April 22, 2019

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Top Recruiting Trends of 2019 – Part 1

In an ever-changing employment market, it pays to be innovative in your hiring practices! As an employer, attracting the right people to join your team is key. Using the best processes to approach, attract, screen, and hire new talent can save time and money, and will ensure that you’re drawing in the very best employees. In this blog post, we will share 4 of the top recruiting trends for 2019, from game-changing HR technology to creative methods that will change your approach to recruiting.

Recruitment marketing

In this candidate-driven job market, the importance of recruitment marketing cannot be overstated. Today’s job candidates are increasingly more internet savvy, and they will gather in-depth knowledge about your company before ever setting foot through the door. That means it’s important to paint a clear picture of your organization and the jobs you have to offer wherever prospective employees might be active online.

Recruitment marketing follows many of the same principles of regular marketing, so keep marketing best practices in mind. Some key tips:

  • Highlight your employer brand

Make sure your website and social channels accurately represent what your company is all about. Include team photos, employee testimonials, and videos to show prospective job applicants exactly what it’s like to work for your organization. What are the unique reasons that make your employees want to work for you? Highlight what you bring to the table as an employer and lay out your employee value proposition clearly. (Read more about this in part 2 of this blog series which is coming soon.)

  • Define your ideal candidate

Create a candidate persona or avatar that reflects the skill set, experience base, goals, and personality of your ideal employee. Use that information to create targeted messaging and to analyze on which platforms you should be advertising and communicating. This ensures that you’re targeting potential candidates who will be the best fit for your company.

  • Provide excellent candidate experience

The job market is increasingly occupied by younger generations who expect a certain level of tech-friendliness in their job search and application process. Pay attention to mobile in your recruitment marketing by making job pages and application forms easy to access on a smartphone.

  • What are your competitors up to?

Find out how competitors in your field are attracting talent and learn from their approach, whether it’s good or bad.

AI Tech

AI tech is a huge development in recruiting and HR technology. Using artificial intelligence in the recruitment process can help automate much of the time-consuming manual work involved, like the screening of candidates, and can help you discover new ways of hiring talent.

  • Data analysis

AI tech can be of incredible assistance in screening job applications, resumes, and CVs for matching skill sets and experience levels. This automation of low-level tasks streamlines workflow, saves time, and reduces operational costs. AI tools can also use data analysis to engage in job matching. Essentially it can flag when a candidate is better suited for a different job offering within your organization, ensuring that you match the right talent to the right position every time.

Use AI technology in the early recruitment stages, too, to improve the quality of your job posting! This is where Textmetrics can help by making real-time text suggestions and improvements during the writing process.

  • Virtual assistance

AI can act as a virtual assistant to contact applicants, schedule interviews, manage calendars, and even analyze interactions. Yet another way to save time and effort.

  • Removing bias

AI algorithms can be trained to remove or disregard certain markers in a job application (like name, gender, and age) that could lead to unconscious bias in the candidate selection process. Entrusting that early selection to an automated process can greatly improve the quality of your candidate pool.

  • Ad targeting

AI technology can target candidates based on their online behaviour. Analyze the online habits of anyone who may have visited your company’s job page and target people who are researching similar jobs. Then use that data to serve posts about your company’s culture and ads for the positions your company has to offer.

Hiring people with future-proof (soft) skills

A LinkedIn report earlier this year demonstrated that, in this era of booming technology, recruiters are struggling more than ever to find people with excellent soft skills, like listening skills, empathy, and strong communication. Those soft skills are essential in teamwork, collaboration, leadership, problem-solving, and flexibility in the workplace. They are the skills that ultimately drive success and can help future-proof your workforce.

The 5 most important soft skills currently in demand are:

  • creativity
  • persuasion
  • collaboration
  • adaptability
  • time management

So how do you go about hiring new talent with strong soft skills?

  • Determine the key soft skills that are of value to your company.
  • Keep interviews consistent and have a formal process to track and analyze candidate performance in a transparent way.
  • Add a tech element to your interviews and application process. Traditionally, asking behavioural questions is a great way to get some insights into a candidate’s soft skills. But take your process to a higher level with online assessments, like games and quizzes. Those will result in data that is less subjective to assess and much easier to analyze, which will limit bias.

Collaborative hiring

Where job recruiting and hiring used to be the exclusive territory of HR departments and hiring managers, the collaborative hiring model takes a whole new approach. This type of team-based hiring requires the involvement of people from multiple departments and various levels within the organization (including employees that would work below the new employee), essentially extending the hiring team.

The great part is, collaboration can happen at any and all stages of the hiring process. It starts with building the job description and extends into attracting/referring prospective hires, candidate interviews, final decision-making, and the onboarding of new talent.

The benefits of collaborative hiring are quite amazing. Collaborative hiring can:

  • take some pressure off the HR team or recruiter.
  • get whole teams, departments, and companies to share responsibility and get on the same page.
  • offer a stellar candidate experience, with opportunities to ask important questions about company operations, the culture of the organization, and employee experience. This especially helps with employee retention.
  • limit unconscious bias by increased transparency and more diversity in viewpoints.
  • build company culture and improve team dynamic by including employees of all levels in the recruitment of future team members.
  • lead to improved employee engagement as they become more invested in the hiring process and experience transparency. This also leads to an easier onboarding process.

When it comes to collaborative hiring, it’s also important to have the right software in place. The easier it is for the team to share documents, data, and updates, the quicker and easier the hiring process will be.

This was just part 1 of our 2019 recruiting trends. Keep an eye on the Textmetrics blog for more. And of course, contact Textmetrics to find out how our tools can help streamline your recruitment process.

If you wish to know more about how Textmetrics can empower your recruitment process with A.I, get in touch with us!

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