Recruitment Trends That’ll Dominate 2020: What To Expect? What’ll Change?

The field of recruitment has been constantly evolving with modern technologies and trends that continuously shape innovative strategies.

Over the past few years, HR trends have witnessed a huge transformation from a process-oriented perspective to a people-oriented perspective.

In addition, technology is playing a supportive role to empower the new-age recruiters who are gaining an upper hand to make smarter decisions and unearth the right candidates for the roles.

Another wonderful year has gone by, it’s time to welcome  2020 with great pomp and fervour. Below are some top recruitment trends to look out for in 2020 and be ready for the new year of work.

12 Recruitment Trends Set to Dominate 2020

Here’s our look into the crystal ball for top recruitment trends that will potentially take centre stage in the year of 2020…

1. Consumer-Like Candidate Experience

The organisations that attract the best talent are carving out great experiences that transform candidates into employees. As consumers, we naturally expect great customer experience from a product or service. Likewise, candidates also expect the same consumer-level experience in the recruitment process.

Organisations that recognise this, and strive hard to come up with great initiatives to define and measure candidate experience, have their pick of talent.

Even if not selected, the applicants satisfied with their candidate experience are more than twice as likely to recommend the organisation to others, than those who were not satisfied.

2. Relationship Recruiting

Relationships need to take precedence over the process of recruiting. Moving towards a greater focus on candidates and people, building relationships now matters more than ever. Even though technology solutions are available to make your job easier as a recruiter, they cannot compensate for the lack of rapport that a job candidate often feels.

Technology should be used to enhance and build a better relationship with candidates. Rather than blasting out transactional sounding messages to candidates which presume a candidate knows and trusts your company, it’s time to put back the human in hiring. This can be done by treating candidates well, building a connection with them and embarking on a multi touch-point candidate journey.

In addition, there will be an emphasis on relationship recruiting activities like referral programs, recommendations, candidate-initiated networking, social media networking to source top quality hires. All of this will boost the relationship-building aspect of recruitment.

Especially, as social media becomes ubiquitous, it is critical to leverage such channels to forge relationships with candidates and engage them.

3. Looking Beyond the Conventional Skill Set

The skills a candidate possesses can make or break their prospects of being hired for a particular role. However, a huge skill gap is predicted in the coming years and is expected to grow to 29 million skills in deficit by 2030.

Today, the scenario is even gloomier. An average employee is missing nearly two of the 18 critical skills advertised for a job…that’s 23 million skills shortages across the economy.

These missing skills are predominantly that of soft skills. Therefore to address the skills shortage, recruiters should start focusing on social and emotional skills now.

Soft skills, termed by Deloitte as the ‘skills of the heart’, refer to a wide variety of non-technical skills like inductive reasoning, teamwork, critical thinking, collaboration, agility, etc.

Thanks to automation and modern technology, a role that exists today may become extinct in the near future. However, flexible and agile workers will be in a better position to upskill and move to emerge roles easily. So, recruiters should focus on hiring people who can adapt to the changing phases of technology and market conditions.

Hiring for soft skills is akin to hiring for change and adaptability. Looking for a skillset that has the best of both the worlds including technical know-how along with more focus on soft skills of creativity, imagination, intuition and curiosity is the best way to go about it.

4. Tools and Technology to Boost Better Recruitment Performance

Advanced tools like gamification and technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Analytics will gain even more momentum in the recruitment process. But, it will not replace the role of the recruiter, but simply enhance it.

Instead of relying on traditional recruitment processes that are too stressful and intimidating for candidates, why not opt for adding elements of games to make it more appealing? Besides, this will also help you dig deeper into the aspects of the candidate’s psychology and behavioural styles.

Using cognitive technologies like AI and Analytics can reduce the burden of HR from tedious manual processes. Chatbots can help to engage candidates at crucial touchpoints. AI can help to screen candidates, decipher patterns and make decisions without any bias. Analytics can help to uncover the best practices and derive insights on what’s working and what’s not.

5. The Strategic Recruiter

The role of the recruiter is transforming, thanks to modern technologies. Recruiters are able to engage better with all key stakeholders including the hiring manager, employees and candidates. They are in a better position to make strategic moves that create more business impact.

Making the switch from reactive recruitment to proactive recruitment, recruiters are beginning to make strategic decisions that help them hire the best talent out there. Instead of solely focusing on active candidates, strategic recruiters recognise passive talent and untapped resources to proactively develop mobility and career paths.

To this end, building a continuous talent pipeline is of utmost importance. However, this cannot be done over a short span of time. Find out what positions you’ll need to hire for in 3 months, 6 months, or even a year’s time and build talent verticals based around those hiring needs.

6. More Candidates to embrace Mobile Job Search

This is the best way to reach out to Generation Y, Z and beyond. Generation-Z, also known as post-Millenials are soon to start hitting the labour market.

While millennials grew up during the rise of the mobile revolution, Generation-Z was literally born with a smartphone in one hand and WI-FI code in the other. In order to appeal, engage and hire candidates of the modern era, smooth mobile recruitment is essential.

This is where video job descriptions and video interviewing can come to aid. Organisations should be willing to innovate, experiment and succeed to grow in the field of mobile recruitment.

7. One Brand, One Experience

A resilient employer brand is vital to gain traction and attract the best candidates.

Perceptions of what makes a strong employer brand is also changing. People don’t just value monetary incentives and perks anymore, they place more emphasis on culture, values and ethical alignment of the company. Candidates want to work for an organisation that has a positive impact on the world.

An Employer brand should resonate with the same message and perception across all channels and touchpoints that a candidate interacts with. Your website, social media presence, employee testimonials and reviews company on job sites like Glassdoor and more all contribute towards your brand name.

As digital users, candidates have got their eyes and ears wide open and are well-versed in researching before making a decision. Rather than building a brand as a controlled marketing exercise, the greater challenge is maintaining authenticity across all the channels.

More than building a generic employer brand, the focus is shifting towards listening carefully to jobseekers and employees to create a brand proposition that attracts the people you want.

8. You’ll have to get used to changing your hiring plans

It’s not just the company goals that change with evolving market conditions, but the hiring goals also keep changing. If you feel the pace of change has been speeding up lately, it’s time to brace yourselves for more. ‘Expect the unexpected’ is the norm these days. Therefore, a predominant challenge in the recruitment process is to keep up with rapidly changing hiring needs.

As business models, markets and goals evolve rapidly, recruiting teams need to be quick to adapt and be on the move. One way to stay agile is to hone your general recruiting skills to be more agile to a mix of different business lines. You should be comfortable to bring in all types of talent.

Organisations that define talent too narrow might miss opportunities to connect diverse talent groups to their organisation. There is a growing need to adopt a more comprehensive hiring strategy that facilitates casting a wider net to find the right talent.

9. Culture Comes First

Culture has always been a dominating factor in the recruiting space and it shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, the importance of culture is likely to become even stronger in 2020 due to a recent decision by the Business Roundtable, a group of nearly 200 prominent CEOs, which put employees ahead of shareholders as the focus of modern corporations.

Culture should be a core priority of building a strong employer brand and recruiting strategy to attract top talent. It is culture and values that matter the most when it comes to employee satisfaction, ahead of other factors such as senior leadership and career opportunities.

So, continue to invest in a resilient organisational culture that helps to build a continuous talent pipeline and engage current employees as well.

10. Diversity and Inclusion Will Gain Priority

The past five years have seen a large increase in employee-focused diversity initiatives across the globe. These initiatives will continue to rule the roost in 2020 with companies increasingly prioritizing inclusion and creating new programs to ensure they are carried out.

11. Collaborative Hiring

A method where all the stakeholders are involved in the hiring process, it is a method in which HR teams and teams from other departments work in unison to find and hire talent. In order to improve the quality of new hires and assess their suitability to a role, it is essential to focus on a more collaborative recruitment process.

Touted by Steve Jobs as the ultimate way to hire the best talent, it’s about time to quickly transform the novel buzz of collaborative hiring to a tangible team-based hiring practice. This will also help you as an HR professional to obtain greater business buy-in to talent acquisition.

A shift from the traditional model of taking orders as an HR executive to find a suitable talent and embrace a team-based hiring outlook that creates a more transparent recruitment process within an organisation.

12. Warm Talent Pool

HR professionals often tend to overlook the talent pool once they build a database of candidates both active and passive. Made up of pre-qualified candidates, talent pool can serve as a quick reference to deploy talent for a role when the need arises unexpectedly. It helps you prepare in advance for unforeseen situations.

Talent pools have been around for a long time – but the need of the hour is to revisit and nurture the talent pool continuously. Recruitment specialists should divest more efforts to nurture a warm talent pool of internal and external candidates.

Feed your talent pool with the right mix of external candidates, internal talent, contractors, contingent workers sourced from varied channels of career fairs, expression of interest campaigns, internal mobility and proactive social outreach. Your talent could be hiding internally as well and you could benefit more by rotating people across the organisation if the need arises.

Take your recruiting to the next level in 2020

Interestingly, recruitment strategies have evolved over time to a great extent. What was effective five years back, might have become obsolete by now. The trick here is to stay on top of trends and be agile enough to proactively change your stance.

Staying competitive is not just about better planning, anticipating changes but also about planning for unanticipated changes in the market. If you undertake both simultaneously, you will set the stage for success and be able to rise for whatever hurdles may come your way.

The different trends of recruitment may change with each year, but the end goal remains the same – to attract the right people for the role.