As the labor market tightens, talent acquisition professionals
in 2017 will be asked to fill more positions offering alternative work
arrangements and to begin to use emerging technologies to find the right
workers for their organizations.
Employers will staff on-demand and gig positions, utilize data
analytics and artificial intelligence tools, emphasize skills over formal
education to increase diversity, and target passive candidates through
hyper-personalization.
According to Byrne Mulrooney, CEO of Los Angeles-based
Futurestep, a Korn Ferry company specializing in recruitment process
outsourcing, technology will tie all these trends together. “It doesn’t
matter what industry our clients are in—everything from manufacturing to
professional services and retail—every company can now be classified as a
technology company,” he said. “This has forever changed the way
talent acquisition experts do their jobs, and what candidates have come to
expect.”
“Without an embedded commitment to mobile, candidate
experience and branding, your recruiting team is likely losing candidates you
don’t even know about,” said Lars Schmidt, the founder of Amplify Talent,
a recruiting and branding agency in Tysons, Va.
Mastery of Data Will Be
Game-Changing
Industry thought leader John Sullivan says 2017 is “the
year of the algorithm.” Sullivan asserts that the recruiting function will
finally “begin the shift away from a decision model based on past
practices and intuition and toward data-driven decision-making.”
Sales and marketing teams have relied on big data, analytics and predictive models for years to optimize
and personalize the process of converting prospects into applicants,
according to Jon Bischke, CEO of Entelo, a social sourcing and talent analytics
software company in San Francisco. “Talent teams are finally catching up
to their colleagues,” he said. “In 2016, we saw recruiters … adopting
technologies to automate aspects of their daily workload and leveraging the
rich data stores they’ve amassed to create meaningful and actionable recruitment
plans.”
Using data to predict behavior will become increasingly
important as technology continues to advance, said Brendan Browne, vice
president of global talent acquisition at LinkedIn.
“Sourcing systems are becoming much more intuitive and can
pick up on certain cues that will give employers a whole new level of
insight,” agreed Eric Presley, chief technology officer at CareerBuilder,
an HR solutions firm based in Chicago.
Smarter use of talent data will expand recruiting metrics beyond
the hire itself, from time-to-hire and cost-per-hire to longer-term metrics
that measure tenure, performance, fit and retention. Data tools will help match
a candidate to the position that best fits his or her skills and background;
assess a candidate’s personality, values and interests; rank the priority of
jobs for workforce planners; and arguably, root out hiring bias.
“A recruiter can go out and scrape someone’s online profile
and find out that he or she poses a potential health risk because of a mention
on Facebook about diabetes,” he said. “That’s the big danger… [making
observations and assumptions about] their personality, their reputation, their
creditworthiness, and doing it without any candidate awareness.”
Another danger is trusting these tools without knowing the validation
criteria, Wheeler said. “Are they really predicting what they say they are
predicting? I think it’s really shaky today and it’s totally unregulated,
leaving a lot of potential for really negative consequences.”
Tools Will Get More Intelligent
HR and talent acquisition practitioners will hear a lot about
artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and bots in 2017. But how this
evolving technology impacts HR and recruiting isn’t completely clear, as the
technology is at an early stage, currently focusing on process automation and
efficiency.
“The way we interact with AI right now is really
simplistic,” said William Tincup, SHRM-SCP, an expert on recruiting
technology and president of recruitment media company RecruitingDaily.
“It’s like going from paper to digital. You used to write things down on a
Post-It note to remind you to do something. Now you have a program where you
type those things in and it reminds you,” he said. Essentially, at this
early stage, AI is automating manual tasks.
“Recruiters are horrible at letting candidates know where
they are in the recruiting process,” he said. “AI will make it so
that feedback is consistently given.”
It’s important to note that the future of AI is based on the
tool getting smarter over time as more people interact with it. “The first
years will not be that great,” Tincup said. “But it will get smarter
via the users’ behavior. There is no ceiling for knowledge. The technology will
take data, put it together and keep learning. But it will not displace recruiters.”
Experts assert that the technology will instead elevate HR to
become more strategic. “Humans will still need to do the qualitative
stuff,” Tincup said. “The technology will free recruiters to spend
more qualitative time with candidates and hiring managers. Robots will not
strategize, not for a long time.”
The On-Demand Workforce Will Grow
Some researchers estimate that by 2020 as much as 40 percent of
the American workforce will be made up of contingent workers, which includes temporary employees, independent contractors and project-based
on-demand workers.
According to Mulrooney, the two key drivers responsible for the
rise of the on-demand workforce are workers’ demand for diversity and
flexibility in their roles and a shift in organizational strategy from needing
to hire a person to needing to complete a task.
Wheeler explained that, historically, recruiting focused on
full-time regular hires or temporary hires. Gig hiring—such as when retailers
ramped up headcount during the annual holiday season—fell under purchasing or
procurement. “TA was unaware that those people even existed,” he
said. “The TA function had been insular, focused on growth or replacement.
Many colleagues in TA have told me they are now looking at taking over gig
workforce hiring as a part of their responsibilities.”
Determining the optimal workforce composition will be a core
competency for HR and TA functions going forward, Wheeler said. “HR will
be asked to help determine which positions should be full time and which should
be done by contractors, or staffed by third-party agencies. We’ll see a shift
to contracting with more niche expertise workers as needed instead of hiring
full-time generalists to all-purpose roles.”
The growth
in recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) firms will also continue.
“Agencies will have to include RPO or they will not survive, except a
small sliver of executive search firms,” Wheeler said.
Recruiting Will Get
Hyper-Personal
With the talent market becoming more competitive, companies are
switching focus from what employees need to what employees want, Browne said.
“Today’s candidates require a consumer-quality experience,
similar to what they receive when shopping online,” said Roopesh Nair,
president and CEO of Symphony Talent, a leading recruitment marketing company
based in New York City. “Personalization is the key to capturing their
attention. Thanks to omnichannel
solutions and artificial intelligence, data is getting more precise than
ever and can be gathered from every point of contact with a candidate to
provide a more relevant, consistent and personalized experience.”
Personalizing careers sites and recruitment marketing will
significantly impact not only the quality of candidates companies can reach and
attract but also the number of relevant applications. "Data can be
used by recruiters to create persona-based content to reach higher quality candidates,
while at the same time relieving them of mundane tasks so they can refocus on
their actual job—recruiting,“ Nair said.
The success of your business relies heavily on the
capability of your team. If your business does not have an expert on
recruitment that can keep up with the new trends of the labor market, you
should consider Converge HR Solutions. One of our many services is Recruitment
Process Outsourcing, and we can partner with your organization target the
talented candidates you need. Visit our
website for more information https://convergehrsolutions.com/. Contact us directly at info@convergehrsolutions.com or 610-296-8550.
Article source: https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/Pages/Recruiting-Trends-2017-Technology-Change.aspx?utm_source=SHRM%20PublishThis_TalentAcquisitoin_7.18.16%20(16)&utm_medium=email&utm_content=March%2001,%202017&SPMID=&SPJD=&SPED=&SPSEG=&restr_scanning=silver&spMailingID=28077201&spUserID=OTI1ODQxNTExMDQS1&spJobID=1000146565&spReportId=MTAwMDE0NjU2NQS2
0 Comments