Global Recruiting Trends In 2019

LinkedIn’s annual global recruiting report for 2018 looked at staffing trends across a wide range of recruiters. The survey solicited responses from almost 9000 recruiters and hiring managers across 39 countries worldwide and looked at issues such as diversity, interview processes, and artificial intelligence (AI).

Here is a summary of the Global Recruiting Trends report findings.

Diversity

Diversity and inclusion were found to be one of the top trends. 82 percent of respondents stated that diversity was a driving force behind their hiring strategy. Key drivers in this area were that companies see workforce diversity as an arbiter of culture and optimized performance. However, 40 percent of companies were still finding it a challenge to locate appropriate candidates and 27 percent found it difficult to retain such candidates once they had hired them.

Interviewing Trends: New Ways to Assess Candidates

Interviewing trends are shifting to accommodate new processes and modern workplace needs. these methods include a focus on soft skills assessment, understanding a candidate’s shortcomings, and mitigating interviewer bias.

Going forward, new tools that will help to streamline the process might include assessments conducted in virtual reality (VR), on-the-job auditions, and meeting outside of the office in more casual locations. The thinking behind these strategies is that it will be more difficult for candidates to overstate their skillsets and that it will be easier for the hiring manager to assess whether they are a good fit for the position.

Data-driven Decision Making

Data is already a key driver throughout the recruiting industry, but going forward, it will become even more important. The study found that almost 40 percent of respondents see data as one of the most important components of the recruiting process.

Currently, only about 65 percent are leveraging data towards reducing attrition, skills assessment, and crafting more attractive offers, but in 2018 and beyond, almost 80 percent say that they will be implementing a data strategy in the hiring process, indicating a significant movement in that direction.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Will Become Commonplace

AI is penetrating many sectors of industry. From customer service to retail, it is seen as a potential threat to the job market, but in the recruiting sector, it may just be a game-changer. Some hiring managers receive upwards of a hundred resume’s every single day. AI can help them more accurately shortlist for required skill sets and experience, giving recruiters an accurate screening tool that will greatly reduce the time-to-hire and any recruiter bias that may exist.

That said, only 14 percent of hiring managers seem to think that AI threatens their own livelihood. Some of the things that AI simply cannot do include seeing a candidate’s potential and establishing a cultural fit within the organization.

Conclusion

While the LinkedIn report highlights that the recruiting process has become largely transactional, there are trends emerging that elevate the job to a more strategic level, emphasizing the human connection and critical thinking about how to land the right candidates. Going forward, the recruiters who will find the greatest success will be the ones who can leverage new trends and technology through these market changes.

How Employer Branding Can Help Your Recruiting

The face you present to the world – your brand image – is an important component of your marketing. In business, it provides a stepping-off point for differentiation, giving your customers and your broader audience something to identify with. No matter how strong your services or products may be, if you are unable to build positive association with your brand, you may never be able to gain traction in your niche.

Your brand, in a sense, is what people say about you behind your back – or at least this is how you should think about it. Taken in context, you need to control that conversation by crafting a clear message and making sure people know who you are and what you stand for.

Branding Takes Your Image to The Next Level

While most people associate branding with landing new business, your public face is important to a lot of other initiatives as well. In the area of recruiting, your brand says a great deal about what kind of employer you are and if you want to ensure you are attracting the right candidates, you need to make sure you are sending the right message.

This is what we call Employer Branding. Employer branding might be described as the action of helping your ideal recruits see you as an employer of choice in your industry.

In order to tailor your message to the right individuals—much like marketing in any industry—you need to understand your target market. Not to be confused with consumer marketing, this involves understanding what people are looking for in a job and developing a strategy as to how you can deliver it.

Conduct Internal and External Analyses

In a broad sense, you need to establish a brand image that is attractive to your target audience. If you come across as an organization that people want to do business with, then it follows that you will be a desirable company to work for as well. Top talent seeks out the best possible placements for their talents. Your task is to become that aspiration.

On an internal level, you should take a close look at your company culture, your staff, and what can be done to make your workplace more desirable. This could involve career development, or it could extend to work-life balance, diversity, or a progressive physical workspace. Employee training also provides a particular allure for some, as many top achievers are always looking to learn, expand their skills, and grow as a professional. If you offer these opportunities, you will likely attract a higher caliber of individual.

How Your Employer Branding Can Help or Harm

If your company had no employer branding whatsoever, it could easily alienate some applicants. As a newcomer who has only surface knowledge of your company, it would be easy to pick up on the more negative aspects. A company that would have you onboard without any potential for development, for instance, is a red flag for many. Nobody wants to feel like they will be stuck in a rut with no discernable future. You want to give the impression that you care about your employees and that you are a good company to work for.

Your employer branding will be a monumental help when it comes time to recruit new talent. Landing high-performers is not a simple task, especially in today’s competitive job market. Your ideal candidates need to have the right mix of skills, experience, and cultural fit if they are going to go the distance. Being their number one choice will give you an edge when it comes time to make that decision.

In closing, spending some time to develop your employer branding will take care of many of the pain points of recruiting. If you are effective in delivering a positive impression, your biggest problem will be shortlisting the hordes of candidates that will be coming your way.

If you would like to learn more about employer branding and how it can help your organization attract top Life Sciences talent, schedule a consultation with Pact and Partners today. With more than 30 years of experience in trans-Atlantic life sciences executive recruiting, we are your rock in a changing world.

Common Hiring Mistakes And How To Avoid Them

We’re all human. Therefore, we’re bound to make mistakes. When you’re a new manager, these mistakes can easily come back to bite you. You’re taking on a lot: you’re managing your team, you are recruiting, hiring, and training. With a workload like that, you’ve got an uphill battle.

In any HR environment, there is always a lot of pressure to get it right the first time. Any missteps cost the company in more ways than you can count. Managers can be particularly susceptible to hiring mistakes because they are often the sole contact throughout the process.

It’s always a good idea to take a broad look at what you’re doing. Consider how your actions will affect all stakeholders and don’t just think about yourself. Granted, getting the job done quickly is the ultimate goal, but the best hiring managers take their time and involve others at every point in the process.

Here are some hiring tips from the pros for new managers:

1. Don’t believe everything you read on paper

Your first point of contact is going to be a candidate’s cover letter, resume or CV. While these items are an important part of the introduction, they can be deceiving. You simply can’t make an accurate judgment about somebody based on their CV. In fact, more than 46 percent of candidates pad out their CVs or even outright lie. Even if you see some big names and big claims on the resume, don’t just take them at face value. Let the candidate prove their worth through your discussions.

2. Shortlist your applicants

Having a larger pool to choose from might be tempting, but if you’re interviewing a lot of people who you know probably won’t work out, cut your losses. After all, your time is valuable too. Some dangers to the “more is more” philosophy include that you might simply forget who’s who after 30 interviews and start relying on resumes to remind you and it won’t help you find the right person any faster. Shoot to interview no more than eight or nine candidates at a time. That will make it easier for you to refine the process if indeed you didn’t find your ideal hire in the first round.

3. Be aware of the eye-glaze factor

Any good hiring manager should be able to articulate a company’s mission and vision, its values, its goals and where it’s headed in the future. You need to be able to get this point across to the candidate, but keep in mind that when you’re talking, the candidate isn’t. The interview should be a chance for you to get to know a potential new hire. While you are engaged with them, take the opportunity to walk them around the office. Introduce them to people and let them get a better understanding of what they might experience when working there. Not only will you become more aware of how they interact with other people, they will get a good feel for the culture and their place in it. Letting your interviewee do the talking will always reveal more.

4. Ask the right questions

You’re going to ask a lot of questions, so make them count. Broad questions lead to broad answers, so if you really want to learn more about a person, think about what you want to ask in advance. Think about the experience and skills they need to have. Think about soft skills that every applicant in every position will need to possess. Instead of asking direct questions, ask them to describe scenarios that demonstrate skills you require. For instance, you might set up a scenario and ask them how they would handle it. Or, ask them to describe a technical situation where they were able to turn a negative into a positive.

5. Trust your gut

In retrospect, with regard to most of the bad decisions we make, we can say that we knew it wasn’t going to work out. This is true in about 99 percent of situations. Trust your first instinct, it’s almost always dead on. While it’s never a good idea to make snap judgments about anybody, if you have an instinct that somebody is not going to work out in a job it’s better to act on it sooner than after you’ve already committed time and resources to the hire. However, if you have made a mistake and you know it, don’t hesitate: try to make it right as quickly as possible. Everybody makes mistakes, we are all human, after all.

In conclusion, if you are in charge of hiring for your small company, you might feel a lot of pressure to get the job done quickly and rush through the process. Keep in mind that this is never the best course of action to take and it may cost you more in the end.

Have any questions or comments about the hiring process? Contact Pact and Partners today.

The ability to communicate is arguably one of the most important attributes of any successful person — being able to get your point across clearly, concisely, and more to the point — persuasively.

In life sciences, as in many other highly skilled industries, we often look first at technical ability, experience, and education first, but it’s the soft skills that elevate some above the rest.

Effective leadership, in fact, depends on soft skills.

Soft skills provide a basis from which executives are able to lead through others–in essence, being able to motivate and persuade those they lead to carry out their vision for the betterment of the organization. You might say that it’s an exercise in storytelling as much as it is in leadership. Your teams need to be engaged with the plot line in order to move that story along to its ultimate conclusion.

Soft skills analysis

Let’s look at some of the essential soft skills a c-suite exec should have in his or her arsenal:

Communication: speaking the language

In any life sciences organization, there are many departments whose jobs are so technical that they actually have their own language, their own terminology. It’s the way they communicate among themselves, but another department may have little understanding of their jargon, relying instead on their own inter-disciplinary lingo to communicate to their own team and peers.

As a leader in the c-suite, a working knowledge of the jargon used by each department is necessary, but even more important is the ability to translate that information into plain English that anybody can understand.

Why is this important? As a leader, a c-suite exec is in a position where they need to be able to take what is happening in any given department at any given time and relay concerns and issues in a way that is understandable to the rest of the executive team — and also to be able to speak directly to the stakeholders who are at the heart of the issue.

Empathize, listen, understand, visualize

Beyond the ability to understand and communicate between teams, a c-suite exec needs to be able to empathize. This is a key attribute in the process that will ultimately lead to a successful resolution of the issue at hand. Without the ability to truly empathize, there is no impetus to find a solution beyond the obvious.

Our top talent in the c-suite does not get there by being unapproachable, rigid, or closed-minded. The leaders we look to for the guidance and vision we need are not only easily understood, they are good listeners. They are intuitive, they encourage open dialogue, and are pivotal in encouraging collaboration and productivity. They are as transparent as they are personable.

While these are qualities we aspire to at the management level as well, they are traits that most c-suite executives have mastered. They possess a combination of practical and theoretical knowledge and can put an analytical slant on a situation while also applying best practices, employing a combination of these things to arrive at an equitable solution.

As opposed to a manager who may be operating on a reactive or gut-level basis, c-suite executives must function at a higher level, a place where opportunity springs from adversity and solutions are not just of the break-fix variety, they are sustainable and far-reaching.

Rather than being dependent on their technical know-how, their ability to hear what’s being said and to envision a path through to the other side is what sets a true leader apart. What gets them there is their ability to listen, to empathize, to analyze, and to persuasively communicate what needs to be done

Diversity of experience

All organizations have a very specific culture. If the culture is high-performing, it’s important to be able to maintain its functionality clear to the c-suite. This means that their leaders need to be able to recognize that culture and provide a habitat where it can thrive and grow.

Even if an executive is coming from a completely different niche, a different industry or a different country altogether, their ability to articulate and embody the values and the culture of an organization are what is going to support it best. Knowing what motivates employees is the key here, and having the insight to recognize what needs to be said or done to continue to motivate them brings value that resonates throughout every department.

Adaptability: the final frontier

Having mastery over these soft skills is a common thread we see in the c-suite. These are skills that will rise to the fore in times of change–and if anything is a constant in today’s world, it’s change. The ability to foresee the change that’s coming and then to gently steer the organization and its people towards that future demonstrate true leadership.

While some changes are subtle, others can be life-altering. This could be due to sweeping regulatory restructuring at the government level, internal or external financial trends, or technological transformation.

Any of these things could cause widespread disruption and fear that the mission is not sustainable. This is a situation that illustrates just how important soft skills truly are in the c-suite, as an effective leader can help brace for the change and gradually steer their organization in a positive direction, using persuasion, empathy, and their innate ability to tell the story of how all will be overcome.

How Pact and Partners can help

While soft skills may be viewed by some as being intangible, your executive recruiter can play a significant role in helping to identify these qualities in potential executives. Call or request a quote today.