5 TA Trends That Will Define 2024

What are the biggest talent acquisition trends that you need to be aware of in 2024?

Hung Lee from Recruiting Brainfood recently told us! During our first webinar of the year, we sat down with Hung to discuss the 5 TA trends that he believes will define the year.

Check out the full 45-minute webinar below or read on for a brief synopsis of the 5 trends that were covered. 

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1.) Artificial Intelligence

AI was the buzzword of 2023, and we don’t see that changing in 2024. SHRM recently reported that roughly 80% of employers are now using some form of AI in recruiting and hiring. Hung sees that moving to 100% fairly shortly as AI is going to be deployed into us as recruiters whether we like it or not. Hung touched on a variety of ways recruiters are using AI within the hiring funnel, and on the flip side, how candidates are using it too. In fact, Hung thinks candidates are ahead of recruiters in their use of AI, and this will be a significant challenge for recruiters because we’ve not designed our systems to deal with AI-enabled candidates.

When it comes to AI, efficiency should be the priority. TA teams are not going to be looking at massive increases in headcount this year, but they are going to be looking at massive increases in expected productivity. Teams are going to need to examine all the activities that they currently perform and deploy AI into them. And the biggest advice Hung has concerning AI…embrace it! 

2.) Candidate Experience

We had a big candidate experience regression in 2023 for a variety of reasons. Hung shared his thoughts on why we saw this regression. Firstly, the number of applicants far exceeded what was expected - up to 10 times what we saw in 2022 vs. 2023, and with the amount of lay-offs that many organizations experienced, they then had less people to handle the influx in applications. Thus a decline in candidate experience.

In 2024, Hung expects the applicant flow rate to increase again, especially as candidates continue to become AI-enabled. We will begin to lose our capacity to understand what is an AI-generated application vs. a manual one. Recruiters will then have to spend more time sifting through applications, which means there will be less time to get back to candidates, and this is why candidate experience will continue to decline throughout this next year.

3.) Talent Intelligence

Talent intelligence has kind of been gazumped by AI, but it’s one of the fastest-growing categories in HR tech. Hung dove into this topic by first clarifying that he finds talent intelligence to be completely separate from people analytics. In fact, there’s still some confusion in the market on what exactly talent intelligence is. Hung mentions that in simple terms, talent intelligence is information that’s external to the company (what pay rates are in certain geographic locations, how to find the source of your best candidates, etc.) while people analytics is internal data about a company’s current workforce. The biggest question Hung has regarding talent intelligence this year is whether it will fold into AI initiatives or if it will continue to remain a separate entity.

4.) Pay Transparency & Equity 

Laws at the US-state level and EU country level are drastically going to change how we create and make job offers. Depending on location, a more recent jurisdiction forces companies to publish salaries. According to Hung, what we should start to see is a centralization of how compensation is created.

One of the clauses in the EU Pay Transparency Act is that recruiters can no longer ask candidates what their current salary is. This is something that pretty much all recruiters have become used to asking, so their behaviors are really going to have to change here.

5.) DEIB

DEIB is a hot topic at the moment, but not for positive reasons. We’ve seen a lot of backlash towards DEIB programs, and Hung believes that HR & TA need to be a bit more vocal in fending off this backlash. Overall, Hung mentions that this is a difficult conversation, but he thinks it’ll be a hot topic this year (but maybe not a pleasant one).

Overall, Hung believes 2024 will be another challenging year for the space - simply because the macroeconomy is so volatile right now. But, we have to lean into this adversity with energy and a positive mentality. He also mentions that we have to stay closer to each other as a community in terms of webinars, in-person events, etc. because accessing crowd intelligence is one of the ways in which we individually and as a representative of our companies are going to win.
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Thanks to Hung for joining us! Don't forget to check out the entire webinar linked above to uncover even more of his thoughts concerning these 5 trends.

And see you on February 22nd for our next webinar. We’ll be joined by Hebba Youssef, Chief People Officer at Workweek and Founder & Creator of “I Hate It Here”. We’ll be publishing the registration page soon (follow us on LinkedIn so you don’t miss it).