The last few years have been the years of artificial intelligence technologies, workplace diversity and candidate experience in the recruitment industry. A lot of these will follow into 2021 and we will continue to see the changes brought about by them in the years to follow. Let’s look at some of the top recruitment trends 2021 which would come into prominence in the recruitment space.
Top Recruitment Trends 2021
#1: Candidate Experience to Further Improve
There has been a rising trend of organisations realizing the need for treating candidate as a customer. Recruitment industry has the bad reputation of having outdated, unfriendly and slow practices which usually don’t provide a great experience to the candidates. This long drawn practice has changed for good.
Just like consumers, candidates should also get real-time updates and access to the information they seek about their application process. Adoption of recruitment chatbots are a great step forward to this welcome trend. Recruitment chatbots work just like the smart home devices like Google Home, Siri and Alexa to understand and respond to the incoming messages via different messaging platforms. Candidates might be open to interacting with a chat bot if it means a significant speed boost to the process and ready access to information.
#2: AI to See Rapid Growth
Artificial intelligence is one of the top recruitment trends 2021. The term artificial intelligence has been associated with the job industry ever since it gained mainstream popularity, especially with a negative connotation. AI is all set to bring about ground breaking innovations in areas like hiring and retention. It will make the talent acquisition process more streamlined and eliminate bias to a great extent.
AI systems would be programmed to sort candidates on the basis of their skills and the match with the employer rather than age, race and demographics. The result of this would be unbiased, high quality screening that helps organizations make better hires. AI will significantly reduce the recruiters’ workload by scanning through hundreds of thousands of applications in a matter of milliseconds.
Recruitment professionals who adopt AI will see an increase in their productivity and quality of hires.
#3: Better Employment Perks
With the increasing coverage and rising speed of internet, more and more companies are happily offering remote working as an employee perk. Moreover, with the advent of Augmented reality technology, being anywhere and everywhere has become a possibility. We will see more companies putting these to use, thereby enabling more employees to comfortably work from home whilst not degrading the productivity. Remote working isn’t all good. While it can help employees free themselves from the stressful atmosphere in the office and improve work-life balance, it could also affect team comradery which is something you can’t experience while working from home. However, more companies are likely to add this perk to attract and retain talented employees, helping them boost their overall satisfaction in the job role. Remote assessment will also gain more popularity with the advancements in augmented and virtual reality technologies.
#4: Continuous Learning is the Way Forward
The stagnated one time education will no longer apply in today’s fast-paced world. This is why continuous learning is fast gaining momentum. HR professionals have already recognized the need to keep employees learning throughout their time at an organization. ‘Learning should never stop’ is the slogan and 2021 will see more and more organizations taking proactive initiatives to continually upgrade the knowledge and skills of their workforce so as to adapt them to any future changes in their job roles.
#5: Agility will be Prioritized Over Experience
Agility is another of the top recruitment trends 2021. Recruiting employees who can quickly adapt along with the ever-changing technologies and economical shifts would be prioritized by recruiters in 2021 and beyond. Companies have realized the need to build a workforce which is capable of adapting to the future trends and this will be a prime concern in 2021. Learning agility, collaborative capabilities and innovation will be among the top requirements of employers.
Building a high-performance, sustainable work culture with innovative, creative and engaged employees will require a shift in the emphasis on hard skills to agility. We will soon see more employers changing their talent acquisition strategy to focus on this.
#6: Augmented and Virtual Reality
Augmented and virtual reality technologies have come a long way, especially during the last couple of years. It can also be said as another top recruitment trends 2021. These developments hold tremendous value to the recruiters considering how it can revolutionize the hiring process. Virtual reality along with augmented reality can enrich video interviews, making them more reliable while saving time, cost and efficiency. With the emergence of VR and AR in recruitment, candidate experience is also likely to get a huge bump.
#7: Use of Data in Hiring in Recruitment Trends
With the advent of big data analytics tools, recruiters are now at a position where they can readily get a complete understanding of their candidates, what they are looking for and most importantly anticipate their future needs. 2021 will see more companies utilizing this unique power of data to get a detailed picture of the candidates’s potential and better insights into the job search patterns of their target candidates. With the realm of information available at the disposal of employers, using this data to make better hires would be easy and straightforward.
Recruitment Trends 2021 – Bottom Line
With 2021 fast approaching, it’s quite clear that the technology-driven advanced hiring trends will have a huge impact on the recruitment industry soon. Many of these are already in place and only need some time to grow and gain more acceptance in the industry. The best thing for recruiters and employers to do is to get ahead of the curve by adopting smarter technologies of future. Be it exploring social-media enabled hiring to find passive candidates or identifying jobs that can be replaced with AI, it’s always better to start the preparations today.
