Despite innumerable layoffs in recent months and a possible economic downturn, recruiting still holds promise in 2023, according to a recent report by Gem. The 2023 Recruiting Trends report found that 24% of recruiting organizations saw reductions in force in the last half of 2022—but 33% of smaller organizations and 54% of larger organizations saw recruiting team growth. In fact, 75% of talent acquisition professionals at smaller organizations and 70% at larger organizations said that they expect the headcount at their companies to increase in 2023.
The company said the outlook for 2023 appears conservatively optimistic, even though, many organizations saw reductions in their workforce in the latter half of 2022.
In this “downtime,” many talent teams are waiting out the economic downturn and preparing for when hiring returns to full-swing. As such, Gem found that the number one activity for teams to engage in was building better talent pipelines, with 60% of the survey’s respondents said their teams were pipeline building. Other tasks included data cleanup, DEI and strengthening EVPs.
Furthermore, with new growth seemingly on the horizon for many teams, a shift in focus has been shown with half of respondents saying their priority is now diversity hiring or talent sourcing.
Challenges and Solutions
The survey also found that the majority of TA professionals are still anticipating some challenges in the year to come, despite a positive outlook. The most heavily reported was finding quality candidates for positions. Nearly two-thirds of respondents from smaller organizations and over half from larger organizations said that was their top concern. In addition, not being able to make competitive offers and nurturing passive talent were high on the list of challenges as well.
As a result, many companies are prioritizing talent technology — like candidate sourcing software and recruitment marketing tools — to help streamline processes as well as find and engage top talent. In addition, the study saw an increased emphasis on data collection and analysis, with respondents rating it as an important part of recruiting in 2023. The most common projected use for data were to uncover the best sources of hire, to report on-time-to-hire and cost-per-hire and to track diversity hiring, with 64%, 60% and 57% respectively.
The HCM Technology Report is a publication of RecruitingDaily.
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