We’ve all experienced the phenomenal growth in the markets this year, and this Pitchbook article summarizes the magnitude of just how remarkable it’s been. 2021 will likely close with more than $100B in private company fundraising for the first time ever, and there has never been more IPOs and liquidity events than what we’ve seen this year — more than the last several years combined. 2021 US companies will have a record exit value of more than $582B. On top of that, technology is becoming more integrated into every industry and all aspects of our lives, which means a disproportionate amount of all of the capital being raised is being put into many of the innovative tech companies you all are working in.

All of this has led to a frenzy of hiring, particularly in tech, and many companies at earlier stages are building in-house recruiting teams vs relying on outside agencies. We’ve also seen more time and resources being put into building out recruiting operations as a core capability.

We recently reached out to recruiting operations leaders at some of the most recognizable high growth technology companies in our network to ask what teams are prioritizing in 2022. We asked this group as well as sent out a broader survey to our community about recruiting tools to see where teams are looking to drive more efficiency within their process.

Here are the common themes for what Recruiting Operations teams are focusing on in 2022:

1. Back to basics in order to drive more interviewing consistency and effectiveness. Teams are investing in interviewer and hiring manager enablement programs and training, and designing structured interviewing processes to mitigate bias and create more consistency across teams. Many teams are focused on redesigning their interviewing processes to remove unnecessary friction, delivering virtual training courses, and finding opportunities to drive scale through solutions like Brighthire and Metaview.
2. Talent brand has emerged as essential in a world of seemingly endless opportunities for candidates. Companies are exploring ways to personalize and amplify their culture signals. Some teams are applying product marketing tactics to drive engagement, and even finding leaders from internal product marketing teams to transition into these roles within Recruiting teams. Products like Cameo and Pave are being used to personalize the closing process.
3. Recruiting analytics and capacity planning are big focus areas both in hiring dedicated team members to focus on this, as well as on improving the infrastructure itself. Teams aren’t finding success with in-app capabilities within their Lever or Greenhouse ATS and are turning to platforms like Ashby, Gem, TalentWall, and TopFunnel to get insights into the health of their recruiting pipelines. Companies are starting to hire business operations and strategy type candidates into recruiting to drive more analytical rigor into the planning process. Recently, several platforms have started to release forecasting features within their products and our team has been working on addressing the need for better recruiting capacity planning with a product we’ve built, RecruitingPlan.

We’ve all read about the rise of attrition, but one of the things that hasn’t been discussed as much is the rise of boomerang hires as a result of the reshuffling. Alumni programs have resurfaced as a path to efficient hiring where engagement programs and strategy are created similar to referrals. Finally, with fast growth comes constant change, and teams are exploring tools like Jira and Asana to stay aligned on priorities, roadmaps, and status of projects. Keeping up with what’s changing is challenging, especially when teams are distributed, so a focus on asynchronous documentation combined with more visually engaging tools like Loom and Miro for co-designing solutions and communicating changes can be great tactics to keep teams aligned.