5 Hiring Trends Set to Take 2023 by Storm

Are you gearing up to start rapidly scaling in 2020? Meticulously planning a rocket-fuelled recruitment drive?

There’s a war for talent - and we’re here to supply you with all the ammo you need to stay ahead of the curve.

We’ve whipped out the tarot cards, gazed into our crystal ball and delved into the data to bring you our top 5 hiring trends for 2020.

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1) More companies will be ditching CV’s‍

An increasing number of employers are giving CV’s the boot. Why? Because they’ve been proven to be pretty useless at predicting ability, and they invite recruiters to let their biases run wild!

As it stands, traditional CV sifting favours candidates who attended Russell Group universities and worked at big companies… but these don’t necessarily mean they’re the best person for the job.

We’ve heard from a lot of organisations that are manually crossing out certain details on resumes in an attempt to make the process fairer. However, this doesn’t go far enough - in fact, the information left is still fairly unpredictive!

Fortunately, more companies are waking up to the fact that CV’s aren’t the best way to assess ability. Ernst and Young have gone ahead and scrapped their requirements for a 2:1 degree, which is definitely a step in the right direction. Plus, there’s also new online platforms designed to replace the CV altogether.

‍Psst. We built Applied to do just this - replace the typical, biased process with data-driven blind hiring!
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2) Focus will shift from past experience to future potential

Companies will start looking at what you can achieve, rather than what you’ve already done.

Previous companies on your resume will become less relevant. Instead, expect to see (an albeit snail-paced) move towards work sample questions. These are situational questions that ask candidates what they would do in hypothetical (but realistic) situations or how they approach certain tasks.

Being given a task as part of an application is fairly common now, but they’re normally dished out after the CV sift. We believe in getting candidates to do these sorts of tasks instead of CV’s!

Looking too deeply into where people have worked and what they claimed to have done means that some potentially talented candidates won't have a chance. The most skilled, capable candidate might not have worked at Netflix or Deliveroo. Having companies like these on your CV shouldn’t give you an auto-legup over everyone else.

If that experience made them better at their job, it’ll show through their work sample questions or task.

Also, there’s the fact that a lot of ‘achievements’ people put on their CV’s are absolute baloney! Ability to come up with impressive B.S. doesn’t equal ability to do the job.

Assessing for potential as opposed to experience also means placing more value on soft skills. Technical knowledge can always be taught. However, if basic soft skills like communication or creativity are lacking there’s actually unlearning that has to be done.

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3) Putting candidate experience front and centre

Candidate experience is set to become a higher priority for any company serious about hiring top talent.

Companies will want to have a fantastic reputation to attract candidates. With more and more top companies to work for lists popping up, a bad reputation can be fatal. So, if companies are serious about their values, their candidate experience should reflect this.‍

Careerbuilder’s research found that 68% of candidates think the way they are treated in the hiring process reflects how the company treats its employees.

Monzo, for example has talented people dying to work for them largely due to their reputation for being great employers. 

In the words of researchers at Deloitte, “not every candidate will join your organisation. But every candidate will have an opinion about whether your organisation is worth joining.” 

Having a candidate experience that mirrors employer branding will become a must-have for the majority of companies. ‍

Wondering how bad it can really get? Get a load of the hiring process I endured before being hired here at Applied.

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4) The death of ‘cultural fit’

Cultural fit has become a bonafide buzzword among startups and tech companies.

However, cultural fit could well start to become obsolete in 2020.

The problem with cultural fit is that it focuses on how similar candidates are to people already at the company. Will they ‘fit in’?

This means that hiring mangers can get away with blatant bias under the guise of cultural fit. This way of judging candidates hinders any chances of improving diversity. People are being rejected from applications because they’re simply not like the recruiter/hiring manager.

However, we expect to see this begin to change!‍

Cultural fit is being replaced by what’s known as ‘cultural add’. This means looking for people who value the company's culture and bring an aspect of diversity that will bring something new to the team.

Assessing cultural add will enable companies to build more diverse teams (this includes diversity of thought and experience, not just physical differences like race and gender), whilst maintaining their culture and values.

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5) Using data in the recruitment process‍

Despite the fact that the recruitment process has such an immediate business impact, traditional hiring still relies on gut instinct... 

Recruiters are still sifting through paper CV’s, choosing candidates they think will be a good fit and have few viable means to measure their success.

Hiring with your gut isn’t just outdated, it’s damn right detrimental. In fact, it leads to about a 50% failure rate!

It might not be this way for much longer though.

In a recent survey, 71% of companies have been found to prioritize people analytics.

And now there’s a new swathe of tech products and services are offering more predictive, data-driven recruiting to meet this demand. These cover everything from job description analysis tools (we actually have our own one of these), applicant tracking and sourcing. 

HR teams are constantly collecting heaps of data from every interaction with candidates - it’s about time this was utilised to refine the process and help them hire the best person for the job, every time! 

‍Want to get a leg-up on the competition in 2020? Learn how you can use blind hiring to improve quality of hire and diversity with our free guide. You can also book in a demo of the Applied platform and make predictive, unbiased hiring a piece of cake!