The Seven Transformations Of Recruitment in 2016

By Peter D. Weddle

What will the recruiting profession look like a decade from now? Will there be a War for Talent or will there be a War for Work? Will technological advances play an even bigger role in the way we source and recruit new hires? Or, will our work be accomplished a little faster and more efficiently, but otherwise, very much as it is today? Will our organizational role in 2016 be the same as our role in 2006, or will recruiters find themselves taking on new requirements and responsibilities?

Answering such questions is undeniably difficult at any time, but especially in the hurly burly of meeting day-to-day recruiting requirements. Just as ignoring the past can doom us to repeat it, however, ignoring the future can cause us to constrict or even misshape it. It's important, therefore, to cast an eye forward from time-to-time, even as we concentrate on accomplishing the business at hand.

To that end, I've identified seven changes that could alter our profession over the next 10 years. Now, admittedly, my crystal ball is no better than anyone else's, but I think these developments -- more than any others -- have the potential to impact significantly on our profession. If that's so, then now is the time to make sure we understand what they portend and how we should adjust to them, on both an individual and organizational level.

The Seven Transformations of Recruitment in 2016

Transformation No. 1: Communicating employment opportunities. The use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and podcasting to access content will grow dramatically among all cohorts of the workforce. As a result, job boards, employers and staffing firms will extend the reach of their online advertising by transmitting specified job postings to individual candidates via their personal digital assistant (e.g., MP3 player, iPod). This enhanced portability will take recruitment advertising beyond just-in-time to all-of-the-time. It will make the right recruitment messages available to talent wherever and whenever they want to see them.

Transformation No. 2: Redefining the best hire. The increased price of gas will make commuting cost prohibitive for a large segment of the work force (assuming employers are unwilling or unable to pay higher salaries). Rather than limiting the pool of applicants for open positions, however, this development will cause companies to "defacilitize" their operations by allowing more employees to telecommute from home. As a consequence, recruiters will be able to source candidates without geographic limitation, in effect redefining the best hire. They will no longer seek to find the best qualified person within a specified geographic area, but instead, look for the best qualified person there is.

Transformation No. 3: Upgrading the ability of ATS to identify candidate sources. The pressure to maximize the return on an organization's investment in online recruiting (financial and labor) will force applicant tracking system (ATS) vendors to upgrade their ability to accurately identify the sources of candidates entering their systems. Their current, rudimentary approach that relies on the memory of the job seeker (to determine where they first learned of an opportunity) and simplistic drop down windows will be replaced with virtual tags and continuously updated taxonomies of candidate sources. That information, in turn, will enable employers and staffing firms to evaluate alternative investment strategies and optimize the yield they generate from their online spend.

Transformation No. 4: Treating candidates just like boxes. In an effort to improve their PRM (prospect relationship management -- the employment version of customer relationship management), employers will finally eliminate the resume black hole and the sounds of silence that greet applicants online. Mimicking the longstanding box tracking capabilities of Fedex and UPS, employers will provide a way for applicants to track their progress through an employer's recruitment process. Individuals will be continuously and instantaneously informed of changes in their status. In some cases, they will be required to visit the employer's Web-site to obtain this information, and in others, they will be able to receive it via their personal digital assistant (see shift No. 1).

Transformation No. 5: Implementing the interview remotely. The increase in the price of gas and growing use of home-based employees (see shift No. 2) will cause employers to rely on "virtual interviews" for many of their openings. These sessions will be as rigorous as traditional face-to-face interviews, but will be conducted over the Internet, using computer-mounted cameras provided (as necessary) by the employer. In addition to assessing individual qualifications and person-job/person-team fit, however, these interviews will also be used to determine a candidate's ability to communicate and interact in a virtual environment. To that end, the interview will involve both conventional questions and answers and such behavioral techniques as role playing and problem solving exercises.

Transformation No. 6: Elongating the employment relationship. Employers will continue to eschew any responsibility for managing an individual worker's career. However, they will also recognize that a worker's employment in the 21st century is likely to be episodic -- encompassing several different periods of time and/or jobs -- rather than continuous -- involving a single job and/or work experience. To make sure that they encourage departing workers to return, employers will augment the career areas on their Web-sites with tailored alumni centers. These centers will provide information and links to resources that facilitate career advancement by former employees, regardless of where they are working. By supporting career self-management, employers will elongate their relationship with workers to the full life cycle of a person's participation in the world of work.

Transformation No. 7: Re-imagining the role of recruitment. Institutional investors will (finally) realize that they cannot meet their fiduciary responsibilities by investing in organizations with HR strategies and programs that optimize quarterly earnings at the expense of longer term talent capacity and performance. As a consequence, they will avoid organizations that "pump and dump" their workforce to meet short term financial targets and support those that make sound strategic investments in strengthening talent acquisition and retention. How will investors make such distinctions among employers? They will look for those with above average commitments to the budget and staff of their recruiting functions and/or those that relocate that function from the human-resource department (with its administrative focus) to the sales department (with its customer focus).

There are, of course, two truisms about this list:

Not all of the transformations will actually occur.
But, some of them definitely will.
How can you prepare yourself and your organization in the face of such uncertainty? Invest your time and energy looking forward, not back. Don't squander them on resisting change, but rather on sharpening your awareness and understanding of it. That's the best way to ensure you're the master and not the victim of whatever transformations occur in our profession.

-- Mr. Weddle is an author and commentator, and publishes Weddle's, a newsletter about successful online recruiting.

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