Dive Brief:

• Thirty-seven percent of employers have relaxed job requirements for temporary workers to compete for talent, according to a new survey by Adecco USA of 501 individuals responsible for hiring. And 72% of those employers loosened the requirements in the past year, according to the poll.
• Nearly half of respondents who relaxed or plan to relax their requirements did so because they couldn't find enough qualified candidates, they said. And among those who said they plan to loosen requirements, 46% hope they will find a larger pool of qualified candidates. A third of respondents said they decided to relax requirements because they were losing job candidates to the competition. Just over half said they were unable to fill openings fast enough.
• Survey results also found that some of the ways companies relax job credentials is by shortening the required years of experience, reducing the required academic credentials, speeding up the hiring process, ending drug-testing of candidates, and halting use of background checks.

Dive Insight:

The economic think tank The Conference Board speculated in 2018 that employers — facing a tight labor market, acute skills gap and time-to-hire issues — might need to relax their job requirements to fill positions. A fair number of employers are doing just that, or at least planning to, according to the Adecco survey.

"With the shallow candidate pool, many employers face challenges identifying candidates that meet all the qualifications traditionally required. By loosening requirements, employers may open up an entirely new group of candidates, which can enable them to better fill in-demand positions," Adecco USA SVP Amy Glaser said in a news release. "In fact, the survey found that by loosening requirements, many respondents (47%) saw an increase in applications and 42% said their pool of qualified candidates for each position had become larger."

Generally, employers and job seekers prefer a short time-to-hire process. Shortening time-to-fill enhances candidates' hiring experience by reducing the stressors of unemployment, mitigating job search-related anxiety, and presenting a positive impression of the organization, SparkHire CEO and Founder Josh Tolan​ told HR Dive last year.

Relaxing job requirements and speeding up hiring time may also raise questions about the quality of candidates. Tolan said that employers can speed up the hiring process without sacrificing candidate quality by making the recruiting process personal and communicating regularly and transparently.