Important HR-trends everyone should know about

Remote work, mental health, automatization of recruitment, inclusion… How will HR-trends influence our work in the near future?

Our author, Anna Stetsenko, is the founder of Indigo Tech Recruiters, an IT recruitment agency

The relationship between company and employee continually changes. People are looking for jobs, and companies are becoming more particular about choosing their teams as their care for their brand increases. So which HR-trends does everyone needs to know about?

Trend №1 — inclusion

As of now, inclusion as a fundamental value is still at its beginning, as transformation of a whole generation is necessary for this value to be fully implemented. Inclusion was one of the most discussed issues during Western HR-conferences of the past year. It is becoming more and more important across the globe, yet grows very slowly in the homogenous and relatively intolerant environment of Ukraine.

So what is inclusion? In a business environment, it means more than a harmonious integration of people with different physical and mental needs.

Rather, the main point is to Include All Voices in Your Workplace Culture. This means recognizing the uniqueness of the individual needs of every team member. This also means understanding that equality begins with diversity.

Here’s how it can be done in practice:

• enough space for privacy and rest instead of to much open space;
• elevators, ramps, bathroom facilities and workplaces adapted to people with disabillities;
• office rooms for breastfeeding and a paid babysitter in case of force majeure;
• using gender-neutral language in corporate communication;
• all gender-friendly toilets (small details such as tampons and pads are just as necessary to have in offices as toilet paper);
• recognition of all religious and cultural celebrations depending on the composition of the team. Creating prayer rooms, kosher refrigerators, reduction of work hours on Fridays in respect of the Sabbath, flexibile meeting times in respect of prayer times;
• respect of diet preferences including vegetarian, vegan, and raw food, as well as being attentive to the needs of those with food allergies when developing a menu

Trend №2 — remote work

Remote work becomes more and more popular. The tendency is evident:

• the number of remote employees will soon equal the number of office workers;
• Ukrainian business will continue to experiment with remote work;
• there are already hybrid solutions, such as one day a week out of the office;
• there are more and more job openings for remote work, and companies are increasingly trying to make their teams work remotely.

The trend is gaining momentum. There are conferences, courses and even entire academies dedicated to remote work. For instance, this year Indigo has been a partner to Running Remote Conference.

Trend № 3 — mental health & mindfulness

It was once the domain of those steeped in esoterism and the restless startupers of Silicon Valley. Now mental wellbeing is a necessity for everyone who wants to be successful and happy. So welcome to the club! Proper sleep, techniques for relaxation and concentration, meditation, getting into the state of flow, all these things are now appearing even on a corporate level.

Trend № 4 — human-recruiters and recruitment chatbots

Nowadays recruiters are not just humans anymore; they are also chatbots. New York companies have begun to openly forewarn job seekers about this during the preliminary stages of recruitment, so that it’s clear who they are communicating with.

The most entrepreneurial, such as Reply.id, have already created bots to process job offers.

What does this indicate? We have become so mired in recruitment information noise that has clogged up the channels of communication with candidates, that something must replace cold recruitment.

Sales experience has same tendency. Everyone is tired of cold letters and calls and high hopes are placed on influences. Perhaps human recruiters must also move in this direction.

Trend № 5 — artificial intelligence

Everyone is sick of hearing about the disruptive HR technologies. Not because the technology doesn’t exist, but because marketing is way ahead of the implementation. Meanwhile, good solutions often arise.

For instance, there are services which make sourcing (primary search for candidates) much easier and automatically find the exact matches between a job description and a CV.

For example, CV Compiler is a service to improve CVs of IT professionals and increase the chances of finding a job. The global goal of the project is to turn CV Compiler into a personalized career consultant which will help job seekers to get a job in a specific company.

The world does not stand still, and we hope you don’t either!