Future Recruiting Trends: What to Expect

We live in times where digitalization often progresses faster than we would like. What was just a recruiting trend, for example, is already completely outdated and uninteresting in the next moment. In particular, in recruitment, both applicants and companies are relentlessly searching for ways to make recruiting easier, faster, and more successful.

The internet provides a platform with enormous reach, relevance, and countless possibilities to fill vacancies with highly qualified personnel in the shortest possible time. We at kroot would like to explain in more detail what the future recruiting trends are. 🚀

A Brief Look Back: Recruiting Trends of Recent Years

Those who still rely on newspaper ads and flyers in recruiting find it difficult—no, actually impossible—to reach young professionals who are qualified through innovative thinking. As digital natives, you primarily reach young target groups on the Internet, and recruiting trends are also shaped by the constant changes that make the digital world so flexible—but also confusing and overwhelming for many. 😵

Before we look to future trends, let's review the recruiting trends of recent years. No one knows whether companies would have experienced such a shift in the workday without COVID-19—and although this was partly characterized by high losses, absenteeism, and bottlenecks, the transition to home office and remote work seemed to have functioned better and more sustainably in many industries than previously assumed.

While only 3% of working individuals worked from home before the pandemic, this number rose to a whole 25% during the pandemic! 😱📈 Additionally, about ¾ of working individuals could envision working from home in the long term—a change that certainly very few had foreseen so quickly and one that will also have consequences for recruiting trends.

Besides job ads on social media & co., digital job interviews and the success monitoring of the entire recruiting funnel through KPIs became real recruiting trends. Recruitment has been completely digitalized in many companies, which has provided better control and optimization options and will continue to do so in the future. Today, it is not uncommon for applicants to get to know a company digitally up to and including onboarding—and beyond—without ever being on-site. 💻

What Awaits Us: 4 Trends in Recruiting 4.0

A brief look back at the past shows one thing above all: The recruiting trends of recent years have been characterized by changes, which have occurred in part by an inevitable digitization. And even though the corona pandemic now seems to be slowly passing, the shift to digital remains a fixed part of future trends in recruiting. Discover which 3 recruiting trends will await us in recruitment 4.0 and how you as a company can best prepare for these changes. 💪

Trend 1: Artificial Intelligence in Recruiting Tools

In recent years, it was still HR personnel who were responsible for all internal recruiting processes. In addition to target group analysis, creating and disseminating job advertisements, and conducting interviews, tasks for optimizing recruitment also fell back on the HR department – often an absolute overload responsible for the absence of recruiting successes or recruiting trends.

To relieve HR personnel in the future and make recruiting more efficient, artificial intelligence (AI) is already part of recruiting trends. In addition to analyzing target groups and appropriate distribution platforms for your job advertisements, analytics tools capture relevant KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) around the clock. ⏰

Based on these measurements, the AI automatically suggests which measures should be optimized to reach your target group faster and more specifically and convince them. In the future, there will even be recruiting tools that can implement these optimizations independently without your intervention. This is how recruiting trends arise. 💡

Chatbots are also part of AI and will most likely develop into trends in recruiting; active sourcing is the keyword here. A lot of time was lost in the past finding potential candidates with the corresponding qualifications and addressing them on their own accord – especially if, after long conversations, a rejection ultimately followed. Intelligent chatbots will take over this communication in the future and enormously relieve HR personnel both in terms of time and mental effort.

Trend 2: More qualified applicants through transparency

The shortage of skilled workers will continue to rise, and in the future, highly qualified workers will be nearly free to choose their employers. This development creates significant competition between employer brands that want to outdo each other as employers and communicate the benefits of your company externally. The employer brand comes into focus. The internet already offers numerous advantages and possibilities that will also be reflected in the recruiting trends of the coming years.

Starting with your own career page through classic job portals and social business platforms to profiles on social media – everywhere, you can present yourself as an employer in the best light and draw potential applicants to you or the job. 🤩 Those who are as transparent as possible in providing a lot of information about the open position, their own company values and structures, as well as current developments, will make themselves more interesting to potential applicants. Welcome to the recruiting trends.

Trend 3: Recruiting as an independent business unit – creating recruiting trends

Recruiting will become significantly more complex in the coming years, despite the relief from recruiting tools, analytics, and AI. 😵 With great likelihood, completely new paths and recruiting trends will crystallize, which will come as quickly as they go. Long-term developments should be followed, but short-term opportunities should also be seized. Constant optimization of recruiting successes, such as time-to-hire, will also be of utmost importance in the future to stand up to the competition.

In recent years, the recruiting of a company has often been managed by 1 or 2 HR personnel, but in the future, the individual complex subprocesses such as target group analysis, monitoring and optimization of KPIs, and communication with applicants, etc., should be handed over to a separate business unit with several employees that is solely responsible for recruiting. Besides, recruiting itself is becoming a trend for the coming years in addition to trends within recruiting. 🚀

Trend 4: Recruiting Trend – Candidate Search via Social Media

Recruiting has already evolved and digitized significantly. Target group accuracy continues to increase, and especially the target group of willing young people is seeking and finding new ways to apply. One possible way is definitely through social media. The companies' candidate search is gradually being redirected to platforms like Instagram or TikTok. Facebook still plays a role as well. Leaving aside the usual career sites like Xing or LinkedIn. The goal is to understand these platforms and generate target-group-specific acquisition opportunities. Here, kroot can definitely help you position yourself correctly and advantageously for trends in recruiting.