Amongst other industries, the recruitment industry has had to adapt in these extremely challenging times.
With demands on everyone being greater, and business needs in a constant state of flux - here is our observations made during this year on how we can take advantage of this opportunity to take calculated risks in business now more than ever before.
Here are our predictions on the future on recruiting:
1. Facing unprecedented uncertainty and volatility, we are seeing a trend in the number of companies that are moving away from “static” jobs in siloed departments and move towards project-based cross-functional work. As a result, employees are instead moving across to new projects as business needs change.
2. This will also change the way recruiters assess and hire talent. They’ll prioritise applicants’ potential and transferable skills, like adaptability and problem solving, over experience level and technical capacity to do specific tasks.
3. Remote work has vastly expanded available talent pools, allowing for greater access to candidates from underrepresented groups and deflating past challenges that “the talent isn’t there to be found”. Recruiters like us have not only delivered a diverse pipeline of candidates, but also advocate for them and hold hiring managers accountable for moving those candidates through the funnel. In fact, 76% of talent professionals in EMEA say diversity will be very important to the future of recruiting.
4. Companies in the past before COVID did dab into video interviewing and other remote assessments, but not at the obvious scale we are seeing today. The reality of lockdown has sparked all companies to now create an end to end virtual recruiting process for the first time.
5. The need to stay engaged virtually has meant that companies have focused their attention towards their brand. We have seen the rise in companies posting on Linkedin, in fact company posts on Linkedin were up by 48% in June (YoY) across EMEA. Instead of focusing on polished marketing materials, companies have been drawing their attention to what they’re doing to support employees, customers, and communities in times of crisis. From partnerships with nonprofits to employee assistance programmes, these actions have been key to shape their brand equality. All the way this has been beneficial too to the overall 360 degree recruitment process to attract new candidates from their everyday social media activity and interactions.
It is apparent that recruiters will increasingly serve as the bridge between a company’s hiring needs and other key in house HR personnel.
We’ve already seen a rapid increase in skills like diversity and inclusion, decision-making, and HR strategy to their experience and CVs. These new skills will help bring clarity to talent data, reshape company branding, and fine-tune the virtual hiring process — all in a continuous process of improvement.
