Remember the early 1990’s when pulling names from a Rolodex and dialing a phone meant effective recruitment. Soon after, we had the job boards of the 2000’s to simplify the hiring process. In The 2010’s of course, social media encouraged users to create and exchange content including emails, blogs, instant message (IM), Facebook, LinkedIn, photo sharing, file sharing – also changed recruiting forever.
A change in the driver’s seat
Those days are now history, when companies would dictate who joins the organization based on numbers of years of experience and skills the employees brought to the company.
“As the employment market continues to tighten, it will become increasingly difficult for employers to even find the quality, skilled candidates to meet their needs.” said Joanie Courtney, Senior VP, Global Market Insights at job site Monster.
Qualified candidates are now in the driver’s seat. Recruiters have to broaden their sourcing scope while HR looks to repair the candidate interview and on-boarding experience. More companies are finding unique ways to showcase and brand themselves while candidates want to know as much information as possible about the job, company, culture, and corporate values before making that 1st step.
The new paradigm: Pay Vs Challenging work
Based on surveys of employees throughout the year, online retailer Zappos determines which benefits, perks, and career path are most meaningful, which benefits they would like to see added, and which are no longer relevant. Zappos utilizes this feedback to help achieve its goal of happy, healthy, and successful employees, according to benefits manager Bhawna Provenzano.
A better company will make sure employees grows in responsibility, as an individual, and as a professional. A good company invests in its employees, makes sure employees work with brilliant people, and on path to breaking ideas and tasks.
New ways to court the candidate: Social and Digital
Social networks, digital media, smart searches, machine learning are in. Hot lists, agency recruitment, job portals becoming irrelevant. The last five years have shown how recruitment has become talent acquisition. Companies can’t afford, and are no longer hiring in traditional ways. They are innovating themselves to find new, broader and social ways to recruit, which is essential for survival. The number of employers using social media to screen candidates has increased 500% over the last few years. 80% of employers use some form of social networking sites to research candidates, up from 52% last year and 11% in 2006. Partnering with Marketing is becoming part of recruitment in this digital world. Data on the candidate is now easily accessible to find that “correct” fit
Diversity trumps homogeneity
Studies have shown that diverse groups of people bring different perspectives of seeing a problem and thus faster and better ways of solving it. This means companies no longer work in silos. In order to be profitable, have better products, and higher revenues, they expand the horizon to hire people from all walks of life.
At Intel, CEO Brian Krzanich said: “A fully diverse and inclusive workplace is fundamental to our ability to innovate and deliver business results.” And with globalization diverse companies can better serve a diverse user base.
Aptitude and not Age
Google’s average employee is 29 years old, similar to other tech companies, according to the PayScale data. The average age of companies like Google’s, Yahoo’s, Apple’s and Microsoft’s of the world has reduced to below 29. The focus is on attitude, aptitude, soft skills, desire to learn and constantly upgrading one’s skills vs years of experience.
Retention and Internal Recruiting
Many companies have now challenged HR to run their L&D and retention programs. Ignoring this area is costing many organizations. Its 4X more expensive to hire a new candidate vs retain existing talent.
Telecommuting
The internet has opened the world up. Information is available on fingertips. Everything is transparent in this global environment. Virtualization is the key. Gone are the days when people have to come to office everyday 9-5. Now with the help of internet, video chats, VPN’s, satellites employees can be in the other part of the world but still 2 steps away.
Where do we go from here?
Its clear that talent acquisition teams all over the world are dramatically tapping into increased amount of candidate data from third parties and from their own records in ways to identify where to source (job boards, colleges, organizations, and geographies); assessing candidates (skills, aptitude, attitude, behaviors, cultural fits); and also optimizing recruiter performance. For the modern talent acquisition effort, analytics has become a must.
75 % of the organizations in US alone are now using ATS (Application Tracking Systems) products which successfully helps talent acquisition teams to not only improve recruitment process, and candidate experience but also provide important never seen before data insights and analytics.
What’s next? Data to minimize time and hire quality candidates? Predict cultural fit? Filter candidates prone to leave for newer opportunities? Yes, yes, and yes.
