Reengineering the Recruitment Process | Harvard Business Review

The pandemic continues to present an opportunity to reimagine various talent practices, including recruiting. This article identifies three trends that are requiring a shift in recruitment tactics. The trends include: 1) Skills have an increasingly short shelf life—making it more challenging to determine the skills one should hire for. 2) Traditional talent pools are becoming outmoded, requiring firms to tap into non-obvious talent sources. 3) Candidates are becoming increasingly selective about whom they work for and what they want from their work. The authors suggest firms can respond to these trends with two actions. 1) Hire for potential, not experience – where firms look beyond immediate hiring needs and consider broader skills the firm will need and skills that enable people to learn quickly, such as learning agility. 2) Understand how candidates view the company and what they value and craft and tailor employment value propositions (EVP) accordingly. While tailoring the EVP to various candidate segments is not a new concept, the shift in candidate expectations suggests firms will need to reevaluate their EVP and determine the extent to which it aligns with candidate preferences. What aspects of your firm’s EVP will you need to increasingly promote to candidates?