Discover the Top 16 Recruitment Trends of 2024

If the severe shortage of talent wasn’t already enough, the pandemic and the “Great Resignation’ further made life even harder for recruiters. Around four million people quit their jobs in December 2021 alone. The recruitment trends and the market have changed dramatically over the last decade, and so has the work environment. When it comes to meeting candidate expectations, it is proving to be a constant struggle for employers today. 

Amidst the intense competition among organizations for top talent, posting jobs online and waiting for candidates to apply is no more a reliable way of recruiting. Hiring teams now need to be proactive with candidate sourcing, engagement, employer branding, recruitment marketing and whatnot. Building robust talent pipelines is the key to sustainable business growth. 

In addition to the competitive landscape, the increasing skill gap is also a major factor shaping the recruitment industry today. These challenges have led to the advent of new recruitment trends which are more effective than any other traditional recruitment practices. It’s vital to incorporate these latest trends in your recruitment today as you compete with a huge pool of other employers looking to acquire top talent.

In this blog, we will dive deep into the top recruitment trends today and discuss their significance in today’s landscape. Following these trends would not only help you recruit quality talent but also make you stand out as an employer which is vital for your organization’s overall growth.

#1 Prioritizing Candidate Engagement in Early Stages

Numerous organizations are now proactively engaging candidates even for entry-level positions. And it has proven to be an immensely effective recruitment trend. Passive candidate sourcing works but consistently engaging with those candidates amplifies the chances of onboarding the best talent out there. Modern recruiters are actively involved with filtered applicants and try to build relationships with each candidate. This helps recruiters drive candidate motivation to join their organization and not any other. Although the core idea is to pull candidates down the recruitment funnel, this trend also enables recruitment teams to build talent pipelines and meet hiring requirements in the long term.

#2 Offering Remote Work to Attract Candidates

98% of people in the workforce want to work from home at least a few days every week. The pandemic made the entire world transition to remote and now mostly hybrid work, candidates don’t want to switch back to the traditional model. Even organizations find it more productive and beneficial to work in hybrid mode. While a number of employers today offer remote opportunities to primarily attract candidates, it has surely become another recruitment trend. 

A number of factors contribute to candidates choosing remote work – commute time, fatigue, flexibility, cost-efficiency and more. Subsequently, candidates decide among multiple employment opportunities primarily through the mode of work offered. 

Remote work is one of the biggest reasons why the workforce is diverting from big corporates to startups today. The flexibility offered is the differentiator, work culture and faster promotions add up. Not to forget – practising this model of work is even more crucial to retaining talent within an organization. 

#3 Collaborative Hiring

One of the most important recruitment trends is the way how candidates are interviewed now. Further, it’s also about how effective the trending approach of collaborative hiring is. Involving relevant vertical heads and a diverse team in the recruiting process could boost your quality of hire. From an improved recruitment process to higher engagement and better candidate experience, collaborative hiring can prove to be a vital step in your recruitment journey. 

Implementing this recruitment trend is a huge positive for recruiters as well because none of them would now have to handle the entire stress of recruitment. Psychology has it – when you evaluate candidates with a team and make decisions collectively, the chances of hiring a cultural fit magnify.

#4 Spellbinding Candidate Experience

78% of candidates say the experience they receive while recruitment defines how an organization values its people. Candidate experience is clearly a critical recruitment trend today. Your outreach, interaction, engagement, onboarding, post-hiring and offboarding experiences – all sum up together to form the overall candidate experience. 

A productive recruitment funnel is driven by positive candidate experiences at each stage. So, it helps in attracting top talent, making them inclined towards the opportunity, encouraging referrals, enhancing the employer brand and ensuring happier employees. While combined efforts of the recruitment team do the job here, effective and clear communication is the key. A large chunk of candidates never hear back from employers after applying for a role – about 65% don’t get notified. This is changing rapidly as organizations are focusing more on recruitment experience.

#5 Advances in Recruitment AI

Sourcing and screening of candidates and filtering of applications are being done with the help of AI recruiting solutions. This is helping recruiters in scaling up their recruitment and hiring more candidates in a short period of time. Additionally, AI is aimed at ensuring there’s absolutely no bias while screening candidates. 

Intelligent chatbots are being integrated with career pages of organizations to help candidates when they visit the website for quick queries. AI is constantly becoming more powerful and some recruitment teams are making the best out of it. It’s basically about eliminating the mundane, lengthy tasks and removing the human bias along the process.

#6 Recruitment Marketing

Just like brand marketing which is about persuading customers and maximizing sales, recruitment marketing revolves around attracting and hiring top talent in the market. It’s one of the most popular recruitment trends in 2024, and employers are not hesitating in going that extra mile to multiply their brand reach. 

The practices involved in recruitment marketing are closely similar to conventional marketing, but with a different target audience. Effective recruitment marketing tactics enable recruiters to attract, engage, nurture and convert talented candidates. It is an area where a collaboration of recruitment and marketing teams is ideal for the best possible results. You constantly position your brand and available opportunities as the best fit for target candidates in the market.

Just creating a careers page on your website isn’t enough today. Recruitment marketing needs to cover the trends including content marketing, social media marketing, video marketing, email and more to attract and engage with candidates while ensuring a positive brand outlook.

#7 Diversity Hiring

A majority of organizations across the world have been ignoring diversity in their workforce over the years. However, after observing the results of top businesses that benefitted from diversity and inclusion – this has become a strong recruitment trend now. In fact, companies with an ideal level of diversity and inclusion are 35% more likely to outperform their competitors, and 70% more likely to capture a new market. A diverse workforce accelerates innovation within an organization as candidates bring various cultural, ethnic, creative, and problem-solving experiences and ideas.

Not to forget – diversity and inclusion also help companies in attracting great candidates and retain talented employees.

#8 Employer Branding

The following statistics were taken from Glassdoor:

          - 50% of candidates wouldn't work for a company with a negative reputation, even for an increase in pay. 

           - 92% of the people belonging to the workforce would consider changing jobs if there’s an opportunity in an organization having an excellent              corporate reputation.

           - A significant employer brand can reduce the cost per hire by as much as 50%

Employer branding is undoubtedly the most important part of recruitment today. It helps in attracting great candidates, sourcing passive candidates effectively, retaining talent within the organization and building a robust talent pipeline as people in the workforce want to work with you. 

Contrary to popular opinion, employer branding can not just be built through marketing and promoting yourself as an employer. It’s the end-to-end coverage of what people inside and outside the organization think of your company. From work culture to the recruitment experience you deliver and how you position yourself as an employer of choice. It’s a candidate-centric world and hence - employee perks, workplace experience, company culture, diversity and inclusion, and recruitment processes – all contribute to your employer brand.

#9 Social Media Recruiting

How can social media stay out of recruitment trends when billions of people across the world are using it actively every day? Among those users, a majority are job seekers or passive candidates. Social media recruiting isn’t a -’nice-to-have’ practice anymore, it has become a need for brands. Role-specific multichannel outreach holds the key to identifying and connecting with the right candidates. 

Platforms like Instagram and Facebook have emerged as the priority destinations for sourcing creative designers, marketers and writers, video editors along with others – all thanks to the content creation trend that has taken up during the last few years. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is the best place to source all types of talent, is the world’s largest professional platform,

#10 Monitoring Well-Being & Mental Health of Employees  

While we can’t deny this has always been important, awareness was missing. The pandemic made people and organizations realize the importance of being healthy – both physically and mentally to be able to work productively and enjoy life. A recruitment trend started recently covers the well-being and mental health-related policies for employees. Health insurance is a common perk but now organizations are taking this a level higher. Free well-being apps, surveys, mental health counselling, training and consultations are being provided for the better health of employees. When it comes to recruitment, these factors and additional benefits play a significant role in convincing candidates too.

#11 Data-driven Recruitment Strategy

In the last decade, we witnessed organizations and startups hack their growth with crucial data-driven business strategies that wouldn’t have been possible without deep analysis. We found the changing consumer behaviour and studied it through data. No doubt data-driven decisions in recruitment would make a big difference too. Numerous organizations are already practising it. 

A recruitment trend that could well define the growth trajectory of organizations, data-driven recruitment involves leveraging techniques, technology, facts and data to inform your hiring decisions. By identifying and selecting candidates with the right skills, experience, mindset and culture fit – recruiters can directly optimize the quality, speed and costs of recruitment with the data-driven approach.

#12 Offering Flexible Schedules

A mix of recruitment trends and work mode trends – flexible schedule is something a large number of organizations are offering to add up to candidates’ convenience. Especially, now after the pandemic – as hybrid/in-office work continues, employees are keen to have flexible working schedules. The focus is on the work done or the hours spent in the office rather than the fixed time shifts. Recruiters also use this perk for marketing purposes to promote their open opportunities and attract good candidates who’re interested in such opportunities.

#13 Referral Rewards 

Not that referrals are new in the market, but the kind of rewards some organizations now offer for successful referrals are beyond imagination. From expensive gadgets to cash coupons and bonuses, referral rewards have evolved. The demand for quality talent is huge and businesses want to acquire talent fast, and hence – bigger rewards for referrals are justified. 

Especially in tech hiring, it is becoming quite popular to award phones, laptops and other gadgets for referrals. Referrals also help in maintaining diversity and inclusion among an organization as people often tend to refer people similar to them. 

#14 Contractual Work

The gig economy grew exponentially during the pandemic. Freelancing and contractual models of working became the norm and it’s surely one of the top recruitment trends. Allowing contractors or freelancers to be extended parts of your team can immensely help organizations as per the niche and skills expertise brought in. For domains like marketing, content creation and design – where brands don't necessarily need full-time employees, they can hire contractors to get the work done without worrying about quality and in a cost-efficient manner too. 

#15 Higher Inclination towards Soft Skills

Soft skills have always been important for organizations and recruiters. However, in a recent study – it was found that 89% of bad hires usually lack basic soft skills like communication, teamwork, adaptability, time management, people management and collaboration. Moving forward, this area would be deeply focused on by recruitment teams. There are multiple reasons for it – finding such candidates is hard among a plethora of unqualified applications and training them post-hiring is expensive and unproductive.

Recruiters are tweaking their strategies and introducing new assessments for specifically evaluating the soft skills of candidates. Hard skills are important, but separate qualifying criteria is being implemented for shortlisting hires. The primary parameters would be the applicant’s behavioural patterns, decision-making skills, body language, verbal and written communication, language expertise, public speaking, presentation skills and more. 

#16 Automation of Repeated Processes

One of the most innovative recruitment trends is the automation of mundane admin tasks related to the recruitment process. Both active and passive recruiting involves hectic repeated tasks for recruiters. 

Recruitment tasks like: 

• Identifying the right candidates, 
• Adding them to the sourcing pipeline, 
• Engaging with each of them in a personalized way,
• Actively managing the recruitment pipeline, 
• Maintaining talent pool database 
• Extracting performance data

and a number of non-analytical tasks take up a lot of human efforts from recruitment teams and automation tools are helping organizations solve them. 

Recruitment technology allows recruiters to source, attract, nurture and engage talent at scale. With top talent being available just for 10 days in the market, automation acts as the biggest differentiator and enables recruitment teams to hire within days rather than weeks or months. Your team gets free from all the mundane tasks so that they can focus solely on processes that need human intervention, like interviewing the candidates. The entire recruitment process also gets streamlined and you’re updated on the recruitment status of each candidate at any given time. Not to forget - improved candidate engagement, and hence experience which empowers your recruitment. 

Level Up Your Recruitment With End-to-End Sourcing Automation

Over 80% of recruiters believe they would be more productive if they could automate sourcing altogether. Nurturebox helps recruiters and hiring teams simplify candidate sourcing management with a comprehensive sourcing automation tool. The best thing is – you don’t need to switch from your existing recruitment technology stack. 

Nurturebox integrates with your ATS seamlessly and puts sourcing pipeline management on auto-pilot. Apart from sourcing and adding candidates to your pipeline, the tool also helps you automate multichannel engagement so that you can engage with candidates at scale without the usual hustle and bustle.

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Here’s how our platform helps in acing your talent sourcing journey and makes your life easy as a recruiter:

• Extract contact details from LinkedIn: Adding a candidate to your sourcing pipeline just takes a couple of clicks. Use the available plugin to find contact details and add them to your campaign. Our solution also allows you to link your existing ATS using plugins like Recruitee so that your pipeline management gets fully automated.

• Engage with candidates over multiple channels: Whether it’s email nurture sequences or engaging with your candidates on Whatsapp, you can automate it within seconds with Nurturebox. We make sure you don’t compromise the personalization too.

• Monitor and analyze performance dynamically: Track your outreach status and know what works with your targeted candidates. Have complete access to analytics covering all the engagement touchpoints.