I’m constantly being asked about what are the “trends of 2019”.
Honestly, year to year trends are usually fairly unnoticeable to most people working a real job in HR and TA.
Google for Jobs was a giant trend in 2018 and yet most TA leaders still have no idea what it is and haven’t felt a real impact of it. Yet, it was a huge trend.
I can give you some great guesses about what the trends will be in 2019, but it’s fairly worthless. Me telling you that machine learning assisted automation will change how you find talent in 2019 isn’t going to really change a single thing you do.
Instead, I have all of these questions I would love to get answers to in 2019. Some of those answers will come from the industry, some will come through testing, and some will be left unanswered.
Here are some of these questions:
- What are the common talent acquisition metrics we all should be using to measure the success and failure of our efforts? How do we get all TA shops to use these, or better, how do we get ATSs and TA suites to build these ‘common’ measures into their technology? (If you tell me Days to Fill/Hire I will punch you in the face!)
- Can we automate most of the sourcing function across the talent acquisition supply chain? (I know it can’t all be automated, but it would seem with the current technology in the market 90% of sourcing could be automated. The last 10% are those Super Sourcers, like the folks that attend SourceCon.)
- Can selection and assessment science make better hiring decisions than hiring managers? If so, how do we gain buy-in from hiring managers to move this science forward?
- Is “Job Brand” more important than “Employment Brand”? Do candidates care more about your job or your company? (This is clearly predicated on the idea that the majority of candidates aren’t searching for companies, they are searching for jobs, yet we spend just a fraction of time on our jobs versus our employment brands.)
- How can I tell if a person (either experienced in recruiting or entry level) from outside my environment will be a great recruiter inside my environment?
Let’s not kid ourselves, a softening of the economy in 2019 and 2020 won’t make our jobs significantly easier. A 4.0% unemployment versus a 5.5% unemployment isn’t really going to change most of our jobs. Talent will still be difficult to find.
While the TA industry has grown so much over the past decade, we still lag many other functions when it comes to some basic building blocks that will really move us forward. The idea we don’t have common measures of success across industries in recruiting is shameful for a function that wants to call itself a profession.
I’m super interested in what questions you are trying to answer in 2019! Hit me in the comments.
Candidates 100% care more about the job brand and team brand than the employer brand (assuming the company is a generally decent one to work for). But vendors keep pumping EB, so we all still have jobs.
I think Time to Fill is an incredibly valuable item to always watch. I always scratch my head at why you are so against it.
Time to Fill is one of the BEST indicators you can have that something is going wrong in your hiring process. Does the time to fill number itself tell you anything? Not really. But seeing that time to fill number starting to deviate from the norm is one of the best indicators you can have that something is going on in your hiring processes and make you take some action to dig and find out what is happening so you can address it and fix it before everything falls apart.
Selection & Assessment tools – we don’t need them to be better than hiring managers, I’d be happy if they functioned at the SAME success rate as hiring managers. Because hey, you can get the same results with a whole lot less effort and energy wasted. Seems pretty smart to me.
Dan –
We’ll disagree on the Time to Fill. Just because you fill a job slower this month then last month doesn’t tell you anything about your process. There might be a million factors around why it took longer this month, or why it was shorter last month. Maybe your job mix from month to month changed, and you had more difficult to fill jobs this month. It’s a number built on nothing when taken in aggregate, and it definitely does not give you any insight to the health of the TA function. Your Days to Fill number might be increasing because your recruiters are taking more time to source higher talent, is that a negative? Of course not. Too many factors to use this as a measure of success or direction.
T
Is Time to Fill a useful metric for TA?
Great question about job brand! When you look at all the successful marketing companies P&G, Coke, etc., they dedicate all their resources to promoting their products, not their companies. The collective reputation of their products becomes their corporate brand. More emphasis on job marketing will generate the measurable results that employer brand has been missing.