Rectec can proudly announce we are looking to hire an ambitious Commercial Success Manager.

2023 is panning out to be our best year yet – but to realise that potential and for us to reach the levels we want to reach in our pursuit of becoming the central focal point for all recruitment tech purchasing and vendor information, we need a visionary, customer-focused and dedicated Commercial Success Manager to join the team.

As a remote technology start-up in a fast-paced industry, we’re looking for an individual who can be adaptable to the challenges that this role will bring, and be proactive in creating and executing ideas.

In return, you’ll gain commercial experience across a wide remit, benefit from the freedom and flexibility of home-working, and have the opportunity to contribute significantly towards our continued growth.

“Rectec are on the cusp of breaking the mould of what can be possible for a recruitment technology marketplace – we’re doing what no one else is doing, and are putting the foundations in place for years of growth.

To that end, we want someone to join the team who shares this vision – who can push us to hit new heights, who can serve as the primary point of partnership contact, and who can positively impact our client relationships and business development.

If this is you, give us a call!”

Rob Green – Founder & Director

You can find a full job description on CV library   https://www.cv-library.co.uk/job/218948911/Commercial-Success-Manager

You can apply for the job there, or simply contact us at the below:

   +44 203 983 5511

   hello@rectec.io

 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.

The post We’re Hiring! appeared first on Rectec.

It isn’t bad business practice, exactly, to create a set of expectations, workflows, KPIs and goals that point your people towards success, based on what works.

After all, if it ‘aint broke don’t fix it, right? In a disrupted working environment a bit of stability can be a good thing, a lighthouse in the service world storm if you will.

But to deny your people change, to turn away and discount new ideas, new workflows, innovative tech or creative ideation is to hamstring your business for good. 

Whilst we cannot advocate enough for mentoring and perfecting staff performance on a company-wide basis – celebrate the wins, by all means – here at Rectec we know that innovation is the true power behind success. 

Innovation doesn’t mean burning the old to make way for the new. What it means is utilising what already works, and combining it with new ways of working that elevate sustainable performance.

Innovate to accumulate.

Here at Rectec, we witness, daily, just how innovative people and business leaders can be. 

But innovation is so much more than new tools or cool UX – it’s about offering sustainable solutions that fit hyper-specific needs, on-demand, at scale.

The simplest example we can give is this: there isn’t just one Applicant Tracking System that everyone uses. No one company monopolises talent acquisition tech or controls how creative recruitment tech can be. 

No one size fits all. Variation and personalisation are key because every industry, every TA team and every candidate has different needs and requirements. And, to fully appreciate the service rhythms and outcomes of each industry and every candidate, a variety of endeavours is required.

So we want to channel a bit of that into some quick-fire hints and tips about how to get the very best out of your high performers. Because high performance doesn’t ever manifest in isolation, and every high performer deserves to be celebrated in the right way. 

So here are some things to remember when you’re looking to replicate success across your organisation!

A rising tide raises all boats.

This isn’t just a slogan for fair people management – this should be an ironclad rule for all businesses.

By “rising tide”, and in regards to high performance, what we mean is the ability to contextualise what makes a particular worker good, and adapt those same ethics, productive behaviours and positive attitudes for every member of staff, individually. 

Consider the differing people management styles for neurodivergent staff, for example. The best leaders make workplace changes to be more inclusive to neurodivergent talent because not only is it the right thing to do, it means businesses can utilise the focused, logic-centric, analytic power of neurodivergent thought processes for total, complete business good. 

Simply put, use your high performers as benchmarks, but don’t assume that simply cloning their targets, KPIs and attitudes will work for others. 

Bring new ideas of “success” into the fold and mentor your people into finding their niche version of high performance. 

Do your business goals match your people’s personal goals?

Improving your bottom line, nailing that new client pitch, scaling to demand, releasing that new product – all of these are objectively great business targets. 

But do they match your people’s targets?

When more and more people want to work for purpose-led companies, and when millions of staff quit their jobs over the last few years because their professional ethics and personal morals clashed with the sometimes cold, calculating nature of business targets (not to mention lack of commitment to ESG policies or unsustainable target hitting), alignment between the business and personal is key to elevating total, company-wide performance. 

Of course, every staff member’s personal goals cannot be, at all times, accounted for at all times – but you should know what drives your people to succeed, and use that energy to parallel what you want to achieve as a business. 

Adjust your leadership styles and don’t be afraid of c-suite change. 

It cannot be ignored that leadership visibility – the elevation of diverse leaders and minority talent into leadership roles – has a significant and immediate impact on performance and business success. 

Diverse hiring strategies and bringing new ideas into the fold should be of prime consideration for any leadership team looking to attract the very best of the best.

Adaptable management styles and cultures of leadership are the foundation of these moves to a more equitable workplace – and it starts with existing leaders turning their analytical gaze on themselves. 

As per this wonderful piece in HBR titled How to Help Superstar Employees Fulfill Their Potential, there are 5 primary business leadership challenges every leader should consider:

• How should we lead teams?
• How should our leadership change?
• Does our leadership style match our needs?
• How can we continue to lead at scale?
• How do leaders drive business results?

Every single of these leadership elements profoundly affects team performance and, in this case, individual performance and the ability to grow and get better at a job.

But the critical thing to remember is that the best leaders adapt to each pain point in the search for a well-balanced business. 

Diversify your big billers.

Whilst we slightly baulk at the term “big billers”, anyone who’s worked on a sales floor understands the critical importance of elite delivery of ROI for clients, users or customers. 

However, consider this – if the vast majority of your business success comes down to a small, high-performing team who goes above and beyond, what happens if that team leaves? What happens if that team gets sick, or falls out? What happens if the team becomes dysfunctional, or has an off week?

Consolidation of income streams is hardly a novel business decision, but when it comes to high performance it’s critical you spread the “risk” over as many well-performing teams as possible. 

Start simple, diversify what success looks like, and reap the rewards. 

 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.

The post How to elevate your high performers. appeared first on Rectec.

Most, if not all, recruitment tech platforms are created with a goal in mind, efficiencies to implement or an integration to perfect. Most, if not all, tech platforms understand their platform doesn’t operate in a vacuum: they need to compete against other digital creators and seamlessly fit into workflows and recruiting practices without reducing recruiting impact or ROI. 

And of course, within this matrix of technical decision-making and tech creation sits the very human user. A cruel irony that plagues the HR and recruitment tech sector – an irony shared by every other technical sector – is that a digital platform is only as good, effective or efficient as its very human user. 

Digital illiteracy can undo years of product perfection. A recruitment team who doesn’t invest in digital L&D can pour 6 figures into the most modern, most well-integrated ATS and receive a grand total of 0 applications to roles because of platform misuse. When melded with tech, traditional hiring techniques can (if not suitably reworked to fit our digital age) actually work against hiring platforms and the efficiencies they produce. 

Naturally, this is down to one thing – a critical lack of understanding just and how and why recruitment and HR tech works, and how technical success lies in augmentation, not replacement, of the human-centric elements of hiring. 

We like to think of Rectec as straddling two parallel but different worlds – the digital creators and SaaS platform revolutionaries on one side; and the job-seeking, career-focused employees that keep our country moving on the other.

So a word to the wise for our client-handling recruiting contingent reading this – no matter the brilliant ATS vendor you use, or the incredible CRM platform you dive into every day, your actions determine the effectiveness of these platforms. 

So here are 4 simple but essential rules to successfully utilise recruitment tech.

Never stop learning. 

To say the recruitment tech industry moves fast is a savage understatement. However, most recruitment teams or agencies are not in the habit of changing ATS providers every couple of years – if anything, once a consistent and usable platform is put in place that helps teams effectively recruit it’s wise to keep a steady ship and not rock the technical boat. 

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep an eye on changes to technical provision in the sector, especially when it comes to candidate attitudes and interactions with recruitment tech.

Consider career pages and employer branding – 5 years ago a simple ATS provider more than likely wouldn’t have prioritised employer branding storytelling. Now, many ATS providers include employer branding, career page and even social media integrations to help better communicate with potential candidates. 

Keep it human.

Never, ever expect the technical tools you use day in, day out to source, interview, vet, assess or hire people to replace you. 

In simple terms (and we consistently beat this drum for good reason) tech should be used to augment what you already do, rather than replace what you do. 

As chatbots and AI find themselves seeping into automotive flows it’s becoming apparent that NLP-built tools are hard to distinguish as a bot. Yes, within reason and at some stages of the hiring funnel chatbots are suitable tools to help connect with and contact candidates. 

But at the business end of recruitment, every candidate wants more than efficiency – they want someone in their corner, fighting for their needs and career, leading with emotion and professionalism.

Recruitment Tech doesn’t make you happy. 

Happiness indicators and assessments are nothing new. 

In the last 20 years, it’s become imperative for employers to market their workplaces as happy places to do work. The cult of the “work wife/husband” has not been bred from nothing – people want to like where they work, they want to find friends and peers where they work, and they want to feel a sense of value and purpose where they work. 

Tech cannot do this. Only human interactions, relationship-building and good workplace culture can.

Does recruitment tech make you a better recruiter?

This is a bit of a trick question because, in reality, we’re asking you whether KPIs and data-supported ROI is the primary indicator of recruiting success.

As anyone who’s ever stepped onto a sales floor knows, recruiting can be about short-term gains and interview-to-placement ratios, but good recruitment cultures are built over time, not over placements. 

Make sure your tech helps you build a sustainable, attractive, affordable and effective recruitment culture, not simply a machine to throw talent at jobs. Recruitment is so much more than that.

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.

The post 4 rules of successfully utilising recruitment tech. appeared first on Rectec.

If you ask the average recruiter to define traditional recruitment methods, the answers will undoubtedly follow some tried and true set processes. 

Those traditional methods of sourcing, vetting and hiring staff have, in the main, defied the steady march of time, numerous talent crises, economic woe and multi-generational changes to career building, skills development and what constitutes good candidate experiences.  

From modern Applicant Tracking Systems augmenting and collating previously siloed recruitment processes to digital onboarding and remote work-as-standard, recruitment is now bookended by tech platforms and digital interactions, buffeted by our fast-paced online culture. 

So how have the standard recruitment touch points – the sourcing, vetting, interviewing, onboarding and post-placement – changed as a result of innovative technical advancement?

Sourcing with HR tech.

Whilst a significant proportion of candidate sourcing has been conducted online for the best part of 20 years, the dominance of SaaS hiring software – and its seemingly limitless integrative possibilities – has opened a new front in hiring efficiencies. 

Candidate sourcing – the identification and entry into a hiring pipeline of new candidates – has been transformed by tech, especially by modern Applicant Tracking Systems and how they now seamlessly integrate multiple talent networks into easy-to-access sourcing pools. 

But that’s not to say the “human” has been replaced. The best ATS platforms on the market utilise automation, AI search tools and manual, hands-on traditional face-to-face candidate connections to create the most relevant talent pools available. 

Vetting and Testing with HR tech. 

Candidate assessments have long been a bulwark against poor hiring and are the first barrier against misplacing the wrong talent into a role. 

In the digital age, assessments can be done anywhere, at any time. In the remote working age, borderless testing (due to a now limitless digital talent ecosystem of remote workers), has reinvigorated the need for bespoke testing solutions.

Employers require rapidly deployed digital assessment tools and need digital accessibility across borders, demographics and languages. 

Naturally, those very same assessment and testing facilities have been moulded into ATS, recruitment CRM and performance management platforms for a more singularly branded, unique and improved candidate experience all under one roof.

When digital hiring platforms advertise their services as “end-to-end”, here is where it really matters – taking as many candidate interactions points under one roof, and hyper-personalising them for maximum hiring investment ROI.

Interviewing with HR tech. 

Since the advent of COVID-19, remote interviewing has become part of the recruiting landscape. The scale of remote interviewing software solutions has proliferated – investment into video interviewing is breaking records, and when the rise of job offers being made remotely has tripled, it’s a significant sign remote interviewing is not only a digital necessity but essential for overall hiring success.

The rise of video interviewing and remote working-as-standard has built entire new cultures of work, completely revolutionising how workers earn their keep and how candidates build new careers.

Onboarding with HR tech.

Akin to remote interviewing, digital onboarding has offered a uniquely contemporary flavour to staff integration, training and induction. 

Onboarding innovation is rampant in the recruitment tech space. Applicant Tracking Systems are leading the way, building suites of onboarding tools to complement their talent acquisition and vetting platforms. 

And, as improving hiring diversity becomes central to hiring culture, digital onboarding providers are finding solutions to bias-less hiring where others can’t.

Post-placement with HR tech.  

Aftercare within recruitment is all important. Post placement, the ability for new hires to feel integrated, psychologically safe and valued is a high priority, and again many ATS and recruitment CRM providers are leading the way in establishing new models of performance management and L&D that are changing the fabric of work. 

The bottom line. 

Recruitment is and always will be a job for humans, made by humans. But it’s hard to ignore the power of tech and how innovation is rapidly transforming the industry from an analogue one to a hybrid digital experience.

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.

The post Has the rise of HR tech killed traditional recruitment? appeared first on Rectec.

For business leaders in 2023, it’s vital to remember that if you’re facing staff walkouts it’s already too late to put in place toxic workplace mitigation strategies – that HR ship has sailed.

The magic behind effective staff retention lies in knowing the signs that your workforce is slipping into dysfunction, and making efforts to mitigate any disenfranchisement way ahead of the tipping point from working productively – and happily – to rage quitting, rage applying and rage walkouts.

What is rage quitting? 

As per BetterUp:

 “Rage quitting is exactly what the name implies: becoming so angry or frustrated that you abandon a situation entirely, leaving before resolution.

In the workplace, this usually involves quitting your job at the last minute without giving the customary two weeks’ notice. But it can also manifest through smaller outbursts, such as storming out of a meeting due to frustration or walking away from a conversation with a condescending colleague”.

So, in theory to Rage Quit is to finally let out what was once held in – a building up of frustrations, anger and stress, that then leads to a rapid exit 

Rage quitting, and rage applying, in the post-COVID era. 

To say that rage quitting has gone through something of a renaissance would be trivialising how effective it’s been for employees looking for a better workplace deal in the post-COVID world. 

Rage quitting is, in effect, leverage, and has been repackaged as “rage applying” where workers, sick to death of poor conditions or a slow-moving and ineffective management system know full well they aren’t going to really quit, but make a show of quitting to leverage better conditions, pay or benefits by applying to new jobs on a whim. 

If they don’t get those concessions from their current employer, they have a new job waiting, often with better pay, benefits, perks and conditions.

This has been a remarkably effective employee strategy, especially in niche industries where specific talent is in high demand. Indeed, this has in some cases helped “Gen Z and millennials land $30,000 raises”.

So what can you do to stave off rage quitting?

Utilise empathy, honesty, and communicativeness.

• Although it seems a little crass to have to keep banging this drum, empathy and open channels of communication are the most powerful rage-quitting weapons in your arsenal because they create the foundation for an open culture of feedback. 

• When one of the main driving factors behind rage quitting is a job not meeting the financial, cultural or career expectations of a worker, simply having a line for staff to make their feelings heard encourages trust and more effective, personalised reactions to staff unhappiness.

Tech to the semi-rescue. 

• Here at Rectec, we like to think we understand the power of good HR tech – and in regards to Rage Quitting we believe tech augments but doesn’t replace, effective people management – you cannot expect tech to improve poor workplace morale!

• So rather than leaning on the digital world for a solution to workplace dysfunction, use curated HR tech platforms – like performance management tools, video and chat tools and even anonymised feedback apps – to create a culture of connection between peers and management and a benchmark for open lines of comms to encourage feedback. 

Wellness and mental health prioritisation.

• As we and many others have mentioned before, HR teams will be put under immense pressure in 2023 to maintain productivity and engagement levels in the face of recession, inflation and the ongoing cost of living crisis.

• But to focus on KPIs and deliverables is to completely miss the point of what actually drives workers to be productive in the first place – happiness, purpose, connection of labour to company outcomes, a feeling of value, a feeling of trust and appreciation, workplace friendships, and the chance to build a career free of bias. 

• Leaders need to make sure they prioritise workplace wellness and mental health support to guarantee employees feel that sense of value, care and trust. In short, leaders and HR teams need to prioritise the happiness of their people above all else. 

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.

The post Why rage quitting is more than bad for morale, and how to mitigate angry staff walkouts. appeared first on Rectec.

Mid-COVID crisis management dictated extreme HR measures, as we well know. Those extreme measures (see: furlough) may have saved UK plc from going under, but those decisions birthed a whole new way of looking at work, work/life balance and the future.

Despite all the best intentions to hold companies to account and keep employers focused on keeping staff welfare, staff happiness and staff security front and centre, enterprises everywhere had to focus on keeping a roof over their heads.

The response – record vacancies, disengaged workers, record gaps in the market that aren’t being filled. And, 2 years post-pandemic, we’re facing a recession and a downturn of potentially unfathomable proportions that could only exacerbate the same feelings of workers being adrift, facing global events out of their control and facing insecurity at home.

Career support in a crisis.

In this frame of mind, workers across the UK are wondering whether their careers can ever truly develop in such a dysfunctional economy. 

But we’re here to remind you, the humble UK employer, that some of the simplest career support solutions are contained within HR solutions many of you are already implementing. But, and here’s the rub, taking career support to the next level may require some tech tweaking.

So here are a few key, yet simple, reasons why having a well-sourced recruitment tech stack can not only help you recruit great staff but can elevate employee career development. 

Performance management included. 

We will keep banging this drum until the cows come home, but effective staff development means you have to be able to measure, assess and reward performance, in context, continually. 

Modern HR tech platforms are built on universal features – they’re often cloud-based for easy, remote access; they’re central points of control (or easy to integrate) for everything from payroll to rota management to performance reviews, and they’re often designed with easy-to-navigate UX.

Within this fluid, data-heavy ecosystem are the two things employers need, more than anything else, to help advance staff careers – measurable data to help workers improve, and the ability to hyper-personalise analysis of that data.

So bosses, HR pros and L&D specialists everywhere take note – recruitment tech should be as much angled towards career development as any other product feature. If anything, your staff retention strategy depends on how well you collate and analyse data pursuant to your employee’s career direction and skills development.

Also, it’s worth pointing out that in the context of career development, personalised performance management also improves the perception of your company, which is great for reputation and hiring.

Although perceptions are subjective and often somewhat illusory, they are emotionally central to how an employee (or prospective employee) looks at your firm. So bear that in mind!

L&D and upskilling.

Upskilling, reskilling, L&D, development – it doesn’t matter how you term it, an important feature of any work tech stack has to be how you provide the platforms, assessment tools and learning centres for staff to get better at their job. 

We’re not saying every CRM or CMS has to be a part-time classroom, but good work tech makes the barriers between learning and assessment seamless. It makes learning easier.

For example, we urge employers to consider integrating recruitment-adjacent features into ATS or recruitment CRM software – like skill assessments, psychometric testing, diversity integrations and, you got it, skills development platforms.

A good skills development system is only as good as how interconnected your data systems, L&D and employee outcomes are, and how easy it is to pull together disparate skills development data (for example, peer reviews and assessments displayed together) into one, easy-to-analyse place. 

Do you know what does all that? TECH. 

Putting your technical money where your emotional mouth is. 

Career development is as much an emotional endeavour as it is hard skills effort. 

Creating a workplace that values growth mindsets and that’s supportive and reassuring is as much a part of skills development as having a world-beating L&D super-platform. 

In this regard, tech doesn’t have to be an all-singing, all-dancing skills cheat code – it needs to provide objective, qualified data that gives astute development direction and accurate feedback on performance. It has to provide realistic, real-time feedback for your people.

As we always say at Rectec, recruitment tech and recruitment adjacent tech aren’t designed to replace the human in workplace HR management, it’s there to augment it.

So never compromise on the emotional component of skills development and utilise tech to drive emotional connection and value where you can!

If you haven’t seen our ATS and recruitment CRM comparison service yet, what are you waiting for? 

Rectec Compare is totally free to use, and you can input your requirements in under 20 minutes to see what ATS or recruitment CRM best fits your needs. 

Get started Now!

The post Tech can transform how you manage your employee’s career development. appeared first on Rectec.

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.

You can click here to register for Rectec Compare – and best of all, it’s completely free of charge.

The post What will be the most in-demand candidate skill of 2023? appeared first on Rectec.

The age of the digital nomad is here. 

This new iteration of flexible worker is, technically, a “state” less worker, capable of working from any location, any time, and is incredibly popular as a form of work and living for digitally native younger generations, freelancers, and a new remote working demographic. 

What is digital nomadism?

• As HubSpot says, “With 34% of remote employees working 4-5 days a week out of the office, the digital nomad lifestyle could be an exciting possibility if you’ve caught the travel bug and want to break free from the shackles of 9-5 life”.

Digital nomadism is remote work turned up a notch. It’s becoming a more popular long-term culture of working that extends the hybridisation of work and life into a new, novel, fun, engaging, freeing form of earning a keep from anywhere in the world. 

It bottles up all the flexibility and freedom of remote working and combines it with the wanderlust inherent in people who don’t want to set roots but work on the fly. 

The difference between pre-pandemic and post-pandemic remote work is that so many more jobs are now capable of being done remotely. From accountancy to QA, from teaching to even running a company, it can all be done remotely, and therefore the rise of digital nomadism is guaranteed. 

However, ignoring the digital nomad marketing efforts of some areas, states and countries to attract remote workers to their shores via digital nomad visas, digital nomadism is a pretty unique new iteration of the post-pandemic remote work norm. And it isn’t for everyone.

The pros and cons of digital nomadism.

There are obviously certain roles and career paths that are more open to nomadism than others. It’s also worth noting that, for all of HubSpot’s urging of nomadism as a combination of work with the travel bug, in reality, remote workers are looking for working spaces and routines that provide a different sort of working vibe close to home – not everyone has the luxury of travelling by default, and most professionals have priorities that keep them in a certain area like families, relationships and social circles. 

However, it cannot be ignored that remote workers do desire a different environment and creative space in which to work from time to time, be that local co-working spaces, public spots with WiFi like coffee shops and hotels, or via a hub-and-spoke arrangement with their employers. 

The key for workers is finding out what culture and work process suits them. 

The way to go about getting it is by leveraging your skills as a remote worker or digital nomad, and making sure they are communicated to those that matter – bosses, freelance communities, in-house managers, business owners and the like.

For some, the challenge lies in asking your employer or contract employers or agency to become a digital nomad – this can be a bit tricky, and like most questions of remote work and hybrid arrangements the outcome rides on a lot of variables: the existing culture of work, your peers and their needs, your team’s or department’s success, business requirements, historical working norms, on and on the list goes.  

However, the die is cast, and work is changing. If the last two years have shown anyone anything it’s that without change, companies stagnate. Most business leaders understand workers want flexibility in work for a multitude of reasons, and the data is clear that productivity and business success remains consistent no matter where people work. 

But sometimes your bosses need a bit of a nudge. They need raw proof you can excel as a remote worker, and to do this you need to find a way of communicating how your skills have adapted in the wake of the pandemic. 

Everything comes down to communication. 

So what skills should you be displaying for the benefit of your boss or company leader to ensure your digital nomadism is long term and supported?

Use self-analysis to prove your worth. 

• Simply put, prove to your seniors, freelance community and peers that your performance has stayed consistent when working remotely or via disrupted means. You can do this via online portfolios, testimonials, in-house feedback reviews, and a well-curated CV with references – use any and every line of communication to prove your worth!
• Self-analysis is an oft-forgotten soft skill that could make the difference for workers who want a little more “freedom” to work a little more effectively. 

Upskill yourself!

• Proving your command and control of remote systems and tools is a basic expectation of establishing confident remote workflows, so you need to show your peers and seniors you can do this consistently, persistently, over time and over numerous projects, deliverables and deadlines. 
• This may take a bit of patience, learning or upskilling (which good employers should assist with through L&D programmes, mentoring etc if you’re in-house and looking for remote work as standard), but the results are tangible pointers to your ability to work remotely, well. 

Show adaptability. 

• The chief soft skill you need to display alongside communication is adaptability. You need to live and breathe flexible working attitudes in word and deed.

Planning Ahead. 

• Digital nomadism is a parallel style of work and living similar to freelancing or contracting – and the capital rule of freelancing is planning ahead. This means financially having a fund of backup money to cover expenses in the case of a drop-off of work, but also knowing how to confidently plan workflows and deliverables ahead of time.
• For in-house and remote workers within full-time employment, planning is a skill to show you have ample control over the planning of workflows, of working hours, and of application of skills. All of it needs to be planned and communicated.

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 complimentary tech marketplace, to help you build the perfect recruitment tech stack for your business.

You can click here to register for Rectec Compare – and best of all, it’s completely free of charge.

The post Top Skills for Digital Nomads. appeared first on Rectec.

“Upskilling” is now understood to be a bulwark against future business and professional decline. It’s firmly established that workers across almost every industry (but especially in a few select sectors) want to unlearn and relearn new, essential skills that will help them continue to earn a good keep and stay in work. 

Upskilling and Reskilling have become an acutely personal and business necessity in the wake of the pandemic. Upskilling has, in this context, become a byword for ensuring job security. 

• “The pandemic has been an accelerant—speeding up digitization, e-commerce and automation. And as a result, even more people are now exposed to job displacement than before”.
• “Between 400 million and 800 million workers around the world could be displaced by automation by 2030”.
• “A report by the Learning & Work Institute shows that according to 92% of businesses, digital skills are key”.
• “Employers expect that by 2025…85 million jobs may be displaced by a shift in the division of labour between humans and machines, while 97 million new roles may emerge that are more adapted to the new division of labour between humans, machines and algorithms”.

In short, upskilling is mostly desired because the winds of business change are blowing. While much of the focus has been on the worry of employee obsolescence as the driving factor behind the push for new digital skills, there is huge scope for employment opportunities and career growth in new industries and jobs.

However, a word of warning for recruiters who want to use professional L&D as your reskilling USP – a target word for consideration in one of the above quotes is “could be displaced”.

There is no uniform automotive or digital wave of change that will hit each industry at the same time. For some, it’s already occurring. For others, change will be negligible or slow-moving.

Here is where we want to draw a pretty firm line in the ground: “upskilling” as a term, even as an entire HR sub-industry, is an incredibly large arena of business investment. Therefore, the development of your staff cannot be haphazard – it needs to be targeted, affordable, meaningful, and market-relevant.

Above all else, you need to have complete and total employee buy-in: there is no point in accelerating L&D programs if the outcomes don’t help your people. 

This, in essence, makes upskilling less of a hard skills development plan, and more of a holistic, cultural awakening.

This is where employers have a unique opportunity. Employers can reframe the meaning and vitality of reskilling in personal, employer-specific ways, and attach reskilling initiatives to business, personal, and societal improvements that mean something to your industry and to your people. 

This not only helps your skillset within work but improves your EVP and employer brand and helps give your team a sense of continual value in their development.

So where do we start?

We think it best to focus on the two main pillars of upskilling – what hard skills and what soft skills will most employees absolutely need in the future?

Hard Skills – Digital Skills

This is close to our heart – as Rectec is a digital tool, created expressly to make recruitment CRM and ATS comparisons rapidly available, hyper-relevant and completely digital, we intimately understand the usefulness and power of digital skills and the power of well-curated recruitment tech platforms.

However, our platform can only work with recruiters who understand how ATS efficiencies augment and improve the real job of recruitment – building human relationships and establishing trust between experts in certain fields. 

However, we digress – digital skills are the one “hard skill” employees desire and employers require. 

• “Workers want more digital skills, more inclusivity, and more flexibility…In one of the largest global surveys of workers (workers want to) learn new digital skills and…quickly adapt to remote work. Yet many people think their job is at risk, and half of all respondents feel they’ve missed out on career opportunities or training due to discrimination” – PwC.
• “For UK employers, reskilling would yield positive economic returns in about three-quarters of cases…more than 90 per cent of the UK workforce will need to be trained” – McKinsey.

Soft Skills – Communication

While hard skills may be the superstructure of future-proofing business, Soft Skills are the underlay, the insulation, the facade and the foundations of making sure those hard skills can be deployed and sustainably used. 

According to Pertemps, the most in-demand soft skills for our future of work are:

• Complex problem-solving
• Critical thinking
• Creativity
• People management
• Coordinating with others
• Emotional intelligence
• Judgement and decision-making
• Service orientation
• Negotiation
• Cognitive flexibility

In short, empathetic, open communication and flexibility of working approach seem to be the height of soft skill requirements. 

Hard and Soft skills complement each other. Considering the iterative, multidisciplinary approach of creating digital tools, communication, problem-solving, and coordination of teamwork are just as important as raw coding skills. 

Summary

Upskilling is urgently necessary, professionally demanded and essential for business security. But upskilling raw hard skills alone won’t guarantee an effective workforce or future proof business. 

There have to be commitments to understanding the essential role soft skills play in your business model. Employers need to understand the importance of confidence-building as workers face the existential threat of obsolescence. 

Employers have a window of opportunity to help their people through hard skills upgrade strategies, whilst simultaneously focusing on the long term holistic improvements soft skills development offers both worker and employer.

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.

You can click here to register for Rectec Compare – and best of all, it’s completely free of charge.

The post How to start upskilling your workforce, and why it’s so important. appeared first on Rectec.

The post-pandemic recovery continues apace, and innovations continue to inspire people to think, work, communicate and grow in new and amazing ways.

Many of the new crisis-proof systems we have introduced over the last year – remote work as standard, for example, or a reliance on “hands-free” processes and the renaissance of the QR code – have been underpinned, guaranteed and indeed launched, supported and created by Tech and tech innovators.

While some of the more COVID-specific changes such as app-based vaccine passports and the conversion of app-based “wallets” into secure banks of health information may be short term in use, many of these changes are very much long term in concept and theory. We are building the foundations for a future that is increasingly a more integrated, digitally reliant one, and the inheritors of this universal hybrid work-and-life-place need to understand how, why and where it came to be, to continue the good work our tech visionaries have started.

But rather than wait until Gen Z comes of age, we urge employers to meet 2022 at a sprint by building recruitment strategies that are inclusive of Gen Z talent, their particular place in history, and their incredibly conducive digital mindsets and familiarity with tech, the online world, digital existence and digital theory.

Look not at our youngest generation as inexperienced, unbloodied apprentices to our workplaces – they are, and should be seen as, a boon to employers seeking digitally skilled talent. Indeed as the UK struggles with an enormous dearth of tech talent – especially in the data analysis, cyber security, data architect and developer fields – the focus should be on how we can integrate and train younger workers more effectively and more specifically to the needs of today and tomorrow.

Rather than focus on what Gen Z workers want (there are some incredible resources available for that, such as this Deloitte report) we want to focus on strategy – how employers should look at the big picture of where Gen Z reside, what sort of recruitment methodology you need to work within, and what sort of guidance, support and techniques best engage Gen Z workers.

The focus on Environment and Social Governance (ESG).

It’s easy to focus on Gen Zer’s unique place jammed between two financial crashes and a coming-of-age mid-pandemic as the origin of their desire to work for employers who’s ethical credentials and commitment to diversity marry their own – Gen Zer’s want to work in a better world.

While this is most certainly true, it doesn’t explain the whole picture.

Gen Z workers have no qualms about communicating their displeasure with a brand, directly, and immediately. This is a result of a much more democratised culture of brand-loyalty and contact driven through social media. This confidence has blurred the lines between brand, customer and advocate forever.

The work brands do to protect our environment, become more inclusive, hire and elevate diverse workforces, and help those less fortunate, are incredibly important factors to younger workers.

Employers beware – Gen Z candidates have rigorously delineated rules about what constitutes good or bad corporate behaviour, and they most certainly mirror that in their job search and recruitment practice.

Experience Vs Resumes Vs Availability.

“The unique world Gen Z finds itself in is creating problems with moving from secondary and post-secondary education to the workforce. Only 58% of Gen Z is employed from the ages of 18 to 21, compared to 72% of millennials during the same age range”.

Bear this in mind. Although Gen Z workers will constitute roughly 27% of all employees by 2025, many of them are coming into work later in their teenage/young adult life. Rather than use this to galvanise a hiring spree on jobless inexperienced younger workers, the thing to remember is why.

Economic scarring has hurt younger workers more than any other demographic, and jobs that traditionally constitute the “first job” such as hospitality, retail and customer service, are beset by COVID-related downturns and closures.

The unique skills young workers gain in these arenas – communication, working as a team, working to routines, professional behaviours etc – haven’t been lost. They’ve simply moved locations.

Gen Zer’s digital skills, and the proliferation of freelance work, side hustles, day-trading, micro-work cultures and communities of iterative young developers especially (see a myriad of hackathons held all over the world) has meant our youngest generation are engaged, and skilled, in different ways to any other generation. Especially in regards to tech and digital culture.

So is the humble resume important any more?

Is, in fact, a 10 minute programming skills test and a chat about a candidate’s love of crypto more indicative of their “fit” within your tech firm? You decide.

Multi-generational hiring strategies.

Good recruiters create consistent hiring practices, but shift expectations, specifics and interview techniques to meet a candidates’ skill level and seniority. This should obviously not change, but we urge recruiters and HR professionals to consider consistency of culture a central component of this, especially when it comes to how you hire across all demographics.

Millennial workers and Gen X workers are the primary drivers of labour, capital, ideas and innovation in today’s employment market. But they share the same worries, and fears, about long term employment pressures, L&D, career development and remuneration as Gen Z workers – and are doing it with families and more pressures on maintenance of households.

We believe that creating strategies of fluid hiring practice that better include Gen Z talent actually benefits every age group – from reskilling legacy talent, to entry level worker.

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 complimentary tech marketplace, to help you build the perfect recruitment tech stack for your business.

You can click here to register for Rectec Compare – and best of all, it’s completely free of charge.

The post Why focusing on Gen Z hiring strategies can help secure multi-generational talent. appeared first on Rectec.