Top recruitment trends of 2023

The recruitment world is unpredictable as the workforce goes through continuous change.

Founder and managing director of EST10 Recruitment, Roxanne Calder, outlined her pick for the top five recruitment trends of 2023.

Skills-based hiring

“Recent research shows skills-based hiring is up 63 per cent as more employers value experience over academic qualifications. It broadens the talent pool, increases the speed of hiring, and adds diversity. Homing in on the pure needs of the job assists in highlighting a job seeker’s transferable skills,” said Ms Calder.

Back in the office

Ms Calder commented: “More employers are requesting an office presence for the first six months of employment. Insufficient remote onboarding, the lack of support felt, and tech issues caused a drop-in employee engagement and morale. The fallout of the Great Resignation of 2022 caused a rethink of remote working.”

Flexibility

“The hyper-focus on work/life balance means expectations for flexible working remains. The aim is to strike a balance between in-person office days, building company culture and collaboration while sustaining flexibility to uphold work/life balance and employee morale,” she said.

Redefining hybrid working

“Hybrid is no longer working from home and the office. It is teleworking anywhere, any time and in the office. This can mean at a café, on a plane and even whilst on holiday,” Ms Calder explained.

Purpose

Ms Calder added: “Employees seek much more from their employers and career choices. Ethics, culture, walking the talk and diversity, equity and inclusion are all topics explored and researched by job seekers.”

Recruitment trends were further discussed by Ben Townshend, the technology sales recruitment lead at Bluefin Resources.

Redundancies

“We’ve obviously seen the well-documented redundancies, and I think a trend we’ll see is they’ll continue to come; unfortunately, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of them,” said Mr Townshend.

“I think what that will cause is the market is gradually becoming a client’s market, so for the last two, three years, it’s been very much candidates in the driving seat. That will change naturally, like it always does. It’s a seesaw.”

Severance packages

“A trend that we’ll see now is severance packages being negotiated into contracts. It’s not something I’ve seen in my kind of nine-plus years in recruiting, maybe with senior execs, but I would say certainly for kind of top talent, they’re going to see what’s happened with redundancies happening and say, ‘Look, I actually want to have something put into my contract that’s going to give me a decent runway if there is to be any kind of redundancies further down the track’,” Mr Townshend explained.

Flatlined salaries

“What we saw through COVID-19 was salaries inflated massively. It was so hard to get talent, but that is stagnating. I don’t think salaries would necessarily go down too much, but I certainly think that the big outlier salaries that we saw in 2021 and 2022 will be a thing of the past. And I wouldn’t call it a downturn, but more of a normalisation,” said Mr Townshend.

Automation

Mr Townshend said: “ChatGPT automation, that’s going to shake the industry up; it’s scary. Hopefully, it doesn’t take me out of a job, but I think the way that recruitment is managed will change a lot.”

“I think transactional recruitment will be a thing [of] the past. I think there’ll always be a place for us recruiters and recruitment in general, but I’m actually quite excited to see what happens there and the changes that kind of automation and stuff like AI will make to the industry.”