Some surprising trends are driving hiring success in a tight marketplace.
LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends 2019 report, featuring a survey of talent professionals, identifies four major trends that will drive hiring this year and beyond. These suggest some important paradigm shifts and a growing demand from job candidates for employer accountability and transparency.
Soft skills. The vast majority of survey respondents said that soft skills—such as teamwork, conflict resolution, problem solving, and time management—matter at least as much as hard skills when they hire new staff. Eighty percent said these capabilities are increasingly important to their organization. However, only 41% of talent professionals said that they have a formal process in place to measure soft skills.
Work flexibility. This is no longer a perk but a must-have for many workers. In the last two years, there has been a 78% increase in LinkedIn job listings that mention work flexibility. At the same time, in four years, there has been a 24% increase in the number of people who consider a flexible work arrangement/schedule an important factor when weighing a job offer.
Anti-harassment is on everyone’s mind. Eighty percent of talent professionals said that their company has started implementing at least one anti-harassment tactic sometime in the past year. The most popular of these are highlighting existing policies, promoting ways to safely report harassment, adding or improving policies, establishing a zero-tolerance policy, and holding training sessions.
Employees want pay transparency. With aggregated salary information available on LinkedIn, PayScale, and other sites, employers are under greater pressure to be more transparent about pay. However, it’s a slow road. Only 27% of talent professionals said their company shares salary ranges with employees or candidates early in the hiring process, and 22% say they’re likely to do so in the next five years. Those who said they share salary information observed that this streamlines negotiations, ensures fair pay, filters out candidates who wouldn’t want the job, and allows for the interview to focus on other issues.
