Recruiting Trends Week is upon us! Each day, everday this week Blogging4Jobs is taking it to the streets to find out what trends will be “the trend” in recruiting. What do you think? What trend do you see as #1 in 2014? Let us know here! Elevate your brand and HR & Recruiting practitioners. Learn more about sponsoring a future themed week on Blogging4Jobs by clicking here.
As the economy continues to improve, albeit slowly, and hard to fill jobs remain difficult to fill, we’ll see firms continue to focus on recruiting innovation. Whether it’s getting the unemployed and long term unemployed back to work, or finding the needle in the hay stack, recruiters will continue to get creative with process, technique, and technology in the ongoing attempt to help their firms hire faster and better than their competition.
We will continue to see an onslaught of tech vendors try to get their slice of the recruitment and recruitment tech budget. The top tech trends from last few years: Mobile, social, big data, analytics, and cloud computing will keep evolving, recruiters will continue to get adept at applying the tech, and that will drive much of what we see happening in recruiting.
5 Recruiting Trends to be on the lookout for in 2014
Sourcing continues to get easier.
Recruiting professionals will tell you that sourcing is part science (technology) and part art (creativity). While this is true, the pace of innovation we’ve seen with new sourcing tools that leverage the open, mobile, and social webs will continue to come at recruiters and sourcers at a dizzying pace. The good news: Smaller firms that can’t afford to outsource sourcing, or hire the sourcing wizards to fill their hard to find positions will continue to have more horsepower at their fingertips as tools get easier to use and candidates that are increasingly on the web, get easier to find. The challenge: As we see today, differentiating the tools and selecting one may be half the battle.
Recruitment Marketing becomes more mainstream
Three years ago if you talked about recruitment marketing you were evangelizing a concept that only the early adopters had considered. Applying current B2C or B2B marketing concepts and technology to build an employment brand, candidate pipeline or talent community was ahead of the curve. Today, it’s one of the faster growing approaches in the recruitment space. The alignment between recruiting and marketing concepts has always been accepted, but applying principles like Branding, Customer/Candidate Relationship Management (CRM), and Content Marketing are now top of mind for the large mid-market and enterprise level firms.
Recruitment Analytics
As firms get better at applying marketing-type process and technology, they will continue to develop more of a need and appetite for easy to use/access – better data to help form strategies and make recruitment spend decisions. Real time data on candidate quality, source effectiveness, process efficiency, by department, region, business unit, media type (social, mobile, etc.) or down to the hiring manager or recruiter will help recruiting departments justify strategies, campaigns, and business decisions.
Referrals
If sourcing is getting easier, recruitment marketing is getting more effective, and analytics help recruiters pinpoint where the best talent is coming from, then pointing all of that process and technology horsepower toward driving better referrals (internal and external) will continue to be a hotbed of recruiting innovation. “Who do you know?” has always been the most important question a recruiter could ask. As the world continues become more “social”, and more and more candidate information is available on the web, “Knowing who the candidates know before you ask” may become how recruiters differentiate themselves and help their firms get more effective. I think we’ll see a lot of creative approaches to this top talent source, it won’t just be about the technology this year.
Contingent/FTE Hybrid Recruiting
Current trends show the Fortune 500 workforce being 50% contingent by 2020. The current workforce is almost halfway to that mark. This means that in many environments the two worlds of recruiting Full Time Employees (FTEs) and contingent workers (contractors, temps, independent consultants) will collide. The FTE recruiting process has long been managed under Human Resources. Contingent staffing has long been managed by purchasing, line management, and staffing firms (Managed Service Providers/Sole Source). A new recruiter may start to emerge in some more innovative large shops. A recruiter more concerned with managing the spend and delivering results that map to drivers like project profitability and FTE:Contingent ratio in mission critical projects. This trend could shake things up more than just a little in larger firms some time soon.
Whether its technology, process, or approach recruiting is always a hot-bed for new trends and innovation. Always evolving, keeping pace with shifts in the economy, job market, and technology landscapes, recruiting teams and sourcers are always looking for new ways to find and hire the best people faster. Whether it’s furthering existing trends or creating new ones, recruiting will continue to be a competitive and fast paced world in 2014.
