The Trends Shaping Recruitment

November 9 2017 - Despite the unemployment rate being at a 43 year low, there are a huge amount of jobs there for the taking in the UK - 783,000 current job vacancies, in fact. With recruitment rapidly becoming digital first, this has brought a few unique problems to clients and HR departments, such as low employee retention rates.

This article will cover a few of the cutting edge techniques that recruitment agencies are employing to find the very best candidates who are capable and reliable.

Deploying Software

It would be remiss not to emphasise just how much importance is placed on IT by the recruitment industry. As soon as workforces are even in the 10s of employees, software is often mandatory to enable proper recruitment. Agencies utilise recruitment software as they save time and can put the onus on the employee to demonstrate that they meet the minimum requirements (for example qualifications), acting as a filter. Software also provides a solid paper trail and reduces overhead costs and time.

Rediscovery

A very simple but overlooked scheme that is starting to gather traction is rediscovery, which is the simple method of looking at previously rejected interviewees, or candidates who failed checks, again. Of course, this isn't foolproof, but can be a handy and cost-saving way to find staff who had nearly met the grade previously or have had their circumstances change to the employer's benefit.

Social Media Automation

Social media is ubiquitous, with 38m Brits on social media. The sheer scope of social media, from throwaway comments on Twitter to online CVs on LinkedIn, has proved a fantastic source of information for recruitment agencies. This has resulted in a 2017/18 trend of recruiters pushing jobseekers to make their social media application compatible; that is, formatted in such a way that it can be taken, on face value, as a CV.

The proliferation of social media as a tool for recruiters has also enabled agencies to filter out potentially disruptive hires, bringing efficiency to HR professionals down the line.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI is a disruptive technology that is transforming many markets, providing automation to cars and to large-scale factories. The technology is seeping into the online world now, too, with controversy over huge, human-mimicking botnets influencing events as far reaching as the US presidential election in 2016. Whilst recruitment AI is still developing, the use of sophisticated AI and other algorithm-based software to construct the 'perfect' image of a would-be employee is starting to seriously take off.

Just like with social media use, this is helping to remove from the pool potentially disruptive employees and to pre-empt future behaviour.

Recruitment is being transformed by a combination of futuristic computing and a renewed emphasis on older, neglected methods. Whichever way the agencies you work with go, it's benefiting HR agencies and employees.

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