By Deborah Thoben
Last year, millennials dominated the hiring trends. HR professionals wanted to know how to attract millennials, and how to keep them once they got them. Well, it’s a new year and it’s not just about attracting millennials anymore.
1. Diversity. Employers are realizing that attracting and retaining a truly diverse workforce with regard to age, gender, and race is going to be vitally important in the ever-tightening labor market. According to LinkedIn’s 2018 Global Recruiting Trends, 78% of hiring managers said that diversity is their top hiring priority and suggest that “diverse teams are more productive, more innovative, and more engaged.”1
2. Interviewing. While traditional interviewing can inadvertently introduce bias to the hiring process, today’s interviewing tools can provide more objective results and important data. For example, online testing assessments can objectively gauge a candidate’s soft skills and provide valuable insights into their cultural fit. Virtual reality allows a candidate to demonstrate their on-the-job capabilities in a simulated work environment. Tools like video interviews allow for the assessment of a wider pool of candidates in a shorter amount of time than face-to-face meetings. In the LinkedIn Trends report, 56% of HR professionals sited these interview tools and others as important to their hiring process.1
3. Data. In LinkedIn’s study, 50% of talent professionals said that data is the most critical trend in their hiring process. Today’s interview tools provide hiring professionals extensive data and the necessary analytics to make use of it.1
4. Artificial Intelligence. It’s terrific to have tons of data, but processing and making sense of it all is where AI excels. 35% of talent professionals and hiring managers sited artificial intelligence as the most critical trend impacting their hiring process. With this powerful tool, hiring managers can now process and analyze huge amounts of HR data to make informed hiring decisions and predictions regarding quality-of-hire and retention.
5. Career Training. With over 6 million job openings to fill, it’s going to become important for employers to offer career training so that the available workforce can acquire the skills needed to fill their open positions. Augmented reality will allow companies to provide on-site guidance and training.2
6. Work/Life Balance. Taking a lesson from the millennial playbook, the next generation of workers wants to enjoy quality-of-life as well as having a job. While at work, they want to be in a positive, engaging environment where they can collaborate and interact with co-workers. They also want access to wellness and health programs.3