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There’s no denying that 2021 was a wild ride for HR and talent acquisition teams, making it tough to predict recruiting trends for 2022. Around the world, millions of employees took part in the Great Resignation—quitting their jobs at record-setting rates and leaving companies rushing to fill open roles. In the months that followed, HR […] More
There’s no denying that 2021 was a wild ride for HR teams, making it tough to predict HR trends for 2022. Around the world, millions of employees took part in the Great Resignation—quitting their jobs at record-setting rates and leaving companies rushing to fill open roles. In the months that followed, HR professionals faced a […] More
In December 2021, total payroll employment rose by 199,000 nationwide, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.9%. But despite the solid rehiring in the last few months, the labor force participation rate remains short of pre-pandemic levels.
A low participation rate – coupled with a labor shortage that is giving workers more leverage than they have experienced in years – is continuing to challenge employers in attracting and retaining key talent.
While positive for workers, the competition for talent is expected to last well in 2022. And though hard to predict what the future will hold in this candidate-driven market, it is clear that hiring will not get easier in the coming year. To overcome this, recruiting teams should turn to various tools including talent acquisition (TA) planning “workbooks,” which are catalogs of tools designed to help recruiters approach strategic recruitment in the new year with a reimagined gameplan.
Create a high-level strategy
The first step in improving recruiting strategies this year is creating a strategic and detailed plan to help achieve 2022 hiring goals, including anticipating the number of new hires over the next 12 months. Recruiting teams should work with their executive leadership team to understand what the company’s strategic plans are for the new year, and in turn, what roles they will need to hire.
This is also a key time to examine if a team should:
Conduct employee engagement surveys, which can help anticipate satisfaction, engagement, and turnover.
Study historical trends, as some employee turnover and hiring needs can be cyclical. For example, many employees make the decision to leave their current jobs in January.
Estimate the impact of the “Great Resignation” on your employee base and anticipate increased employee turnover as well as expectations such as increased wages, better working conditions, remote work options, flexible workplaces (especially for working parents), and improving diversity, equity, & inclusion (DE&I) efforts.
Similarly, get a firm understanding of DE&I goals for 2022, as well as any plans for attracting, hiring, and retaining talent from all walks of life.
Consider any internal mobility or promotions anticipated that will lead to the need for new hires. Additionally, determine the anticipated number of new employees needed by role, location, and business unit.
This strategy should help establish goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. Recruiting teams should set a realistic number of goals that a given team could achieve depending on team size, maturity of the TA function, and the company’s strategic plans. A great way to think about goals is to put the team into the future: “By Dec. 31, 2022, the team will have hired 10,000 new employees, increased the percentage of underrepresented employees by 10%, and reduced time-to-hire by 30%.”
Build targeted audience plans
Another strategy recruiters can employ in 2022 is identifying, prioritizing, and nurturing the audiences most important to the organization. Specifically, this includes:
Key talent audiences: These audiences have the experience and skill set to fill high-volume jobs, geographically targeted jobs, or critical jobs like executive hiring.
Strategic audiences: These demographic groups that businesses want to attract such as underrepresented candidates, veterans, and military hiring, along with university relations for students, interns, and recent graduates.
Relationship audiences: These include candidates that the business already has a known relationship with, including employees, alumni, employee referrals, contingent workers, and past applicants, such as high-potential candidates.
Most companies are already focused on developing great content, whether it be through clear job descriptions, cultural videos, or company blogs as means to attract and engage new job seekers. To ensure this content is seen by the right candidates, recruiters should incorporate targeted audience planning into the research and development steps that come right before the content is built. Before executing any recruitment marketing effort, TA professionals should gather a team made up of a representative from marketing, recruiting, customer success, sales, and employees who match the type of hires the company is looking to attract in order to ensure materials are seen through multiple perspectives within the organization.
Overall, organizations need to become more adaptable to labor market conditions in the new year. In addition to the above, this can include automating recruiting processes and leveraging innovative technology such as intelligent messaging and chatbots, as well as outsourcing more jobs and making more internal hires.
These strategies are just the beginning of ways teams can ramp up hiring efforts in 2022. Because of the constant change in the TA landscape over the last year, it can be difficult to know where to begin when preparing for the new year in recruiting. But with the worksheets as a tool, recruiting teams can take stock of current programs and make data-driven decisions to get better results from future processes, ensuring a positive return on their hiring budget for the new year.
By: Kerry Gilliam, Vice President of Marketing Strategy at Jobvite.
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Every day, four billion email users are tapping into email marketing – a low-cost but highly effective digital comms tool. And for recruiters, it’s not only an easy way to engage with candidates on a one-to-one level, but it can also open up doors to new opportunities.
However, that doesn’t mean to say that each piece of content landing in a jobhunter’s inbox will be acted upon or even looked at. There must be a compelling reason as to why they should interact with what they’ve received and ultimately place their career search in the hands of specific recruitment professionals.
What that means today is, it’s no longer best practice to send out hundreds of bland emails to a bunch of prospective candidates – containing an irrelevant message that’s loosely received by all – in the hope that an individual might take up the offer presented to them. It’s about providing comms that are valuable and helpful to ease the strains of a monotonous job search.
The good news here is, there are a multitude of ways in which email marketing can encourage candidates to engage, and even if they’ve never previously interacted with the recruiter too. Here are five areas recruiters should focus on if they want their next comms campaign to be a raging success…
1. Always opt for clickable subject lines
If a job hunter isn’t interested in the first line they see, they’ll be highly unlikely to open and digest the content – regardless of how carefully crafted the content is. After all, 50% of a user’s decision to engage with an email is all to do with the brand itself. The other half? The subject line. So remember:
Get straight to the point: Examples such as ‘Junior PHP Developer Wanted: Near Newcastle’ or ‘Experienced B2B Copywriter Needed’
Think about verbs: What should the recipient do? Will it be ‘Read Our Top Tips Guide On Job Interviews’ or ‘Learn How To Create A Cover Letter’
Don’t forget the proof: In a nutshell, ‘88% Of Candidates Want Hybrid Working’
Could there also be a question? To provoke debate – examples include, ‘Are You Tired Of The Commute?’ or ‘What Would You Do With A £45k Salary?’
Then there’s the urgency: ‘Hurry, It’s The Last Day To Apply!’ or ‘Be Quick, Send Your CV Today!’
And remember to personalize where possible: This is ideal when it comes to adding an ultra-individualized touch. For example, ‘Hi [name], I Was Impressed With Your CV’ or ‘[first name], [company name] Was Mentioned Today…’
2. Be clear with what the recipient needs to do
Once someone has engaged with the subject line, what should a recruiter do next? Here’s where the nurture comes in – and it’s easy to do.
Simply split up valuable email content over a series of email sends to truly keep a candidate interested throughout the journey. Plus, this technique provides recruitment professionals with even more opportunities to say what they want their readers to do without it coming across as aggressive or a ‘hard sell’.
A 10-word headline and focused call to action work well. Not only is this a succinct way of doing it, but there also won’t be any confusion as to what the end goal is. For example, ‘Book An Appointment’ or ‘Download Our Guide’.
And never alienate people with jargon-heavy language or tiny text that’s impossible to read on a desktop, laptop, or mobile device. Think about font size, colors, and the overall sentence structure to ensure candidates are provided with ultimate accessibility to all the relevant information.
3. Ever heard of the ‘Squint Test’?
If not, do it now. Sit back and squint before reading the email headline, call to action, and viewing the main image.
Does it still read well and look engaging?
If elements are spaced out, sized nicely, and are still able to stand out – that’s gold dust! Plus, the recipient is more likely to interact with the comms because they’re not trying to figure out a clunky sentence or being taken aback by a sea of color clashes. Simple and effective is the way forward.
4. Think about including ‘trampoline’ email content
Whatever sits below the email headline and call to action is what’s referred to as the ‘trampoline’. Why? Simple – it’s designed to bounce the reader back up to what they should be clicking on if they want to access more detail.
If recruiters are still unsure as to what this copy might entail, think about including reviews and testimonials to invoke trust and authenticity, or reference related products and articles such as ‘You Might Also Like…’
5. Personalization, personalization, personalization
For every piece of content that’s heading into a candidate’s inbox, always hyper-personalize the comms. The easiest and swiftest way to do this is by plugging in an intuitive marketing automation platform that’s built to enable users to send targeted, ultra-individualized emails specifically to segmented groups. And it’s more than a ‘Hi [first name]’ introduction – it’s all about sending the right message to the right person, at the right time.
These are only some of the ways in which recruiters can drive a greater level of interaction and get to know candidates on a much deeper level. Having a relationship built on trust – and which is beneficial to both parties – can be powerful, and that’s before considering how much it can positively impact a professional’s conversion rate.
By Adam Oldfield, CEO of marketing automation platform Force24
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The record number of vacancies across the country is no secret. The war for talent is creating a difficult hiring environment for organizations across all industries. This has prompted a self-fulfilling prophecy, and in turn a key challenge for all businesses – the power has well and truly been put into the hands of workers (of all kinds).
The ‘great resignation’ is the result of individuals realizing they can have more control and autonomy over their careers based on their experiences during the pandemic. As a result, most have more demands from prospective employers than ever before.
Those sourcing workers with digital skills in particular are experiencing some of the starkest shortages. So, if businesses don’t look to overcome them soon and find the talent they need, they’re at significant risk of having to put their digital transformation strategies, which are crucial for their future, on hold.
Priorities are changing
A lot of digital transformation has taken place over the past 18 months, but digitizing is an ongoing process with no end game. In fact, most businesses are still playing catch up as they look to overcome the challenges created by the pandemic as many weathered the storm by adopting a reactive business continuity approach to digital development rather than taking a more strategic view on the opportunity. This is in addition to the challenges brought on by Brexit and the subsequent supply chain struggles. However, digital transformation cannot go ahead without the right people driving it.
This increased demand for a specific set of skilled workers is having a big impact on the way businesses are looking to attract them. Some have turned to increases in salary, for example, but research shows that’s not enough – employees now increasingly value flexibility on par with, if not more than, their salaries, having appreciated the work-life balance afforded to them during national lockdowns.
With so many businesses hiring from the same pool, organizations might need to think outside the box to get the people they need to drive their futures. After all, this landscape means it is becoming more time-consuming and expensive to recruit in the traditional way.
Breaking the habits of a lifetime
Especially when recruiting for digital roles, organizations are usually looking for highly specialized skills, and at short notice. Often these skills are needed for specific and individual projects, which can put HR teams under pressure to fill the gaps quickly. However, the sourcing of permanent, full-time employees typically remains the end goal, for which the traditional recruitment process is too cumbersome, expensive, and limited.
Instead, when recruiting to make up the personnel shortfall needed to deliver these projects, businesses must embrace more flexible methods beyond the standard recruitment of full-time employees. Away from the world of fixed notice periods and poor scalability, doing so can provide faster access to quality talent that businesses might not have had the pulling power to hire permanently.
For example, freelancers are playing an increasingly important role in plugging the skills gap faced by businesses. It’s becoming a more attractive career option for many, as individuals realize they can take back control of their own time and prospects. Many furloughed workers who have turned to self-employment simply haven’t gone back. Thankfully, embracing this more flexible talent pool is an important and efficient way of making the recruitment function – and therefore the company’s workflows – more agile.
Businesses should remember that embracing a more flexible and elastic workforce must be matched by a more flexible way of working. To truly take advantage of the sharing economy for skilled labor, they must have a global mindset, rather than falling into the trap of settling for local candidates, something now possible with most knowledge workers based remotely. After all, the benefits of a flexible and elastic workforce will be largely redundant if the search for said skilled workers is restricted to a comfortable commuting distance.
It’s time for change
It’s hard to believe that so many businesses are putting potentially revenue-generating projects on hold because of hiring struggles. The incumbent recruitment strategy feels even more outdated when you consider that many of the skills they need today might be different tomorrow. However, working with skilled freelancers – or building an elastic team– to complement full-time staff, means businesses can use as much or as little resource as they like and scale and recompose depending on demand.
This doesn’t put recruiters out of a job. Like all industries, it simply demonstrates a need to evolve. As we look to 2022, businesses will need to adopt more flexible approaches to recruitment and talent management. This doesn’t mean simply putting better ‘perks’ in a place like hybrid working – arguably the bare minimum for today’s workforce – but shifting to a new flexible, elastic model that can respond to how the hiring and recruitment landscape is changing.
By Callum Adamson, Co-Founder & CEO, Distributed.
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The debate on labor market changes and transformation has been ongoing globally for years. Yet, most organizations are still suffering from a lack of good quality candidates in the recruitment pipelines.
In a recent study of over 200 HR professionals, most organizations are suffering from a lack of good quality candidates, even if 43% of companies are investing more into recruitment than previously. Despite increased resources, 55% of the interviewees said that recruitment has become more difficult in the past five years. Less than 20% of the companies have been able to increase the number of quality candidates.
The effectiveness and costs of different recruitment channels are not monitored
Recruiters are largely unaware of which advertising channels work best. This is due to the rapid growth in the importance of marketing in recruitment and the lack of attention paid to measuring the effectiveness of these channels. In general, there is a shift in recruitment advertising from traditional advertising channels to digital channels. Digital recruitment marketing allows the effectiveness of channels to be measured so that decision-making and recruitment development can be based on data with confidence.
The direct cost of recruitment campaigns in terms of capital invested into visibility and reach varies from less than a hundred euros to over 1,000 euros. The most surprising finding in the study was that a whopping 28% of the respondents didn’t know how much money was spent on their recruitment campaigns.
Digital tools and channels make it possible for much more detailed data gathering than traditional channels, like newspaper ads. Even so, almost 40% of the organizations couldn’t name their most effective recruitment channels. In the worst-case scenario, this leads to more investments into ineffective channels, making recruitments unnecessarily expensive and heavy for the companies.
Of those who buy social media publications, 46% report that most of their leads come from social media. Less than one-fifth of those who buy paid job boards said that job boards are the largest source of job seekers. The vast majority of service providers direct candidates from social media ads to their own employer job board, which partly skews the estimate. A third of organizations use direct search services for recruitment.
The importance of marketing in recruitment is highlighted, but the effectiveness of marketing is not measured. This leads to an increase in costs because it is not known which measures are working. In the worst case, this leads to organizations investing in ineffective measures, resulting in higher costs.
Challenges vary between industries
One of the hardest industries for recruitment is the healthcare industry, with a crippling 93% of organizations feeling that recruitment has become more difficult. Another hard-hit industry is IT, with 83% of the organizations finding it hard to recruit suitable candidates.
Internal vs external recruitment factors
Based on the responses, the factors influencing recruitments can be divided into two main categories: internal and external factors. The internal factors describe the organization’s own activities, while the external factors are external influences.
Around 69% of those who experienced a negative development attributed the cause exclusively to external factors. The most common external factors influencing recruitment are industry attractiveness, the influence of Covid-19, and political and economic factors.
External factors can have both a positive and a negative impact on organizations in the sector at the same time.
Communicating with candidates
The survey shows that less than 58% of respondents reported that their organization managed recruitment through a recruitment system.
Candidate communication plays an important role in the success of recruitment. It is the candidate’s first contact with a new potential employer and has a strong influence on the candidate’s perception of the new employer. The main purpose of candidate communication is to inform the candidate about the recruitment process and to guide the candidate through the different stages of the recruitment process.
From the candidate’s point of view, the best processes provide candidates with interim information on the progress of the recruitment process and any delays. In addition to this, candidates who are not selected for the post will be informed in person.
Bottlenecks in the application process hinder hiring top talent
Employer brand development is often sparked by a lack of quality or quantity of candidates, but the main bottleneck is often in the application process. Application processes have been built over time to attract active job seekers, so that today, when sectors are suffering from labor shortages, it is not possible to attract talent already in employment elsewhere.
Less than half of organizations have optimized their application process for modern times. Recruitment processes are often designed from an employer’s perspective, which means that the fast pace of modern life and the value of effortlessness are not sufficiently taken into account for candidates.
Approximately one-third of the interviewees in the study said that they had developed their recruitment processes. However, most of these had developed their process to be organization-driven, meaning that organizations are trusting their brand to be strong enough to get the best candidates into their pipeline instead of smooth application processes and modern recruitment marketing strategies.
Companies that emphasize the candidate’s experience and develop their company brand to support that are more successful in getting qualified candidates.
To receive applications, companies should emphasize a smooth application experience, and ensure that it can be done with all mobile devices. The use of mobile devices has exploded as a tool to access various services and applications. Making the experience nice and effortless for the candidate usually demands a complete restructuring of the current process.
Challenges with applications being made on mobile phones include open text fields and the requirement of attaching a full CV into the application, for example.
Almost a third of respondents indicated that the application process requires separate registration in order to submit an application. From the candidate’s perspective, separate registration makes the application process more challenging and discourages in particular passive applicants. The requirement to register was particularly prevalent in the public sector.
To sum up
Companies that are not ready to radically change their ways of working will face major challenges in their recruitment efforts. Those that have been willing to evolve their practices to respond to market changes have been able to turn the situation around.
With efficient candidate marketing tactics, following metrics and cost-structures of different channels, and fixing the broken process, many organizations can fix the issues in their recruitment.
By Henri Nordström – CEO, Jobilla.
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A bad candidate experience can have a detrimental effect on both brands and those applying to work with them. During the pandemic, we saw a huge increase in volume of applicants for different positions. Rumors ran rife about being ghosted deep into the recruitment process. We wanted to investigate the scale of the problem and the damage being done, so we commissioned some research.
The findings were shocking. 65% of people have been ghosted, according to our research of 2000 UK adults. 86% said their experience of being ghosted left them feeling down and 43% said it took weeks, or even months, to rebuild and move on. The damage to brands also became clear, with 94% saying it left them with negative thoughts or feelings towards the company they applied to.
Most small companies manage with spreadsheets and simple trackers while large companies and recruitment agencies invest in technology, customized to their needs. Here are some tips to ensure your company can confidently avoid ghosting candidates.
Get everyone on board. Recruitment is an area that most department managers get involved in as well as HR teams. Step one is to take the facts about the impacts of ghosting and educate everyone internally. Once you have company-wide support to ensure this doesn’t happen in your organization it’s time to make a plan on how you’re going to tackle ghosting head-on.
Put yourself in the candidate’s shoes. What sort of communication would you want at each stage? A quick email takes seconds and can really help a candidate.
Set up automated emails. If you have one, use your applicant tracking system (ATS) to set up automated emails to candidates at each stage of the application process. This means they will always be kept informed of the stage of their application.
Send updates promptly. No news is good news, except for when you’re waiting to hear about an application. As soon as you’ve made a decision, positive or negative, then let the candidate know.
Make notes straight after a call or interview. ‘Don’t put off to tomorrow what you can do today’ as the old adage goes. Take thorough notes each time you speak to a candidate, this will make it easier to make a decision and also give you plenty of information to use when you go back to them.
Use bulk email or SMS. Communicating with multiple candidates quickly and simply, a standardized message is better than no contact at all.
Use your ATS reporting feature or keep a log. This helps to ensure that no candidate gets forgotten, know how many candidates have applied to each role, what stage they’re at, and when you last contacted them, save all that inbox searching time.
Close down the role. When you hire someone make sure to go back and check you have processed and responded to all of the other applicants.
Get feedback from your applicants. They’re the ones that have been through your process so can offer some valuable insight. Make sure you speak to both successful and unsuccessful candidates for a well-rounded view.
Review and improve your process. There’s always room for improvement, ensure you revisit your plan and the tactics you’re using every few months to make sure they’re still impactful and to implement any new ideas.
Telling candidates they haven’t been selected is a tough call to make, especially when you’ve been positive up until that point. But doing so quickly and kindly provides closure and allows them to move on with their career elsewhere.
No one ever intends to ghost a candidate part-way through the recruitment process, but it’s important to acknowledge that it does sometimes happen. We need to tackle this problem together. By supporting this campaign and following the best practice guidelines, employers can show that they care about each applicant as an individual. We invite readers to join the campaign or share their stories at www.end-ghosting.com.
By Neil Armstrong of Tribepad.
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Many industries were forced to halt their recruitment initiatives at the start of the pandemic and have since had to place existing employees on furlough or make redundancies. But as the UK economy is beginning to bounce back, so is employment, with record vacancies continuing to be reported in the UK. At Cognizant, for example, we are looking to hire more than 2,000 new recruits in the UK&I in 2021 alone.
One of the key conversations to have come out of the pandemic is how it has fundamentally changed the workplace and the way we work – in many cases, for the better. The rise of remote working is the most obvious trend many of us have been talking about. Recent research shows that flexible working is now a basic expectation, with 66% of employees backing a hybrid approach to remote working.
But this isn’t the only trend to have been sparked by the crisis. Businesses’ approaches to hiring are also changing – and if they’re not, then they need to if they are to reflect the changing attitudes towards work and culture. This needs to start by placing empathy at the core of the process.
A new recruitment landscape: Why we need a high level of candidate empathy
The remote working boom enabled a private, digital window to open in employees’ and colleagues’ lives – as a result, we’re now all used to family members and pets making brief appearances on video calls. The psychology behind this is powerful, humanizing personnel in a way that has never been experienced before. This has created a drive to emphasize and improve the fickle work/life balance, highlighting the need for businesses to conform to employee and candidate needs, instead of expecting individuals to conform to the organization.
At the same time, the pandemic brought with it a lot of anxiety and stress for individuals whose jobs were put at risk or lost altogether. It has left many wondering what the future of work will look like and reimagining their careers, making it even more crucial for companies to make a conscious effort every day to create the appropriate environment for everyone to thrive. So, while competitive salaries, benefits, and perks can be attractive, it’s also important that organizations consider a more empathetic approach to their recruitment processes to fall in line with this new landscape.
This starts by demonstrating a clear effort to understand what each individual’s values and interests are right from the beginning of the interview process. Companies should also be making a proactive effort to involve employees in their culture as well as any extracurricular initiatives that are in place, to help create a more fulfilling and satisfying work experience.
This will help organizations to take a step back and understand more about the individual and their circumstances and values, instead of just their qualifications, which will lead to better long-term results for staff retention.
How to make the recruitment process more empathetic
Business leaders need to demonstrate themselves to be inclusive leaders. This means being deeply aware of and empathetic towards others, with the courage to harness the power of diversity in everything they and their company does. Embracing this approach helps to elevate our work and create a powerful ripple effect on our teams, clients, and communities.
In fact, empathy should be a key attribute in all organizations’ wider diversity and inclusion initiatives as well as their recruitment processes. There are a number of steps and considerations businesses can make to improve their recruitment processes and put empathy at their heart, including:
A humble point of view: Interview assessors need to demonstrate throughout the recruitment process a humble point of view. If organizations seek to set a perfect environment, they won’t come across as authentic, but instead misleading – no company is perfect.
Retrospect: It’s important to retrospectively refer to how organizations have supported people through the pandemic to demonstrate a company’s value for their employees. It’s a good litmus test to show where an organization has shown resilience and compassion.
Never underestimate the value of listening: Understanding what a candidate’s career aspirations are can be achieved by having an open dialogue with them in the interview. This will help a business understand how they can support that individual with the right training to help them achieve their goals, which is incredibly important.
Involve the candidate in the journey: Most successful organizations today know they must continuously evolve to maintain their success. Demonstrating how a business is doing this, for example implementing new digital tools or adopting updated ESG goals, in an interview can help build a picture for the candidate of the journey that they can be a part of, which aligns with their values.
Demonstrate trust: Ultimately, people want to contribute to driving change and influence. It demonstrates cultural and social empathy. It also allows people to feel as if they can be a true representation of their authentic selves. With this in mind, candidates should be given the opportunity during the interview process to express their values and opinions.
A new approach to recruitment strategy post-pandemic
Empathy is and should be considered by all a crucial attribute in today’s business leaders. This includes being proactive and persistent in working towards creating an environment where each and every employee feels welcome, heard, and equal. And this must start with the first step of an employee’s experience: the recruitment process.
Organizations need talent to build themselves back up and make a success of the future. To do this, they must demonstrate themselves as a collaborative and supportive workforce – one that individuals want to be a part of. Putting empathy at the core of any recruitment process will not only help businesses attract the right talent, but it will help them to build honest and open relationships with new employees right from the start and ultimately improve retention.
With remote working here to stay, it’s vital that recruiters and businesses as a whole find new ways to engage with their remote workforce. Adopting an empathetic approach shouldn’t just be applied to recruitment, but to all areas of business. It helps to ensure candidates and staff feels cared for, which keeps them engaged in their roles.
By Rob Walker, Managing Director UK&I of Cognizant.
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