Top 4 Recruiting Trends for 2018 based on LinkedIn’s Global report
Every year, LinkedIn publishes the Global Recruiting Trends report, which most of the talent acquisition fraternity looks forward to. The 2018 report was based on a survey of 9000 recruiters and hiring managers from 39 countries, all from a great mix of industries and uniform distribution across different company sizes.
The 2018 Report revealed the four big hiring trends that are determined to transform hiring from a transactional function to a strategic one, where the focus would be on hiring high-potential talent.
1. Diversity (Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging):
Companies treating diversity hiring as one of those unavoidable tasks or a checkbox that had to be ticked have been finding it difficult to not only make those diversity hires, but are also retain them once hired. They started realizing that unless they provide inclusion and belonging — giving the diversity hires the feeling of being valued, appreciated and at home, diversity is going to remain just another metric on paper.
2. New Interviewing Tools:
Interviewing is an integral part of the hiring process. Traditional interviews fail in areas such as assessing candidates’ soft skills, identifying weaknesses, eliminating bias in interviews etc, increasing the time to complete the process.
56% of the respondents (global average) agreed that interviewing innovations are ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ important to the future of hiring.
It will be exciting to see how companies utilize some of the most useful interview innovations such as Virtual Reality Assessments, Video Interviews etc.
3. Data:
While most talent acquisition professionals acknowledge that data is important in recruitment, not many rely entirely on it. This could be because of various factors:
- Manual methods such as colour-coded excel sheets are still favoured as reporting solutions by some TA folks.
- Existing reporting solutions are broken or do not convey the data required.
- The reporting solutions are complicated and not user-friendly, requiring advanced technical knowledge, making users reluctant to use them.
- Gut instinct-based decisions still rule the majority of hiring decisions.
How can data help transform the hiring process:
- Track and predict hiring outcomes, translating to efficient, faster hiring.
- Replace gut-instinct based decisions with those backed by data
- Give companies the competitive edge in candidate-driven job market -by adding talent intelligence to their arsenal of strategies.
4. Artificial Intelligence:
No surprises here as to why this is our favourite section :)
76% of the respondents said that AI’s impact on recruiting will be atleast somewhat significant.
The biggest impact has been on 2 areas:
Time: AI promises to eliminate some time-consuming and repetitive tasks by automating them. It also helps recruiters make data-backed decisions in a fraction of the time it would take them to do manually.
Eliminating bias: Interviewer/recruiter bias (conscious or unconscious) has been an issue affecting the hiring process. AI helps reduce bias in the recruitment process — especially at the screening stage where a lot of resumes get screened out because of bias.
AI is the future, but won’t replace humans:
While AI is influencing more and more tasks that are part of talent acquisition, it is unlikely that AI will fully automate the TA function. This is because some of the aspects of a recruiter’s job are not something AI can do such as
- Building candidate relationships,
- Seeing the candidate’s full potential (beyond the credentials on the resume),
- Evaluating the value-add a potential hire will bring to the hiring team
- Devising hiring strategies based on fluctuating market trends.
Stay updated, Stay Relevant:
As AI and automation are eliminating a lot of manual tasks and the role of the transactional recruiter is about to become obsolete, recruiters will have to switch gears and move to the more strategic talent advisor role. It would benefit recruiters to embrace the new changes that will disrupt the industry — weave diversity, inclusion and belonging into the company’s cultural fabric, use new interview tools to find top talent faster, use data to make faster hiring decisions and let artificial intelligence take over tasks like candidate sourcing, screening, interview scheduling etc to help them hire better and faster.
If you would like to know how our product Param.ai can help you solve some of the challenges you are facing in your hiring process, get in touch with us today
