Talent acquisition and Recruitment Trends in 2023
With workers returning to the office and the effects of the “great resignation” still being felt, recruiters now have to appeal to candidates worried about salaries and inflation.
While the COVID-19 pandemic has diminished in many countries, the “great resignation” is in full swing and creating huge turnover and recruitment challenges for many organizations. Now, inflation and the rising cost of living — along with the corresponding demand for higher salaries — are creating new headaches for recruiters.
Those pressures are also having an impact on eight ongoing and emerging trends that should have a prominent place in your recruiting strategy in 2023
Remote interviewing
The dawn of the new era of remote work and recruitment has marked 2021, and this trend looks likely to remain for years to come. No longer can businesses limit themselves to their physical premises for talent acquisition and selection. Remote interviewing has thus become a fundamental aspect of the hiring process, enabling people to have video interviews via platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Cisco, Webex, as well as specialist video interviewing software such as HireVue and Montage. This technology makes it possible for multiple departments to join the interviewing and selection process.
However, conducting an interview in a virtual setting can have its difficulties. For instance, there is the potential for the interviewee’s surroundings to appear untidy or unprofessional, while any children or pets in the home may create distracting and disruptive background noise. Technology-related issues, beyond the candidate’s control, can lead to the candidate feeling flustered and uneasy. On the other hand, recent improvements in virtual meeting technologies such as custom and blurred backgrounds, as well as an overall increase in acceptance of a range of interview settings, may be of help in addressing some of these challenges.
Although the pandemic has subsided to some degree with advances in vaccines and treatments, remote interviewing looks set to remain in place for its convenience, speedy organization and assistance in the collaborative hiring process
Candidate selection
The COVID-19 pandemic pushed the importance of employee experience and listening programs to the forefront, as employers seek to provide their staff with an experience that prioritizes health and wellbeing, and an overall positive balance between work and life. Additionally, the focus has been extended to include the candidate experience. In the current labour market, characterized by high competition and ‘great resignation’, an optimized candidate experience is necessary in order to acquire the best talent, and gain a competitive advantage over rivals.
Organizations must build a positive experience and company culture for employees and candidates, in order to reap the most benefit and be profitable. Strategies to do this may include: creating surveys to gain feedback from potential hires, upgrading career websites, personalizing the hiring process and collecting analytics to improve candidate experience, and utilizing recruitment marketing and career site software.
Candidates value career websites which are straightforward and easy to use, so they can create a profile, search for jobs and apply quickly. On the other hand, if these processes are too slow or difficult to understand, they may turn to an alternative which has been optimized to their needs. Moreover, the overall candidate experience must be upheld even after they are accepted into the job candidate pool. The manner in which an organization communicates with candidates, organizes and carries out interviews, and implements follow-up processes will inform them as to how professional and desirable a workplace is.
Robotic process automation
RPA is trending because the technology can do a tremendous amount of heavy lifting at high speed, while simultaneously adding value and automation to talent acquisition processes. When combined with AI, the technology can source, screen, sort and rank candidates to create a pipeline of qualified candidates that are likely to succeed in vacant positions, based on the skills and potential gleaned from candidate profiles, resumes and social media. These steps involve highly repetitive manual tasks, but by using an RPA bot, recruiters can cut the effort from hours or days to minutes
Artificial intelligence
Unlike RPA, which performs a large volume of manual, repetitive tasks, AI can perform intelligent activities, such as reviewing resumes for specific skills, characteristics or keywords. AI can add intelligence to high-volume tasks, helping recruiters review a large number of job boards, process documents and read and process data from those sources.
Recruitment chatbots can help engage candidates and provide details about jobs while they search. NLP helps organizations write job postings and offer letters more accurately and appealingly while keeping them free of unsuitable language that might discourage some candidates from applying. It also enables chatbots to be user-friendly and accurate when responding to people.
Contingent workers
Over the past few years, there has been an upward trend in using contingent workers and creating a hiring process expressly for them. Talent acquisition is different for contingent workers than it is for full-time employees, and organizations need to be set up to seek out, recruit and process these types of hires. A vendor management system can be a useful tool for managing procurement of contingent workers, but organizations should also be prepared to use their career site and social media marketing to appeal to contingent workers and set up different interview methods and vendor approval processes. Whatever you do, know that recruiting contingent workers remains a trend at many companies.
Analytics
The use of analytics across talent acquisition processes assists data-driven decision-making and helps provide insights to identify areas of strength and weakness. It can also reduce the cost of talent acquisition practices, identify problems and blockages in the process, and fill vacant roles more quickly. Additionally, talent analytics can prove the effectiveness and ROI of your recruiting software investments.
More specifically, analytics can help provide recruiters with metrics such as the following:
source of hire, Time to fill, Time to hire, Age of job (how long a job has been open),Offer acceptance rate, Cost per hire, Quality of hire, Vacancy cost (how much it costs the organization while the position remains vacant), Diversity
With predictive analytics, which is also trending up, recruiters can project and predict future trends, such as estimated future candidate performance, predicted time to fill, interview acceptance probability and predicted tenure of a candidate.
HR software vendors are now including attributes, such as interpersonal skills, aspirations and motivations in their systems.
Having an awareness of particular skills and competencies can be critical for hiring the right employees. For example, a healthcare position requires specific skills compared to a psychiatrist, yet they may also overlap in one or two key areas. Nontechnical or soft skills, such as time management and critical thinking, as well as hard skills, such as engineering and software development, must all be considered. Having the right software to help you match the right candidates to the right jobs based on a set of skills and competencies will increase the success of your recruiting process.