HR 101

Five Recruiting Predictions for 2022

Pat Brothwell
Pat Brothwell
Applicant waiting to be interviewed.

The Current State of the U.S. Workforce

Each month, LinkedIn releases a monthly workforce report, since, per their website, “Over 176 million workers in the U.S. have LinkedIn profiles; over 97,000 companies in the U.S. use LinkedIn to recruit, and members can add over 38,000 skills to their profiles to showcase their professional brands. That gives us unique and valuable insight into U.S. workforce trends.”

LinkedIn’s Workforce Report for December 2021 found:

  • November actually was the strongest hiring month since 2015! Hiring was up 7.4% than October and national hiring was 5.7% above pre-pandemic levels. That’s great news for employers and hopefully an indicator of things to come. 
  • Agriculture, education, and manufacturing are seeing the most significant monthly hiring gains. 
  • 19 of the 20 metro areas LinkedIn tracks were hiring above pre-pandemic levels.  

Looking Forward

Of course, this is the time we start to look back and see what we can learn from the past year’s events. We’ve certainly been doing a lot of that at HiringThing as we start to plan and strategize for 2022. It’s also the perfect time to look forward and determine how past hiring trends might affect our future. 

Much as LinkedIn is the perfect platform for sharing work insights, HiringThing knows a thing or two about the state of hiring and recruiting—we’d like to share what we feel will be some of the trends and issues shaping recruiting in 2022.

Five Recruiting Predictions for 2022

An Even Bigger Role for Social Media

The majority of today’s job seekers are searching for employment via social media:

  • CareerArc found 96% of job seekers use some type of social media when conducting a job search. 
  • Almost 40 million people search for jobs on LinkedIn every week, and 49% of professionals follow prospective employers on social media to stay aware of job opportunities.

There’s also the sheer number of social media users. Whether they’re actively looking for employment or passive consumers, social media use is ubiquitous—84% of job seekers have a Facebook profile, and the average American spends approximately 2 hours a day on social media. 

If social media isn’t part of your hiring strategy, it’s time to incorporate it. Use social media to post jobs, build your employer brand, nurture a relationship with your customers (who often turn out to be the best job candidates), and mine what’s arguably your biggest potential talent pool. 

Candidate Experience Will Be Even More Important

What might be the most significant change in recruiting over the past year is this shift to a candidate-driven job market. For years, employers had the upper hand, insinuating job seekers should be lucky they had the opportunity to interview—how things have shifted! Forward-thinking employers know that they’re lucky to have valuable job candidates show interest in their company. Candidate experience matters. Period. 

Here at HiringThing, we’ve been saying that recruiters and hiring professionals need to reimagine job candidates as customers. 

  • More than half of job seekers say employers never kept them up to date about their application status.
  • 61% of job seekers say they’ve had recruiters “ghost” them, even after having an initial phone screening.
  • 60% of job seekers quit in the middle of an application due to length or complexity.

Can you imagine a company not keeping up with half their customers? It’s ludicrous, and yet, that’s been the experience of many job seekers, despite the evidence that this doesn’t benefit companies at all: 

  • 63% of job seekers will reject a job offer due to a bad candidate experience.
  • 72% of job seekers told their network about their lousy candidate experience.
  • 64% of job seekers said a bad candidate experience would stop them from utilizing a company as a customer. 

What can organizations do to provide job seekers with the candidate experience they seek? 

  • Reevaluate your hiring process: What barriers are in play? What could leave a bad taste in a candidate’s mouth? What part would make them want to quit? 
  • Communicate well: 30% of job seekers rated responsiveness as most important to their candidate experience, yet 75% of job seekers report never hearing back one way or another from a job they applied to. Ensure that all job candidates, even those that aren’t moving on in the application process, get thoughtful communication on where in the process they stand. 
  • Prioritize inclusivity: Does your ideal candidate need a college degree? Relevant experience? The need to lift a 25-pound box and stand for long periods? If they do, that’s fine, but for too long, job postings came with these gate-keeping caveats that could deter fantastic candidates and feel exclusionary for no other reason than “it’s the way things are done.” Prioritizing inclusivity not only creates a better candidate experience but has the potential to significantly increase your applicant traffic.

Employer Brand is Important 

Invest in your employer brand: I’ll repeat one of the recently cited stats: 72% of job seekers shared a bad candidate experience—reputation matters. Strengthen your employer brand, but ensure that this brand reflects the reality of being employed in your company. Today’s job seekers value authenticity, which means you might need to make some policy changes in your organization to portray yourself the way you want. 

Employer brand is the reputation your organization has as a place to work. Innovative organizations will put aside time and resources to develop a clear employer-brand strategy. What are employees saying about your organization? Job candidates? Online reviews? Do you agree? Disagree? How can you use this information to grow, change, and strategize? What can you do to give job candidates a positive impression of your brand? 

Nurture Your Talent

With record numbers of unemployed individuals actively not looking for jobs, more and more organizations have begun to embrace internal hiring. LinkedIn reports that internal mobility is up 20% since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Hiring and onboarding are timely and expensive, and with the current talent shortage, it makes sense to look inward. Those of us who live in the HR world have known how much nurturing your talent pays off for years. Aside from a shorter, cheaper hiring process, you’re also hiring someone who’s already knowledgeable (and hopefully passionate) about your company. And showcasing room for upward mobility will make your employees more satisfied and engaged at their jobs.

How can you nurture internal talent, especially if you don’t have a tremendous learning and development budget? Start by letting your workforce know you’re invested in their skills and growth (today’s employees value professional development opportunities). We let our employees at HiringThing know we’re happy they came on board, we’re happy they’re on the team, we want them to enjoy coming to work, and we want to keep them employed!

We have multiple HiringThing team members that have risen up the ranks (in some cases, creating new positions), and have zero regrets about any of them. Nurturing your talent is a real win-win and a trend we’re happy to see gain steam.

Referral Programs for the Win

85% of jobs are filled through networking. That’s always been a powerful statistic to understand, but even more critical now that organic applicant traffic isn’t as robust as it once was. 

If you’re already hiring excellent employees, why wouldn’t you mine your awesome employees to find great candidates someone you already trust can vouch for? Setting up an employee referral program is incredibly easy and something more companies should be doing. 

More Money Spent on HR Tech

At their very core, every company is made up of people, and if there’s one throughline connecting all the changes and shifts in our current workplace, it’s that the world of work needs to become a much more people-first place. 

  • HR Cloud solutions are currently a $148 million market, and this year HR tech spending is up 57% from 2020. 
  • Even pre-pandemic, 74% of companies were planning on increasing their HR tech spending. 
  • Reporting by SHRM predicted companies investing in technology that supports diversity and inclusion, learning and development, remote work, mental health, and recruiting. 

Organizations are realizing that HR solutions can’t be something that’s just “nice to have” anymore. They need to be a priority because companies have seen in real-time that if they don’t make investments in the people who make up their company a priority, they will look for employment elsewhere. 

Related Resources

About HiringThing

HiringThing is a modern recruiting platform as a service that creates seamless hiring experiences. Our private label applicant tracking system and open API enable technology and service providers to embed hiring capabilities from sourcing to onboarding. Approachable and adaptable, the platform empowers anyone, anywhere, to hire their dream team.