HR Trends to take into account for 2021

The challenging and unpredictable year 2020 for the labor market will soon come to an end. Companies, institutions, and their HR departments are already starting to work intensively on new strategies for the next year. What trends and directions of HR development are forecast by experts for 2021?

What trends in HR and recruitment in 2021 will we observe? Which tools, techniques, and recruitment methods should be implemented to meet market demands?

Reskilling and upskilling

Thanks to digital, business, and economic transformations, jobs are changing very quickly. Old skills may not be enough anymore, so employees will have to improve them or even retrain constantly in the future. The HR departments' role will be to prepare the possibility of raising qualifications or changing them by introducing regular upskilling/reskilling programs. The prepared learning and development strategies will be essential next year. If a company wants to recruit talented employees, it must also provide them with an environment to develop skills, increase creativity, and support innovation. An interesting trend in the L&D strategy is learning in the workflow, that is, enabling access to small pieces of information during everyday tasks, which will allow you to simultaneously solve current problems and learn slowly but regularly, instead of spending many hours or days on large training blocks.

Continuous performance evaluation process

Continuity is a keyword, also when it comes to performance management of the future. Instead of offering routine annual or monthly feedback, it is much better to continuously evaluate the employee (the idea of ​​instant feedback) with regular monitoring sessions and frequent one-on-one meetings. Employees appreciate immediate feedback, because thanks to it, they can immediately implement solutions that avoid mistakes in the future and improve their performance much faster, which translates into a more dynamic development of their career and greater motivation to work or acquire new competencies.

Work on internal communication

Large team dispersion caused by remote work should not cause disorganization. An important task for HR departments working closely with their superiors will be to improve internal communication. For this purpose, companies will willingly use various types of communicators, in which it is possible to create teams. Chatbots that will automate repetitive dialogues will also be useful. They will answer frequently asked questions and thus save time and energy of employees. It is good to convey the most important information through videos, which provide a much more personal and authentic contact than text messages. This method will become even more popular than before. But how to conduct onboarding when you cannot show a new person around the office and familiarize them with the rules governing the organization? It would be a good idea to record tutorials, which will certainly reduce the risk of misunderstandings. The new employee will feel better when he receives a short video showing the office and being greeted by his superiors on the very first day.

The effects of employer branding can be measured.

Human resources departments will want to build their positive image and control whether the actions taken in this area bring results. They will do it by analyzing the level of rotation in the company. The number of CVs of candidates may also be a decisive indicator. It is also important to measure the involvement of employees. To measure them, you can use anonymous questionnaires that will be given to employees to complete.

The power of the internet

The Internet is primarily social media, which is a permanent element in building the employer's image. Corporate LinkedIn, Facebook, and even Tik-Tok are the beginning of research on a given company for more than half of the candidates. The Internet offers great opportunities thanks to LXP (Learning Experience Platform), a user-focused software platform designed to make onboarding, development, and career processes as easy as possible. Thanks to it, it is possible to become more involved in the organization among new and current employees.

Recruiting employees in many ways

Efficient online recruitment processes in post-pandemic reality will not be easy. HR specialists will use the online candidate databases for this purpose. Thanks to mobile applications for recruitment teams, the entire team will decide the received CVs quickly. Communication with selected candidates will be facilitated by videoconferences. Besides, online employee referral systems will play a significant role in the recruitment processes.

Encouraging job offers

The content of advertisements will be of key importance for job seekers. Potential candidates will apply to a given company if they receive information about the company's career path and educational programs already at the stage of the announcement. The description of the company's culture and information about the products/services may also be interesting. However, topics related to work-life balance will be of less importance.

HR departments face the challenging task of working fully online. In this way, they will improve the work of dispersed teams, build a positive image of the organization, facilitate the development of already employed employees and recruit new ones. The epidemiological situation makes each of these activities difficult.