Introduction
Recruiters had a difficult year last year. The epidemic and its ramifications wreaked havoc on some talent acquisition teams, piled additional pressures on others, and proved to be a watershed moment for many as virtually recruiting and onboarding a distant workforce became the norm.
The challenges of 2020 will undoubtedly influence talent acquisition patterns in 2021. More businesses will use virtual recruitment tools, focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and move their talent acquisition efforts to remote candidates. The best recruiters will take advantage of the chance to learn new abilities, adjust as needed, and demonstrate their worth to the company.
The top 5 heated hiring trends will help your company to keep up with the most up to date recruitment environment globally, so please continue to enjoy the read.
1. Diversity Equity & Inclusion
According to experts, diversity, equality, and inclusion (DE&I) will continue to be a focal area for recruiters, especially because more candidates will make employment decisions based on a company's visible DE&I commitment.
"Companies recognize that they are being scrutinized more than ever by stakeholders and are committing to aggressive diversity targets," said Dan Schawbel, a bestselling author and managing partner at Workplace Intelligence, a New York City-based HR research and advisory firm. "This year, 70 per cent of job seekers said they want to work for a company that demonstrates a commitment to diversity and inclusion."
Almost half of all talent professionals told LinkedIn that hiring managers were not held accountable for interviewing a broad pool of applicants. More recruiters, according to some experts, will endeavour to eliminate arbitrary entry barriers such as educational requirements from job qualifications, advocate for a diverse channel of applicants, and hold hiring managers accountable for advancing those prospects through the recruiting process.
"Diversity is a business-critical imperative and one that recruiting can lead," Lobosco said. "Not only is it imperative that recruiters deliver a diverse pipeline of candidates, but they must also play an important advisory role for the hiring managers they support. This could be through restructuring hiring processes to reduce bias, building diverse interview panels and mandating data-driven reporting against diversity goals."
More firms are searching for tools to help them eliminate bias in the recruiting process and design systems that promote and develop workers fairly, according to Cheryl Roubian, vice president of people at Greenhouse. "This is far from being a new idea, but the confluence of increased awareness, the availability of talent and geographic flexibility will continue to amplify the importance of investing in the right tools to build more diverse teams."
2. Hiring Internal Candidates
Internal hiring is a more convenient and cost-effective method of retaining talent. While there are certain disadvantages, recruiting managers should examine their present talent pool to better understand how to use this resource efficiently, especially with a rise in internal promotions and personnel sharing within internal teams.
Begin by asking staff what present problems or areas they would want to fix, as well as what potential they see for the future of your company. When you know how your employees feel, you can foster a culture of trust, which is beneficial to your company's long-term success.
3. Virtual Recruitment
According to 70% of LinkedIn study respondents, a hiring process that mixes virtual and in-person processes will become increasingly regular owing to the related cost and time benefits, just as a hybrid workforce of onsite and remote employees will become more mainstream.
"Job interviews will largely continue to be conducted virtually," said Candace Nicolls, SHRM-SCP, senior vice president of people and workplace at Snagajob, a Glen Allen, Va.-based online staffing platform that specializes in matching candidates to hourly wage jobs. "Even for businesses resuming in-person operations, I expect that virtual and automated interviews will instead replace many in-person touch points, helping to accelerate timelines while also providing a critical layer of safety as we continue to observe social distancing rules."
By reaching across geographic barriers, virtual recruitment in 2020 helps firms expedite recruiting processes, enhance diversity hiring, and attract superior people, according to Ryan Healy, president and co-founder of Brazen, a virtual hiring event platform. "These gains mean virtual recruiting has earned its place in the ongoing talent acquisition strategies of nearly every industry across the country, and employers will continue to use virtual recruiting alongside more-traditional in-person recruiting and interviewing once it's safe to meet with candidates face to face again," he said.
But Addison Group CEO Thomas Moran contends that the future workplace will be less remote than many are forecasting. "As the COVID-19 vaccine takes hold, people will welcome a return to the office to be with their colleagues," he said. "While the pandemic may have taught us just how resilient we can be working remotely for an extended period via Zoom conference calls, it is not sustainable. Humans are a social species and ultimately need that direct, in-person contact and connection with one another."
4. Expansion of Skill Sets
Unsurprisingly, the top skill for recruiters to embrace in 2021 is adaptability, according to LinkedIn's survey.
During the epidemic, personal development was the fastest-growing pivot for recruiters. "We saw recruiters massively increase their appetite for learning as soon as COVID-19 hit last March, more than doubling their normal learning consumption in the following months," said Johnny Campbell, CEO of Dublin-based SocialTalent, a learning platform for recruiters. "Hot topics included talent advisory training, virtual interviewing, being productive while working remotely, virtual onboarding and internal mobility. Learning how to be better talent advisors is always a popular topic for recruiters, but many more sought it out for the first time as their hiring managers frantically reached out to them with a massive demand for information about the evolving labor market."
As the coronavirus spread, Colleen Garrett, SHRM-CP, who worked as a recruiter at a retirement facility in Fort Myers, Fla., saw the pause as an opportunity to "think outside the box," she added. "It was a time to take a step back, audit processes, figure out what had been working in the past, what hadn't been working and how the future was going to change," said Garrett. She rethought her talent strategy, learned how to incorporate new talent acquisition technologies into processes, created training manuals, and researched issues like social recruitment and how SEO affects job postings.
Recruiters nowadays should invest time honing their abilities in virtual interviewing, onboarding new recruits, understanding talent analytics, and demonstrating empathy and compassion, according to her.
"Naturally, recruiters are people-centric," Garrett said. "But 2020 wasn't just hard because of the pandemic, but also because of the economic fallout and all the people who are jobless or displaced in their career. It is our duty to go the extra mile, to understand their struggle and what their needs are."
5. Automation
Using integrated HR automation, businesses may save up to 17% on hiring costs and 26% on HR personnel hours.
Recruitment automation software makes use of artificial intelligence to help in talent acquisition. This involves things like finding applicants, conducting interviews, and matching values, among other things. Tasks like AI-resume screening, automated job posting, interview scheduling, and onboarding may all be simplified by incorporating automation tools.
This frees up time for your recruiting teams to focus on what matters most ineffective recruiting: interacting with top applicants.
Conclusion
It is undeniable that this is a difficult moment for employers, but a closer examination reveals that the majority are using it to reconsider how and who they recruit.
As a result of the epidemic, several firms claim they now provide remote and flexible work options. These are important methods for businesses to recruit people, along with wage hikes and other incentives, and the majority think it is working. Employers who have used virtual interviewing have discovered that it boosts the size and variety of their talent pools.
When hiring got hard, employers made deliberate modifications to appeal to job searchers and stand out from the throng, and many are willing to abandon their previous methods.
