The Global Trends That Will Shape Recruiting In 2015 [INFOGRAPHIC]

Today we released the 2015 edition of our Global Recruiting Trends Report and we are excited to share the results. The report covers 31 countries and is based on the responses of over 4000 recruiting leaders.

We have been running this survey for four years now, and it’s been fascinating to see how the world of recruiting has evolved. The most noticeable changes have come across in the way recruiters are resourced, where they find quality hires, and how they promote their talent brand.

Take a look at the infographic below to see the trends that will shape the way you work in 2015:

In 2015, recruiting leaders will have higher budgets and even higher hiring volumes.

It could be a sign of the global economy heating up or recruiting getting more respect and priority as a function within companies. Whatever the cause, the implications are the same – recruiting leaders must prepare for a more competitive hiring and spending environment in 2015.

Because of this increased competition, recruiting leaders must come up with a long-strategy for winning over talent and arm themselves with the latest talent pool data. Where do your target hires live, what’s the breakdown in seniority levels, where did they go to school, what did they study, and what’s the best tailored message to get them interested in your job? If your competition knows these things and you don’t, they will have a leg up. To help with that, we’ve shared some free talent pool reports and if you’d like to find a more detailed breakdown, contact your LinkedIn account manager.

Social networks are becoming the preferred channels for promoting talent brand.

Like exercise, we all view talent brand as important, but it’s much harder to do it consistently well. The majority of global recruiting leaders agree that talent brand impacts their ability to hire top talent, but far fewer have the budget to promote and measure it. As a result, many companies use affordable channels like social and professional networks to promote their talent brand messages.

Company career sites remain the top channel for promoting talent brand, as many companies use them as the “storefront” when introducing the company to candidates. The friends and family word of mouth channel remains strong although declining slightly, perhaps because it’s hard to measure offline word of mouth activities.

Recruiting leaders should take care to benchmark their talent brand against other talent investments, to ensure it’s funded in line with other priorities. Since marketers have been thinking about brand for a while, recruiting leaders can amplify their efforts by partnering with marketing on crafting and promoting high-quality talent brand content to remain top of mind with candidates.

The top sources of quality hires have shifted in the past 4 years.

Four years ago, the top source for finding great people was referrals from your network. Today, it’s job boards and social professional networks – highly digital and targeted sources.

The growth of social professional networks as a source of quality hires mirrors the growth in membership of platforms like LinkedIn, which rose from 100 to over 300 million members over the last 4 years. The growth of job boards over the past year mimics the global uptick in the % of active candidates from 20% to 25% in the past year.

These changes signal the need for recruiting leaders to up-skill their teams on social professional network sourcing techniques and managing the process for active job seekers applying through niche and general job boards.

Companies aren’t capitalizing on the large passive talent pool.

Only 61% of global companies have a strategy for passive candidate recruiting. These are surprising stats, since the latest data on the passive/active candidate split shows that over 75% of professionals are passive -- they would not proactively seek out and apply to jobs. That's a huge talent pool to miss out on.

If you are yet to start developing a passive candidate recruiting strategy, these stats make a great case for why you should prioritize these efforts in 2015. Consider piloting a program with a recruiter (or a few) whose full-time job is to source and engage passive candidates. Then measure your results. For the same reason there are inbound and outbound salespeople and marketers, recruiters could also benefit tremendously from organizing themselves this way.

These stats are just a few of the main takeaways from our Global Recruiting Trends report. To get a full breakdown of how these trends have progressed in the past 4 years, and learn more about where you should focus your recruiting efforts and budgets, download the complete report.