There are two teams that come into play when hiring occurs in a company. There’s management who tend to act on impulse when they see an employee with an impressive resume or cool ideas for ways to improve their business. Then, there’s HR which, we think you’ll agree, acts far more rationally. They keep a check on the legal side of hires and ensure that companies aren’t leaving themselves open to problems that could crop up in the future. For instance, management might wish to hire someone with little experience but great potential. While the HR team might be more comfortable having a tad more experience in the room. These teams often but heads on potential hires but eventually they have to come to an agreement.
Indeed, it could be argued that recruitment is one of the most important areas for your HR team. As such, it is important to understand that the trends that will be shaping the future of recruiting and thus HR itself.
It’s A Candidate Market Out There
You might think due to the huge number of employees on the job market today, employees and HR teams can sit back and wait for the talent to come pouring in. Actually, experts suggest that candidates are in more control here. Particularly, the top candidates who will almost certainly have multiple offers from different businesses. As such, businesses and HR teams need to work hard to dazzle and delight potential candidates. They have to make sure that they feel as though the business is offering everything they are looking for.
You need to think about this when you are posting ads online or sending out offers to potential candidates. It’s important that you do show what’s different unique and attractive about your business. Teams are going to need to show why candidates should choose the company that they are a part of.
Return Of The Apprenticeships
You might have noticed that apprenticeships are slowly trickling back into the business model and it’s not just blue-collar industries. White-collar industries have been showing interest and support for apprenticeship schemes as well. There are many advantages of supporting this type of setup in a business.
First, it allows you to get young talent before their price tag rises too high. Second, you’ll be able to shape them however you want, get cheap labor and train them up. Hopefully, if you promote loyalty in your business, they’ll also stick around once they’ve received training, strengthening your business.
HR teams may be responsible for setting up and managing the apprenticeship schemes that make up part of the workforce. This could include forming connections with colleges for training as well as recruitment.
Forget Spreadsheets, Start Looking At Visualised Data
If you hate the part of your job that involves looking at spreadsheets, analysing numbers, candidate traits and goodness knows what else, you’re in luck. A big part of HR in the future will be data visualization. Rather than looking at data, you can use software to bring it to life and see the patterns in a visual way. For instance, you’ll be able to see the hierarchy of an IT department. In doing so, you can fill in the gaps by knowing what’s business from your own IT team and that’s just one example of how effective visualization can be.
Before visualization, you could cast big data aside as something that, while valuable, didn’t provide many benefits. But with visualization, there is real merit with being able to see all the factors and recognizing the key traits. It will help HR teams build up businesses that are going to perform well on the market.
Retention Is More Crucial Than Recruitment
Voluntary turnover by employees is a big problem for businesses. Over a year, they can spend hundreds of thousands on marketing and filling new positions of people who have left their business. They have to spend even more money in the actual recruitment process because it takes a lot of time to find the right individual for the role. As such, it does make sense to work to maximize retention in a business.
To do this, HR teams need to look at the issues that are causing employees to abandon ship. It might be a problem with how the business is being managed. Perhaps, it is because the employees simply don’t feel valued in their positions. If that’s the case, it’s worth thinking about how to fix this issue. HR will always play a key role in providing support for employees. It is their responsibility to ensure that any issues are handled and dealt with so that employees feel comfortable in their respective roles.
Don’t Forget Security
One of the issues with recruitment is that it involves keeping a lot of personal data and using it frequently. If you are looking for the right candidate, you might be sifting through a wealth of different information that could be deemed sensitive. We know that hacks, fraud, and data theft are all becoming more common in the business world. As such, it is crucial that companies and HR teams protect themselves against threats like this. Any sensitive employee data should be handled carefully and stored securely.
Obviously, cloud servers are the most important tool to consider here. With a cloud server, you can make sure that everything is stored remotely. As such, there is less of a chance that someone could steal it without trouble. You’ll see an increased focus on data security in 2018 and further into the future. You can also bet that businesses will be punished more severely for breaches to data management regulations.
As you can see then, there are a lot of changes happening in the recruitment industry that are sure to impact on HR. The role of HR professionals will change, and no, before you ask, the position of HR is not going to be handled by AI in the future. Luckily for HR professionals, the tides are actually turning the other way. It’s likely that there is going to be a heavier focus on finding unique individuals with specific characteristics that provide something fresh for the company. For that, you still need the human touch.
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