2015 – A Year of Much Change

What’s 2015 going to bring to the recruiting world? The past 15 years have been packed with changes and challenges; the next 15 will be packed with even more. Social media has come of age and there will be explosive growth and adoption.  Video and gaming are poised to take off, especially for engagement and assessment. Recruiters will find their skills challenged.  Here is a brief look and what I think may be coming in the new year.

Technology and Changing Org Structures will impact recruiting

Firm will continue to get smaller – partially by finding other ways to do work through automation and forms of outsourcing. Cost pressures, the need for innovation and speed, as well as the economy will put pressure on recruiting leaders to find ways to be more efficient and cut overhead.  Automation will play a part: We are already seeing the advent of this in assessment. There are beta versions of automated personality assessments using social media; there are numerous assessment-related games and videos.
These cost pressures, and the availability of alternatives to permanent recruiters, will cause many positions, especially lower-level ones, to move to recruitment process outsourcing firms (RPOs). The total number of recruiters employed by an organization will decline over the next two years forcing recruiting leaders to concentrate on finding and retaining only social-media, marketing-oriented recruiters who can leverage a variety of media to expand candidate sources and engage them in conversation.

 Marketing will Trump Traditional Sourcing

Recruiters will realize that they are really in the marketing business. It will be necessary for recruiters to develop unique and engaging content that attracts the right talent and engages those people in conversation, learning, and eventually to applying for employment. They will develop relationships with many different potential candidates thorough establishing communities and through social media.
They will also use analytics to judge the effectiveness of various messages. It will be necessary to dig into the data they have about what recruiting strategies have worked best and about what activities have led to hiring the best people.
Some firms will follow Zappos and eliminate job postings in favor of attracting people to broader and more generic employment categories. Employees themselves will become part of the candidate marketing process by referring potential candidates and by engaging with them in conversation.  The theme of next June’s ATC Conference is Recruiting is Marketing and we’ll have the head of recruiting for Zappos there.

 Social networks will continue to mature

Social media will become more central to successful recruiting than it has been. LinkedIn and Twitter will most likely remain dominant, but there may be some new entries challenging them. Visually oriented sites such as Slideshare, Pinterest, and Instagram are already moving in this direction. Regional specific social networks have already grown rapidly in China and India. There are many new books and emerging consultancies that specialize in helping recruiters use social media effectively. Candidates are much more likely to join a community in order to find out about a company or to look for an interesting job than they are to come to a recruiting website or job board.  Once they have a relationship they may then do to those places to apply or learn more specifics, but initially a relationship will help that process.
There are many other changes coming in 2015 that I will write about on forthcoming articles.  Meanwhile, I wish all of you a great holiday. Recharge your energy because you will need all of it in 2015!