Recruiting Trends

Every company has a special way of reaching out to its potential employees. They are all trying to find the Mecca of recruiting trends to reach that golden audience that they believe will elevate their organization to the next level.

While there are many different ways recruiters are reaching out to candidates, there are three specific trends that are seeming to sweep the recruiting world as we know it. 

These trends include:

1. Employment Branding

2. Strategic Workforce Planning

3. Social Recruiting

This blog post will discuss exactly what these recruiting practices are and illustrate what companies are excelling with the practice.

1. Employment Branding

Employment branding is a combination of things that work together to form a single calculated impression that works the physical feelings, the intellectual impressions and emotional experiences of current and potential employees. 

There are three main qualities that powerful brands possess:

Functional Benefits: these include tangible rewards for employees, which include but are not limited to salary, healthcare, a clean and safe workplace, and a good location.

Emotional Benefits: these are made up of the mission, pride in the company, job company status, job satisfaction, camaraderie, etc.

Reasons to Believe: this basically is proof by word of mouth or concrete evidence that the organization is a great organization to be a part of. (Ropello, 2013).

A company that really embodies the idea of successful employment branding is Google.

GOOGLE

Recently, BusinessWeek conducted a survey that provided that Google was rated the number two choice among college students as a place to begin their career.  As a fairly young firm, Google’s brand recognition is hard to compare. Google has dual meaning as a noun and a verb.  What sets Google apart from other companies focusing on their employment brand is the untraditional medium in which its management practices are discussed. Google allows for schools to tour their facilities.  My sister attends a school where they take educational trips each year that supplement their studies in some way.  As a student interested in coding, my sister chose to attend the San Francisco Technology trip option.  During her travels she took a short 35-minute drive to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.  She could not stop gushing about this place. Everything was cutting edge and laid back and “just fun.” She said that it made sense to have this sort of environment for a cutting edge innovation company because, “In order to come up with creative and new ideas, people need to be in fun, relaxed, and uplifting environments like this,” (Maria Garippa, age 16).  While not everyone has opportunities like this to visit the headquarters, Google let the entire world into their home in the recent movie, “The Internship.” This is the type of medium that everyone else dreams about in the quest to improve their employment brand.  What this movie did was introduce the Google culture, what they stand for, what they’re looking for, what the environment looks like and most importantly, what the company itself offers everyone else. (Sullivan, 2006)

2. Strategic Workforce Planning

“Strategic workforce planning is the analytic, forecasting, and planning process that connects and directs talent management activities to ensure an organization has the right people in the right places at the right time and at the right price to execute its business strategy” (Santonocito, 2010).

Strategic workforce planning is exactly what it sounds like it’s the “grind.” It is made up of the metrics and statistics that help forecasting become more accurate, and that most recruiting managers completely dread.  What is important for recruiting managers is to not get overwhelmed by these metrics and statistics to the point that they start becoming irrelevant.  Recruiters must find connections between metrics and stats that are going to provide a means for improvement or efficiency for the organization.  This is exactly what Starbucks’ Jason Warner did. 

STARBUCKS

As arguably the most well known coffee shop in the world, Starbucks has got quite the reputation.  With so many locations and so many employment opportunities all over the world, it only makes sense that somebody within the organization came up with statistical correlations between external and internal factors in regards to employment.  What Jason did was identify statistical correlations between external environmental factors like unemployment rates and the turnover rates of Starbucks’ managers and employees.  He illustrated the concept that as fewer people are unemployed, others realize that there is less competition and begin a job search.  This give Starbucks an upper hand in establishing the market in which they want to target their talent search in. (Sullivan, 2006)

3. Social Recruiting

Social recruiting is sweeping the nation.  It is key in attracting candidates like the millennials that were discussed in my previous blog posting.  There are many different takes on the definition of social recruiting. The best combination of everything that I came across in my search is this:

Social Recruiting is a concept not a term. It is a concept that job seekers and recruiters use to source and recruit candidates through social media sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. (Le Viet, 2013)

FACEBOOK

When most people hear the words social and recruiting together in a sentence, their brains jump straight to LinkedIn.  Stephane Le Viet, Founder and CEO of Work4 believes that LinkedIn is “out,” (Auf Wiedersehen).  I would venture to say that LinkedIn has established itself as the “traditional” professional recruiting site.  It serves as an online resume for its users and presents itself solely for recruiting purposes. In that respect, there’s not much room for evolution in that foundation.  Facebook on the other hand presents a more free form of possibilities. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, “Facebook allows a recruiter to cast a wide net and connect with more potential job seekers than other services because of the widespread use of Facebook; 70.2 percent of users cited this as one reason why Facebook is an effective recruiting too” (NACE, 2012).  With it’s easy accessibility and the astounding amount of users, Facebook has established itself as a new medium for recruiters and job seekers all over the world.

Works Cited:

NACE. (2012). Use of facebook in the talent acquisition

process. National Association of Colleges and Employers, Retrieved from http://naceweb.org/uploadedFiles/NACEWeb/Connections/social-jobs-partnership-executive-summary.pdf

Ropella, P. (2013). How employment branding attracts the

right talent. recruitingtrends, Retrieved from http://www.recruitingsites.com/how-employment-branding-attracts-the-right-talent/

Santonocito, P. (2010). Trends in strategic workforce

planning: Positioning your organization for the economic turnaround. recruitingtrends, Retrieved from Trends in Strategic Workforce Planning: Positioning Your Organization for the Economic Turnaround

Le Viet, S. (2013). There’s more to social recruiting than

linkedin: Why facebook is the next frontier. recruitingtrends, Retrieved from http://www.recruitingsites.com/theres-more-to-social-recruiting-than-linkedin/

Sullivan, J. (2006). 12 best recruiting practices to copy.

ere.net Recruiting Intelligence, Recruiting Communiy, Retrieved from http://www.ere.net/2006/09/25/12-best-recruiting-practices-to-copy/