Road to 2017

It’s year 2017 and recruiters are under the pressure: day by day it’s getting harder and harder to attract, recruit and hire good people. Which mean, if you are also one of those who needs to hire in year 2017 you need to focus on recruitment more than ever before.

You need to become professional recruiter, know your labor market (read: the whole word) and recruitment trends.

Here are my thoughts what to consider in recruitment in 2017:

Employer Branding plays even greater role than ever before. Why should anyone apply to your company if they do not know anything about it? Or if this that they know is what keeps them away instead of attracting? We are in the war for talents and if you want to be one of the winners you need to act. You need to fight for your employees, keep them motivated and engaged. Only then you can become the employer of choice and attract those whom you need and want.

There are tens of thousands employers looking for employees. There are hundreds of thousands job advertisements on job boards. How to attract the attention of potential candidates? Answer is, you need to do something different. One possibility to do that is to create innovative job advert and get people attention with that. You can for instance upgrade your employee referral program; create your own recruitment game or recruitment campaign. Whatever you do you need to touch the ones you are targeting. For instance, you can put human touch to your next job advert by telling your story or asking your employees to tell their stories. I would even go so far and say that storytelling is the new black in recruitment world.

There are different challenges that are waiting for us at our workplaces already today. Five different generations working together in one company is for instance one of those challenges. Which means: if you want to be successful when recruiting and retaining your people you need to be more flexible. Only a few companies can afford to have only one target group specific recruitment strategy. Other must be ready to revise their HR strategies and make them flexible and suitable to different target groups.

Last, but not least: if you want to be successful in 2017 then you need to be socially responsible. CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) is no longer the playground of only big corporations. Every employer who wants to attract and retain talents must become socially responsible. This means that CSR must be encoded to your company’s DNA, starting from recruiting different target groups (such as different generations, people with disabilities, etc.), participating in joint charity projects (such as ''Let’s donate time''), developing your organization as well as your people, and etc.