Every year it bemuses me to see just how many articles are published predicting the future of recruitment. They always appear around this time of year too. It’s as though the transition from one year to the next is going to somehow miraculously produce a seismic shift in the way that recruiters operate. Of course it’s not.

What I find more compelling is to look at the pain points and undeniable trends we can see in the market right now – and then project forward what these mean recruiters will be most anxious to address in the coming year.

From the conversations I’m having with recruiters and recruiting leaders around the world, three things stand out as issues that our industry will be desperate to address in 2016:

1. Mobile apply has become business critical

The first major concern for recruiters is undoubtedly the issue of converting mobile job seekers into actual applicants. For a number of years now, it’s been predicted that there would come a time when more job seeking activity would take place from a mobile device than from a desktop computer. In many Western countries that moment is now upon us. But while there has been much focus on producing career sites that render well on a mobile device, there has not been nearly as much focus on actually ensuring those candidates convert into actual applicants.

With traffic from both Google and social media increasingly being of the mobile variety, it has become an absolute business priority to ensure that candidates are not lost once they have browsed to a careers page, because there is no simple “Mobile Apply” option on the site. Companies that have addressed this are seeing far higher application rates from mobile candidates and this is a competitive recruiting advantage that other companies simply cannot afford to leave unaddressed.

Expect the coming year to see “Mobile Apply” become one of the most pressing projects that recruiting teams want to have addressed.

2. Increasing competition on social media demands investment to stand out

A second issue that recruiters have really been waking up to this last year is the rising competition to attract and engage with candidates on social media. Those of you who rely heavily on LinkedIn have of course been afflicted by this for at least a couple of years. Who hasn’t seen that the volume of InMails you need to send to generate adequate response has inexorably risen over the last years?! This is nothing more than the law of diminishing returns and we can expect to see exactly the same phenomena play out across social media in 2016.
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