Is your organization looking to hire new employees in 2014? If so, here is a quick look at some of the online trends in recruiting that were seen in 2013 and are likely to stick around through 2014 and beyond.
1: Online Career Centers
Perhaps the most well established recruiting option on this list, nearly 50% of all organizations have some type of online career center on their website. More non-manufacturing organizations’ websites have an online career center (53%) compared to manufacturing organizations (40%).
Although online career centers have been around longer than other avenues such as social media or mobile recruiting platforms, their popularity seems to have leveled off right around the 50% mark over the past few years.
With more online options cropping up, organizations no longer need to rely solely on their own traditional online internal career boards for recruitment.
2: Social Media Recruiting
One of these other more external recruiting options that is becoming of the norm in terms of recruitment is social media. In fact, if your organization is not currently using social media as part of your recruiting strategy, you may find yourself in the minority here in Northeast Ohio in 2014.
Due to various potential legal liabilities that have been addressed by the EEOC and in the courts in 2013, it is likely that most organizations will continue to utilize social media tools to post jobs (54%) and source candidates (43%). However, very few organizations are using social media for formal screening purposes during the hiring process.
For example, only 8% of respondents in 2013 report using social media before bringing in a job candidate and even fewer login to social media to formally screen candidates post-interview (4%) and post-offer (4%).
In these few cases where social media tools are used as a formal screening tool, employers are typically looking at the basics, i.e. place of previous employment, job title or position held, job description or responsibilities and dates of previous employment. Evaluating more subjective items like opinions about personality, work culture fit, management/work style or motivation and options about job performance is left largely to the more direct and traditional reference check method.
Until the case law around social media and recruiting becomes better defined, many would argue that this more subjective type of information is wisely left alone.
3: Mobile Accessibility
Looking ahead it appears that mobile accessibility in recruiting is the next high tech mechanism that organizations looking to recruit top talent may need to adopt as part of their process. According to the 2013 ERC Hiring Trends & Practices Survey only 10% of local organizations have a recruiting website that is optimized for mobile viewing and the same percentage allow job candidates to upload/edit resumes via mobile devices.
However, according to the 2013 Global Recruiting Trends Survey, when given the online infrastructure to do so, 59% of potential job candidates use mobile devices to learn about job opportunities and 53% actually apply for jobs on these types of devices.
This gap between the mobile device habits of potential applicants and the mobile recruiting offerings put forth by local employers could become a key opportunity for organization looking to recruit young, tech savvy top talent in 2014.
It should be noted that in the coming months local organizations are already making plans to do exactly that by expanding their investment in the realm of mobile recruiting.
The figures below illustrate these projected changes, with another 10% of organizations planning to add a mobile optimized website for recruitment and 12% planning to add a resume uploading/editing function to this infrastructure.
Figure 1 | Mobile Recruiting Strategies Being Used
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