From new employee management strategies to cutting-edge innovations in marketing, the year ahead is headed towards booming success for companies that align their strategies accordingly.
For this post, we’ve rounded up the latest recruitment trends of 2020 to steer you in the right direction for a boost in helping you achieve all your hiring and growth goals.
Read on!
1. Turning to the Pros: Partnering with Executive Recruiters
In the past 20 years, 60% of successful companies have reported consistently utilizing executive recruiters to identify top talent for their critical hiring needs. As we enter into a new decade, because of historically low unemployment rates and a disparity between demand and supply in certain candidate profiles, we are now seeing an upsurge in companies that choose to harness the abilities of professional recruiters to be competitive in the current hiring race for exceptional candidates.
Recent studies show a whopping 84% of companies that have current hiring needs anticipate using executive recruiters to fill those roles.
The following industries appear to be particularly inclined to utilize recruiters to gain access to exceptional candidates for critical fill roles: banking and finance, sales, HR, manufacturing, healthcare, and construction.
Executive recruiters deliver top talent to hiring managers attention that he would not have otherwise had access to, making companies substantially more competitive in the current war for talent.
2. Embracing Flexibility in the Workforce
More companies are now seeing the wisdom in offering flexibility in the work environment. While companies were previously quick to dismiss candidates who wished to work from home or had conflicting schedules, the gig economy is now becoming increasingly common.
Over 36% employees (57 million U.S. workers) are currently in the gig economy and the number is expected to increase as the year progresses.
The American workforce has become a unique melange of full-timers, freelancers, and contractors, with increased subjectivity between the layers. Hiring managers have become more empathetic to the personal needs of each candidate, and rather than letting them go when an issue arises, they are much more inclined to work with the employee to find a workable solution whenever possible.
Not only does offering the ability to work remotely increase retention rates, but providing flexibility in location and work hours also proves to be the single most effective way to increase the pool of potential candidates when looking to fill a position.
3. Increased Diversity and Inclusion
Corporate America has fully embraced the wisdom in creating workforces as diverse as the customers they hope to serve.
By increasing cultural, racial, religious, and gender-based diversity, the workforce has become more equitable and just. Not only is this trend ethically sound, but research consistently shows that companies that actively work to create as broad of a spectrum as possible within their workforce enjoy the benefits of higher retention levels and increased profits.
4. Seeking Gen Z Candidates
As the newest generation (born between 1995–2015) comfortably settles into its 20s, hiring managers have begun understanding its potential, talent, technological insight, and social media expertise in its entirety.
As technology moves to the forefront of effective strategies in an array of disciplines, hiring candidates who have a primary and instinctive understanding of the immense power of computers makes good sense.
5. Focusing on Soft Skills
While experience, education, certifications and all the other so-called ‘hard skills’ are still clearly valuable, the hiring trend is clearly seeing a rise in the importance of ‘soft skills’. Previously dismissed as extraneous, soft skills like creativity, team-building capabilities, collaboration, emotional intelligence, leadership, communication, and time management have emerged to the forefront.
As companies have come to realize that one of the most common reasons employees quit is because of poor company culture, the importance of creating positive cultures has risen dramatically.
Wise hiring managers will pay more and more attention to the personality traits of potential candidates as they build their teams.
In the past year, hiring managers reported being thrice as likely to hire candidates that they perceive as having greater soft skills as opposed to other applicants.
Smart companies pay attention to building a positive company culture and then assess candidates both on their hard skills as well as their personality fit when making hiring decisions. This two-pronged evaluation pays off in increased retention and benefits both the company as well as the employees.
There are some tremendous tools now available to track everything from basic personality characteristics to intrinsic motivators. We have enjoyed great success with Predictive Indexing. Regardless of which of the many behavioral and aptitude testing options you employ, it makes good business sense to utilize one of them to make the best hiring decisions possible.
Third-party criminal record checks also ensure a quick and easy way to see whether a candidate has a history of offenses that are indicative of their work ethic and character. This step in the hiring process adds a layer of assurance that a potential hire is fit for the job and the company.
Is your business struggling to hire competent candidates? Whether you’re overburdened with an excessive number of positions to fill or can’t seem to find the right set of candidates, International Search Consultants can help you out. As one of the leading executive recruiting firms in the U.S., ISC has been providing top talent to our clients since 1999.
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