Recruiting’s biggest challenges in 2018

February 7th, 2018 | Industry News

LinkedIn’s 2018 Global Recruiting Trends report contains a fascinating range of challenges for recruiters in the year ahead – although a number of them seem to conflict with wider trends in the UK economic climate. A major theme is the role of diversity – which 82% of hirers saw as the top trend for the year, at a time when almost every professional and trade body is expressing concern about the effect of Brexit on the candidate pool and especially, the tendency for top talent to be seeking jobs outside the UK because of employment uncertainty.

A second factor that will challenge hiring managers, is the ability to assess soft skills, which 63% of those surveyed said was a problem. Soft skills are notoriously difficult to interview for which is why recruitment software that can build soft skills evidence in to the applicant tracking system is likely to be invaluable to companies and recruitment agencies seeking candidates with well-developed communication and teamwork attributes.

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Recruitment resolutions to make in 2018

January 19th, 2018 | Industry News

We’ve been looking around at industry predictions and reviewing 2017’s highs and lows to come up with some recruitment resolutions that will help your organisation in 2018.

1. Recruit/Promote/Replace – be visionary about growth

According to a survey of nearly 1,000 recruiters, 76% of managers are planning to promote staff, while 24% are intending to replace departing staff with technology that will perform their functions. At a time when recruitment is booming in certain industries, finding suitable consultants can be time-consuming. Chatbots that handle the first stages of candidate filtering are becoming commonplace. Even simple recruitment software now offers sophisticated applicant tracking systems that reduce the time spent on administration and give consultants more time to do the really important human tasks such as building trust and understanding client needs.

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Recruitment predictions for 2018

January 5th, 2018 | Industry News

In the final days of December 2017, a report from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) reveals that fewer UK employers are planning to take on more staff next year. In fact, employers in London are expecting to reduce jobs. Two thirds of companies said that Britain will be a less attractive place to do business in 2018 and at the same time as recruitment struggles, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development said that pay rates are likely to remain tight, with most employers not intending to make any pay rises above the current inflation rate. What does this mean for the recruitment industry and recruitment generally?

The same REC report showed that many British businesses are finding it hard to locate the skilled workers they require, which can lead to limited business growth as well as stifling wage increases. The evidence is that permanent jobs were filled at the quickest rate for three months in November, as businesses grabbed suitable candidates. For recruitment consultancies, applicant tracking software that rapidly filters candidates by experience and/or qualifications can make the difference between a successful placement and a failed relationship with a client. Cloud recruitment software offers a distinct advantage in this regard, giving consultants online access to candidate profiles and client communications both round the clock and when on the go, meaning that the face-to-face part of consultancy can be maintained alongside managing the administrative processes of effective recruitment systems.

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2017 in focus – recruitment at the forefront

December 26th, 2017 | Industry News

Brexit, budget and disruptive technology – 2017 has been a turbulent year for recruitment. Growth revision has been lowered from 2% to 1.5% with a continuing decline until 2020, leading to stagnation in the job market and fierce competition for candidates in the diminishing pool of suitably qualified mid to senior personnel in many industries, notably the legal, pharma, medical and estate agency sectors.

The budget announcement of a new partnership between CBI, government and the TUC is designed to encourage people of all ages to train and retrain in key shortage areas. Digital skills are a particular focus and this is important to SMEs who will be glad to hear that many start-ups, technical ones in particular are to be given support to grow. IR35 will have a compliance load for contractor and business-to-business transactions around labour supply. New tax and NI obligations will add to the cost of doing business and sophisticated recruitment software can help organisations reduce both the cost and the extra time required to administer changes in taxation.

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How to be a happy recruiter

December 12th, 2017 | Industry News

Recruitment experiences different pinch points throughout the year and at the end of the summer but before Christmas there tends to be a rush of candidates seeking new jobs before the new year. The good news is that a recent survey revealed that there has been an 11% increase in advertised vacancies over this period in 2016. The bad news … those applications tend to be rushed, incomplete and inexact.

Recruitment software that can’t recognise such inadequate CVs leaves recruiters with a headache. Any applicant tracking system that doesn’t support recruitment agencies or HR departments in sifting heaps of applications is almost worse than useless because it creates the impression that it’s speeding up the recruitment process whilst in fact it’s leaving recruiters with a pile of useless candidate profiles that still have to be trawled through as the ideal candidate could be lurking within the heap.

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Recruitment’s elephants in the room

November 20th, 2017 | Industry News

It’s been an unusual month for the recruitment industry which has – on several fronts – faced a hard reality check. One development will soon be adding extra pressure to the work of recruitment agencies dealing with construction and HR departments in the building and construction industries. A campaign to convince up to 1500 overseas construction workers to move to New Zealand is offering fast track visas and ‘experiences’ including fishing, surfing and cultural activities to qualified construction workers. This talent trawl is designed to entice building professionals who are feeling worried by Brexit, and recruitment professionals in the UK will need to have a clear and comprehensive offer to compete.

This means working with a recruiting platform that does much more than simply track candidates: hiring and keeping skilled trade professionals inside the UK will require recruitment software that identifies key candidates as soon as they become available and processes them through an applicant tracking system that creates a conversation between recruiter and candidate. Above all, in an industry like construction where downtime is expensive, cloud recruitment software may be vital to effective candidate adherence – building professionals seek rapid and professional placement and one key offering that could keep workers in the UK is being placed speedily into a new job, rather than waiting for visa application and clearance procedures to move abroad.

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Recruitment – agency culture, cyber attacks, software

November 10th, 2017 | Industry News

Accountancy Age suggests that the 2008 financial crisis has caused a massive but almost undetectable change in the recruitment industry. According to a recent article, it says ‘recruiters are failing to speak to candidates directly’ which means that candidates don’t benefit from conversations with a recruitment consultant and therefore aren’t given the advice on career development that would previously have been available.

While it’s certainly true that recruitment has both globalised and intensified, with many consultants never meeting the candidates they place, we think they are missing some of the substantial developments that make modern recruiting practices more personal rather than less so:

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Recruitment innovations

October 31st, 2017 | Industry News

The decline in job applications in the past year has been a clear response to uncertainty over Brexit and a clear desire to hold onto employment. For 2018 this suggests that successful recruitment consultancies will need to be:

1. Technologically adept – for example online recruitment software will need to make better use of real-time activity. Programmatic advertising (which uses algorithms to buy advertising space in real-time) requires applicant tracking software that can both recognise the best candidates and redirect less attractive ones to other vacancies without dropping them from the recruitment pipeline.
2. Brand driven – in a candidate led market, brands need to be highly attractive to the applicant and that’s not just the client brand, recruitment agency brands also need to be clearly differentiated and appealing to individuals who want to be confident about their recruiting platform.
3. Communicative – the old system of only contacting candidates when a job is on offer and only speaking to clients when they have vacancies is dead. There is no such thing as pipeline information, instead webs of knowledge link candidates to clients to agencies and regular communication in all directions not only keeps a recruitment database current but ensures agencies can plan ahead for horizon events such as changes in legislation, business practice or even likely changes to organisational culture as major players move on, or up.

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Why recruitment consultancies fail to upgrade

October 16th, 2017 | Industry News

Like many software providers we’re keen to discover what causes people to use our software – but we’re equally fascinated by what stops them! While we have a substantial amount of information on the first group, it’s difficult to find out about the second, but by aggregating information from a number of high profile cases we are able to discover a few key problems that keep businesses from reaching their full potential.

Complexity creates fear of recruitment software

Any change to business practice can create fear in users – maybe they won’t understand the new system, perhaps processes will take longer than with the old one, or it might even be that users fear losing data. That’s why we’re called Recruit So Simple – because we know that for recruitment agencies to choose our SaaS recruitment software, it has to be three kinds of simple:

• Simple to set up
• Simple to learn
• Simple to use

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Recruitment industry ‘megatrends’, UK confidence levels and AI

October 4th, 2017 | Industry News

Adecco, the world’s largest staffing organisation, has identified a number of ‘megatrends’ influencing the nature of recruitment in recent years. None of them will surprise the well-informed recruitment consultant or HR manager, but when aggregated together they reveal a substantial change in the nature of recruitment. The mega-trends are:

• Businesses favouring flexible workforces in an increasingly fast changing environment
• An ageing global workforce
• More people freelancing
• The need for lifelong learning in the workplace
• The opportunities presented by automation.

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