What Can We Expect in Recruitment for 2022?

The new normal that we expected to see as the pandemic ended and we went back to the offices did not arrive. And the world of business became agile to the changes as never before. As a result, countries have gone back to the office and into lockdowns more than once throughout the year, which significantly impacted companies' performances.

Therefore, besides hiring the right talent for such an interchangeable and mostly remote environment, developing and maintaining a distinguished work culture is crucial. When taken into consideration that the companies were forced to get back on their feet after a devastating 2020, having a team on board that would be able to carry such weight and help the company overcome challenges became highly desirable. 

And even though companies were once again forced to adapt to the new circumstances, these new challenges gave birth to some recent trends and helped improve many industries. And the HR industry is no different! 

So, what can we expect from recruitment in the year ahead of us? Which long-term trends did emerge in 2021? 

1. Hybrid work became a real thing - and looks like it’s here to stay

2. The rise of companies dependance on advanced technologies in HR 

3. Tackling diversity issues become an imperative

4. HR is increasing its strategic importance in companies worldwide

Hybrid work became a thing that’s here to stay! 

After a year of remote work, and as the vaccination took place across the globe, the restrictions were loosening down, and employees were mainly able to return to the offices. However, most of them didn't want to - at least not to a full degree. Since 2020 proved that companies can have their entire staff working remotely, it's become difficult for them to convince their employees now to return to working at the office full-time. 

This is exactly what gave birth to this new term, "hybrid work." It seems as though everyone is working "hybrid" at the moment. The new schedule of working just a couple of days from the office and the rest of the week working from home seems to be working for everyone. However, to maintain hybrid work long after the pandemic, companies must build infrastructures that would allow it. 

In a hybrid environment, the alignment and communication between employees cannot suffer. Companies across industries from various parts of the world were forced to find new procedures for the things they have been doing in a certain way for ages. To achieve good results in the transition, companies needed to implement new technologies in their work. More specifically, various online communication channels were implemented to make asynchronous communication across a company possible. Once these new technologies impact the way companies do business, it seems like it will be almost impossible for them to disappear in the upcoming year. 

More specifically, looking at the job requirements from the past couple of months where there is an increasing surge for people with experience in working remotely, we can only say that remote work is here to stay. However, as we see, the upcoming year will be more structured in how companies position themself - whether they are solely remote companies, a hybrid environment, or an on-site type of organization. It will be interesting to see which one will be attracting the most applicants! 

Companies’ are increasingly relying on HR technology

With the remote environment comes remote hiring as well. And, as we already mentioned in a previous paragraph, having a remote company requires more technology dependency. That being said, recruitment technology that would allow recruiters to recruit talent regardless of where their location became more critical than ever. There are several elements in which recruitment technology assisted the creation of a cohesive remote workforce:

1. Reaching remote global workforce 

2. Streamlining the recruitment process from sourcing candidates to onboarding new employees

3. Building a recognizable online presence for the companies

Reaching remote global workforce

Increasing recruitment marketing efforts has been trending in the past year and is definitely about to become even more critical in the year ahead of us. As the workforce is becoming more globalized, the competition among candidates is growing, and the only important thing became - how skilled are you? 

Consequently, recruiters are increasingly searching for hard-to-reach talent from different parts of the world. However, anyone who has experience recruiting talent would know that successfully finding talent in other countries online is difficult without a good knowledge of the scene. For that reason, familiarizing the recruitment industry with digital marketing trends and the possibilities of different job boards will only be on the rise in 2022! 

Streamlined & automated online recruitment

Hiring a new employee without ever having the opportunity to meet them and guaranteeing that this same employee will go on to do an excellent job while working remotely is a difficult task. That is why successfully assessing candidates for the position they are about to perform is essential. To find, reach, attract and ultimately hire the right candidate for the job, you need good tools assisting you throughout the process. Recruitment tools centralize all recruiter's efforts, streamline the process, and provide an online infrastructure for hiring great talent. 

Whether you need to send out online assessments or schedule online interviews and remind candidates of them - the recruitment tool is here to assist. Even more so, chatbots and other AI technology show that recruiters' daily tasks might drastically change in the upcoming years - leaving the more repetitive tasks to technology and focusing on strategic aspects of their role. But, ultimately, as we see no sign of stopping when it comes to hiring remote talent, we also know there is no turning back to the excel/spreadsheet type of work for recruiters. Consequently, the increasing adoption of advanced technologies for attracting, nurturing, and hiring talent occurs.  

Building a recognizable online presence

For a remote company, their online presence is their everything before the person starts working at the company. With everything being online, it is much harder for a candidate to get a natural feel of the company besides their website, job advertisements, or online events they host. 

For that reason, some tools focused on creating a website builder for their customers and allowing HR departments to customize various landing pages with different elements to truthfully and transparently communicate their values. It will become more critical for companies to have appealing career sites that would convert their visitors into applicants in the upcoming year!

Tackling diversity issues becoming imperative

The matter of diversity and inclusion is taking over the world. And even though the companies were often falsely portraying the workplace as being diverse and inclusive in the past, the events with racial and gender equality movements pushed companies to try harder. Incidents of mistreating racial or gender minorities have become so devastating for companies' reputations that most of them are trying to prevent them from occurring. 

With the increased interest in creating a more inclusive and diverse working environment came the idea of learning to decrease personal biases. Bias training and other forms of educating staff to become aware of their biases to try and minimize them are becoming one of the first steps into creating a more diverse workforce. Additionally, since bias can hardly be entirely eliminated from one's mind, more and more technology is being developed to assist humans in such efforts. Ultimately, finding a way for recruiters to have technology assisting them in repetitive and bias-sensitive tasks is the direction in which we see the HR industry developing in the upcoming year. 

HR is becoming strategically more important to businesses

As businesses increasingly realize the importance of hiring and retaining top talent to build great products or offer outstanding services, the role of HR becomes more and more crucial. Not only for hiring great teams, but also the importance lies in creating a distinguished culture so that employees with different ambitions, priorities, or interests gravitate towards other surroundings. 

As a result, a well-planned and executed strategy for hiring qualified candidates that will be a good culture fit can go a long way - including increased productivity, satisfaction, and lower turnover rates. Since all these reasons directly impact the companies revenue, more and more companies are deciding to allocate their resources and efforts into placing HR as one of their core strategic strengths for growth.