Recruitment Trends For 2021: Latest Predictions You Should Be Thinking About
Recruitment activities are routine processes and an integral part of all organizations. It involves filling new positions and replacing the employees who got greener pastures or just decided to walk away. Unlike any other time, the year 2021 has begun with significant challenges carried forward from 2020. It has brought a challenge to recruitment agencies and Human Resource managers, pushing these companies to ensure that they have the updated systems for their organizations to run smoothly as desired.
The current scenarios have only added to the woes of skill gap issues, manpower shortage, limited access to expert talent, and many other recruitment challenges. Selecting applicants from across cities make it doubly difficult as companies get hundreds or more than a thousand applicants per role.
While many may be panicking on where to get started from, there are others who have transformed their recruitment efficiency by leveraging the right tools. Using AI in recruitment or AI in hiring, home-based employment and remote recruiter support are some of the popular practices in 2021.
The Latest Predictions and Recruitment Trends in 2021 That All Recruiters Should be Thinking About
1. Targeted Use of AI in Hiring Process Optimization
Let us first understand what AI in hiring means before understanding its implications in recruitment.
What Is AI in Recruitment
Applications supported by Artificial Intelligence (AI) can automatically scan and search through a large amount of data and create reports based on the search, tracking, or identification criteria. AI-based applications can be linked with various data or people analytics applications and linked databases to create predictive models. These models are created to predict possible outcomes related to a particular profile in the context of the employer organization. Let us now dive deep and look at the benefits, features, and future of the use of AI in recruitment.
How AI in Recruitment Designed to Optimize the Hiring Processes
As a recruiter, you do not have to go through the hard-tiring process of viewing every single application and applicant query. You could use AI chatbots that carry out essential functions like asking questions to get the best-fit candidate; these tools are now synchronized within the AI in hiring practices.
With a bulk-full of applications, there will be a large volume of CVs without any doubt. Avoiding time wastage in going through each of the Curriculum Vitae, the AI-based automation can screen hundreds of formatted and standardized candidate resumes to pick up traits based on criteria and prepare a shortlisted candidate list. Several intelligent automation tools can be custom programmed to look for specific skills, certifications, academic qualifications, GPA, years of experience, etc., and overlook things like age, gender, religion, etc.
2. Enhanced Use of HR Analytics and AI in Recruitment Strategy
In the position of a human resource manager, there is quite a lot that is expected of you. Employee performance and retention can be improved through analytics, which analyzes and applies analytical processes to the human capital. With AI, HR has a simple job; metrics like recruitment, engagement, training, and development are managed smoothly.
With the enhanced use of AI analytics in candidate hiring and retention and forecasting future demands, big companies like Google, Microsoft, Walmart, Juniper Networks, etc., have completely reinvented hiring strategies and processes within their organizations.
Not only the Fortune 500 companies but numerous organizations which have large-scale annual recruitment needs are leveraging AI to enhance and speed up some of the recruitment processes.
3. Increased Use of Virtual Recruitment Applications
With 2021 having the full effect of the pandemic, HR may not find it a choice to invite executives to their offices for interviews. However, this can only be achieved by those who have already opted to use Ai recruitment.
Many platforms like Talentis are working on getting their clients the executives they want. They make the job application or headhunting, and interviews are done through online videos using platforms like Zoom.
AI has eliminated many tiresome processes – like painstakingly going through a massive amount of CVs’ – the majority of which are only going to be found unsuitable or irrelevant for a position. AI brings endless benefits, including reducing the workload of the talent acquisition team, allowing them more time and resources to enhance recruitment outcomes across roles across divisions.
4. Remote Team Recruitment – Here to Stay
Many recruiters have, for the short time that their employees had to work from home, seen the great benefits that come along with it. Remote working is not another word for a work-from-home arrangement, though. It is about sourcing certain business processes or tasks, or projects to remote teams. It could be a team of individuals working from any location other than office premises or a team comprising professionals operating from different geographical locations.
Numerous companies have now hired remote recruiters and created platforms or online working facilities for their software teams, data analytics teams, content management teams, enterprise record management teams, HR teams, etc. Through such platforms or online resources, remote employees are able to manage work through virtual desktops, VPN, cloud-based infrastructure, etc., using their laptops equipped with the right hardware or software.
Companies have also taken to sourcing work through staff augmentation or master vendor-based recruitment strategies and models. The temporary or contractual remote workforce has become a trend across many sectors that have an uncertain project or work volumes. The role of remote recruiters is on an increase. It is wiser to take the help of these experienced remote recruiters if you are planning to strengthen your remote workforce.
5. Home-Based Employment – Will Be Integral to Maintaining Workforce
Home-based employment and working from home were forced on companies to survive over month-long lockdowns. As the pandemic continues to create uncertainties and life risks, for most small and large organizations, home-based employment or working from home continues to be the way work is managed for most kinds of functions.
Companies have started to realize that for business continuity or stable performance, it is wiser to invest in technology that allows them to improve employee availability, online work management, and performance improvement support for a home-based employment workforce.
6. Automation in Application Tracking will be Widespread
The year 2021 is the year that automated applicant tracking systems (ATS) will increase in popularity. One can not be left behind; technology never waits on anyone unless you move with it; the benefits will be staying ahead of the competition and the ability to manage recruitment in a more profitable manner.
A few years back, talent acquisition teams of people-intensive companies put in 100-300 man-hours of work (or more) per month in tracking applications and pre-screening candidates. These activities need to be conducted to shortlist candidates for the first round of interviews with project managers or division heads. Today, it seems a huge expenditure to pay thousands of dollars for work that can be managed in minutes or a few hours through application tracking systems.
7. Mobile Recruitment Can Not be Avoided
You might be hearing more and more about mobile recruiting – this was among the most preferred methods of initiating and conducting the first stages of recruitment. Employees are able to find, apply, and get interview offers through the apps on their mobile phones. The recruiters for many companies used questionnaires and pre-recorded interview methods to screen candidates. Pre-recorded interviews are assessed with ease and efficiency than spending time on arranging and conducting interviews.
In 2021, numerous companies across sectors conducted most interview rounds through laptops or mobile phones and even technical and behavioral assessments. The investment in mobile recruiting is not going to be ruled out but rather enhanced, especially in the context of increased remote and work-from-home employment.
8. Employer Branding Will Become Popular
The term employer branding started getting popular in the 1990s. With time, it has become a globally known term for companies across sectors. Still, not many companies had invested much in improving online employer branding.
As recruitment across sectors is being done online and job seekers take time out to review potential employers, employer branding is something that companies can no longer ignore if they want their online presence to be positive.
Organizations are creating digital employer branding materials and creating solid social media networks to improve their brand as an employer. Company websites also have pages dedicated to their employees as part of moves to project the company as a good workplace. Surveys and market research is conducted to develop strategies to enhance reputation as a great workplace or a good employer. This trend is likely to increase in 2021.
9. The Use of Natural Language Processing and Soft Skills
It has become a common practice in many sectors for companies in one part of Europe, North Americas, the Middle East, Asia, or Australia to hire teams or manpower from other parts of the continent. With remote employment on the increase, people are hiring from across the globe.
The ability to communicate efficiently in a foreign language is not a skill that every recruitment team can have. It is much easier and effective to use natural language processing (NLP) tools to manage applicants who are native French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Ukrainian, Arabic, etc., and have limited skills in speaking other languages.
The use of NLP in hiring has increased many folds over the years and is projected to keep increasing.
Alliance Recruitment Agency
Alliance Recruitment Agency is a global recruitment solutions company with specialized teams of recruiters for different industry sectors. We also offer consultancy and advisory support to employers for enhancing and optimizing their recruitment approach and processes. Our company has enabled many companies to leverage the power of the latest tech-enabled hiring practices to offer fast, efficient, cost-efficient, and outcome-oriented recruitment solutions. We have a highly-efficient team of remote recruiters for various sectors, and are helping numerous companies to successfully implement home-based employment practices.
If you are looking for a partner to choose the right recruitment models and optimize hiring outcomes, please connect with us. We will be happy to help you.
