What to expect from recruitment market place in 2018?
In today’s tough talent market, employers are redefining their HR approach and very often are looking into the modern tech to create sufficient talent pipeline and fulfil internal demand. There are many technological tools that appeared recently, just to name few like: WayUp, The Fetch “Tintern”, Snaployee, Entello, TalentTool. Digital hiring platforms, hiring market places, cloud based applications and recruitment marketing tools are penetrating recruitment process more and more. Knowing all this let’s have a look at the few key upcoming recruitment trends on the 2018-year horizon.
Talent pipelining. “Sudden openings” are no longer an isolated event accruing randomly. (Especially in the growing markets). More employees become comfortable shifting away from security needs and toward more exciting job opportunities putting an extra pressure on HR department. Recruitment teams will have to invest time and efforts to constantly build and retain a virtual bench of candidates ready to enter the hiring process. Pre-recruitment screenings and chats, warming up calls and meet ups combine with marketing ‘tricks’ (talent nurturing) all to convert in time virtual bench into a live candidate pipeline.
Passive candidates hiring. “Silent candidates”, (those who are not actively shouting for a job change), have been targeted for some time now. Applications to direct approach, networking to croawdstaffing, blogging to tweeting, social media will continue to shape the headcount fulfilment process further in the current year. No doubt about it. Typical social sites like FB/Instagram/Tweeter will still be the places for initial searches however professional forums (subject corners/industry related meet-ups and experience sharing places) will show up more often in the recruiters daily action plans. The new 2018 sourcing approach will be “find & engage” all in relatively short period of time (an average time for a skill candidate to freely hand out on the market is 10 days!). Data mining, mapping and investing in less typical contact channels will for sure be used for the recruitment companies and HR/talent acquisitions teams.
Candidate experience – one of the most if not the most important trend for the current year and years to come! Why is this so important? Well, let me name few key reasons: a). *33% of candidates who receive a negative impression from the recruitment process will not apply again to the selected company; b) 28% of candidates will happily share a negative opinion about the company with their relatives and friends from the industry; c) 46% of candidates will make a positive decision regarding job offer heavily based on the process cycle experience! The candidate experience starts way before the candidate starts to apply for a specific job and nicely developed job board and detailed job description won’t make the job if the application and/or hiring process stinks…
Job Posting. Something unique is happening in the job board market. For recruitment companies posting becoming gradually less attractive than social site licences (direct approach) and content/automation marketing (meet ups/knowledge corners/knowledge sharing blogs sites). A typical ad is changing its meaning and shifting more towards an employer branding activity – informing candidates about corporate values, community engagement and company lifestyle. On the budget side, we can see a constant cost increase per advertisement with less conversion per hire.
Completive analyses & automations. The recruiting function will further develop practices and mechanisms to track and then counter each of the competitor’s major recruiting and employer branding moves. The growing emphasis on using metrics to determine the quality of hire from each source will continue in 2018. As it was an important factor in the last year and year before this year however it has to be done more frequently. Growing number of candidates sources, multipole candidate experience touchpoints allow company to learn on best practices and avoid worst.
Technology has been and will continue to be an important factor in this attraction and hiring process in 2018. As a recruitment professionals, we have to remember that each generation perceives employment market differently and it’s up to us really to use existing and emerging hiring tools appropriately.
