#BizTrends2023: Jump on these 3 trends for successful recruitment

Nelly Mohale, Head of Human Capital at Decusatio

However, these are the three trends that you should jump on to have a successful recruitment strategy in 2023.

Offer flexibility

The pandemic brought about a culture of flexible work and it is here to stay. Employees have changed their perspectives on the value of work in their lives and are demanding more flexibility in their day-to-day work activities. Flexible working arrangements, such as self-scheduling, remote working and hybrid work structures, continue to become more and more prevalent. Research found that 80% of candidates would choose a job that offers flexible working arrangements over those that didn't. In fact, 30% stated that they valued flexibility more than they valued other benefits such as vacation time.

In the war for talent, businesses that don't offer flexibility are unappealing to the workforce of the future. The nature of work is evolving and flexibility remains important when attracting talent.

Candidate experience from day one is key

Studies of the impact of Covid-19 on the workforce has highlighted the downstream mental health issues and heightened stress levels experienced by employees. This has accelerated the need for creating an environment that upholds employee health and well-being, and encourages a healthy work-life balance to ultimately provide employees with a positive experience. This starts from the time the application process begins.

A strong candidate experience has the power to influence the candidate’s decision to apply and ultimately accept your offer. Each stage of the recruitment process offers a chance to develop closer connections with candidates and entice them to work for your business. 58% of applicants say that an excellent recruitment process increases the likelihood of them accepting an offer.

Providing an excellent candidate experience will allow you to engage with applicants and influence your top prospect to accept your offer over competitor offers. You can enhance and optimise your candidates’ experiences by making use of candidate surveys to collect data that will help you to analyse feedback from applicants. Make sure you use this feedback to adapt your strategy to ensure candidates have a good experience with your company from their first engagement.

Technology is the foundation of modern recruitment

Recruiters will highlight that one of their single biggest challenges is the need to streamline the application process and allow them additional time to focus on talking to preferred candidates. Human Resources Today reports that 86% of recruiters use digital recruitment software systems to manage the recruitment process and locate quality leads. Technology plays an important role in streamlining the process of recruitment and the right tools allow recruiters to strategically attract and engage candidates in ways that traditional recruiting cannot. Above all, technology gives recruiters the chance to save considerable amounts of time and resources when recruiting talent.

More and more candidates are making use of technology to job hunt, especially the workforce of the future. If your recruiting technology is outdated, you run the risk of losing high-quality applicants and investing time filtering through lower quality candidates. You must be willing to take advantage of modern technologies to streamline recruitment processes, meet the rising demand to source high quality candidates to recruit and retain quality employees. If this is not your core business or competence, then you can save significant time and money by outsourcing this function.

Trends come and go but we believe these three trends are worth jumping onto as they will be here to stay. If you don't adjust your recruitment strategies in line with these trends you are setting yourself up for failure. By focusing on providing flexible working arrangements, delivering an excellent candidate experience from day one and taking advantage of smart technology, recruiters will gain a competitive advantage and set themselves up for a whopping 2023.

Nelly Mohale is Head of Decusatio Human Capital. She works with high-growth businesses to identify talent that can positively contribute to all elements of the organisation.