Today’s tight labour pool makes it more important than ever for hiring companies to stay up to date with emerging trends in recruitment. Build the team of your dreams with these 2020 recruiting trends to secure the best talent in your industry.
1. Build an Employer Brand
Today’s candidates are looking for more than a paycheque. Do you support local charities, provide paid time off for birthdays or offer flex work? Brag a little! Use what makes your employer brand so special to attract potential candidates to your open positions.
Put this trend into action
Focus on what makes your brand stand out from the rest by highlighting your company’s culture and values. For example, you may choose to use a social media platform such as Facebook to provide a video of a typical day at the office or Instagram to share pictures of your most recent potluck lunch.
2. Focus on Inbound Recruiting
A tight labour pool means employers must market themselves to secure qualified applicants for their positions. Similar to an inbound marketing strategy, inbound recruiting engages both passive and active qualified candidates, communicates your employer brand and ultimately creates new applicants.
Put this trend into action
To effectively attract candidates for your open positions, it’s important to reflect on your company culture in order to identify the ideal candidate persona for your organization. Once you’ve defined your target applicant, curate content for a variety of platforms to attract these candidates and lead them through your application process.
3. Create a Talent Pool
Gather top applicants from job searches, referrals or applications from inbound recruiting to create a comprehensive talent pool to assist with future hires. A talent pool full of top candidates for all frequently hired positions can help your organization prepare for unexpected turnover.
Put this trend into action
Create a database of the best applicants received through inbound recruiting, social recruiting, referrals and more. And don’t discount your existing employees. Your workforce contains candidates with skills and capabilities that can be developed for success in new positions. Add the best colleagues from your current labour pool to facilitate current and future recruitment processes.
4. Sample Social Recruiting
With close to half of the world’s population spending an average of 2 hours and 23 minutes on social media a day, social media has become an influential outlet for all types of marketing, including recruitment.
Put this trend into action
Consider the ideal candidate for the role and utilize the best social media platforms to attract these applicants. Looking to fill a professional or executive role? Use LinkedIn to network with potential applicants. Blue collar position opening? Your ideal candidate may be found on Facebook. Seeking the creative type? Take advantage of the networking and marketing opportunities on Instagram.
5. Take Advantage of Automation
Automation has assisted recruiters for years. Commonly used to screen resumes for keywords, the technology has become even more sophisticated and can now enhance the candidate experience with chatbots and provide even more insights for recruiters by decrypting interviews to analyze choice of words, speech patterns and facial expressions.
Put this trend into action
Use automation to streamline your recruitment processes while improving your candidate experience. Resume screening tools can help save recruiters time by screening candidates that meet skills and experience requirements, while enlisting the use of chatbots can help keep applicants updated with the progress of the hiring process.
6. Hiring for Transferable Skills
A shrinking labour pool means that it’s getting harder to secure the perfect candidate with the ideal education, skill set and experience. To combat this, employers must hire for the skills that are fundamental to the success of the position and seek out candidates with these transferable skills who can be trained on the job.
Put this trend into action
Make a detailed job description that outlines specific responsibilities to be performed and the hard or soft skills required to complete these responsibilities successfully. Target potential applicants who possess the skills, adaptability and capability to learn and grow into their new role.
7. Consider the Candidate Experience
Stand out from the competition by creating a hiring journey that is aligned with your corporate culture and leaves the candidate feeling valued. Focusing on a positive candidate experience for applicants can help attract top talent, while shining a positive light on your brand and the way you do business.
Put this trend into action
Focus on communication with all applicants. Be clear on timelines and provide prompt feedback after interviews to demonstrate that you value the candidate’s time. Don’t forget that every candidate is a potential customer. The way they are treated throughout the recruitment process has the potential to impact how they perceive your brand, services or products in the future.
8. Don’t Forget the Benefit of Employee Referrals
Employee referrals are not a new trend, but they are still one of the most successful ways to attract top talent. Referred candidates are higher quality, helping to dramatically improve your ROI by being cheaper and faster to hire and quicker to on-board.
Put this trend into action
Create an employee referral program that encourages colleagues to assist in the recruitment process. Share job descriptions of open roles with colleagues and share your expectations of the ideal candidate. Also, think about providing incentives to encourage your employees to submit a referral.
Ready to embrace these workplace trends for 2020 and start the year with your organization’s dream team? Contact your local Adecco branch to gain access to some of the top talent in the country.