As recruitment costs continue to rise due to the skills gap, hiring will be more difficult in 2020 and Small-to-Medium sized companies will suffer the most. If this is something you’re already thinking about then this is what you need to plan for in 2020:
As recruitment costs continue to rise due to the skills gap, hiring will be more difficult in 2020 and Small-to-Medium sized companies will suffer the most. If this is something you’re already thinking about then this is what you need to plan for in 2020:
Expect to use recruitment agencies more than you previously have to find people with the right skills. Skills availability will pinch even harder in 2020 with macro factors such as potentially exiting Europe, the drive for digital transformation, and emerging skills and worker preferences changing making it super competitive.
Expect those agency fees to be more expensive than before. This is a simple case of supply & demand. As talent becomes more scarce, the competition for said talent increases and many agencies will work with businesses that are willing to pay them the most.
Expect to recruit at lower levels than you initially intended and expect to have to plug additional training costs and ramp up the time you invest in new hires.
Expect to increase the salary/package on offer to recruit people with the right skills. Talent will be able to command higher salaries because they have skills that are in demand. Most talent will be either be interviewing at multiple companies or being headhunted by a minimum of 6 agencies.
Expect recruitment to take longer – add an additional 6 weeks to your average time to hire for in demand talent. We will see a lot of ghosting in 2020 and the rise of the infamous counter offer!
Expect to use temporary labour more. As it becomes more difficult to get the appropriate skills through traditional channels, the use of temporary labour will rise in 2020. This will be partly driven by the need to tap into skills you don’t hold in-house and partly due to a change in the way the new generation of talent coming into the labour market want to work.
So how do you capture the attention of the best talent, compete with big businesses and do both at a lower cost?
The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem! I’ve been at the forefront of the industry for 10 years, so I know first-hand how much recruitment has changed. Fuelled by the growth of information, social media, recruitment marketing, and the relentless development of new technologies, over the past decade the in-house recruitment sector and how you resource projects has changed almost beyond recognition.
I’ll be covering the 6 Ways SMEs Can Plan for the Recruitment Challenges of 2020 in my next blog, so keep an eye out. Of course, if there’s anything you’d like to discuss from this blog then please do get in touch.
