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An Absolute Must: 2016 Recruiting Trends

Denying the importance of trends is a mistake -- to be the first can confer a competitive advantage for your firm and your reputation, and goes towards building your employer brand. Once new trends have evolved into current practices, they lose their effectiveness due to their wide spread and use by competitors.
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Today many recruiters are so busy that they forget to put time aside to monitor changing trends. Is it really a priority to do so? Well yes. Denying the importance of trends is a mistake -- to be the first can confer a competitive advantage for your firm and your reputation, and goes towards building your employer brand. Once new trends have evolved into current practices, they lose their effectiveness due to their wide spread and use by competitors.

To remain at the forefront of best practices in unearthing great talents, we must reinvent ourselves, distinguish ourselves from others and constantly develop new recruitment strategies. This is an absolute "must" and a view that Dr. John Sullivan also supports in a series of articles on 2016 trends. Out of the 12 major trends identified by Dr. Sullivan, here are a few that will hopefully inspire you.

Video becomes prominent in all recruiting messaging

Why being aware of this trend is critical -- online videos now exceed 50 per cent of mobile traffic and 64 per cent of all Internet traffic. And video usage is bound to continue to increase (at least in part because of the popularity of cat videos, LOL). Video usage is increasing because of their high impact. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, think what a video is worth because it is more eye-catching and engaging. Most recruiting leaders find that videos are the very best way to reveal the excitement and the passion that can be found at your firm. If the videos are shot by your own employees on their mobile phone, they are also likely to be considered more authentic and believable.

Best practices involving the use of videos:

• Deloitte started a major trend with its "film festival," which offered its employees a chance to shoot short videos from their cell phones revealing the fun inside the company. More than 2,000 employees participated.

• With the widespread availability of smart phones, recruiters and hiring managers can now make personalized recruiting videos to send to high-value candidates.

• Video job descriptions and even video job offers can have a profound impact on selling candidates.

• "How-to videos" on a technical topic posted on YouTube have proven to be a great attraction tool. When the employee is contacted, they can eventually turn that contact into an employee referral.

• Placing actual recruitment ads on TV has been recently popularized by GE, Walmart, and Koch. Coors offered a compelling TV ad that linked fun work and producing a great product. The ad included these lines: "A story about loving what you do"; "When you love your job, you never work a day in your life"; "When beer is your calling, you never clock out."

All recruiting applications and communications must be deliverable on the mobile platform

Why you must track this trend -- the smart phone is ubiquitous and people carry everywhere. As a result, it has the highest response rate of any communications channel. Already more than 43 per cent of job seekers use the mobile phone in their job search, and that number will continue to rise until the mobile smart phone is dominant in recruiting. And as a result, it becomes the primary way for applying, communicating, and providing information to candidates and maintaining candidate relationships.

Best practices that allow the movement of more recruiting tasks to the smart phone:

• Failing to have the capability to complete an application on your corporate applications site from any mobile platform may cause your application drop off rate to skyrocket.

• You should also make it possible for candidates to accept your offers directly on their mobile phone.

• You should always use the most responsive channel for communications, and currently that is often texting.

• The mobile platform makes it possible to hold live video interviews from anywhere.

• All internal recruiting applications and webpages should be mobile phone accessible for all managers and recruiters.

• Employees must be able to do all of their referral tasks on the mobile phone.

• Eligible candidates should be able to self-schedule their own interviews within any of their hiring manager's available times.

Shifting to data-based decision-making in recruiting

Why you must track this trend -- lately in recruiting, we have gotten quite good at collecting metrics. Unfortunately, after collecting them, we don't use them to make decisions or to force change. Because data-based decision-making improves decision quality and speed, it has already been adapted by every other business function, except HR. I estimate that compared to the normal intuitive decision, data-based decisions can be at least 25 per cent better. Google is leading the way by declaring that "All people decisions are based on data & analytics." And "We want to bring the same level of rigor to people-decisions that we do to engineering decisions."

Best practices of a data-based decision model:

• Data will reveal which sources produce quality applicants and hires.

• Data will reveal which types of interviews and interview questions best identify future top performers.

• Data can show you whether your references are accurate predictors of future performance.

• Data can show you your new hire failure rate (which can average 46 per cent).

• Data can reveal which recruiters and hiring managers routinely produce the highest-quality hires, and which ones do not.

• Data will reveal which single factor has the highest impact on hiring success (i.e. the relationship with the hiring manager).

An article by Sonia Desrosiers in reference to the following series by Dr John Sullivan :

Recruiting Trends for 2016 and Their Supporting Best Practices, Part 2 of 2

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