What’s crucial for HR leaders and decision-makers in today’s rapidly evolving job market? Staying ahead in recruitment requires more than just keeping up with trends – it demands strategic adaptation.
The rise of automation, AI-driven processes, and shifting candidate expectations present both opportunities and risks. HR trends that are introduced too fast and/or by the wrong department will backfire by e.g. generating additional costs, negative employer branding, losing valuable candidates, longer recruitment processes, low(er) candidate experience, etc.
To help companies avoid these mistakes, we put together a summary of the most important trends along an employee’s life cycle – with their accompanying threats and – where possible – adding relatively simple quick wins – everything backed up with stats and real cases.
This week, we are sharing trends and threats related to Phase #2 out of 5: Recruiting Candidates.
HR Trend #1: ATS (Applicant Tracking System)
Let’s face it: an average recruiter is flooded with hundreds of CVs. As the 2024 Applicant Tracking System Usage Report conducted by Jobscan says, 98.4% of Fortune 500 companies use ATS in recruitment processes – as an easy and fast way to “scan” candidates.
According to Forbes, the inability of job seekers to reach a human is the number one complaint, as they feel that their resumes go into a company’s ATS and never come out the other end.
The Employer Branding in Poland Report tells us that:
- Technology, automation and AI will have the greatest impact on business in the near future (62% of responses in comparison to 34% in 2022).
- HR and recruitment are key areas where automation and AI plays a significant role in streamlining processes.
- 49% of the respondents use automation / robotization / AI in recruitment and HR.
- In 2024, the most commonly used tools are ATS systems or other comprehensive recruitment tools (63%), which significantly support the management of the entire process.
Another research, published by SelectSoftware Reviews tells us that:
- 70% of large companies and 20% of small and mid-sized companies currently use ATS.
- 94% of recruiters agree that their ATS has had a positive impact on their organization’s hiring processes.
- 62% of teams that use ATS find more high-quality candidates when compared to those using traditional inbound applications.
- 70% of recruiters believe that automating key recruitment processes, like sourcing, will lead to increased productivity.
According to our own data, 60-70% of managerial and executive roles are handled by ATS and ATS pre-selection – that would have been unheard of till 2016!
What are the potential threats?
- Incorrect selection of candidates for technical reasons, as most ATS are “more A than I” – they reject good CVs because of e.g. not recognizing text in a table or not finding the right key words although they are theoretically there (e.g. recruiting vs recruited). In other words: companies might miss out on (a lot of) valuable candidates!
- Advanced ATS (those that are “more I than A”) remember the recruiter’s choices and learn from them – instead of eliminating bias and increasing diversity of employees, the opposite happens.
- Candidates don’t trust AI – if they find out that the recruitment process is conducted by a bot, they might step back.
- Low(er) candidate experience, if the application process is not “quick and easy” enough. In some cases, despite uploading the CV, the candidate still has to fill out a loooong form by hand. Now imagine if an active job seeker has to do that 2-3 hrs / day for a handful of applications!
Solution?
→ Instead of fully trusting ATS, review rejected candidates manually as part of the process.
→ If you are recruiting for key positions – especially senior ones, allow candidates to apply through an alternative channel, by email.
HR Trend #2: Tests
As surveys from 2020 show, more than 80% of Fortune 500 companies use online tests when hiring for C-level positions. 89 of Fortune 100 companies use Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality test to screen candidate and predict future success.
Here’s more data from 2024, delivered by tekstac.com:
- HR will shift its criteria from measuring education to assessing real-world skills. This means talent acquisition professionals may need to invest in job-specific tests that accurately measure the skills required to perform in a job role.
- Simulators for on-job scenarios and coding labs are turning smarter to test practical skills. They are designed to replicate present challenges to see how the candidate would perform on the job. For example, coding simulators can test a developer’s ability to debug code, while customer service simulators check how well the candidate handles client inquiries.
- With mobile devices now dominating internet use, candidates expect pre-hiring assessments on mobile devices. More and more platforms will optimize pre-hiring tests so candidates can complete assessments anytime, anywhere. This is especially useful when hiring high-demand roles or tech candidates.
Moreover, game-based and gamified assessments are becoming more popular. Game-based assessments refer to assessments that are completely game-like in their process and structure, while gamified ones retain the traditional format with embedded game elements. According to GraduatesFirst.com, you can use such assessments for skills like attention, memory, risk-taking, emotions, organizing, multitasking.
Testing for soft skills is no less important than for hard skills. According to toggl.com, critical soft skills to test include communication, teamwork, leadership, problem-solving, time management, and critical thinking.
What are the potential threats?
There’s a risk that companies will choose tests incorrectly – there are many of them that are not reliable and/or don’t fulfill the proper requirements. Additionally, the results might not be interpreted in the correct way.
Solution?
→ Before you start testing candidates, do proper research. Analyze available tools, read opinions, ask experts. You should choose a test that is reliable and verifies a candidate’s competences. Look at correctly calibrated benchmarks and set a benchmark based on your current top performers (in the sense of e.g. reliability, accuracy of delivery, quality of work) in the team.
At Career Angels, after thorough analysis, we decided to use these two tests as part of our recruitment process: Career View by Decision Dynamics and Gallup Top 5 CliftonStrengths. As a result, we reduced our personnel turnover from 30-50% to 0% (!).
HR Trend #3: Plug&play candidates
As described in Gartner’s HR Toolkit: 9 Future of Work Trends for 2024, college degrees are the top requirement of yesterday’s job descriptions – not tomorrow’s. More and more employers nowadays are looking for ideal “plug & play” candidates who represent a lower risk factor. Organizations are increasingly getting rid of the barrier workers without degrees face, and embracing skills-based hiring instead. Moreover, Gartner’s findings include:
- Major companies including Google, Delta Airlines, and Accenture have already removed many of their degree requirements from job offers.
- This shift is a response to the tight job market, as well as an adjustment to the current trends of undergraduate degree completion decline.
- Employers must consider new ways to find or help shape the talent that they need – in the EU there has been a rise in shared apprenticeship programs where smaller organizations share apprentices to create a complete training program for the talents they need.
Some additional information can be found in Talent Acquisition Trends Report:
- Recent LinkedIn data reveals recruiters on the platform search for candidates by their skills 5 times more often than by their degrees.
- The share of LinkedIn job postings that didn’t require a professional degree grew by 36% over the course of 2022.
What are the potential threats?
If you select candidates only by “ticking off” boxes based on a candidate’s CV, there’s a high chance you will miss out on a valuable employee.
Solution?
→ Focus on competences, not CVs. Change your way of thinking about candidates through the lens of e.g. role or age. This way, you can achieve the same results but hire from a much broader talent pool.
HR Trend #4: Ghosting
The data in SHRM 2024 Talent Trends states the following:
- The third place in top three challenges that organizations experienced in the last 12 months belongs to the increase in candidate ghosting (46%).
- Industries most likely to report an increase in candidate ghosting include healthcare and social assistance (60%), wholesale / retail trade, transport and warehousing (60%), and manufacturing (56%).
According to Greenhouse.com:
- Ghosting is on the rise from the companies’ side as well: 61% of job seekers have been ghosted after a job interview, a nine percentage point increase since April 2024.
Solution?
→ Implement better procedures. Use automated solutions to reject candidates and, if you hire an agency, include a clause in the contract that guarantees that no candidate is ghosted. To avoid being ghosted by candidates, reply to them within 24 hours and include a “ghosting clause” in the job ad – highlight that candidates who ghost you will not be able to participate in the recruitment process in the future.
Data collected by Select Software Reviews in 2022 said that chatbots can help you save time by handling as many as 80% of standard questions within minutes. This is especially helpful knowing that over half of all applicants give up on a company if they haven’t received a response within two weeks of applying. Moreover, 31% of those candidates expect a customized message, which chatbots are capable of curating as they leverage existing data, machine learning, and natural language processing to make interactions personalized.
HR Trend #5: HR analytics
As Lyra Polska states, people analytics allows us to analyze data on employee engagement, productivity and turnover, and identify the factors that shape them. Additionally:
- For this reason, companies will need HR employees with high analytical competences and tools that will allow them to collect and interpret employee data in a way that supports business decisions.
- HR analytics tools allow us to notice signals of planned departures or low job satisfaction. Organizations that invest in HR analytics are able to significantly reduce turnover.
- Such advanced predictive analyses and personalization of HR activities are possible thanks to analytical platforms using AI and machine learning.
What are the potential threats?
- If data is accessible and analyzed, but the results of analysis are not aligned with the organization’s strategy, it might lead to nothing.
- Only one department collects the data. HR analysis is about integrating data from different departments and/or locations to show the processes in the organization in the most reliable way. What happens often – data from one department is not compatible with data from another – it’s difficult to analyze them as one.
- Data is not collected = can’t be interpreted.
Solution?
→ Implement data collection and analysis – even simple ones: length of hiring process, number of ghosted candidates, etc.
→ Make sure several different departments collect the data to ensure the processes are reliable.
→ Remember to take the conclusion of your analysis into consideration and align it with your organization’s strategy.
HR Trend #6: AI
AI continues to influence all aspects of our lives, and recruiting is no different. According to Forbes, in June 2024, ResumeBuilder.com surveyed more than 1000 employees involved in hiring processes at their workplaces, and here is what they found out about their companies’ use of AI interviews:
- 43% of companies already had or planned to adopt AI interviews by the end of 2024.
- Two-thirds of this group believe AI interviews will increase hiring efficiency.
- 15% say that AI will be used to make decisions on candidates without any human input.
- More than half believe AI will eventually replace human hiring managers.
Workday Global Workforce Report presented the following data:
- 82% of the surveyed people expect moderate or major efficiency gain from using AI and ML in hiring.
- 70% somewhat or strongly agreed with the statement “Using AI and ML for hiring creates a fairer process for candidates”.
- 77% said that use of AI and ML for hiring in next year will slightly or significantly increase.
Additionally, potential employees also use AI in the recruitment processes:
- Randstad’s Report states that 72% of surveyed job seekers already use generative AI in their application documents, mainly for content creation (up from 50% in May 2023).
- According to Talent Acquisition Trends Report, applicants using AI for resume enhancement saw an 8% higher hiring rate, 7.8% more job offers, and 8.4% higher wages, as per an MIT Sloan study.
What are the potential threats?
- Bias and discrimination – AI models can inherit biases from human training data.
- AI-driven recruitment may unknowingly violate laws such as GDPR. Moreover, lack of transparency in AI decision-making can make it difficult to justify hiring decisions in case of legal disputes and provide little to no feedback on why a candidate was rejected.
- AI recruitment tools collect and analyze large amounts of candidate data, which can be at risk of breaches.
- Job seekers may exploit AI weaknesses by tailoring resumes with keywords that AI favors.
- AI struggles to assess soft skills and emotional intelligence, which are also very important for the hiring process.
Solution?
→ Audit AI models regularly to detect and eliminate discrimination in hiring algorithms.
→ Combine AI recommendations with human judgment to ensure fair hiring decisions. Use AI as a screening tool but let humans make final hiring decisions.
→ Implement AI models that provide clear reasons for rejecting or selecting candidates and allow the candidates to request feedback.
→ Limit data collection and introduce strong data encryption and security measures.
→ Follow GDPR and other relevant privacy regulations to protect candidate information.
→ Use AI models that analyze resumes holistically rather than just focusing on keywords.
→ Incorporate human-led interviews after AI shortlisting. Companies that retain a high-touch approach to hiring will prevail, as one of the top reasons people decide to work for a particular company is that they feel good about how they were treated throughout the hiring process.
If you want to find out more about the HR trends and threats regarding the first phase – Attracting Candidates – make sure to read the previous article from this series.
Coming up next: “HR trends: Onboarding”
If you’d like to discuss how we could potentially support your organization, feel free to get in touch by email with Zadrozna.Anna@CareerAngels.eu.
