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.

In this complex landscape, intelligence and insight are your allies. Realising this, more and more recruiters are adopting proven marketing tactics to enhance, refine and ignite their hiring efforts. The rise of the candidate persona is a prime example.

What is a candidate persona?

Candidate personas are the recruitment equivalent of a marketer’s buyer persona. The latter is a semi-fictional version of an idealised customer, created from detailed research to focus marketing minds on exactly who they’re reaching out to with their products and advertising.

Likewise, a well-developed candidate persona can focus and steer your recruiting strategy, giving you a definitive image of a real person to latch onto at every stage of your talent acquisition process. No more hazy, ill-defined target audiences. Candidate personas give you a tangible and relatable figure, alive with personality, ideally suited to your role and ready to inspire their real-world counterparts to apply.

They’re a useful tool in any hiring campaign – which is why it’s a good idea to create personas for every key role in your organisation.

What goes into a good candidate persona?

The important thing about any good persona is that it’s real. A composite picture it may be, but your persona has to ring true as a multi-dimensional person. So it should cover far more ground than the work history, skills, qualifications and cursory demographic information that informs most job profiles.

You’re aiming to flesh out a complete human being, with drives, goals, habits, passions, reservations and objections, even a name and a mugshot. We like Maren Hogan’s neat summation of 3 things candidate personas need to focus on to be effective:

• Who this person is
• What they do all day
• What keeps them up at night

Here’s a more in-depth list from Glassdoor:

• Demographic information: Age, location, current job title, income.
• Background: Educational and professional history.
• Personal attributes: Traits, strengths, weaknesses, interests, fears.
• Qualifications: Any required or preferred skills, certifications etc.
• Goals: What motivates them? Where are they going?
• Objections: Why would they not want to work for you? What aspects of your brand, culture or hiring process would cause them to lose interest?
• Web activity: Where do they spend time online? Where can you start an authentic hiring conversation with them?

And here’s a fully comprehensive cheat sheet, courtesy of TalentLyft:

From research to realism

The other key to keeping it real is rooting your persona in reality. The best examples are informed by the richest research. The good news is that you should have a lot of what you need already in the organisation, in the shape of your successful hires and star performers.

If you’re hiring into sales, interview your top salespeople to see which traits are common to them all, then add the data to your persona. Review successful sales applications from the past and feed the overlaps in. Maybe reach out to the external market too, by setting up a Survey Monkey questionnaire for your professional or personal network.

What does it get you?

We’ll admit that a lot of effort needs to go into creating a candidate persona for it to be of value. But this is undeniably time well spent, certainly for mission-critical roles. One particularly evangelical article lists 14 benefits, ranging from better quality hires and more offers accepted to reduced turnover rates and lower cost-per-hire.

On a less granular level, we’d describe the key benefits as greater foresight, accountability and personalisation in your hiring approach. If you value candidate experience, your persona can inform every stage in your process, from your attraction messaging and where you put it, to how you write your job description and what format assessments take.

If your persona is most interested in career growth, that’s what you should talk to candidates about the most. If they’re more interested in innovation and ideas, show them your entrepreneurial side. If they don’t want to be deskbound, interview them offsite.

Take your hard-won insights and build a tailored process around them. Crucially, make decisions that are guided by logic, evidence and intelligence… three key traits in the idealised persona of any recruiter in 2019!

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.

The post Candidate Personas: Think Like a Marketer, Win As a Recruiter appeared first on EWS.

That’s the question we put to our global research team for our latest blog post. With the internet full of articles about in-demand professional skills, we wanted to give recruiters and candidates more insight into the human factors that sway employers. So we asked the experts and turned their responses into the list below.

First, a little clarification.

What do we mean by soft skills?

From leadership to critical thinking, we’re talking about skills not directly earned in the workplace (even if they can be enhanced or proven at work). They’re useful in most if not all jobs. And they’re impossible to fake. For candidates, probably the easiest way to think of it is that if you haven’t got it now, you never will. However, the more of these traits you can honestly see in yourself, the greater your chances in the global job market, in any sector.

You can’t tick all the boxes

Before we get to the most in-demand skills, a quick word on the most overused ones. Our researchers agreed that job profiles and applications tend to be overloaded with empty skills. Things like honesty and confidence are taken as read, while the likes of teamwork and attention to detail are ubiquitous to the point of redundancy. When updating your LinkedIn page or drafting a role profile, keep in mind this brilliant quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add,
but when there is nothing left to take away.”

The anatomy of an in-demand executive

Without further ado, here are the top 5 traits our researchers said their clients look for in executive candidates in 2016.

1. Leader

A manager is one thing. A leader is another. This distinction is why we define leadership as a soft skill, even if it has to be proven through experience to be a true asset. Top employers want leaders at every level driving their company forward.

2. Entrepreneur

We’re living in an era of reinvention. Globalisation, tech innovation and economic uncertainty spell caution for some, but possibility for others. Executives who embrace the latter are the ones companies want on their payroll, particularly in the US and expanding markets like India.

3. Growth mindset

Our researchers find our clients asking for candidates who can convert the opportunities of our time into solid company growth. They want employees who aren’t happy resting on a plateau, but always eager to press on to the next peak.

4. Adaptive

In uncertain times, it’s not enough to accept change. You have to embrace it, mould it, use it to your advantage. We see this as not just adaptability, but adaptation. Some people are simply better at this than others. They’re the candidates leading employers want to talk to.

5. Relationship builder

‘Communication skills’ may be a recruitment cliché, but like most clichés, it’s overused for a reason. At executive level, nurturing fruitful relationships is absolutely vital, whether handling different client types with aplomb or building internal alliances to unlock new opportunities.

Taken together, these 5 complementary traits add up to a clearly impressive candidate – influencer of people, darling of clients, engineer of opportunity and architect of the future.

Candidates, how do you measure up? If you have 3 or more of these soft skills, we think you’re set fair for a successful career in your field. If you have all 5, the world is yours!

Recruiters, we hope you found this glimpse into our market intelligence revealing. If so, we’ve plenty more to tell you.

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