 "Employee referrals, retention top priorities for companies in 2016: LinkedIn")
Employee referrals, employee branding and quality of hire are among the top priorities for recruitment in 2016, according to the findings of LinkedIn India Recruiting Trends 2016.
According to survey, employee retention will be a key focus among corporates.
"The gap between volume of hiring and hiring budgets has widened in 2015. With a decrease in the hiring budget, talent leaders see employee retention as a priority for their organisation," said the findings.
About 36% of talent leaders said that employee retention is a top priority over the next 12 months.
To address employee retention, leaders will also have to also focus on internal hiring and transfers as re-skilling has become easier. Currently only 5% of the leaders look at internal hiring as a priority. It is essential for leaders to formalise the internal hiring process and boost employee retention, LinkedIn said.
Irfan Abdulla, director, Talent Solution, LinkedIn India said, "Organisations are watching their hiring budgets more closely now and it comes as no surprise that employee retention and quality of hires have surfaced as top priorities for talent leaders. The jump in employee referral to source quality talent is another reflection of this. These emerging trends underscore the power and value of relationships whether through partnering with marketing for stronger employer branding or leveraging employees to reach potential candidates. In my view these are the right moves for recruiters to stay ahead of their game."
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Employee referrals and social networks as a recruiting trend is here to stay. 55% of talent leaders stated that employee referral programs were the top source of quality hires and 42% considered social professional networks as equally important. Both sources were said to be long-lasting, and were thus preferred.
It is interesting to note that India leads the globe in the usage of referral programs, with 65% organisations using employee referrals as against the global average of 39%.
The other important finding of the survey was quality of hire. "Growth in business has made talent leaders look more aggressively for quality talent to sustain this growth. 39% of recruiters agreed that quality of hire was the most valuable metric for tracking a recruitment team's performance. Half of the recruiters surveyed said that they measured quality through new hire performance evaluation and 54% Indian recruiters, as against the global figure of 33%, were confident about this method of evaluation," said LinkedIn.
Moreover, both talent acquisition and marketing leaders now share the responsibility for employer branding. The study revealed that 37% of talent leaders shared or contributed to managing employer brand and 63% considered online professional networks as the most effective tool for this.
LinkedIn surveyed 3,894 talent acquisition decision makers who work in a corporate HR department and have some authority in their company's recruitment solutions budget.