Employment in the European labour market has been slowly recovering ever since the Coronavirus pandemic shook it. The third quarter of 2021 saw 195.7 million people employed in the European Union, which was slightly lesser than the pre-pandemic peak witnessed as we bid adieu to 2019. For the European Union’s 27 member states, there was a 69.3% increase in the employment rate, with the top position (in terms of the highest employment rate) being bagged by the Netherlands. While the unemployment rate climbed to 7.7% during the pandemic, it came down to 6.2% by January 2022. But all’s not good despite this trend of solid rehiring.

Compared to the pre-pandemic times, the participation rate of the labour force is lower. Since there’s a labour shortage in the job market, experienced workers are enjoying more leverage than they have experienced in years. Both these factors have made the job of employers pretty challenging as they struggle to attract and retain key talent.

This competition for talent is anticipated to last in 2022, which will make recruitment for employers difficult in this candidate-driven market. If your company’s recruiting team is struggling with its hiring process, it needs to reimagine and reinvent its game plan to enable faster and more effective recruitment.

Chalking Out a Detailed Strategic Plan

This is the primary step to achieving your company’s 2022 hiring goals. You should begin by predicting the number of new hires over the next 6 to 8 months. Your recruiting team should work closely with its managers and the organisation’s decision-makers to be aware of what the company’s strategic plans are for 2022 and what roles it needs to recruit for.

This is also a good time for your recruiting team to:

  • Analyse historical trends to find out recurring or seasonal hiring needs and employee turnover.
  • Carry out employee engagement surveys to foresee engagement, satisfaction, and turnover.
  • Make an educated guess about the effect of the “Great Resignation” on your employees and predict increased employee turnover and expectations such as improved working conditions, increased wages, flexible workplaces (particularly for working parents), better options for remote work, and improved efforts toward meeting DE&I (diversity, equity, and inclusion) goals in the workplace.
  • Have a clear understanding of DE&I objectives for 2022, and formulate plans for attracting, recruiting, and retaining diverse talent.
  • Take into account any internal promotions that are expected to happen and will cause the need to recruit new people for the vacant positions. It’s also equally crucial to decide the probable number of new employees needed by location, role, and business unit.

Targeting the right audience with specific plans

Another key recruitment strategy to focus on in 2022 is to spot, prioritise, and foster the audiences most important to the company. This specifically includes targeting:

  • Key talent audiences: These are people with the requisite experience and skill-set to fill geographically-targeted jobs, high-volume jobs, or decisive jobs like executive hiring.
  • Relationship audiences: These are people who already have an association with the company. Such audiences include current employees, past job applicants (like high-potential candidates), employee referrals, contingent workers, and alumni. 
  • Strategic audiences: These are audiences that the company wants to draw in, like the veterans, underrepresented candidates, and university graduates, students, and interns.

It’s good that the recruitment teams of most companies are already persistent with their content development plans. They have clear strategies to create high-quality content, including job descriptions, company blogs, and cultural videos, to attract and connect with new job seekers. 

Your company’s recruiting team should mould the content it creates to suit the target audience persona, as it will ensure the content gets seen by them. To accomplish this, your company’s recruiting team or talent acquisition professionals should meet representatives from sales, marketing, customer success, and even employees who match the category of hires the company is planning to attract. These groups should work together to ensure the content developed is based on multiple perspectives within the organisation and seen by the target audiences.

To Conclude:

All three aspects mentioned above are essential, but the most crucial element is the human element. To ramp up your recruitment efforts in 2022, you should become more adaptable to the current labour market conditions. If your TA or recruiting teams are overwhelmed with work, you could even consider outsourcing some parts of the hiring process, conducting more in-house recruitments, and automating recruitment processes by leveraging pioneering technology like artificial intelligence that drives recruitment chatbots and intelligent messaging.

Is Emotional intelligence an important factor in your organization? Is EQ a KPI you also take in consideration? Studies show that increasing the Emotional Intelligence of your team will turn into a compound improvement of their professional skills. What are your thoughts on this? Share your ideas in the comment section below.

If you are an HR Director or a CEO, have you been pondering on these matters? What are you currently struggling with? Comment below so we can start a discussion.

Thank you for reading,

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