Trending Recruitment Practices in India & Road Ahead

The Indian economy is growing at an attractive rate. As a result, the demand for talented professionals is increasing across many sectors to deliver rapid and sustained growth.

Therefore, Indian recruiters will be facing significant pressure in attracting and retaining top talent. In fact, experts found that 79% of Indian organisations project increased hiring for 2016-17. This seems to be a critical time for Indian recruiters to evolve and be as innovative and nimble as possible. In this article, we have broken down the 5 key recruitment trends happening in India right now and some key actions Indian recruiters can take in this new landscape.

Recruiting agency for companies in India

Trend #1. Increasing Gap Between Hiring Volume and Budget

After a positive year with the gap between hiring volume and recruitment budget getting narrower, yesteryears saw this gap get significantly wider. This means Indian recruiting leaders must do more with less and invest wisely check out loanstip.co.uk. This finding from LinkedIn’s India Recruiting Trends report makes it all the more difficult for recruitment teams to overcome the obstacles associated with attracting top quality candidates from high-demand talent pools.

The disparity between volume and budget means recruitment teams need to use creative and cost-efficient ways to meet their goals. Some of the trends that follow are evidence of this, with more companies focusing on less costly channels such as employer branding and employee referrals so as to not break the bank.

HR consultants in Kolkata

Trend #2. Quality of Hire

One of the key priorities for HR consultants in Kolkata for the foreseeable future is optimising ‘quality of hire’. According to LinkedIn, talent leaders believe ‘quality of hire’ is the most valuable performance metric to track hiring effectiveness. While the urgency to fill open positions led to ‘time to fill’ getting the biggest increase in attention over the past year, ‘quality of hire’ remains the most valuable key performance indicator for recruiters.

Common challenge recruiters face is finding the best way to measure this metric. And there seems to be no unified way to measure this, with Indian recruiters tracking ‘quality of hire’ in various different ways. Time to productivity, new hire performance evaluation and early attrition are all used to determine this success metric. Aligned with this, hiring manager effectiveness in identifying the best talent is a key enabler in optimising this metric. This means employers need to build the interviewing capabilities of hiring managers.

Trend #3. Employer Branding

With the increased demand for talent for many economic sectors in India, recruiters are beginning to realise the positive impact a well defined and consistently communicated employer brand can have in attracting top candidates. With senior leadership starting to take a keen interest in their companies’ employer brands, this is starting to grow as a big priority.

Almost every recruiting agency for companies in India believes that recruiters need to start building cross-functional relationships, specifically with marketing. This will help them in order to build attractive employer brands and gain a competitive edge. According to LinkedIn’s report, social media is on the biggest upward trend when it comes to employer branding tools, with traditional channels like LinkedIn and websites falling in popularity. Also becoming more popular is using employees as brand ambassadors who can help communicate a distinguished employer brand.

HR consultants in Ahmedabad

Trend #4. Employee Referrals

Using employees as brand ambassadors is the perfect segue into the next big Indian trend: employee referrals. Employee referrals as a source of hire in India have grown in size and importance, especially in the last year. Reasons for this include the need to reduce cost per hire and getting access to passive talent that would be otherwise not available for recruiters. A big finding in the LinkedIn study was that India is leveraging employee referrals extremely well and that they actually lead usage in this across the world.

If an organization is not using employee referrals as one of its main sources of hire, it needs to start experimenting with this immediately as it is fast becoming a key trend in the Indian recruitment market. Recruiters may face some challenges in getting internal buy-in as well as developing one that incorporates current technology (digital and mobile) but these programmes can drastically improve candidate quality, quality of hire and employee retention. The organization should be sure to communicate to employees what they can expect from the employee referral programme and make sure to incentivise them with rewards.

HR consultants in Bhubaneswar

Trend #5. Analytics

Given that Big Data has swept into every industry and has become the key basis of competition and growth for enterprises of all sizes, it comes as no surprise that the integration of talent analytics and key hiring decisions is becoming a top priority. According to some experts, 65% of Indian companies now have dedicated team members for talent assessments, data analytics and technology.

That being said, many companies lack the ability to effectively crunch the data. Recruitment teams need to start building an in-house capability to drive data-based hiring by educating themselves on best practices, tools and techniques, as well as selecting the metrics that really matter. Glassdoor recommends some key metrics one can measure around the quality of hires, influence over hires, and retention, which should serve as a good starting point.

These are the 5 biggest recruitment trends that India recruiters need to look out for.