Hiring is changing, and it is changing fast. 

To develop well-rounded talent acquisition strategies, you need to know how new technology is being used, what candidates value now, and what fast-growing companies are prioritizing when it comes to hiring. These are some of the key questions you have to ask yourself at this stage:

• ^{How can AI streamline recruiting without losing the human touch?}
• How can remote hiring practices attract top talent?
• Are we looking at still degrees over skills, or has this changed?
• What hiring insights can data analytics reveal?
• How can L&D be used as a tool for retention?

Let’s look at six key trends that answer these questions, trends you need to stay on top of to optimize talent acquisition in 2024. 

6 key talent acquisition trends to follow

Here are six key talent acquisition trends you should be aware of and incorporate into your hiring practices.

AI to enhance and speed up recruiting 

According to a survey by LinkedIn, the average recruiter spends around 30 hours every week on administrative churn. There are a few key ways you can leverage AI to cut this time down:

• Source candidates faster by automatically searching through vast databases, job boards, and social media platforms.
• Screen candidates by efficiently parsing resumes, evaluating candidates based on predefined criteria, and setting up one-way interviews. 
• Advance candidates automatically through the hiring funnel based on custom rules you have set and trigger actions according to events such as completing interviews and assessments. 

In other words, AI can handle repetitive tasks so you can focus on tasks that require personalization and critical thinking. But as AI gets smarter and you include it in more of your processes, the question of balance arises. 

How far can you push AI and automation to achieve the key goal of higher quality work, more personalization, and less manual work? Without becoming too mechanical about it?

Pushing automation too far puts you at the risk of:

• Overlooking unique candidate qualities
• Losing personal connection and empathy
• Over-relying on data without human intuition

You stand to lose two key hiring elements: the accuracy you have gained from years of expertise and the perspective of the human eye. Plenty of candidates may not look perfect on paper but have the exact skills you’re looking for, but AI has no process for identifying these people. 

So how do you successfully adopt this “trend” without falling victim to its flaws? The sweet spot lies in using AI strategically to enhance your capabilities to:

• Automate repetitive, time-consuming tasks
• Provide data-driven insights for informed decision-making
• Maintain human oversight and final decision authority

This is easy when you use a tool based on these principles. As an all-in-one ATS, Kula can:

• Reject candidates with configurable delays and customizable messages
• Trigger assessments and send messages automatically when new candidates are added to a workflow step
• Predict hire dates by analyzing the funnel and past hiring processes 
• Surface sourcing, cost-per-applicant, interview, and cost-per-hire analytics

Early career hiring 

Is finding fresh out-of-school candidates to fill entry-level positions, training, and promoting them the way to the future?

The clear pro to doing this would be that you’d get to mold candidates to fit your organization’s culture. They wouldn’t be as “set in their ways” as experienced employees and would have a fresher perspective. 

The other benefit of prioritizing these candidates is it would kickstart a culture of internal promotions. Train employees for better roles, promote them and hire entry-level employees to fill that gap. 

Filling entry-level positions is also substantially easier than requiring specific expertise and advanced knowledge. 

When exploring this talent acquisition avenue, remember that it comes with cons. You may put a lot of effort into training someone who leaves for greener pastures, but one might argue that could apply to any role and candidate.

Kula ATS has two key features that make early career hiring easy and efficient:

• Custom candidate fields: You can add specific fields to candidate applications and records to capture important information for entry-level roles, like their education details and any internships or projects they've done. This lets you build a database of early career candidates with relevant info all in one place.
• Custom candidate sources: You can create and label different sources in Kula, like "Recent Grads" or "University Job Fairs." This makes it quick and easy to find and track early career candidates when you need to fill junior positions.

Skill-based hiring 

The primary focus all along has been educational qualifications and past employers. Candidates worked hard to attend the best schools and get in with impressive employers. 

The last few years have seen a sharp pivot in these priorities. Employers have realized that the above criteria may not guarantee hiring success. 

They’re looking at skills (like adaptability, learning agility, leadership, and problem-solving) more closely and evaluating a candidate's capabilities and potential instead of sticking to resumes. 

When it comes to deciding whether this trend applies to your company, ask yourself the following questions whenever you’re hiring for a role:

• What is more important for this role: education, past employers, or capabilities?
• Does this role require extensive molding for success? 
• Are leadership skills important for this role?

Kula ATS makes it easier to find the right candidates for your open roles by:

1. Automatically sorting candidates into talent pools based on key info like:

• Skills
• Location 
• Experience level
• Education

2. Letting you add custom tags to candidate profiles. For example:

• Tagging candidates with specific skills like "Python" or "project management"
• Creating tags for any other important qualities, like "leadership potential"

3. Providing an advanced search tool to find candidates with the exact skills and qualities you need.

• Once you've built your candidate database in Kula, you can search it based on skills, tags, and other criteria
• This lets you quickly pull up a list of candidates who are a good match for the role you're hiring for

Remote working

After the pandemic, it looked like two things could happen to remote working. It would either become a non-negotiable and the new normal, or companies would convince employees to return to the office permanently. 

We’re still at a crossroads today, and the debate is ongoing. You need to decide your stance on remote working, but a steadily growing section of the workforce is opting for it. This is because:

• Relocating for work is no longer a no-brainer, as relocation costs have risen and the budget has dropped. 
• Increased productivity due to fewer distractions and personalized work environments.
• Improved work-life balance for employees, leading to higher job satisfaction

Kula simplifies remote hiring by:

• Synchronizing remote interviews between hiring managers and candidates with side-by-side calendars and candidate self-scheduling features. 
• Make it easy to create branded career pages that showcase company values that are easy to circulate to a global audience.

Increased focus on data analytics

According to this report by SHRM, the average cost per hire is $4700, but employers say the real figure is much higher — 3-4 times the hire’s first year's salary. 

Recruiting is expensive now, so companies are placing more importance on sourcing efficiency and employee retention. The only way you can do the same is by looking at your hiring figures and working on optimizing key metrics. 

Some of the key reporting features offered by Kula include:

• Real-time dashboards that provide an overview of key hiring metrics like time-to-hire and cost-per-hire.
• Detailed sourcing reports that highlight the most effective channels for attracting candidates.
• Applicant funnel reports that track conversion rates at each stage of the hiring process.
• Custom reporting capabilities that allow you to create and share your own analytics dashboards.

Prioritizing learning and development 

Learning and development used to be an afterthought for most companies, only offered as a perk that no one would think to utilize. 

The stance on that has changed, with a new generation joining the workforce. Jobs are a means to an end, not the end-game itself, with employees looking at their jobs as stepping stones to creating a stellar career. 

Now, the focus is on competency and skill mapping for every employee. Employees expect an internal learning system so they can progress. From a business perspective, you’d want to offer learning and development for two reasons:

• To retain employees who expect this benefit.
• A business will need to plan for future skill sets, especially in fast-moving industries like engineering and marketing. 

You can use Kula ATS to:

• Create structured candidate evaluations via customized interview scorecards to identify their skill gaps. that can become template scorecards
• Create a resource library of all competency criteria across scorecards to maintain rating consistency.   

Keep up with trends with Kula ATS 

As we move further into 2024, several key areas are shaping the future of hiring:

• A candidate’s abilities and potential are scrutinized more than traditional benchmarks like education and experience.
• Remote hiring is a non-negotiable to lots, and companies expand their reach and improve employee satisfaction as they acknowledge this. 
• Data-driven insights can reduce costs and predict future hiring needs.

To help recruiters and hiring managers stay on top of these trends, Kula ATS offers a range of powerful tools and features:

• The skills database makes it easy to find and tag candidates with the right capabilities for the job.
• You can create custom career pages that showcase your company culture and values, helping to attract candidates who are the right fit for the organization.
• From scheduling to feedback collection, Kula's interview management features help teams collaborate effectively and move candidates through the pipeline with ease.
• Built-in reporting capabilities can provide you with real-time insights into every aspect of the hiring process, from source of hire to time-to-fill.

To build an effective talent acquisition system, you need the right tool. Book a demo now.