One need to be at the top of one’s game if you plan to stay ahead of the competition when it comes to the recruitment industry. To that end it is only natural to expect the best to come up innovative methods to stay relevant, current and competitive to a veritable degree.

Failure to put one’s finger on the trends that are fast gaining popularity can be fatal to the efficiency of a recruiter. At the same time, it can be next to impossible to predict how a trend may turn around next year. The ideal approach in such a volatile scenario would be to build one’s strategy around the pillars of vigilance and adaptability. Intelligent guesses cannot however, be completely disregarded, and the following is a list of trends expected to be prominent this year:

1. Talent Analytics will be of Prime Importance

To anyone who has been in the recruitment industry long enough, it is a well established fact that it was, is, and shall remain a numbers game. Instinct and intuition may be fleetingly successful if they are the only tools employed in the hiring process, but to disregard statistics and data entirely can never spell good news in the long run. In fact it may well be said that analysing talent metrics is a key part of gauging how lucrative or potentially damaging every single hire made could be. And how well a recruiter can gauge this is essentially all that the efficiency in ‘recruitment efficiency’ is about.

2. A Great Candidate Experience will climb up the Priority List

Candidates have a lot more options and are afforded a lot of flexibility today than they were back in the day, and recruiters have lost out on a lot of the leverage they used to have. The ‘wait and see’ approach doesn’t work quite as well as it used to, and so it is important for companies to be a lot more accessible in general. Turning candidates off to the prospect of working for a company does a lot more damage today than it possibly could have at any other point in history, owing to social networking and the speed at which bad press spreads. Therefore, a hiring process absolutely must keep candidate experience in mind right from the drafting stage.

3. HR Shall Be Compelled to Expand Talent Pool Sources

This has been in motion for some time now, but has really gained momentum recently, and shows no signs of slowing down. One really must reassess the talent pool one considers and break away or at least add to the traditional ones with the likes of social media. Since it is easier to reach out to people from all corners of the globe now, one best adapt fast and tap into the potential of social networking sites to acquire quality talent. At the same time, tapping into the existing company resources has proven lucrative enough to become a fairly popular trend recently. A great way to put would be: How would one know one’s Accounts professional is looking for a career shift into Marketing, unless one asks?

4. Efficiency in Hiring Process Will be Boosted by Technology

It’s not happening, it’s happened. One must either get with it, or get out. At the same time, it is not nearly as ominous as pop culture depicts it to be. Technology has proven that human intellect is indispensible, nowhere more so than the recruitment industry. All it does is save large amounts of time in doing lengthy and repetitive tasks in the research, data analysis, communications and more, so that the human intellect is freed up to be employed in more lucrative tasks. Recruitment software is here, on the brink between trend and norm, and there’s is no better time to embrace it than now.

5. Marketing the Employee Experience will be a Key Focus

The younger employees today have the luxury of prioritising their career development over anything else owing to the before mentioned increase in the number of options available for them. That being said, it would be a fairly comprehensive move on the part of companies to market their employee experience in an enticing manner, in order to attract the top tier of talent. Perhaps that’s why it’s no surprise that trend would probably be the most practiced one this year.

Based in the City of London, Recruitment SMART is a HR tech startup on a mission to bring disruptive technology to the recruitment industry. They are developing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning based sourcing solutions. Team includes veterans from both the recruitment and tech industries and has client globally in UK, US and APAC. Feel Free to Write to us at info@recruitmentsmart.com