4 Major Ways Recruiting Will Change in The Next 5-Years
Did you know Leonardo Da Vinci is credited with creating the first resume? According to a Business Insider article, he wrote the very first one in 1482, which then was more of “a letter of introduction.” It slowly evolved over the next 500 or so years, until it was an expected part of the hiring process by the 1950s. The pace of how things evolved back in Da Vinci’s day was quite different.
With the resume, it took 500 years for it to fully bloom into the powerful tool we still use it as today. Now, in the future of work—5 years is enough time to drastically change the landscape of the recruiting and hiring process. The pace of change and iteration has picked up exponentially, and employers need to be aware of the trends and changing tides in order to survive the future. So, let's dive into the top four major ways recruiting and hiring will evolve in the next 5 years.
Recruiting Will Be Increasingly Important
If there’s anything the Great Resignation has revealed—it’s the absolute necessity of keeping a workforce happy. Keeping them happy enough—to at least stick around—is essential to every operation in every industry. That’s one reason the future of work will have a different relationship with the recruitment, hiring, and retention side of business operations. It’s becoming increasingly more important. A trend that was developing well before the pandemic even got here.
According to a data-driven, 2019 article by LinkedIn, demand for recruiting professionals has jumped by 63% since 2016, and we expect that trend to continue. That’s a massive jump in just 3 years. The article goes on to say—Why? Talent will simply matter more. As automation takes over our most repetitive tasks, the work left to us humans will be more creative, less predictable, and more consequential to the business overall.
On top of our work becoming more consequential, employers across nearly every industry are having a hard time keeping their top-talent around. The Great Resignation has flipped the old script upside down. No longer is it simply understood that employees work hard because they’re scared of losing their jobs. At this moment in the history of the workforce, it’s employers who are scared. According to a recent Harvard Business Review article, Resignations peaked in April and have remained abnormally high for the last several months, with a record-breaking 10.9 million open jobs at the end of July.
Recruitment will continue to grow in importance at the highest level of how businesses function. Not only are employers at greater risk of losing their talent than ever before, the human jobs that do remain are of greater importance. It’s the perfect recipe to fast-forward the overall impact that hiring and retention have. What that means for the future of recruiting is that it’s role will both expand and be more crucial. In other words, It’s one thing to execute a hiring plan, but it’s quite another to design a hiring plan—and in the future, companies will ask recruiters to do both.
The Actual Process Itself Will Continue to Modernize
The days of the entire recruitment process revolving around paper resumes and in-person interviews are long gone. If you’re older than Gen Z—basically if you’ve been in the workforce for 5 years or more—your first foray into employment likely followed the same steps they did in the 1950s.
You submitted a resume and cover letter.
The employer sorted the resumes into no, maybe, and yes piles.
If you were in the “yes” pile, you were scheduled for an interview.
It’s a system that’s been in place for nearly a century. Since the 1950s, resumes and interviews have been the two pillars of the hiring process. Today, we still use resumes and we still use interviews, but there are so many powerful new technologies that can help recruiters make the process of hiring more impactful, more collaborative, and less burdensome. Generally, the process still starts with collecting resumes (i.e. applicants). It also generally still ends with either in-person or synchronous video interviews.
The new technology out there makes its impact in the middle of the process—helping recruiters turn a stack of resumes into the exact right 3 people to interview. It allows you to get to the synchronous interviews stage with far less energy and time invested. The primary way to confidently move people from the good resume pile to an interview scheduled on the calendar, is with asynchronous video interviews. Powerful new communication platforms, like Voodle, allow you to assess a group of candidates on your own time. Voodle is an asynchronous communication tool built on sending and receiving 60-second videos, which can be organized, archived, and retrieved later.
Recruiters can create short videos that are sent to all the candidates of interest, both giving them important information about the role and company, as well as prompting them to answer important questions. These video responses can then be reviewed and rated later by an entire hiring committee—who can individually participate when their own schedule allows. This technology allows an entire group of people to seamlessly participate in the process. As the LinkedIn article puts it in relation to hiring-related technology, This tech won’t replace recruiters, but it will reduce busywork and save time. Candidates can be vetted extremely well at scale with Voodle, and you can begin the final interview phase with extreme confidence that whoever is offered a role after this stage will be a great fit.
Generation Z’s Impact Will Be Felt Strongly
Generation Z already makes up about 25% of the world's overall population, according to a recent Harris Poll, and over the next five years they’ll become a huge percentage of the workforce. The oldest members of Gen Z are currently 25-years old, beginning to establish themselves professionally. In 5-years however, many will be in positions of management and leadership. They’ll also be making up a larger and larger percentage of the overall workforce.
Although the Baby Boomers, who are nearing retirement, might lump Millennials and Gen Zers in the same category—there are some major differences between these two groups. There are three major contextual differences between Gen Z and Millennials, pointed out in this report by Harris Pole, that will have major implications on the working world as Gen Z’s impact continues to grow at every level across every industry.
Gen Z pioneered “cancel culture,” while Millennials pioneered “like button activism.”
For Gen Z “inclusivity is a non-negotiable,” while Millennials are more “focused on breaking barriers.”
Gen Z views “mental health as a top priority, while Millennials see “physical health as a top priority.”
Gen Z has progressed culture and society, including the working world, in a variety of important ways already. Inclusivity is no longer a “nice to have.” Mental health is no longer taboo to discuss in relation to work. Finally, disagreeing with the way leadership or an entire organization handles anything will be openly called out. Rather than fear of backlash from those in positions of power, there is almost a fear of backlash for not speaking out from the culture at large. For not pointing out any observable injustices. Generation Z has normalized speaking out through the megaphone of the internet, and that has already made a massive impact on how companies hire and operate overall.
For recruiters considering Gen Z’s impact, focus on these three primary differences. Be sure to prioritize diversity, lean into conversations about mental health and employee well being (yes, that means throughout the courting and hiring process), and listen more to suggestions for ways to improve. If you don’t—you’ll be sure to read about it on your company's Glass Door page.
You’ll Need to Cast Your Net In New Oceans
In regards to “prioritizing diversity,” it’s a lot easier said than done. Talent comes knocking, and you hire the best fit. You hope that in the end, when the hiring dust settles, there’s a diverse team in place. That’s how most recruiters and hiring managers approach this tricky subject. Some companies have put diversity quotas in place, to mixed reviews and controversy—but short of that, what can recruitment professionals do? One way to be more proactive about ensuring you’ll wind up with a diverse team, is to cast your recruitment net in new and different oceans.
In other words, beyond instituting quotas—one way to take an active approach to hiring for diversity (instead of just crossing your fingers in hopes that diverse talent finds you), is to recruit from diverse locations. This will become more and more essential over the next five years for multiple reasons. For one, employees are leaving behind jobs at an historic pace, so recruiters have to be more clever than simply posting open roles to Monster.com or LinkedIn. Also, it’s a non-negotiable to retain young talent. Many in Gen Z will simply not work for a company who’s entire leadership team are white men. They just won’t.
Luckily for recruiters, there are more diverse hiring platforms sprouting up all the time. This Breezy article lists 20 places that focus on connecting diverse talent to good jobs. Over the next five years, it will become more and more important to seek out talent from these new talent sourcing options. The first step to reaching a more matured level of diversity as a team is to first acknowledge it as a top-priority. To consider it something that you, a recruitment professional, have an active role in creating (or failing to create). According to the Breezy article, 71% of companies say they want an inclusive culture but only 12% have reached a level of diversity and inclusion that can be described as “mature.” Consider it crucial, cast your nets in more diverse waters, and you can likely skip both the quota-setting and Gen Z backlash controversies.
Created in Collaboration with Voodle.