Top 16 Recruitment Trends You Shouldn’t Miss in 2022

August 16, 2023

If the severe shortage of talent wasn’t already enough, the pandemic and the “Great Resignation’ further made life even harder for recruiters. Around four million people quit their jobs in December 2021 alone. The recruitment trends and the market have changed dramatically over the last decade, and so has the work environment. When it comes to meeting candidate expectations, it is proving to be a constant struggle for employers today.

Amidst the intense competition among organizations for top talent, posting jobs online and waiting for candidates to apply is no more a reliable way of recruiting. Hiring teams now need to be proactive with candidate sourcing, engagement, employer branding, recruitment marketing and whatnot. Building robust talent pipelines is the key to sustainable business growth.

In addition to the competitive landscape, the increasing skill gap is also a major factor shaping the recruitment industry today. These challenges have led to the advent of new recruitment trends which are more effective than any other traditional recruitment practices. It’s vital to incorporate these latest trends in your recruitment today as you compete with a huge pool of other employers looking to acquire top talent.

In this blog, we will dive deep into the top recruitment trends today and discuss their significance in today’s landscape. Following these trends would not only help you recruit quality talent but also make you stand out as an employer which is vital for your organization’s overall growth.

#1 Prioritizing Candidate Engagement in Early Stages

Numerous organizations are now proactively engaging candidates even for entry-level positions. And it has proven to be an immensely effective recruitment trend. Passive candidate sourcing works but consistently engaging with those candidates amplifies the chances of onboarding the best talent out there. Modern recruiters are actively involved with filtered applicants and try to build relationships with each candidate. This helps recruiters drive candidate motivation to join their organization and not any other. Although the core idea is to pull candidates down the recruitment funnel, this trend also enables recruitment teams to build talent pipelines and meet hiring requirements in the long term.

#2 Offering Remote Work to Attract Candidates

98% of people in the workforce want to work from home at least a few days every week. The pandemic made the entire world transition to remote and now mostly hybrid work, candidates don’t want to switch back to the traditional model. Even organizations find it more productive and beneficial to work in hybrid mode. While a number of employers today offer remote opportunities to primarily attract candidates, it has surely become another recruitment trend.

A number of factors contribute to candidates choosing remote work – commute time, fatigue, flexibility, cost-efficiency and more. Subsequently, candidates decide among multiple employment opportunities primarily through the mode of work offered.

Remote work is one of the biggest reasons why the workforce is diverting from big corporates to startups today. The flexibility offered is the differentiator, work culture and faster promotions add up. Not to forget – practising this model of work is even more crucial to retaining talent within an organization.

#3 Collaborative Hiring

One of the most important recruitment trends is the way how candidates are interviewed now. Further, it’s also about how effective the trending approach of collaborative hiring is. Involving relevant vertical heads and a diverse team in the recruiting process could boost your quality of hire. From an improved recruitment process to higher engagement and better candidate experience, collaborative hiring can prove to be a vital step in your recruitment journey.

Implementing this recruitment trend is a huge positive for recruiters as well because none of them would now have to handle the entire stress of recruitment. Psychology has it – when you evaluate candidates with a team and make decisions collectively, the chances of hiring a cultural fit magnify.

#4 Spellbinding Candidate Experience

78% of candidates say the experience they receive while recruitment defines how an organization values its people. Candidate experience is clearly a critical recruitment trend today. Your outreach, interaction, engagement, onboarding, post-hiring and offboarding experiences – all sum up together to form the overall candidate experience.

A productive recruitment funnel is driven by positive candidate experiences at each stage. So, it helps in attracting top talent, making them inclined towards the opportunity, encouraging referrals, enhancing the employer brand and ensuring happier employees. While combined efforts of the recruitment team do the job here, effective and clear communication is the key. A large chunk of candidates never hear back from employers after applying for a role – about 65% don’t get notified. This is changing rapidly as organizations are focusing more on recruitment experience.

#5 Advances in Recruitment AI

Sourcing and screening of candidates and filtering of applications are being done with the help of AI recruiting solutions. This is helping recruiters in scaling up their recruitment and hiring more candidates in a short period of time. Additionally, AI is aimed at ensuring there’s absolutely no bias while screening candidates.

Intelligent chatbots are being integrated with career pages of organizations to help candidates when they visit the website for quick queries. AI is constantly becoming more powerful and some recruitment teams are making the best out of it. It’s basically about eliminating the mundane, lengthy tasks and removing the human bias along the process.

#6 Recruitment Marketing

Just like brand marketing which is about persuading customers and maximizing sales, recruitment marketing revolves around attracting and hiring top talent in the market. It’s one of the most popular recruitment trends in 2022, and employers are not hesitating in going that extra mile to multiply their brand reach.

The practices involved in recruitment marketing are closely similar to conventional marketing, but with a different target audience. Effective recruitment marketing tactics enable recruiters to attract, engage, nurture and convert talented candidates. It is an area where a collaboration of recruitment and marketing teams is ideal for the best possible results. You constantly position your brand and available opportunities as the best fit for target candidates in the market.

Just creating a careers page on your website isn’t enough today. Recruitment marketing needs to cover the trends including content marketing, social media marketing, video marketing, email and more to attract and engage with candidates while ensuring a positive brand outlook.

#7 Diversity Hiring

A majority of organizations across the world have been ignoring diversity in their workforce over the years. However, after observing the results of top businesses that benefitted from diversity and inclusion – this has become a strong recruitment trend now. In fact, companies with an ideal level of diversity and inclusion are 35% more likely to outperform their competitors, and 70% more likely to capture a new market. A diverse workforce accelerates innovation within an organization as candidates bring various cultural, ethnic, creative, and problem-solving experiences and ideas.

Not to forget – diversity and inclusion also help companies in attracting great candidates and retain talented employees.

#8 Employer Branding

The following statistics were taken from Glassdoor:

- 50% of candidates wouldn't work for a company with a negative reputation, even for an increase in pay.

- 92% of the people belonging to the workforce would consider changing jobs if there’s an opportunity in an organization having an excellent corporate reputation.

- A significant employer brand can reduce the cost per hire by as much as 50%

Employer branding is undoubtedly the most important part of recruitment today. It helps in attracting great candidates, sourcing passive candidates effectively, retaining talent within the organization and building a robust talent pipeline as people in the workforce want to work with you.

Contrary to popular opinion, employer branding can not just be built through marketing and promoting yourself as an employer. It’s the end-to-end coverage of what people inside and outside the organization think of your company. From work culture to the recruitment experience you deliver and how you position yourself as an employer of choice. It’s a candidate-centric world and hence - employee perks, workplace experience, company culture, diversity and inclusion, and recruitment processes – all contribute to your employer brand.

#9 Social Media Recruiting

How can social media stay out of recruitment trends when billions of people across the world are using it actively every day? Among those users, a majority are job seekers or passive candidates. Social media recruiting isn’t a -’nice-to-have’ practice anymore, it has become a need for brands. Role-specific multichannel outreach holds the key to identifying and connecting with the right candidates.

Platforms like Instagram and Facebook have emerged as the priority destinations for sourcing creative designers, marketers and writers, video editors along with others – all thanks to the content creation trend that has taken up during the last few years. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is the best place to source all types of talent, is the world’s largest professional platform,

#10 Monitoring Well-Being & Mental Health of Employees

While we can’t deny this has always been important, awareness was missing. The pandemic made people and organizations realize the importance of being healthy – both physically and mentally to be able to work productively and enjoy life. A recruitment trend started recently covers the well-being and mental health-related policies for employees. Health insurance is a common perk but now organizations are taking this a level higher. Free well-being apps, surveys, mental health counselling, training and consultations are being provided for the better health of employees. When it comes to recruitment, these factors and additional benefits play a significant role in convincing candidates too.

#11 Data-driven Recruitment Strategy

In the last decade, we witnessed organizations and startups hack their growth with crucial data-driven business strategies that wouldn’t have been possible without deep analysis. We found the changing consumer behaviour and studied it through data. No doubt data-driven decisions in recruitment would make a big difference too. Numerous organizations are already practising it.

A recruitment trend that could well define the growth trajectory of organizations, data-driven recruitment involves leveraging techniques, technology, facts and data to inform your hiring decisions. By identifying and selecting candidates with the right skills, experience, mindset and culture fit – recruiters can directly optimize the quality, speed and costs of recruitment with the data-driven approach.

#12 Offering Flexible Schedules

A mix of recruitment trends and work mode trends – flexible schedule is something a large number of organizations are offering to add up to candidates’ convenience. Especially, now after the pandemic – as hybrid/in-office work continues, employees are keen to have flexible working schedules. The focus is on the work done or the hours spent in the office rather than the fixed time shifts. Recruiters also use this perk for marketing purposes to promote their open opportunities and attract good candidates who’re interested in such opportunities.

#13 Referral Rewards

Not that referrals are new in the market, but the kind of rewards some organizations now offer for successful referrals are beyond imagination. From expensive gadgets to cash coupons and bonuses, referral rewards have evolved. The demand for quality talent is huge and businesses want to acquire talent fast, and hence – bigger rewards for referrals are justified.

Especially in tech hiring, it is becoming quite popular to award phones, laptops and other gadgets for referrals. Referrals also help in maintaining diversity and inclusion among an organization as people often tend to refer people similar to them.

#14 Contractual Work

The gig economy grew exponentially during the pandemic. Freelancing and contractual models of working became the norm and it’s surely one of the top recruitment trends. Allowing contractors or freelancers to be extended parts of your team can immensely help organizations as per the niche and skills expertise brought in. For domains like marketing, content creation and design – where brands don't necessarily need full-time employees, they can hire contractors to get the work done without worrying about quality and in a cost-efficient manner too.

#15 Higher Inclination towards Soft Skills

Soft skills have always been important for organizations and recruiters. However, in a recent study – it was found that 89% of bad hires usually lack basic soft skills like communication, teamwork, adaptability, time management, people management and collaboration. Moving forward, this area would be deeply focused on by recruitment teams. There are multiple reasons for it – finding such candidates is hard among a plethora of unqualified applications and training them post-hiring is expensive and unproductive.

Recruiters are tweaking their strategies and introducing new assessments for specifically evaluating the soft skills of candidates. Hard skills are important, but separate qualifying criteria is being implemented for shortlisting hires. The primary parameters would be the applicant’s behavioural patterns, decision-making skills, body language, verbal and written communication, language expertise, public speaking, presentation skills and more.

#16 Automation of Repeated Processes

One of the most innovative recruitment trends is the automation of mundane admin tasks related to the recruitment process. Both active and passive recruiting involves hectic repeated tasks for recruiters.

Recruitment tasks like:

Identifying the right candidates,
Adding them to the sourcing pipeline,
Engaging with each of them in a personalized way,
Actively managing the recruitment pipeline,
Maintaining talent pool database
Extracting performance data

and a number of non-analytical tasks take up a lot of human efforts from recruitment teams and automation tools are helping organizations solve them.

Recruitment technology allows recruiters to source, attract, nurture and engage talent at scale. With top talent being available just for 10 days in the market, automation acts as the biggest differentiator and enables recruitment teams to hire within days rather than weeks or months. Your team gets free from all the mundane tasks so that they can focus solely on processes that need human intervention, like interviewing the candidates. The entire recruitment process also gets streamlined and you’re updated on the recruitment status of each candidate at any given time. Not to forget - improved candidate engagement, and hence experience which empowers your recruitment.

Level Up Your Recruitment With End-to-End Sourcing Automation

Over 80% of recruiters believe they would be more productive if they could automate sourcing altogether. Nurturebox helps recruiters and hiring teams simplify candidate sourcing management with a comprehensive sourcing automation tool. The best thing is – you don’t need to switch from your existing recruitment technology stack.

Nurturebox integrates with your ATS seamlessly and puts sourcing pipeline management on auto-pilot. Apart from sourcing and adding candidates to your pipeline, the tool also helps you automate multichannel engagement so that you can engage with candidates at scale without the usual hustle and bustle.

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Here’s how our platform helps in acing your talent sourcing journey and makes your life easy as a recruiter:

Extract contact details from LinkedIn: Adding a candidate to your sourcing pipeline just takes a couple of clicks. Use the available plugin to find contact details and add them to your campaign. Our solution also allows you to link your existing ATS using plugins like Recruitee so that your pipeline management gets fully automated.

Engage with candidates over multiple channels: Whether it’s email nurture sequences or engaging with your candidates on Whatsapp, you can automate it within seconds with Nurturebox. We make sure you don’t compromise the personalization too.

Monitor and analyze performance dynamically: Track your outreach status and know what works with your targeted candidates. Have complete access to analytics covering all the engagement touchpoints.

Amidst today’s noisy digital world, brands find it challenging to create meaningful connections with their customer base and target audience. Getting the target consumer’s attention and persuading them to buy from you gets even trickier. Hence, content marketing has become more crucial than ever for brands to attract, educate, and retain customers.

Content creation is a top priority for 80% of marketers, and there is no reason it shouldn’t be. Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts your audience’s decisions through education and persuasion.

Depending on your business goals and requirements, the role of Content Marketers you hire will vary. The primary responsibilities revolve around forming consistent brand messaging and deciding upon a unique and identifiable voice, style, and pitch across various distribution channels.

From raising brand awareness to attracting a relevant audience to your website, boosting social media presence and engagement, generating leads, and building brand loyalty – content marketing drives all the growth efforts for your brand. When done effectively, it can help you:

Build positive brand awareness
Make your audience stick around for longer
Get better traction on social media
Gain more trust of your audience than ever
Generate qualified leads
Improve conversion rates
Boost business visibility with SEO
Position your brand as an authority
Cultivate loyal brand fans

While content marketing is a broad role with numerous areas of expertise involved, it’s vital to thoroughly understand your company’s current marketing goals and the related requirements. In this blog, we will dive deep into the step-by-step approach to hiring a Content Marketer.

What is The Role of a Content Marketer?

A Content Marketer must be deeply passionate about telling your brand’s story to the world. The objective is to educate and nurture the target audience to establish brand authority using thought-leadership and drive more people to buy from you.

As a candidate is expected to be a mediator between the brand and the target audience, they are primarily responsible for planning, creating, and sharing valuable content to grow their company’s awareness and engagement to bring more business.

To be more specific, the role of a Content Marketer requires a perfect blend of creativity and attention to detail in an individual. It’s a balancing role, as they need to ensure creating content that resonates and strengthens business relationships, using strategies that position your business as authentic and problem-solving.

Take a look at the core responsibilities of a Content Marketer that most businesses expect them to take over:

Research and Competitor Analysis: The first and foremost step to creating a content marketing strategy is effective initial research. It not only helps a Content Marketer understand the nuances of the industry through competitor analysis but also study and understand the target audience thoroughly. ‍
Building Content Marketing Plans: Once the competitor research and target audience analysis is done, a Content Marketer needs to work on the different plans for all the business objectives, targeted channels, segments of the audience, and the bigger marketing strategy. A content marketing plan typically consists of:
Specific goals along with a pre-decided timeline
Various channels to be targeted for content distribution
Types of content to be created
Budget for the entire staff, outsourced services, and paid promotion (Collabs and Ads)
Creating Editorial Calendar: Creating, managing, and maintaining a content calendar is one of the most crucial responsibilities of a Content Marketer. It is a centralized visual document that enables effective collaboration among the marketing team and helps Content Marketers ensure on-time production and delivery.‍
Content Creation: Once the strategy and calendar have been approved by relevant stakeholders, Content Marketers need to do the on-ground work. This task usually depends on the scale of your company and content marketing strategy. Suppose an organization already has a set of writers, then the Content Marketer doesn’t need to create content by themselves.‍
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Producing quality content that educates your target audience and resonates with them, isn’t enough. You need to optimize your content creation to make it search engine-friendly. While most companies need a dedicated SEO specialist for keyword research and planning, Content Marketers need to closely collaborate with them and should be well-versed in the basics of SEO.

While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with

Content editing and ensuring adherence to a certain style guide
Continous publishing and distributing content
Measuring and analyzing performance

How to Hire a Content Marketer: Step-By-Step?

Content marketing has become the key to driving growth for businesses. Unlike a few years ago, it’s not possible now to get away with a one-person team for content marketing. You need deeply trained individuals for specialist roles.

Let’s now dive into the step-by-step approach of hiring a Content Marketer. But before you even source your first candidate, you should have a clear expectation of the skillset and experience to look out for top content marketing candidates.

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Step 1: Create a Candidate Persona

Let’s sort out the priorities first, and decide the type of content marketing candidates you want to recruit. From exceptional research skills to storytelling, communication skills, relationship building, audience engagement, and more capabilities must be comprehensively considered. Identify and break down the skill requirements for Content Marketers:

What are the educational qualification criteria for the role?
How many years and what type of work experience do you want in candidates?
What are the specific skill sets you’re looking for?
Which industry experience would you primarily prefer?
Are there any tools your candidates should be hands-on with?
What are some personality traits that will fit your company?
Where do they look for a new job?
What are their career and life goals?

Forming a candidate persona by answering all these questions would ensure you are not shooting in the dark while sourcing candidates. Further, it helps you determine the traits of the ideal candidate, and plan your sourcing and recruitment strategy further.

Step 2: Document the Role Requirements and Decide on Your Recruiting Process

Next step is determining your role requirements suiting primarily to organizational needs and business goals. A content marketing professional is expected to own the entire content strategy, creation, and distribution. But what about your business’s unique requirements?

You might need someone comfortable with frequently creating long-form content pieces like blogs, ebooks, or whitepapers, or creating engaging video content based on your industry trends.

Talk to various relevant stakeholders for seeking the complete detailed company requirements for the role.

Before you enter the recruitment funnel, outline your talent acquisition process. Identify various strategies, channels, and other informational insights you would need – and maintain a collaborative document.

As you update the tactics and tweak your recruitment process for meeting hiring requirements optimally – keep your document up to date.

Step 3: Prepare a Content Marketing Job Description

Once you have finalized the role requirements with respect to your current content marketing goals and team, you can start sourcing candidates. Preparing the job description is the first task you’ll need to do.

Here are the necessary components you must have in your job description:

Job Title: The position you’re looking to fill. For example - Content Marketing Specialist or Content Marketing Manager.

Roles & Responsibilities: An outline of the candidate’s day-to-day activities. From ideation to implementation and the impact on the organization, everything should be covered.

Skill Requirements: Skills and abilities a candidate must have to perform the job successfully.

Perks and Benefits: The compensation details, perks of the job, and any other benefits.

About the Company: Why should a candidate consider working with your company?

Content Marketer Job Description Template

Role

The job of a Content Marketer is to perform competitor research, create user persona, and write plagiarism-free content for blog articles, social media, and the company website. They need to stay updated on the latest SEO techniques.

Responsibilities

Develop, write and deliver persuasive copy for the website, email marketing campaigns, sales collateral, videos, and blogs
Build and manage an editorial calendar; coordinate with other content crafters to ensure standards
Measure impact and perform analysis to improve KPIs
Include and optimize all content for SEO
Contribute to the localization of processes and content to ensure consistency across regions
Review and implement process changes to drive operational excellence

Requirements

Proven content marketing, copywriting, or SEO experience
Working knowledge of content management systems like WordPress
A well-maintained portfolio of published articles, blogs, copy, etc
Proven experience of working under pressure to deliver high quality output in a short span of time
Proficiency in all Microsoft Office applications, Google Suite
Fluency in English or any other required language

Soft Skills

Excellent verbal and written communication skills
Excellent writing and editing skills
The ability to work in a fast-paced environment
The ability to handle multiple projects concurrently
Strong attention to detail and the ability to multi-task projects and deliverables

Step 4: Source Candidates

Once you have the tailored job description in hand, it’s now time to do the groundwork and source candidates. Create an attractive job post to promote your job across job boards and social channels.

Begin with what to expect from the role at your company?
Why should candidates apply for the position?
Highlight the growth opportunities
State the company vision and mission
Briefly describe the recruitment process

Prepare an impactful job post and also execute paid job ad campaigns if required. The next step would be promoting your jobs on various job boards and hiring platforms. You can leverage the following platforms for hiring Content Marketers:

LinkedIn
Indeed
Instahyre
ZipRecruiter
Monster
GlassDoor
CareerBuilder

Not to forget - almost 3/4th of the workforce includes passive candidates, so you cannot miss out on passive talent sourcing as well. Reach out to qualified candidates on communities, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook to offer them suitable opportunities.

Step 5: Evaluate Candidates and Interview Shortlisted Ones

Once you have filtered candidates based on their experience and skills listed on their profile, it’s time to evaluate them deeply. Ask them to create a content strategy for your website, along with a value-adding content piece like a small blog. The topic of the article must fall within the scope of the strategy.

Interview the candidates whose profiles got shortlisted. Keep in mind the parameters covering skills, relevant experience, and personality traits of candidates.

Step 5: Make the Hire

Reach out to selected Content Marketers and communicate about the compensation.

Further, extend your offer letter to all the candidates who have been selected. In the case of passive sourcing, extend to only those who were aligned with you on the compensation and are willing to move forward.

Ensure having a deadline for the joining date and mention the necessary documents required by your recruiting team.

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Get the required documents and set up the offer agreements with candidates
Organize an orientation session for the onboarded candidates
Introduce them to the entire team and the marketing teams they will be working with
Guide the new candidates about your company management tools and communication channels
Provide candidates with forms for benefits and perks like Health Insurance.

Supercharge Your Hiring for Content Marketer with Nurturebox

Inbound candidate sourcing doesn’t work effectively anymore. Do you also find challenges in closing quality candidates through job posts even after spending on ads?

Don’t worry, passive candidate sourcing can be an optimal solution for hiring top content marketing candidates.

Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement platform which is powered by automation. Here’s how you can source product managers from LinkedIn using Nurturebox:

Install the Nurturebox Chrome plugin and sign up.
On your LinkedIn profile, start sourcing Content Marketers with boolean searches stating the required experience from targeted locations and including other criteria
Add the qualified candidates to your sourcing campaign pipeline with just a click
Automate the candidate engagement through email, Whatsapp and LinkedIn direct messages for reaching out and nurturing candidates at scale.