The following 20 trends are excerpted from Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends report. All trends were developed with input from more than 1,000 chief human resources officers around the world.
Deloitte anticipates:
1. Increasing diversity and aging populations will converge to make health, wellness, and employee assistance programs top priorities. To attract the best talent, companies are increasingly focusing on being able to offer flexible work schedules, work-life integration policies, family-friendly benefits, healthy lifestyle programs, elder care services, time off for personal wellbeing activities including vacations, sabbaticals, and work-life integration, as well as mental wellness programs.
2. Artificial intelligence will alter business models while stretching HR professionals’ skillsets. Data science and machine learning technologies will be integrated into recruitment processes to better identify the right talent for open positions by analyzing keywords in resumes or job descriptions, competencies held by existing employees in the same role, and employee performance data.
Integrating workforce planning with talent acquisition will improve accuracy in hiring forecasts by analyzing attrition rates of similar companies or even industry averages, leading to better budgeting for recruitment spend. Automation technologies will reduce reliance on human capital management professionals by enabling companies to process work authorizations without approvals.
11. Global talent mobility will continue to increase, impacting global hiring and HR practices. The growing need for companies to go global is challenging the traditional approach of recruiting and developing workers in their home countries. To address these challenges, organizations will look for new ways to manage mobility programs that drive engagement and productivity across borders.
12. As more baby boomers leave the workforce, companies will have to expand their talent sourcing efforts beyond traditional recruiting channels and tap into a wider pool of nontraditional sources. To do so, companies will invest in new platforms and technology solutions to engage passive job seekers who are not currently being targeted by recruiters.
13. With the growing popularity of online learning among millennials, employers will seek to provide opportunities for employees to develop new skills and master existing ones, giving them the tools they need to become more productive. Employees will expect access to online courses that fit their schedule, often through cloud-based systems, virtual classrooms, and social learning networks.
14. Employers will continue hiring across generations as millennials enter the workforce in the next decade. With Generation X retiring in greater numbers, millennials will make up approximately 75% of the workforce by 2025, creating a need for companies to find ways to attract and retain them. Employers will look for new strategies to engage with this generation through social media channels, online communities, and mobile apps.
15. As employers offer more flexible employment options, contingent and contract workers will become a more significant share of the workforce. The move toward flexible work arrangements will expand opportunities for many types of individuals who may not have otherwise considered working for their employers because of how they prefer to structure their time.
16. New talent acquisition technologies and approaches, such as mobile recruiting apps and gamification, are poised to significantly alter the way companies recruit talent. By 2022, more than 75% of organizations will use gamification in their recruiting strategy.
17. There will be a continued shift toward cloud-based solutions for human capital management (HCM) as technology continues to become more affordable and easier to implement and use on a daily basis. By 2022, more than 50% of organizations will have moved their HCM systems to the cloud.
18. Employers will invest in technologies that aim to better a candidate’s experience throughout the hiring process, including augmented and virtual reality for online assessments and 360-degree video capabilities for conducting interviews from remote locations.
19. By 2023, employers will prioritize analytics and business intelligence to identify areas for improvement in their hiring processes. To do so, organizations will invest in cloud-based solutions that provide real-time access to data, along with predictive capabilities for identifying trends within their talent pools.
20. The recruiting function is expected to become more data driven as organizations monitor different performance metrics to determine the effectiveness of their recruiting strategies. To better measure these efforts, organizations will increase the use of analytics and business intelligence in staffing initiatives.
The HR technology market is projected to grow from $50 billion in revenue in 2020 to over $70 billion by 2022, with an expected compound annual growth rate of 17%. The number of people that work globally in the HR profession is projected to grow by more than 10% in the next five years, with advanced degrees in human resources expected to increase by 25%.
The use of social media has changed the way that employees interact with employers. This allows them to provide feedback about their employer in a public forum. According to Forbes, employers are concerned about these online reputations because they can influence a person’s decision to take a job offer. In the past, employers had more control over information online about their company and have been able to manage this representation. However, with employees being able to post opinions on sites such as Glassdoor or Indeed, it becomes difficult for organizations to control their brand story.
