Hays’ Christiaan Cumine takes a broad view of the recruitment landscape and examines some of the changes that have occurred in recent years.
Throughout our Future of Work Week in August, we explored the many ways in which the workplace and the jobs market are changing, due to Covid-19 and other changes that have taken place in the global economy.
But it’s not just the jobs themselves that are changing, but the way in which these jobs are filled. Christiaan Cumine is chief product officer for Hays, looking after a lot of the company’s tech landscape and the impact it has on its recruitment consultants.
In an interview with SiliconRepublic.com, he highlighted some of the biggest trends and changes within the recruitment industry. “There is a huge amount of tech innovation out in the market,” he said. “I’d say there’s been a huge leap forward in analytics and I would say we’re now at the foothills of the impact of AI.”
But it’s not just the technology tools that are having an impact on recruitment trends. Other secondary impacts as a result of this tech evolution have changed the way recruitment happens.
Where to find talent is changing
A change that has been occurring for a while and has only grown in recent years is where candidates can be found.
“From a recruiter perspective, we now need to be far more aware of how to find talent,” Cumine said. “There is a world of talent out there that is still to be developed and to be found and therefore, we have very different strategies now to find different types of candidates in different places.”
From a tech perspective, he said these candidates can often be found at hackathons or in the world of GitHub and as a result of this, recruiters’ radars need to be far wider. “It’s still very much a candidate-short market, and therefore, you need to be able to know where to look for them and you also need to know how to entice them.”
Understanding new skills
The advances in tech have also meant that the candidates and skillsets that need to be found have changed. From a recruitment perspective, this means having an understanding of these new skills that goes beyond analytics tools because it also needs resources behind it.
“Skills are in decline, skills or roles that are then morphing into slightly different areas because of the impact of different technologies,” said Cumine. “You need a lot of processing power to understand what that is, to be the first person to move and invest in those particular areas.”
With this in mind, he said predictive analysis is really interesting, not because it’s new but because other tech such as AI can help boost its power. “AI will affect it and [also] you’ve got AI engines running over it to create that predictive analysis.”
Ongoing battle of remote and office work
Unsurprisingly, another trend coming into play for recruitment is the battle between working remotely and working in the office. Cumine said this battle is currently “working its way through a journey” and employers and employees fight for what they want.
“There is a mindset challenge between employers who want to bring their staff back into the business with candidates saying, ‘Well, I’ve been able to do this from home’.”
He said right now the mindset of the employer and mindset of the candidate are still off balance as there is still a debate around what the right balance is.
“I think at the moment there is probably a level of cultural change that will still happen between what a candidate wants to do and what the employer wants to do.”
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