On February 28th, Talenya held a webinar on challenges, tips, and trends in the 2022 recruiting industry. Our expert panelists had a lot of insightful and helpful advice on dealing with a talent market that’s more competitive than ever before and constantly in flux. Below we’ve summarized for you what we learned. You can also check out the full webinar recording here.

The talent market is more competitive than ever.  

They’re calling it “the great resignation”. There’s a lot more turnover and much higher expectations from candidates than ever before, meaning it’s much harder to find, attract, and keep the best talent. This leads to a few new challenges.  

First, retention has become just as important as finding new employees: as people resign or move on in droves, bringing in new talent isn’t enough to grow our workforce—we must focus on keeping the quality talent we already have as well. Second, there’s a lot of pressure to hire quickly, which is difficult to balance with assessing candidates—especially when they have very high wage and title expectations and hiring them might be a big commitment. A too-small candidate pool can layer on even more pressure. 

Recruiters and hiring managers need to act quickly; there are several strategies that will help. 

As the talent pool gets smaller and more competitive, our panelists said they have tried to instill in their teams the importance of acting quickly when they run into great candidates.  

This means understanding in specific detail what the job requires or what the needs of the company are, because we don’t always have the option to weigh candidates against each other anymore. When hiring managers are accountable for making the hiring decisions using their own judgment based on nuanced understanding of job description and what a candidate will add to the team, they can trust their gut and make faster decisions. 

Bringing in applicants requires an ever-widening array of skills, strategies, and openness to change. 

The market is changing, and it’s important to constantly reassess and pinpoint how to maximize your applicant stream. For one thing, we need to use the data that is available to us. For example, at what point in the process do people drop off, and what will keep them interested? Employment branding and marketing now both fall under the recruiter purview; however in many cases the problem is simply time. We can’t expect applicants to follow through on long application processes when they have many other jobs available to them; similarly, in the case of passive talent, it’s more effective to speak with them one-on-one before asking them to contribute time and effort to a long online form.  

It’s also helpful to tap organization leaders’ networks while simultaneously casting a wide net outside the network to get as wide a pool as possible.  

Finally, being open to new tools and AI technology will help recruiters tremendously in sourcing and engagement campaigns. 

Increasing diversity requires a number of interconnected tactics. 

There are many ways to help increase diversity, among them are holding managers accountable; using data to your advantage; and being more creative with job descriptions. 

When increasing diversity, accountability at every level is vital, meaning setting specific goals for how you want your workforce to look and holding hiring managers to those standards. It’s helpful to be aware of the makeup of your current workforce so as to set a plan for how it will look at specific future dates. It’s also important to rethink the requirements in job descriptions, as being too specific can rule out many qualified people. This is another area where AI can empower recruiters: it can play with job requirements and infer skills in order to uncover candidates of underrepresented identities. 

The industry is undergoing a seismic shift, and recruiters need to adjust accordingly. 

Going forward, it’s clear the talent market may never look the same again. It’s an incredibly challenging but very exciting moment in history, and we need to be rethinking what we value and how we source talent.  

In many cases, candidates respond to the promise of flexibility above all. We also need to be more open to the idea that we may not be hiring long-term—so what can a candidate contribute in a shorter amount of time? Can we shift our recruiting strategies to account for higher turnover? 

These are all big questions, and they require big answers that we’ll continue to find as time goes on. We at Talenya will continue contributing resources, advice, and of course AI solutions to recruiters as they adjust to the “new normal”.