As the year has just begun, I already see strong trends emerging for 2024, which I invite HR and Recruitment teams to focus on.
1 - The Meaning of Work: a lost battle
There's been a lot of talk about employee expectations, especially about finding meaning in work. This echoes the Employee Value Proposition (EVP), the moral contract that binds employees and employers together: what makes that I get up in the morning and go to work?
The Meaning of Work (or "at" Work?) is a lost battle. Why?
First, candidates' expectations are very high, and becoming more and more tied to their personal life (and therefore require personalized approaches).
So, if you really wanted to satisfy everyone, well, you couldn't. You need to choose your "battles" and capitalize on your strengths.
But the other reason why the Meaning of Work is a lost battle is the status of mistrust found among candidates. Due to misunderstandings between employers and employees, the employees' trust has been polarized.
It can have been reinforced for some, making them think twice before leaving their employer to join another. And this trust has sometimes been broken for others, so deeply that it impacts their relationship to work.
And I'm not even talking about the "quiet quitting" phenomenon or the 2.8M people community on Reddit r/AntiWork!
Look at the numbers from the latest IPSOS 2024 survey in France:
40% of employees say they are generally dissatisfied with their lives;
53% declare themselves disengaged;
67% go to work without motivation;
As an employer, you should no longer just wonder why candidates come to you: you need to ask why your employees stay!
Does that seem like a harsh question when I put it that way? And yet, that is the key.
You won't change the market. Depending on your size and inertia, it might take time to change anything about you that is meant to last.
So, act with your strengths: build on the moral contract that binds you to your employees.
2 - The role of LinkedIn in a sourcing strategy
Four situational elements make 2024 a year where LinkedIn is back in many conversations:
LinkedIn's service fees are increasing to a point where corporate recruiters are opting out of the Recruiter solution (the one that allows team collaboration) for a solo version, just because of the price,
LinkedIn has reached a "king of the hill" social network status: they no longer have competitors at the moment, except for certain networks dedicated to niche markets.
The purely social aspect of LinkedIn has become very cluttered: it is increasingly difficult to spot the "signals" and important messages amidst the noise brought by many contributors from all walks of life (to the point that LinkedIn is now mocked by mainstream comedians, a sign of the phenomenon).
LinkedIn's new restrictions on sourcing from external sources to its platform (e.g., Google X-Ray) are undermining many direct approach practices that have been part of sourcers' daily routine for years.
Hence a question I hear at least once a week: "How can we recruit without LinkedIn?" I have ideas, but they won't work for everyone to date ;)
3 - Evaluation practices on the Hiring Managers' side
This is clearly not a topic that dates from 2024. But how much importance it has gained in recent months!
I am pleased to see more and more companies choosing to build custom training programs for their managers.
For a long time, we didn't dare go too far with Hiring Managers.
Firstly because we assumed that Recruitment was just common sense: while actually, there are practices and methods that work better than others, and a rich scientific activity - it's not a bad word - to advance it.
Then because we weren't sure what to tell them: "I want to train my managers in Recruitment, but where do I start? What do they really need?" That's why I recommend tailored training programs. Because each manager's daily life is unique, a Recruitment training must be able to be contextualized to their jobs and their daily lives.
When I train managers in recruitment, we work on their current positions, their interview questions, their real life. Theory is just a backdrop, what matters is filling their toolbox!
4 - Creating candidate engagement is one thing, but how to nurture it during the process?
Everyone is short of candidates. Or rather, everyone is short of candidates that meet their needs.
We can no longer just focus on sourcing to bring in more candidates: the market is tight, and every candidate matters!
We must bring as many candidates as possible to the end of the process
= We must maximize candidates' engagement throughout the process.
Engagement is like a flame. Before the application stage (whether through employer branding or the sourcing pitch), we try to create sparks. And if this small flame comes to life, it's the role of the recruitment process to know when to blow on it to make it grow.
That's how we create engagement. It can't be done without our Hiring Managers. It can't be done innately either.
In 2024, it's clearly time to work on improvement margins on the Managers' side!
5 - AI in Recruitment
What can already be done, and what can't yet be done with AI in Recruitment?
First, you can do far less with AI than what is sold to you on social networks. However, you can do much more than you might think at first glance: you just need to have been able to test the limits and capabilities of AI tools to know where to stand.
The current limitations of AI do not allow them to browse information in real time as a sourcer would, for example. AI is a robot, and most sites know very well which robots they should let in (for example, the small Google robots that come to catalog your site's pages to index them in their search engine) and which robots they should keep out the door (those without shoes, obviously).
If we can overcome this first limitation for the general public, then the relevance of conversational AIs will be greatly improved.
The other problem is the number of parameters an AI can handle at once. An AI produces a result in response to a query; a query that includes multiple parameters and criteria of your choice. To date, public conversational AIs are not capable of managing as many different parameters as a human being.
For example, if you ask an AI to write a message for a sourcing approach, it will produce a text that is not very personalized and relatively "generic", even if trained on approach messages (I will share my detailed experience on this subject soon).
It's a matter of quality first, and ROI second.
The current limitations of AI do not allow producing as much quality as a human being whose job it is. However, it will probably produce a better message than someone who has never written an approach message.
Then, the question of ROI arises: if too much time is spent training a tool to ultimately have a less satisfying result than what one would do "by hand", it's wasted time, even if the process is automated later.
So yes, in recruitment we have often heard the phrase "done is better than perfect". It's false. Or at least, if it was true one day, it is no longer.
The market is tight, candidates are demanding, an employer who wants to succeed in their recruitment objectives must give their best, not just a "best effort".
Yes, AI in recruitment is a topic to follow closely. Because we can already do amazing things, especially at the experimental level (I'm talking specifically in recruitment), but we are really not far from being able to implement it for good. And major updates are planned on the main tools for 2024.
Stay tuned! And you can count on me to continue experimenting with these tools.
What do these recruitment trends hold for us in 2024?
These 5 topics seem to me to be really recurrent in Talent Acquisition departments, and they are far from being "short-term" topics: HR Directors and their teams have enough to keep them busy all year.
Interested in how you can work on these?