As societal changes are made to today’s workforce with the help of technological advances, it’s no surprise that employer and employee relationships have shifted as well. In a recent study conducted by LinkedIn, the company used a database of over 5,000 talent professionals over the span of 35 countries to understand the top talent trends developing for the year.
Today’s workforce requires more than hard skills to determine a candidate’s ability to succeed in a new position. Soft skills, work flexibility, anti-harassment, and pay transparency will now play a large part in the new year for candidates. As a recruiter, it is crucial to implement these new trends into daily practices to enforce quality candidates with high retention rates for 2019.
Soft Skills
To create clarity, hard skills will continue to be the major deciding factor when faced with the decision of finding the appropriate candidate for the position. Realizing that hard skills is the determining factor if the candidate can “do” the job, soft skills often determine the ability to complete the job “well”. As the demand for candidates with appropriate soft skills continues to grow, recruiters must prioritize both hard and soft skills during the hiring process.
Among the top 4 trends, soft skills are deemed as one of the most rapidly growing influences for a successful corporation. An important identifier for the quality of future candidates, recruiters are required to conduct proper assessments to determine each candidate’s soft skills before they are passed along.
Currently, creativity is considered one of the most “in-demand” qualities closely followed by the ability to persuade, collaborate, adapt, and properly manage time. These soft skills can be determined through assessments such as problem-solving questions. When initially screening your candidate, ask them to solve an impending issue that could characterize their hard skills and supplement these questions with an introduction of duress that would represent their ability to demonstrate their soft skills.
Work Flexibility
Since the transition to a technology leading era, it comes as no surprise that multiple corporations are moving away from a corporate office structures and adapting a policy for employees to work from remote locations. In attempt to retain top quality candidates, allow their employees to work from a location of their choice, within reason.
For candidates considering potential candidates for open positions, flexibility brings both advantages and disadvantages in the position. Though the position can improve productivity and retention, the lack of immediacy can present challenges in collaboration and bonding with other employees on the team. To combat this, companies are quickly adapting by implementing the use of messaging platforms and video conferencing to recreate the sensation of “being in the same room”.
With the improved stability for work life balance, lesser cost for companies needing to accommodate space for employees, and improved retention and loyalty to current positions, work flexibility is becoming a rapidly rising trend. Major companies such as Dell, implemented their strategy with 60% of their employees working remotely in 2014 and now allows the corporation to save $12 million dollars annually while sourcing candidates from beyond their local offices.
Anti-harassment
With the budding attention towards social movements such as #MeToo, today’s candidates are demanding corporate cultures that expands further than just anti-harassment policies. In most previous cases, hostile work environments commonly have had high turnover rates and productivity issues but since exploitation of high-profile harassment cases, companies are now pressured by employees to develop a culture that circulates around safety and respect.
Companies are now encouraged to understand where their companies stand before implementing changes. Fully comprehending how employees experience policies and practices is the beginning of making proper changes leading to training, communication, reporting, and responding tactics. At times, bringing on third parties to assess company needs could prevent the pressure of acknowledgement when restructuring current harassment policies.
With the empowerment of social media however, employees now are more open and vocal about their tolerance towards bad behavior. Along the new implementation of a “safer” workforce environment, companies have additionally cultivated new policies and strengthened communication to fulfill needs towards a more respectful atmosphere.
Pay Transparency
Speaking about salaries has always been considered a taboo topic and has been kept in confidence between employer and employee. Employers have felt that by disclosing information could cause a variety of issues when instead, by disclosing salary information could prevent disputes from arising.
For those companies that have implemented change, found that the practice has built trust towards the company. Companies such as Starbucks, who have reached pay equality for all genders since 2018, believes that by doing so has allowed them to attract top talent. Though the current business model is torn on this practice, potential candidates still have the option to see and view salaries on mediums such as Glassdoor and LinkedIn.
By openly discussing benefits, misinformation that directly correlates with morale and retention is greatly diminished. Allowing all employees to quickly rest assured that there is fair pay across all gender, race, and other demographics to create a balanced and fair environment for employees.