3 Ways Recruiters Should Prepare for the Future (and 15 Free Resources to Help You Get There)

In 2018 and the following years, tools that automate the recruiter’s traditional responsibilities are poised to fundamentally change how they work.

How should you prepare for the future of recruiting?

These are three things recruiters can do to stay ahead of the curve, with free resources for each.

1) Build Numerical Literacy

You may have gotten into HR and recruiting because they emphasize soft skills over hard, numerical skills. A baseline comfortability with numbers and statistics puts you in a position to adopt and understand new analytical tools and software.

Free online statistics courses are a great place to start establishing this baseline or brushing up old skills. Great options here are available through:

• Stanford: Probability and Statistics
• Udacity: Intro to Statistics

If you’re looking to explore deeper, check out the highly recommended Foundations of Data Analysis, Part 1: Statistics Using R from the University of Texas at Austin through edX.

While you probably won’t be doing much multiple linear regression, concepts like statistical validity are universally applicable and crucial for making decisions based on data.

2) Embrace Your Inner Marketer

It’s no secret that recruiting has become a close analogue to marketing. Concepts like employer branding, candidate experience, and candidate nurturing all have close relatives in your marketing department.

You probably read a number of recruiting blogs like this one on a regular basis. Expand into marketing blogs to stay up to date on the latest trends and issues in marketing; some of these are inevitably applicable to recruiting.

High quality marketing blogs include (but are not limited to):

• Buzzsumo’s Data Driven Marketing Insights Blog: social media and content marketing, focused heavily on proprietary data and research.
  • Talent Acquisition Analogues: Social Sourcing and Employer Branding.
• LinkedIn’s Marketing Solutions Blog: covers a broad range of marketing trends.
  • Talent Acquisition Analogues: Recruitment Marketing and Employer Branding.
• Marketo’s Marketing Blog: focuses on practical advice and guides for email and content marketing.
  • Talent Acquisition Analogue: Candidate Email Nurturing.
• Ahrefs SEO Blog: provides practical, data-backed guides for all things search engine optimization.
  • Talent Acquisition Analogues: Recruitment Marketing and Career Page Optimization.
• Copyblogger Blog: focuses on helping you write persuasive copy.
  • Talent Acquisition Analogues: Career Page and Job Description Optimization.

Like with all blogs, your mileage may vary. The five blogs above cover broad range of marketing topics and are a great starting point.

3) Expand Industry Domain Expertise

The more you learn about your industry, the more credible you are. This directly impacts your ability to source and nurture high-quality candidates for your organization.

What this looks like is wholly dependent on your industry.

A recruiter in the financial services industry might want to learn about financial forecasting, or how interest rates are decided for mortgages. A recruiter in healthcare might want to learn how to treat fractures, or how health assessments are conducted.

What do financial forecasting or health assessment have to do with recruiting? Nothing. But knowing how your target audience talks is invaluable for communicating with them. It will help you sell your organization to hard-to-hire candidates - like physicians - or create email nurture campaigns that speak directly to your candidate persona.

Fortunately, the online learning industry has exploded: free knowledge and expertise has never been more accessible.

Free Resources to Expand Your Domain Expertise

• Edx.org: Colleges from MIT to The University of Queensland Australia host free online classes here. Topics range from Architecture to Philosophy, and Biology to History.
• Stanford Self-Paced: Stanford offers a number of archived online courses to be completed at your leisure. Courses range from “Adventures in Writing” to “Statistics in Medicine.”
• CodeAcademy, Khan Academy, and Coursera: These sites offer free resources if you’re curious about software development. Khan Academy and Coursera also offer free courses in other subjects.
• MIT OpenCourseWare: Similar to Stanford Self-Paced, these are online courses MIT has released for free.
• Your Local Library: Walk into your local library and grab a book on a problem facing your industry. Many libraries also offer research assistants; these can point you to resources tailored to your previous (or lack of previous) knowledge.

Remember: anything within your industry is fair game.

Want to learn more about how recruiting is evolving?

Learn How Artificial Intelligence is Changing How You Recruit

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