Planning for 2023?

Post the dramas of covid and furlough, Talent Acquisition teams are now facing a candidate-dominated market, with job listings at an all-time high. The current environment in the recruitment industry is particularly challenging as we see frantic hiring alongside anxiety over the looming forecasts of recession.?

Our current Annual Talent Acquisition Survey is now live and all participants get access to the report (valued at ￡500). With data gathered from respondents across the industry, the survey, once complete, informs those in the recruitment industry of what is coming, enabling them to prepare and adjust their plans and strategies.

What trends have we seen from our Annual TA Survey to date??

Here’s a sneak peak at just some of the key stats we’ve collated over the past few years:?

Every recruiter uses LinkedIn, right?

Well actually, no, not quite. Last year’s survey (2022 Annual Survey) showed that only 99% of respondents use LinkedIn for attracting, engaging and recruiting candidates – but only 83% found it the most effective SoMe tool. Despite that 41% saw an increase of hires with LinkedIn as the candidate source.?Interestingly, the previous years’ report showed slightly lower numbers?in both usage (95%) and from those believing it to be the most effective SoMe platform (75%) – even though there was a higher percentage of increase of hires (51%) suggesting recruiters look for a longer term cumulative impact before they deem an approach successful.

So, what other platforms are recruiters using?

For the first time last year, TikTok made the list, but just 2.5% of respondents had used it in their attraction, engagement and recruitment strategy (an increase from 0.9% in 2021). We can already see an increase this year – but we’re intrigued to see what the final figure is by the time our survey closes!

Despite a wider decline in popularity amongst younger generations, Facebook remains a popular channel for recruiters – with early insights for this year suggesting recruiter usage increasing further. You’ll need to wait for this year's Annual Report to launch to see if there’s a correlation to hiring effectiveness.

With EVP and employer branding remaining steadfastly in the top 3 priorities according to the data, it’s perhaps not a surprise to see Instagram usage has been gradually climbing across the past 5 years. However, recruitment effectiveness for the platform is yet to reach a rating of 2%. Are we as an industry measuring recruitment effectiveness purely by source of hire?

Old habits die…., well just die it seems

2022 results showed that 10% didn’t use job boards or CV databases at all – 13%, 11% and 5% for the previous 3 years. Despite these figures, the majority of respondents last year saw job boards and CV databases as a source of hire remaining steady

·????55% said the number of hires remained about the same from generalist job boards

·????67% said the number of hires remained about the same from specialist job boards

·????64% said the number of hires remained about the same from CV databases

This year we delved deeper into that data, and responses so far indicate that whilst 3% don’t use job boards a whopping 30% don’t use CV databases at all.

Window shopping

Window displays are a customer's first glimpse at what a store has to offer, and a careers website is essentially the shop window for a company. So we’re always interested to see how companies rate their careers websites. In our 2022 report 47% felt their careers site was average, poor or very poor – previous years were 45%, 51% and 53%. Which begs the question, should companies be investing more heavily in this area? How do you rate your careers site?

Data, Data, Data

Metrics, KPIs, - they’re key in recruitment aren’t they? But whilst there’s no doubt recruitment teams collect data, are they acting on it to drive improvements? 2022’s report showed that time to hire was the most popular metric used to measure success. Despite candidate experience being the #2 priority last year and never out of the top 5), only 44% of respondents measured it. Further to that, a third of respondents felt their recruiters lacked candidate engagement skills. There’s an argument that a recruiter with better candidate engagement skills, delivering an improved candidate experience is likely to be able to bring down their time to hire – so are we as an industry missing an opportunity?

Get involved and get your copy of the report

Intrigued? We are too (every year!) - but we need your input to ensure we’re providing you, and the wider TA industry with as comprehensive data as possible, so grab a coffee and give us 15 minutes of your time to share your expertise.*?

* All respondents will be entered into a draw to win ￡50 of vouchers of their choice