Re-Emerged Trendsin The Dynamic World Of Recruitment Industry

Mirela Vasile, HR Director, People Enablement & Digitization, Synamedia

The world of work is changing, enabled by technology and now the pandemic disrupting everything and accelerating change at a pace never seen before. Recruitment has taken front row being impacted in a very direct and abrupt away. As one of the most dynamic areas of the People function, it had to go through a steep curve adapting to the new ways of working.

The impact that the pandemic had on the job market around the world created challenges in the go-to-market approach. As the world changed, so did the job market and the recruiting process alongside. It happened almost overnight, and recruiters had to find a way to adapt as fast as they could through openness and eagerness to learn, exploring other ways to approach recruitment and embracing the unknown. Who would have thought before we can do interview and hire exclusively remote?

The need for adaptability has been one of the biggest trends emerging in the last two years and will continue to be so. Lots of companies were talking about embracing change and agile ways of working before the pandemic, but when faced with uncertainty and prospects of everything shutting down, many had to act on what does this means for them, their business and industry.

This volatile environment created an unprecedented challenge to businesses all around the globe, with their multi-layers of inter-connections, dependencies as we operate in a connected and global landscape thus having to mitigate and prevent a domino effect type of risk.

Just think of how challenging onboarding new people started to be when we moved completely to virtual hiring. Having to ship equipment, coordinate logistically the tasks of different departments all working remotely proven to be quite a task at the beginning until a sort of mechanism emerged to keep things afloat.

The adaptability trend also created a different kind of opportunities, explored by very few up to this point. With so many people impacted by the job loss across industries directly affected by the forced shutdowns, the talent pool available on the market grew exponentially. Companies that continued to hire or increased their hiring needs, seized this unprecedented opportunity, and took an out of the box approach, looking for skills to be reconverted for their open roles, rather than the more conventional checkbox job match approach.

"Recruitment is and will remain a human-to-human approach, always reinventing itself by tapping into technology advancements to organize and streamline the company’s hiring efforts"

Candidates also became more flexible on their requirements, open to explore convergent areas to their established domain expertise, often considering total reconversion.

The skills reconversion is another big trend on the rise in many industries and skilled recruiters that know what is happening in both the job market and their own industry are tapping into it seeking the best of the best, a win-win for both candidates and employers.

“Recruitment is and will remain a human-to-human approach, always reinventing itself by tapping into technology advancements to organize and streamline the company’s hiring efforts”

Diversity and inclusion have emerged as a priority for organisations and, while they have been part of the hiring and business world for years, there are still lots of companies yet to act on it.

The global events that emerged lately made it actual than ever before, showing we need to make a bigger effort to seereal change.Companies must play a more active role, being intentional on their approach to ensure diversity, equity and inclusion are at the core of their organisations’ culture. Stating an intent to be an equitable and inclusive environment is not the same as making sure to follow through this intent.

With a committed executive team, a strong management advocating and reinforcing the diversity agenda, coupled with ongoing awareness raised in the organisations, companies can start making a huge difference in moving from intent to action, improving equality and diversity in their workplace. Recruitment execution has a big role to play in this space being in a key role that allows them shifting the needle on hiring intake composition.

Diversity, equality, and inclusion need to be translated in every aspect of the screening and selection process, starting with gender neutral job descriptions, the make of the panellists in the interview process, the onboarding content and so on.

Technology is there to enable it through a good and optimised design, but it cannot remove unconscious biases nor replace the human interaction. Recruitment is and will remain a human-to-human approach, always reinventing itself by tapping into technology advancements to organize and streamline the company’s hiring efforts.

Agile