How Are New Trends and Technologies Going to Affect Public Sector Recruiting?

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According to the Office for National Statistics, 6 million people in the UK currently work in governmental agencies. The public sector plays a critical role in the UK employment landscape and, as such, its hiring managers must stay on top of recruitment trends to compete with the private sector for the best talent. As we watch Recruitment 4.0 continue to mature, we’ll see dramatic adjustments to legacy recruitment technology systems and processes.

Here’s where we’ll see the majority of those changes take place:

Feature creep and abandonment are making old tools obsolete

Dramatic leaps in technology mean that across countless industries old tools are being replaced by more modern alternatives.

This is the same in the world of recruitment, too, where recruiters are abandoning older tools. Feature creep – the ongoing expansion of new features – means that older applications are not fit for purpose any longer.

It’s becoming increasingly challenging to find recruiters and hiring managers who can use those tools, too, which can elevate training costs and reduce efficiency.

AI sourcing is replacing Boolean sourcing.

For many years, Boolean sourcing was an essential strategy for recruiters and hiring managers. Elegant strings of operators and quotation marks were able to surface suitable candidates, but this technique wasn’t without its drawbacks.

It’s challenging to master and the results weren’t 100% comprehensive – there was always the danger of missing out on the perfect candidate. Every recruiter will know that it can also be quite time consuming, too.

As Recruitment 4.0 continues to mature, we’ll see AI sourcing replace Boolean sourcing and cement itself as the go-to sourcing method. To give you a head start, here’s a closer look at some of the ways we’re likely to see public sector recruitment change in light of new recruitment trends and technologies.

Sourcing candidates

In the private sector, 47% of companies currently report little to no qualified applications for the positions that they are trying to fill. This dynamic also affects the public sector, which has a strong need for the most impressive talent.

We can expect public sector recruiters to capitalise on new recruitment trends and technologies to source a higher number of qualified candidates:

Contingent workers will present an opportunity for the public sector

The meteoric rise of talent platforms like Upwork and a growing appetite for self-employment among workers means that there’s a higher number of contingent workers. Those professionals are often freelancers, independent contractors, agency workers and consultants.

In fact, there are an estimated five million self-employed workers in the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics. As this figure grows, we can expect the public sector to capitalise on this trend to meet its talent needs.

Alumni pools will provide proven candidates

As the battle for talent becomes even more fierce, public sector recruiters and hiring managers will make the most of talent pools to keep track of their candidates.

The talent within those pools can be divided into smaller subsections such as referred candidates, applicants, and alumni. We’ll see alumni talent pools play a significant role within the public sector, given that they can make it easier to recruit pre-approved and trusted talent.

Boomerang Employees will reduce recruitment costs

The modern workforce is more mobile than ever before, with three out of four millennials stating that they’re open to finding a new job.

While vast portions of the workforce will seek greener pastures, some of them will inevitably return to previous employers. Those people become boomerang employees, in fact 15% of employees have returned to a former employer at some point.

This is an excellent dynamic for the public sector. Not only will public sector agencies be able to reduce their recruitment costs, but they’ll also be able to source proven and trained talent.

New tech will help public sector recruiters handle more significant volumes of applications.

AI-driven sourcing tools such as Elevate are already helping recruiters and hiring managers around the world to manage more applications and better identify and validate the ideal candidates. 

Meanwhile, new trends like programmatic advertising can target qualified talent with pinpoint accuracy.

These are just some of the ways that new technology will empower public sector recruiters and hiring managers to attract qualified candidates.

Shortlisting candidates

Nascent trends and technologies will also impact the way public sector recruiters approach the shortlisting of candidates. Here’s how:

Automate the screening process

Screening and evaluating candidates is often the most time-consuming part of the entire recruitment process. Frequently, recruiters and hiring managers will also discover that a candidate is unsuitable for different practical reasons like location or salary expectations.

Nascent tools like chatbots and sophisticated survey tools are now capable of offering a helping hand at the outset of the screening process. Take Elevate, for instance: AI algorithms are capable of analysing vast amounts of information faster and smarter than any human. Leading to recruiters and hiring managers liberation to focus on building recruiting strategies and nurturing candidate relationships.

Essentially, AI is capable of delivering high-quality talent at a faster pace while improving the overall recruitment experience.

The recruitment process will become more human

Public sector work is divided into two key areas: central and local government. Also, millions of people work in public services like healthcare, law enforcement, social care and education.

Those are all diverse fields and finding candidates with the perfect blend of personality traits is challenging. A nurse will need to exhibit different personality traits to a police officer, for instance.

New recruitment technology is going to automate routine tasks so that hiring managers can spend more time getting to know their candidates to assess better their characters leading to satisfaction all round, improving employee fit and sequentially retention rates.

Selecting candidates

Once the list of candidates is reduced to a set of finalists, recruiters need to start making their final decisions and perform hires. This is a delicate part of the recruitment process, and recruiters have to be on the top of their game.

Here’s how new trends and technologies will help public sector recruiters to select the right candidates:

Gamification will enrich the selection process

Gamification is cementing itself as a reliable recruitment technology. Games are becoming incredibly popular because they empower candidates to showcase their competencies in practical ways and demonstrate their agility.

These gamification technologies are also a great way to enliven the hiring process and energise public sector candidates. Gamification can also be used to more effectively gauge the personal traits of candidates.

New technologies can help with diversity hiring

Over the years, some media reporting and commentary have suggested that areas of the public sector over-rely on internal recruitment. People who subscribe to this idea believe that the public sector has suffered to incorporate new ideas and profiles.

In the era of Recruitment 4.0, AI-driven platforms analytics and talent intelligence will play a prominent role in the recruitment process. Expect to see recruiters and hiring managers use technology and insights to complement internal hires with talented and diverse candidates from outside the public sector.

Closing Thoughts

We hope that this piece helps you to think how new recruitment technologies could help your talent acquisition initiatives. Have you seen the rise of any unique opportunities? We’d love to hear your thoughts and how you think public sector talent acquisition might evolve.

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Will These Be the Fastest-Growing UK Recruitment Sectors in 2020?

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The UK is going through a period of profound change and uncertainty. Looming Brexit deadlines, sweeping changes to workers’ rights and economic uncertainty brought about by the coronavirus mean that recruiters and hiring managers need to stay on their toes.

Amid all this change, which are going to be the fastest-growing UK recruitment sectors in 2020? It’s a tough question to answer, but we’re going to dig into the numbers to paint a clearer picture so that you can prepare and plan as effectively as possible.

The Fastest-Growing UK Recruitment Sectors

Here’s a look at the critical recruitment areas in the UK that will see significant growth over the course of 2020:

IT and Digital

The UK tech sector is flourishing: investments in the UK tech sector soared to £10.1 billion in 2019 – a £3.1 billion increase in 2018’s strong figures.

Those figures mean that UK tech companies secured a third of all VC investment made in Europe last year. That impressive statistic cements the UK as a global player, and it only sits behind the US and China when it comes to total VC funding received last year.

According to Digital Minister Matt Warman, this success is testament to the UK’s “business-friendly environment, talented workforce and longstanding reputation for innovation.”

Figures from Tech Nation reveal that over 2.1 million people were working in tech in 2018, meaning that the tech industry is a more significant employer than other key sectors like hospitality, construction and financial services.

All of this means that we’ll see the demand for talented tech professionals extend way into 2020. Recruiters and hiring managers will have a tough time battling it out for the best talent until the skill shortage is addressed.

Healthcare

There are over 5,600 life science companies active in Britain, and they work incredibly hard to manufacture and market-leading clinical products and pharmaceuticals. The UK healthcare industry is only behind the US in terms of size.

An impressive one-fifth of the British workforce is currently employed in STEM-based careers, and this makes Britain the most knowledge-intensive nation in the G20 when it comes to matters of science. This strong reputation means that the UK has one of the most robust healthcare industries and most experienced workforces.

A recent UK private healthcare market report suggested that the market is estimated to grow at a rate of 2.6% by 2023. This growth has been attributed to longer NHS waiting times, referrals to the private sector and increasing uncertainty about the future of the NHS.

The UK’s strong healthcare industry and growing demand for private healthcare could result in significant hiring initiatives over the course of 2020.

Construction

The new Conservative government has promised increased expenditure in critical areas like housing, health and major civil engineering projects. This could mean that there are lots of exciting upcoming opportunities within the construction industry. Numbers from the Office for National Statistics indicate that construction work is on the rise.

The Thames Tideway and Hinkley Point projects are two significant ongoing initiatives that continue to create vacancies, for instance, while a range of additional ambitious infrastructure projects has been given the green light.

Some analysts also believe that the HS2 project will be approved this year, joining a host of ambitious rail and highway projects. Those will generate a significant number of vacancies while the government’s pledge to build 300,000 homes each year over the coming years will lead to new opportunities.

The outlook for the UK construction industry is very positive, and as such, we’ll be sure to see lots of demand for trained professionals at all levels of seniority.

Prepare for the Future with These Resources

Do you have significant talent needs to address this year? It’s critical that you capitalise on every opportunity to find the right talent; here are three useful resources that can help you to acquire the best talent over the course of the year:

Use These Steps to Secure Talent Acquisition Success in 2020

In this piece, we take you through some of the key techniques and strategies that you can use to put yourself ahead of the competition and find the best talent in 2020.

Explore these unmissable talent acquisition steps.

Half of All Employees Want Flexible Working in 2020

Flexible working is going to define the world of work in 2020 – are you prepared to deliver on your candidate preferences and unlock the benefits of flexible working?

Learn what you stand to gain by offering flexible working.

Five Unmissable 2020 Talent Acquisition Trends

There are five unique talent acquisition trends that you can capitalise on this year to get the best results.

Stay on top of these five critical 2020 acquisition trends.

Closing Thoughts

We hope that this post has given you some interesting food for thought, and we’d love to hear your ideas about what to expect from UK recruitment over the course of 2020.

If you’re planning a big recruitment drive in 2020, you should be sure to learn more about Elevate and how our AI-driven platform can empower you to move fast and recruit now.

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Four Reasons AI-Driven Recruitment Will Benefit Charities

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These are challenging times for charities in the UK. While the need for their services is rising dramatically, only 18% of charitable organisations have the appropriate resources and tools to meet that demand.

This challenge is being compounded by the fact that the long-term impacts of Brexit have yet to manifest, the proportion of people giving money to charity saw a steady decline between 2016 and 2018 (69% to 65%) and budgets continue to tighten.

Among other challenges, this blend of factors means that many charities are understaffed. 88% of local charities have fewer than five full-time employees, while 55% have no full-time employees at all.

Could the development and adoption of AI-driven recruitment technologies help UK charities to unlock new efficiencies and address their staffing challenge?

Let’s take a look at what these AI-driven platforms can achieve and how they might benefit UK charities.

What Are AI-Driven Recruitment Platforms?

These powerful nascent platforms can automate critical recruitment tasks, such as:

  • Talent sourcing
  • CV screening
  • Candidate outreach
  • Candidate qualification

By helping with such tasks, those platforms can elevate hiring results and make hiring managers much more efficient.

Those platforms are growing in prominence, too: an impressive 96% of senior HR professionals believe that AI has the potential to enhance talent acquisition and retention significantly. In comparison, 55% of HR managers see evidence of AI becoming a regular part of HR within the next five years.

How AI-Driven Recruitment Will Benefit Charities

Here’s how we will see UK charities make the most of these platforms:

1. Reduce recruitment costs

According to findings from Glassdoor, the average cost of recruitment for a new employee in the UK is £3,000. That’s a significant amount of money for any private sector organisation, let alone a public sector charity.

In trying times, it’s critical that UK charities work as efficiently as possible and leverage new technologies to reduce that cost.

AI-driven recruitment tools are a great opportunity from this perspective.

These recruitment tools can help hiring managers within charities to automate critical tasks, unlock new efficiencies and find talent quicker. Using an AI-driven tool, for instance, hiring managers within charities will be able to access a wider pool of talent and sort through it much faster.

Those types of features can help drive down steep recruitment costs and protect the budgets of cash-strapped charities.

2. Free up valuable time

As we touched on earlier, charities often have very small teams. This means that multidisciplinary team members will usually wear several different hats – recruitment and hiring might prove to be a distraction from other more primary work.

AI-driven recruitment tools are going to liberate the time of charity workers, who’ll be better able to focus their attention on other areas. With more time on their hands, charity workers will be able to focus on crucial areas like fundraising and essential administrative tasks.

As AI-driven recruitment tools continue to mature, we’ll be sure to see teams within charities do great things with their newfound time.

3. Slash time-to-hire

The average time to hire in the UK lasts 26.8 working days. This is often longer within the public sector, too, owing to a lack of candidates and resources.

This presence of unfilled roles can negatively affect charities, given that it can cause significant operational challenges. Without the right team members, charities find it difficult to operate and place a considerable strain on existing team members.

AI-driven recruitment tools can help to expedite the time to hire, though, and give charities the power to find the right candidates within a reasonable timeframe.

4. Uncover appropriate candidates

It’s critical that charities are able to attract the right talent. Potential team members need to exhibit desirable personality and character traits that will set them up for success within a charity environment.

The process of finding sourcing those candidates according to those factors is never easy, however. It takes a lot of time and effort, which results in more expensive hires and a protracted sourcing period.

AI-driven tools are giving hiring managers new ways to sort and select their talent. These new functionalities can provide hiring managers within charities the ability to sort talent and source the perfect candidates to fill their essential roles.

Closing Thoughts

We’ll be sure to see AI-driven recruitment platforms mature over the coming years, and we’re very excited about how their application might benefit the many hard-working charities in the UK.

Here at Elevate, we’re delighted to play a part in discovering the potential of AI-driven recruitment technology. We look forward to helping charities across the UK and beyond unlock all of the benefits outlined above.

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What Are Boomerang Employees (And Should You Hire Them)?

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In today’s recruitment landscape, the power lies with candidates rather than employers.

This means that candidates with the appropriate skills and experience can afford to be highly critical of your offering. With so many potential opportunities out there, they can scrutinise your employer brand and recruitment process at their will.

This dynamic makes talent more mobile than ever before, too: a white paper from LaSalle Network found that three out of four millennials are open to finding a new job.

Recruiters must adjust their strategies and techniques to this new dynamic if they’re going to attract the best talent.

This means reassessing your attitude towards boomerang employees.

What Are Boomerang Employees?

Boomerang employees are those team members who decide to leave a company but return at some point in the future.

As we all know, there are several reasons that an employee might decide to leave a business. Some of the main reasons include:

  • Looking for new professional experiences
  • Pursuing better benefits
  • Dissatisfaction with their job
  • Changes to personal circumstances

Those employees might look for greener pastures, but never actually find them. In some cases, those employees might decide to return to their previous employer – that’s when they become a boomerang employee.

In The Corporate Culture and Boomerang Employee Study, Workplace Trends found that 15% of employees have returned to a former employer.

Why Hire a Boomerang Employee

As the workforce grows more mobile and receptive to new opportunities, we’ll see a growth in the number of boomerang employees.

The same study from Workplace Trends found that 76% of HR professionals are more accepting of boomerang employees today when compared to the past.

Here are the main reasons you’ll want to consider hiring a boomerang employee:

A proven cultural fit

A study from Leadership IQ found that 46% of new hires will fail within the 18 months. Of that 46%, a shocking 89% are deemed to fail because of difficulties integrating into the workplace and its culture.

That can increase your employee turnover rate and push your recruitment costs sky high. If you hire a boomerang employee, though, you can rest assured that they’re a great cultural fit and that they’re familiar with your unique culture.

A lower cost per hire

According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the average cost per hire in the UK is placed at around £3,000. That’s a significant amount of money – mainly when you’ll almost inevitably lose a portion of that talent within the first 18 months.

If you maintain close contact with your alumni, you’ll be able to slash those costs. A well-maintained talent pool can give you access to the pre-approved talent that you need.

Curious about what talent pools can do for you? Read our piece on six reasons you should develop an alumni talent pool.

A lower time to hire

Every day that you have an empty vacancy will cost your business significant amounts of money. You might lack a salesperson, for instance, who would otherwise be contributing to your revenue.

This is why it’s critical that you reduce your time to hire. That’s easier said than done, though, given that it’s currently so difficult to find the appropriate talent. That difficulty protracts time to hire and costs your business money.

Boomerang employees can help here. Given that they’ll be pre-approved talent, you can often move them faster through the hiring process to reduce your time to hire.

Shorter onboarding times

Finding the right talent is just half of the battle: you’ve also got to train and onboard your new hires. This can be an expensive process, given that you’ll have to assign lots of administrative time and effort. New hires might also impact the productivity of your existing employees, too.

Those risks are mitigated when you decide to work with a boomerang employee, though. Your pre-approved talent will be able to hit the ground running immediately and start driving value from your business.

Benefit from new perspectives

Diverse workplaces are happier, more productive and more innovative. It’s crucial that you try to foster people from a range of different backgrounds – that includes professional experiences.

On their adventures, your boomerang employees might have picked up some valuable experiences and best practice along the way. You can incorporate the best parts of those experiences into your culture to reap the benefits of fresh input.

Boost your employer brand

According to LinkedIn, a staggering 75% of candidates will check out your company’s online presence before submitting an application. This means that they’ll inevitably check out your reviews on job boards like Glassdoor.

Re-hiring a boomerang employee can boost your employer brand. It demonstrates that your employees genuinely enjoy working for your business, and it also shows you value enduring relationships with your talent. Those are desirable factors to potential talent.

Monitor Your Boomerang Talent with Elevate

Are you ready to keep tabs on your alumni, attract boomerang talent and unlock the benefits above? Learn more about Elevate and how our platform can provide you with immediate visibility to the talent you need.

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Discover Suitable Candidates Using Your Legacy Systems Data

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Data is the new oil. Vital to power our activities yet costly to acquire. 

This is especially true for the recruitment industry, where the need for multiple sources of verified talent data (CV’s) is the life blood that is required to drive daily activities.

Many businesses are paying high prices needlessly for building these different sources of talent , though, given that they’re already sitting on vast treasure troves of legacy candidate data. The issue is that this data has been challenging to interrogate via boolean search, but that’s no longer the case.

Let’s take a closer look at what we mean by legacy data, why it was so difficult to manage in the past, and why it is critical to migrate your legacy data now.

What Is Legacy Data?

Legacy data is information that is stored in an old or obsolete system. This means that the data is difficult – or even seemingly impossible – to access and incorporate into an existing system.

It’s common for recruiters and hiring managers to have lots of legacy data spread across different systems, such as:

  • Disused Excel spreadsheets
  • Physical CVs and application forms
  • Obsolete in-house tools
  • Candidates CV’s stored on various hard drives and cloud drive applications.

While the data might be locked away and inaccessible, it’s still precious. The truth is businesses might find themselves paying to acquire new potential candidates when they already have that information in an obsolete system.

Thankfully, cutting-edge technology can now act as the key to open those useful treasure chests of candidate data.

Why Was Legacy Data Difficult to Manage?

Recruiters and hiring managers need to focus on what they do best: building relationships with candidates and assessing their suitability for a range of roles. They can’t afford to spend their time collecting, organising, analysing, interpreting and presenting candidate data.

Aside from the time and skill shortage, the diverse nature of those legacy systems made it difficult for businesses to extract and sort that data in a logical and automated way.

Those factors mean that for far too long, businesses have sat on valuable data that they paid for but couldn’t use.

Why Is It Critical to Migrate Legacy Candidate Data Now?

Now’s the time to migrate your legacy data and unlock its full potential. Here are the key reasons that are the case:

1. Move quickly

Manually moving and manipulating data is no fun: it takes a long time, it’s uninspiring work, and there’s always the potential for human error.

Cutting-edge technologies offer businesses powerful functionality that makes it simple to handle legacy data. New AI sourcing technologies – like the Elevate Valut – can automate the process to migrate legacy data quickly and accurately giving you instant access to a useable talent pools.

This empowers businesses to move quickly and bolster their talent pools with high-quality candidate data in no time at all.

2. Reduce wastage

There’s a good chance that you pay top dollar for each candidate that you acquire. This means that your legacy candidate data is just as valuable as the day you first paid for it.

New technologies can help you to re-use that older data, protracting its value and boosting your ROI even many years later. This allows businesses to reduce wastage and squeeze every ounce of value from the data that they collect.

In a time when candidate data is so expensive and challenging to acquire, this can give you the edge over the competition.

3. Access a more significant volume of leads

As we touched on already, data is the new oil. If your recruiters and hiring managers are going to continue chugging along and getting the results that you need, you must provide them with as much fuel as possible.

The talent shortage means that by 2030, there will be a human talent shortage of an estimated 85 million people. If you’re going to conquer the talent shortage challenge, you’ll need as much data as possible.

Mobilising your legacy data is a great way to put yourself ahead and grow the volume of leads that you can access for your positions.

4. Harmonise your data in one place

Data is vital to recruitment success, so you must learn how to manage and manipulate data to fit your needs. Often, this means collating your data and putting it in one location.

By migrating legacy data into your current talent pools, you’ll be better able to manipulate and sort that data. Powerful platforms like Elevate can give recruiters the ability to intelligently match candidates to specific roles based on many data points, too, further assisting recruiters and hiring managers.

Closing Thoughts

We hope that this piece has been useful to you. As you can see, now’s the time to start migrating your legacy data and unlocking its actual value for your business.

Elevate can empower acquisition teams to move faster and recruit talent quicker. Request a demo today to see Elevate in action.

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