No one got their predictions right for 2020. The global health crisis transformed almost every business and business model worldwide.

While talent acquisition and sourcing leaders scrambled to cope with a number of curveballs, one truth emerged – recruitment advertising was never going to be the same again.

With remote workforces being the new norm, how can you effectively engage with job seekers digitally and ensure that you source the most relevant talent in the shortest time? 

As hiring goals and candidate demand continue to ebb and flow in line with shifting dynamics, how can you establish predictability in output?

How can you leverage technology to “do more with less” and enable your teams to be more effective and efficient?

With these and several other questions in mind, we asked some of the leading experts in our industry about what they thought would be the hottest recruitment advertising trends to emerge in 2021. 

Here’s what they had to say.

expert on recruitment marketing trends of 2021

Michael Swift

Director, Recruitment Marketing

HealthTrust

Linkedin

2021 will bring an increase in all recruitment advertising efforts across the board. With more companies shifting to a remote workforce and continuing to do so the need to engage with a digital audience is more important than ever before.

expert view on recruitment marketing trendsRyan Affolter

Manager, Recruitment Marketing

Life Time Inc

Linkedin

We will continue to see an emergence and growth of the Employer Brand. A powerful employer brand is crucial to attracting and retaining top talent. The bridge between HR / Recruiting and Corporate Marketing will slowly narrow over time. The importance of “Employer Brand” and “Recruitment Marketing” specialists as well as consultants and agencies will grow.

There will be a higher focus on HR automation across the board. Programmatic job advertising platforms, AI sourcing/screening tools, assessment tools, chatbots, virtual job fairs, and video platforms will see more adoption. 

HR-based CRM’s across small, to mid-market to enterprise will continue to see traction, eventually pairing with an ATS platform or HCM suite.

The focus on candidate experience will be high as ever. Tech integrations, alliances, and acquisitions will continue to happen between CRMs, ATS platforms, and plugins.

Quincy Valencia

Vice President, Product Innovation

Alexander Mann Solutions

Linkedin

I believe we’ll see recruitment advertising come into the fold of the “single platform.” TA tech this year with programmatic providers and even full service recruitment marketing firms will become a larger part of the big acquisition/consolidation trend we’ve seen in 2020. Organizations are, rightly so, continuing to focus on the candidate journey and experience, and marketing and advertising should match and bolster that. It’s only logical that the experience in the beginning of the journey (the advertising) matches the rest, through offer

Chad Sowash

Co-Host and Producer

Chad & Cheese Podcast

Linkedin

Much like job postings killed the newspaper ad, performance will kill duration in 2021. 

Recruitment advertising platforms will move aggressively to work on partnerships – and acquisitions – that embed into the very ATS/CRM processes. This move will hijack the standardized duration posting focused and insert a more targeted and cost-effective focus on moving TA standard process to performance. 

In 2021, integrations with core systems are the major plays necessary to install performance as the ad standard.

Andrew Hunter

Co-Founder

Adzuna

LinkedIn

With the move to so much remote working, we’ll start to see more bidding based on different criteria. We’ll go beyond job types and sectors and start to adjust strategy around whether a job is remote, part-time, or some other function. Programmatic bidding has made advertising more efficient, and the natural extension is allowing bidding on the metadata associated with a job advert.

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While we would all like to believe that 2021 will be about getting back on track to a sense of normalcy, the truth is likely to be far less straightforward. 

Recruitment leaders will need to invest in approaches and technologies that are robust, resilient, and yet agile enough to adapt to changes that continue to crop up this year and beyond.

Yet, they have reason to feel confident about certain movements that are unlikely to be affected by the lingering uncertainty, such as an increased focus on the employer brand and candidate experience, rise in adoption of pay-for-performance approaches – including programmatic job advertising, and more.

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