In the current labor market, candidates hold more power than ever before, putting pressure on staffing agencies and organizations to source the best talent, fast.
In fact, according to a recent report from Resume-Library, 83.9% of hiring professionals cite a lack of relevant talent as a major challenge right now.
In light of this, this article will explore five key hiring trends to stay on top of in 2019, if you want to source, hire and retain the right people for your vacancies.
1. Target Passive Candidates. While it’s all very well advertising your vacancy and waiting for the applications to roll in, 2019 will see more hiring professionals focus on targeting passive candidates, as opposed to active ones.
Consider what you can do to re-engage candidates with your brand. Are you using social media in the best way possible? Are you re-targeting them with email campaigns?
2. Build Talent Pools for the Future. With a widespread talent shortage across the country, building talent pools is an extremely important hiring trend to get on board with.
This is easy if you use an applicant tracking system and many integrate with job boards to ensure you always have access to the latest version of their resume.
3. Set Better Success Metrics. Understanding what methods are working and what ones aren’t is crucial. Without this information, you risk assigning your hiring budgets to the wrong areas, potentially limiting your talent pool.
Start by looking at the amount of clicks that convert to applications, applications to interviews, interviews to offers and offers to hires. You can then think of other areas, such as quality, cost and time to hire. This ensures that you’re investing the right money, into the right tools.
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4. Focus on Candidate Experience. Our survey found that 45.8% of hiring professionals measure success on candidate experience. This is only set to increase in the year ahead, as more companies recognize the importance of accommodating to candidate’s needs.
Key points to think about include how informative your job adverts are, how effective your application process is and how good you are at communicating with candidates.
5. Streamline Your Application Process. According to our research, nearly two-thirds (60.7%) of hiring professionals think application forms are no longer necessary, with a further 55.7% stating that a resume and cover letter should give you enough information about the candidate.
In order to get ahead in 2019, organizations need to focus on streamlining their application process and making it easier for candidates to apply to their jobs. Nowadays, people don’t want to fill out pages and pages of application forms. They want fast results and to be able to apply for jobs on the move.
6. Dealing With Unconscious Bias. With nearly one in 10 (9%) hiring professionals stating that unconscious bias is a current issue, we expect more companies to focus on a fairer hiring process in 2019.
In fact, many organizations are removing the human eye from parts of the recruitment process and investing in technology as a means to match the very best individuals to their vacancies.
In addition to this, artificial intelligence has quickly emerged as a key piece of technology for sourcing and screening candidates, with 12.9% believing that it can help to remove unconscious bias.
Stay on Top of These Hiring Trends in 2019
While some of these trends may not seem particularly groundbreaking, you’d be surprised at how many organizations in the US that still haven’t streamlined their hiring process in light of these factors.
If you want to hire the best workers in 2019, make note of these key hiring trends and consider how you can make your recruitment process more effective.
