Current Hiring Trends

by Andrew Meehan, Principal Recruitment Lead: IT Infrastructure/Security at Abrivia Recruitment

As the war for talent intensifies, employers will be really tasked with differentiating themselves from the competition in order to win talent. Resonating from last year, employer branding, utilising recruitment analytics, identifying new sourcing channels, and repairing the candidate experience will all prevail in 2017. This more buoyant market will act as a double negative edged sword for organisations; making it more difficult for employers to source good quality and befitting candidates for their needs. And also to hang onto and retain top talent within the organisation.
 
So for me the below trends will continue to reverberate throughout 2017 and will have the most impact on recruitment professionals.
 
1: Organisations will continue to add to their candidate sourcing arsenal of channels. With the lack of qualified candidates, employers are going to have to get creative about hiring. Developing talent internally, headhunting from similar industries to poach talent, increased use of agency recruitment, and LinkedIn Recruiter will all witness increased usage.
 
2: Investing in employer branding programs. For candidates it not just about pay and benefits anymore. They want to join a company that share similar values, invests in their employees, has a positive culture, and offers ample development space. Quality candidates are in the driver’s seat and job seekers today are more sophisticated job shoppers. With the advancement and wide adoption of social media and employer-brand-focused sites like Glassdoor, it’s critical that companies focus on establishing and developing their brand. The employees themselves, will be the best brand ambassador however.
 
3: Using Business Intelligence (BI) to improve talent analytics will increase. Analysing and interrupting data to measure and improve hiring will become more prevalent in 2017. Recruitment teams will continue to pursue better ways to get grasps on the data and develop value adding insights about future and current employees. Talent acquisition professionals will feel the pressure to move away from traditional recruitment methods dominated by instinct and begin to master the ability of turning real tangible data into recruiting intelligence.

About the author
Andrew holds a Master’s Degree in Human Resource Management (MBS) coupled with a Degree in Accounting and Strategic Management (BA). Andrew is also a member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD). He has over 5 years recruitment experience in the IT infrastructure industry. At Abrivia Andrew provides holistic IT infrastructure recruitment solutions to existing and new client organisations. He would have previously successfully placed C-level straight down to technical level 1 grade professionals. Across chiefly the financial services, software, supply chain, manufacturing, and consulting industries. His technical expertise would cover Microsoft, Linux, Virtualisation, Storage, Cisco, HP, and dev op
related technologies. Andrew has also written a number of published articles in the Irish Times Connected magazine around IT in Ireland, IT recruitment and a number of technical pieces.
He was also published in the Business and Technology 100 magazine 2015 for an article he wrote about on the Internet of Things (LOT).