Hiring and Retaining Talent: Top Three Challenges From 2024

By Allison McLellan
Learn from other HR and TA leaders’ struggles and successes of the past year so you can start the next one off right.

Key Takeaways

  • Employers are increasingly focusing on candidates' skills over degrees or prior job titles, but hiring managers may need more data — and encouragement — to fully embrace career changers.
  • While diversity, equity and inclusion remain crucial, rising political tensions and organizational pushback are making it harder for practitioners to focus on DEI goals.
  • Workers prioritize mental health, career growth and strong managerial support, requiring companies to rethink their retention strategies and benefits packages to stay competitive.

You’re sitting at your desk facing a flood of emails — roles aren’t getting applications, interviewees are ghosting, new AI recruitment tools are coming out faster than you can keep up. If this has been your experience hiring and retaining talent in 2024, you’re far from alone. 

The Indeed Leadership Connect community brings together senior HR and TA executives to discuss the problems they’re facing today and potential solutions. Indeed leaders and external business experts center these virtual and in-person discussions on provocative insights and future-facing strategies to lead tomorrow’s workforce.

Here’s a roundup of the top hiring and talent management challenges we heard from Leadership Connect members this year and what to do about them, including tried-and-true tips from your peers.

For the latest on what other talent leaders are doing with AI, check out our practical guide to AI in recruiting. If you’re an HR or TA leader at the VP level or above, learn more and apply to join the Indeed Leadership Connect community.

Rebuild a better world of work today! Apply for Indeed Leadership Connect

Learn More

Getting Your Team on Board With Skills-First Hiring

Some food for thought from one Leadership Connect discussion: Jobs don’t require degrees — employers do. If employers are going to adapt to the impending global labor shortage, they need to rethink how they hire, and skills-first hiring can lead the way.

Skills-first hiring (or skills-based hiring) focuses on job seekers’ abilities and aptitudes instead of more common but less effective measures of job performance, such as degrees, previous roles or years in the industry. 

Many employers today, like professional services company Accenture, are decreasing education and experience requirements, while others are eliminating resumes entirely. In fact, 2024 data from Indeed’s economic research arm, Hiring Lab, finds that the number of job posts on Indeed that mention educational degree requirements are declining in nearly every industry.

Some talent leaders are getting creative to support this new approach. In blue-collar industries like logistics, applicants may not have laptops to create formal resumes and need more mobile-friendly methods. To address this gap, some Leadership Connect members said they use Google Forms for brief candidate questionnaires or an applicant tracking system (ATS) to mock up a resume and establish a candidate’s career progression and skill level.

Other skills-first hiring strategies include:

  • Identifying and targeting talent pools with transferable skills.
  • Creating training programs that guarantee placement within the company.
  • Giving hiring managers anonymized applications with only basic required information to support fair chance hiring.
  • Investing in a dedicated team to reskill or upskill employees and route them into other roles (especially in layoff-prone industries).

Overall, leaders support skills-first hiring, but some say research proving retention rates of skills-first hires is lacking. They’re looking for this data to help convince hiring managers to consider candidates with transferable skills instead of prioritizing those rarer applicants with exact experience.

Keep an eye out for brand new Indeed data on the benefits of skills-first hiring, coming out in early 2025 on Lead with Indeed.

DEI Goals Are Important but Hard to Uphold

While many care about the work and understand the business case, talent leaders have found that DEI (or DEIB+ at Indeed) goals are difficult to accomplish in a practical way. Why? Their principles have become targets in our nation's culture wars.

DEI resistance can rear its head in unexpected places. For instance, a learning and development leader noted in one Leadership Connect cohort that younger workers value strong leaders and mentorship, which involves a lot of soft-skill development for managers. However, those soft-skill trainings often include conversations around DEI practices and are becoming more difficult to conduct amid rising negative rhetoric.

Another challenge is that many ATSs only provide the gender choice of female or male, excluding nonbinary, transgender and genderfluid people and deterring them from applying. On the flip side, efforts to be as inclusive as possible can receive backlash.

“All anyone wants to do is have a great job and hiring experience; just because I take care of people doesn’t mean I’m attacking someone else's values,”  said one talent leader, pointing out that this year’s presidential election heightened tensions. 

In discussions, Leadership Connect members recommended using transparency and accountability to open the door for meaningful engagement and feedback around DEI goals. This means sharing leadership metrics (gender identity, race, socioeconomic environments) company-wide; identifying where your organization is succeeding or could use improvement; and communicating next steps to address any shortcomings.

Members also offered specific strategies for strengthening DEI practices:

  • Look internally and at alumni to attract diverse workers. “Many of us lost workers during COVID, but they may still be in your community,” one leader said.
  • Create a talent pipeline by partnering with local schools, universities and organizations supporting the underrepresented demographics you want to attract.
  • Hold space for difficult conversations to support inclusion, belonging and psychological safety in the workplace.

In a sometimes strained environment, you also have to prioritize self-care. One talent leader said grounding yourself in the areas where you are in control and can make a difference is a useful tactic to maintain morale if you continue running into resistance while pursuing DEI goals.

Meeting Evolving Workers’ Needs

“Once we get the bodies in the building, the next challenge is around retention,” an HR senior leader said. As work environments and employee expectations evolve dramatically, many organizations are struggling to understand and meet these demands to keep their workforces engaged.

According to Indeed’s Global Work Wellbeing Report 2024, wellbeing in industries like healthcare, education and transportation has been declining since the pandemic, when people were clapping and thanking frontline workers. Now, frontline workers are working just as hard but with less appreciation, contributing to turnover.

Compared to the 2023 report, survey respondents increasingly say employers rather than employees are more responsible for setting the tone of the work environment. Using this data, talent leaders can play a key role in understanding workers’ current values and concerns to make informed updates to their employer value propositions. But it’s important that any changes in areas like your benefits packages and employee perks are data-driven. 

One Leadership Connect member said their organization improved retention, especially in frontline hourly roles, by analyzing the root causes of worker turnover and addressing those issues. The data showed that unmet needs and poor role fit were the main reasons people left the company, with managerial issues surprisingly cited more often than pay concerns.

Once you make changes, highlight new offerings in your company communications, employer branding and job postings. “We purposefully used the Work Wellbeing index from Indeed and spoke to internal and external markets to learn what they wanted. We found we had most of it — we just weren’t talking about it,” said one head of talent acquisition. “They want career pathing, growth, wellness and involvement in the community.”

Additional ideas to keep up with worker expectations include:

  • Having a dedicated retention team or onboarding partners to ensure new hires understand their benefits and career pathing options.
  • Starting an employee resource group (ERG) for new hires to provide an immediate network and get feedback on the training and orientation process.
  • Creating a system for people leaders to both privately and publicly recognize and appreciate employees.

As talent leaders navigate a rapidly changing hiring landscape, skills-first hiring, growing DEI backlash and meeting employee needs are at the forefront. Staying agile and addressing these challenges head-on will help companies attract and retain top talent in today’s competitive market.

Rebuild a better world of work today! Apply for Indeed Leadership Connect

Learn More
Three individuals are sitting at a table with a laptop, a disposable coffee cup, notebooks, and a phone visible. Two are facing each other, while the third’s back is to the camera. The setting appears to be a bright room with large windows.

Spread the word!

Help your peers stay up on important hiring trends and best practices. Invite VP-level and above talent leaders to apply for Indeed Leadership Connect membership today.
Share now

Join the conversation!

Indeed Leadership Connect membership is exclusive to VPs, SVPs, CHROs and other leaders in the fields of HR and talent attraction. Thank you for your interest, we’ll review your submission and respond as soon as possible.