While 2021 was characterized by resignations and worker shortages, 2022 will be defined by a large-scale return to the workforce. Employers will have to be attentive to market changes and candidates’ desires to ensure they’re sourcing ideal, highly skilled talent for their roles.
How have candidates’ desires changed and expanded? What new routes can be taken to find talent? What changes do you need to make to your candidate experience? Find out more below about the ways you’ll need to understand your candidates in 2022 and beyond.
The New Candidate
As employees began to reevaluate their positions and benefits, and became more concerned with the impact of their work, they took time to resign from the workforce and reflect on their career paths. Now, candidates are looking to make a return to the workforce, holding impact, benefits, salary, and employee experience as paramount.
Branded as ‘The Great Rehire,’ candidates are now looking to rejoin or relocate within the workforce with refreshed perspectives on their workplace desires and needs. The Great Resignation represented more of a mindset shift rather than solely the wave of resignations, as 65 percent of employees are still currently looking for new roles.[i]
Candidates are looking for companies where they know the exact benefits, compensation, and internal mobility that they’ll receive.[ii] For many employers, this will mean rethinking internal upskilling and reskilling to effectively revamp internal mobility for their employees. Creating an internal, upward trajectory for employees will allow your workforce and candidates to feel like they can have a measurable impact on your company’s profit, work, and success.
Candidates’ preferences for opportunities also extend to the overall onboarding and candidate experience as well. With the average time-to-hire having been 38 days prior to the pandemic,[iii] employers will need to find ways to streamline their onboarding processes to ensure employees are quickly integrated into a team and have a referenceable, positive hiring experience.
Emerging Hiring Strategies
The worker shortages of the past few years have highlighted stagnation in employers’ hiring and recruitment processes. As automation, AI, and data-driven hiring continue to come to the forefront of recruitment, employers will need to readjust their recruiting methodology to remain ahead of the curve.
The US staffing industry is projected to make 157.4 billion dollars in revenue – an industry record – highlighting the necessity for companies to begin reworking their recruiting strategies and processes to prepare for a period of ample hiring.[iv] This growth in staffing and recruiting is largely due to an ongoing shift to newer hiring processes. As Baby Boomers begin to retire and Millennials start leading the new era of hiring, recruiting is gradually becoming more of a marketing-centric process, where employer branding, resume databases, comprehensive candidate profiles, and social media all play central roles in the process.[v]
At its core, new-age recruiting will be a branding-centric process where employers must create an attractive brand, business model, and corporate social responsibility strategy to help attract talent alongside conventional hiring avenues. Candidates are concerned with their impact on a company –their contribution to a business’s success, profitability, and performance – but they’re also concerned with the impact of the prospective company in terms of environmental efforts, DE&I strategy, and social responsibility.[vi]
Optimizing your hiring processes for the new-age candidate will be a holistic and necessary process that will yield measurable benefits and allow your organization to capitalize on the opportunities of the Great Rehire. To find out more about the ways you can take advantage of the climate of the Great Rehire, visit www.appleone.com.
[i] https://www.pwc.com/us/en/library/pulse-survey/future-of-work.html
[ii] https://www.lever.co/blog/the-great-rehire-and-candidate-expectations-in-2022/
[iii] https://a16z.com/2020/05/01/covid-and-the-great-rehiring/
[iv] https://www2.staffingindustry.com/Editorial/Daily-News/US-staffing-revenue-to-grow-16-this-year-to-record-high-SIA-forecast-58974
[v] https://hiring.monster.com/resources/blog/hiring-trends/
[vi] https://www.lever.co/blog/the-great-rehire-and-candidate-expectations-in-2022/
