It is time to start planning for 2017 and the best way to do that is to take a look at 2016 and analytically predict trends for this year. Assessing these trends will enable you to identify hiring practices in the industry, and help you shape your company’s talent acquisition and talent retaining polices. Here are a few trends that have emerged and will be vital in talent acquisition this year:

More focus on Hiring Manager’s Experience

There has been a greater focus on improving candidate experience in the recruitment cycle, which has taken precedence over the HR manager’s experience, who are equally involved in the process. Hiring managers also need the same customer-like experience in the process that is enjoyed by the candidate.Hence, latest trends have been focusing on developing and utilizing tools that will help hiring managers do their job more effectively and with quick results easily delivered to them with the click of a button.

In this year, HR Teams are expected to invest more time in setting expectations for ‘how long it will take to fill a position’ based on the data provided, making processes more streamlined with frequent progress reports and thus, fashion more efficient processes.

Technology will help recruiters with candidate conversion rates and response time analysis.

Applicant tracking systems are becoming highly intuitive and have complex pattern recognition algorithms that can pick up on various clues; the abilities will give greater insights to employers and help them gain the competitive edge.

Technology will help employers assess how well candidates are performing in the current company, their job satisfaction, and even history of the candidates regarding job stability. These highly intuitive systems would-be able to track and analyze these factors and predict how soon the candidate would be looking for a new position. This will definitely give employers an early bird advantage with respect to expanding the labor pool and hire quality resources at competitive rates.

Tools with semantic search capabilities

More focus will be laid on recruiting tools that have semantic search capabilities that are able to understand the intent & contextual meaning implied by the candidate while describing a skill or an experience. While sourcing candidates, semantic searches will enable recruiters to search for a specific term, for e.g., ‘JAVA’ that also yields matches on words that are related conceptually like J2EE, EJB, Servlets, etc. About 59% of the HR managers in the CareerBuilder survey agreed to have used search terms while finding candidates that led to semantic errors later on, in the recruitment process.

HR will start using experts from finance and other departments

Collection and analysis to draw meaningful conclusions from data can be highly complex and time-consuming. HR managers will turn to departments such as, Finance, Business Intelligence, and Market Research, that have existing expertise in handling vast amounts of data and thus, create battle strategies together. The survey conducted by CareerBuilder showed that around 45% of HR managers are using data and analytical tools in their recruitment programs.

A/B testing will play a critical role.

A/B testing has done wonders for Web Development and Marketing and with the increasing use of this technology, it was bound to venture into the recruitment process. HR teams will eventually experiment with A/B testing to gather intelligence and optimize the recruitment process & communication strategies, in order to gain competitive advantage.

A/B testing could be done to answer questions like ‘How many questions should be there in an ideal screening process?’, ‘Does adding videos and other multimedia content on websites make a candidate more likely to join the company?’, etc.

Recruiters and marketing team will become the social media strategy partners.

In order to attract potential talent, recruiters think like marketers and sell the idea of working in their company. As of now, nine out of ten companies use some kind of social media posts or advertisements to attract and engage qualified talent and more than half of the recruiters in the U.S. consider candidates sourced from social media being of “highest quality.” Now, thinking like marketers, recruiters will build the employment brand among popular social media channels and promote their benefits packages, work environment, career opportunities, etc.

Investing in HR technology will be a joint decision among the heads of Human Resources, Technology and Financial departments.

It is expected to see higher involvement of CTOs and CFOs in making technology purchases for the HR, especially in the form of Recruiting Software & Applicant Tracking Systems. The survey conducted by CareerBuilder pointed out that 45 percent of HR managers already involve their CFOs in their purchases and around 33 percent say that they had also involved their CTOs. We will see further increase in this percentage this year.

Building pipeline to internally promote highly engaged employees.

HR will focus their attention on employees who are eager to move up the ladder within the organization; they will be given higher importance as companies build and nurture the pipelines of internal candidates to award loyalty. One third of the HR Managers in a survey said that there is high employee turnover considering the improved economy, where employees are frequently switching jobs for better opportunities, especially, in areas like customer service, information technology, product development and marketing and sales.

2017 is definitely a year to watch out for – with highly dynamic technological, economic and political environments that will directly influence hiring practices of the industry.

Meet vTech Solution at:

VMSA LIVE PHX 2017

April 5-7, 2017

JW Marriott Phoenix Desert Ridge Resort & Spa
5350 East Marriott Drive, Phoenix, AZ

VMSA Live is a semi-annual executive conference that addresses the unique challenges facing companies using a program governance model, VMS (Vendor Management System) and MSP (Managed Service Provider) to acquire and manage contingent labor and SOW-based services.

For more details on this event, visit: www.vmsaccelerators.com/events