Here Today, Gone Tomorrow Keeping Up With the Current State of Recruiting

When it comes to talent acquisition, revising a recruiting strategy can be daunting.

With more recruiting channels than ever before in a quickly changing landscape, many HR executives are finding it difficult to keep pace. Add competing priorities that extend beyond talent acquisition and increased pressure to lower cost and improve quality and time-to-fill, organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to do on their own.

As future trends quickly become today’s best practices (or yesterday’s news), the following three areas carry the biggest pain points:

Technology:
From applicant tracking systems to state-of-the-art sourcing software, recruitment technology has significantly evolved over the past 10 years, offering solutions for every part of the process. Today, recruitment customer relationship management (CRM) tools are gaining noteworthy attention, as are Web 2.0 tools that help support employment branding and communication. However, unable to afford costly mistakes, many companies are forced to think twice before making an investment.

Consider this:

• By integrating into an applicant tracking system, recruitment CRMs help drive the recruiting life cycle, manage the volume of applicants, and can provide valuable reporting on the back end to help streamline efforts for continuous improvement.

• Today’s leading CRMs also give you the ability to simultaneously post on hundreds of job boards and offer overnight search capabilities through defined criteria for increased efficiency to pinpoint the right talent.

• A recent Aberdeen report titled “Employer Branding: How to Grow, Measure and Manage Your Company’s Perception” reported that the adoption rate of Web 2.0 tools that enhance employment brand will increase more than 100 percent in the next year.

Social recruiting:
As Recruitment 2.0 continues to evolve, social media, networking and micro-blogging are driving the recruiting transformation of the future. With traffic at the big job boards in decline, best-in-class companies are shifting their focus to direct outreach and passive recruiting initiatives. However, considering current trends like job-board aggregators, and tools such as LinkedIn and Twitter being nonexistent five years ago, it can be a challenge to determine what’s here to stay, what’s worth the investment, and what’s gone tomorrow.

To that point:

• Nelson Online recently reported about 60 percent of people on Twitter end up abandoning the service after a month.

• According to the professional networking platform LinkedIn, the site receives 1.5 million new members every month, currently totaling more than 40 million.

• A recent AfterCollege survey of 670 college students found that more than 82 percent of respondents use social networks on a regular basis.

Changing workforce:
At 70 million strong, Gen Y will soon become the largest generation in the workplace. And, say many researchers, they’ll be unlike any generation that has ever come before. With predictions from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that the American workforce will drop by 8 percent between 2010 and 2020, it is vital for companies to understand and embrace Gen Y’s unique workforce attitudes and values in order to attract and retain top performers. With extreme expectations and untraditional demands, many companies currently struggle between new versus old employee expectations and management.

Consider this:

• A survey conducted by the Australian Experimental Learning Centre found that 64 percent of Gen Y employees intend to stay less than two years with their employer.

• The American dream for Gen Y is time not money; salary is no longer the biggest bargaining tool.

• According to Gen Y member and speaker Peter Sheahan, most members of Generation Y will have 25 jobs in their lifetime.

As talent acquisition and recruiting trends evolve, companies are left with a number of options: stay the course, build it in-house, partner with a recruitment process outsourcing provider, or some combination of the preceding.

Regardless of strategy, it’s time for companies to view talent acquisition as a vital strategic solution to overall business plans. Organizations that do not embrace the changing landscape and simply stay the course will be at a significant disadvantage.

As the talent acquisition evolution continues, enterprises committed to understanding and managing these changes will see considerable payoff to their bottom line, increase their competitive edge and further reinforce their brand as an employer of choice.