Marketers, creatives and developers are invading recruitment teams

As society evolves, attitudes change – and successful companies have the sense to change along with them. 

The big shift of today? How easy it is to find a job. At 76.5%, UK employment is higher than it has ever been. Add to this review platforms like Glassdoor, ever-increasing competition between employers and an endless stream of job search sites where people can find new career opportunities, and it’s easy to see why recruiters are having to work much harder to fill their roles. The balance of power is shifting: from the employer to the worker.  

Traditional recruitment – a determined and charismatic individual finding and engaging talent – is ill-equipped to overcome these challenges. And businesses are beginning to see that hiring the right people, at the right time, at the right scale, requires a radical rethink of what a hiring team is – and who sits inside it. This means that, as we move into the new decade, you don’t need to be a recruiter to be in a recruitment team.

I know what you’re thinking. You wouldn’t hire as a chef somebody who doesn’t know how to cut an onion. The idea is not, ‘let’s replace our recruiters with randoms’, but, instead, ‘let’s add an extra dimension to their capability and make it easier for them to do what they do best’. 

With that in mind, which new skillsets are joining the recruitment team? And how are they helping employers hire talent more efficiently?

The Data Scientist is a relatively new breed of interdisciplinary professional and, so far, most of their kind are working in Finance, Insurance, Professional Services and IT. But demand is both increasing and diversifying – and the recruitment function is certainly one place where Data Scientists can make a big impact. Today’s in-house recruitment can generate a huge amount of data from candidates, teams, jobs and analytics. At the Big Data-level, this information is only useful if you have a Data Scientist who can clean, process and analyse it. Through debugging, building and testing, a Data Scientist scrubs and interprets the data, allowing a company to make data-driven decisions that boost ROI across the HR function. For example, this could mean presenting salaries that are more likely to be accepted by candidates, providing benefits that specific talent prefer, reducing unconscious bias, or boosting diversity in job shortlists.

At bigger organisations, recruitment-specialised designers, videographers, copywriters, animators and producers are also increasingly welcome to work in-house. Their talent and ingenuity is helping employers develop a more creative approach to hiring, through recruitment marketing campaigns incorporating employer branding and skillset specific messaging. Levelling up your employer brand’s creativity is often the difference between someone clicking on a job ad or scrolling straight past it, especially when they, like most of your potential talent pool, are passively rather than actively looking for a job. 

And what about developers, product professionals and user experience designers? As employers adopt, adapt and even build their own software to enhance and streamline recruitment processes, these tech skillsets will increasingly be required. Recruitment chatbots, careers websites, and internal HR mobile applications are just three of the most obvious products that need building, as well as software that makes it easier for teams to manage their candidate pipelines, stay connected, unite on projects, access files and monitor success. With synchronised touchpoints throughout the entire process, the new era of connectivity is allowing team members to deliver an excellent candidate experience while taking a given role from vacancy to onboarded – without the bottlenecks. 

But what good are fancy job descriptions and intelligent chatbots if they can’t reach the people they are designed to encourage applications from? Strategists and marketers are able to make sure that the right talent sees the job adverts and careers sites your creatives and developers are cooking up. Their clever targeting can increase candidate reach and engagement of passive talent, which in turn helps your company beat the competition and secure the talent it needs to thrive. Because they help recruitment teams attract and engage more of the right people – and thus quality over quantity applications – marketers should be given space to save their company time, achieve real innovation and define new strategies for attracting highly-sought after talent.

This more diverse approach to in-house recruitment means businesses can gain endless access to data, creativity and strategy, giving birth to many more strategic opportunities than were previously possible. This allows employees to come together and live the buzzword that all business people love to use – synergy. To top it off, because they aren’t contracting ad-hoc consultants and creative agencies for recruitment campaigns, employer branding and marketing, employers can also drive down costs.

By creating successful and bespoke hiring techniques, engaging more talent with in-depth targeting and employer messaging, constructing a more diverse workforce within recruitment teams and generating a better company culture overall, businesses have a new opportunity to flourish. When incorporating a collaborative approach with other specialist skillsets gives a company such an opportunity to thrive beyond their competitors, it begs the question: how can recruitment teams afford not to try this?

Whatever your recruitment team looks like, Leo is an ATS and recruitment CRM that keeps everyone in the loop. Check it out today.