A LinkedIn report says demand for recruitment specialists is up 63% since 2016.
LinkedIn Talent Solutions has released a report explaining how recruitment has become increasingly crucial for business. According to their data companies are hiring more recruiting professionals right now than at any other time in the last five years, with demand up 63 percent since 2016.
The means the war for talent is likely to become more aggressive than ever when it comes to hiring and retaining recruiting teams. Recruiting has long been about human connection, people skills, and intuition—now it’s also getting analytical. As recruiters take on a more strategic role and interface with leaders, their advice and decisions will be backed by data. Whether analysing trends in the labour market or predicting who would make the best hire, it’s increasingly critical for recruiting pros to understand data and how to shape it into insights.
Here are their seven predictions on how the role will change.
1 Recruitment will be critical.
With demand for recruiters on the rise, employers will have to assess whether they need to hire more recruiters to meet their future hiring needs. That said, only 34 percent of recruiting professionals surveyed said that retaining top recruiters would be a major priority for them over the next 5 years.
2 Workforce plans will have to get agile.
The top priority for recruiting organisations over the next five years will be keeping pace with their company’s rapidly changing hiring needs, according to our survey. To keep up, recruiters need to stay close to the business by aligning with leaders often while also keeping their own teams flexible so that they can adapt to new needs quickly.
3 Recruiters will be less like salespeople and more like business people.
Many recruiting jobs still revolve around executing a few core tasks, like sourcing, interviewing, or closing candidates. It’s one thing to execute a hiring plan, but it’s quite another to design a hiring plan — and in the future, companies will ask recruiters to do both
As the most administrative and routine parts of work get automated, jobs are getting more creative and complex. More than 1 in 3 recruiting leaders came from a previous role outside of HR.
4 Using metrics will track outcomes, not just actions.
LinkedIn says that, while time to hire is an easily measurable and commonly used metric, it’s not the most strategic. Because it only explains how fast recruitment teams hire instead of how well they do it.
A slow recruiter who hires 10 high performers is far more valuable than one who efficiently hires 25 poor performers. The challenge with measuring the quality of hires, however, is that it speaks to the long-term business impact of new employees.
5 Using technology more effectively
LinkedIn asked recruiting professionals about the best ways to improve recruiter performance over the next 5 years. Their most popular answer was, investing in new recruiting technology. The most popular tools were as follows:
- Tools to find and engage candidates
- Soft skills assessments
- Tools to analyse the talent market
- Video interviewing
- Customer relationships management systems for managing customer databases
6 Engaging, analysing and advising.
Engaging passive candidates, analysing data, and advising leaders will become essential skills for recruiters. Instead of just sifting through applicants or locating the perfect passive candidates, recruiters will need to focus on effectively bringing them into the funnel.
Instead of simply entering data correctly, they’ll need to leverage data-driven insights to drive decisions. And instead of dutifully executing orders, recruiters will need to advise business leaders and hiring managers—that means pushing back and setting the strategy, not just following it.
7 Recruiting team swill add non-recruiters.
LinkedIn says talent analytics roles have grown by 111 percent since 2014. As companies identify increasingly critical areas of recruiting - like analytics, marketing, and technology - many will decide that these call for their own dedicated roles. Rather than only relying on recruiters, who can dedicate 20 percent of their time to people analytics or recruitment marketing, it will make more sense to hire a specialist who can spend 80 percent of their time on these areas.
These specialists - like data scientists, seasoned marketers, and IT consultants - also bring a higher level of expertise than any recruiter could. As they integrate into recruiting teams, they will be able to share their knowledge, train recruiters, and oversee operations in their area of mastery
