Businesses are knee-deep in developing game plans and creating hiring strategies for the new year because they know that shifts are coming in the staffing industry and they need to plan and adjust accordingly. As unemployment hovers at 3.9 percent, and it’s important to stay competitive throughout the hiring process. It’s time to think about new strategies as recruitment trends continue to emerge. As you compete and hunt for the best talent here are five hiring trends you need to plan and strategize for with your team.
1. Automate your recruitment and hiring efforts
72% of employers expect talent acquisition roles will be automated by 2027. AI was lacking in staffing the past decade but it’s beginning to make huge moves in the industry. Companies are latching on hard to AI efforts and using it to their full advantage to source, engage, nurture, and convert candidates into being applicants.
On average, hiring managers lose 14 hours a week, manually completing tasks that could be automated. That’s a huge amount of time and productivity wasted. By introducing automation into your hiring plan, it will streamline recruitment and, in the end, make it quicker and more efficient.
Here are several ways you can bake automation into your current processes.
- New hire requests – A standardized template in a new hire request app ensures no information is omitted in the job description. Recruiters can collaborate in the workflow, rather than through strings of emails, to consolidate mandatory qualifications, desired skills, and preferred experience for the job.
- Sourcing applicants – Providing applicants with an attractive, professional hiring experience from day one keeps candidates on board rather than turning them off with a slow, unappealing process.
- Screening candidates – Manually keeping up with all the applicants in spreadsheets is painstaking, but an applicant tracking system can immediately process applications, rapidly sorting through copious amounts of data thanks to the integration between workflow software and spreadsheet/database apps.
- Interviews – A scheduling module can align the managers’ calendars to automatically place candidates in open slots for interview times, setting interviews closer together for a more accurate comparison while eliminating the need for annoying email strings.
- Offer letters – When a candidate is selected, the documents continue to stack up. Instead of accumulating paper file folders or manually scanning and saving forms, an automated recruitment workflow can generate and save digitally signed offer letters, contracts, and other hiring documents securely on the cloud.
- Onboarding – Welcome emails, technology access, pertinent contact info, orientation programs, and training can all be set up and scheduled through automated workflows. Instead of sitting around waiting for information, new hires get everything they need to jump into their new role.
2. Plan a proactive and measurable social recruiting strategy
Social media will only continue to grow and change over the years and recruiters will continue to love using social media to hunt for the best talent. 91 percent of employers are using social media to recruit, however, the best staffing firms and recruiters should go beyond the baseline of just posting to get something out there. It’s now more important than ever to move to a more planned, proactive, and measurable social strategy.
Using video as a form of recruitment is a very popular trend! If you want to gain more impressions, engagements, and capture new candidates, then now is the time to pull out your camera. Social recruiting will focus on creating engaging and shareable content that will amplify your brand.
Here are two ways you can improve your social recruiting efforts.
- Videos – Video content is one of the most engaging forms of content. Start planning short and long-from videos that will engage and inform your audience.
- Local targeting – Use location-based targeting to reach out to and attract passive talent from a specific geographic location. If you add locations to your content, it will show up in these search results, helping local people find your brand and content.
3. Create a mobile-friendly job search
Today, an estimated 81 percent of Americans own a smartphone, according to Pew Research Center. But what’s even more eye-opening for businesses is that in just five years, 72.6 percent of internet users will exclusively access the web through a smartphone, according to the World Advertising Research Center (WARC). It’s clear that mobile devices have become embedded in our daily lives, so it’s important that organizations create a recruitment strategy that reflects this.
If you’re looking to make better hires and get them in the door quickly, it’s important to create a mobile-friendly application process. Candidates are looking for your job on the go so a slow and incomplete mobile application process will turn them away.
Here are a few ways to start creating a mobile-friendly process.
- Maintain a mobile-friendly career site – Best practices for mobile-friendly career site content include: short paragraphs, short sentences, a good amount of white space, engaging images and short videos. All of these components will make it easier for job seekers to scan your page on their smaller, mobile screens before applying.
- Communicate with applicants via text messaging – Your job applicants receive countless emails on a daily basis, posing a risk for your candidate communication to get overlooked. Text messaging is an impactful communication channel for both employers and job seekers that can streamline your candidate and new hire communications to keep candidates engaged.
- Offer an option to apply via mobile – To ensure you’re not driving away applicants looking to apply via mobile, make sure your job applications are mobile-enabled and don’t require too many steps to apply, so it’s easy to do on the go. Rather than having candidates type their resumes or upload their resumes via mobile, offer an alternative option for candidates to simply include a link to their LinkedIn profile or portfolios.
Start with small steps toward improving your mobile job search experience by introducing a quick apply feature that only takes candidates a few clicks to apply! You will reap the benefits.
4. Embrace CRM functions
CRM is a method for managing and improving positive relationships with past, current, and potential candidates. CRM technology is used to automate the communication process with the candidates, encourage their engagement, and improve their experience. Because there is a war for talent, and it’s considered a candidate-driven market, CRM is becoming a trend that staffing professionals will find extremely effective when applied to their recruitment efforts.
CRM strategies are used through recruitment marketing tools that are robust and have a candidate-centric approach. Treating candidates as valuable customers elevates every hiring aspect to new heights.
Here is how to bake CRM into your recruitment strategy.
- Introduce it to your candidate pipeline – Candidate relationship management helps create a continuous inflow and outflow of candidates. You form long-term connections with past, current, and future candidates.
- Expand talent channels – Networking to potential candidates on multiple channels will grow your candidate pool. Interacting with current candidates will foster trust. Your CRM solution can organize talent channels and develop candidate relationships.
- Maintain passive candidates – Candidate relationship management makes it easier to recruit passive candidates. You have already established relationships with talent, so it’s easier to reach out to them. Your CRM solution organizes qualified candidates in your recruiting database. Old candidates stay in your pool, so you don’t need to constantly establish new relationships.
Using CRM in your recruiting efforts will assist you in creating engaging campaigns that will effectively provide valuable content for candidates to help build stronger relationships with qualified candidates.
5. Increase your employee referral programs
88 percent of employers rated employee referrals above all other sources for generating a higher quality of new hires. Having a formal employee referral program makes sense, after all, who is more equipped to refer great people and sell those people on why they should work
for your organization than your own employees? This is one of the main reasons why we will see an increased focus on collaborative hiring in the upcoming year.
Here is how to start creating a referral program.
- Proactively encourage referrals – Building this program means building a pipeline. To generate a constant flow of talent, you have to encourage the use of the program and keep people engaged in the advancement of the organization. Share the program on social media, create ads, email campaigns, and other marketing tactics that support the program.
- Spread the program beyond your employees – Your employees aren’t the only ones who want to recommend great candidates for a position. People who don’t work for a certain company can also refer great candidates. Given the larger number of referrers, you’ll also get more high-quality candidates, which is a major benefit to opening your employee referral program to anyone.
To do this successfully you will need to have a clear vision and determine goals. Once you have your objectives determined, get more specific—check how you can increase the percentage of referrals or how to improve the quality of referrals.
The Takeaway
These five hiring trends offer great insight on how to capture great talent in a candidate-driven market. Knowing and implementing these effective strategies will get you ahead of the competition. If you need help creating a streamlined hiring process, our recruiting team at TMG is here to help you with your specific hiring needs. We have the technology, connections, and experience to help you find the right fit. Learn more here.