Pt. 3: Top 10 ‘Bleeding Edge’ Recruiting Trends to Watch in 2015

The Top 10 ‘Bleeding Edge’ Recruiting Trends to Watch in 2015

by Dr. John Sullivan

Additional Bleeding Edge Trends To Watch

Some additional trends that also reveal the future of recruiting include:

• Data-based decision-making in recruiting goes mainstream – recruiting leaders are finally realizing that all other business functions now make all major decisions based on data. Metrics-based decision-making will have a huge impact in recruiting because I find database decisions to be at least 25 percent better than intuitive decisions. Forget the low-value historical metrics and expect to see real-time and predictive metrics dominate. If you need increased budget resources, work with the CFO in order to assign a dollar value to how much recruiting results directly increase corporate revenue.
• Referrals continue to dominate – spamming employee contacts for referrals has run its course. Referrals produce quality hires not because of who they know, but instead because your best employees far surpass even recruiters in finding, building relationships, assessing, and selling top people who are not active in the job market. At top firms, over 50 percent of the hires will come from quality employee referrals.
• Personalization will become more common – top candidates will no longer tolerate a “one-size-fits-all” approach. In-demand candidates are now beginning to expect a unique and personalized recruiting approach (much like what occurs in executive recruiting). I call this approach “artisanal recruiting.” And don’t be surprised when top candidates begin to expect that even their job will be customized for them. Providing top candidates with choices that include who they work with, where and when they work, and even who their supervisor will be become more prevalent. And because the measured resources mean that you can’t personalize every job or candidate experience, prioritization will become even more essential. Prioritization allows you to focus your resources on the jobs and the candidates that will have the most business impact.
• Colleges and their students have changed dramatically, but college recruiting has not – unfortunately, corporate college recruiting budgets and processes have been stagnant for years, even though the demand for grads is now soaring. Unfortunately, during the slack college hiring period, colleges themselves, the visibility and the expectations of college students have changed dramatically. A reengineered recruiting model must move beyond a focus on career centers. Instead it must increase its capabilities in the areas of global college recruiting, remote college recruiting, recruiting students from online universities, recruiting “passive” students, and the use of market research to completely understand the job search process and the expectations of this new generation of grads.
• Large firms will struggle to compete with startups for innovative talent – the recent lavish funding and the economic success of numerous startups will continue to make them attractive to innovators and top talent. Unfortunately, few major corporations have a market-research-driven strategy or a set of tools that allows them to successfully recruit against startups for these valuable innovative prospects with a startup mindset.
• Workforce planning returns as a hot issue – recruiting shortages and high turnover rates have historically forced executives to focus on developing dependable talent pipelines. Expect an increased emphasis in all aspects of workforce planning, including talent pipelines and talent communities, supply/demand forecasting, succession planning, predicting employee turnover, and leader development. Don’t expect much success in this area because of the volatile VUCA environment and the fact that professionals in each of these workforce planning areas have almost universally failed to produce the promised results because they do not use data based decision-making.

Expect Continuing Disappointments in These Recruiting Areas

Unfortunately, you won’t find any predictions of dramatically new recruiting technologies on this list because our technology sector has continued to disappoint by providing only incremental changes.
Also don’t expect any new innovations in recruitment process outsourcing, in truly global recruiting approaches, in executive search, on corporate career websites, and from those who push recruitment and employer branding advertising. And finally, although these areas are getting more attention, expect little major innovation in the candidate assessment, diversity recruiting, and automated employee referral areas.

Final Thoughts

Many industries are finally experiencing dramatic growth, and as a result, their executives are clamoring for the talent that is required in order to continue that growth. And as the world moves faster, these executives are also expecting a continuing increase in corporate speed.
Meeting these high-level growth, speed, and innovation needs is difficult enough during normal times. But the escalation of turnover rates combined with vicious competition for top talent has produced a level of difficulty and challenge that recruiting leaders haven’t faced in years. Firms that expect to simply meet those challenges will obviously need some new recruiting strategies, tools, and approaches. However, if the goal of your firm is to go the next step and to dominate your industry, you will need to be on the bleeding edge of recruiting practices. This is because you can’t expect to provide your firm with a competitive advantage if you simply copy the recruiting practices of your talent competitors.

Capturing the lion’s share of top talent and becoming an elite recruiting leader in a highly competitive talent marketplace requires the foresight and the courage to implement the bleeding-edge approaches that are listed here.

Here are parts one and two in case you missed them:
Part 1
Part 2