COVID-19 has indelibly impacted the world of human resources. As the pandemic retreats, it’s a good time to visit leading trends in talent recruitment. Chief among them:
A hybrid workforce—the mix of onsite and remote employees working from home or elsewhere—is the new reality for the lion’s share of companies everywhere. Likewise, your standard hiring processes should include virtual interviewing via video and in-person interviewing.
During the pandemic, businesses banned or severely curtailed interview travel, resulting in considerable cost and time savings. It’s likely that companies will maintain this boost to their bottom line to one extent or another, putting an onus on the quality and content of remote interviewing.
“We’re not focused on location. We’re focused on finding the best talent,” says Sharon Mjelde, technical recruiter at Stelligent. She’s excited about growing a more globalized talent workforce, recruiting beyond geographic borders, and hiring people in their markets.
When hiring isn’t constrained by geography, it’s easier to attract talent from a variety of ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds.
Businesses benefit from a wide variety of viewpoints and perspectives, obtained by recruiting people from a range of backgrounds at all seniority levels. Studies show over and over that companies with a diverse workforce outperform companies that are less diverse, in areas including productivity, sales, and innovation.
Additionally, an increasing number of job seekers are putting diversity high on their list of employer criteria.
Boosting diversity and inclusion falls largely on the shoulders of talent acquisition and recruitment staff. Recruiters are responsible for filling the talent pool with a wide diversity of candidates, along with making them feel more inclusive. Identifying talent sourcing pipelines that contain diverse candidates is a good first step, like a solid email campaign sourced from a diverse list of potential candidates.
HR leaders can help by implementing training such as unconscious bias awareness, along with other initiatives that promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
In 2020, the downturn in hiring brought a huge spike in recruiters’ professional and personal development. “People had time to brush up on their skills!” says Mielde.
As hiring managers reached out to recruiters for insight on the evolving labor market in the pandemic, recruiters stepped up their learning in areas such as remote interviewing, virtual onboarding, talent advisory training, talent data analysis, productivity while working remotely, and internal mobility.
Some recruiters took the downturn as an opportunity to gain skill sets in entirely different fields, like software development engineering, and are now applying their specialized knowledge in the talent screening and hiring process.
Whether inside or outside recruitment, adaptability became the byword for recruiters in 2020—and the trend toward expanding their skill sets is likely to continue.
As with all functions in a company, analytics continues to be a hot trend in HR and recruitment. Analytics inform talent acquisition and recruitment strategies with hard data, helping companies identify areas of strengths and weaknesses, reduce costs, and eliminate hurdles. Analytics can also help prove the effectiveness of your recruiting software investments.
Recruiters are turning toward analytics to provide such metrics as time to fill, time to hire, cost per hire, offer acceptance rate, and diversity. For example, recruiters can perform more accurate and robust funnel analyses and calculate conversion rates at every stage to inform their methods.
Another upward trend is predictive analytics, which uses statistics and modeling techniques to determine future performance based on current and historical data. Recruiters can use predictive analytics to determine factors such as predicted time to fill, interview acceptance probability, and predicted candidate tenure.
Like analytics, AI and automation are hot trends in every industry, everywhere. Talent recruitment is no exception. Creating a pipeline of qualified candidates involves repetitive, manual tasks, and AI is being used to significantly reduce the heavy lifting involved in sourcing, identifying, and engaging talent.
Technology that uses AI also helps remove bias from the candidate identification and selection process, by enabling recruiters to automate the tedious and time-consuming task of screening resumes and shortlisting candidates. Automating these tasks increases diversity because it replaces manual shortlisting that’s prone to unconscious bias.
In large part due to AI and automation, recruiters expect more from their software tools today. Stagnant resume repositories are giving way to AI-driven software and apps that not only make recruiters’ jobs easier and faster, but also improve and fine-tune the candidate matching and engagement process. Take Consider, for example, which automatically:
The right software can help you source, screen, and match the right candidates to the right jobs in minutes versus hours or days. So, you have more time to focus on professional development and projects that help grow the business.
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