9 Reasons To Resolve Your Hiring Hang Ups in 2021

Meet ESPN personality and broadcast media pro, Rebecca Grant. She’s helping Syntagma demonstrate the pain B2B hiring managers feel when working with inexperienced recruiting managers. Why’s it so painful? Hiring managers like Rebecca know an inexperienced team limits their ability to quickly recruit and hire top talent. In 2021 and beyond, that’s a hiring battle that must be won every time.
Here’s why:

Recruiting Rules

For decades, B2B companies in every industry have known that recruiting top talent was a priority. However, as the pandemic continues to destabilize job markets, recruiting top talent has now become THE priority. 

Think about the highest performing brands in your industry. It’s quite possible they’re more effective during this pandemic at recruiting top talent than ever before. How could this be? Well, according to HR Executive Magazine, 97% of enterprise decision-makers believe the pandemic sped up their company’s digital transformation including recruiting.  

Recruiting Trends

Recently, a World Economic Forum report on the future of jobs identified nine trends forcing many brands to reimagine the future of recruiting. For example, 40% of future jobs will have require new in-demand skills — and these skills will not just be in technology. Here’s a summary of the trends listed in the report. 

  1. TECH ADVANCEMENT: The pace of technology adoption is expected to continue and even accelerate in some areas. The adoption of cloud computing, big data and e-commerce remain high priorities for business leaders, following a trend established in previous years. However, there has also been a significant rise in interest for encryption, non-humanoid robots and artificial intelligence.
  2. PROCESS AUTOMATION: Automation continues to disrupt existing workers as 43% of businesses surveyed will be reducing their workforce due to technology integration, 41% plan will expand their use of contractors for task-specialized work, and 34% plan to expand their workforce due to technology integration. 
  3. JOB DISPLACEMENT: Employers expect that by 2025, increasingly redundant roles will decline from being 15.4% of the workforce to 9% (6.4% decline), and that emerging professions will grow from 7.8% to 13.5% (5.7% growth) of the total employee base of company respondents. 
  4. IN-DEMAND SKILLS: Skills gaps continue to be high as in-demand skills across jobs change in the next five years. The top skills and skill groups which employers see as rising in prominence in the lead up to 2025 include groups such as critical thinking and analysis as well as problem-solving, and skills in self-management such as active learning, resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility. 
  5. BRAND-IMPROVEMENT: Digital transformation is in full swing as 84% of employers are set to rapidly digitalize working processes, including a significant expansion of remote work—with the potential to move 44% of their workforce to operate remotely. 
  6. SELF-IMPROVEMENT: There has been a 4X increase in the numbers of individuals seeking out opportunities for learning online through their own initiative, a 5X increase in employer provision of online learning opportunities to their workers. 
  7. RE-SKILL WORKERS: The window of opportunity to re-skill and up-skill workers has become shorter in the newly constrained labour market. For those workers set to remain in their roles, the share of core skills that will change in the next five years is 40%, and 50% of all employees will need re-skilling (up 4%).
  8. HUMAN CAPITAL: Despite the current economic downturn, the large majority of employers recognize the value of human capital investment. An average of 66% of employers surveyed expect to get a return on investment in up-skilling and re-skilling within one year. 
  9. BETTER MEASUREMENT: Companies need to use more elaborate metrics for human capital and adopt new measures of human capital accounting. 

Recruiting Resolutions

Perhaps it’s time for you to make an early new year’s recruiting resolution. For example, for your first resolution, we’d suggest focusing on a broad concept. For example,

  • In 2021, I resolve to rethink my recruiting mindset.
  • In 2021, I resolve to rethink my recruiting vision.
  • In 2021, I resolve to rethink my recruiting strategy.

This approach will allow you to explore more creative recruiting options. Once all your recruiting resolutions are listed out, you can then prioritize those resolutions that, if completed successfully, will make all others fall into place. We can help.

In the end, with all the change happening in 2020, one thing will remain constant this new year. Recruiting top talent should be priority one if your company hopes to remain competitive! In our next blog post we’ll dive deeper into how to hire top talent and describe how we identify top talent no matter the industry or job order.

Next Steps