Top HR Investments in Recruitment for 2014

Top HR Investments in Recruitment for 2014

Investment_lightbulbIn our recent McQuaig Global Talent Recruitment Survey, we asked HR professionals from around the globe what recruiting-related systems or processes they planned to invest in to help them attract and retain talent. The results we got back show some interesting global trends and also a few thought-provoking outliers.

In this blog, we’re going to look at where companies are planning to spend their money and what it might mean.

We asked nearly 600 HR professionals from around the globe to tell us if they planned to invest in one or more of six key recruiting systems or processes. Here are the results:

  1. Social Media Management – 40%
  2. Onboarding Programs – 38%
  3. Employment Website – 35%
  4. Behavioral Assessment Tools – 29%
  5. Applicant Tracking System – 27%
  6. Compensation Data – 21%
  7. CRM – 13%

The top investment, globally, was social media management. Organizations have embraced that this is a channel they can’t ignore in their efforts to attract top talent. It is, arguably, the most effective tool for attracting passive candidates. And because top performers are generally not actively looking for a new job, this is the best way to get on their radar.

Whether these companies are putting those resources to work effectively is something we didn’t measure, but for some helpful tips on how to make the most of social media for talent recruitment read this

It gets more interesting when we break out the responses regionally. Here are the top 3 planned investments across four regions:

Top_Planned_Investments

Note how onboarding programs jumps to the top of the list in the US and Canada. Companies in those countries seem to be acknowledging the need to invest here to keep the employees they are already investing so much in to attract.

In the UK, it’s quite a different story. Onboarding drops down to second last on the list, while social media remains in top spot. Iain Chalmers of The Holst Group, a leading talent management consultancy in the UK, explains the difference this way:

“I think, in some ways, we are scrambling to catch-up. The UK is finally coming out of recession this year and businesses are finally starting to spend some of their cash piles as confidence grows. Social media is an area, I think, the country has been behind on for a few years. No one wanted to look at social media management when there wasn’t enough business coming through the door. I think the smaller companies are getting a handle on it much quicker than the blue chips.”

In Australia, another interesting twist emerged with behavioral assessment tools tying social media management for top spot. We asked Martyn Rogers of The Rogers Group, a leading personnel assessment and training solutions provider in Australia for his thoughts these results.

“Australia wasn’t affected in the same way as the rest of the world by the global financial crisis; as a result of this, unemployment has remained low right the way through. With our recent mining boom and focus on high-tech industry, it’s been hard to get good staff. Employers have had to compete furiously to get the best.

That has made us early adopters of various technologies including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Many employers are also using focused/directed advertising for positions on social media.

Interestingly though, when we generate applications for a vacancy through such diverse channels, it may result in an unmanageable number of responses. This, of course, also means that we now have ‘professional candidates’ in the mix who are expert at the one-act play called the interview. This is part of the reason, I suspect, that behavioral profiling has also become so important as an effective tool to sort the genuine candidate from the convincing actor.”

You can download the detailed results of our 2014 Global Talent Recruitment Survey here.

What about you? Where are you spending your money this year?

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