Top recruiting trends to follow in 2022

We’ve already seen digital work and retail explode in the wake of the pandemic as people seek a safer, socially-distanced way of doing business together. This spells a radical shift in terms of which skills and expertise will be most sought-after in the coming years as well as what our relationship with work will look like.

Expect greater investment in internal talent development as businesses try to anticipate their future digital needs and generally increased competition for top talent as a result.

Stryve has collected data on the hiring trends that defined 2021 and those that are expected to shape the recruitment space next year, let’s take a look.

The Great Migration

According to Ranstad UK, nearly 70% of UK workers are confident about moving jobs in the immediate future and 1 in 4 have plans to do so in the next three to six months.

The pandemic is partly responsible for this as it gave many workers a pause to reconsider their work/life balance and now they are looking for jobs that reflect their change in priorities.

Retention is always better than hiring, you save time and money by holding on to an experienced worker rather than trying to conjure a replacement from an already short-handed and cutthroat hiring market.

Firms that want to retain their best staff, and save, on average, £25k per person in hiring and training costs, need to start focusing on the compensation, flexibility, and working culture that they can offer.

A good salary alone is no longer enough to attract and keep the best talent and if you want to avoid falling prey to the great migration, then start investing in work-from-home support, subsidised travel, and lifestyle perks that appeal to your staff as human beings as well as employees.

Skills vs Degrees

2020 proved that agility is the most important characteristic for futureproofing your organisation. Considering the rapid switch over to an almost entirely digital marketplace that’s taking place, this agility will have to be baked into how we cultivate future talent.

Skills-based education is an answer to this challenge, and aside from the flexibility to tailor training to your skills needs as they emerge, it offers a couple of extra benefits that support an effective and fair hiring practice.

For one, unconscious bias is far less likely to affect hiring choices as roles become more and more skill focused since having an objective marker of a candidate's value will skip past a lot discriminatory thinking while redaction of personal information protects candidates along similar lines.

Second, the timeline for retraining or adding skills to a promising candidate can be reduced dramatically because the training itself can be designed with the outcome in mind.

This often involves a hands-on learning approach which gives them a chance to use their new skills practically and in an environment that mirrors what they can expect once they take on the role.

The skills boom will also allow you to streamline your hiring overall since the ability to quickly build the expertise of current employees may make hiring for that role completely unnecessary. Moreover, maintaining a detailed catalogue of the skills within your organisation can then direct hiring efforts meant to plug any gaps.

Rise of the Metaverse

The metaverse is a ‘what if?’ scenario based on current tech trends like AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality).

In a nutshell, it's a simulated space within the internet that will allow for realistic, 3D rendering of human interactions and experiences. As a result, it offers a total transformation of how we interact with each other digitally and with the web as a whole.

Popular thinking is that it could be an Internet 2.0 and while the first iteration allowed for unrivalled data exchange and communication, the metaverse will be an ‘internet with a heart’ that allows for emotional engagement and experiences within a virtual, remote context.

While video conferencing platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams have allowed us to maintain basic communications with each other, they have been lacking in the human element that is so crucial to long-term success and efficiency.

We can already see the metaverse in action in the Horizon workrooms app, developed by Facebook (now Meta), and although it’s got huge potential to business interactions, it also presents an obstacle in terms of training, adaptation, and integration.

As with any new technology, especially if it has a range of applications, your teams will need time to fold these possibilities into how they currently work. That goes double for your hiring department given that so much of their workload is based on person-to-person communication and interaction.

Although this technology is extremely exciting, it is worth noting that it remains untested on a large scale and its success will be at the mercy of competing entities being willing to find common ground to make it universally accessible.

The metaverse may not be a must-have in 2022, but its promise of bringing people closer together and offering them a warmer, more individualised experience is worth considering when assessing your own internal culture and how you manage remote working.  

NLP’s Arrival

NLP or Natural Language Processing is aiming to build on previous AI-driven interpretation and translation software. The idea is that it combines existing algorithmic processes with structural analysis of written text.

From a hiring perspective, this offers an additional tool to support the removal of bias and prejudice from the hiring process at an individual level and, although Stryve believes in engaging with every tool at our disposal, there are systemic issues within NLP that could actually lead to increased cognitive and cultural bias.

Since NLP engages data at a high volume, it can inadvertently reinforce our pre-existing human biases in ways that are more subtle than the individual examples of bias we might take from a non-automated process. As a result, these can be harder to spot and resolve, leaving the team in question unknowingly on the hook.

As with the metaverse, there is certainly potential for NLP to disrupt convention - particularly in the hiring space where quick and insightful data analysis is key to success.

But at this stage it’s difficult to see whether the inherent issues of mass data interpretation might hold the technology back.

Applicant Tracking Systems

ATS’ are unique to this list in that it’s not the technology so much as its availability that is new. As with all emerging tech, it starts out costing the earth and becomes more accessible as time passes, which is where we’re at now with applicant tracking systems. Unsurprisingly, they are fast becoming a mainstay of SMEs and are crucial to their success in an increasingly competitive hiring space.

As we move into 2022, the ability of ATS’ to automate and schedule candidate communications, as well as streamline discussions on hiring choices and timelines will see the technology become even more of a standard in businesses of all scales.

Through a combination of keyword searches and statistical analysis, the ATS can filter candidates to only allow the top talent through and maintain the standards of your teams without the laborious need for a hiring manager to assess applications individually.

Stryve’s ATS platform takes each of these benefits and builds upon them with a unique scoring system that collates the skills, experience, and qualifications of would-be hires and translates them into a simple yet comprehensive metric.

Additionally, our platform contains integrated commentary and tagging features that allow you to get the skinny on a candidate and with just a couple of clicks be able to give your thoughts on their suitability as well as tag others into the conversation.

Finally, our platform has GDPR compliance built into its DNA, with automated reminders of when applicant data needs to be purged as well as storing according to GDPR requirements. We also provide periodic data checks as part of our service to make sure that compliance is maintained.

Book a free demo today to see how Stryve can help with your hiring.