The focal points of Australia's 2015 recruiting trends

As more and more highly skilled candidates make the Australian job market ever-more competitive, what are the key trends for recruiters to look out for across 2015?

Networking giant LinkedIn has attempted to answer that very question. Its recently published Australian Recruiting Trends report surveys some 274 talent acquisition decision makers across the country – in efforts to better understand what the most in-demand jobs and industry trends are.

Their expertise is then channeled into assessing the health of the job market across Australia while also determining how it stacks up within the rest of the Asia-Pacific region.

Hiring volumes hitting peak levels

The report explains that both the number of people being placed into work and the hiring budgets of companies openly looking to recruit are set to reach near-unprecedented levels in 2015.

Fifty-five per cent of chief experience officers (CXOs) maintain that their companies will grow across the next 12 months, and Australian CXOs are more confident in their prospects than those in other surveyed countries.

A fact that will be of interest to job candidates is that hiring budgets across nearly every sector look set to increase. Thirty-four per cent of respondents to the survey explained that their company's hiring budget is actively being expanded.

This is as close that figure has been to the record of 46 per cent set in 2011, when the wider Australian job market was at its most potent.

Hottest recruiting trends

The research looks into the biggest trends and issues facing recruiters today, while also casting a glancing eye over the future too. In the next five to 10 years, there will be three particular critical areas of focus:

• Defining and measuring the quality of hires. Fifty-nine per cent of the LinkedIn sample put this ahead of all else as the most noteworthy issue in recruitment across Australia.
• Improved candidate and job matching. Forty-one per cent of talent acquisition decision makers find this to be key now – and into the future too. Managing how effectively a business is matching candidates skills with the applicable role is one of the huge benefits of utilising the right recruitment software.
• Recruiting becoming more like marketing. Thirty-nine per cent of recruiters across the sample size believe that changing the way in which jobs are advertised to candidates – and how their businesses are perceived – is more of a trend now than ever before.

Employer brand power

Despite there being more opportunities than ever to find the right person for the job, the most desirable candidates will continue to be hot property – with recruiters having to do more than ever to persuade highly skilled individuals to join them.

To that end, company brand power is now more significant than ever, with over three-quarters – 77 per cent – of candidate acquisition leaders across Australia explaining that it has a 'significant impact' on their ability to secure the best new hires.

Linked back to the trend that shows that recruiting is likely to become more like marketing – hiring managers who are ready and willing to promote their company's brand most effectively are likely to be successful through 2015 and beyond.

Technology enables smarter recruiting

The LinkedIn report finds that there is no denying that technology is making for smarter recruitment, but only 13 per cent of acquisition managers believe it is being used to its full potential.

Drilling down into exactly which candidates are right for the applicable role is crucial, with technology – recruitment software in particular – an effective way to better enable this to happen.

A solution such as FastTrack360 has powerful search capabilities, ultimately making it easier to find candidates that meet the right criteria – such as an applicable history and varied skills – and match them to the right job more quickly.