Hiring prospects for 2016 / 17 are flourishing. Employers looking to benefit and pick the best from a thriving hotbed of talent will themselves be required to take measures to show they are exceptional and stand out from the rest.
Insiders anticipate that many establishment recruitment trends will continue to thrive and take prominence in the coming year. Including broadening of recruitment sources, further refinement and improving the individual experience, use of automation tools, and expanding the incorporation of talent analytics in the recruitment process.
With the increase of more and more options with which employees and employers can interact, the challenge of finding the right person with the right, skills, qualities, and experience for a role will only get greater. Holding on to skilled workers will also prove to be an important area to focus on, as competitors will continuously attempt to gain an advantage by offering tempting salaries, conditions and opportunities.
Talent Analytics
In many organisations, it is still commonplace for the majority, quite likely all, of recruitment decisions to be made based on face to face meeting and hence, largely influenced by intuition and subjective interpretation. Thus, many HR professionals do not currently make use of, or see the need for a data based foundation upon which to make their decisions. This is understandable, however, as Big Data and its interpretation is relatively new to the mainstream, and represents a progression, or evolution in terms of bringing quantifiable information into the arena of recruitment. Many studies into why many are reticent and reluctant to take on board a data driven recruitment strategy have found the main obstacles to be difficulties faced organising and comprehending the acquired data. Therefore, many businesses have outsourced to third party specialists to complement their HR strategy in favour of retraining their staff.
Services that offer methods for matching emails to profiles are particularly valuable in identifying passive talent and analysing digital behaviour.
Social media has proven to be an excellent resource for Big Data, and specialised talent analytics solution providers such as SignalHire have taken advantage of huge data pools such as LinkedIn and GitHub by using focused algorithms and sifting software to retrieve pertinent information on employee and employer behaviours, determine patterns, and identify other relevant trends.
Individual Experience and Passive Talent
The area of employer / candidate relationship management, and employer/ candidate relationship building, is an increasingly significant trend that sees companies utilise tools such as talent analytics to seek out potential employees and also maintain a company environment that is fertile for developing the employer/ candidate relationship. With the recruitment stage increasing in size, there is a developing emphasis on the need to offer more, and to do things a little differently in order to be an attractive prospect for potential employees.
To this end, an open and broad approach to attracting and grooming potential employees is essential. This skill pool is known as ‘passive talent’. Hence, the individual experience focus utilises company hiring profiles, employee tracking, and various other tools that gather information on employee behaviour which can be used to draw conclusions and inform hiring strategy, such as identifying high mobility / low skill retention areas, areas with skills shortfalls, and areas of saturation. Again, this developing trend has precipitated the emergence of third party service providers such as SignalHire, which provide usable metrics on such information, allowing companies to refine abundant information into a usable resource.
Some platforms also enable cross-platform insights from contact numbers, which adds another layer of depth to behavioural analysis.
Integral to improving the individual experience is the reviewing and updating of recruitment procedures in order to simplify and streamline the application process. Further to this, applying a more human, individualised approach to the hiring process, such as maintaining prompt and courteous correspondence with individuals, has proven positive correlation to broadening a company’s options in the talent pool.
Re – Hiring
Another trend that is gaining acceptance is the re-hiring by company’s previous employees. This approach to staffing has really shown a marked foothold in recent years, with a shift in attitudes that are now beginning to be more open to taking the positives from this recruitment segment. Also, the inter-connectivity fostered by abundant social networking allows employers to remain in contact with past employees like never before.
A company that re-hires past employees sees the benefits of this approach through bypassing the need to train the returning employee aspects of company culture and idiosyncrasies, whilst benefitting from the experience and training that the employee has received during their tenure elsewhere.
With workers being more willing and able to switch jobs with greater frequency nowadays, this dimension will no doubt play an exponential part in future successful recruitment strategy.
Reviewing an example talent profile from the aviation sector can help companies understand how employee data evolves over time and how it can be leveraged during re-hiring decisions. The incorporation of a big data sifting strategy will also play a significant role in the success of this approach, with talent analytics services providing HR dashboards facilitating the ability to predict employee migration based on data on workforce, company, as well as market trends.
By and large, the most significant progressive movement that will be seen in the recruitment arena is the increasing dependence on data analysis. It will become increasingly vital for employers to be able to view, comprehend, and make informed choices based on their workforce, competitor, and employee market data.
