Marie Ryan
HireHive
Around the world, the pandemic changed the state of employment. Many businesses are seeing the long-term effects and how they’ll play out over the next several years. To discuss the talent acquisition trends of 2022 without mentioning the COVID-19 crisis would be difficult, but we are only seeing the beginning stages of a complete workforce revolution.
Marie Ryan
HireHive
As one example, The Great Resignation is spreading across the U.S. and Europe as some workers refuse to participate in low-wage, high-risk jobs. This influx of talent to the marketplace is shifting the available workforce away from some sectors and into others. But how do businesses take advantage of this new normal? What are the top hiring trends to expect in 2022?
In this article, we’ll discuss global trends that are affecting the work of recruiters and hiring managers, including:
When you’re constantly fishing from the same pond, you get the same fish. Multi-channel recruitment is the idea that expanding your reach allows you to source more talent for your open positions. With The Great Resignation making waves worldwide, developing options for sourcing means greater chances of finding top talent.
This doesn’t necessarily mean a global candidate search, but for many industries, it can. However, there are plenty of other aspects you should explore to help expand your reach.
While it seems like these are not all sourcing strategies, they all play an important role in candidate recruitment and have gone far beyond simply posting a job and waiting for people to apply.
Sourcing is only a part of talent acquisition. You also need to ensure that potential employees feel drawn to and excited about working with your organization. That’s where employer branding comes into play. A strong employer brand demonstrates your reputation as a company and showcases the people who work there now and why candidates would be interested in moving forward with your process.
Start with your value proposition. What benefits do you provide to customers or end-users through your products or services? Potential candidates will evaluate your value proposition and weigh it with other companies they’re considering.
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While the core of your value proposition is about your customers, many companies will also include the benefits they provide to employees. Knowing employees are the heart of the company brand, your employer brand should be set up to attract and hire the best.
You also want to evaluate your onboarding experience to ensure that all new employees feel valued and empowered in their first days, weeks, and months on the job. And be sure to tap into the resources of your team members to understand your employer brand better and make improvements when necessary.
There was a time when agency recruiters were entry-level roles. Companies might hire ten or more people and put them through a short training seminar before placing them at a local office. This kind of hiring process led to high attrition. Other recruitment methods saw a need for more experienced recruiters, and rather than throwing new hires from the frying pan into the fire; they cultivated talent. That has never been more important than it is today.
Hiring top recruiters will help you hire top talent. Some of the most important skills include:
Solid recruiters will have a passion for finding talent and placing them in matching positions. Their success rests on the success of each placement, whether they’re an agency recruiter or working in the Human Resources department.
There are two types of recruitment: proactive and reactive. Reactive recruitment happens when a position becomes available, and you begin the process of sourcing and hiring top talent. The problem here is the time frame. In the time it takes to recruit new talent for the role, the work is not being done or has been portioned out to other employees now feeling the stress of an overloaded work schedule. And if you make a bad hiring choice, then you need to start all over again.
Proactive recruitment takes potential attrition into account. While retention should be high on your list, having a pipeline of qualified employees potentially available will also help your company stay competitive.
To begin a proactive recruiting practice, consider it more about building an audience than about collecting applications. You find the types of candidates who are a good potential fit for your organisation congregate and engage them. Keep this talent pool hooked with great information on your social media or blog, so they stay interested.
When a position does become available, visit this network to connect with potential candidates and invite them to participate in the hiring process.
Since the turn of the century, we’ve been in an era of Big Data. Information is collected across all industries that can help businesses better understand trends moving forward. But with Big Data comes the need for analysis, and that’s led to more automation in sectors like recruitment.
What makes it exciting today is the use of artificial intelligence to help recruiters stay more productive. When recruiters spend more time on the minutia of administrative work and less time on recruitment, there is little efficiency in the process. By improving processes through automation and allowing AI to handle the basic tasks, recruiters can spend more time with the more critical aspects of their job. This will enhance recruitment across the board, including the quality of placements and the time to hire.
AI technologies currently used in the industry include chatbots that help facilitate the initial conversation with potential candidates. It can enhance applicant tracking software and improve the online application process.
Many people in the industry worry that AI will replace human recruiters, but that’s not exactly true. The correct use of this technology will enhance professional recruiters to make the entire process more efficient.
Maelle: Do you have any nice screenshots of our analytics? Preferably from the new app.
Big data across all industries has given rise to the use of analytics in every aspect of a business. Recruiting analytics has evolved into an era of talent intelligence. Analytics has always been a way for companies to have a competitive advantage. In the battle for top talent in the wake of today’s Great Resignation, that’s never been more critical. But even before the pandemic, 69% of companies with over 10,000 employees had developed a people analytics team to understand the workforce better and recruiting processes.
However, there are some challenges for European companies. In April, the EU proposed regulations to limit the use of AI for recruiting. The use of AI to parse and identify essential data has become big business around the world. But ethical talent intelligence may be the best resource recruiters and hiring companies have to place top talent in open positions.
51% of people indicated it was extremely important to work for a company committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. In Europe, debates about DEI include much more than just gender, race, and ethnicity. Diverse religious and political beliefs, education, socioeconomic background, disabilities, gender identity, and sexual orientation are all factors.
But it’s clear that DEI is about more than just optics. Organizations with solid diversity, equity, and inclusion policies are 36% more likely to have above-average profits than their competition. But there are still concerns about the gender pay gap, equity and representation of LGBTQ+ people, and the diversity of executives.
Companies developing DEI programs should consider:
The pandemic has exacerbated what was already perceived as a significant skills gap. But there is a solution. With advancements in technologies like automation and AI, companies that focus on upskilling and reskilling have an advantage in the marketplace. By providing opportunities for continued learning, companies increase their effectiveness without having to source and hire outside talent for these roles.
As an added benefit, upskilling significantly increases employees satisfaction and retention. The statistics are astounding. Companies with a comprehensive training program have a 218% higher income per employee than companies that don’t. They also have a 24% higher profit margin than companies that spend less on this kind of employee development.
Even before the pandemic, companies were exploring the increased use of contingent and on-demand employees. The continuing evolution of temporary work and the incorporation of more advanced technologies have opened doors to more efficient on-demand workforce requests. The European Parlimentary Research Service showed that temporary work had increased, affecting 14.8% of working-age Europeans even before the pandemic.
But the stigma around some forms of temporary work has been dispelled, and choosing contingent work is a positive for many people. It represents the ability to be flexible and accept only the assignments that work for the individual at any given time. And for companies, there are financial benefits to hiring some workers on a contingent basis.
While several industries are associated with on-demand workers or short-term assignments, such as hospitality and healthcare, more industries are being disrupted by the availability of contingent workers. In an era of skills shortages, especially in conjunction with the Great Resignation, both companies and workers are willing to embrace short-term work.
Companies spend a lot of time with the onboarding process and improving retention that they often forget about a critical factor in the process. The candidate experience informs potential applicants about the company way before they are in the running for a job. A Careerbuilder survey indicated that 60% of applicants abandon online applications. In some cases, they cite technical difficulties, and in others, they perceived the experience to be a roadblock to employment, not a pathway.
The candidate experience doesn’t stop there. Candidates have expectations about how the process works, and if those aren’t met, they won’t accept the job and let others know about their experience. 94% of talent would like to receive feedback after an interview but only 41% have ever received feedback before. Companies who improve the candidate experience will have more success with building a pipeline and hiring top talent.
While the seeds for remote work had been planted long before the COVID-19 crisis, the pandemic sped up the process. Companies in early 2020 had to shift quickly to remote work arrangements. While some companies are slowly returning to an office setting, others are embracing remote or hybrid work. Before the pandemic, 5% of Europeans worked from home, but that number rose to 12.3%. Finland has the highest share of remote workers at 25.1%.
There are now calls for improvements in the process across Europe. Before the pandemic, 85% of workers had never teleworked, and many didn’t realize it was an option. There was a belief that workers wouldn’t be as productive when they worked from home, but that has proven to be demonstratively false, with 82% of senior executives saying that productivity held steady even as workers were forced into remote arrangements. More companies moving forward will begin considering remote work arrangements for jobs that can be as effective when done from home.
With more competition in today’s global market, it pays for companies to consider all their advantages and the use of tools to assist in the quest to find talent. HireHive helps busy people hire great people. By having your entire recruitment process all in one place, you can post jobs, streamline your online application process, improve the candidate experience, and tap into vast networks.
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