The last two years took a toll on the recruitment industry. The rapid development of technologies, COVID-19, and major shifts in the job market created new recruitment trends and the changes that continue to unfold. Recruiters must now become experts in HR tech trends, like virtual recruiting, predictive analytics, and many more to stay afloat and find skillful employees.

In this article, we’ll break down the main catalysts of those changes and guide you through the top recruiting trends for 2022.

Major catalysts for changes in recruitment

New trends in recruitment processes don’t exist in a vacuum — they appear for a reason or many reasons. Let’s take a closer look at the key drivers of recent recruiting trends.

Post-pandemic world

COVID-19 reshaped our lives in many aspects, and the recruitment arena is no exception. While many people lost their jobs, some businesses benefited from the pandemic. But what’s clear is that absolutely everyone was affected. For month after month, seemingly with no end, employers and employees had to address challenges posed by global quarantine and find effective solutions, including reshaping work practices to manage remote work and finding new ways to communicate while remaining isolated from one another.

Hot job market

While the world is slowly returning to some sense of normality, the job market is on the verge of a crisis. Businesses are looking for new employees, but people aren’t ready to get back to work just yet. Using unemployment insurance as a main source of income has allowed people to stay at home without decimating their finances. In fact, according to a recent survey, 34% of respondents don’t plan to go back to work anytime soon. The main reasons are COVID-19-related concerns and low salaries that they are not currently willing to accept.

Employers now need to work extra hard to find and attract the most suitable candidates to fill vacant positions. They need to adjust wages, strengthen employer branding, invest in advertising, and seek more ways to stand out in a flooded job market.

HR tech developments

HR tech has become more advanced. Many parts of the recruitment process, like recruitment tools and job applications, were digitized and automated throughout the last few years. As a result, hiring managers are less caught up in mundane work and can focus on the interpersonal and social parts of recruitment. HR tech creates opportunities to optimize workflows and pay more attention to finding the best professionals in the field.

10 recruitment trends for 2022

Without further ado, let’s find out which hiring trends will continue to heat up in 2022.

Virtual recruiting

Virtual recruiting was making gains even before COVID-19, but the pandemic has boosted it. Today, virtual recruiting is the primary recruitment method for many companies. It involves not only searching for candidates through professional sites, online career forums, and social media, but also conducting virtual interviews and virtual onboarding processes.

Virtual recruiting benefits both employers and employees. It allows employers to access a large pool of candidates and broadens career opportunities for potential employees. Virtual recruitment also speeds up the hiring process, saves time and money for both employers and employees, and reduces turnover rates.

AI recruiting

AI recruiting is becoming more popular among HR professionals and refers to the use of artificial intelligence to automate the parts of the recruitment process like screening CVs or scheduling interviews. According to 52% of HR leaders, the hardest part of recruitment is determining which candidates among an extensive applicant pool are the best fit. Thanks to AI, recruiters can focus on creating better strategies to communicate with shortlisted candidates instead of spending time and effort screening CVs. AI recruiting also enables recruiters to gain more information about the skills and knowledge of the candidates by analysing their social media, CVs and defining patterns of behaviour.

Natural language processing (NLP)

In the past, recruiters often spent most of their time looking through hundreds of CVs to fill one position. Because of this, they’d look specifically for keywords and ignore the rest of the content, which is one of the most inefficient ways to choose a candidate. A field of AI, NLP speeds up the process and guards against subconscious bias while delivering a shortlist of the best-qualified candidates. It uses lexical, semantical, and other kinds of analysis to interpret natural language, including hidden meanings, sentiments, or intent. Today, NLP can handle legal documents, create algorithms that match potential candidates with vacancies, and assist recruiters in repetitive tasks such as scanning through CVs.

Predictive analytics

Predictive analytics allow recruiters to use historic workforce data to their advantage. It considers factors like previous work experience, character traits, and skill sets to detect the candidates who are most likely to succeed at the job. Predictive analytics also helps discover potential candidates who aren’t actively seeking a job but are open to new opportunities. What is more, it can detect current employees who are considering leaving a company. Combined with AI, predictive analytics has the potential to reshape recruitment methods and approaches further.

Social media recruiting

Social media is an indispensable part of our lives for communicating, expressing opinions, shopping and finding new career opportunities, and that’s why using social media for recruiting will only grow in popularity. In the future, companies will pay more attention to engaging candidates through social media, post more photos and videos that aid in recruiting and encourage current employees to share content about new openings. Posting on social media is also another way to strengthen employer branding. Skilled candidates have lots of employment opportunities, and strong employer branding makes your company stand out from the rest.

Referral programs

The hot job market has made the search for candidates a more challenging quest than ever before. That’s where referral programs come in handy. Throughout the last decade, nearly 30% of newly hired employees were found through employee referral programs. These programs are often among the most cost-effective recruitment methods. Often, referred employees are a perfect cultural fit, good performers, and less likely to leave.

Referral programs vary and may include doubled monthly salary, bonuses for successful referrals, phones or laptops as rewards, and so on.

Diverse teams

Remote work made it possible to hire employees based solely on their skills and knowledge instead of their location. As such, workforces become more diverse in terms of culture, race, religion, gender, etc. In turn, diversity increases companies’ productivity, creativity, and profit. Every employee presents different points of view based on their background and experience. Having multiple perspectives on the same problems leads to fast, unexpected, and efficient solutions.

Data analytics

Future recruitment trends will also include data analytics tools and applicant tracking software that allow hiring managers to discover patterns for searching, selecting, and hiring candidates. Identifying such patterns helps optimize recruitment processes and enables data-driven decision-making. With data analytics tools, recruiters can better understand candidates’ previous experiences, which can lead to more accurate hiring decisions. Data analytics will help detect the patterns in recruiting and shape future recruitment practices.

Agile workforce

An agile workforce consists of full-time, part-time, and freelance employees in a company that wants to adapt to the changing business landscape quickly. A scheme like this opens more opportunities for retaining expertise, promoting innovation, and increasing collaboration between the company and professionals in different fields. In this case, any technological, operational, or strategic changes can be faced without losses.

Generation Z recruitment

Some of us still imagine Gen Z as edgy teenagers who have weird tastes in music and clothes. But it’s 2021 out there, and Gen Z has already grown up and infiltrated the job market. And it turns out they have pretty different views on jobs and careers compared to millennials.

To attract Gen Z talent, you need to adapt your recruitment strategies to their values:

• Prioritize diversity: Gen Z candidates consider a company’s position on diversity a key factor in their decision to work there.
• Foster flexibility and remote work opportunities: Work-life balance, safety, and a focus on quality over quantity are priorities for Gen Z, especially in the post-pandemic world.
• Automate and digitize the recruitment process: Gen Zs don’t remember life without technology, and they tend to trust companies that incorporate modern technologies into their processes more than companies that don’t.
• Focus on selling the role: Gen Z candidates are well aware of their value and the number of opportunities waiting for them. You have to be persuasive in explaining why your offer is the best one.

If you want to bring Gen Z to your company, impress them. Show them that you care not only about making money, but also about ensuring the professional and personal development of all employees.

Recruiting the right way

The rapid changes of the recruitment industry over the last few years have changed the approach that many firms are choosing to make. To stay ahead of the trend, newly developed AI, multiple candidate channels and the latest marketing techniques are used at DSA to ensure we can provide our clients with the best service on the market.

If you have any questions or would like to enquire about our services, please call us on 01675 464 060 or email info@dsaexecutive.com. Alternatively, visit our website and view our services page here.

Lidia Dats, 17/08/21