The only absolute certainty is that there is no going back to the way things were pre-pandemic. The old normal is gone, even if there are no definitive indications yet of what the new normal will be. 

Not an easy time, you might think, to be making predictions for the next 12 months. But there is sense to be made in all this uncertainty. Armed with our hard-won talent market intel and on-the-ground observations from our seasoned consultants, we have some valuable insights to share.

Here’s the EWS view on where the talent market is heading in 2024… and what smart recruiters need to do to be prepared.

The global economy in 2024

Macroeconomic forecasting has become something of a fool’s errand in recent years. The world economy has been disrupted by an unprecedented sequence of black swan events, all while the climate emergency makes ever-more-urgent demands for new economic thinking. However, optimism is now coalescing around core factors like growth, inflation and employment. 

Goldman Sachs Research, which predicted the global economy’s outperformance against expectations in 2023, is even more positive about the prospects for 2024. Income growth, cooling inflation, a robust job market, room for Central Banks to reduce interest rates – it’s not for nothing that their report is titled The Hard Part Is Over. 

The OECD predicts more uneven growth but a similar picture around interest rates and continuing low unemployment rates. 

Specifically in the talent space, Recruitics forecasts cooling labour markets, although cautions of a persisting gap between supply and demand. 

So where does this leave recruiters? We’re viewing the answer as a shift from wait-and-see mode to planning mode. Irrespective of the precise trajectory of the market in 2024, it’s highly likely that growth is stabilising and an uptick in investment is on the horizon. 

That gap between supply and demand won’t be closing any time soon. So when the time does come to start hiring again, the successful recruiters will be the best prepared. 

“This isn’t the time to be reactive. We know a fundamental change is coming and there will be a point relatively soon when you will be hiring more than you have been. The best way to be ahead of that is to start early. Invest in talent pipelining, invest in talent mapping. Ultimately, the busier you are now, the better positioned you’ll be when the boom does come.”

Darren Hornigold, EWS Director

Emerging talent trends for 2024

We’re seeing some significant new trends emerging, with other recent trends solidifying, falling back or balancing out. These are converging to reshape the talent landscape for 2024 – and every one of them should be on your strategic radar right now.

1. The end of The Great Resignation? 

As our Global Delivery Leader Ken Craig notes, all signs are that The Great Resignation is itself quietly quitting. 

“Workers quitting or job-hopping spiked in 2021-22 but post-pandemic, this looks to have peaked. Through 2023, we’ve seen ever-stronger emphasis on candidates who haven’t jumped from job to job. And this dampening in demand has also seen wages start to balance out after a period of inflated growth. Things are looking a lot more sustainable on that front now.”

This is one big relief for talent teams, but no reason yet to take your eye off the retention ball. 

Ken cautions that “employees want evidence they’re in a company that wants them long term. Many of our clients are investing heavily in learning & development – both upskilling and reskilling – to design career progression paths to retain top talent. This is a key employer brand pillar and one that vastly improves employee engagement.”

2. The Great Retirement gathers pace

As Strategic Dimensions puts it, “the 2020s is the decade during which the challenge of an ageing population shifts from being tomorrow’s problem to today’s.” Almost half-way through, with the Covid-accelerated rise in workers retiring early, this is a workforce trend that cannot be ignored.

There is vast intellectual capital locked up in all those Baby Boomers, and increasingly Gen X executives, on the verge of retirement. Without a clear view of where to find the next generation of exec-level talent, The Great Retirement will be anything but great for organisational futures.

EWS Director Darren Hornigold proposes a clear strategic solution. “The more people analytics you use, the more you understand the ebb and flow of your workforce and the wider talent market. So you know you’re going to have a 10% loss of ‘grey’ intellectual capital over the next five years. How are you going to manage that effectively without a talent pipeline?” 

3. The Great Reprioritisation: Rise of the selective candidate

We are seeing an intrinsic shift in what candidates are prioritising in their career decision-making. So fundamental is this shift, we’ve coined an entirely new category of candidates. Where we previously demarcated active and passive candidates, we now speak more and more of selective candidates.

These are candidates who are only open to exploring new opportunities if they fit certain criteria, typically around working pattern, culture and non-compensatory benefits. Crucially, even for roles where there’s a good competency fit, if these criteria aren’t met, selective candidates are saying ‘no’ far sooner.

Darren explains: “Traditionally, our model was to target passive candidates. But now we’re having a completely different type of engagement. Candidates can be active for two or three conversations, and then very quickly they’re turned off because it doesn’t quite fit with what they want in their life. For selective candidates, what matters to you is a holistic thing rather than a job title”.

This poses a major new challenge for recruiters, one that will only grow with the rise of the selective candidate. It’s no longer enough to have a big name, an attractive role and a great compensation package. 

As Darren puts it, “now you need to factor in all kinds of intangible variables. Can they work from home? What are their long-term incentives? What are you doing about wellbeing? What’s in the office fridge? Do you have a ping pong table? It’s a different landscape with a far greater need for more nuanced qualification.”

Navigating that landscape, then, requires an equally nuanced mindset. This is partly an employer branding challenge. Ken is finding that “an organisation’s perception in the market is becoming increasingly important, with green and sustainable practices particularly high on candidate agendas. You can no longer rely on the company name. It’s about changing the go-to-market narrative.”

Another crucial mindset shift for talent acquisition teams is from prioritising identification to focusing resources on candidate engagement. Which leads us neatly on to our final trend…

4. The sweet spot between AI and HI

The exponential growth of AI recruitment tools continues apace, particularly in managing job applicants. We’re going to see more and more ChatGPT-written job descriptions, chatbot-answered application questions and interview questions generated by AI tech analysing job descriptions and applications.

Yet with the rise of the selective candidate, the demand for human intelligence at the front end of the recruitment process will become greater than ever. AI tech undoubtedly has the potential to 10x our work in candidate identification. But in the increasingly critical engagement phase, it’s another story altogether, as Darren explains.

“With selective candidates, it’s no longer binary qualification. Say you’re looking for a Marketing Director on the U.S. West Coast with a B2B background, some B2C and 8+ years’ experience. You have three key essentials and there’s a good chance AI will improve our ability to map out that market. What it can’t do is ask the question about the grey areas, the intangibles. It can’t engage on a human level. And unless you’re willing to risk the quality of your candidate experience, that person-to-person element is essential.”

How talent acquisition teams are preparing for 2024

Hiring is going to be back on the agenda in 2024, even if our crystal ball doesn’t allow us to put an exact timeline on it. But when investment starts flowing again and the new war for talent does break out, you’ll win by having put in the groundwork early.  

We know that in-demand skills are already scarce and competition for that talent is only set to rise more sharply. Factor in the advent of the selective candidate and the pressures of the Great Retirement, and the smart money is on the horizon-scanners, not the shoegazers.

As ever, EWS is here to help you take a more strategic view of talent acquisition. We’re experts in talent mapping, so we can apply a laser focus to the talent markets you want to understand. And our pipelining prowess will help you build proactive talent pools, ready to be dipped into when the time is right. 

When that moment comes, you can rely on us to seamlessly search for and engage the best candidates, attending to their deeper priorities as well as their career aspirations and salary expectations. 

With that in mind, perhaps we have one final recommendation for the year ahead. In 2024, choose a talent partner that’s in it for the long term.

“The talent landscape is changing and hiring priorities are in flux. In this market, a true partner is one that can adapt easily to map out the road ahead. They will know your business, your competitors and your market. They’ll understand your culture and the types of people you want to attract. And crucially, they can give you the insights and intel to shape your hiring around your strategy.”

Emma Watson, EWS Managing Director

The post The EWS View: Top Talent Trends For 2024 appeared first on EWS.

The founders of Digital Minds position themselves as digital psychologists offering “a revolutionary assessment tool” that’s not only more accurate and precise for employers, but also easier and faster for (fully consenting) candidates.

Their product, in Politico’s words, “skims a job applicant’s private conversations to compute an assessment of his or her psychological traits […] based on the so-called Big Five personality traits — openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. [This] gives the potential employer an assessment of whether the person in question would be a good fit at his or her company.”

It follows a 2017 study by the University of California, Berkeley, which found that language used in internal company emails could successfully predict an employee’s career trajectory. So is this simply another heel-click step along the road to the promised land of cheap, reliable, unbiased automated hiring?

Your answer to this question ultimately depends on how happy you are to blindly hand over decision-making power to opaque and unaccountable algorithms.

It’s hard to avoid the exploding trend to take decisions out of human hands and entrust them to algorithms. Amazon and Netflix decide what we’ll like to buy and watch next. We let Google algorithms determine the answers to our questions. In finance, 85% of foreign exchange trading is conducted by algorithms alone. In Italy, healthcare treatment is allocated via automated data analysis. The list goes on.

But the concern for many is that all of these decisions are based on at best undecided criteria, at worst completely inscrutable ones. And as Politico puts it:

“The opacity in exactly how [algorithms] make those decisions is what poses the biggest risk from these new technologies and approaches.”

Indeed, there is a growing bank of evidence that algorithmic decision-making is profoundly fallible.

Reuters reported last October that Amazon had to scrap a prototype AI recruiting tool after it was found to be discriminating against women. Likewise, a 2016 ProPublica study uncovered a racially biased algorithm at use in US courtrooms.

There are enough reported instances of algorithms going rogue to give even the most burnished AI evangelist pause for thought. John Jersin, vice president of LinkedIn Talent Solutions, acknowledged to Reuters that:

“I certainly would not trust any AI system today to make a hiring decision on its own. The technology is just not ready yet.”

Regardless of whether or when the technology is ready, the question remains whether it should ever be trusted.

In the brilliantly titled comment piece Algorithms Are Already Making Decisions For Humans, And It’s Getting Weird, Dionysios Demetis of the University of Hull concludes that:

“As new boundaries are carved between humans and technology, we need to think carefully about where our extreme reliance on software is taking us. As human decisions are substituted by algorithmic ones, and we become tools whose lives are shaped by machines and their unintended consequences, we are setting ourselves up for technological domination. We need to decide, while we still can, what this means for us both as individuals and as a society.”

These decisions – about the scrutability, accountability and unintended consequences of automating machines like Digital Minds – are the ones we still have control over. Now is the time to exercise that control.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

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In this age of metrics, data analytics and ROI, no element of the recruitment process escapes scrutiny. Having already put job descriptions, CV screening and onboarding under the Talent Unlimited microscope, our steely gaze now turns to the keystone of most selection strategies: the job interview.

Such a review has been a long time coming. The evidence is mounting against the fairness and effectiveness of interviews as an indicator of future job performance. In response we see ever more measures introduced to eliminate unconscious bias, with artificial intelligence touted as the great blind arbiter of skills and skills alone.

But still the argument remains that job interviews are only truly good at identifying good interviewees. The qualities that shine out at interview – likability, ease, confidence, verbal dexterity – are certainly useful in some jobs, but does that apply to your vacancy? Be honest: how charming does your back-end developer really need to be?

Hence the rise in recent years of the job audition. The idea is simple. Rather than ask candidates what they will do in the role (spoiler alert: you aren’t guaranteed an honest answer), see them in situ instead. Watch them performing in a real-world context and discover for yourself whether they’re up to the job, how well they work with your team and whether there’s a good culture fit.

Auditions are a smart way for employers to de-risk this precarious stage of the selection process. In terms of results, there are some very compelling stories out there:

1. Web development company Automattic achieved microscopic turnover rates of 2% after introducing ‘tryouts’ (read the full fascinating tale here).
2. In the three years after job auditions were adopted at social media platform Mogul, precisely zero employees quit the company.

One of the big attractions of job auditions is the way they benefit employers and candidates equally. Compared to the staged and cagy interview setup, auditions offer both sides a far more realistic assessment of future fit. You get to see skills and temperament in action, while your candidates can experience your daily work, plunge into your culture and even meet prospective coworkers. What could possibly go wrong?

Getting job auditions right

At this point we should note ethical objections some have raised against job auditions. Chief among them: Are auditions exploitative? Our answer is that they’re no more exploitative than the employer behind them. It’s for you to choose how you structure your audition – how long it lasts, the type of work undertaken on it, whether candidates are paid for their time etc.

For our part, we have three core beliefs about fair job auditions:

1. Always pay for real work
If you’re asking candidates to contribute to live projects alongside your team, you need to pay them for their time. No one should be expected to act as an unpaid consultant during the recruitment process.

2. Consider dummy work instead
There are many ways you can mimic the actual work of your company. You could canvas suggestions for a new project or recreate an existing one. Ask web developers to build a landing page or sales candidates to edit an old pitch document. It doesn’t have to be real to be relevant.

3. Make it rewarding for candidates
It should always be a two-way audition – candidates trying you out as much as vice versa. They should be able to use the experience to make an informed decision of their own. Give them the opportunity by being open, accommodating and genuine at all times.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

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So says Sara Whitman, one of the multitude of talent leaders buying into the persuasive philosophy of continuous recruiting. If it isn’t on your radar yet, here’s why it should be.

The idea of continuous recruiting is aptly named and compellingly simple. Your company should always be hiring, instead of merely waiting for a vacancy to arise before you go out looking. It’s a principle neatly summed up by talent strategist Candice McGlen:

“Talent acquisition is not a reactive function.”

As a continuous recruiter, you’re in active control of the hiring process. With your antennae in perpetual motion, you spend your Quadrant 2 time identifying the best prospects for your key functions and adding them to your talent pool. Informational or exploratory interviews usually have a big part to play.

As a result, when your CMO is poached by a sexy fintech start-up, you don’t fall into the habitual flurry of panic as you frantically fire up your hiring machine to look for the best available replacement. Instead, you’re able to save the day with a couple of calm calls to a top-tier candidate who’s already expressed an interest in talking about the right future role.

It’s such a smart method of recruiting, particularly for larger companies able to forecast their major talent gaps. Think of the revenue you lose, the stress you undergo, and the pressure you put on the employees picking up the slack every time you go through the reactive process described in the last paragraph.

And yet a 2014 CareerBuilder study found that only 38% of employers continuously recruit for potential future openings.

Now more than ever, as a new generation enters the workforce with new priorities and rules of engagement, it’s time for the other 62% to come on board. Generation Z begins interacting with admired brands on social media way before they start thinking about their career. For them, a fulfilling career looks set to be defined more by brand affinity than job titles.

In this context, the importance of a strong employer brand and an always-on approach to candidate interaction is impossible to overstate. Those who remain reactive will find themselves behind the game, or as Michele Markey of Skillpath puts it:

“If you’re only recruiting talent when there are open positions, you’ll end up with the best of the leftovers.”

A sentiment which we, as unstinting experts in talent pipelining, wholeheartedly endorse.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

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Answering the thorny question of why your company is in business is not easy. It may require the dissatisfied curiosity of persistent pre-schooler. But it’s a major step to hiring more motivated, loyal and productive employees.

Why?

Because it connects you over purpose, and purpose is one of the most powerful motivators in the workplace today.

Why purpose matters

Where purpose is present, performance soars. A benchmark 2016 report into workplace purpose, by Imperative, cited research demonstrating that:

• 85% of purpose-led companies showed positive growth
• 42% of non-purpose-led companies showed a drop in revenue

Even more dramatically, a Harvard Business School study found that over a ten-year period, values-driven companies outperform non-purposeful ones by a factor of 12 in their stock price.

How purpose helps

Why does purpose make such a difference? In short, because purposeful companies are more likely to have purposeful employees. And in just about every metric that matters, purposeful employees make better employees.

We touched on this in our infographic on the Emerging World of Software Engineers, which cited job satisfaction and loyalty as two characteristics of purpose-oriented employees. But according to the aforementioned Imperative report, such employees are also more likely to be:

• Good colleagues
• In a leadership role
• Net promoters of their employer

Defining purposeful

If you want to understand what makes purpose-oriented employees perform so effectively, you only need to consider what it actually means to be one.

To be purpose-oriented is to see work as a path to personal fulfilment, strong relationships and a positive wider impact. An employee with purpose prioritises work that matters to them, their company and the world. They are almost certain to be more engaged in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work.

Interestingly, they aren’t just millennials: a higher proportion of both Gen Xers and baby boomers define themselves as purpose-oriented.

By contrast, non-purpose-oriented people see work solely as a source of income or status. They are far less likely to be engaged in their work, like the staggering 68% of US workers cited in a 2015 Gallup survey into employee engagement. Gallup went on to define not-engaged workers in the following terms:

“These employees are not hostile or disruptive. They show up and kill time, doing the minimum required with little extra effort to go out of their way for customers. They are less vigilant, more likely to miss work and change jobs when new opportunities arise. They are thinking about lunch or their next break.”

Not exactly the first words you’d choose for your next person spec. Yet like the majority of employers, are you actually doing anything to distinguish and target purposeful candidates in your hiring efforts?

If not, here’s where you can start:

• Understand your company’s purpose – While every company knows what it does, very few know what for. But until you can clearly say why your company exists, you have no way of making a meaningful connection with anyone – customers or employees.
• Bake purpose into your employer brand – Your ‘why’ should be articulated in your company mission statement and you want it front and centre in your employer brand. It should define your values and drive your culture, so that anyone coming into contact with your company can see it at work.
• Connect with purpose-oriented talent – Create purpose-driven attraction strategies and seek out candidates who share your sense of purpose. Bear in mind these candidates are more likely to be passive, so you can add them to your talent pipeline and start a meaningful long-term conversation even if they’re not ready to jump now.
• Probe for purpose during selection – Ask questions like “what matters to you?” and “what motivates you?” at interview. And remember that when it’s the candidate’s turn to turn the spotlight on you, you’ll have a much better answer to the question “why should I work here?” up your sleeve.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

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All those emotions – positive and negative, excitement and apprehension – get overlooked in favour of dry paperwork and presentations. But this isn’t what people buy into or ultimately settle into. If the point of onboarding is to turn new hires into loyal employees, something more is needed from the HR teams responsible.

Instead of focusing solely on what you want someone to know about your company, consider how you want them to feel about being part of it. Here’s the EWS view on what you can do to make formative emotional connections that bring new joiners truly on board.

1. Make them feel important

It’s a great feeling being chosen for a new job, but it’s even better to know just how much you mean to your new company. There are many simple ways to make a new hire feel valued during onboarding: a welcome email or video from the CEO; an effusive announcement on their first day; even a small gift with their offer letter.

2. Make them feel welcome

Building strong relationships is one of the surest ways to make new hires feel at home (according to one study, over half of employees who have a best friend at work feel a profound connection to their company). Assigning a mentor is a no-brainer, while team lunch or dinner makes personal introductions fun and social.

3. Make them feel prepared

A new job comes with an avalanche of paperwork to fill out and new information to take in. Avoid first-day overload by telling new employees as much as you feasibly can before they start. Send all standard HR paperwork, share logins for tech tools, provide organisational charts, record a video tour of the company. Whatever it takes to help them spend Day 1 feeling informed and excited, not overwhelmed.

4. Make them feel like they belong

We recently blogged about workplace belonging: the idea that employees should feel free to be themselves at work, so that they can contribute the full force of their unique perspective in their role. Start the process before they join by creating a team Whatsapp group for informal introductions or setting up a video call with their mentor ahead of their start date.

5. Make them feel useful

No new hire wants to feel like a spare wheel and there is no Day 1 question more awkward to ask than “Is there anything I can do?” Integrate them straight into their role by briefing their team to provide small but useful tasks. As well as giving them an immediate sense of their value, it’s the best way to get them up to speed on team workflow, communication, expectations, deadline rules etc.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

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An early Talent Unlimited post listed the most in-demand soft skills in the job market. A couple of years later, it appears one of them – adaptability – is becoming the Holy Grail for recruiters operating in what we might call a post-skilled world of work.

The diminishing shelf life of skills

In recent years, hard skills and specialist knowledge have become a devalued workplace currency. In previous generations, workers could spend an entire career carving out and honing their specialism, building their skills methodically as the world progressed steadily, non-tangentially, predictably.

Fast-forward to today, and the pace of change in technology, work methods and jobs themselves is such that specialist expertise now only has a shelf life of a few years at best.

The World Economic Forum offers two projections that neatly illustrate the point:

1. 35% of our most valued workplace skills will have changed within 5 years
2. 65% of schoolchildren today will work in jobs that haven’t been invented yet

In a post-skilled world of work, the question faced by recruiters is starkly simple. Exactly which trait marks out the best candidates for a given role?

Adaptability is the answer

With the necessary skills for a given job (even the job itself) superseded so quickly, today’s best candidate is the one who’s proven their desire to continually, successfully retrain and reinvent themselves throughout their career.

This is the crux of a high Adaptability Quotient: one’s facility for dealing with and thriving in the rapidly changing context in which we all now live and work.

Expanding on that definition, high-AQ employees are:

• Comfortable with change and uncertainty
• Prepared to adopt new ways of working
• Happy to go outside their functional role and take on something new
• Eager to solve problems, even ones they haven’t encountered before

These are the traits that many smart recruiters are looking for first. HR influencer Jennifer Dulski states in a LinkedIn blog post:

“We all know there will be new devices, new programming languages, and new approaches tomorrow that don’t exist today. I like to hire people who want to learn those new things and who want to be part of creating them.”

Dulski has a simple way of assessing adaptability during selection:

”I usually ask very direct questions like, “Can you tell me about a time when your company or team went through a major change and how you handled that?” People who can describe situations where they adeptly maneuvered a period of change are especially valuable on teams.”

Why AQ is something new

At this point, you may be wondering what all the fuss is about. Isn’t this merely rebadging the Growth Mindset we’ve been assessing for umpteen years?

Actually, there are two reasons why AQ is worth paying more attention to. First, on a human level it’s not that easy for us to be truly adaptable, for reasons set out in this excellent article.

Second, AQ doesn’t just apply to individuals. In fact, employee-level adaptability is only half the story. In an increasingly complex and volatile corporate climate, adaptability must also be a top organisational priority, in order to avoid going the way of Blockbuster, Kodak, Toys R Us et al.

The 2018 Innosight Corporate Longevity Forecast is sobering reading for even the biggest blue-chips. It tells a story of corporate lifespans speeding inexorably up. This is highlighted by the downward trend in average tenure of companies in the S&P 500 – from 33 years in 1964 down to 24 years in 2016. By 2027, Innosight predicts, that tenure will be a mere 12 years.

Faced with this prospect, ‘Adapt or die’ seems a corporate mantra worth adopting for the next decade or so. But crucially, it must be baked into company culture. In order for their adapters to thrive, first companies have to create the conditions in which adapters thrive.

In the best cases, high AQ will be a healthy symbiosis between individuals and the organisation they work for. Recruiters will be able to lure high-AQ hires with the promise of continual upskilling in a naturally fluid culture that truly celebrates learning. In turn, those hires will become loyal employees proactively motivated to evolve and reshape their organisation to succeed in the unchartered future ahead.

Before that can happen, AQ has some evolving of its own to do. For now it’s appreciated as a prized candidate asset. But its true value will only be realised when it becomes a quantifiable metric for ranking candidates (and by which candidates can rate prospective employers). No doubt the adapters are already on it.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

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