Build a sustainable talent acquisition strategy, and the candidates will come.
But to do that, recruiters need to be industry pioneers, leaders in the field, and change-makers in the world of hiring. Talent acquisition managers cannot afford to lag behind as the recruitment sector innovates in the wake of the pandemic and the ongoing struggle for talent.
To that end, enterprises need to re-engage with their digital recruitment assets and build a contemporary recruitment tech stack hardy enough to weather the rough winds of hiring staff in a hyper-competitive talent market.
Contents:
- Recruitment Tech and how it helps the candidate experience (CX).
- CRM and the power of connection.
- DEI and spreading the net wider.
- Technical upskilling and the rise of non-linear careers.
- How agile is your ATS? The rise of “interim leaders” will require it.
Recruitment Tech and how it helps the candidate experience (CX)
A modern, successful recruitment strategy centralizes the candidate. From employer branding to exit interviews, targeted, personalized candidate management and expectation management are the by-words for effective recruitment and retention of talent.
So everything a recruiter does has to revolve around candidate engagement and building desire in a candidate. As such, your entire recruitment tech stack has to pivot to your candidate first and foremost. The best example of this industry-wide trend is the rise of CX as a guiding recruitment principle.
The reason why CX is having a bit of a moment is that it’s entirely driven by candidate brand perceptions: subjective judgments that are often the deciding factor in a candidate’s decision to join a company.
So recruiters need to make sure everything centers on candidate experience and perception management, and recruitment tech is a central ingredient in the recruiting mix.
Focus GTS Top Tip
Recruitment tech is a great candidate communicator, so by utilizing a well-curated tech stack you can build positive brand perceptions up and down your hiring funnel. Every element of your tech stack needs to speak to your candidate, from your website to your performance management system.
Make sure you get the basics right. Your career page on your website needs to be well-written and full of candidate stories. Your social channels and your blogs need to tell your story. Your entire brand front needs to scream Employer Brand.
Then you finish off your world-beating stack with a well-integrated ATS platform, full of features like video interviewing, remote or hybrid workforce management (if possible), and peer-led systems of feedback, reward, and recognition.
CRM and the power of connection
A recruitment CRM is the powerhouse of any digital recruiting strategy and outreach. We see recruitment CRM moving from passive candidate administration and support to full recruitment strategy HQ software and central point of recruitment decision-making over the next few years.
This is down to two things:
- As we said above, CX is everything. The recruitment market is candidate-led, candidate-centric and candidate-dominated, so recruiters need to move beyond seeing a CRM as a simple database of talent, and focus on the “candidate relationship” in Candidate Relationship Manager.
- The rise of automation, and how a fully integrated CRM will act as a focal hub for everything from employer brand marketing to automated social media job adverts to onboarding, video interviews, skills testing and so on and so forth.
CRMs are ultra-efficient channels between candidate, recruiter and client, so it’s clear that if recruiters want to improve candidate placement, they have to guarantee their candidate handling is exceptional. Integrated CRMs make this a certainty.
This trend – to integrate and centralize CRM functionality and make the process of connecting with talent hyper-efficient – will only continue. We’re already partly there, so make sure you’re at the forefront of it.
DEI and spreading the net wider
Tech sits at the center of employers’ efforts to fully diversify their hiring culture.
Recruitment tech in the form of outreach, applicant tracking, “blind” interviewing, onboarding, testing and assessments, job marketing, automation and more can augment every facet of recruiting talent to better elevate diverse voices and diverse applicants.
Most recruitment tech providers understand that legacy biases are hard-coded into recruitment practice within a lot of industries and are doing their utmost to build platforms of communication and talent vetting that are as objective and fair as possible.
Improving recruitment DEI isn’t and should never be a “trend”. What we see is long-term change management, better measurement of DEI metrics, and a wider talent net being cast, for good.
This will be driven in large part by forward-thinking tech providers – the game changers who are already sitting at the vanguard of change.
Focus GTS Top Tip.
Seek out recruitment tech providers with specialist DEI features as part of their feature set, or better yet, build a DEI tech stack and hard wire that into your HR and workforce management platform culture.
Be a leader, not a follower.
Technical upskilling and the rise of non-linear careers
There have been many reports about the need for workers to reskill and upskill within the digital sector, but we think there are three strands that impact skills development that are worth a little unpacking – general upskilling, employer support, and non-linear career growth.
Let’s break it down and analyze how these three points intersect:
- It’s clear that the country needs to upskill, fast – “the World Economic Forum estimates that up to 50% of workers will need to add new skills to keep up with the requirements of in-demand careers”.
- It’s also clear that in the vast majority of cases upskilling is done by the employee directly, rather than something that’s invested in by the employer – “About 84% of employees upskill themselves, while slightly above 30% of IT employers provide development and training support”.
- And contemporary candidates in a growing number of sectors – including the tech sector – want to engage in more portfolio careers, get experience across a range of employers, work freelance (and flexibly) or engage in side hustles to earn more money.
So what does this mean for employers? Follow the trend, don’t fight against it. Lead your industry and provide more training and actively engage your workforce to help them meet the needs of the future.
Recruitment tech should intersect with skills development programmes and learning tools as part of a performance management strategy. L&D tech provides immense reach and ease of learning, and most L&D providers create modular learning lesson plans to help workers upskill sustainably and in more flexible ways.
Focus GTS Top Tip
Recruitment tech platforms cannot live outside of skills development platforms – they have to work together.
A major technical trend over the next 5 – 10 years will be the rapid digitisation of work, worker skills and worker engagement. This means employers should be focusing on digital transformation now across every HR touch point to make sure they are prepared for a more personalized form of recruiting, talent acquisition and work.
How agile is your ATS? The rise of “interim leaders” will require it.
The post-COVID permanent hiring landscape has been cruel for many employers.
In response, some recruiters have turned to the interim and temporary staffing sector to bolster numbers. But where the interim talent market used to be a short-medium term recruitment solution, employers are now realizing that the often high-quality interim candidate market is a very sustainable, long term and flexible solution for long-term, multi-project timescales.
Korn Ferry makes a big point of this in their new report, Talent Acquisition Trends 2023. In it, they prove that shortages of perm talent don’t mean shortages of all talent. Here at Focus GTS, we think tech employers who are struggling with hiring will have no choice but to deep dive into the temp market.
- “In 2023, we will see an increase in people seeking flexible opportunities who are willing to compromise a sense of security from a full-time job…in such a dynamic landscape, experts recommend companies maintain a 70/30 FTE-to-interim worker mix”.
The sourcing, hiring, onboarding and often paying of interim staff requires an effective, accessible and efficient contract-centric ATS. This new “sustainable interim” trend dictates that digital candidate management systems need to be fully functional for the long term too.
A word to the wise – dipping a toe into the interim market, and making sure you have the right digital platforms in place to manage them, is fast becoming a major element of recruiting in specialist markets.
Focus GTS Top Tip
Make sure you shop around for the right ATS!
Any recruitment tech platform you use needs to be well-researched and perfectly formed for your company, and trust us there are enough providers to choose from. Many ATS offer suites of products, integrations, and novel features to improve ROI and hire followthrough, so be choosy.
References:
https://www.linkedin.com/business/talent/blog/talent-acquisition/what-is-candidate-experience
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/employer-branding
https://www.lever.co/resources/create-dei-tech-stack-improve-recruiting/
https://www.salesforce.com/news/the-future-of-digital-skills/
https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-org/goodwill-digital-skills/
https://time.com/charter/6206500/portfolio-career/
https://www.kornferry.com/insights/featured-topics/talent-recruitment/talent-acquisition-trends-2023