The new normal for recruiting

May 20th, 2022 | Industry News

Recruitment has always been a challenge. Add to that the difficulties of the pandemic and the unique tribulations of relatively new industries like fintech, crypto and blockchain and even the best recruitment CRM is facing unprecedented demands. But all this is part of the new normal for recruiting – and web based recruitment software is at the forefront of it all.

While research suggests on average we change jobs a dozen times over our career, for fintech, crypto and blockchain this is the low end of the scale. There are two reasons for this:

1. There is no established career path into two of these industries (crypto and blockchain) and fintech is an industry still relying on transferable skills
2. The growth in all these areas is exponential (in 2017 a study estimated 1900 employees in crypto, today it’s at least six times that) – meaning that importing from other sectors is the only way to fill jobs.

But there are problems. Even the best recruitment database software can’t suggest adjacent knowledge and transferable skills in industries where demands are changing so rapidly that there are no benchmarks (NFT expertise, for example). Head-hunting and word-of-mouth recruitment are weak tools when an organisation hasn’t been established long enough for benchmarking (essentially, recruiters are taking the word of somebody whose own credibility has barely been established about a third party with no credibility at all). Finally, these are territories where job boards, adverts and automated processes are all but useless because the few potential candidates are being pursued by so many potential employers that they just aren’t looking for jobs.

So how do recruiters find candidates for niche jobs? Having found them, how do they attract them?

The answers are actually much simpler than might at first appear. There are a few, very simple, tools, that can be used to engage candidates in niche, high demand sectors, which are within reach of even small recruitment agencies:

• Go green – endless amounts of research show that this generation of employees is not only more environmentally conscious than any other, but also has a great commitment to environmental neutrality or positive environmental engagement. This means that organisations with good green credentials are in a great position to engage young candidates by highlighting their environmental focus.
• Employee-led social media – while established industries may have constrained policies around allowing employees to speak for (or even about) their employer on social media, newer sectors can really benefit by inviting, sharing and utilising employee generated social media to drive their own recruitment.

Finally, having engaged potential candidates, and despite the fact that standard automated processes don’t work for niche employment, sensitively crafted automated responses via online recruitment software can be used to keep in touch with people who’ve responded positively to this kind of message, creating the beginning of a funnel that leads to on-boarding a new employee.