5 Trends Corporate Recruiters Need to Embrace

By Jobviddy

I’ve heard it said about corporate recruiters that you tend to react to technological advances in one of three ways:

1) Get overwhelmed by all of the new offerings and tools out there, so you choose two or three that you feel comfortable with and that work well for you and then ignore the rest!

2) Question whether the upsides of new tools outweigh the time and effort needed to get up to speed with them, particularly when viewed in light of the pressing deadlines you undoubtedly are facing in your role; or

3) Keep an open mind, study industry trends, and always make time to try new technologies to see what works for your business and what doesn’t.

Across the board, I’m told that the most successful corporate recruiters typically fall into category number three. Would be interested to hear your thoughts on that!

But with these 3 stereotypes in mind, here are 5 technological advances that I envisage savvy corporate recruiters will increasingly be using to further their recruitment efforts in the coming year:

1. Adopting Video Interviewing Tools

Video interviewing tools, such as Interview4 and Montage Interview, have made it faster and cheaper to conduct initial interview screenings of candidates. Using these tools, recruiters can conduct live, recordable, or virtual interviews, in which candidates are able to sign onto the platform at their convenience and record video responses to questions that the recruiter has entered into the system. This has the dual benefit of allowing more candidates to be given an initial interview assessment; and reduces the travel and cost associated with candidate interviewing.

2. Investing in Mobile-Friendly Application Processes

According to a 2013 study by Glassdoor, 68 percent of job seekers use their mobile devices to search for jobs at least once a week. Due to the growth of mobile device use in the job search, employers need to put themselves in a job seeker’s shoes and adapt their application processes to accommodate them.

Jobseekers expect two key deliverables from you when using a mobile device. Firstly, a positive user experience meaning they want to be able to navigate to relevant content on your careers site without difficulty and for that content to be delivered quickly and viewed easily. Secondly, they want options, the option to save the job for viewing later or the option to go through and complete the application process in its entirety, including uploading of a CV.

Failing to deliver on these two important areas can lead to jobseeker frustration and the inevitable missed opportunity to convert their visit to your career page into an application.

How can you, as an employer, avoid this from happening? There are a few ways. Create an app that candidates can use to easily search and apply for your jobs. Make a mobile version of your career page that limits the text to only include the necessary information. Add a “one-click apply” option that allows job seekers to easily import the information from their LinkedIn profiles. By taking these steps, you will be able to prevent losing job candidates due to frustration or confusion during the application process. Companies such as Three Sparks can help deliver a mobile-optimised version of your site whenever someone is visiting on a mobile device. Lack of IT resources really is no longer an obstacle to addressing this issue!

3. Attracting Candidates with Visual Job Descriptions:

Visual content is consistently looked at, shared and engaged with more than any other type of content, especially across social media. With candidate attraction and engagement an increasingly hot topic amongst corporate recruiters, traditional text job descriptions are simply no longer able to differentiate an employer, their brand and career opportunities from the next. Important considerations, especially when you’re trying to attract passive candidates to your company.

Video job descriptions have been used to great success in recent years by some very recognizable global companies as they are a great way for job seekers to feel a connection with you and your brand however there has always been concern with the effort, skills needed, cost and flexibility of using video to advertise multiple jobs . Companies such as ours (JOBVIDDY) have emerged to remove these concerns by giving employers a very time and cost-effective way to combine their existing corporate and career video content directly with their individual job roles. The result is an attractive, engaging, informative and interactive candidate experience for both the active and passive jobseeker audience.

If you’re serious about attracting talent and not just job applications, then video job descriptions are a valuable addition to any company’s recruitment strategy. They’re no longer time-consuming or costly to produce and you may even find you can secure a free trial to see for yourself exactly the impact this can have on your hiring effectiveness (see link above).

4. Experimenting with New People Aggregator Services

Although LinkedIn is still the go-to website for professional networking, the user base is still a tiny fraction of all the potential job candidates out there… and LinkedIn is becoming saturated with corporate recruiters and hence less effective as a means of approaching candidates. New People Aggregator services, such as HiringSolved, SwoopTalent and Connect6 allow recruiters to search for candidates across multiple social media sites and contact them directly. This means you can skip your “send and pray for a response” ritual the next time you send an InMail because you will have other avenues to connect with candidates.

5. Becoming Content Brands

Content curation and social media sharing technologies are now highly advanced and allow any corporate recruiting team to become a serious publisher – both of their own content and of content sourced from other publishers. Publishing original content from their corporate recruiter teams or by staff from within the business in particular gives prospective candidates a great insight into the business. This facilitates ongoing engagement with candidates who have expressed interest in the company and also provides a means to attract new candidates to join a company’s talent pool.

Publishing original content is a great way to bring those purple squirrels into your own backyard! Keeping talent engaged with a steady stream of insights about the company and industry knowledge ensures you have prospective hires on tap whenever your company next turns up the hiring dial.

So these are my 5 recommendations for Corporate Recruiters looking to experiment with new recruiting approaches in the coming months. Any I’ve missed that you think deserve a special mention? Or some of the above that you have first-hand experience of using? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section below. 

This post was contributed by Andy Kerney, Founder of Jobviddy

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