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Always a pleasure to receive a guest post invitation, but especially so when it comes from someone I’ve known for many years and catch up with all too rarely!  Jessica asked for my views on recruiting trends for the year ahead and happy indeed to share some thoughts.

Social Graph will continue to be big:

So far, it’s being used as a data source by advanced recruiters only, scouring the web for those hard to find candidates. We’ll see two main changes here:

• Social graph searching will move into the mainstream.  More and more recruiters will be forced to look wider than simply LinkedIn and start search the whole of the web instead of just the obvious data pockets.
• The hardcore sourcers will move onwards. They currently look more at existing datasets, searching known skills and repositories.  This will move towards something with far greater impact, but even more specialist – future-sourcing.  Using social triggers to become aware of potential job-seekers, maybe using behavioural “tells” to spot a job-seeker before they themselves are even conscious of the desire to move. Predictive future-sourcing will be a growth area for both technology provides and training/consulting sourcers.

Mobile will change for the better

Mobile has been a constant topic of discussion for the last few years – and I expect to see two major step-changes in the coming year.

• Good mobile career sites and application facilities will become more commonplace.  The noise has been there long enough, but now Google are actually penalising sites which deliver badly on mobile, companies will take more notice.  There’s no point investing in SEO and content if Google themselves are going to slam it down…

• The mobile discussion will extend beyond the attraction and application part of the cycle and into onboarding.  With notice periods and gardening leave to consider before a candidate actually starts a new job, much induction and cultural adjustment can be done before that first day.  As companies face more and more pressure to get new hires delivering value quickly, tools to shorten “time to effective” will become more commonplace. For those employees working out a notice period with their old firm, mobile delivery of this simply has to be the weapon of choice.

Finally, I expect to see many new entrants to the recruitment (and small business HR) market.  The barriers to entry in building technology products are lower than ever – and the entreneurial people who build and run tech firms are becoming ever more dissatisfied with the standards of both service and product in this industry. Expect them to start building their own tools as weekend hack projects, sharing them with other firms they work with, then maybe spinning them out.  Expect also to see a few incubators and accelerators focussing specifically on HR/Recruitment. Picking out talented hackers with an interest in the space, supporting them with domain knowledge and resource and intended to further disrupt the space.

It’s gonna be an exciting ride!