What are the top trends that will define our profession in the short and medium term?
Candidates are scarce merchandise these days obviously. And it is not only demand for the IT roles which got even stronger due to Covid and the digitization of everything. We can see the lack of candidates across the board. The short-term goal should be to make the staffing effort maximally efficient as there is also a big demand for recruiters and talent sourcers. And their salaries increased up to 30% recently. The winners of this situation will be organization who not only can search efficiently but they can produce the candidates with a specific skill-set to the market. It's called eduployment and the creation of specific academies. The goal is to do hiring from the academy graduates. There are companies doing this for the washing machine servicemen or specialized IT academies. For instance, we created Microsoft GoodCall Academy a year ago to re-skill and up-skill people to Microsoft certified specialists who can be directly hired by Microsoft partners.
What do recruitment managers need to invest in order to run a successful recruitment organisation?
There are things which are not directly dependent on the specific industry such as learn how to lead hybrid teams, the youngest generation and make the organization lean to be prepared to the sudden collapses we experienced in March 2020. When speaking about the recruitment organizations, managers needs to adjust to the new customer needs such as flexible recruitment. We experienced the increased demand for our recruitment outsourcing services last year than ever before. And we are not talking about outsourcing the 360-degree recruiters only but also talent sourcers for full and also part-time. Plus it's more global than before.
What business needs are most affecting the recruitment profession today?
When I speak for the Czech Republic where we set our business from, the recruitment is very hard as we have the second unemployment in the world after Singapore. Definitely the lowest in the EU. So it doesn't matter if we talk IT, marketing, finance or simply office managers. They are hard to find these days. If I have to pinpoint something, it's even stronger demand for the IT specialists as we are rolling through the spiral of the digitization of everything. Companies are also dealing with one major things and that is how to work with internal gig workers. Working as a freelancer or contractor, even if on part-time only, it's a trend and corporations would rather utilize these people from their our lines than lose them for good.
What are the potential pitfalls that recruitment professionals should be aware of?
It's a question of a perspective - in-house vs. agency or a company recruiter vs. management. Anyway, where recruitment is still far behind is automation and general data-saviness. There are already tools which can easily automate your daily routine tasks which can save you a lot of time and make you a transhuman staffing professional. I will probably be talking about some of these in my speech at RecruITech.
How can recruitment be a strategic partner for management today?
What we are often asked by recruitment managers at companies is so called talent mapping. Organization must be more sophisticated in terms of which city to open a new branch at, which companies are hiring/firing the staff they could hire, etc. This information can be gathered for example from LinkedIn if you know how. And if you can interpret the results. One quick hint, the premium account LinkedIn Sales Navigator has an extended company search where you can search for companies based on various criteria including if the company is hiring or firing a general or specific staff based on real LinkedIn data.
Do skills and culture really matter, or is our profession still based on requisition?
Skills and culture are two different things but both of them definitely matters.
If you could give one piece of advice to the recruitment profession, what would it be?
Learn, learn, learn. Recruitment is copying trends from other industries such as marketing (e.g. job ads), psychology (e.g. interviews), IT (we use many tools for recruitment), cyber security (e.g. OSINT - Open Source Intelligence for talent sourcing), etc. I usually say that I don't know about the more significant innovation in recruitment since LinkedIn was founded. That's even why I externalized LINKEDIN on my car plates. Anyway, it will come one day. There are the brand new things such as metahuman, metaverse, web3 and others coming.
Personally, what was the most challenging thing in the last year and what has been a positive surprise?
The most positive and challenging at the same time was that the recruitment market recovered not only so quickly but to such heights as it is. Not it's a challenge to hire our own people into the recruitment organization and we need 25+ of them as of today. So we have to implement the same things we do for our clients including the already mentioned eduployment which is handled by our Recruitment Academy. The same way we created the very first talent sourcers on the market in 2013, we are now creating the pipeline of our recruitment certification graduated ready to be hired at our organization or anywhere else.
Thank you for the answers to José Kadlec, the Chief Recruitment Architect & Founder of GoodCall!
