the recruiter failed to build enough organizational buy-in during the process.
Why this happens: Salary benchmarking happens after a candidate is selected, not before the role is posted.
The fix:
Category 4: Technology and Data
Problem 8: Your Tech Stack Does Not Talk to Itself
The average recruiting team uses 7 different tools. Job boards, an ATS, a LinkedIn Recruiter license, an email client, a scheduling tool, a video interview platform, and a spreadsheet to hold it all together. None of them shares data automatically.
Why this happens: Tools get added one at a time to solve immediate pain points. Nobody audits whether the new tool integrates with existing systems.
The fix:
Problem 9: You Do Not Know Where Candidates Drop Off
You know your time-to-fill. You probably do not know which interview stage produces the most candidate withdrawals. You likely do not know which job board produces your highest quality of hire or what percentage of rejected candidates from one role were hired for another role six months later.
Why this happens: Recruiting dashboards are configured during ATS implementation and never revisited. Default reports track volume (applications received, interviews scheduled), but not conversion quality, so data is collected but never analyzed.
The fix:
Problem 10: When Salary Expectations and Compensation Don't Align
Hiring a senior engineer when your approved salary band is calibrated to 2021 market rates is not a recruiting problem. It is a budget problem that will waste 8 weeks of recruiter time.
Why this happens: Headcount budgets are set annually by finance teams using historical data that lags 12 to 18 months behind the current market. By the time the role is approved and posted, the approved band is already below what qualified candidates expect.
The fix:
How to Build a Recruitment Process That Does Not Break Under Pressure
The companies that consistently hire well do not do it reactively. They are not opening a LinkedIn Recruiter seat when a role has been open for three months.
Build your talent pipeline before you need it. This means maintaining active relationships with candidates who were strong but not selected in previous searches. It means sourcing passively even when headcount is frozen. It means treating your ATS as a talent database, not just an applicant tracking system.
Reactive hiring will always cost you more: in time, in recruiter hours, in salary premiums paid to candidates who know you are desperate. Proactive talent acquisition treats hiring as a continuous process, not a crisis-response.
Conclusion
Most recruiting problems trace back to the same root cause: processes designed for low volume that were never updated to handle scale. Job descriptions that were never revised. Screening is still done manually. Communication that relies on recruiters having spare time they do not have. The fix is not complicated. Define your SLAs, automate your candidate communication, benchmark compensation before the search begins, and use data to find where candidates are actually dropping off. None of these requires a large budget. They require someone to own the process and follow through. Recruiting will not get easier on its own. But with the right structure in place, it does get predictable, and predictable hiring is competitive hiring.
Start a free trial of Manatal and see how much of your screening and workflow can be automated from day one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What are the most common recruiting problems companies face in 2026?
A: The most common recruiting problems are slow time-to-hire, high volumes of unqualified applicants, weak employer branding, unconscious bias in screening, and offer-stage losses due to below-market compensation. Most of these are process failures, which means they are fixable with the right tools and structure.
Q: How can I reduce time-to-hire without lowering my hiring bar?
A: Set SLA limits for each hiring stage: 48 hours from application to screening, 5 days from screening to first interview, and 3 days from final interview to decision. Use automated scheduling tools like Calendly and require interviewers to submit structured scorecard feedback within 24 hours.
Q: What is the fastest way to fix problems with recruiting when I have a limited budget?
A: Start with free tools: rewrite your JDs using Gender Decoder, set up Google Alerts to monitor your employer brand, build structured interview scorecards in Google Sheets, and use your ATS's built-in automation to send candidate status updates.
Q: How do I handle the talent acquisition challenge of too many unqualified applicants?
A: Add 2-3 knockout questions to your application form and set an auto-reject threshold in your ATS for candidates who do not clear it. For roles with very high application volume, consider switching from open applications to sourced outreach only. AI-assisted screening tools like Manatal's Recommendation can rank applicants, allowing recruiters to review only the top 10-15% of the pool.
Q: What recruitment problems and solutions should I prioritize if I can only fix one thing?
A: Fix your screening and response process first. If qualified candidates are being lost to slow follow-up or zero communication, every other improvement is downstream of that failure. Set up automated stage-change notifications and rejection emails in your ATS.
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