Even though 2020 is coming to an end, countries and many of their industries have still been struggling from its severe impacts, and HR/ recruiting is no different. 2020 is a challenging year for all industries as it established many major trends in the workplace and how things get done. One of the evidence is the rise in remote interviewing and optimizing the candidate experience in the talent acquisition trends.

Today, CMC Global has gathered top emerging IT talent acquisition trends – the ones we see not only going strong, but steam and getting set to make an even bigger impact on talent acquisition not only today but well into the future. So, below are 7 ongoing and emerging trends that we think are going to have a big impact on your recruiting strategy in 2021 and beyond.

1. Remote interviewing

In a time when social distancing and wearing a mask are the only ways to keep our society from falling apart, remote interviewing is the most popular trend that has emerged in the talent acquisition and recruitment area. For example, until this day, England is still on its second national lockdown, which makes it hard for candidates to even go to the company for an interview, not to mention long-distance travel. And yet, a business can not be put to a halt – so does talent acquisition.

Remote interviewing involves job interviews using video conferencing software, such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Cisco Webex, or any similar platforms and tools such as HireVue and Montage. With technology advantage, recruiters and candidates can join a video call and interview as if they were having a regular face-to-face interview.

Talent acquisition trends disadvantages

Even though this trend is prominent during the pandemic, it seems to have quite a lot of challenges. First, presenting oneself in a professional manner at their home can be difficult in the presence of children or pets. Secondly, there are also factors that they can not control such as a noisy neighbor or unforeseen technical challenges. These unfortunate factors can lead to candidates becoming flustered and embarrassed, and ultimately, this can lead to recruiters being put off a candidate.

With Russia and America’s successful COVID-19 vaccines and other treatments, the use of remote interviewing will likely become less frequent in the long run.

2. Candidate experience

Demand for IT talent has been affected by COVID-19 but opportunities remain, according to an article about IT jobs posted on Computerweekly. Jobs in fields such as cloud, data science, and artificial intelligence (AI) are still struggling to fill in the gap, and thus, enhancing the employee experience is one of the things recruiters must do right.

Normally, organizations that focus on creating positive experiences for employees are found to be more successful and profitable. The same can be said in terms of candidate experience. Thus, improving the company’s career sites and using surveys to get feedback from candidates to get their opinion are two ways employers can do to boost their candidate experiences.

Candidates want career sites to be detailed and easy to use so that they can navigate around them easily and quickly set up a profile to search for jobs and apply. Using this way, candidates will have a good impression of the company’s professionalism and the company’s target IT talent can be expanded. On the other hand, candidates will be unlikely to recommend career sites they find to be awkward, slow, and complicated.

Candidate experience doesn’t stop there but expands to the stages in which a candidate has been put into the candidate pool, communicated with, interviewed, and other follow-up processes. In a competitive labor market, the overall experience is crucial because it not only attracts the best talent available but also builds a good image of your brand in the employee’s hearts in comparison to your competitors.

3. Diversity and inclusion

Diversity and inclusion are the growing focus for HR leaders that translates directly into the talent acquisition and recruitment process.

According to the World Economic Forum, businesses that support and promote a diverse and inclusive workplace are gaining benefits that go beyond the optics, which means they have more productivity and profitability. Thus, many organizations are looking to boost the diversity of their workforces, in the meantime making them more inclusive.

This is the recruiter’s responsibility to identify and bring a wider diversity of candidates into the talent pool.

See which countries provide the best IT talents for outsourcing.

4. Contingent employees

Finding the right IT staff is hard enough, but it is truly harder in times of COVID, according to a webinar conducted by Gartner. With businesses facing prolonged disruption and uncertainty, staffing is more difficult than ever. This whole situation demands the existence of contingent labor/ freelancers to fill the needs of the fluctuating and short-term operations.

In terms of contingent labor, people mostly think of highly skilled laborers who do jobs such as consultants or highly skilled experts in their fields. However, over the past few years, there has been an upward trend in using contingent workers, which creates a hiring process exclusively for this kind of worker. The talent acquisition trend as well as the process is different for contingent workers than it is for full-time/part-time employees. 

Today, companies need to seek out, recruit and process these types of hires, or partner with an outsource service provider. In the meantime, companies should also prepare to have their career site ready to appeal to contingent workers and set up different interview methods.

You don’t want such lengthy processes? Find an expert or teams of experts now at CMC Global: 

5. Analytics

In 2020, it is not strictly a recruiting trend but in 2021 and many years to come, analytics is predicted to grow at a rapid rate and become a major trend that will impact how organizations define their talent acquisition strategies as well as recruit talent.

In the future, the use of analytics across talent acquisition processes can help decision-makers have a better and data-driven choice, as well as provide insights to identify areas of strength and weakness to reduce the cost of talent acquisition. It can also identify problems and blockages in the process so that recruiters can fill vacant roles more quickly. Additionally, talent analytics, with data-driven dashboards can be an effective tool to measure the effectiveness and ROI of your recruiting software investments.

Analytics provides recruiters with metrics such as:

• source of hire
• age of job (how long this job has been open?)
• time to fill
• time to hire
• cost per hire
• quality of hire
• offer acceptance rate
• vacancy cost (how much it costs the organization while the position remains vacant)
• diversity

With predictive analytics from such many metrics, recruiters can project and predict future trends. For example, users can predict the time to fill, estimated future candidate performance, interview acceptance probability, and the candidate’s tenure.

6. Artificial intelligence

No one can deny the dominance of AI in all areas, especially talent acquisition software. AI can improve ways of sourcing, identifying, and engaging talents, ranging from smart talent platforms, like Eightfold AI, to job-posting platforms, chatbots, and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. Moreover, AI can ensure the promise of equal opportunity for all candidates as it removes bias from candidate identification, selection, and hiring.

The amount of work AI can work at high speed can surprise anyone. It can simultaneously add value and automation to the talent acquisition processes while sourcing, screening, sorting and ranking candidates to create a pipeline of qualified candidates who are likely to perform well in vacant positions, based on the skills in their profiles and resumes. Right now, these steps require highly repetitive manual tasks, but in the future, by using an AI-based talent acquisition application, recruiters can save hours or even days..

AI can also make chatbots smarter, especially recruitment chatbots to engage with candidates and provide details about jobs upon request. Machine learning can bring continuous improvement to AI, which means the longer it is used, the more effective the software is.

7. Skills and competencies

While skills and competencies have been used in talent management for quite some time, they haven’t always been used effectively in talent acquisition. In the previous time, it was used particularly for identifying and matching people who can succeed in key positions or identifying career paths.