04 Jan Looking Back: The Five Most Important Recruitment Trends From 2015 (and What They Mean for you in 2016)

Looking back on 2015, its amazing what we’ve achieved in recruitment. LinkedIn has just released their Global Recruiting Trends 2015 data, it’s an amazingly thorough (and more importantly data-based) summation of how the world of recruiting has changed and where it might be headed. So here’s what’s happened in the world of hiring in 2015, and where it might be heading in the next year.

• Hiring budgets are increasing (but volume is increasing faster): In 2015, hiring budgets increased by 44%, but hiring volumes increased by 62%. This matches trends we’ve seen for the past five years. In order to compensate for this mismatch, recruiting managers will need to turn to recruiting strategies which are more cost effective. Where techniques such as interviews and CV screenings were once sufficient, these are no longer time or cost effective enough to be used on every candidate. Instead, savvy recruiters are replacing the early stages in the hiring process with talent measurement solutions which can be administered online and quickly narrow down the talent pool by removing those who don’t have the competencies to perform on the job.
• Quality of hire is top dog: Quality of hire is rated as the number one performance indicator for hiring managers, with time to fill coming in as a narrow second. Of course, recruiters need to strike a balance between quality and speed of hiring. If time to hire was the highest priority, anyone could hire the first person who walked in off the street and fill the position in an hour. But they probably wouldn’t be a very good worker. Conversely, you could wait years for the perfect candidate to come along. Eventually they’d arrive, but the lost productivity from the empty position wouldn’t be worth the cost. An ideal solution meets the needs of speed, without sacrificing quality in the process.
• But they don’t know how to measure it: While quality of hire is of utmost importance, not many people actually know what they’re looking for. According to LinkedIn, only 33% of organisations feel that their hiring methodologies are strong, and only a miniscule 5% believe that they’re best in class. Therefore, most if not all companies believe that they have significant room to improve their methods of sourcing top talent. And of course, those who believe that they’re best in class may be working with outdated information. The world of recruitment is changing so quickly that what was bleeding edge technology at the beginning of 2015 may now be painfully outdated. Unlike a building, recruiting effectiveness is never a process that can ever be ‘finished,’ only incrementally improved through hard work and inventive use of technology.
• Employer brand: A recruiters brand is playing an increasingly vital role in attracting candidates. For a good example of this we can look no further than Google, who attracts more than 2 million applications in a year. Of course, your brand isn’t always easy to control – no matter how carefully you manage it. If one bad hiring manager offends 10 good applicants, who then tell 100 of their friends, that’s 1000 people who all of a sudden think that your company’s name is mud. Of course, the easy solution to this is to make sure that every applicant has the same hiring experience. Many companies are achieving this by taking their hiring online. By creating a unified recruitment experience for all candidates you can ensure that when it comes to hiring you’re putting your best foot forward, and that everyone is going to see it.
• Retention is a top priority: 32% of recruiters rank employee retention as a top priority, and with good reason. Hiring isn’t cheap. And it becomes even more expensive when you have to replace employees who have left or just haven’t worked out. For example, once you account for acquisition, training, and replacement costs, a single sales representative costs nearly $115,000 to replace. Fortunately, we have long known that likelihood to turnover can be predicted by a number of personality characteristics such as extraversion and openness to experience. While hiring using personality tests can help us avoid those employees who are likely to turnover, it can also help us identify those rock star employees who might need that little bit of extra encouragement to stay with the company before they even think about looking for another job.

We all know that hiring isn’t easy, and these stats prove it. But by utilising the latest technological innovations, those organisations on the bleeding-edge are turning their recruitment into a walk in the park – and collecting the top candidates to show for it.