The 3 Most Significant Trends to Watch in the Recruitment Landscape

During a recent product demonstration, Prolucent SVP of Product, Rod Shifflette, was asked an interesting question:

“What do you see as the 3 most significant trends in the recruitment landscape over the next 3 to 5 years?”

Not only is it a great question, it was also posed to the perfect person. Described as brilliant by colleagues and clients, Rod is a product-focused business leader who is masterful at translating client needs into powerful product features. He, along with others on the Prolucent team, pioneered and developed some of healthcare’s first and largest labor marketplace and vendor-neutral VMS and MSP offerings. Since then, he has developed additional healthcare VMS and workforce management platforms including Prolucent’s proprietary platform, LiquidCompass^®.

As the product leader, Rod and his team continue to modernize and innovate features and functionalities of LiquidCompass^® to keep pace with today’s evolving workforce management needs. With this rich background, Rod’s response to this question is backed by decades of hands-on experience and aligns with the reason Prolucent was created.

Here are the top 3 workforce trends Rod (and Prolucent) foresee taking shape or continuing over the next 3 to 5 years:

1. New Technologies that Innovate the Common Application Process

The most significant change in the recruitment landscape emerged in 2020 and has led to the steadily-evolving trends we see today. Hiring competitiveness rapidly increased and perspectives on life, work, and balance were forced front and center. Employers were required to accelerate improvements in the applicant experience.

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are generally focused on the application and the internal steps in the applicant review and onboarding process. In essence, they are largely centered around the talent management team. Improving the applicant experience has far-reaching implications on both recruiting processes and technology. It involves not only the career site and the ease of the application, but also timely feedback, iterative and relevant communication, AI and ML engagement tools, preference-based targeting, and many other aspects of the application and hiring process.

A great career site with an exceedingly easy way to express interest in the right job that correctly integrates with the employer’s ATS and generates a quick, thoughtful response is the beginning. This trend, a rigorous focus on the applicant experience, will introduce new technologies in the engagement stack and will require talent management teams and hiring managers to rethink the common “application processing” mentality of the past.

2. Offer What the Jobseeker Wants

Pay is not the only or even always the most important factor. As noted in our previous blog post, nurses “…ranked attention to their mental health and a focus on work-life balance as their top worries for working in healthcare rather than adequate pay or benefits”. Workers are increasingly seeking good company culture, traditional and new benefits, balance, flexible and controllable schedules, and career path options over salary or rates of pay.

There is much that goes into delivering on this trend but, at a minimum, your career site and job postings need to offer the required information. Your platform needs to have far-reaching distribution capabilities and it needs to be clear about all opportunities that exist in your organization, not only permanent but flexible and travel opportunities as well. These opportunities need to be clear to new applicants, current employees, and past applicants that you are seeking to re-engage.

3. Increased Focus on Active Sourcing

While there are many other emerging trends highly relevant to the uniqueness of our platform at Prolucent, we expect to see an increased focus on active sourcing. We define “active sourcing” as an evolution to the current (best practice) activities of extensive, automated/integrated job distribution. The evolution involves:

• Improvements in the targeting of job distribution across all channels to drive higher converting and more cost-effective outcomes from each channel
• Improved value for applicants and better management of their application data
• More effective use of already collected applicant information

In the Prolucent platform, we have the foundation and data to improve job advertisement targeting. We are expanding our platform to include a robust and portable applicant profile that delivers value and options for job seekers and we are expanding our job and worker intelligence engines to more effectively match current and past applicants to current job opportunities.

In conjunction with this last initiative, we are seeing an increasing number of healthcare employers implement candidate CRM platforms to improve how they communicate with and actively source candidates. Prolucent is in lockstep with this trend.

Our team at Prolucent is constantly learning, engaging, and innovating. We listen to the needs of the market through thoughtful engagement with our clients, discussions with potential customers, and by attending conferences. These interactions continue to propel us to advance our cutting-edge workforce acquisition and conversion platforms.

We are happy to answer questions you may have about the future of workforce management and how Prolucent is disrupting the industry for the betterment of both job seekers and customers.

Reach out to us at info@prolucent.com.