Recruiting for 2016 Involves Knowing and Sharing Your Employer Brand

In time for planning your 2016 recruiting strategy LinkedIn has released their big report on recruiting trends for 2016, and the subtitle tells the story: ‘Global Recruiting Trends 2016: Relationships at the Core’. For this report LinkedIn again surveyed thousands of talent acquisition decision makers (this time 3,894, 305 from Canada) and compared their data to similar data gathered over the past 5 years to produce a look at what is trending and what is changing in recruitment.

The World of Work Continues To Look Different

How employees work, where they work and how they relate to the workplace continues to drive change in organizations.  If organizations are to remain competitive and agile their talent recruitment, retention and engagement strategies need to continue to look different. According to the recent  ‘2015 Global Human Capital Trends Report’ from Deloitte, among the top issues organizational leaders are concerned about was their ability to manage ‘workforce on demand capabilities’ and ‘workplace culture’. One way to begin to address these and other issues will be to develop, implement and execute effective recruitment strategies to find and attract the right employees, including short and long term employees (such as contingent and project based employees).

Snapshot of Interesting Information

• Quality of hire is the most valuable metric of recruitment performance said 39% globally (35% in Canada)
• Employee referral programs are considered a long-lasting trend by 26% globally
• Employee retention is a top priority over the next 12 months say 32% (33% in Canada)
• 23% of Canadians respondents indicated that internal hiring is a long lasting trend
• 59% are investing in their ‘Employer Brand’ to address staffing and recruitment challenges
• 46% of Canadians indicated they share or contribute to employer branding efforts

Quality of Hire

To save money and time organizations seek to use recruiting to find and hire people they need, who will stay and perform. That is why it is important to track hiring performance using retention and employee performance data. Talent Leaders consistently report that the ‘quality of a hire’ is an important element of hiring for organization and most measure ‘Quality of hire’ by looking at performance, retention and hiring manager satisfaction.  However, Talent leaders are not confident they are measuring quality effectively and finding ways to measure quality of hire well and a trend for the future is to gather and understand quality of hiring data better. In 2016 we will see a continued growth in the deployment of software to gather and try to understand quality of hire data to help predict future hiring strategies.

Obstacles to Attracting Top Talent

• Finding a candidate in high demand talent pools 46% globally but 56% in Canada
• Compensation 43% globally (42% in Canada)
• Competition 39% (globally and in Canada

Survey respondents indicated that their hiring remains volume has remained consistent while their hiring budgets have decreased for the past two years. Indeed, the survey revealed a trend in the expansion of the gap between hiring budget and hiring volume over the past few years.

	% Difference in Hiring Volume and Hiring Budget
Globally	10%	15%	17%	18%
Canada	4%	14%	20%	24%
Year	2012	2013	2014	2015

• 36% of respondents of the survey indicated that recruiting highly-skilled talent is a priority
• 33% indicated Employee retention is a challenge
• Internal candidate recruiting was a high priority for 37% and a modest priority for 49%.

As recruiting and hiring change, with more work on demand hiring organizations need to devise strategies to manage the gap between volume and budget. Over half of Canadian respondents indicated finding top talent is a challenge.  Role, industry and geography coupled with changing demographics are most likely at the heart of these perceptions but lack of budget and an ineffective recruitment process and strategy may be contributing factors.

Employer Brand As A Recruitment Tool

Globally Employer Brand as a recruitment and retention tool dropped in momentum last year but is again picked up speed and is expected to take on a bigger role in 2016. Globally 62% (60% in Canada) of respondents said Employer Brand is a top priority for the organization and 55% (53% in Canada) said they had a proactive employer brand strategy.

Canadian respondents differed from their global counterparts on how they were dissemination their Employer Brand. Globally there was an upward trend in using social media, (Facebook, Twitter) up to 47% and online professional networks up to 61% (LinkedIn) for employer branding and a downward trend on relying on the company website (still high at 68%). 75% of Canadian respondents reported a reliance on a company website, no discernable social media presence priority and an slight increase in their online professional networking (LinkedIn) to 57%.

A recent HR Insider article, “Can You Create Happiness In The Workplace? Fibernetcis did and you can too!” discussed aspects of employee happiness in the workplace and featured the example of Ontario based Fibernetics. In November Fibernetics won the “Accompass Award’ a Canadian HR Award for best Employer Branding with their “Im In’ culture. Fibernetics CEO John Stix attributed employee happiness to their ongoing success in business and in employee recruitment and retention. Fibernetics has an active LinkedIn presence as an organization supported by activities by their employees and CEO.

Trends for your 2016 recruitment strategy

The authors of the LinkedIn report concluded that the trends they were seeing were tied to the importance of relationship building as a strategy to recruitment success. This is not a new trend but a changing one as these relationships are being built often via social tools such as LinkedIn and through proactive employer branding. The survey respondents were asked what they considered three most ‘essential and long-lasting trends in recruiting for professional roles) and they reported the following priorities:

1. 41% Employer branding strategies
2. 37% Using social and professional networks
3. 33% improving sourcing passive candidate
4. 26% increasing employee referral programs
5. 26% Using strategic talent advisers

All of these strategies rely on people to help create and disseminate a message about the company to attract the right candidates on an ongoing basis. If you want to compete for the talent you need to understand where recruiting is headed as an important line of defense, and a more important component of your offense.