Recruitment & Selection Trends 2016

What could be more important in a fast-moving world than keeping up with developing trends?
Unfortunately, many in recruiting are so busy that they forget to set aside time to follow or act on these
important emerging trends.
The Many Benefits of Tracking Emerging Trends in Recruiting
Not following trends can be a mistake because being first provides your firm with a competitive
advantage and a notoriety that helps you build your employer brand. Unfortunately, once a recruiting
practice becomes a trend, the opportunity to be first disappears forever. Not keeping up with trends
probably also means that you are using dated practices, and as time goes by, they can only produce
weaker results. Knowledge of upcoming recruiting trends will also make you appear forward-looking
to your manager and colleagues. And finally, knowing about growing trends keeps you from being
surprised, and if youre aware of these trends early enough, you will have time to plan on how to best
handle them as they eventually get more prominent.
The Top 12 Recruiting Trends That Will Become Dominant in 2016
In Part one of this article, I will cover the first six trends and their related best practices. The remaining
highest impact six recruiting trends will be covered in part two, which will be published on 11/23/15.
Trend #12 Anonymous resume screening and blind interviewing
Why being aware of this trend is critical because the recent strong push for hiring diverse people and
STEM women occurred primarily in the technology industry, there has been much more emphasis on
using a more scientific approach to diversity recruiting. As a result, more recruiting leaders have become
aware of the significant unconscious biases that many hiring managers and interviewers have. In
addition to training that makes them aware of their unconscious biases, hiding irrelevant information
from the eyes of hiring managers has also proven to be effective.
Best practices in hiding irrelevant information
Irrelevant information on resumes can provide an opportunity to be biased. Background information
(like a candidates name, grades, their address, or their school) that has not been proven to be valid
predictors of new hire success can be removed or obscured from the resumes that are presented to
hiring managers. Firms like Deloitte and Google are experimenting with this practice.
Visual biases during the interview can be reduced by using more telephone interviews, where the
individual is not visible. Another approach is, as many symphony orchestras now do, literally hide the
performing candidates behind a screen.
Voice biases can be reduced by offering written or questionnaire Internet interviews. This is where the
candidate types their answers to the posed questions on a computer screen, so the candidate is neither
seen nor heard.
Trend #11 A significant shift toward finding talent becomes easier but selling talent becomes more
difficult

Why being aware of this trend is critical literally, for centuries, sourcing or finding talent has been
extremely difficult. However with the growth of the Internet and social media, it is now possible to find
almost anyone who is qualified to do a job. So now the most difficult phase of recruiting will become the
selling aspects. Top candidates will be harder to sell because the drop in unemployment rate and the
creation of more jobs means more choices and competing offers. In order to be successful, recruiters
will have to develop much stronger selling skills in the areas of convincing prospects to apply, to come to
multiple interviews and to accept your offers.
Best practices in improving the selling capabilities of your recruiters
Start by assessing the sales skills of your recruiters, because in many cases, they are under emphasized
and extremely weak.
Drop the intuitive approach to convincing and adopt a scientific candidate research approach. Survey a
sample of recruiting targets in order to specifically identify how they look for a job, where they look for a
job, and what factors must be present before they will apply for and accept a job.
Consider hiring ex-salespeople as recruiters, because they already have the necessary selling skills. Be
aware that you may have to pay them more, because recruiters salaries are usually significantly lower
than those of the best salespeople.
Survey all of your new hires during onboarding and ask them specifically what arguments or sales
approaches were effective and which ones had no major impact. Then use that information to improve
your selling approach.
Trend #10 Video becomes prominent in all recruiting messaging
Why being aware of this trend is critical online videos now exceed 50 percent of mobile traffic and 64
percent of all Internet traffic. And video usage is bound to continue to increase (at least in part because
of the popularity of cat videos, LOL). Video usage is increasing because of their high impact. If a picture
is worth 1,000 words, think what a video is worth because it is more eye-catching and engaging. Most
recruiting leaders find that videos are the very best way to reveal the excitement and the passion that
can be found at your firm. If the videos are shot by your own employees on their mobile phone, they are
also likely to be considered more authentic and believable.
Best practices involving the use of videos
Deloitte started a major trend with its film festival, which offered its employees a chance to shoot
short videos from their cell phones revealing the fun inside the company. More than 2,000 employees
participated.
With the widespread availability of smart phones, recruiters and hiring managers can now make
personalized recruiting videos to send to high-value candidates.
Video job descriptions and even video job offers can have a profound impact on selling candidates.
How-to videos on a technical topic posted on YouTube have proven to be a great attraction tool.
When the employee is contacted, they can eventually turn that contact into an employee referral.
Placing actual recruitment ads on TV has been recently popularized by GE, Walmart, and Koch. Coors
offered a compelling TV ad that linked fun work and producing a great product. The ad included these
lines: A story about loving what you do; When you love your job, you never work a day in your life;
When beer is your calling, you never clock out.

Trend #9 Improve the selling capability of your job descriptions

Why being aware of this trend is critical many candidates who were initially interested will turn away
after reading dull and poorly written job descriptions. They demand an exciting job and they assume
that the dull job description is accurate. Misleading job descriptions can also increase new hire turnover
when they realize that the job described in the outdated description is completely different than the job
that they discover on the first day.
Best practices for increasing the selling capability of job descriptions
Start by testing if your firms job descriptions are superior to the ones offered at competitive firms.
Simply conduct a blind side-by-side test (where the job descriptions have no company name on them).
Then in order to find out how relatively attractive your description is, simply ask a sample of people in
the field to rank the most exciting job descriptions for similar jobs. Borrow some of the terminology
from the most attractive descriptions.
You should also survey potential applicants to develop a list of the words and phrases that definitely
would excite them about this job.
Video job descriptions involving the team are becoming quite popular because they reveal much more
excitement than any written job description can. Firms like Quickstop, Accenture, and Deloitte have all
used them.
Obviously you should change the ratio of the words used so that the percentage tilts toward the selling
aspects of the job description.
If youre having difficulty finding diverse candidates, consider an approach that Google has tried. Allow a
team of your own diverse employees to rewrite the job description so that it is friendlier to your target
diversity group.
Trend #8 A focus on recruiting innovators
Why being aware of this trend is critical the most innovative firms like Apple, Google, Facebook and
Amazon produce a significantly higher workforce productivity (i.e. revenue per employee) than the
average firms in the industry. This is because they focus on hiring innovators, who produce at least 10
times more than the average worker in the same job. Innovators also allow a firm to be first in the
marketplace, which builds the product brand and often produces high margins.
Best practices for recruiting innovators
Because innovators know other great innovators, referrals are the best way to identify and recruit
additional innovators.
With the growth of the Internet, blogs, and slide sharing, video, and picture sites, it is now amazingly
easy for your employees and recruiters to find the ideas and the work of innovators.
Put together a process for identifying innovators within the large volumes of resumes or LinkedIn
profiles.
Dont lose innovators during the early stages of the interviewing process because of their tendency to be
slightly arrogant. Train recruiters and managers not to instantly reject individuals because they abruptly
answer interview questions with phrases like, no, I would never do it that way!

Be aware that innovators also expect different things before they will accept a new job. They are likely
to want the job customized to them. And they would want lots of freedom and the ability to take risks
and to try new things.
Trend #7 Take a forward-looking approach to recruiting
Why being aware of this trend is critical in business, it is better to be prepared than to be surprised.
But unfortunately, rather than being forward-looking, 100 percent of all current recruiting metrics are
historical and backward looking. So shift to a future-focused approach because warning others about
upcoming talent problems allows them time to prepare and to mitigate the potential damages. Being
forward-looking may also help your career because others will view you as strategic because you
continually look and plan ahead.
Best practices for becoming forward looking in recruiting
Conducting workforce planning helps you prepare for the future by knowing what types and amounts of
talent your firm will need in order to meet business needs.
Offering effective succession planning will help you fill your leadership openings with better prepared
internal candidates.
Forecasting possible turnover and then alerting your managers before a key employee become serious
about quitting can improve retention. Alerting hiring managers to the fact that a great talent is suddenly
on the job market can improve recruiting results.
Using predictive metrics allows you to prepare for next year. Predictive metrics can warn you about next
years turnover and offer acceptance rates and the number and quality of applications that the firm is
likely to get in the near future. Firms like Google are now even predicting which employees are likely to
quit because they feel underused.
Final Thoughts
Every company is different, so trends dont impact every firm the same. However, if your firm must
dominate your recruiting marketplace, you have no choice but to follow and to occasionally start trends.
One way to continually become aware of trends is to create a Google alert covering recruiting trends.
Part 2
Tracking upcoming recruiting trends is a professional obligation, but it can also help you identify and
adopt powerful new trends before other firms are barely aware of them.
In this Part II, the countdown to the No. 1 trend continues. I will cover the remaining six highest-impact
recruiting trends and their related best practices.
Trend No. 6 Calculate the tremendous costs resulting from a bad candidate experience
Why being aware of this trend is critical weve been treating candidates poorly for years, but,
unfortunately, we have routinely underestimated the costs associated with that negative treatment.
Recently, CareerBuilder (and the CandEs) has identified some of the unexpected consequences,
including lost sales, where 9 percent would tell others not to purchase products from the firm and up to

23 percent would reduce their own purchases. A firm will also get a reduced volume of applications,
where 22 percent would tell others not to work at the firm. You should also assume that at least 10
percent would post negative social media comments about your hiring process, which would discourage
many others from applying.
Best practices for improving the candidate experience
Survey a sample of past applicants and new hires to identify what they didnt like about your hiring
process.
Consider periodically using mystery shoppers to go through your hiring process to identify issues.
You should also check to see (or ask them) if a to-be-interviewed applicant is currently a customer so
that you can treat them better.
Periodically track negative social media comments about your interviews on Glassdoor.com and other
similar sites.
Trend No. 5 All recruiting applications and communications must be deliverable on the mobile
platform
Why you must track this trend the smart phone is ubiquitous and people carry everywhere. As a
result, it has the highest response rate of any communications channel. Already more than 43 percent of
job seekers use the mobile phone in their job search, and that number will continue to rise until the
mobile smart phone is dominant in recruiting. And as a result, it becomes the primary way for applying,
communicating, and providing information to candidates and maintaining candidate relationships.
Best practices that allow the movement of more recruiting tasks to the smart phone
Failing to have the capability to complete an application on your corporate applications site from any
mobile platform may cause your application drop off rate to skyrocket.
You should also make it possible for candidates to accept your offers directly on their mobile phone.
You should always use the most responsive channel for communications, and currently that is often
texting.
The mobile platform makes it possible to hold live video interviews from anywhere.
All internal recruiting applications and webpages should be mobile phone accessible for all managers
and recruiters.
Employees must be able to do all of their referral tasks on the mobile phone.
Eligible candidates should be able to self-schedule their own interviews within any of their hiring
managers available times.
Trend No. 4 Increase your speed of hire in order to increase new hire quality and corporate revenue
Why you must track this trend unfortunately, very few hiring managers and recruiters realize that if
they dont act quickly, many of their top applicants will drop out of the hiring process within as few as
10 days. That is because the best are likely to receive other offers, so they are not going to wait for a
delayed offer, even though it may be a promising one. Others may view your slow hiring as a mirror of

the speed in which you make business decisions, and drop out because they expect faster decisionmaking. Firms also need to be aware that slow hiring times are posted on sites like Glassdoor.com, so if
you are slow at hiring, many potential applicants will know it. Finally, realize that if a vacant position is a
revenue-generating position, a great deal of corporate revenue will be unnecessarily be lost if a slow
hiring decision keeps the position vacant for too many days.
Best practices that allow you to reduce your hiring time
Measure the correlation between hiring the speed and new hire quality to show that slow hiring reduces
the quality of your eventual hire.
Prioritize the recruiting for jobs and candidates that require speed in order to land the best candidates.
Identify the unnecessary delays in the hiring process and show those causing the delay the impact it has
on the quality of hire.
Widely distribute a ranked list of the managers with the slowest hiring speed in order to embarrass
them.
(A quick definition of quality of hire: The percentage of improvement in the on-the-job productivity
including work volume, work quality, and the retention rate of new hires.)
Trend No. 3 Use quality of hire data to identify what works and to help quantify your business
impacts
Why you must track this trend by measuring the on-the-job performance of new hires, you can group
them into a high-performing and below-average-performing groups. You can then identify the factors
that the individuals in the top performing group had in common. By identifying which factors correlate
with success, you can more accurately determine which of the selection criteria that youre using
actually predict on-the-job success. Quality of hire data can also help you determine which sources
produce great hires. By knowing the top- and the worst-performing new hires you can refine your
recruiting process and improve the elements that work and fix or eliminate those that dont. By
quantifying the percentage that new hires perform more than the average, you can quantify the
business impact of recruiting.
Best practices that allow you to take advantage of quality of hire data
Work closely with the CFOs office in order to add credibility to your data.
Using mathematical correlations, identify which sources, selection criteria, recruiters etc. have the
highest predictive value in identifying new hires who will exceed average performance.
Measure the percentage of improvement in output of your new hires who work in already quantified
jobs like sales, customer service, and then put a dollar value on their performance improvement.
In other jobs, multiply the improved performance percentage of new hires by the firms average
revenue per employee in order to get a dollar value for jobs that dont have their output quantified.
Calculate the percentage of your hires who are weak hires and then estimate the cost of each one.
Calculate the loss to the business for each high-quality missed hire who applied but that you never
landed.

Trend No. 2 Referrals will become 50 percent of all hiring so you better get them right
Why you must track this trend now that the best firms are getting nearly 50 percent of their hires
from employee referrals, invest time and resources into your referral program. Referral programs
routinely produce the highest quality hires, the highest volume hires, hires with the highest retention
rate, and if done correctly, referrals can be among the fastest and cheapest hires. Unfortunately, referral
programs are not self managing, so they must be continually updated and improved.
Best practices that will improve the effectiveness of your referral program
Rather than focusing on the money, motivate your employees to put the company first and hire for the
team.
Educate employees on how to make good connections and referrals with an educational referral toolkit,
which provides sample social media profiles and advice on how to build relationships and to effectively
assess potential referrals.
You must remain highly responsive to each referral in order to maintain high participation levels.
Give feedback to your employees on weak referrals, so that individual employees can improve.
The best single way to improve referral quality is to require your employees to know the work and the
skills of the individual. Also, require that they have assessed the prospects fit for the firm/manager and
that they have presold them on the company, to the point where they will accept an offer of an
interview. Actively discourage referrals where the employee is not totally familiar with them and their
work.
And finally
Trend No. 1 Shifting to data-based decision-making in recruiting
Why you must track this trend lately in recruiting, we have gotten quite good at collecting metrics.
Unfortunately, after collecting them, we dont use them to make decisions or to force change. Because
data-based decision-making improves decision quality and speed, it has already been adapted by every
other business function, except HR. I estimate that compared to the normal intuitive decision, databased decisions can be at least 25 percent better. Google is leading the way by declaring that All people
decisions are based on data & analytics. And We want to bring the same level of rigor to peopledecisions that we do to engineering decisions.
Best practices of a data-based decision model
Data will reveal which sources produce quality applicants and hires.
Data will reveal which types of interviews and interview questions best identify future top performers.
Data can show you whether your references are accurate predictors of future performance.
Data can show you your new hire failure rate (which can average 46 percent).
Data can reveal which recruiters and hiring managers routinely produce the highest-quality hires, and
which ones do not.
Data will reveal which single factor has the highest impact on hiring success (i.e. the relationship with
the hiring manager).

Final Thoughts
Its easy to read about trends, but few in recruiting actually follow up to prepare for even one of these
upcoming trends. And that Ill get to it later approach will, unfortunately, mean that their firms
recruiting competitors will implement these emerging practices faster and they will win a higher
percentage of head-to-head battles for top talent. That dooms the recruiting leader to a life of catch up
and unpleasant surprises because what worked in the past no longer produces even average results in
the ever-changing world of business and recruiting.

Ten other trends in talent management.

1. To a broader definition of talent
Many organizations have very specific definitions of talent. Example:
A high potential has a minimum of four years work experience, of which at least two in our
organization, with the potential to grow to general management positions, or specific specialized
positions in research and development, with at least level A2.
The notion of more diverse talent groups is slowly entering organizations. The wishes and expectations
of talent differ, and also change over time.- Some people are looking for a career in one organization;
Some people are looking for a couple of years experience, and their plan is to move on afterwards
(although they might not express this when you interview them);
Some people are not looking forward to be employed by a big employer, but they like to be involved in
challenging complex projects;Organizations that define talent too narrow might miss opportunities to
connect talent to their organization.
2. More customized programs
Connected to number 1, you can see a move to more customized programs. The question is: how can
you tailor what you want to offer to the talent with individual needs in the market? For some an
attractive well-planned trainee program might be a very good solution. For others the opportunity to
work in Asia for a couple of years. A highly talented technical student might have other needs. Less
standardization, more customization will be the credo.
3. Looking for general profiles
Scientific knowledge is slowly entering the HR arena. Gut feel is no longer trusted, and organizations are
looking for people who have traits that have a proven correlation to success in organizations.
Intelligence is certainly one element to be looking for. Learning agility another.
4. From secret to transparent
This is often a delicate issue. Do we spoil people if we let them know they are considered high potential?
Do we disengage the people who are not part of the talent pool? The overall trend seems to be to more
transparency, whether organizations like it or not. It certainly helps to have a broader definition of
talent (see 1). It also helps to be clearer about expectations and commitment. If you have a pool with

talent for future general management positions, being part of this pool comes with obligations. Like:
high performance and international mobility. Sometimes assumptions are not tested, as the
conversations with the talent in the pool are too limited and not explicit enough.
5. From general to very specific skill training
We all know the high potential and general management programs, where you have to learn everything
you will ever need to know or need to master in one or two weeks. International collaboration. Personal
effectiveness. The strategy of the company. Intercultural differences. Managing people in turbulent
times. Engaging people, and so on. The (slow) trend is in the direction to more specific skill training, as
close as possible to the real work of people. In a certain way going back to old-school training. Define
very clearly what skill people have to learn to be successful, and then train, observe, feedback, train,
observe, feedback and so on until the skill becomes an acquired skill.
6. The increasing importance of HR analytics
Maybe this trend should be on position number one. 2015 has been described as the breakthrough year
for HR analytics and more specifically talent analytics. Current technology and the increased possibilities
of big data analysis are important drivers for more objective and scientific research and fact finding in
the talent arena. Intuition and gut-feel can now be tested against the facts.
7. From annual to regular maybe even real time feedback
It seems that performance management is changing. Organizations are looking for possibilities to give
more regular and more objective feedback to people.
Harvard Business Review recently published a great article on how Deloitte is changing their global
performance management process. Very practical and inspirational for other organizations. Elsewhere
you see experiments with more frequent feedback, using tools as provided for example by Impraise.
People who are very good always want to become better. Most performance management systems
today provide helpful feedback for people who are average or below average, but the feedback for top
talent is often not so helpful. If you are very good you need more granular feedback than just a
subjective rating on a 5-point scale.
8. Gamification everywhere
Gamification is entering the talent management world. In selection where simple games can be used to
test cognitive and social capabilities. In recruitment where candidates are able to experience what life is
like in an organization by participating in a simulation. In performance management by introducing
leader boards, points and badges related to specific desired behavior. In training, where games and
simulations are often far more effective than traditional classroom training.
9. Pay top for the best
Here I want to refer to two excellent articles. Number 1: The myth of the bell curve, by Josh Bersin in
Fortune (February 2014). Number 2: Making star teams out of star players, by Mankins, Bird and Root
in Harvard Business Review (January 2013). The key message: performance of people does not follow a
normal distribution, but a power distribution. When you can measure performance, the best performers
can perform 2x, 5x, 10x and sometimes even more than 10X better than average performers. This has
great implications for HR. Laszlo Bock, in Work Rules, gives great examples how they deal with this
inside Google. Chapter 9 in his book is called Pay Unfairly, arguing that when people perform plus 10X
better, it does not make sense to only pay them lets say 20% more than average.

10. From 1:1 succession management to broad talent pools

Especially in fast moving and fast changing organizations 1:1 succession management does not make a
lot of sense. HR spends a lot of time making the lists of potential successors for key positions, but when
the time comes a position needs to be filled, the organization has changed, the information is outdated
and the requirements for the positions have changed as well. Instead of the lists, it makes sense to have
a good view on the different talent pools, inside- and outside the organization. More importantly: to
have fast processes to be able to mobilize talent quickly when you need it, even if it is not in your
database.
Ten trends in talent management. Some of them are maybe more wishful thinking, I have to admit. Not
all trends will be visible or applicable everywhere. Some organizations are trying to create or nurture
counter trends. Like: all our talent should be inside the organization.