Top 10 Recruitment Trends of 2018

Keeping up with the recruitment trends and always being innovative is the only way you can truly pick the fruits of success in this business – which is why we decided to write about this year’s hot trends.

What would be the one thing you’d want to avoid in a business? Think about it. We have, and the conclusion is – being boring. People enjoy everything that’s new and refreshing. If you want to open a new successful restaurant in your street, you’d want it to be different, either in terms of cuisine, interior, service, anything. We live in a fast-changing world and if you choose to stay mediocre it won’t take you too far. This especially applies to recruitment business. Your competition there is your same street from the restaurant scenario. No matter how big you think the market is – it’s just a tiny little Recruiting street in the suburbs. Everyone wants the greatest talents and there aren’t many – especially if you choose not to stand out.

In case you were behind, this will help you learn something new and set yourself up for succeeding in 2019. 🙂

1) The Magic of Marketing

It is well known that every single successful business nowadays, relies on a good marketing strategy.
Like in any other business, recruitment marketing makes a huge impact on your success. It is the process of attracting and nurturing talents using marketing tactics. Why do we need those? Simply because the industry has always been one of the most competitive ones and for that reason one of the most innovative. Consequently, recruiters that first adopt these new preferences and challenges will be the ones that attract more talent.

In addition to this is a “little” thing called inbound recruiting. Simply reaching out to talents and offering an available position isn’t the gem anymore – now we’re enjoying a whole new era of good old courtship.
Inbound marketing is when you proactively and continually entice candidates aiming to make them choose you as their next employer. It will help you for the long haul since it will skyrocket the whole recruitment process.

2) Proactive Talent Sourcing

A must have recruitment strategy. According to LinkedIn research, more than 90% of global professionals are interested in hearing about new opportunities out of which only 36% are actively looking for a job.

3) Employer branding

Or simply – reputation. Reputation is crucial when you’re sourcing, recruitment and of course, hiring. Companies with a bad reputation won’t only struggle with attracting but also with retaining employees. Consequently, recruiting for such companies or failing to brand the employer right won’t lead you to success. Employer brand basically mirrors the employer values. Is the company a great place to work? Will the candidate serve a greater cause by working there? Does it have certain perks and benefits? Events? Did it encourage its employees to write stories and testimonials? INCLUDE ALL THE GOODS WHEN RECRUITING FOR A COMPANY.

4) Referrals and Candidate Positive Experience

It’s pretty much self-explanatory but a little further explanation never hurt nobody. This, of course, is talents’ general perception of the recruiting process they went through. Candidates whose experiences and feelings were positive will more likely accept your job offer, reapply in the future and REFER others to your company. Also, research has proven that referred employees take the shortest amount of time to hire and on board. Now, they’re branding you and their evaluation will depend on what you had to offer.

5) Managing the relationship

Relationship with candidates will, of course, be influenced by candidate experience. But there’s more to it. Nurturing and maintaining a relationship with a talent you’ve successfully placed into a company is going to be easier. However, that doesn’t mean those candidates are the only ones you should strive to have a relationship with. On the contrary, you should never forget talents even if you haven’t had the luck of placing them anywhere, YET. Always maintain a relationship with your candidates.

6) Swimming in a pool of data

Your lifesaving tool. Every time your client contacts you with a job opening, you just dive into your magic talent pool and pick the most suitable candidate for it. As impossible as it sounds – thank God it’s not!
This tool improves the quality of the hiring process by reducing the time and cost of hiring. They allow you to search not only for active candidates and those that have applied for the job themselves but also sourced, referred, hot shots, passive’s and even those that have willingly jumped in your pool through inbound marketing.

7) A pool of data vol.2

While we’re at data, using data-driven metrics is yet another trend that will help you understand which segments of your hiring strategy are proving to work well and which should be improved. As well as talent pools, HR analytics and data-driven recruiting will save your time and money by improving hire quality. Win-win situation, huh?

8) Artificial Intelligence

To which we’ve dedicated a whole blog, is another popular recruitment trend of 2018.  Machine learning helps the removal of bias and it has proven to be efficient in delivering the best candidate matches according to their skills. An interesting example are chatbots. They are implemented in the process of recruitment to answer questions about job ads to potential applicants. Furthermore, Chatbot can detect if the candidate loses interest in the process. If that happens, your bot will remove that particular candidate from the pool –  which will allow your team to focus on truly interested and suitable candidates.
As fascinating and as helpful as this is, talent sourcing and recruitment is mostly about building relationships and being human. 🙂

9) GDPR

GDPR is a new piece of EU legislation that replaced the current the Data Protection Act (DPA) and it was introduced on 25th of May 2018. By that time, organizations in non-compliance faced heavy fines. This legislation will give people more control over their personal information. This brought a change in the recruiting process as well.

10) Interviewing smart

After you’ve used all the tips and tricks, you scheduled an interview. Congrats! Now, this phase leads to some more strategies. An interview is crucial in the recruitment process which is why you must think smart.
There are 3 ways of constructing your interview:

• structure them
• don’t structure them
• semi-structure them

There’s no need to be lazy and go for the unstructured interview being all confident. First, you should know the advantages and disadvantages of each type. Next, you should align them with the company and job you’re interviewing for.

Tijana Djurdjevic

According to E.L. Doctorow “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” So, according to that Tijana is our accepted schizophrenic. She is a philologist and our Content & Marketing specialist that never lacks writing inspiration. Sadly, she also never stops believing she’s a photographer too – go check her Instagram.