Importance of Recruiting Trends
As the modern world becomes more digitized, business owners rely more on automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and HR-specific technology to attract the right talent to help their companies grow. If your goal is to recruit top talent, you should embrace digital recruiting trends.
This article explains the top recruiting trends to help you find and retain qualified hires.
Top 5 Recruiting Trends
Keeping up with trends in digital recruitment–including targeted ads, personality surveys, and AI-powered recruiting tools–ensures that you’re taking advantage of the recruitment technology that can give you an edge over your competition.
Let’s look at the top five recruiting trends and how to implement them within your overall hiring and employee retention strategy.
1. Targeted Recruiting Ads
Targeted recruiting ads help your job postings get seen by people with the skill set you need. In the same way that targeted advertising shows people ads related to their interests, targeted recruiting ads match you to qualified job seekers by using industry keywords and descriptions.
For instance, a targeted recruiting ad for an elementary school teacher would specify the skills and experience the open position requires–such as relevant education history and a professional background working with children–and would be shown to job seekers living within a certain distance from the school.
Remember, whenever you track users’ online behavior, you must comply with any applicable privacy or data protection laws.
2. Data-Driven Recruiting and HR Analytics
Having access to massive amounts of data means nothing if you can’t organize it and use it to achieve your goals. Using a data-driven recruiting process means that you analyze your HR data to make the best hiring decisions.
Data-driven recruiting and HR analytics can help you:
- Determine areas of improvement in your hiring process
- Understand and address retention issues
- Identify and enhance recruitment strategies
Applicant tracking systems (ATS’s) and recruitment marketing platforms such as Greenhouse and Rippling can aggregate your HR data and analyze it to gain knowledge about and streamline your recruitment, onboarding, and overall hiring process.
3. Online Personality Surveys
Online personality surveys help ensure that potential candidates are a good match for your company culture before they apply. You can use online personality surveys to find candidates with the personality traits and characteristics necessary to excel in the open position.
For example, let’s say you are hiring for a fundraiser position. The ideal candidate will have excellent communication skills, and feel confident in asking strangers for funding. You can use a personality survey to weed out candidates who prefer solitary roles or are uncomfortable discussing finances.
4. Video Conferencing
Video conferencing can save you–and your potential employees–the time and energy of setting up and traveling for an in-person meeting. Using video conferencing makes interviews convenient and accessible and helps streamline the hiring process for remote and on-site employees alike.
You can conduct multiple interviews for free or cheap with video conferencing through popular apps like Zoom and Zoho Meeting.
5. AI-Powered Recruiting
While some people are uncomfortable relying on AI, it’s not likely that their visions of involuntary submission to machine overlords will come to pass anytime soon. AI is currently nothing more than a tool; your results depend on how you utilize it.
With AI-powered recruiting, you can customize your platform or tools to define your goals, and then sit back as AI takes care of the heavy lifting. Using AI to help recruit top talent can help save you time and money by automating repetitive tasks, such as:
- Sourcing candidates
- Posting jobs
- Reviewing and screening resumes and job applications
- Scheduling interviews
- Generating contracts
- Tracking applicants
When using AI, it’s important to remember that it is not a creative thinker; it will respond to the rules you set for it, and may inadvertently weed out candidates who are highly qualified but lack specific requirements.
For instance, if you’re hiring for a tech role, AI might skip over a skilled self-taught programmer just because they don’t have a college degree. It’s a good idea to choose the most advanced tech whenever possible and keep AI limitations in mind when setting the parameters for what you want AI-powered recruiting to do for you.
Other Trends
The future of recruiting depends on many factors, including the likely automation of repetitive roles and the necessity of the human touch for others. Let’s look at other trends to keep an eye on to stay at the cutting edge of recruitment strategies.
Social Recruiting
Social recruiting is when you utilize social media accounts such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Meta (Facebook) to advertise jobs and connect and communicate with potential candidates.
Creating Talent Pools
You can create a talent pool within your own organization by offering promotions to existing employees. Internal hiring is an employee retention strategy as it shows employees that you value their work and want to reward them for their loyalty.
SEO
Using search engine optimization, or SEO, in your recruitment process can help your jobs get seen by candidates searching online. SEO techniques such as using relevant keywords, ensuring that your job posts are high-quality and informative, and optimizing your posts for both web and mobile viewers can help drive traffic to your job posts in search engine results.
HR Automation
Automating repetitive HR tasks such as onboarding and time tracking can help save you time and money and allow your HR team to focus on creative problem-solving and issues that require human communication.
Building and Using Referral Programs
Creating a referral program is simple: All you have to do is let your employees know that you currently have open positions and that they will receive a perk or bonus if they refer someone who you end up hiring. Referral programs are a great way to find employees who fit into the company culture and to encourage employee loyalty.
Hiring for Soft Skills
Soft skills are personality traits like creativity, communication, and problem-solving skills that are often overshadowed by hard skills (the essential requirements of the job). Focusing on soft skills can help you find employees who are easy to work with and eager to contribute to your team.
Employee Wellness, Safety, and Support
Offering your employees perks like gym memberships, free therapy, and paid sick days can go a long way in attracting candidates who will stay with you for the long run.
New HR-Based CRM
Customer relationship management (CRM) is technology that helps you communicate with customers and improve the efficiency of your marketing and sales systems. HR-based CRM can help you automate your recruitment process by collecting employee data, sourcing candidates, and engaging with potential employees.
Should Businesses Continue to Use Traditional Job Boards:
Using recruiting technology is a great way to up your recruitment game and attract the best, most tech-savvy candidates. However, you shouldn’t neglect traditional job boards! Thousands of candidates still look to job boards to help determine their next career move. Ignoring traditional job boards means missing out on a vast talent pool of qualified candidates.
Conclusion
The top five current recruiting trends and what they can do for your recruitment process are as follows:
- Targeted recruiting ads: Best for attracting relevant candidates
- Data-driven recruiting and HR analytics: Identifies areas of improvement in your hiring process
- Online personality surveys: Help you find candidates that have the traits they need to succeed in their roles
- Video conferencing: Makes interviewing easy and accessible
- AI-powered recruiting: Helps save you time and money by automating repetitive recruitment tasks
If you want to beat your competition and attract the best candidates, you should start incorporating the digital recruitment trends that make the most sense for your business.
FAQs
What are recruiters looking for in 2023?
In 2023, recruiters are looking for remote and temporary workers and diversity in candidate selection. Recruiters are using HR-based CRM technology to automate and optimize the hiring process.
