Trends like artificial intelligence, automation, gig workers, and mobile-first strategies have altered the recruiting landscape. If your HR department is struggling with hiring demand, it may be time to consider some changes. The volume of data your HR department has access to can seem overwhelming, making it difficult to map out an efficient recruiting process.
 
Thankfully, it’s relatively easy to revitalize your recruiting efforts with these eight actionable resolutions based on today’s hottest recruiting trends:

1. Use your data. The right data can facilitate effective workforce planning, correlate people analytics to business performance, and predict turnover and retention rates. Data holds the key to understanding your workforce and predicting trends you can act on.  Data can also reveal cultural challenges, recommend employee job changes, assess cultural fit, identify regional compensation trends, and pinpoint potential hiring biases that could create diversity hire challenges.
2. Remember that candidates are always on their phones, so place your ads on job boards optimized for mobile. Mobile technology gives you an edge in recruiting because you know candidates are always on their phones. Recruiters, in particular, should leverage mobile technologies to have a competitive edge.. Optimal presentation of hiring ads and application portals on mobile screens, leveraging mobile recruiting apps, facilitating ease of access to candidate info on mobile for hiring managers, mobile analytics, and utilizing SMS messages require advanced planning, but they can take your recruiting efforts to the next level.
3. Make sure your employer brand resonates. Competition for quality talent has created an increasingly employee-centric recruiting process. To attract and retain those highly sought-after candidates, you need a strong employer brand that encompasses culture, management, training, growth potential, work-life balance, and flexible work opportunities.
4. Map out the candidate journey. This one will give you unique insights to improve your candidate process. The “candidate journey” encompasses each interaction a candidate has with your organization from initial contact to final offer. Every step of that process should be mapped out and optimized to foster stronger engagement, faster communication, and increased process efficiency.
5. Implement recruitment marketing. Recruitment marketing allows your company to tell its story in a compelling way so that your target audience (i.e., the awesome, hard-to-hire candidate) takes action. An effective recruitment marketing strategy will engage quality candidates, draw them in, and convince them to take the next step.
6. Use social recruiting and technology to your advantage. LinkedIn isn’t the only social media site where you can engage candidates. TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram also deliver excellent opportunities to interact with people on their home turf. Incorporate a variety of contact points and branding elements on these channels and make sure you have someone on your HR team ready to answer messages from potential candidates.
7. Leverage automation. This Hubspot article highlights the importance of automation in HR, to lessen the burden on departments. Standardized onboarding and training, leveraging programmatic job ads to reach your ideal target candidate wherever they are on the internet, and automated HR solutions can go a long way to improving the bandwidth of HR departments.
8. Take advantage of the gig economy to access the best people. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 55 million people in the United States were gig workers - or 34% of the workforce. And Pew Research reports that among current or recent gig platform workers, 31% -- 3% of U.S. adults overall -- say this has been their main job over the past year. Top quality workers across the spectrum of professional services are engaging with companies on a contract basis, it’s no longer just Uber drivers and landscapers who are in business for themselves. Businesses can capitalize on the trend by networking with non-traditional workers and utilizing their skill sets for specific projects.

If your HR department would benefit from increased bandwidth for hiring needs and increased automation, now is the time to make sure your organization is using technology to its benefit. Measurable, step-by-step automation and technology plans will both help you quantify what you want to achieve and provide you with a roadmap to get you there.