How changing demographics and workplace structures will alter the recruiting paradigm.
The future of recruiting is going to look and feel dramatically different than it does today. In the future, the workforce will be younger and more diverse. Employees and leaders will be selected for their creativity and problem-solving skills rather than the status of their academic degree. They will also work differently — in flat hierarchies and remote locations. Team dynamics will change according to project needs.
Consider the data:
- By 2030, employees will spend 24 percent more time using social and emotional skills than they do today.
- Employees will spend 55 percent more time using technical and digital skills by 2030 than they do today.
- Demand for higher cognitive skills including creativity, critical thinking, and decision making is expected to increase by 19 percent in the United States.
- There are 61 million Gen Zs in the US alone (one million more than millennials), and the first wave just graduated from college. By 2030 they will dominate the workplace.
- Fully 79 percent of executives believe the future of work will be based more on specific projects than established roles or titles.
- Companies will continue to prioritize diversity in recruiting because it has been shown to improve corporate culture and financial performance.
To evolve with global business trends, we need to adapt how we find, vet and hire candidates. The skills companies will need to thrive in the future can’t be determined from a resume. Studies show that traditional methods of recruiting at the same handful of college campuses every year are why companies have a diversity problem to begin with.
The future of work requires a more agile approach to recruiting that makes better use of a broader range of candidate data and analytics to assess not just who the candidate is or where they studied but how they will perform and fit into the company culture.
What’s a resume?
This shift begins with the vetting process. Many experts today predict that resumes will soon be a relic from the past. This trend is already starting to take root. A recent Jobvite survey found resume reviews to be one of the biggest bottlenecks in the recruiting process.
While recruiters still rely on resumes today, they are getting better at culling data from multiple sites and sources to get a more accurate picture of who a candidate is beyond resume data. According to the Jobvite survey, personality tests were ranked among the top additional sources of information to better understand a candidate’s fitness for a job.
In response, many recruiting firms are partnering with pre-employment assessment companies so they can provide candidate personality data to improve their clients’ recruiting decisions. Understanding candidates’ personality traits and problem-solving skills provides companies with better insight into whether they will fit the job and the culture, and where they may have gaps that can be addressed through training or mentoring.
Social recruiting and data-driven decisions.
The future of recruiting will embrace a more marketing-based approach to attracting candidates. They will run targeted recruiting ads with messages tailored to each audience. Career sites will showcase more video. Overall there will be a heavy investment in talent branding and social connectivity. These methods will help organizations attract younger candidates and to build connections with the passive talent pools for current and future hiring.
All of these trends are driven by data and the ability to analyze information from multiple sources. The more recruiters can make data-driven decisions about a candidate’s skills and personality traits, the better they will be at matching people to roles in the future of work.