Faro Newsletter November 2020

COVID-19 has changed the way you recruit as a search and staffing agency. With constantly shifting business needs and fewer resources, you moved your company through historic challenges and started to rethink your approach to recruiting from the ground up.

Search and staffing professionals have risen to the challenge in extremely challenging times. Your teams are leaner, demands on you are greater, and business needs are constantly shifting. But through it all, you’ve stepped up and steadied each other, and now you’re poised to take on a bigger role as search and staffing organizations than ever before. Hereafter are four predictions about the future of recruiting — based on input from data points from the LinkedIn platform, and interviews with talent leaders from around the world. You’ll be on the front line of diversity efforts, connecting with candidates and holding hiring managers to account. You’ll make virtual recruiting feel as personal as an on-site handshake. You’ll make the most of the remote workforce. And you’ll continue to add new skills, adapt as needed, and grow beyond the boundaries of your role. Read on to see how you’ll reshape the future of recruiting.

Prediction 1 - Customers and companies will build and borrow more

In volatile times, companies will move away from static jobs in siloed departments and toward project-based cross-functional work, where employees will shift to new projects as business needs change. Recruiters themselves experienced this in the immediate responses to COVID-19, with many moving to new projects when hiring shifted. This will also change the way search and staffing firms assess and hire candidates — prioritizing applicants’ potential and transferable skills over their pedigree and technical capacity to do specific tasks.

Prediction 2- Virtual recruiting is here to stay

Companies have dabbled with video interviews in the past, but the realities of COVID-19 have led them to create an end-to-end virtual recruiting process for the first time. They are seeing firsthand how it can save time and resources during Covid-19 time. Following are some technology solutions that companies normally use for interviewing:

Video conferencing software
Live chat
Automated chatbots

These enable the companies to host interviews and evaluate candidates from a distance.

Prediction 3- Recruiters will lead the transition to remote work

Remote work tantalizes with its possibilities: diverse talent pools, increased productivity and retention, and savings on salaries and facilities. But it also complicates workforce planning with difficult considerations around compensation of remote workers, capacity planning, company culture, technology, and employee visibility. Recruiters are uniquely positioned to provide advice on this transition, armed with data-driven insights about where talent is and feedback about what talent wants and needs. Knowing these concerns and moving quickly to address them can give your customers a competitive advantage. Recruiters can also help weigh the benefits of an anywhere in-the-world approach versus a hub strategy of targeting a few sites to make career development and company culture stronger.

Prediction 4- Recruiters will build new skills to align with the business

Recruiting teams have been stretched and refashioned recently, and that’s likely to continue. From dealing with hiring slowdowns (or unprecedented spikes) to aligning with ever-shifting business priorities, the one constant will be the need for adaptability. While some recruiters will hire for different roles, locations, or companies as needs change, many will be asked to go beyond hiring. In fact, the fastest-growing skill for recruiters is personal development — the ability to add new skills. Recruiters will increasingly serve as the bridge between a customer’s hiring needs and other customer HR initiatives. They’re rapidly adding skills like diversity and inclusion, decision-making, and HR strategy to their resumes. They’ll bring clarity to talent data, enable employer branding, and provide guidance on the virtual hiring process — all in a continuous process of improvement.

“If you want to build cost-efficient talent acquisition teams, you need to make sure that people are more flexible, more adaptable, and that they can really change to the needs of the business. Lots of companies have got boxes that people sit in. I think those boxes may start to dissipate over time.”

(Source: LinkedIn Talent Solutions)