.png){kind=spacer}
Recruitment has been changing, slowly and steadily. But that change will speed up now some major trends meet.
Recruitment trends in the last decade were defined by organizational trends like cultural fit (personality assessments and work fit tools), the employee brand (Glassdoor reviews and shiny career websites) and flex working (gig economy and part-timers). AI got it's introduction in the last decade but didn't see lift off yet. That will change in the next 10 years following the remote working adoption and the embracement of data driven recruitment across channels.
These trends will significantly change recruitment in the next decade:
It has become acceptable, and in some cases even preferable, for many companies to hire remote employees. Especially tech companies adopt the remote philosophy since their workers are not dependent on on-site facilities. Google, LinkedIn and Amazon have been playing around with remote work and seem to end up in the middle, a hybrid model. But some companies like Otrium decided to launch their ‘HQ in the cloud’ and promote work from anywhere.
Remote working means the world becomes your talent pool instead of the region you are sourcing in. This will put more emphasis on the experience and skills of talent since location is in many cases not a required criterion anymore.
Cultures are being mixed at scale, which means employees should adapt their behaviour and prepare for cultural inspiration. But it also brings complication as a result of culturally specific preferences and habits that should be taken into account while working together.
It also means different benefits. Employees at remote companies enjoy working from anywhere, whether it’s with their families or living the digital nomad lifestyle.
Gen Z'ers, or the "Zoomers", are true digital natives. They use technology in almost every daily activity. In work, play and even in school they couldn’t go without.
They are now up to 25 years old and are starting to join the workforce at a larger scale in the coming years.
Gen Z'ers are multitaskers and can handle many stimuli which in tech companies doesn’t have to be a bad thing. They want to be part of a bigger whole and join communities and social networks in a blink but also want to stay true to themselves and don’t accept to be labelled. Their awareness of ethics and social responsibility adds up to their ability to make sustainable impact.
Recruiting for Gen Z means you need to adapt to a target group that is digitally oriented. Long job applications with loads of distractions will not help turning them into hires.
You need to move fast, emphasize the unity on a team level and organizational level and show that your company cares about people’s wellbeing and about building a sustainable business.
Candidates communicate with companies and their recruiters through a variety of channels. They include chatbots, forms, video, SMS, Slack, WhatsApp, Clubhouse and other social media platforms and many more channels.
Recruiting companies can choose to use this opportunity to cater for the communication to the preferences of their candidates or risk creating a lot of friction because of all the different channels used.
Since the majority of the workforce already are millennials and the Gen Z workforce is on the rise, you will have to deal with a very digitally spoiled target group who are used to shiny user interfaces and who reject any hiccups in the digital candidate experience in the wink of an eye.
The introduction of more channels for recruiters means that they have to better manage these channels and especially their integrations. The recruiter is responsible for signalling friction points in the candidate experience and suggesting different, more simple ways of communicating.
Access to talent data becomes increasingly more accessible. This is due to more advanced data extraction technologies that people data companies deploy and more user friendly ways of looking at that data.
Better access to relevant talent data will mean a rapidly increasing adoption of the use of this data. Because people data will be more accessible also the non tech savvy recruiter, which is by far the biggest part of recruiters, will start to adopt it. As a result of this proactive sourcing for passive candidates will see a huge boost.
Recruiters will rely less on job boards and more on custom talent search made for their industry and requirements. Recruiters will not only rely on data coming from LinkedIn anymore, but will be able to access consolidated profile data coming from several sources like niche platforms.
For sourcers and recruiters it will be less about the technical skill to work with data and more about the right interpretation of profile data. Integration of data and functionality to analyse and present that data will be in the hands of software providers. The judgment of a profile will still be for a big part the recruiter’s responsibility.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the most promising and at the same time riskiest technological development of our time. As you might have read in our earlier blog Recruitment's Final Destiny we've been deep diving into the implications of AI. What if you could get a sneak peak inside a candidate’s brain without speaking a word with them? What if candidates would offer robotized versions of themselves?
Reading minds, AI employees and holograms of colleagues sound futuristic but are closer than we might think. Elon Musk's Neuralink is a device that gets implemented in people's brains and helps them speak again or enable them to give orders to machines. A similar project by UCSF already succeeded at having someone speak without saying a word at all, with brain signals only text was generated.
Candidate interviewing also transforming. Companies like HireVue and MyInterview now already offer automated interviewing robots and candidates in their turn are deploying robots to answer the interview robot's questions.
In this sea of opportunities we also should be aware of the risks of AI. One of the concerns in general is that AI's and specifically Machine Learning models become black boxes where people don't understand anymore how the machine comes to its decisions, not even the people who developed them. Control becomes limited and with that the future outcome unexpected.
AI is changing every aspect of daily life and business. And with every technology there will be people who profit from it and people who will have to adapt because of the consequences of AI.
Search billions of profiles through dozens of platforms.
