The lowest unemployment numbers recorded in decades are impacting those looking to recruit the best and brightest and forcing them to try new ideas when it comes to hiring.
Here are some trends impacting hiring and how they can impact you:
1. Team Hiring
Many startups are following the lead of companies and hiring (or poaching) teams en masse from their competitors. Team hiring is exactly what it sounds like, lifting a successful team from one project to another, except the new project is in another company. This solves many issues for the employer, like worrying about culture fit, paying a placement fee for each new employee, and onboarding in perpetuity.
Stripe is a San Francisco-based online payment company that’s become the hot startup du jour; it was featured on “60 Minutes” as a company that’s shaking up financial technology. Now, Stripe is getting press, including write-ups in Quartz and BBC, for shaking up the recruiting world with its new hiring initiative, Bring Your Own Team (BYOT).
In this unique new hiring push, Stripe invites entire groups — they could be coworkers, college classmates, or any group who just wants to work together — to apply en masse for a job at Stripe.
“The industry has always focused on hiring atoms,” Stripe says in its blog post where it first announced BYOT. “We’d like to try hiring molecules.”
2. Recruitment Augmentation
Hard to say, easy to implement. Recruitment augmentation is basically your internal team but on steroids. Marketing teams have been using outsourced resources (i.e. agencies) for decades, but for some reason, this leveraged model hasn’t appeared in recruiting, save the large RPO offerings, which don’t always fit into a startup or SMB plan.
Again the economy figures into this trend, allowing employers to build their IP, expand their team based on need, and build up their internal training program. In a time period where employer brand is paramount, but the talent is scarce, with nearly half of all hiring and HR managers surveyed (45%) saying they’re unable to fill much-needed positions because the qualified talent is scant, augmenting your recruitment team with additional talent seems like a no-brainer.
According to Matt Ferguson, CEO of CareerBuilder, “There is a perfect storm happening in the U.S. labor market. Low unemployment paired with lagging labor force participation and a growing skills gap is making it very difficult for businesses to find qualified candidates – and this is for all types of roles. If employers want to remain competitive, they are going to have to look to new talent pools and significantly increase their investment in training workers to build up the skills they require.”
3. Always-On Sourcing
While sourcing has been viewed by some as a nice-to-have, today’s recruiters are learning that talent relationship management and sourcing are essential in the fight for candidates. When talent is easy to find, a simple search on your favorite professional network or a quick post on a job board might do the trick. With jobs remaining unfilled for 12 weeks or more, research or candidate sourcing or talent relationship management (whatever you call it) has become a crucial skill.
Creating a sourcing function in your organization overnight is no easy task. However, firms like IQTalent Partners can help by supporting that function, mapping out your processes (you own the IP), setting up your technology and working alongside your recruiters to create a sophisticated sourcing and recruitment team that could take years to build organically. Is it worth it? You decide. Recruiters who use proactive sourcing extend over 3x more offers and the acceptance rate is a whopping 93%.
4. Data Analytics in Recruiting
Understanding where your recruitment process is succeeding and failing is a hot trend in 2017 and 2018. As more companies start to calculate productivity, cost-per-hire, and Quality of Hire (QoH), it’s become clear that Silicon Valley hires are no more or less effective than equivalent talent from the remainder of the country. These recruitment tools and analytics suites allow Talent Acquisition professionals to easily search, locate and analyze their candidates. Other analytics providers give employers a view of top applicants and how they perform post-hire. Still, more are giving recruiters and hiring managers unique insight into assessments and allow these pros to filter applicants in a granular way, allowing for specific and customized recruitment.
5. The Exodus from Silicon Valley
It used to be very difficult to recruit the best and brightest. After all, it seemed like they were all heading to Silicon Valley to plant their career flag. Today though is a different story. Almost overnight, talented individuals are leaving the Bay Area for less crowded living conditions, more equitable distribution of wealth, lower cost of living and a respite from gridlock. As Lou Hansen recently reported, people are leaving Silicon Valley as quickly as they are coming in.
“Between July 2015 and July 2017, the region gained 44,732 immigrants but lost 44,102 residents to other parts of California and the country,” according to a new survey by Joint Venture Silicon Valley. “The population drops have been most notable on residents between the ages of 18 and 24, and between 45 and 64.”
With great developers, marketers, programmers, data scientists and countless of other talented people looking to make a move, companies based in smaller areas should beef up their “slice of life” marketing. For those who own a home and make around $80,000 but still feel like they are “barely getting by,” your job in Nashville, Kansas City or Raleigh could be just the thing.
Want to start leveraging these trends to fill your talent pipeline but don’t know how to start? Have our team augment your recruiting and sourcing function to build, implement and train these tactics to your people! Not only does IQTalent Partners scale with your company, we act as an extension of your brand to attract and hire the very best. And you don’t have to be the largest company in the world to use our services. Give us a call and find out how affordable and easy it is to get best-in-class recruiting and sourcing services working to grow your company.
About the author: Chris Murdock is the Co-Founder and Senior Partner of IQTalent Partners. Chris has over 12 years of executive recruiting experience and leads search execution and client relationships along with supporting searches across the firm.
