There was once a time when advertising agencies employed large teams to take job orders from clients who wanted their vacancies to be displayed in newspaper classified sections, and other large teams would then design the job ad copy before sending to publishers for printing. These ads had to be brief out of necessity as space was at a premium, deadlines were tight and the ads were a one-time-only occurrence that could not be changed post-deadline. This was happening as recently as 8 years ago. I know because I worked alongside that very team.
Fast forward to today and we live in an internet-enabled self-service culture with real-time analytics, rich media, big data, social media and “the internet of things”! The advertising world of 2016 is one of innovation and progression resulting in an array of interactive methods to engage with audiences and keep them coming back for more.
A major part of call centre recruitment is advertising, right? Companies are nothing without the talented people that work for them, and those people come at a heavy cost, so recruitment must be at the forefront of this revolution in advertising, no? Well, not exactly, not yet at least. Looking back at the recruitment advertising market of 2015 and ahead to what we may find in 2016 I’m only now beginning to see that HR & Recruitment departments are starting to embrace the full range of tools that modern advertising channels provide.
Here’s my take on what we are likely to see in 2016:
1 – Tougher Competition
The economy is recovering. Growth industries which were recruiting in the recession and had their pick of the best talent now find themselves competing with an increasing number of businesses. And they are all looking for the same people, leading to candidates having more of a choice on the market. As we move towards a candidate-driven market employers within the call centre market will want to gain the best possible exposure for your vacancies, be as proactive as possible in your candidate engagement process and ensure your candidate experience strategy is providing an advantage over your competition (more on these points later). Furthermore, you will want to ensure that you are where your potential hires are…
2 – Mobile Recruitment
…which leads me to mobile recruitment. Your potential hires are mobile! They are browsing the internet on their commute, in their breaks, in the street etc… Mobile will be everywhere this year. Indeed.com spent 2015 integrating and embedding the Moboltmobile recruitment platform and in the last two weeks alone the LinkedIn app has reminded me twice to download their dedicated Job Search app. But mobile doesn’t start and stop at job searching via your phone. The best resourcing teams are ensuring their careers sites are mobile optimised, that all rich media is visible and content plays without any problems, and they are embedding mobile strategies into their candidate engagement processes, proactively using SMS and social media notifications to keep interest as high as possible as candidates move through the recruitment process or even before potential candidates begin the recruitment process. Are you doing this?
3 – Improved Talent Attraction
We are all accustomed to slick internet sites nowadays with information at our fingertips. If I don’t know something and wished I did know, nine times out of ten a quick search will yield what I’m looking for. Candidates are no different when deciding on their next career move. They want to know more than just what your company name is and what vacancies you currently have open. Faced with increased competition in a candidate-driven market you will want to ensure you have a clearly defined talent attraction and branding strategy so that candidates can find out as much as possible about working for you. Think about adding features such as company blogs, videos detailing “a day in the life of…”, social media news feeds, gamification to test candidate abilities (where appropriate), live video blog sessions through media platforms such as Periscope, or careers Q&A sections. Your candidates will want to know how they can progress through your company, understand what their first 30 days will look like, what training they may receive and have a clear overview of pay and benefits etc… and all of this should be online.
4 – Pre-recruitment Candidate Engagement
So, I just invented a term, or at least I think I did. You may know “Pre-recruitment Candidate Engagement” as pipelining or just plain old candidate engagement but it is more than these things. At a time when candidates are increasingly tied into long notice periods impacting time per hire figures there is more emphasis than ever on reducing the time spent searching for that right fit for your company! So, why ever stop? Keep on looking! We’ll see an increasing number of companies not only regularly pipeline for regularly advertised roles but also hard to fill rarely advertised jobs, keeping those candidates engaged via forums, networking events, blogs, video content, SMS and social media messaging and the like. The candidates may be passive but they will feel wanted, involved and hopefully impressed so that when a suitable vacancy does arise you will have somewhat pre-qualified talent at your fingertips.
I could go on and on about increasing use of pre-application gamification, use of big data companies to attract passive highly-skilled talent on niche web forums, the refinement of social media to gain ad exposure, but I feel that I have captured what I see as the most prevalent trends for 2016 in the top 4 listed.
All of the above is not quite a revolution, more of a slow evolution and maturing of the recruitment marketplace. It is no surprise to me that everybody is looking for resourcing or recruitment professionals right now and guess what? Those talented resourcing professionals using the most progressive techniques are also in very short supply!
So, will you be using any of the above techniques to catch the big fish in today’s talent pool?
Have I missed out on any hot features or methods that your company is pioneering?