By Laura White, operations director at The Treasury Recruitment Company

“Happy New Year, now let’s get planning!”

This is how it would have felt for many people as they headed back to work at the start of the year. No sooner had you awoken your computer from its slumber than words like ‘objectives’, ‘goals’ and ‘targets’ began being thrown around in the boardroom – often accompanied by feelings of trepidation and hysteria as you tried to recall your objectives for last year, let alone decipher your goals for the year ahead!

But once this initial panic has passed and some sense of normality returns, it is vital that you have a clear strategy in place for the year ahead. This can never be more true for your hiring and talent management strategy. Hiring is critical to every company’s future and with 73% of CEOs citing skills shortages at crisis levels, organisations can no longer expect talent to come to them.

Gone are the days of simply posting a job advert and waiting for the right candidates to find you. Recruitment has changed; the way candidates look for jobs has changed. Consequently, finding and hiring the ideal candidate has become increasingly hard, expensive and time-consuming. If your recruitment strategy does not adapt to these changes, you will be at serious risk. This seismic shift in the recruitment process has led to the candidate becoming ‘King’ (or Queen!) and the need for hirers to think more like marketers in the quest to attract the top talent.

But don’t be fooled. The job of building and delivering an effective talent strategy does not lie purely in the hands of the Talent Acquisition Team; far from it. It is down to every individual in the organisation to be involved in some way – viewing talent acquisition as the lifeblood of the business in order to build an employer brand that is so powerful, every potential new employee that engages with the business is biting their right arm off to be a part of it.

So how confident are you that your recruitment strategy is up to scratch?

How much do you know about the top recruitment trends hitting the market for 2019?

What can you be doing to contribute to this business-critical function?

If you’re feeling somewhat out of the loop with this, take a look at our Top 5 Recruitment Trends for 2019.

No. 1: Collaborative Hiring

Collaborative Hiring, or ‘Team-Based Hiring’ as it is sometimes known, is one of the key trends hitting the world of recruitment. Historically, hiring decisions have fallen in the hands of managers; however, the idea behind this approach is that teams work together to find and hire talent.

Typical teams will include people in different positions – hiring managers, HR managers and recruiters as well as people at different levels within the specific team – so employees that will be both above and below the level of the candidate in your organisation chart.

Benefits:

• Better quality of hire as more people are involved in the process
• Promotes positive team culture and strong company values
• Reduces the risk of ‘things not working out’ or feelings of the ‘job being mis-sold’
• Provides a more diverse assessment of each candidate, helping to eliminate any biases
• Improves retention rates as existing employees feel they have a voice and are valued

No. 2: Proactive Sourcing

Proactive Sourcing is the ‘skill of identifying, pipelining and engaging with potential candidates before a job is even available’.

This approach is all about building ‘talent pools’ which you can tap into when the need arises. It is centred on the passive candidate market which in Treasury equates to a rather large pool – well, more of an ocean really. Following the Treasury Recruitment Company’s recent Salary Survey, a massive 80% of respondents stated that although they were not actively seeking a new role, they would be open to hearing about new opportunities should they present themselves.

This is a ‘long-game’ approach, requiring a strategy centred around effectively nurturing relationships over time – through understanding key shifts and movements in the market as well as providing valuable content through blogs, videos and social media.

Benefits:

• Reduces time to hire as you will already have an immediate pool of talent to tap into
• Improves the quality of talent as culture fit and skills assessments will already have been carried out
• Drives competitive advantage as you will have greater access to top talent
• Promotes diversity as you have time to use more creative methods to attract candidates

No. 3: Inbound Recruiting

Inbound Recruiting uses on and offline marketing strategies to engage targeted groups of passive and active job seekers in different phases of the recruitment cycle.

The power of this method has been driven by the shifts in the way candidates now search for and make decisions about job opportunities. Simply advertising an open position and hoping the right candidate will come along is not the way to attract candidates anymore. Employer brand and the candidate experience is paramount. As such, recruiters and hiring managers need to think like marketers to engage and delight candidates throughout the process.

Benefits:

• You will attract people who actually want to work for YOU, not those just looking for a job
• Leads to higher success rates as candidates have already bought into the business/opportunity
• Reduces advertising costs and reliance on generic job boards for candidate attraction

No. 4: Candidate Experience

Candidate Experience centres on candidates’ overall perceptions of a company’s recruiting process –from sourcing and screening through to hiring and onboarding.

The emphasis of this concept is on ‘communication’, whether that be through online activities (job postings, careers sites, social media interactions) or more personal offline interactions (interviews, inductions).

The key thing to remember is that every candidate is important, not just those that you may want to hire. According to The Talent Board’s recent Candidate Experience Research Report, 33% of candidates with a negative experience intended to share the news publicly via social media, whilst 78% of those who had a positive experience said they would refer someone to the business in the future – so it is critical that Candidate Experience is at the top of your hiring agenda.

Benefits:

• Leads to higher success rates as candidates have a positive view of the business
• Increases the number of candidate referrals as candidates will recommend to their friends
• Encourages candidates to re-apply for other positions in the future

No. 5: Social Recruiting

Social Recruiting is the method of using social media networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) to find, attract and hire talent.

This has been one of the biggest trends to hit the world of recruitment in recent years; but with Millennials beginning to transition into leadership roles and Gen Z’s starting to enter the workforce, it has never been more important to build an effective Social Recruiting strategy.

Benefits:

• More cost effective than traditional advertising methods via job boards
• Increases job visibility as offers a wider candidate reach
• Allows more accurate candidate screening to assess culture fit
• Higher success rates as you are able to target specific candidate groups
• Reduces time to hire as methods of communication are a lot faster compared to traditional advertising methods

There you have it, our Top 5 Recruitment Trends for 2019 – which have hopefully given you some food for thought for the year ahead. Mastering these approaches will not happen overnight though and it very much needs to be a team effort. So get your marketing hats on and start planning which strategy will work best for you – there’s a battle for talent out there and you need to be in it to win it.