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    How Recruiters Can Find Opportunity Amid Uncertainty

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    The forecasts are in, and economists paint a gloomy outlook for the UK economy in the coming months. It has been predicted that Britain risks being the first G7 nation to slip into recession – and the last one to get out of it – which is undoubtedly causing concern amongst business leaders.
    To prepare for challenging times ahead, many organizations are already making tough decisions about where to prioritize investments as budgets tighten. According to new research from LinkedIn, three-quarters of business leaders in the UK are anxious that the current climate will force companies to wind back progress made during the pandemic on important areas of working life such as flexible work, as well as skills development (76%), and employee wellbeing (83%).
    However, this is at odds with what professionals want and has the potential to significantly impact a company’s ability to attract and retain talent. LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends report finds that flexible work is the biggest factor UK employees value in employers today, even before compensation, with skills development and work-life balance, also featuring high on the list.
    Opportunity for recruiters
    Despite the economic outlook, we’re still seeing a very active labor market with low unemployment levels and a healthy level of job vacancies – with the term ‘jobful recession’ being coined to describe the current climate.
    However, with uncertainty front of mind for many, it has a knock-on effect on how people respond to new opportunities. LinkedIn labor market data reveals that job-seeking behavior in the UK is down compared to the first half of the year, suggesting that people are becoming increasingly reluctant to change jobs during this time of uncertainty. Furthermore, recent LinkedIn research found that 4 in 5 UK business leaders say it’s been difficult to attract talent in the current environment.
    Recruiters play a pivotal role in helping businesses navigate labor market changes, but during periods of uncertainty like the one we’re collectively experiencing now, they have even more of an opportunity to play a strategic adviser role to clients. They are uniquely positioned to help reduce the disconnect between what candidates want and what many employers are now offering by helping companies understand what candidates need in order to consider and pursue new opportunities actively. This is particularly pertinent at a time when many businesses are struggling to find and recruit talent with specific skill sets needed to grow their organizations.
    In a tough hiring environment where people are potentially sheltering in their roles and reluctant to make a change, recruiters can help companies make sense of the hiring market. Here are four key things recruiters should keep front of mind during this time:
    Helping companies understand what candidates want
    The pandemic has changed the world of work as we know it and shifted the needs and wants of employees. This means that it’s more important than ever for recruiters to understand what job seekers want. The biggest shift is the increased desire for greater flexibility in the workplace. For many job seekers now, flexible working arrangements are a deal breaker when considering a new role, let alone accepting one. Recent LinkedIn data highlights the growing preference amongst candidates for flexible working, showing that demand outstrips supply for remote roles – with remote roles making up less than 12% of job ads in the UK, but receiving more than 20% of applications.
    Flexible working will be a key talent magnet for the foreseeable future and can be a core differentiator for recruiters when reaching out to candidates, so featuring an organization’s flexible working policies front and center is going to be key.
    In addition to flexible working, LinkedIn’s recent Global Talent Trends report shows that skills development is a top priority for employees and job seekers. By highlighting a company’s commitment to skills development and the different L&D initiatives that are available, recruiters can help candidates see how a job move can help them develop new skills and progress in their careers.
    Encouraging companies to think skills-first
    For decades, candidates have been assessed on their formal education, experience, and previous job title, which has resulted in companies missing out on high-potential talent. There’s an opportunity for recruiters to help organizations transition to a skills-based hiring approach, where candidates are considered for their skills and future potential. This can help ease the challenges of recruiting in a tight labor market.
    Our data shows that LinkedIn members globally have added 365 million skills to their profiles over the last year, up 43% compared to the previous year. By using skills to screen and search for candidates, rather than relying on direct previous experience, recruiters can help companies unlock new talent pools and source talent from non-traditional backgrounds, which may also help them to improve the diversity of their organization. In addition, recruiters that adopt a skills-based hiring approach will help companies take a ‘select in’ approach to their recruitment, actively bringing in candidates who might not have realized their skills qualified them for the role – rather than just filtering out unsuitable applications. Given we’re still seeing labor market tightness, drawing in new talent this way will be highly valued by businesses.
    Bringing a company’s purpose, culture, and values to life
    More than ever, job seekers are attracted to companies that align with their personal values. When looking for new roles today, it’s more common than not to see candidates challenge and evaluate where a company stands on particular issues they value most, such as DEI or environmental sustainability.
    Recruiters, therefore, need to be well-versed in understanding a company’s purpose and values, ensuring these come through during the hiring process. Recruiters will also need to partner with companies to help them best highlight these attributes to job seekers through their employer branding.
    Data-driven recruiting is the future
    With so much change in the labor market, businesses are increasingly looking for partners who stand out from the crowd and can be truly consultative – providing them with actionable insights grounded in data.
    This means there’s a huge opportunity here for recruitment firms to arm their teams with the right tools to source this data and the skills they need to be able to decipher it. By equipping their teams with these abilities, recruiters can earn a higher seat at the table, providing their clients with strategic advice on workforce planning.
    There is no denying that these are challenging times, but recruiters have a right to be cautiously optimistic and can provide a huge amount of value to clients by playing a more advisory role. By providing counsel and guidance, recruiters can help organizations navigate a tough economic environment, unlocking new talent pools and successfully attracting top talent.
    By Adam Hawkins, Head of Search & Staffing EMEA & LATAM, LinkedIn.
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      5 Automation Habits of Highly Effective Recruiting Teams 

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      In a talent-short market, having a consistently engaged talent pool sets recruitment firms apart from their competitors. Thankfully, cutting-edge automation tools are helping recruiters to engage, nurture, and, ultimately, place top-level talent into new roles at the pace and scale demanded by their clients. In fact, according to Bullhorn’s aggregated data, agencies that use automation have a 64% higher fill rate and submit 33% more candidates per recruiter than those completing tasks manually. How are firms making the most of automation to see these incredible results?
      Here are five habits of Bullhorn customers who leverage automation to create an engaged talent community that is excited to work with them in the short and long term.
      1. Engage regularly with talent
      According to our recent survey of 2,000 candidates, the number one reason talent becomes frustrated with recruiters is poor communication. Automation enables recruiters to manage communications more effectively and to keep candidates informed at every stage of the process.
      Many firms already use automated emails, surveys, and text messaging in the recruitment process. However, recruiters need a tightly integrated tech stack to guarantee that they’re able to gather handy information across every channel, as this is essential for personalization and for generating reliable talent insights.
      Recruiters can send occasional feedback requests through automated messages to new hires, those nearing the end of their contracts, or people that have been in a job for a while. These timely interactions will ensure recruiters stay top of mind and will pay dividends once candidates start looking for new jobs – without the burden of conducting manual ‘busywork’.
      Furthermore, AI-based automation can significantly improve the matching process by intelligently recommending candidates for jobs and jobs for candidates. This is particularly useful for temp or contingent workers, whom recruiters can quickly redeploy into newly available positions as soon as their contracts end.
      It’s also important to note that most recruitment firms have numerous candidates in their databases with whom they don’t engage regularly. Using AI, you can stay in touch with them over time and give them content by suggesting jobs, articles, and tips. It’s also a way to notify them that you want to keep their personal data in your database. However, under GDPR, you need to delete their data if they request it since candidates have the “right to be forgotten”.
      2. Improve data health
      Recruitment teams will always have to collect, store, and analyze data in order to succeed – and it’s something to avoid doing manually, especially on a large scale, as siloed, error-filled data can create just as many problems as unified, clean data can solve.
      With the right automation, recruiters can streamline data management and compliance tasks. These include anonymizing candidate records and updating job, company, and contract status for all the records within the applicant tracking system (ATS).
      Declutter your ATS by using automation to identify outdated records, people with no contact information, or records without activity to speed up searches. To make sure you are GDPR-compliant, your ATS must have all its processing activities governed by a contract under EU legislation.
      Don’t forget that internal reminders are an integral part of data collection – remind recruitment teams to send an early message to new contract starters to get feedback on their well-being and work conditions. Unlike traditional recruitment methods, automation simplifies mass communication with candidates.
      3. Stay organized
      Automating simple tasks within the ATS like notes and alerts gives recruiters back valuable time to spend on building candidate and client relationships. With so many candidates competing for so many vacancies, this solution is invaluable for staying organized.
      It also helps recruiters to set interview reminders and let applicants know whether they’ve been accepted or rejected. Importantly, if a candidate has been offered a position and it falls through for whatever reason, you can contact other suitable job seekers and fill the job quickly if your database is up to date.
      4. Streamline onboarding
      The ability to automate paperwork eases the process of onboarding talent. This is especially relevant for recruitment firms working across different locations and industries, where there might be different laws on taxes and compliance. Companies also have different policies on harassment, pay, benefits, company culture, and other aspects they want extra documentation on.
      A well-defined, automated onboarding system tailors processes to different types of hires and mitigates hiring risks. Back-office mistakes not only distract from an employee’s productivity, but mistakes like worker misclassification also carry the potential risk of fines and penalties.
      5. Scale up marketing
      Automating marketing campaigns to candidates and clients across channels like web, mobile, email, and social media is extremely helpful. Equally helpful is the ability to automatically personalize your content to better communicate with specific groups and ensure everyone receives relevant and interesting offers.
      Determine the segmentations you want to use in your marketing workflows and create lists. This will help to target specific contacts with relevant content. The workflow doesn’t just engage prospects initially but is critical to establishing a sustained interaction with them. As a result, you can expect better engagement scores (and closing ratios) from clients or candidates who are actively being nurtured, instead of those who aren’t.
      Nurturing sales prospects with valuable content enables a recruitment agency’s sales team to focus on engaged leads while automatically engaging with not-ready-to-buy prospects. Some of the metrics to track include engagement score (points are added to prospective candidates’ profiles on the database each time they engage with content), pipeline revenue (income generated through lead conversions), and new lead close rate (the percentage of leads that turn into conversions).
      By Jason Heilman, Senior Vice President, Automation, AI, and Talent Experience, Bullhorn.
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      How Recruitment Marketers Can Utilize Data to Drive Candidate Success

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      More than two million job vacancies are currently available throughout the UK. And so, while it’s still a difficult market to cut through the noise as several organizations restructure in a post-pandemic world, savvy recruiters – and their marketing departments – are tapping into insight in a bid to stand out from the crowd.
      That’s because they realize that a generic ‘InMail’ message via LinkedIn or cold email sent off-the-cuff is unlikely to pique interest in a job seeker who wants more from their recruitment contact if they’re searching for a role with an organization that displays a similar level of passion as them and fits with their culture and values, a flat, impersonal piece of communication simply won’t cut it.
      Yes, there will be recruiters out there who will experience some success when they send out hundreds of ‘batch and blast’ marketing messages to scores of recipients in their contact base. But when a blanket piece of irrelevant content is loosely received by all – and subsequently ignored or deleted altogether – are they making the most of their time, effort, and resources?
      Plus, does this type of content show that they’re genuinely interested in ensuring the right candidate applies for the right job? Perhaps not.
      Like customers searching for products or services, candidates want to feel like the brands they’re communicating with and understand their wants and needs in real-time. That means delivering hyper-personalized content covering available roles that suit that individual’s of-the-moment circumstances – from location to salary requirements – and skillset.
      When that type of marketing message hits the bullseye, recruiters are in a solid position to not only successfully fill a vacancy but attract more talent in the future because they’ve taken the time to get to know their recipients and have responded to their interests. Plus, word-of-mouth endorsement can be an exciting thing.
      Moving away from delivering bland messages
      So, can recruiters make sure they’re sending ultra-individualized comms that effectively cut through the online noise? It comes back to data. When savvy professionals unlock and understand their insight, they’re better placed to deliver digital comms to the right person at the right time.
      Many recruiters have seen them plug in marketing automation to do the ‘heavy lifting’ for them. Armed with an intuitive tool, users can extract critical information on each candidate’s preferences and respond swiftly to their online behaviors.
      To put this into context, if a candidate searches for a particular role and has downloaded a recruitment brand’s guide on ‘The X skills a modern-day construction manager needs,’ users can take this piece of detail and tailor comms specifically for that individual. It could be an invite to a relevant webinar with a construction company CEO or a blog covering the questions to ask in an interview.
      It’s all about utilizing the data they’re already sat on and creating something meaningful for each audience member.
      How to evaluate the strength of your content
      When roles become available, many recruitment marketers might opt to place all their vacancies in a newsletter sent to their database. And for them, a high open and click rate of that email is the measure of success.
      However, while it might be a good piece of content, these ‘vanity metrics’ don’t always tell the whole story. For example, a candidate could have accidentally gone into the email while scrolling through their newsfeed. If they’ve then hit ‘delete’ seconds later, it shows they’re not interested, but the statistics will tell a different tale.
      Instead, recruiters who have plugged in automation can unlock the powers of lead scoring. This means placing a metaphorical figure against each interaction – a ‘9’ for highly engaged recipients down to a ‘1’ for those who aren’t that bothered. As a result, recruiters, and their marketing teams, can prioritize the more significant numbers for further communication because they know they’re speaking to someone keen.
      Not every piece of comms will work
      And finally, it might not be something recruiters, and their marketing teams want to hear, but there won’t always be a winning outcome to every single email sent. That’s because nobody gets things spot-on all the time. So, why should they expect their content to achieve the impossible?
      The difference here though is that, when professionals have data and marketing automation to lean on, they’re immediately in a better position to deliver digital comms that land perfectly into the right person’s inbox at the right time.
      They can also use their clever tool to analyze each email, newsletter, or webpage to understand what’s working and what’s not. And when the latter occurs, they can swiftly tweak and alter copy to try another way of breaking through the noise.
      Overall, recruitment marketers who arm themselves with data – and use it to drive effective content – should soon see their success rate soar, putting themselves way ahead of the competition as a result.
      By Adam Oldfield, CEO at marketing automation platform Force24.
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      Do Recruiters Still Read Resumes?

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      They used to be the best way for candidates to get noticed by prospective employers, and there were certain rules for compiling them including lots of dos and don’ts. But are they really relevant and should we be bothering with them at all in this digital and social media age where there are far more […] More

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      12 Things Your Candidate Should Say at Interviews

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      Recruiters have a whole arsenal of advice for the candidates in their care. But a lot of this advice tends to be negative: don’t say this, don’t shake hands like that. As with most feedback, when critiquing a candidate’s mock-interview it is easier to address what went wrong than to cook up positive new ideas […] More

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      Flexit: What it Means for Recruiters Post Brexit

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      It is undeniable that Brexit marks the biggest geopolitical shakeup for generations. It is a topic that dominated public attention last year, with the news agenda eagle-eyed on parliament’s struggle to deliver a unanimously satisfactory exit deal. Similarly, when it came to the end of the year election campaign, the majority of the debate centered […] More