LinkedIn India Recruiting Trends 2016!

LinkedIn, world’s largest professional network, today unveiled key findings from the LinkedIn India Recruiting Trends 2016. The study revealed that employee retention, focus on employee referrals, employee branding and quality of hire are likely to be the top priorities for the recruitment landscape in 2016.

Employee retention, a way to close the hiring gap:  The gap between volume of hiring and hiring budgets has widened in 2015. With a decrease in the hiring budget, talent leaders see employee retention as a priority for their organization. Thirty six percent of the talent leaders stated that employee retention is a top priority over the next 12 months. To address employee retention, leaders will also have to also focus on internal hiring and transfers as re-skilling has become easier. Currently only 5% of the leaders look at internal hiring as a priority. It is essential for leaders to formalize the internal hiring process and boost employee retention.

Employee referrals and social networks, a recruiting trend that is here to stay: Fifty five percent of talent leaders stated that employee referral programs were the top source of quality hires and 42% considered social professional networks as equally important. Both sources were said to be long-lasting therefore preferred.

It is interesting to note that India leads the globe in the usage of referral programs with 65% organizations using employee referrals as against the global average of 39%. Nurturing strong relationships with employees and their networks would help organizations identify and source quality talent.

Quality of hire is the magic metric: Growth in business has made talent leaders look more aggressively for quality talent to sustain this growth. Thirty nine percent of recruiters agreed that quality of hire was the most valuable metric for tracking a recruitment team’s performance. Half of the recruiters surveyed said that they measured quality through new hire performance evaluation and 54% Indian recruiters, as against the global figure of 33%, were confident about this method of evaluation.

Strong employer branding enables quality hires: Both talent acquisition and marketing leaders now share the responsibility for employer branding.  The study revealed that 37% of talent leaders shared or contributed to managing employer brand and 63% considered online professional networks as the most effective tool for this.

Irfan Abdulla, Director, Talent Solution, LinkedIn India said, “Organizations are watching their hiring budgets more closely now and it comes as no surprise that employee retention and quality of hires have surfaced as top priorities for talent leaders. The jump in employee referral to source quality talent is another reflection of this. These emerging trends underscore the power and value of relationships whether through partnering with marketing for stronger employer branding or leveraging employees to reach potential candidates. In my view these are the right moves for recruiters to stay ahead of their game.”