The world is changing rapidly and the pace of that change is accelerating. Just about everything we knew and believed about work, jobs, careers, and the workplace is being obsolete. Five millions jobs may be lost as early as 2020 according to the World Economic Forum. Many of those jobs may include recruiters.
It is not just jobs that will be lost. As many as 65 million people may be unemployable by 2025 due in part to automation but mostly because they will not have the skills to do the jobs that humans can do.
Recruiters will get squeezed hard from both sides. Technology like artificial intelligence will make many recruiters obsolete while others will not have the skills to meet the demands of the job.
Here are 10 trends that will disrupt the role of the recruiter as we’ve know it for nearly 50 years.
- Like almost every job, technology will significantly disrupt how recruiters work.
- The change won’t be modest and incremental but dramatic and exponential.
- Recruiting will not disappear but many recruiters will. The skills that will be required will extend far beyond who owns the largest rolodex and network.
- To compete with technology, recruiters will need to become labor data scientists with a sales personality.
- Recruiters who will succeed in the future will not just fill a role businesses can’t perform well but will be required to simplify the complexity of staffing.
- How little you think technology will impact recruiting, double the impact. However long you expect it will take until technology makes a significant impact, cut the time in half.
- Executives and managers will demand that algorithms and science replace hiring managers’ gut instinct when it comes to employee selection.
- However fast or how much recruiting will change may be open to debate. What is non-negotiable is that it is inevitable that recruiting will change in unimaginable ways sooner than later.
- The labor market will shrink. The number of jobs that recruiters have to fill will fall dramatically once more machines replace humans. To compete recruiters will need to up their game and find ways to add more value. Recruiters that rely only on a rolodex and “hard work” will become low-cost commodities.
- In this age of acceleration there is always more to come!
To learn more about how work, jobs, careers, and the workplace will change, download my free whitepaper When the SHIFT Your Plan and pick up a copy of my book by the same name when published in early 2017.
