QUESTION | How are recruitment strategies poised to change in 2016?
ASHTON LOUIE | Creative marketing director, GradsLikeMe
Recruiting and marketing are becoming one and the same. With many Canadian students opting to pursue higher education in addition to their bachelor’s degrees, the workforce is saturated with specialized candidates. Want a UX designer with poli-sci background? Easy! A project manager who knows biochemistry? No problem! That said, recruiters have the luxury of looking beyond skills and aiming for “the total package,” more than ever before.
Having more applicants does not mean getting more talent. Recruiters will be appropriately narrowing their outreach strategies by opting for more concentrated listing visibility. It’s all about defining a target employee and getting your opportunities in front of the corresponding demographics.
When filtering for the right candidates for a short list, seeking compelling online portfolios, personal websites and personal networks will become a norm. These components offer greater applicant insight and, in time, will become an expectation among all applicants. Collectively, this will add more of a human element back into the recruitment process by offering a greater capacity for personality than lone traditional resumés.
As a result, various new technological tools and types of software will be developed to bridge the gap between company branding, niche audience targeting and applicant exposure. Although HR as we know it is not completely dead, it is growing, shifting and adopting a more macro approach to micro markets.
PETER REEK | Founder and principal, Smart Savvy + Associates
B.C. is fortunate to have a diversified economy, so while resource industries are taking a hit in B.C. and across the country, we’re seeing growth in a number of industries, particularly technology and tourism (the latter due to the lower dollar value). Employers in these sectors are looking for experienced, hard-to-find talent to expand their companies.
We see hiring is becoming more intentional and purpose-driven. Businesses are likely to turn to specialized recruiting firms to fill focused niche needs, particularly when time, importance of role, and supply-and-demand dynamics for talent are pressing factors. In our industry, for example, digital marketing specialists are extremely hard to find right now but the demand is high.
Our advice to employers:
•Be open minded – focus on hiring for transferable competencies and achievements as opposed to exact industry/profile fit.
•Don’t focus on consensus; focus on competence – the popular hire is not always the best hire.
•Prepare to invest if you want talent from outside our market (local salaries are 20% lower and cost of living 20% higher than in other markets).
•Get really good at smoking out the pretenders. Ask for specific demonstrations of competence in key areas – not their philosophies on those topics.
•Partner with a recruitment firm that thoroughly understands your business, its culture and the position you are seeking to fill.
ANDREW BARE | Enterprise account executive, HackerRank
First and foremost, you will see companies move away from rigid frameworks that dictate the minimum requirements for hard-to-fill positions. Companies that have long been known for accepting only four-year grads from top universities will take a different approach and finally seek to hire the person with the most talent, not the best pedigree.
The good news is technology is now stepping in to help recruiters screen far more candidates, in far less time. This time savings allows the hidden gems to surface, and these rare finds usually turn out to be great hires. This year will see skill-based assessments replacing the resumé as the single point of truth for hiring managers and the recruiters responsible for ensuring only the best candidates make the cut.
I work in the highly competitive market to attract and hire tech talent, where on average only one hire is made out of every 30 interview candidates. This leads to a lot of time wasted, and often to a negative experience from candidates who do not receive offers. Pre-hire platforms like HackerRank cut out these time-consuming processes and allow recruiters to truly embrace the power of automation. The idea is to allow candidates to qualify themselves by completing an online coding challenge. The platform automatically scores and ranks each candidate based on skill, not school, giving recruiters the data they need to eliminate unqualified candidates early and, more importantly, focus their efforts on the top talent.
