Talent Acquisition Outlook for 2020: What You Should Know

With the current tight talent market conditions, what should talent acquisition leaders watch for in 2020? The Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association has been reporting on new trends specific to RPO solutions over the past year. You can review insights from RPO leaders on these trends on the RPO Voice. 

In this roundup of top industry articles, we review varying insights and opinions on where talent acquisition is headed in 2020. One thing they all agree on is that successful recruiting means being well prepared to manage a talent supply chain that reflects today’s ultra-fast, competitive job market.

Recruiting 2020: Transforming your talent acquisition process, by IBM

Transforming talent acquisition (TA) is not a single event but an ongoing process that uses multiple approaches to review and make improvements throughout the TA lifecycle. Future recruiting strategies must address four important areas:

1. A tight talent market where skills are in demand but talent is in short supply calls for emphasizing progress over process and must include a willingness to disrupt.
2. Reimagining the TA function from one that’s based on a one-size-fits-all method to a more agile one that uses data analytics and tech advances like AI to facilitate hires. For IBM, that’s meant introducing four new roles in TA: talent influencer, talent scientist, data poet, and scrum master.
3. With great talent increasingly hard to find, recruiters must redefine what “qualified” means. That often means looking for potential, not perfection.
4. Candidate experience is a real thing and one that can directly affect whether a job is filled. Technology can help improve efficiency and secure the best candidates by delivering personalized application steps that are informative and fun to engage with.

Talent Acquisition Is Going Social and Simple For 2020, by Forbes

It’s being called the new frontier in talent acquisition. Social sourcing for recruiting is now replacing the traditional path of posted ads, resumes, and interviews with methods like Facebook Live, LinkedIn InMail, live streaming, YouTube, and messaging to recruit and hire. Forward-thinking TA pros are moving away from a complicated (read antiquated) tracking system and towards a process that taps into a talent pool that prefers engaging on social media.

Accessing talent: It’s more than acquisition - 2019 Global Human Capital Trends, by Deloitte

Record low unemployment rates and skills shortages are forcing organizations to focus on new methods that:

• Mobilize internal resources.
• Find people in the alternative workforce.
• Strategically leverage technology to augment sourcing and boost recruiting productivity.

Better use of technology, hiring from within, and accessing talent in the social enterprise reflect the need for organizations to reconceptualize and reinvent their TA process.

Talent Acquisition Trends For 2020, by WilsonHCG

Libby Herrmann, Vice President of Client Solutions at WilsonHCG, points out a few trends in talent acquisition for 2020. Total talent, according to Herrmann, will play an important role in workforce development, and organizations will need to pay attention to their employer branding for all types of talent. Intelligence technology such as artificial intelligence (AI)-based sourcing tools, recruitment marketing and talent engagement platforms, and automated scheduling bots will be essential to drive candidate engagement. Herrman highlights a few more trends, including predictive analytics, diversity and inclusion, unconscious bias, and changes in employment branding.

Emerging Trends in Talent Acquisition, by IDC

How will organizations attract, engage, assess, hire, and onboard new talent in the coming years? By staying on top of the latest innovations, investing in competitive capabilities like analytics, and adopting new technologies. While striking the right balance between infrastructure and innovation is not always easy, companies must look to develop TA strategies that support business objectives while replacing the status quo with new models that maintain a competitive advantage.

20 HR Trends Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2020, by KLEIN HR SOLUTIONS

You may think the last thing the world of TA needs is more buzzwords, but a changing global workforce and workplace mean new approaches and fresh ways of describing them. Trends you’re going to hear a lot about in the coming months and years include:

• Permanent flexibility may sound like an oxymoron, but top talent is demanding more flexible work options to maintain a better work-life balance.
• Chatbots are providing a more personalized employee experience and automating tedious TA tasks.
• Reskilling is the latest professional corporate function that offers continuous learning for employees through teaching, training and assessing, preparing them for taking on new types of work while reducing attrition in the process.
• The gig economy isn’t necessarily a new concept but look for a more significant number of workers shifting away from full-time jobs into free agent employees.
• Gamification in recruitment is being used to identify, attract, and engage active and passive talent alike. Cleverly designed recruitment games inspire potential hires to engage with an organization’s social platforms and careers portal, allowing recruiters to more easily spot and shortlist the best candidates.

As technology and employee demands continue to change the TA industry, recruiters who keep not only on top of, but ahead of these trends will be the ones who thrive. With the right combination of tech tools and recruitment tactics, they will continue to find new ways to connect with and recruit highly-skilled candidates who are looking to bring their best game to an organization that values their contribution.