Recruiters: Companies Taking Too Long to Extend Offers

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Top Echelon Network President Mark Demaree

Just because there are more job seekers in the market doesn’t mean that there are also more of those types of candidates, as well.

Canton, OH (PRWEB) June 18, 2012

Although unemployment remains high and there are millions of job seekers currently in the market, companies are still experiencing problems finding, recruiting, and successfully hiring the candidates they want to hire.

According to the recruiters who are part of a national network, the companies themselves are partly to blame for that problem.

Top Echelon Network, an elite network of highly specialized search firms, recently conducted a poll of its membership. In that poll, Top Echelon asked the following question:

“What’s your biggest problem with clients right now?”

Over one-third of respondents answered, “Taking too long to extend an offer,” with 37.8% of participants choosing that answer. The second-most popular answer was “Lack of timely feedback” at 26.1%.

According to Top Echelon Network President Mark Demaree, both of these answers are disconcerting, because they both contribute to companies losing talent during the hiring process.

“If company officials don’t provide timely feedback and they take too long to extend an offer of employment to qualified candidates, they increase the chances that those talented candidates will take other offers, decide they don’t want to make a move after all, or lose interest in the company altogether,” said Demaree. “And these are some of the things that are happening.”

Unfortunately, a misnomer currently exists in the marketplace: because there are so many unemployed job seekers, some company officials believe they can take their time during the recruiting and hiring process. That is not the case, especially in industries where certain skill sets are scarce and competition for the candidates who possess those skill sets are fierce.

“There are companies that have been lulled into a false sense of security,” said Demaree. “Whereas it would appear that the market is tipped in their favor, that simply is not the case when it comes to higher-level candidates with hard-to-find skills and experience. Those candidates are just as difficult to find and hire as they’ve ever been.

“Just because there are more job seekers in the market doesn’t mean that there are also more of those types of candidates, as well.”

The third-most popular answer in the Top Echelon Network poll was “Getting job orders,” at 19.8%, proving that companies don’t have a problem enlisting the help of recruiters when a need arises. However, they do have a problem with filling that need in a timely fashion, especially when they have the opportunity to extend an offer to a highly qualified candidate.

Top Echelon Network, based in Canton, Ohio, consists of nearly 400 recruiting firms and 1,000 individual recruiters.

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