Looking for work? These are recruiters' top priorities for 2018

New research from online jobs board CV-Library reveals businesses top recruitment priorities for 2018 – from sourcing candidates directly and building talent pools for the future, to establishing a strong employer brand and succession planning.

The study explored the views of 250 professionals with hiring responsibility and found that the main challenge organisations are facing is a lack of relevant candidates, with 72.8 per cent admitting they were suffering from this.

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Alongside this, 20.8 per cent are finding it difficult to deal with candidate demands, for example, when they ask for a higher salary than the company is prepared to pay.

However, powering through into the New Year, 85.8 per cent said that they will be focusing on ‘quality of hire’ when recruiting.

When asked what their top recruitment priorities for 2018 were, organisations cited the following:1. Sourcing candidates directly (68.1%)2. Building talent pools for the future (65.7%)3. Investing in tools to speed up the hiring process (42%)4. Establishing a strong employer brand (40.2%)5. Succession planning (33.9%)

“Getting your recruitment process right is the first thing you should think about when expanding your team,” says Lee Biggins, founder and managing director of CV-Library.

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“That can be anything from where you’re going to search for candidates, the tools that you’ll use to get there and how your company will come across in job postings.

“Without taking a step back and really thinking about why you’re recruiting, and what kind of person you’re looking for, you won’t stand a good chance of hiring the right individual for the job.”

What’s more, a staggering 90.6 per cent said that they would continue to use job boards as their top sourcing channel, followed by LinkedIn (57.9 per cent), their own career site (35.8 per cent) employee referral schemes (34.6 per cent) and aggregators (22.8 per cent).

“Every business has different recruiting needs, and will focus on using different tools to reach their goals,” says Biggins.

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“Job boards continue to be a huge benefit to many organisations, mainly because they serve a dual purpose of being able to advertise jobs and search CVs – plus a whole lot more.

“It’s interesting that LinkedIn is climbing up in importance.”

For more career advice, log on to www.cv-library.co.uk