The Top 3 Trends That Will Shape Your Recruitment Future
Your hiring future is determined by your ability to anticipate and find solutions to upcoming problems. But how do you anticipate the unknown? As the late Professor Stephen Hawking once said, “You cannot predict the future.” While this may be true of theoretical astrophysics, when it comes to predicting the future of recruitment, it’s a far more straightforward proposition.
When anticipating the future of recruitment, we can look at existing recruiter trends against the current economic backdrop and map out, with a good degree of certainty, what future hires will look like – at least in the short term.
As you would expect, year-on-year recruitment practices are becoming more refined. Trends in the recruitment industry are always dictated by the needs and demands of the workforce. And in the post-COVID world, recruiters must approach hiring in a more efficient, streamlined and proactive way.
In the second half of 2022, we had the pleasure of attending Recruitment Agency Expo, UNLEASH World, Web Summit and Bullhorn Engage. Coupled with our own experience on the ground, these events highlighted the continued relevance of in-person events, the importance of GDPR-compliance, and the need to keep your database up to date.
With these recruitment trends in mind, and acknowledging the increased difficulty in attracting talent in a competitive marketplace, we’ve identified three key trends that will define your recruitment future and help guide your hiring strategy in 2023.
More proactive candidate engagement
According to LinkedIn’s Top 100 Hiring Statistics 2022, 63% of agencies identify shortage of talent as their biggest challenge. And among many strategies being adopted to combat this, a switch from reactive to proactive recruitment is already taking place.
As a result, future hires will hinge on your ability to source, engage and attract candidates before you need them. This will enable you to build a talent pool that you can begin to form a relationship with even before the recruitment process starts.
Much like marketing, proactive recruitment has a funnel-like structure. First, you must identify potential candidates, connect and engage with them through various channels, nurture relationships with them, attract them to your vacancies and convert them into hires when the time is right.
By implementing proactive recruitment, you will deliver on that gold standard candidate experience, get ahead of hiring needs, keep your talent engaged, keep your candidate pools full, and keep your clients happy.
There are many top-down methodologies you can adopt to help you engage more proactively with your talent. But for Bullhorn users, there are none as effective and transformative as Connected Recruitment.
Connected Recruitment is a Bullhorn methodology that takes a comprehensive approach to talent engagement. The benefits include a more engaged talent community, lower acquisition costs, higher redeployment rates, and more satisfied candidates.
This approach will also enable you to engage with passive candidates, which become much more valuable in a recession when the best talent tends to remain in employment. The importance of tapping into this pool is reflected in LinkedIn’s The Future of Recruiting report, where 84% of recruiters said engaging passive candidates is becoming important in lower and higher-level roles and for bringing top talent into the funnel.
More widespread adoption of automation
At Recruitment Agency Expo it was clear that the recruiting trend towards automation was reaching near ubiquitous levels, as recruiters seek to put repetitive tasks on autopilot, reduce admin work and speed up the recruitment process. In a Dice report, 72% of recruiters identified lack of automation as a key factor in slowing down their process.
The recruitment trend towards automation will continue to grow in 2023, and for two main reasons: Firstly, automation solutions are increasingly refined to solve more of your pain points. And second, automation is fast becoming a necessity in the highly competitive talent marketplace as an increasing number of recruiters implement it to gain the time, money and effort advantages. This has the knock-on effect of other agencies adopting it to keep pace.
According to data from Bullhorn, recruitment agencies that embrace automation have a 64% higher fill rate. They also submit 33% more candidates per recruiter and are 55% more likely to report major revenue gains.
For an example of how automation delivers these results, we can use our own solution. PitchMe integrates with Bullhorn and other leading applicant tracking systems. It uses data-driven technology to automatically update the candidate information in your database, and source, search and shortlist candidates all within your existing ATS.
If you’d like to learn more about it, book a demo.
With the admin work taken care of, your recruiters can be more productive. Recruiters can be more targeted with who they put forward for each role, they can focus on delivering a best-in-class candidate experience, and they can put more time into filling more positions. The result is more revenue opportunities.
More emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion (D,E&I)
According to BrightTalk, 79% of HR professionals agree that unconscious bias exists in both recruitment and succession planning decisions. However, business leaders globally agree that a culturally diverse workforce fuels innovation, creativity, and higher profitability.
At present, though, only one in three recruiters track the diversity of candidates. It isn’t yet commonplace to use diversity metrics like gender or ethnicity of candidates sourced, shortlisted or placed. However, 2023 will see a change in this ratio.
By collecting demographic data, using one of the three fundamentally different options outlined in this Ashby article, you can begin to build a better D,E&I strategy. Like most methodologies, candidate self-identification, recruiter-led identification and interference all have their pros and cons. But by measuring them against your business needs, and A/B testing, you can work out which one, or combination, is right for you.
Beyond the moral and ethical wins that come with getting D,E&I right, there are the benefits you provide to your clients. These include an improvement in decision-making, stronger employer branding, and greater profitability – all of which are documented in our How to Remove Unconscious Bias in Recruitment and Selection article.
The Outlook
The Collins Dictionary just released their Word of the Year for 2022: Permacrisis. It means “an extended period of instability and insecurity.” And looking back over the year, it’s hard to think of a word that better represents 2022. Of course, as we roll into 2023, we’re still in said period of instability.
However, through the recognition of patterns and emerging recruitment trends, you can defy the words of Professor Stephen Hawking and build a pretty accurate picture of the recruitment future. And that will enable you to build a pretty robust strategy for overcoming the challenges that lie ahead.