Article: Recruitment trends of the future

Talent Acquisition

Recruitment trends of the future

Increased focus on candidate experience and enhanced employer branding are in the offing
Recruitment trends of the future

India Inc showed positive developments and confidence in their hiring statistics across all levels and especially newer geographies to man their expanding footprints. PeopleStrong HR Services believes that this stability started with the political development mid-year at the Centre and the economic revival that followed, with growth-oriented policies.

With GDP growth rate being pegged at 5.5 per cent against 4.7 per cent during the last financial year, according to the mid-year economic analysis 2014-15, businesses across all sectors are expected to grow.  In addition, India enjoys the competitive advantage of demographic dividend which would, together with the hiring intensity, mark a new era of recruitment in the country. We chart out some key trends that would define the job market:

Matchmaking. With an outlook on changing needs, and characterizing manpower as key to business growth, increased job opportunities and a reservoir of available talent pool, hiring would not be only about sourcing, interviewing candidates, and getting the vacancy filled. Instead, it would be increasingly about matching the requirements of a role to a candidate’s capability and vice versa. Organizations would be increasingly looking for a quality talent pool for their open positions and right kind of matchmaking would definitely hold the answers to business growth and expansion.

Outsourcing. It has already been observed in recent times that business leaders, including many CEOs, are driving the talent agenda. The recruitment industry and especially the recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) specialists are increasingly making use of social media and analytics to deliver both efficiency and experience. These two important factors would be the new favorites while looking for quality talent and strategizing to retain the talent. In the present socio-economic scenario, this model would be easily adapted beyond the mass hiring sectors to the niche hiring ones like core, pharma, and public services. The RPO systems working on a strong technology platform have the capability to perform job-candidate matchmaking and deliver world class experience to all parties involved while simultaneously managing cost and time efficiencies.

Social media hires. With 243.2 million internet users and 106 million active social media users among a total population of over 1200 million, the social media wave is yet to get into the heart of India. Talking of using social media for recruitment, this penetration has been equally low, especially when compared to the global markets (where more than 90 per cent recruiters consider social media as one of their major tools). However, given its numerous benefits and ease of usage, there would definitely be an increased focus on social media channels in 2015. While the penetration might not reach 90 per cent in this year itself, according to ISR 2015, the number of recruiters accepting social media as recruitment and sourcing channel will certainly double.

Technology adaptability. As increasing number of employers reach out to Tier II and Tier III cities to meet their hiring needs, increased usage of technology would not be a choice but a necessity. This would increase the adaptation of innovative tools like video interviewing, asynchronous interviewing and online assessments that not only will increase the efficiency of the hiring process by 50-60 per cent, but at the same time help in increasing the quality of hire.

Analytics. The business now expects HR leaders to be strategic partners. As the growth wave in business fires up the hiring engine of the organization, talent acquisition leaders are expected to have the armor of data. By using analytics, HR professionals would be ready to move from intuition-based decision making to data-driven decision making. A recent study by LinkedIn on global recruitment market shows that most organizations do not use data well in the space of talent acquisition. Though India, with 55 per cent score, is well above the global average of 24 per cent on how well analytics is used for talent acquisition process, this number would grow further as analytics enters more into workforce planning, workforce utilization, and simultaneously into untouched areas like sourcing.

Candidate experience. With everyone fighting the war to attract the best talent, it is only obvious that organizations are now focusing on delivering an unparalleled experience to candidates. Though a year ago this intent was limited to industries like IT/ITES, it will soon be adapted by others too. A good candidate experience is brilliant marketing for an organization and a bad hiring experience may cause the right applicant to turn down the job. Top talent has no desire to work in a disrespectful organization with leaders who simply don’t care about the recruiting process.

Online assessment. When you are operating in a country like India, which is on the verge of reaping the demographic dividend, frontline hiring becomes an integral part of the hiring mix. Conducting interviews is a mammoth task and does not deliver desired results. Online assessments are proving to be the best solution in such situations. Claiming to bring efficiencies in the range of 40-60 per cent, assessments are the new favorites amongst the industries like insurance, IT, BPO/ITES where frontline hiring forms a major pie of hiring mix. Many companies are working in a direction where interviews would be replaced by much more reliable online assessments.

Passive jobseekers. They have been attracting recruiters’ attention for quite some time now. And as increasing focus of organizations falls on “quality of talent” rather than time to fill or hiring manager’s satisfaction, this trend would grow further. There will be an upsurge in usage of tools like social media that encourage collaboration and help in engaging this set of job seekers. One can expect increasing number of organizations to have specific strategies for both active and passive jobseekers.

Employer branding. In today’s world of talent wars, attracting candidates is considered as important as attracting customers. In such a scenario, recruiting will increasingly resemble a marketing function. Employer branding would gain more importance than ever. The near future will see employers across industries focus on building attractive employer brands, and using channels like social media and video marketing to reach the workforce apart from the traditional methods.

Recruitment on mobile phones. India is home to about 350 million unique mobile phone users that use this medium to surf the Internet. When talent spends such a large portion of their time on mobile, it makes sense for the recruiters to be there to attract their attention.  As per a recent LinkedIn report, there has been a 90 per cent increase in the number of mobile users who look out for job opportunities and 75 per cent increase in the users who apply for jobs through this medium. This would encourage a large number of employers to have mobile-optimized career sites and job postings.

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Topics: Talent Acquisition, Employer Branding, #IHOWeek, #HR Ready, #Jobs

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