As Q3 2022 rolls around, we wanted to take a little look into the candidate skill near future, and the key skills that will dominate recruitment discussions over the coming 18 months.
2022 has been a rocky road for candidates and clients, especially in the tech space.
Digital natives and pandemic-scarred young workers continue to enter a workplace full of disruption, prices are on the rise, the side hustle has gone from creative outlet to financially necessary add-on, and career security has become the in-demand work perk.
For older generations, the working landscape is no less challenging – reskilling and retraining in the wake of automation is still a high priority, and there are crippling shortages in talent from Logistics to Healthcare, across all age groups.
Retirees are finding their pensions aren’t stretching with the pace of inflation, yet conversely, there is a pool of middle-aged talent looking to retire early, leaving the UK workforce with a potential skills drain in middle and upper management.
Employers, of course, are stuck in the middle – trying their hardest to maintain a modicum of business consistency, whilst hiring great staff and looking after their people, even as the value of each pound earned tumbles.
In our small section of the exploding tech world, however, positivity reigns.
The beginning of 2022 saw record-breaking demand for tech talent and, laterally, the need for recruitment tech:
- “U.S. employers posting 1.1 million tech job openings in the first quarter of this year”.
- “From January to May 2022, there were approximately 870,000 technology and digital job vacancies open across the UK, as an explosion in demand for tech products and services drove hiring in the sector to heights not seen in a decade”.
The tech sector (specifically the recruitment tech sector, which is seeing record amounts of investment and demand, as we mentioned last week) continues to innovate and drive our industry forward and is one of the leading lights in the tech space.
Recruitment tech is helping prop up everything from supply chain management to wearable tech innovation in hospitals, and serves as a primary conduit of people into employment – indeed, the recruitment tech space is serving as a bellwether for innovation and investment.
So what are the primary workforce and tech employer trends driving Q3 and Q4 of 2022, and how can candidates (and clients) take advantage of this wave of positive change and investment in tech, recruitment technology, and candidate connectedness?
Think laterally!
- Tech diversification.
As demand continued to outstrip supply in the tech skills market, Q2 saw the bottoming out of tech labour by some of the world’s most established and well-known tech companies.
Netflix, Spotify, Coinbase, Klarna – all examples of companies who have had to make rapid lay-offs in Q1 and Q2 of 2022 (details of which you can read here).
But Tech is not a legacy industry, and this mini-bubble burst is not indicative of a wider tech dropout.
This is because, as research shows, “Companies in all industries are recruiting interns and recent graduates with strong technical skills”. The diversity of tech “jobs” on offer will continue to evolve and grow as traditional tech responsibilities seep into everyday activities across a wide range of careers.
Diversifying technical responsibilities, and how they impact a workplace, will be a priority for businesses in 2023 – candidates with lateral tech skills will be top of the pile. Alongside hard tech skills such as coding and data science, lateral tech-oriented skills, such as project management, data literacy, technical writing and content creation, will be needed.
So candidates, diversify your skills!
- Soft Skills evolution
“Of the 10 most in-demand skills, seven were ‘soft’, including communication, problem-solving and planning”.
The best way to think about workplace evolution is not as a single point of revolutionary change, but as a slow move to newer ways of collaborating and innovating.
Soft skills are nothing new, and they’ve been a major driving factor behind rebuilt interview strategies in the wake of COVID-19. In digital-based, remote working this has been especially important in regards to team cohesion, communication and working asynchronously.
In 2023, soft skills will be the primary criteria by which new hires are judged, so everyones CV, cover letter and LinkedIn profile needs to reflect this.
- Computational thinking.
“You’ve most definitely heard of STEM, but have you heard of SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud)?”.
The front line of digital change is in the grey areas between networks, people and workplaces.
Thinking about skills through the lens of STEM and SMAC gives talent a reformed view on how to approach a new, digitally-reliant near future.
This helps candidates focus their development on where the real action is – in that mobile, social, decentralised space between people, tech, and the services and online media they need.
A quick, responsive process is what you need to attract and engage the best talent.
At Rectec we help organisations to find the best Applicant Tracking System or best Recruitment CRM to suit your needs, accompanied by our unique complementary technology marketplace, to help you build the perfect recruitment tech stack for your business.
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