Now that 2018 is here, I wonder how employers in hiring land will fare when it comes to finding the talent they need. Surely they are already experiencing less applications as the job market gets squeezed from all ends and talent becomes even scarcer.

I think this year we will see a number of things happen. The most obvious being that WAGES will have to RISE. It’s a matter of supply and demand. There isn’t enough talent (especially lower end jobs) out there to fill what’s open. We are already seeing announcements from major companies like Target which are upping their minimum wage to $15/hr. More companies will follow suit in 2018. Either that or we’ll all be talking to more automated kiosks to place our lunch orders.

Second, employers will need to spend more on recruitment advertising in order to fill their open requisitions. To do that, they will need to get BETTER at recruitment marketing although that is a tall task for many HR departments who aren’t trained in this discipline. If you own a recruitment advertising agency, you should be plenty busy this year.

Those are my predictions but let’s see what the respondents say. A quick glance at the results from the first question in our 1st Annual Recruiting Survey, show that automation, job marketing and candidate engagement is foremost on their minds.

What one thing will you be doing differently in 2018 to make your recruiting better or more efficient?

• “Use more video in our recruiting”
• “More metrics”
• “Find a way to deal with internal recruiters.”
• “Automation in our recruiting process”
• “Kaizen on recruiting process improvement to show leadership we need more time to source and need tools beyond LIR”
• “Fine tune candidate communication/engagement”
• “Trying more technology based systems”
• “Track all recruiting metrics”
• “More client contact / interaction”
• “Communicate better with candidates”
• “Implement a robust employer branding initiative to attract great talent.”
• “Attempting more phone calls and sending more emails for pipelining”
• “Participate in more Conferences”
• “More Advertising locally”
• “Using Linkedin for recruiting”
• “Marketing”
• “Learn more new Tools”
• “Network more offline”
• “Use more social media and employer branding”
• “Organize my list of pipelines”
• “Improving the content of the job postings”

As you can see answers focus a lot on aspects of their job marketing from improved job postings to better communication/engagement with candidates. Tools and technology also were mentioned which leads me into the second and final question of the survey.

Name a tool or other software that you plan on trying in 2018 to recruit with or manage your talent?

• Sourcing tools were foremost on their minds. Hiretual got the most mentions followed by Entelo and SeekOut.
• Other tools that received mentions: Arya, CareerBuilder, LinkedIn Scaled Sourcing, Bamboo HR, Olivia Chatbot, Vonq, Talenya and Google Hire.
• Tactics such as recruiting with Facebook also made their list. (PS…I can help with this)

If you look at these results it is clear that recruiting is becoming a more technically challenging and marketing oriented profession.

Therefore HR departments need to start leveraging technology better as well as making marketing a core discipline among their recruitment teams. The job market is tight and getting tighter.

How will you keep up?