Recruiting is not what it used to be. Here’s a glance at what to expect in 2012 (in no particular order):
- Vehicle: 2011 was about social media recruiting, 2012 will be about the mobile platform recruiting (smartphones, tablets). People will manage every aspect of their professional life digitally.
- Niches: The talent war will return in select regions and industries. Regions are China, Australia, SE Asia, and India; industries are mainly technology-related.
- Turnover: Organizations are getting worse at retaining talent, so turnover rates in high demand jobs will increase by 25%.
- Data: Social media recruiting will be increasingly coupled with data analytics.
- Easier: Most knowledge jobs can be remote, making recruiting easier.
- External: Recruiting outside talent will be more advantageous than developing employees from within. This is because there isn’t time for existing employees to learn completely new skills.
- Internal: Organizations will rely more on employees’ social media contacts for recruiting than on “recruiting agencies”.
- Communities: Long-term branding is increasingly about building talent communities within organizations.
- Applicants: Employer criticism on the web (e.g. Glassdoor.com) will force employers to treat applicants better. Otherwise recruiting and revenue performance will suffer.
- Metrics: Forward-looking predictive metrics will replace backward-looking recruiting metrics.
Source: Mark Matthes’ summary of an article by Dr. John Sullivan, ere.net, Dec 5, 2011. Dr. John Sullivan is a well-known thought leader in HR. He is a frequent speaker and advisor to Fortune 500 and Silicon Valley firms. Formerly the chief talent officer for Agilent Technologies (the 43,000-employee HP spin-off), he is now a professor of management at San Francisco State University. He was called the “Michael Jordan of Hiring” by Fast Company magazine.
