Recruiting trends to watch for in 2022

On Feb 24th, Matt Tague, Gem’s Director of Customer Talent Advisory, partnered with Hung Lee, editor of the leading recruiting industry newsletter—Recruiting Brainfood, and presented the key trends and strategies all recruiting orgs should be focusing on in 2022 in the webinar 7 Future Recruiting Trends for 2022 and Beyond. 

They highlighted the key findings bolstered by recent surveys of over 2,500 talent acquisition professionals across North America and Europe. The conversation was thought-provoking, covering diversity hiring, data-driven recruiting, remote working, candidate experience, employer branding, and more. 

If you missed it, you can watch it here. A lot of great questions were posted in the Q&A, and we couldn’t get to all of them. As promised, here are the follow-up answers. And big thanks to Hung Lee and Matt Tague for their additional insights. 

Q1: What are some popular channels besides email/Inmail?

Hung: Multi-channel comms is the way. Sticking to email / LinkedIn today is likely relying on the phone alone during the web 1.0 era—it might still work for a while, but you are going to get left behind if you don’t find other ways to connect and communicate with candidates. There is really no excuse; most of the communication channels candidates use are consumer tech—social networks. Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit—wherever the candidate is, that is where a recruiter needs to be able to operate. This is not to say that you should invade their spaces with job ad spamming or unsolicited messaging. It is to say that a modern recruiter needs to be a multi-channel recruiter, fluent in these spaces regardless of their immediate recruitment potential.

Matt: In terms of outreach channels, the big three are, of course, Inmail, email, text. The emerging channels are other providers like WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. The issue is these new systems are not connected with any centralized system so tracking conversion results from these systems is not possible today.

Q2: Thoughts on bots on career pages?

Hung: They are becoming mandatory on career pages. A well-programmed bot can provide FAQ responses 24/7 for candidate questions where the answer is fixed. Do you sponsor a visa, is the job full-time, when do you need the person to start, etc. All of these questions which would typically be fielded (poorly!) by a human recruiter can be handled by conversational AI. 

Matt: Yes, this ties into what we mentioned about bringing the customer experience to the candidate experience. Looking for lower-value add activities that can be automated/self-service saves recruiter time and allows them to focus on higher-value activities like closing.

Q3: Without panel interviews, how to prevent bias?

Hung: We have to accept we cannot prevent bias, but we must do what we can to mitigate it. Panel interviews are turning out to be a hugely significant part of doing this well—having two interviewers simultaneously covers more ground, provides better perspective, and seems to moderate extreme positions. For the most critical interview, it’s a good idea to have it as a panel. If this is not possible for whatever reason, the use of interview intelligence software can help—essential transcription analysis software, which can help the decision-makers better understand what actually went on during the interview. 

Matt: Agree that we are beginning a new area around interviewing. Panels are one way to mitigate bias. The use of AI as a supplement can be useful but not overuse AI to the point where it is the decision-maker in a process.

Q4: How do you think companies will adapt to enabling early-career talent to work from home effectively?

Matt: I think that companies should broadly take an equal approach to their remote strategies. If early-career talent can effectively work remotely, they should be able to do so. That being said, early-career employees do need more in-person opportunities to learn/network, etc. There are many ways companies can get creative, like having an in-person learning week with certain company leaders, etc.

Q5: Do you think the compensation levels will eventually even out?

Hung: I think compensation levels will actually crash. The current moment feels like salary can only go up (in real terms). Still, there will be a point where the inability to hire, regardless of salary levels, will lead to alternative solutions being pursued by employers, most obviously moving the job to the location where the talent would be prepared to do the work. We might well see large-scale offshoring of remote-able jobs if the candidate shortage persists for too long. The long-term effect of this will be salaried equalization at a global level, but this will mean a relative decline in salary in the richer parts of the world. 

Matt: A lot of the compensation pressures we are seeing are happening against the backdrop of broad macro inflation. So, it is not just comp but real estate, stocks, services. Everything is going up. That being said, the economy moves in cycles so while it is a candidate-centric market now it can easily shift to being an employer-centric market like we have seen in the past. I also think that these pressures create new developments. You can already see this in the retail sector, where it is already more cost-effective to have self-checkout and robot coffee makers. As prices go up, these solutions become more cost-effective for other sectors as well.

Q5: How do you think recruiting as a career will change in respect to education, experience, etc…

Matt: While there will always be a need for recruiters on the front line to simply fill reqs, progression within the TA space will look different going forward. There will be a much greater emphasis on data, systems thinking, and the ability to recruit at scale.

Thank you for reading this post. If you’d like to learn more, feel free to read the full 2022 Recruiting Trends report here, where you will see visualized data and actual quotes of the survey respondents.