2015 Recruiting Trends in the Netherlands

The year 2015 has brought a new zeal to talent acquisition worldwide as companies are recruiting more now than they have in the last four years. According to LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends 2015, this increase in volume is also met with an overall decrease in HR budgets, leading efficient recruiters to do more with less. To make matters more difficult, competition and compensation continue to be obstacles for landing top talent. Advancements in social media, digital marketing and big data analytics, however, are enabling recruiters to arm themselves with information and craft targeted messages that reach a range of online professional and social networks.
Traditionally a progressive nation, the Netherlands is seeing some interesting and dynamic changes in response to these global trends. We explore these below:

1. Competition from other employers
   Battling with competing firms for top talent is a major challenge for recruiters in the Netherlands. Of the 4,125 global talent leaders surveyed in over 31 countries, Dutch talent leaders were the 2nd highest to name competition as their company's biggest obstacles to attracting top talent. If recruiters want to attract top talent in the Netherlands, it will not come easy, as there will be a number of competitors all offering different incentives to ultimately convince the best candidates to join their team. Other leading trends, however, give insight into some tools employers use to manage their competition.
   
2. Sourcing from social professional networks
   One of the strongest global trends in 2015 recruiting comes from the growing numbers of hires that are acquired from online sources. The Netherlands ranked highest for social professional networks with 76% of recruiters using them to draw in likely candidates. Fifty percent of the Dutch talent leaders surveyed also mentioned that online job boards were a significant source of white collar professional candidates placed in their organization. Third party staffing firms, however, were only significant to about 38% of talent acquisition leaders. 
   
3. Recruiting becoming more like marketing
   Much like how companies work to nurture and maintain their brand with customers, employers today are using branding strategies to ensure they stay top of mind to candidates and attract the best talent on the market. Fifty-six percent of the global talent leaders surveyed said they believe cultivating their employer brand is a chief priority and the Netherlands is named a top country for this trend. Employers work to enhance their employer brand by outlining their values, culture, accomplishments and benefits on either a company website or social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook.
   
4. Passive talent less sought after
   Dutch recruiters are mostly passé when it comes to going after passive talent. Passive talent are those prospective candidates that may be open to speaking to a recruiter, but are otherwise completely satisfied in their current employment situation and don’t particularly want to move. This year, recruiters in the Netherlands were among the least to reach out to passive talent, with only 48% aggressively pursuing them (compared to 83% in China and 72% in the U.S.).
   
5. Recruiting young professionals
   While most global companies actively recruit young professionals, the Netherlands ranks among the lowest, with less than three quarters (71%) of recruiters targeting this group. Young professionals are defined as anyone who is 0-3 years out of school, so this group is likely to have less work experience than other groups. Lack of work experience and a gap in worker knowledge could account for the relatively low number of Dutch recruiters who target this younger talent cohort. However, as more baby boomers become eligible for retirement it will be important to train the incoming millennial staff while transferring key job roles tasks to them in both time and financially efficient ways.
   
6. Talent analytics play increasing role in recruiting
   More global recruiting efforts today are performed using talent analytics, but only a quarter of those talent leaders surveyed believe they are using this data in an efficient wayMoreover, a mere 12% of recruiting decision makers in the Netherlands said they feel they are using talent analytics very well in their roles. These numbers signal an emerging trend in recruiting and data analytics that can be cultivated to target and acquire top talent more effectively, but it will take employers investing more time and resources into their own talent analytics for this tool to be fully optimized for strategic workforce planning.
   Employers today are using more technological and strategic ways to stay ahead of the talent acquisition curve and attract top candidates to their companies. Trends in 2015 show that while competition among employers can negatively impact recruiting efforts, strategies that use effective employer branding as well as professional networks and social media can help maintain a competitive edge. As more millennials enter a workforce that consists of less baby boomers, employers will need to plan smartly for generational shifts that will affect all job roles from the executive to entry levels.