Josh Tolan, Founder, and CEO at Spark Hire discusses new research findings that prove companies don’t need increased budgets to rapidly grow their teams. It just takes a few excellent hiring trends to get them going.
Recruiters can rest assured hiring isn’t slowing down — at least not this year. In fact, for the new 2018 Growth Hiring Trends in the United States report by my team at Spark Hire, rapidly growing companies across the US provided an inside look into this year’s hiring trend secrets.
Companies aren’t waiting for more money
As you know, recruiting costs quickly rack-up and can damage your ability to find, attract, and retain quality talent. However, companies are not relying on increased budgets to tackle those costs and increase their hiring this year.
Even though 77 percent of the respondents in our report plan to increase their staff by 25 percent in the coming year, only 16 percent said it’s because of the lower taxes they expect to pay.
Instead, these significant staff increases are due to companies offering new services, expanding to new geographic locations, and expanding into new industries.
The desire to increase hiring without the expectations of higher budgets points to the new, efficient hiring trends companies are using to acquire talent .
Hiring priorities are shifting
Our report found companies are focused on a variety of important hiring priorities. They want to improve the quality of hires, create more reliable talent pipelines, and shorten their time to hire. This new focus proves companies finally understand that they can’t rely solely on scaling their current hiring processes to grow rapidly.
Even with shifting priorities, major hiring obstacles remain. Our respondents noted a lack of qualified candidates and high turnover remain their biggest challenges.
The future of recruiting is now
Unfortunately, rapid growth doesn’t leave much room for trial and error in solving the issues of lacking qualified candidates and high turnover. So, 62 percent of companies are turning to the latest hiring trends and using modern tools to help them grow.
But rapidly growing companies don’t just find new tools they love and stop looking. They continue searching for ways to improve their process by learning about new and proven technologies. Actually, nearly half of companies (44 percent) said they try out new tools several times a year.
This year, companies are adding ATS (35.6 percent) and video interviews (31.2 percent) to their hiring strategies . However, even older tools, like social media (44 percent), job boards (30.4 percent), and skills tests (29.8 percent), are making a come back.
Processes are speeding up
Plenty of candidates have spoken up about the importance of simple and fast recruiting. So, you’ve likely been focused on speeding up your hiring process to less than two weeks.
Surprisingly, of the companies with a priority hiring of seven to 14 days, 56 percent of respondents still want to shorten their hiring process. Additionally, of the companies that take less than a week, half responded that they can still improve their time to hire.
Attention is on high turnover
High turnover is an ongoing challenge for companies everywhere — rapidly-growing companies are no different. In fact, 25 percent of our respondents named high turnover as a major obstacle when hiring.
We found the issue could be in what they feel is most important when considering candidates. Over 40 percent of respondents said when hiring during a period of rapid growth, work experience is most important. However, the least amount of respondents are focusing on crucial elements, like the cultural fit (7 percent) and soft skills (11 percent).
While many companies are off looking for qualifications in highly experienced candidates, our survey revealed companies that are more concerned about high turnover are also less likely to prioritize cultural fit.
Source: