Top 11 Recruiting trends of 2022

We, humans, are surely never satisfied with what we have, and the same has been happening in talent acquisition. Interviews and hiring are repeating the benefits of this endless curiosity of the human mind as it is leading to major changes in the marketplace, which makes the role of the recruiter vital and the trends in recruiting more crucial. The rise of such trends may certainly be a threat to some jobs, but it is a fact that 54% of recruiters see this as an opportunity to shape the hiring process.

To stay on top, one must always be in and out with the latest trends that are going on, and recruiting is no different. The advancements in technology are shifting the landscape of talent acquisition, leading many companies to embrace virtual recruiting technologies; shift talent attraction efforts to remote candidates; consider internal talent pools; and focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Some of these new methodologies have been glacial, while others seem to happen at lightning speed.

With these advancements taking over the recruitment processes and strategies, it becomes tough for companies to adapt to the ones that they require. This is because recruiters alongside technology make it the perfect combination to carry out a smooth hiring process that can lead the company to tremendous success. After all, one good recruiter is equal to 10 good employees. So, choosing the right trends implies a total landscape change in your entire HR.

Without beating around the bush, let’s start this journey of the excitement of what are the trends that we have analysed and ruled out in the recruiting sector with a roadmap of what we are expecting today!

Virtual Hiring

The unprecedented impact of the COVID pandemic has led to the emergence of this new trend, which has changed recruitment practises and led to the virtual mode of everything. Just like every emerging trend, remote recruitment will become more normalised in the coming days. Because this is an opportunity for you to overcome the geographic barriers of not hiring candidates because they live far away from your workplace, you can instead focus on hiring the best candidate for the job. Virtual hiring happens over video conferencing software, like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Cisco Webex, and other similar platforms. During this, the recruiter from your company will be scheduling the call with a potential candidate to join the call and then conduct a regular face-to-face interview but over a video conference call.

Now, this technology enables the recruiter to choose their schedule and their timing to schedule the call, increasing the flexibility for your employee to live their adventure. With that being said, many companies are thinking of online onboarding as an effective solution for online paperwork, including e-signatures, for all of the essential details since it saves cost and time for both parties. This is not our word, but rather 70% of the company’s words are shifting to online recruiting. Organizations are streamlining online recruiting processes seriously as this will convey the diversity and culture offered by your company. As this method of recruiting isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, you better buckle up with your resources!!

AI

We all know a machine can do wonders if handled in the right way. And that, my friend, is an AI for your HR department. Recruiting, being a top-notch industry, needs to have technology that adds power to your HR team. The engulfing AI will do the job for you because, in recent times, you can’t stick to methods that cost time and effort, meaning you need smart solutions for never-ending problems, and to do that, AI has been a game-changer recently. Tasks like sourcing, screening, sorting, and ranking candidates need repetitive tasks that are mundane, and studies show recruiters spend 13 hours a week on recruiting for just one role, but, with AI, you can transform this to set up a pipeline of qualified candidates based on skills and potential gleaned from different sources who are likely to succeed in vacant positions. As a result, using AI can reduce effort by automating high-value and heavy-lifting tasks.

Even though it is one of the fastest-growing areas of talent acquisition software, even recruiters feel AI can ease their job by up to 36%. AI can help you optimise tasks by using job-posting platforms, application tracking systems, chatbots, and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. NLP is a great invention that enables users to interact directly with candidates and offers personalised communication more accurately and appealingly.

To source candidates, review resumes, and schedule interviews, AI technology is used. Some platforms leverage AI to comb through answers to written interview questions – learning from the data and algorithms are used to push the candidates forward that are the best fit. And one of the areas where AI holds particular promise is in removing bias from job descriptions, along with additional insights that can add leverage to your recruiting team.

Remote Working

Sorry, but we have to bring up COVID-19 again. Why? Because it makes working from home the new normal. It has been the biggest change in our day-to-day lives because we never expected there would be a day like that. That change led to remote working. It is no surprise that it also made it into the list of trends in recruiting because when a survey was taken, about 65% of those who responded said they wanted to continue working from home post-pandemic. Whereas these new changes were initially difficult for businesses to adapt to, they are now a boon for supporting virtual collaboration, communication, and working from a distance. Because with remote working, you can focus on individuals who work well in remote environments and understand how to collaborate when not face-to-face with coworkers. This will help companies to diversify their talent pool by avoiding the problems of being socially isolated because of the pandemic.

WFH has got the HR team running behind providing the candidates’ flexible schedules and timings since it is all virtual. Your team needs to provide remote work technology and equipment (such as standing desks or noise-canceling headphones). These, along with providing collaboration technologies and ways to learn and connect remotely, will distinguish companies from job seekers. And providing this package with all the facilities may be tough, but fruitful!

Diversity and Inclusion

Would you go to your workplace if you found it unwelcome or unrewarding? Of course not. DEI, short for diversity and inclusion, is what all the candidates have been asking for. A growing number of prominent companies have reformed their recruitment processes in a way to access neurodiverse talent, which refers to “outside the box” thinkers. These job seekers require a commitment to DEI, which is why companies are going beyond statistics and implementing these techniques as they tackle systemic inequalities and enhance discriminatory systems in companies. For instance, Salesforce has recently taken initiation of the Racial Equality and Justice Task Force by inviting the leaders of the black employee resource groups to help drive systemic change within the workplace and community and forge their vision. With major companies implementing DEI in their workforce, the DEI measurements have been raised to 22% of executive compensation starting in FY22.

Diversity considerations include redefining leadership, providing education and training to your teams, creating diverse teams, closing gaps, and paying attention to worker needs. To implement this, your hiring team needs to look for varied educational backgrounds among cultural minorities, races, religions, and genders and designate significant positions that drive a diverse workforce. This should not be done simply to show the world that you are a great company; rather, they should be taken seriously as they shape company culture and mindsets that contribute to success. The performance of the company and the working lifestyle, you offer to affect the performance and profitability of the company alongside the candidate’s opinion about your company. You need to adjust to this new trend of recruitment.

Gamification

Gamification has been the new buzz in the HR department. But games and employees? Isn’t that one weird combination? Well, you might think it is, but it is one of the exciting options that can motivate employees in various ways. What is that? This is because everyone loves games, no matter what age you are, and it helps us boost our brain cells and make them work faster than a bullet brain. Though many organisations still feel this concept is skeptical, it helps you absorb more information that is essential for storing interest in your employees and the candidates you are trying to recruit. In gamification, game mechanics, theory, and design are used, which makes it a major game-changer. This goal-oriented concept uses various concepts similar to competition, rewards, level ascension, and more to motivate people.

Because of gamification 89% of employees and candidates feel that gamification is a tool that suddenly makes the entire process more enjoyable. While recruiting a candidate, instead of using boring application forms, you can use quizzes, challenges, and behavior-based evaluations to determine if candidates showcase the job qualifications they’re looking for. The increase in remote working interaction between the employees plays a vital role too, and interacting with them using gaming brings out collaboration or engagement, improves training techniques, makes them feel less isolated, speeds up task completion, or rewards employees for wins. Are you ready for some level-up?

Employee Well-being

Every company should treat their employees not just as people who work for them, but rather as assets who are a true treasure to the company. Because of the changing mindsets of people, it becomes really hard to find trustworthy employees, and to do so, you need to go an extra mile to preserve them. To do this, employee mental well-being should be the major concern of your company. With that being the huge talking point, there are various ways to achieve it. One would be by employer experience and engagement. By keeping your employees engaged and connected, you can tackle the challenges of remote working and increase employees’ productivity, which is why recruiters will have to ace up the employee experience game.

The next one would be flexible timings. Because companies now prefer employees to work from home, respecting their personal space and offering flexible scheduling can impress candidates looking to work for your company. Hand in hand with them, you need to offer on-time payments, bonuses, and salaries based on the market price. In this way, you can boost retention and prove to external candidates your company has capably adapted to accommodate them. Along with these offerings, your candidate’s medical coverage is something that is often overlooked, but it can win hearts in the competitive market.

Recruiting via Social Media

Social media has suddenly become the flavour of the month. With an estimate of 3.96 billion monthly users, social media holds the power to transform nothing into everything in a short period of time. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and many more have been the driving force of interpersonal communication that you offer to your potential candidates. Because at this point, posting a job offer on LinkedIn and waiting for the candidate to walk in has become old news. While recruiting platforms like LinkedIn, Naukri, and phone and email interviews are the most effective tools for sourcing candidates, social media platforms can help your company broaden its scope and appeal to candidates through these platforms. If you know this, Facebook has already begun to mould its platform to make it recruitment-friendly with the new feature “jobs near me,” through which you can view the jobs directly from the app.

With the increased usage of social media platforms, you can gain an audience from younger generations, i.e., newbies to candidates who have excelled in their fields, with eye-catching content on social media that can grab attention by using hashtags like # your company name # the role you are offering You can also post videos, posts, and challenges with catchy captions, such as “Think you’re a coding pro”? Let’s check it out!

Another way of doing it is through podcasts. Yes, you read that correctly: podcasts. Though these have been with us since old times, Podcasts have evolved along with the increase in on-the-go interactions to capture the users’ attention. Companies use this channel not only to promote their brand, but also to find new employees. So, with that being said, social media has been one of the emerging trends to recruit the right candidate in a brand-new way and statistics have been pretty convincing when they say 70% of recruiters have successfully used social media to hire new employees.

Candidate Experience

Candidate experience is another sensation from the drafting of these trends. Aim for this and you have got the candidate up to 50% par. What this means is that candidates have already made their fair share of the factors they are going to check to choose your company and words like “perks” and “benefits” seem like frivolous things to fall for. Rather, top-tier candidates are more into features like workplace culture, work-life balance, positive experiences, the well-being of employees, company culture, etc., which have become critical decision-making factors, and this is because most employees feel culture is more important than salary when we talk about job satisfaction. This can have a huge impact on your recruiting process because companies that follow these norms are found to be more successful and profitable than those offering high wages. Fascinating, right? This is why it accelerated the need to reinvent the employee experience in your organization.

The first impressions you make on the prospects dictate the long-term retention prospects that improve the overall process and quality of hires. To do this, you can provide a seamless application and recruitment process by upgrading career sites to help them quickly and easily set up a profile, search for jobs and apply for them. If your website is awkward, non-user-friendly, not straightforward, slow, and complicated, candidates would most likely not recommend it. So, providing optimised ways for the candidates to access your site is vital. It’s not just how you organise the interviews, execute them, and follow up with candidates; it also showcases how professional your organisation is, which will earn you some bonus points as well. While many companies still think candidates’ experience is an afterthought, 78% of job candidates believe that the way they’re treated in the hiring process is a clear indicator of how a company will treat its employees.

Automated Nurturing

Technology never disappoints you. With this technology rising, there have been rapid changes in the HR recruitment process too. Using this automated technology is the key to providing a premier candidate experience. Most of your employees may fear that technology is taking over their jobs. It is quite the opposite of that. Automated technology eases up the recruiter’s job by providing everything they need for a personalised touch with your team’s candidate outreach and eliminates needless complexity and inefficiency. Every day, mundane tasks carried out by recruiters can be automated now, which will save time and resources because even in this tech era, if you are sitting for hours filtering applications, what is the point of living in the 20th century?

This technology can help you adapt and power a more efficient recruitment process like maintaining resume management, scheduling interviews, tracking the process for the candidate, recruiters, and hiring managers, updating applicant tracking software, resume management, handling onboarding platforms, tracking important KPIs, marketing hard-to-fill roles, etc. This will help recruiters cut down on everyday tasks and assist in the intelligent nurturing of functionalities. As we all know, technology is all about balancing creativity and persistence, so how quickly and effectively you use it to find talent becomes critical. If your employees become successful in putting a combination of efforts into the recruiting process, your company can easily cut down the recruitment time by up to 13 hours on average. For instance, you can use chatbots. Many companies are fascinated by this concept. They can answer queries that are frequently asked by the candidates or help candidates navigate through the process of recruitment. This way, it will be welcoming for the candidates and, along with that, your work will be done.

Internal Mobility

Internal mobility has been the topic of the day recently. Companies are preferring internal mobility with their increasing efforts in hiring. Internal mobility is a concept where you perform hiring within your organization. In this framework, you tend to move your employees either laterally or vertically. Why is this so special? Because skills are the new currency, and instead of wasting time and effort searching for the right candidate elsewhere, you can find the right gem in your organisation and make them skillful enough to fit the role you are offering. The best internal mobility, which reskilling initiatives or engaging contingent talent, encourages people to take on new growth opportunities, is dictated by employees’ long-term career goals and business priorities. Internal mobility has increased to 20% in recent years, and you will be able to address skill gaps in the organisation as we gain a better understanding of existing skill sets.

Even if you manage to find an external person that matches the job criteria to the hilt, alignment, adjusting, and grooming to your organization’s work culture may take more time than expected. Increased engagement, a lower recruiting budget, and a shorter hiring process are benefits of the shift to internal mobility, but the biggest advantage would be improved retention, which helps in creating a thriving marketplace for talent. What’s more, 88% of these HR professionals said their organisations encourage their workers to apply for openings within their companies. Whether it be offering stipends for certifications or conducting in-house training, doing these activities can offer plentiful opportunities for employees to grow their skill sets, which enhances their ability to move up within the organization.

Predictive Analytics

While not strictly a recruiting trend, companies always rely on accurate data to source, interview, and assess job applicants, which is why predictive analytics has become one of the hottest topics in the hiring process. Predictive analysis can assist you in accessing and predicting a prospective candidate’s behavior because the use of analytics across talent acquisition delivers deeper insights to identify areas of strength and weaknesses, removes blockages, and helps to reduce the cost of talent acquisition and fill vacant roles quicker than expected. It helps in making highly educated guesses and streamlining the hiring practices to find the best candidate suited for the job. Predictive analysis goes hand-in-hand with AI and becomes a huge differentiator for companies as it can answer all the ‘why’ questions you have about a candidate, whether it be the past, present, or future, which can help you source the best talent.

The idea of predictive analysis is especially compelling considering the future predictions it can provide. The pattern detection goes all the way from predicting the source of hire, time to fill, time to hire, estimated future candidate performance, offer acceptance rate, cost per hire, quality of hire, interview acceptance probability, vacancy cost, and predicted tenure of a candidate. Machine learning is used to predict and estimate all the information that is needed by using certain pattern detection techniques and algorithms to go through the stacks of applications you receive every day. Considering the data, it can be sourced from the information given the use of predictive learning becomes vital, especially in high turnover roles. It can even predict when an employee is certainly going to leave another organisation so that you can jump in and grab the opportunity to fill your company’s job roles, which can boost productivity at your company.

We all know by now how crucial and tricky the job of HR can be. But managing the recruitment process all in one place, from sourcing to interviewing and assessments, to hiring a candidate, will not be a process of concern if you are expanding your HR department and providing them with the flexibility of a few tips and tricks that can help them optimise the process and evaluate your recruiting methodology according to the ongoing trends. With the increasing number of organizations, the global economy is going to see a greater shape up that is going to change the dynamics of hiring a potential employee quickly and efficiently.

These bright advances can only be conquered if you are understanding the changes in the hiring landscape and finding the right way to fit in. Thus, to help you paint a bigger picture for increasing your organization’s productivity and ensuring success in the coming years, cast an eye on these global recruiting trends we got for you.