Disruptive trends like artificial intelligence, automation, gig workers, and mobile-first strategies have permanently altered the recruiting landscape. If your recruiting department can’t keep up with the demand, it’s time to make some changes. The volume of data aimed at your HR department can seem overwhelming, making it difficult to map out an efficient recruiting process.
This year, we challenge you to revitalize your recruiting efforts with these eight actionable resolutions based on today’s hottest recruiting trends:
- Make good use of data. Data holds the key to understanding your workforce and predicting trends you can act on. The right data can facilitate effective workforce planning, correlate people analytics to business performance, and predict turnover and retention rates. Data can also reveal cultural challenges, recommend employee job changes, assess cultural fit, identify regional compensation trends, and pinpoint potential hiring biases that could create diversity hire challenges.
- Think mobile first for job ads and recruiting portals. Mobile technology has proved to be a disruptive change across the HR spectrum. Recruiters, in particular, should take a mobile-first approach to ensure positive candidate experiences throughout the recruitment process. Optimal presentation of ads and portals on mobile screens, mobile recruiting apps, ease of access for hiring managers, mobile analytics, and mobile interactions will require design innovations that take your recruiting efforts beyond the desktop.
- Build a better employer brand. Competition for quality talent has created an increasingly employee-centric recruiting process that will continue to gain momentum. In order to attract and retain those highly sought-after candidates, you need a strong employer brand that encompasses culture, management, training, growth potential, work-life balance, and flexible work opportunities.
- Map out the candidate journey. The “candidate journey” encompasses each interaction a candidate has with your organization from initial contact to final offer. Every step of that process should be mapped out and optimized for stronger engagement, faster communication, and increased process efficiency.
- Implement recruitment marketing. Like its content marketing cousin, recruitment marketing is the art of telling your story in a compelling way so that your target audience (i.e., the awesome, unique, hard-to-hire candidate) takes action. If you’ve never thought of recruiting in terms of consumer marketing, now is the time to change that. An effective recruitment marketing strategy will engage quality candidates, draw them in, and convince them to take the next step.
- Kill it with social recruiting and technology. LinkedIn isn’t the only social media site where you can engage candidates. TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram also deliver excellent opportunities to interact with people on their home turf. Think outside of the box of a simple text/image post and incorporate a variety of contact points and branding elements.
- Leverage automation. This Hubspot article highlights the importance of automation in HR, to lessen the burden on departments. From utilizing standardized onboarding and training, to leveraging programmatic job ads to reach your ideal target candidate wherever they are on the internet, the advances in automated HR solutions can go a long way to improving the bandwidth of HR departments.
- Take advantage of the gig economy to access the best people. Recently, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 55 million people in the United States were gig workers - or 34% of the workforce. And Pew Research reports that among current or recent gig platform workers, 31% -- 3% of U.S. adults overall -- say this has been their main job over the past year. It’s no longer just Uber drivers and landscapers who are in business for themselves; now, top-quality workers across the spectrum of professional services are engaging with companies on a contract basis. Businesses can capitalize on the trend by networking with non-traditional workers and utilizing their skill sets for specific projects.
If your HR department would benefit from increased bandwidth for hiring needs and increased automation, now is the time to make sure your organization is using technology to its benefit. Measurable, step-by-step automation and technology plans will both help you quantify what you want to achieve and provide you with a roadmap to get you there.
