As the new year quickly approaches, it’s time for organizations to re-evaluate their talent acquisition strategy to ensure they are ready and able to keep up with the 2023 hiring market. The talent landscape has endured many changes over the last few years, and organizations who did not have the right resources in place fell behind.
Companies that are prepared with an updated hiring plan as this year comes to a close will be able to attract and retain the best talent before their competitors even have a chance to adjust their hiring strategy for the new market. To help your organization succeed in 2023, here are some emerging hiring trends to take into consideration.
Hiring Trends to Expect in 2023
1. Proactive Candidate Engagement
The first emerging trend to expect in the new year is the act of looking for candidates to fill a position before that position is available. This practice has long been used to recruit C-suite executives, but now companies are starting to see the benefits of using this method to recruit all employees.
Proactive engagement involves reaching out to candidates before the job becomes available, typically by nurturing them through sales cadences, which ensures your company is top of mind once the position is posted. This strategy reduces the time-to-fill since potential candidates are already selected before the demand is urgent, leading to time and money saved for your organization in the end.
2. Focus on Employer Branding
Your employer brand is your business’ identity. This is how people perceive your organization, and it has a direct impact on whether someone chooses to work for your company or not. Your employer brand serves as a means to advertise your company values and culture to candidates. It’s vital that you build a brand and leverage it to intentionally position your organization in the market to attract the right candidates.
Building a strong employer brand is more important than ever because of people’s renewed focus on employee engagement and wellbeing – most people want to work for an employer whose identity aligns with their own. Having a good employer brand also positively affects the candidate experience, which is another talent acquisition process component that will sway today’s job seekers to choose one company over another.
3. Data-Centric Recruiting
With data-centric recruiting, companies track tangible facts and statistics to determine their hiring process strategy and make hiring decisions. Companies who utilize this method are often more successful than companies who blindly create their talent acquisition strategy. According to LinkedIn, talent acquisition teams with mature analytics are 2x more likely to improve their recruiting efforts, and 3x more likely to realize cost reductions and efficiency gains.
For data-centric recruiting to be successful, organizations need to expand the analytics they track. They need to determine which metrics make the most sense for their needs; for example, they could choose to track source of hire, job offer rates, job acceptance rates, cost-per-hire, time-to-fill, turnover rates, new hire performance, etc. Companies are less likely to experience wasted talent acquisition efforts when they have a proven data-driven strategy in place.
4. Increase of Contract Workers
As companies recover from the pandemic, they may be hesitant to hire full-time employees in this volatile market. Instead, they may opt to hire contract workers who can be hired on an as-needed basis. They are typically hired for certain projects or to fill temporary vacancies.
As the market continues down this uncertain path, contract workers are an ideal talent solution for many companies. Hiring this type of worker allows businesses to save on costs associated with benefits and new hire training, and it also provides them with the flexibility to scale their workforce up or down based on demand.
5. New Demographics in the Workplace
In 2023, companies could realize a change in the demographic make up of the talent market. Gen Z is beginning to take up a bigger part of the workforce, many companies are increasing their diversity hiring initiatives, and people who left the workforce during the pandemic are making their return to work.
Hiring people from different demographics requires slightly different attraction and retention strategies for each population. Talent acquisition professionals need to understand what different candidates are looking for and be ready to alter their plans to accommodate each candidates’ unique needs and expectations in the workplace.
6. Transformation of Recruiters into Business Leaders
As companies continue to move forward, recruiters are going to start looking more like HR business partners. Recruiters will no longer be seen as order-takers whose only responsibility is to fill open job roles. Instead, they will transform into somewhat of a business leader.
It makes sense for them to take on a strategic role within their company considering they are the ones engaging with candidates, so they have first-hand knowledge of what candidates want. This provides the perfect opportunity for recruiters to bring their perspective to help determine a company’s hiring plan, rather than solely leaving it up to the company’s leaders. Recruiters will be most useful if they take on an advisory role when it comes to hiring while still completing their recruiting tasks.
If your organization is prepared for the ups and downs of the hiring market and understands how to deal with changes, you will be able to achieve your talent acquisition goals with no problem. The key to your organization’s talent acquisition success in 2023 will be preparing a strategy now, and seamlessly handling any events that may affect your plan throughout the year.
