In the coming year, the competition for skilled talent will continue to heat up, technology advances will come to the forefront and talent acquisition decisions will be data driven. Here are my top 5 predictions.
1. Marketing will be the driving force for recruitment success
Marketing teams and recruitment teams will continue to overlap and work closely, marketing to candidates more strategically. It’s no secret that recruitment marketing has arrived, and within a candidate-driven marketplace, recruitment has become a proactive driver rather than a reactive business function. However, 2017 will be the year in which recruitment marketing takes its rightful place as the powerhouse behind talent acquisition.
2. The candidate will continue to set the rules
How an employer is perceived by job seekers is now more public and pivotal than ever, and candidate opinion can work for or against the employer. The ease and quality of the job seeking experience will bear strongly upon which school ultimately secures the most valuable talent. Competing establishments with candidate management systems will be able to move quickly between interview stages and secure their new team member quickly.
Applicants can afford to be discerning: they react quickly to barriers and will only spend time on mobile-optimised recruitment sites with robust technology, easy navigation and an application experience ‘convenient’ at least. This means that a candidate-centric online recruitment process backed up by skilled recruitment professionals and proficient candidate management is more important than ever.
3. More time and effort will be spent in growing our own talent
Skills shortages mean the recruitment of a skilled workforce is harder than ever, but you don’t always have to bring in new, skilled staff. Instead, schools which invest in nurturing their current workforce with training and upskilling can expect to reap twice the benefit: not only as the teaching and learning are reinvigorated, but allowing employees to move vertically and horizontally within the organisation will improve retention, morale and reduce recruitment costs. Offering progression will also work wonders for your employer brand: your reputation for progressing and developing hardworking individuals will soon spread.
4. Investment in technology will increase
There is a shift within the industry where talent management and strategic recruitment are now respected in their own rights as critical business drivers, worthy of investment by merit of their significant return. In this web-based career market, it follows that HR software and technologies will play a large part in improving the efficiency of the process of attracting and acquiring the right candidates.
5. Insightful recruitment marketing results will be a budgeting priority
“Big Data” has already consumed a number of business departments, and recruitment is next. There is now such a quantity of historical data about the results of recruitment marketing strategies that it is possible to quantify and critically evaluate the cost-efficiency and effectiveness of every talent acquisition strategy thus far. ATS platforms, such as School Recruiter for the education sector, which provides metric data from which we can quantify the return on investment for each advert or calculate the cost-per-head of the talent acquired, are expected to be a sought-after necessity in the coming recruitment era. To protect budgets, it would be difficult to make new HR decisions responsibly without the influence of those results.
At the speed at which recruitment marketing technology is improving, it’s more important than ever to keep updated on recruitment insights and industry news. The School Recruiter blog and newsletter is a great place to start.