A paucity of talent will mean that in-house recruiters will increase their focus on succession planning in 2022.
Nearly one in three (30%) recruiters said succession planning will be a focus for them next year, according to The Forum for In-House Recruiters (The FIRM) annual membership survey.
Fifty per cent rate diversity and inclusion as a priority for them, 37% will prioritise candidate experience, and 31% will focus on their employee value proposition (EVP) and employer brand.
“For the first time in the 11 years of this survey, succession planning hit the top four strategic priorities,” The FIRM’s managing director Emma Mirrington told Personnel Today.
“This is because people are finding it so hard to recruit at the moment. External talent pools are not providing for them so people are really starting to look at their internal talent pools and succession planning to compensate.”
Mirrington said 95% of respondents commented about the scarcity of talent when asked about their challenges for 2022.
Recruitment challenges
“We had comments such as ‘we can’t recruit HGV drivers’, ‘we can’t recruit data scientists’. This is how competitive the market is,” she said.
Even recruiters are proving difficult to hire, Mirrington said, with members stating that recruiters had accepted counter-offers by organisations that wanted to keep them. Also, many had left the sector for other industries when they were unable to work as hiring slowed down earlier in the pandemic.
Recruitment activity is expected to grow even further in 2022: 31% say they expect hiring activity to increase by 25% or more; 25% expect it to increase by 11%-24%; and 16% expect hiring to increase by up to 10%.
Less than 6% of respondents expect a decrease in hiring activity.
Mirrington said the recruitment teams that focused on internal talent and differentiating their employer brand and candidate experience were the most likely to win the war for talent in 2022.
2022 is going to be the year for differentiation and how they look to make their organisation stand out from the competition” – Emma Mirrington, The FIRM
“2022 is going to be the year for differentiation and how they look to make their organisation stand out from the competition. What can they do to enhance their EVP or employer brand? What can they do to sprinkle some magic dust across their recruitment process so they can really delight and engage their candidates?,” she said.
Only 48% felt their EVP was reflective of their organisation, Mirrington added, and only 58% felt their employer brand was reflective.
Only a fifth had refreshed their employer brand or EVP in the past six months.
Recruiters also needed to “be more agile around how they identify talent and how they move talent around internally”, said Mirrington. Only 12% had a greater than 80% ratio of internal hires to external.
D&I was identified as the top priority among in-house recruiters. Most recruiters (87%) said their organisation had made or was working on D&I commitments.
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Thirty-five per cent had “multiple” D&I initiatives in place, with many adopting diverse interview panels, unconscious bias training for recruiters, and diverse shortlists.
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