Stay Ahead of the Curve by Embracing These 5 Bold Predictions from a Recruiting Leader

One easy prediction for 2022: It will be the Year of the Greats, whether that’s the Great Resignation, the Great Reshuffle, or what we’re calling in Australia the Great Slump.

But it won’t necessarily be a great year for every business. How the year goes will really come down to the different experiences companies create for employees, the types of conversations they’re having, and their efforts to help employees find a new sense of purpose and develop new skills. 

Here are my five predictions for what talent acquisition teams will see in 2022:

1. Companies will supplement onboarding with reboarding

For me, the idea of reboarding first came up as a way to help recent hires, folks who’ve joined during the pandemic, get a better understanding of how we do things. But I’ve come to see it as a helpful idea for everyone on our team. 

Recent hires probably had remote onboarding at some point, but maybe they’re coming back into the office sometime this year. So, reboarding can help answer questions such as, “OK, now I’m in a physical environment, how do things work? And where do I go?”

When someone is onboarding and taking in information in a really stressful time, they don’t take it all in. Organizations may want to think about opportunities for people to reboard and refresh a lot of the onboarding content. That’s for folks who have joined new.

But then there’s also this whole group of employees who’ve been part of your team since before the pandemic. They may need to relearn ways of working now that include, say, more adaptability and asynchronous communication. And certainly our managers who are now leading highly distributed teams need some coaching on ways to do that more effectively.

2. Organizations will help employees develop green skills

Candidates, employees, and people everywhere want purpose. At Canva, we have a two-step plan: We want to be one of the most valuable companies in the world. But we also want to do the most good that we can. And so our candidates often ask us questions around what Canva does for social impact. 

We’re constantly looking for ways that we can become more carbon neutral and for how we can work more sustainably. We look carefully at the types of vendors and partners that we use. And we attract candidates who want to find meaning and purpose in their work and in their lives, and a large part of that is how we can live more sustainably.

Companies will create opportunities for folks to develop green skills and, in turn, those skills and learning will help employees identify “greener ways” for their company to operate.

That’s gold dust.

3. Internal mobility will increasingly be seen as a way to more fully engage Gen Z 

Something we’re often thinking about is how we can ensure that we’re able to move folks around with the skills that they need to be able to work on our biggest problems and most complex challenges. But we’re hardly alone on this — matching skills to fast-rising opportunities is a challenge everywhere.

And so the ability to harness Gen Z, which likes the side hustle and enjoys variety in their assignments, is both a challenge and an enormous opportunity for companies that figure it out.

Gen Z employees typically want to be working on shorter term pieces of work. They’re perfect for companies to be able to mobilize and dispatch on more creative problems. We need to be able to shift direction and focus, quickly and confidently, on whatever is happening in the world, whether it’s the next strain of COVID or a move to automate our processes or services.

4. Companies will put more effort in harnessing employee influencers

I’m constantly amazed by the videos that our employees, particularly interns and recent grads, are creating. I’m like, “Oh, whoa.” This is the future — short, sharp, real looks into life at a company. 

These days, we follow the endorsements of influencers and bloggers more than those of sports stars and actors. This is the world we live in and candidates are going to listen, more than ever, to what your employees have to say.

We’ll see companies finding opportunities for employees to share their voice authentically in a lighter-touch way. These efforts will be more nimble and maybe less tightly controlled than earlier advocacy programs that were run by a team.

Companies will need to get the language right, of course. You ask an employee, “Oh, do you want to be an advocate?” And they’ll say, “Huh.” But ask them, “Do you want to be an influencer?” and they’ll say, “Oh, yeah. I’m in.”

5. Stay conversations will need to replace traditional performance conversations

The concept of stay interviews has been around for a while, but it’s what I think we need to do now, and they need to be much more pointed conversations. 

I often ask my team on a scale of 1 to 10, how are you feeling today? And I always ask, “OK, to get you from a 6 to an 8, what would need to happen? How are you feeling about your growth this year? And the job that you’re doing now, if we were having this conversation in 12 months time, would you still want to be doing this? Where do you want to visualize yourself?” 

You don’t always need to ask directly, “Are you thinking about leaving?” It comes out. 

I recently looked on LinkedIn and, holy moly,  there were more than 500,000 open recruiter roles. And if I go into LinkedIn Recruiter and do a search on “recruiter,” I’ll find 1.2 million profiles. So, I know my team members are getting hit up all the time.

So, I’m having more frequent conversations around, how are you enjoying what you’re doing? What more can I be doing as your manager? What more can I be doing to help you grow your career? Having these conversations frequently is probably going to be more productive than sitting down and saying, “OK, this is a stay interview.” 

And if you’re asking these questions in the exit, forget it. It’s too late.

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