The Skills That Will Matter More for Recruiters in the Future — and How to Develop Them
1. Engaging passive candidates
These days, it’s not enough to put a job post out into the world and wait for candidates to come to you. Nor is it enough to find a few promising candidates and send them a templated message. Great candidates have grown weary with generic outreach — and the more templated messages they receive, the more they’ll seem like white noise.
Amidst all the noise, you can make your voice heard and successfully engage passive candidates by strengthening your communication skills. The right words at the right time can make a candidate sit up and take notice. And once you have their attention, you can use those same skills to deepen their interest — making them excited to learn more about your company and role.
2. Analyzing talent data to drive decisions
With recruiting becoming less about following a hiring strategy and more about driving it, data analytics will soon become a vital component of recruiters’ jobs. While your team may hire a specialist down the line (47% of recruiting pros think hiring a talent analytics specialist would be impactful), it doesn’t hurt to familiarize yourself with these techniques now. In fact, the benefits can be far-reaching.
For one thing, data analysis skills enable you to make smarter, data-driven decisions — helping you pinpoint trends in the talent market, predict which candidates will make the best hires, and steer your leaders and hiring managers in the right direction. They can also help you improve your team’s performance and set more realistic goals.
3. Advising business leaders and hiring managers
It’s one thing to recognize patterns and trends in the data and another entirely to know what to do about them. That’s why you’ll need to become a nimble problem solver in order to advise your business leaders and hiring managers — and help shape strategies that don’t fall at the first hurdle.
Strong problem-solving skills don’t just help you find creative solutions to challenges. They can also help you to get to the bottom of any problem, ensuring you’re treating the root cause, not the symptoms. As a result, you’re less likely to make costly missteps and more likely to find solutions that can take your organization to the next level.
Whether you’re building an internal training program or utilizing online courses like the ones on LinkedIn Learning, encouraging your team to develop their skills has benefits beyond the obvious gains for your company. By helping them grow their careers, you can improve their job satisfaction and retention — leading to a more passionate, dedicated team.
