Article: The emerging new trends in hiring

Recruitment

The emerging new trends in hiring

Rajeev Thakur, Director, Grassik Search discusses the changing landscape in the recruitment process driven by a host of factors.
The emerging new trends in hiring

With the emergence of the VUCA market environment post recession, the hiring landscape began to change. Factors like technology, cost considerations, global instability & changing customer aspirations, most functional roles became complex, creating an acute shortage of right talent were the driving force behind this trend. The pitch was further queered by the new age start-ups, flush with funds, hiring rapidly to ramp up. This resulted in talent scarcity creating a completely candidate-driven market. On top of that, there has been a reducing tolerance for non-performances with candidates finding it difficult to operate in unstructured & high-pressure environment, leading to high churn, especially in the new age companies. This has resulted in organisations rapidly replacing unproductive talents and also increasingly getting choosy in hiring new talent. 

To bridge this talent-gap, new hiring trends have emerged:

1. Roles are increasingly getting difficult to define as organisations focus more on job deliverables rather than background or qualification. 

2. Matching a candidate’s skill sets and attitude to the demands of a role has become more critical. The ability to adapt and work in unstructured environment and charting out innovative solutions to complexities has become the new normal. 

3. It is difficult to create a standard job description for such roles. Clients prefer to give a detailed briefing to their Search Partners outlining their needs & the challenges they face. 

4. The standard JD (job description) is dying a quiet death. The requirements of each role keep changing during the interview process. In many cases, the candidates selected have no similarity to the brief given at the beginning of search. The role evolves as candidates are met & assessed.

5. The latest trend that seems to be emerging fast is that most Business leaders—CEOs & MDs are getting directly involved in the hiring of key talent themselves, bypassing HR. Increasingly, the briefing is delivered directly by the CEO of the organisation. In at least 4-5 instances in the past couple of months, we have been asked to deal directly with the CEO who becomes the first point of candidate interaction— and not the last. I am not talking of start-ups but established brick & mortar business.

6. As the growth wave in business fires up hiring in organizations, we have seen a shift from intuitive hiring to data-based decision making. Talent acquisition leaders are using data analytics to assess fitment of prospective employees.  Though still in nascent stages, analytics would drive key decision making of HR professionals for talent acquisition, workforce planning & utilisation.  

7. As increasing numbers of employers reach out to candidates in tier two & tier three cities, technology utilisation is becoming a necessity & is set to increase. Skype, video conferencing, asynchronous interviewing & online assessments have led to improved efficiency & speed of hiring. As has mobile recruitment. With a large number of active job seekers actively using their mobile phones, mobile optimised sites & job postings are increasingly becoming a great tool to attract talent 

8. Something that has not received too much importance till now but will emerge as key to attracting talent is candidate experience. In the war to attract the best talent, organizations will need to deliver an unparalleled experience to the candidates. As much as employer branding is taking centre stage, an actual experience during the interview & meeting phase is most critical to attract top talent. Poor hiring experience will cause the right applicant to turn down the job. With multiple choices in hand, top talent has no desire to work in a disrespectful organization that simply won’t care about the recruiting process.

One of the major fallout of the current uncertainty & volatility in the market is the reducing tolerance for non-performance. People unable to rapidly scale-up with the organisation or unable to perform in a changed environment or not agile enough to adapt, are being replaced rapidly. This has drastically increased the need for discrete searches to replace existing talent that is getting obsolete. Poaching from competition too has increased 

 

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Topics: Recruitment, #Hiring

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