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The 9 Hottest Trends in Corporate Recruiting

By Josh Bersin, Forbes.com
Special to Online Career Tips

The corporate recruiting market just gets hotter and hotter. I just returned from a two week tour through Europe and attended the iRecruit conference in Amsterdam, where we had the opportunity to talk with dozens of top recruiting managers.

Here are the 9 hottest trends we see from our research, highlighting some of the newest startups in the space.

1. Corporate Talent Networks.

With the growth of LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Glassdoor, Indeed, and a variety of other tools available to promote your employment brand, companies have now evolved from a model of “candidate relationship management” to a model of building a “talent network” from which to recruit. The “talent network” is not just a place to post jobs, it’s a place to attract people: and it includes fans, candidates, employees, alumni, and even customers.

These “talent networks” (AT&T, Microsoft, IBM, many companies now have them) are viral product and service communities and they create magnetic attraction among prospective employees, customers, and partners. Vendors like Avature, BraveNewTalent, Jobs2Web, SelectMinds, and Smashfly help you build them.

2. Social Sourcing.

Sourcing candidates over the web is critical to success today. The granddaddy of these solutions is LinkedIn, which sells the LinkedIn Recruiter tool to HR organizations. Most recruiters will tell you that having a LinkedIn recruiter license is the “cost of entry.” Many of the recruiters I talk with rely heavily on LinkedIn but no longer see it as a competitive advantage – because everyone else has it too.

A whole barrage of exciting tools have been created to help companies better find and source key candidates. In the technology space interesting tools include Entelo, Gild, and RemarkableHire which are out there looking at all your social footprint to evaluate your technical prowess. These companies mine your personal code postings and other social information to create a profile and actual “competency ratings” based on your social data.

3. Recruiters as Sourcers not Recruiters.

As companies globalize and look for more specialized skills, the role of the recruiter becomes more and more important. And where do we want recruiters spending their time? Interviewing people? Or sourcing great candidates?

The highest-performing companies are now pushing more and more responsibility onto the shoulders of hiring managers (training them how to interview) and letting recruiters focus on high-powered sourcing and initial screening. The more “assessment” we push to hiring managers the better.

At Oracle, where recruiting is an art, the company focuses its recruiters on narrow job areas and gives them administrative support for social networking, ad management, and scheduling. The recruiters are very senior and they are measured on their ability to strategically source and attract passive candidates, often from competitors. Hiring managers play a major role in the process and partner with recruiters on sourcing and assessment.

4. A Barrage of New Assessment Science.

The science of human assessment will never stand still. Tools like Myers-Briggs and hundreds of other personality or skills assessments have been around for decades. Today, driven largely by the power of the cloud, there seem to be an explosion of new assessment tools.

Some of the hotter companies include Evolv, Logi-serve, PeopleAnswers, SkillSurvey, Smarterer (customized testing) as well as the large legacy providers like SHL, DDI, Hogan, Kenexa, KornFerry, Profiles International, Wonderlic, and hundreds more. I can’t possibly do this market justice in a few paragraphs, but it’s growing with new providers who not only provide great validated tests, but also collect employee performance data so they are starting to provide real-time feedback on the tests themselves.

If you want to learn more about this fast-growing, high value space, check out our four-stage model for pre-hire assessment.

5. Building an End-to-End Talent Brand

The days of an “employment brand” are over. Now it’s your “brand.” As we see it, your real employment brand is walking out the door every evening, talking with their friends, posting information on Facebook, and possibly complaining about your company on Glassdoor or somewhere else.

Today’s high-powered recruiters work directly with the SVP of Marketing to create a research-based, authentic employment brand and promote it on the front page of the company website (not only in the “careers section”). A large percentage of the people who visit your company online are looking for jobs – so you want to grab them quickly.

A modern talent brand is highly specific, authentic, and narrow – so you attract just the right people. (We call this creating a “tunnel” of candidates, not a “funnel” of candidates.) There’s no reason to attract job candidates who don’t love what you do and how you do it – so be honest and real – you’ll get better candidates and save money on screening.

Companies like TMP, Futurestep, Pinstripe, Seven Step RPO and Kenexa (IBM) are experts and many others are experts at helping you build and communicate a compelling talent brand.

6. Modernized applicant tracking software.

Yes we all hate applicant tracking systems. When you have to fill in 20 fields in a form to apply for a job it makes your head spin. But these systems are badly needed and companies spend millions of dollars trying to make them easier to use and more valuable to candidates.

Slowly but surely a new breed of these tools is emerging and they focus on managing the entire recruitment process, monitoring ad campaigns, and creating an excellent candidate experience. This includes new versions of Taleo (Oracle), SuccessFactors , Lumesse, Tribepad, Jobvite, iCims, SilkRoad, Peoplefluent, and dozens of others.

Yes, ATS’s are not the sexy application they used to be – but now they’re the platform for all the other recruiting tools you need – and they become the data platform for analysis as well.

While we’re talking about the candidate experience, it still needs work… which leads me to:

7. A great candidate experience.

The days of employers putting up hugely difficult websites to attract candidates are slowly going away. New research by the Talent Board shows that you as an employer can damage your own brand by making it impossible to apply for a job, not getting back to candidates, or treating them poorly during the interview process.

Now, more than ever, it’s time for the recruiting team in your company to do their own net-promoter score and use tools like “manage the candidate experience” to measure and continuously improve the recruiting process. If you make it unpleasant to apply for a job at your company, word gets around.

8. High value outsourcers and staffing firms.

The recruiting process is complicated and varies greatly by role, geography, and industry. The $140 billion talent acquisition industry is filled with experts who want to help you. A whole new breed of high value recruitment outsourcers have sprung up to help you find the right people in critical roles.

We used to think that outside recruiters and staffing firms would go away as LinkedIn and other online job boards grew. Not the case. The flurry of new tools available has made it more important than ever to look for seasoned professionals (and often specialists) to help you find just the right people.  (Read “Corporate Recruiting Transformed” for more details.)

And last.. but certainly not least…

9.  BigData and BigData Firms.

Recruiting is the #1 application for BigData in HR.  Our research shows that the most advanced thinkers in HR analytics start by measuring recruiting.  Do you know where your most effective candidates come from?  What backgrounds and experiences make the best sales people? Which sourcing or advertising channels are most effective and efficient?

This is the most data-rich part of HR. New companies like Broadbean (amazing recruitment dashboard), BurningGlass (US talent acquisition data), LinkedIn (check out the Talent Brand Index), eQuest, and dozens of others are now selling data, tools, and analytics services to help you assess, analyze, and improve your recruiting function.

If you aren’t already analyzing your recruiting process in detail, you should be. Companies that measure recruiting well are dramatically outperforming their peers. Watch the BigData in recruiting market – this is going to be one of the best spaces for hot startups in HR.

There is tremendous innovation taking place in the recruiting market. Remember that among all the HR, talent, and leadership programs you work on, the #1 most important is “hiring the right people in the first place.”

Focus on recruiting: you’ll be a better business for it.
You can follow me to stay up to date on trends, research, and news in all areas of HR, leadership, and talent management on twitter at @josh_bersin.

For more information on Bersin by Deloitte, please visit http://www.bersin.com .

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