Three Forces Shaping the Hiring Landscape of Tomorrow

Speculating about the 2030 job market is in vogue. Automation, globalization and other trends are impacting a range of industries, and there is a lot of chatter about the types of jobs that are doomed — truck driver, telemarketer — and the types of jobs that are destined to flourish — computer engineer, alternative energy consultant.

But while this sort of speculation is all well and good, if you’re in recruitment, you need to look a little deeper. Professions are just the surface manifestations of much deeper trends, and to really get ahead of the game, you need to grasp these trends as they begin to take effect.

Here are three foundational forces shaping the hiring landscape of tomorrow:

1. The rise of transferable skills.

Once upon a time, people chose a career path in college. After graduating, they took a position within a company, and stayed there for decades.

Not any more. For the current and upcoming generation, jobs look set to be radically short term. Increasingly, what will matter is not a narrow professional label, but a candidate’s attributes, skills, and experiences. What sort of cognitive capabilities have they displayed? How do they interact with people of other profiles? These core elements are flexible, and can be carried across different industries and career paths.

To help candidates embrace this work life with confidence and skill, recruiters will need to keep them informed of exactly what their skills are, and how they are transferable. On the flipside, hiring managers will have to get used to this new world, where profiles and skill sets matter much more than a list of previous job titles.

2. The decline of geography.

This trend is already well in motion. For professionals in every industry and in every part of the country, work has expanded beyond the physical office and the in-person team. Remote work is the norm, most companies use distributed teams, and long distance travel means that your engineering team and your marketing agency can occupy different continents.

The intensification and normalization of geographical distribution means that human-centric recruiting is out of date. Hiring can no longer operate within a paradigm where people in a city are looking for jobs solely within that city, and need from a recruiter also based in that city. The world, and the world of work, are becoming massively centralized, massively distributed, and rootless. An in-person logic cannot cope with this. Only computerized and machine-driven tools can match this drift. Recruiters and hiring managers will need to embrace such tools if they want to thrive.

3. The acceleration of life.

The millennial generation now entering work are experience-oriented, and value novelty over routine or habit. Mirroring the growing importance of transferable skills (rather than rigid job categories), they are comfortable with rapid change. In this scenario, recruiters and hiring managers need to get used to a world where people and their work lives alter constantly and quickly.

Against this backdrop of constant flux, recruitment has to adapt. Professionals and job-seekers need to be able to reach out rapidly, communicate information easily, and meet or converse with the relevant people asap. The whole shape of starting or ending a job is going to change; the recruitment process can begin to take up not weeks or months, but hours or days. Future candidates are more relaxed about job-seeking, because they’re not looking for a lifelong career. This means companies can move quicker, because they don’t need to fear a bad hire so much.

Over the next decade, these three big trends are going to reshape the fundamentals of hiring. AI recruiting partners like our very own Wendy are built specifically to help recruiters and hiring managers began to adapt to this change. With the aid of task automation and digital intelligence, you can prepare for a world where job titles matter less than skills, where geography is no longer a constraint, and where everything has to move as fast as possible.