The pandemic has forced enterprises to reevaluate their talent acquisition and recruiting strategies for 2021.

Talent shortages combined with unprecedented competition in the labor market are the current hot topics in the recruitment space. Recently, IT major Cognizant had to let go of business due to a shortage of talent. As alarming as it sounds, such events are not unheard of in the IT industry.

And this is not restricted to just the IT industry. Across automobile, manufacturing, logistics, aerospace, and other industries, the talent landscape has undergone a massive shift as a result of the giant technology leaps.

This has led to a rise in the number of redundant talent often pushed to the benches and at worse, being let go in mass numbers. This talent has no choice but to reskill/upskill to ensure that they get back on track to a sustainable career path.

However, when it comes to recruitment, we foresee major challenges for 2021

Recruitment Challenges For 2021

The Rise of Remote Work & the Gig Economy

More and more employees now prefer to work in a completely remote setup. While some organizations have embraced this shift, others choose to stick to a more traditional semi-remote setup. According to a recent survey, more than 60% of respondents remarked that they wished to continue remotely even after the pandemic.

This leaves recruitment teams with an enormous challenge when it comes to finding the right talent. Now they need to find workers who work well in remote workplace environments and make optimal use of cloud-based tools to collaborate with their colleagues.

Combined the demand for freelance labor, recruiters are facing another potential headache.

Despite taking a gut punch in the initial days of the pandemic, the gig economy has well and truly recovered and is now looking at record growth rates in 2021.

Recent surveys reveal that ~86% of talent decision-makers plan to increase their use of gig workers over the next year. And these are not just IT gig workers. Thanks to the increasing crossover in skillsets, people with niche IT skills are in great demand in other industries as well.

While such industries like aerospace or manufacturing might think long and hard before hiring a full-time DevOps engineer or a database manager for a short-term project, they are more than ready to look towards gig workers.

Again, recruiters are faced with the same challenges here. From verifying skills match to ensuring compliance with local regulations, the gig recruitment sphere is bound to be challenging yet requisite for the upcoming quarters.

Find Talent from a Dwindling Talent Pool

Conventional talent pools are dry. This is old news now. Locations where companies used to scoop up 2000 to 3000 candidates at a go, are now turning up empty. The talent fish has moved on, it seems.

Even in traditional talent hotspots for IT jobs, there is a huge dearth of talent, especially in emerging skills such as AI and Cloud that find cross-industry applications.

No doubt the pandemic has forced much talent to migrate to tier 2 and tier 3 cities. But even before the pandemic, the pattern of talent from tier2/3 cities outperforming their tier1 colleagues has been emerging for a while.

Draup’s research indicates that these tier2/3 may not be such bad places to recruit from after all. But how do you, as a recruitment team leader, go about finding these tier2/3 locations?

How Talent Intelligence Can Help With Recruitment

By leveraging the power of AI-powered talent intelligence, much of the issues being faced by recruitment teams can be overcome easily.

Chief among them being:

Recruiting diverse talent

With diversity figuring at the top of a candidate’s wish list when it comes to the ideal workplace, more and more enterprises are actively promoting programs to create a more diverse and inclusive workforce.

However, finding diverse talent is proving to be a difficult task. While recruiting from HBCUs and from locations with a high density of minority talent is a no-brainer, the simple fact is that recruiters have still not been able to crack the diversity problem.

Not to mention the fact that building a diverse workforce is crucial to bridging the talent gap.

To augment their talent pool’s diversity, recruiters are now turning to AI-powered talent intelligence tools.

For example, Draup’s proprietary Diversity Navigator enables HR leaders to visualize ethnic and gender diversity across business functions, geographies, and job role taxonomies. By leveraging the insights from Diversity Navigator, HR leaders are empowered to elevate the career path of minorities, thus helping achieve true diversity & inclusion.

Recruiting talent from underexplored talent pools

Good talent pools are dime-a-dozen. Great talent pools, however, are often hidden in plain sight! By sticking to traditional hiring grounds, recruiters are missing out on a huge potential pool of talent in tier 2/ tier 3 cities.

We like to walk the talk. We employ over 250 executives from Nemili (a small town in Tamil Nadu, India). This non-descript town is nowhere on anyone’s talent recruitment radar.

There are many such under/unexplored talent hotspots that can provide recruiters with cost-effective yet high-performing talent. The flow of talent has somewhat reversed with most people choosing to work from their hometowns and opting to remote-it into work nowadays.

Which means that recruiters need to actively search for tier2/3 cities where such talent is concentrated. This is not a straightforward task. It requires analyzing the university ecosystem of a location, the historical talent data from that location, the ethnic and gender mix, the dominant industries in that region etc.

Thanks to AI-powered talent intelligence solutions like Draup, finding talent from previously unexplored locations and emerging talent hotspots has become considerably easier.

Using Up/Reskilling to Recruit Internally

Internal hires are a trending topic in recruitment 2021, especially with employees making full use of the various upskilling/reskilling courses available.

Today’s employees are well-informed on how they want their careers to shape up. Keeping that in mind, they often enroll in online courses and certifications to ensure a sustainable career path.

Due to this, recruiters looking to fill for new job roles should first post in the companies’ internal job board. Chances are a few employees will be eager to apply.

In some cases, where recruiters are unable to find talent and when the need is not immediate, they can also work with employees in charting a reskilling journey with the target role in mind.

With the help of Draup’s reskilling ML models, it is possible for candidates to find the optimal time, course, and certifications required to attain proficiency in an emerging technical competency.

AI-powered reskilling software will play a huge role within recruitment teams for 2021 and beyond.

So, whether your talent pool is remote-only or contractual or suffering from a diversity crisis, artificial intelligence solutions can help you find the right talent for the right cost at the right location.