Hiring Woes: Top 4 Challenges Faced by HR Professionals in the Textile Industry
Imagine this - you post a job opening and get a sea of unqualified applicants who end up wasting your time!


That's downright taxing on various levels.

Hiring the right employees in the textile industry, or any industry for that matter, might seem a smooth sail on the surface. However, it can be overwhelming and take a toll on the HR professionals. To gain a better understanding of the hiring challenges impacting textile businesses, we asked a few HR professionals to share insights on the subject. Here's what we learned about today's textile hiring ecosystem.

Dearth of Highly-Skilled Applicants
Finding candidates who have the needed skills, competencies, and relevant experience for a particular position is getting increasingly difficult. "It is difficult to find designers with 'out of the box' thinking. Most of the designers lack fresh ideas and creativity. The usual trend seen is that they just make minor tweaks to the already existing style, which is not likely to make a breakthrough," says Gokul S, HR Manager at Hi design.

Lack of Self-Awareness
Attracting top talent needs the HR team to get rid of antiquated hiring practices and evolve.
"Most corporate recruitment and talent functions are reactive and rarely are future focused. These functions aren't aligned to the organization's business strategy, aren't a part of a formal organizational talent, and in fact, seldom even communicate with each other. Organizations must be self-aware and understand their functional capabilities in recruitment and talent management," says Krishnanand Tripathi, Group HR-Head at Textrade International Ltd.

Finding the Right Fit
Aren't we all familiar with how hiring the wrong fit can affect client satisfaction and organizational productivity? "Headhunters often have access to candidates who are not usually willing to contact the company directly even after knowing about vacancies, and this, of course, is due to varied reasons. Therefore, dependence on headhunters for recruitment will always be there. Every textile or retail niche has a different model of business and operations. The challenge for headhunters is to identify the candidate who is the right fit for these businesses and that is seemingly becoming difficult," says Suresh Kumar, Senior Vice President (HR) at Mafatlal Industries Ltd.

Retaining Millennials
By 2020, millennials will form about 50% of the global workforce. However, several textile businesses are finding this group hard to attract and manage."Their aggression, if channeled correctly, can be harnessed for greater accomplishments. At the same time, they also come with their own set of expectations that needs to moderated appropriately," says Y.R. Wilson, President (HR) at the Himatsingka Group.

Conclusion
The textile industry thrives on the backs of talented and industrious people. Implementing smart hiring practices and being proactive, thus, become the order of the day. Understanding the aforementioned challenges can help textile business entrepreneurs come up with ways to overcome them and thereby, result in effective recruitment. More importantly, it can aid businesses in meeting their growth objectives.  

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