Recruiting Trends and Best Practices in 2022 and Beyond

Recruiting Trends and Best Practices in 2022 and Beyond

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In 2022, the way we recruit has changed. New recruiting trends will significantly impact your  agency’s recruitment practices this year.

The current job market is 90% candidate-driven. Recruiting agents don’t choose talent anymore—they choose a specific person instead. In return, the recruiting paradigm is undergoing a significant shift. What does this mean in practice? Candidates are now being treated as customers.

Finding qualified job candidates with in-demand skills has become extremely difficult. It is expensive for businesses and time-consuming for recruiters.

Is your agency leading the pack with innovative recruitment initiatives? If not, will you fall behind your competitors?

Keep reading as we highlight the best recruitment practices and trends in 2022.

Recruitment Marketing for Agencies

Recruitment marketing is a strategy that implements marketing tactics in the recruitment process. You’ll use marketing to nurture and attract businesses as well as talented individuals to your agency.

This strategy is vital to put in place because of the current status of the labour market. The goal is to help agencies overcome the challenges of a candidate-driven market. Do this by marketing to qualified individuals looking for work and businesses struggling with the hiring process who may need your help.

Approach recruiting proactively and embrace recruitment marketing to fare better this year.

Employer Branding

72% of global recruiting leaders agree that employer branding has a significant impact on hiring. The lack of awareness or interest in the employer brand is one of the biggest challenges to recruitment. In other words, no matter how good your agency is, qualified candidates need to want to be hired by the business you’re recruiting for.

“Employer brand” refers to an organisation’s reputation and popularity as an employer. It’s the brand’s value proposition to employees. This is different from the brand the company projects to customers. You should make your clients aware of this dynamic so that you have the right tools to help them find top hires.

As you know companies with a poor employer brand reputation struggle to attract candidates. They will continue to unless they offer something new and exciting to prospective employees. What’s important here is that your client knows it too.

Be proactive! When you see a branding problem you should diplomatically discuss it with your client, for instance, by suggesting benefits that could make their offer more attractive to prospective applicants.

Remote Work and Flexibility

More and more companies are offering flexi hours and allowing work from home. Some enterprises have already gone fully remote.

What’s more, in specialised sectors struggling to find candidates with particular skills, remote work attracts matching candidates from locations around the world. There’s no need to invest in lengthy and costly visa processes. It’s also a perfect solution in a situation when a great candidate is simply unwilling to relocate.

Attracting first class candidates these days without providing some remote work allowances is a challenge. From the point of view of an employee working from home allows for a better life work balance.

However, you should explain to your client that this isn’t just beneficial for those they employ. A happy employee is more likely to provide value for many years to come and workplace flexibility increases work satisfaction. The stats show that 54% of office employees would leave their job for one that offers more flexibility.

Inbound Recruiting

You must proactively attract candidates with the goal that they’ll choose one of your clients as their next employer. You should also attract new clients so that they consistently place their available vacancies in your agency’s hands. This is inbound recruiting.

Your goal here is to understand your target audience and make clients and candidates come to you. You can do it by building trust through inbound marketing strategies such as publishing high-value blogs, visual content and social media posts. Don’t underestimate the value of keeping your potential leads informed via email either.

The truth is that the recruiting industry has already seen a switch from outbound to inbound recruiting. Offering an open position with your client to a potential candidate on LinkedIn no longer works. Don’t stay behind! If you’re looking for a long-term solution to overhaul your recruiting strategy, you need inbound recruiting.

GDPR Compliance

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) replaced the older Data Protection Act (DPA) in 2018. The GDPR seeks to unify data regulations within the EU and give people greater control over their personal information.

The GDPR has completely changed the way recruiting agencies must operate.

Now, data controllers must secure the private data of individuals under new, strict guidelines. Recruitment agencies must comply with GDPR requirements to remain successful and in operation.

Data-Driven Recruiting

Using data-driven metrics can give your agency great insights into your hiring strategy. You’ll discover which strategies work well, and which ones need improvement.

Data-driven recruiting methods involve decision making and planning based on data. You need to collect data through marketing technology. Which channels and content your clients and candidates respond well to? Which jobs and clients get the fastest hires?

Candidates tracking systems and recruitment marketing platforms can inform your recruiting procedures. You can then improve some of the essential hiring metrics and use them as a selling point for your agency when looking for new clients and building candidates’ trust.

Candidate Experience

Your candidate experience is the candidate’s perception of your recruiting process and your agency. It’s the behaviours, feelings, and attitudes they experience during the process.

Why is paying attention to your candidate experience so essential in 2022?

Because candidates who enjoy their experience will more likely accept a job offer you present them with. If they don’t accept a particular offer, they’re more likely to treat other offers you have for them seriously in the future or refer other qualified workers to approach your agency during their job search.

You also can’t ignore negative candidate experiences. You may think you’re only losing a candidate, but your reputation may suffer. Your client, after all, can also lose big bucks in the process. One great example of this is a case by Virgin Media. They calculated a $5.4 million annual loss due to lousy candidate experiences—the equivalent of £4.4 million.

Talent Pools

A talent pool is a place where recruiters and HR managers keep their top job candidates. They consist of not only those who have applied, but also sourced and referred candidates. There also include candidates who have willingly entered your pool in an inbound way.

Talent pools are an excellent way to source high-quality candidates for job openings. Imagine posting a job and immediately having a place to go to select the best-of-the-best individuals for the job to present to your client?

It’s a no-brainer to start a talent pool if one is not already part of your recruitment process.

‍Flexible Job Offers and Assessments

The path to a well-paid job used to be quite straightforward. A person would get a degree in a certain industry and then start a related career. Today, the market is no longer so simple.

There’s a noticeable move of big companies to allow hiring people without a degree as well as accept degrees that are only vaguely related to a given position.

If a degree is no longer necessary how can one tell if a candidate is good enough? Skills are more important than education or even long work experience. That’s why skills assessments are more and more common these days, particularly when it comes to technical positions.

Having a degree and knowing how to prepare a convincing CV is important but what truly matters is being able to do the job. Encourage your clients to keep an open-mind to advertise in a way that actually allows them to find the best people for the job.

Candidate Relationship Management

We’ve all heard of customer relationship management. It’s how we manage and improve relationships with current and potential customers. But did you know the same method exists for job candidates?

Candidate relationship management is all about creating a pipeline of strong candidate relationships. This method is a solution to the challenge of attracting talent in the recruiting industry.

Social Recruiting

The best agency recruiters are beginning to implement social media channels for recruiting processes. They’re using social media networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram to attract and find talent. Also, they’re scouring job boards, forums, and blogs to search for potential talent proactively.

Social recruiting is more than posting current job openings on your agency’s social networks. You should also use these networks to search and reach out to talented individuals.

Recruitment Automation Tools

Recruitment automation tools are software that automates the recruitment process. Some have existed for a while now. These include applicant tracking systems and recruitment marketing software. The new trend is software that offers a two in one solution—both under one platform.

These new tools help find, attract, engage, nature, and convert candidates into applicants. They also simplify and streamline the hiring process, which makes it faster and more efficient for all involved.

Agencies who don’t put in place these new tools will lose top talent who’s likely to move on to more forward-thinking competitors.

Talent Sourcing

Proactive talent sourcing is now a must-have recruitment strategy.

According to LinkedIn, only about 36% of prospective candidates are seeking jobs. Yet, over 90% of them want to hear about new job openings.

Candidate sourcing is to identify, research, and network with potential candidates. Then you can convert them into applicants. By doing this, you’ll generate a consistent flow of highly-skilled candidates so that you always have top talents to introduce to your clients.

Project-Based Hiring

Long term recruiting is an essential part of the business but it’s impossible to ignore the emerging trend of project-based hiring. Your client doesn’t always need to fill a full-time position, particularly when trying to venture to new territories. By employing individuals on project-basis a business minimises risk and maximises return.

A successful project-based hiring experience can mean that the cooperation ends after a project. In this case, it grows the client’s pool of reliable individuals to work with on similar projects in the future. It can also be an excellent way to try out a full-time hire. If your client is unsure about job specifications or business direction, suggest project-based hiring to them as an option to gain some clarity before they commit to take someone on board permanently.

Structured Interviews

Structured interviews introduce effectiveness, fairness, and legal defensibility into the hiring process.

A structured interview is one in which the interviewer asks a set of predetermined questions. The questions are planned so that all candidates receive the same questions and in the same order.

Since all candidates are asked the same questions, it’s easy to compare answers. Your client can then evaluate talent objectively and fairly. This is also something you should keep in mind when learning more about the candidates, before presenting them to clients.

It’s crucial to discuss the importance of structured interviews to your client so that they don’t lose out on hiring great candidates your agency provides them with.

Strategic Alignment

Last but not least, remember that your recruitment process should be aligned with your client’s overall business strategy. Your client’s company cannot grow without new talent, but presenting a candidate to your client should be a strategic decision.

To recruit strategically, you must identify your client’s future needs and goals. Not every candidate who roughly matches the job specifications should be introduced to your client. You want to stay ahead of the competition in terms of successful hires and it’s important to value your client’s time. Your candidate should be the closest match possible to what your client is really looking for.

Investing in the New Generation

Many hiring trends are aligned with the needs of candidates who have been professionally active for a while. They’re not only highly-skilled but also have a lot of experience in their field. You certainly know the value they can offer to your clients. Unfortunately, this preference results in both recruiters and clients overlooking the importance of hiring fresh talent.

There’s a new generation who’s just started to send out their CVs, looking for internships and their first work experiences. While the market is currently aimed at millennials, young people from the generation Z are a great hiring opportunity.

Suggest to your clients considering young candidates you present to them. They may not have a lot of experience yet but their youth and enthusiasm can benefit any company. There are also many things businesses can do to attract and retain generation Z employees.

Stay Ahead of Recruiting Trends With Results-Driven Digital Marketing Services

No two companies are the same, so you must tailor your recruiting process to be seen as an industry expert.

Follow these recruiting trends for 2022 and partner with the right marketing agency. Then, thanks to marketing strategies, you can generate a consistent flow of candidates for your clients looking to hire, providing them with the best talent pool. You can also earn new clients for additional revenue opportunities.

We’re here to be your marketing partner and help provide the newest recruiting ideas. We have the knowledge, strategy, and execution to achieve your goals.

Contact us today, and let’s talk strategy.

Thanks for reading. I hope you got some value!