Emerging Trends In Global Recruiting To Act On Now Today's recruiters need to be global agents in sourcing, assessing, and securing top talent from multiple countries and regions

As technology and business advance, the world feels like a smaller place. Today's recruiters need to be global agents in sourcing, assessing, and securing top talent from multiple countries and regions. Macro and micro shifts in recruiting require talent acquisition (TA) professionals to expand their expertise, thinking and working in new ways. The following are five emerging trends in global recruiting that require our attention and action.

Prioritizing the candidate experience

We talk a lot about candidate experience in TA, and it's increasingly becoming a chief differentiator for companies. You have to get this right. Higher levels of communication, more responsiveness, efficiency in the recruiting process – the candidates you most want (need) to hire expect it. And when they don't get it, well, bad news travels fast. In global recruiting, you have the challenge of managing the candidate experience across different cultures, local expectations, regulation and compliance requirements, not to mention languages. All of this has to be proactively and thoughtfully considered and coordinated. It's a huge learning curve for most organizations and the pace of business doesn't give them time to stumble through it.

Data and analytics

The market is frustrated with antiquated ATS tools that do not parse data, facilitate reporting and comparison, or offer deep analytic capabilities. Data informs our decisions, and technology companies are being forced to innovate on the tools that deliver. An increasingly fact-based set of systems are emerging that provide triggers and alerts, directing the user in real-time. By making predictive decisions that improve efficiency, you can drive down costs and improve revenue. This is all being driven by a post-recession awareness of the need to be very thoughtful about how you spend and prove ROI on that spend.

Shifting workforce demographics and workstyles

Many companies are still set up primarily to address the values and needs of the Baby Boomer and Gen X workforce. They're playing "catch up" on the Millennial generation even though it now comprises the largest share of the American workforce, and they're just starting on the Post-Millennial generation. Companies are having to think very strategically about their employee value proposition (EVP) and how it plays against the needs of very different generations. These include the Millennial's value of life first, work second; the rising Gig Economy, and the fact that people expect to change jobs roughly every three years. It's a fact that being flexible in letting people choose how they get work done is becoming an expectation, not a nice-have. Running an efficient recruiting process while incorporating a finely-tuned EVP puts a lot of pressure on the organizations to think about what the process needs to look like. This is a level of sophistication and agility that recruiting has never had to rise to in the past.

Changing how people find jobs

Job boards used to be king. Now we're using LinkedIn, social media, and job aggregators to market job postings with a focus on steering away from job postings and toward having conversations about jobs. Companies need to ramp up social networking and other strategies designed to personalize the candidate's experience. It's far more about relationship building early on, getting that pool of candidates and creating an engaged pipeline – and far less about posting a job and waiting for people to see it and respond. How you engage and attract talent is going to have to become far more creative and relational.

Leveraging technology-enabled recruiting

One of the biggest advantages of technology and machine learning, is that it lifts the burden of repetitious acts off of humans and frees us up to relate to each other. Leaders in recruiting have to start weaving a bigger picture for how tools can change and improve the way we approach recruiting. Candidates expect us to have all the same tools and technology that they do. If they can text us, why can't we text them? Can we set up a video interview with ease? Can we automate scheduling? Can we have people do a realistic job preview online, fill out the application, upload a 30-second video interview, automate screening, and then deliver a batch of pre-qualified applications to a recruiter every morning? We have the tools for this now, and they will increasingly impact the way we do recruiting.

These trends require an agile, flexible, highly-efficient recruiting model. Organizations have to drive a global model with increasingly limited resources, yet still reflect their footprint, country-specific laws and customs, while meeting candidate expectations of ease, simplicity, and speed in the process. Some organizations are building recruiting functions to do this. Some do not have the time or operational bandwidth to redraw the function. Leveraging an experienced, skillful outsourced recruiting partner to help you meet these challenges may be a great option. No matter how you solve it, though, remember that at the end of the day, it's still all about getting the best people for the jobs in the most efficient way possible. It's just doing it in new ways.