Digital trends for... Recruitment

Based on our digital trend watch and experience with clients in the recruitment industry, here are eight key trends we're observing:

1. Job seekers do invest time in finding the right job, and are often early adopters of new technologies to help them do so
2. Employers are also seeing the benefits of new technologies and recruitment pricing models, moving to more direct resourcing (in response to high cost and low results with traditional recruitment agencies)
3. In the current economic climate, the job market is losing liquidity – there’s a glut of candidates for some sectors and roles as people lose their jobs, and a shortage for others as those who have jobs are less likely to leave
4. Passive candidates are doing more online to manage their career – online CVs, job notifications, LinkedIn profiles, networking, email referrals
5. Recruitment companies are differentiating through personalised value added services for career development, not just job matching
   
6. Use of online social/professional networking is growing by recruiters, particularly in graduate markets (formalising referrals is part of this)
7. Innovative lead generation techniques have proved effective, even if just in the PR they generate (e.g. TMP Worldwide have used Second Life and PlayStation games recruiting for likes of KPMG, IBM, GCHQ)
8. Recruitment companies are investing in technology to improve matching of quality candidates to employers (e.g. scanning CVs and job posts for keywords, using candidate profile data and networks to ‘guess’ who can provide fair references, ‘Career path’ services to plot typical job routes)