We have researched a few exciting skills that would be valuable for Recruiters in 2022 and beyond. Especially in technology talent hiring, many enterprises believe that it is difficult to compete against the tech giants of Apple, Facebook, Google, and similar companies. While the challenge is real, what if we apply a little “Re-Framing.” History has several examples of Re-framing. Steve Jobs, the most outstanding product designer, and innovator stunned the world by developing cutting-edge consumer products with his famous “Think Different Campaign” that started in 1997. In 1978, Peter Habeler, an Austrian Mountaineer, showed the world a form of climbing called “Alpine way of Climbing.” Peter Habeler scaled the summit without supplemental oxygen in 1978.

Williams Sonoma CEO applied this Re-framing brilliantly.  In a new interview, CEO Laura Alber described the surge in quitting as a “big migration” since the company has attracted workers who recently left other jobs.  You can notice that she did not use the term “big resignation” that everyone commonly uses.   While Alber acknowledged that Williams-Sonoma had lost some workers, she credited the company for helping workers prepare for more prominent roles elsewhere. “In some cases, there’s the big resignation,” she says. “But for us, it may be the big migration because we’re getting great talent right now.” Williams Sonoma marketed how their store people started doing design chats with customers from home during the pandemic, which can now attract more people.

So what if we Re-Frame Recruitment into a “Product” that companies offer to understand a lot about Human Capabilities. (a phrase I learned from a client conversation).  Here the term product is used as a representative entity – a mix of services, processes, and interviews offered by Recruiters to the external candidates in the journey of finding their Capabilities.  There is one advantage in Re-Framing Recruitment as a product.  If customers (candidates) need to enjoy your product, we need to bring a host of skills into the product.  Recruiters are the prestigious developers of this product.  Here is a list of the top ten skills and why those can help in such a scenario.

1. Recruitment Marketing: Building and using inbound marketing strategies and tactics to find, attract, engage, and nurture talent before they apply for a job or to get candidates interested in the company. Identifying Candidate Persona, Defining Recruitment Marketing Goals and EVP of the Organisation are integral to creating an effective recruitment marketing plan
2. Social Selling: Utilizing social media to connect with potential candidates on channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest but can take place either online or offline. Activities like sharing relevant content, interacting directly with potential employees, personal branding, and social listening help cultivate one-on-one relationships rather than broadcast one-to-many messages
3. Content Curation: Assembling, selecting, categorizing, commenting on, and presenting the most relevant, highest-quality information to meet potential hire’s needs and build a network. Curation is a way to provide extra value to the followers while highlighting own industry expertise so that a recruiter can improve the brand value and reach out to the best-fit candidates who understand the organization vision
4. Trends Analysis: Collecting and analyzing data about the past marketplace and workforce changes to predict what the future might bring. It is a forecasting assessment that can help an HR department estimate the qualities of the employee line-up the company will need in the future
5. Mobile & Remote Recruitment: Using mobile technology to attract, engage and convert candidates. Common mobile recruiting tactics include mobile career sites, mobile recruiting by text, mobile recruiting apps, and social recruiting, while Remote Recruitment means employing people who aren’t physically working in your office, and the entire recruitment process is conducted virtually without any physical interaction
6. Understanding of Tech Stacks: Comprehensive working knowledge and understanding of  the combination of technologies and digital tools or platforms a company is using to run its HR application and functions; common HR tech stack includes HRIS system like Workday, ATS like TurboHire, Smart Recruiter, etc
7. Employee Listening: Capturing and understanding the employee experience through employee engagement surveys, performance reviews, general employee feedback, and digital employee engagement programs and initiatives. This approach helps in explaining the good experiences to prospective candidates
8. Decision Science: Leveraging quantitative techniques used for informed decision-making. It includes decision analysis, risk analysis, cost-benefit, and cost-effectiveness analysis, constrained optimization, simulation modelling, to name a few.  This approach will help a recruiter write robust business cases and have optimal conversations with business leaders on various hiring decisions
9. Design Thinking refers to a creative approach to problem-solving where “user or employee” is at the center of the experience in each delivery model. It leads to gathering inspiration, making ideas tangible, and sharing the “story” to create innovative solutions. Recruitment can leverage this Design Thinking approach creating cross-functional task-force teams to design experiences related to onboarding, learning, candidate experience, performance management, and recruiting
10. Candidate Experience Management:  A comprehensive science around how candidate interactions and managed and improved

 As you can see, several components unravel by treating it as a product offered to candidates.  And we are sure you will be able to come up with more.  Such is the power of Re-Framing

 The tactical Activities of Recruitment can be automated to a certain extent(not entirely but to a certain extent). Here is our perspective on this (Time saved is based on interviews and other studies in the market and only directional)