The Scoop: Recruitment Trends & Industry Insights | March 2019

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Here is your March guide to the latest in recruitment trends, technology and industry insights! Each month, we highlight the biggest news affecting the industry and explain what to expect as new trends continue to emerge.

BEYOND DESIGN THINKING, DESIGN FEELING

Hopefully, at some point over the past few years, you’ve been a part of a Design Thinking workshop. If not, here is a link to our recent webinar. It is an often-lively solutions-based process for creative problem solving that involves ideation and iterative thinking and is being taught at leading universities around the world.

Google’s Empathy Lab is testing a new concept, “Design Feeling”. At first blush, it might sound slightly warm and fuzzy and that’s not a bad thing. The goal is to evolve the UI design process from focusing on a solution to a “user problem” to applying greater attention to how designs make users feel. The team presents the differences in the two concepts this way:


The team tested three types of interfaces ranging from purely informative to interfaces that are less informative but create more of an emotional connection. Researchers found that 89% of people continued to use the latter interface.

Consider the emotions of “job seekers” (humans) as they are looking for their first job or thinking about the next step in their careers. When you add to that the burgeoning use of conversational agents in digital interfaces, designing a careers site from a place of empathy may be the next logical iteration. https://searchcio.techtarget.com/news/252459180/Google-Empathy-Lab-uses-design-feeling-in-search-of-a-more-human-UI

ESPORTS AND DRONE RACING: ADVERTISING’S NEXT FRONTIER

The relationship between sporting events and advertising dates all the way back to 1870 with tobacco cards (yes, I looked that up). Brands understood back then, and still do now, the value of this uniquely captivated audience. And while the types of games and the methods of ad delivery have changed over time, the value of promotion to this audience has not.

So, it’s not surprising that in 2018, esports saw a 59% increase in revenue from sponsorships and advertising. As generational habits change and entertainment consumption continues to shift to online and streaming formats, brands look for alternative avenues to engage their audiences.

For companies thinking of new ways to attract tech talent, esports fans may align with their key demographic. It’s still a new channel, so brands needs to understand preferences for advertising that adds to rather than distracts from the user’s experience. https://digiday.com/marketing/state-esports-advertisers-five-charts/

The same holds true for brands considering promotion within the drone racing league. Purveyors of this sport find it offensive to be advertised to. They don’t want to feel like brands are talking at them through the sport. Brands succeed by thinking of the opportunity as akin to experiential marketing. Each drone racing level is designed from scratch, creating a wealth of possibilities to incorporate your unique employer brand personality into obstacles and other areas along the mile-long tracks. https://llizo.marketing/how-drone-racing-league-is-integrating-brands-into-its-races/

VR TRAINING ENVIRONMENTS

While definitely no stranger to using virtual simulation for training, the U.S. Army is building a synthetic training environment (battlefield) to train soldiers virtually. This new VR environment builds unpredictability into its design, allowing for simultaneous multi-users engagement. Built on the cloud, it can be easily updated, allowing soldiers in the field to provide updates to the terrain where they’re deployed and let soldiers at home train in the same virtual environment.

Hopefully, in the not too distant future, more employers will incorporate VR training environments into the candidate assessment process, allowing them to evaluate harder to quantify skills such as teamwork, flexibility in unpredictable scenarios and much more. https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/synthetic-training-environment-vr-training/

ROUNDING OUT THE SCOOP: PSYCH, SOCIAL, LABOR AND TECH

  • Providing new avenues for FOMO, Foursquare tested its new Hypertrending location feature during SXSW in Austin. The “map” view of this in-app feature gives you a real-time look at how people are spread throughout the city, allowing you to see how popular places are: https://9to5mac.com/2019/03/10/foursquare-hypertrending-feature/

About Jahkedda Akbar Mitchell

Jahkedda has many years of experience providing strategic guidance, data, and insights on job-seeker trends in support of Radancy and its clients. She has also worked in-house on the candidate attraction team for a large fortune 500 company. Jahkedda has a passion for psychology and storytelling; understanding why we do what we do and how to change behaviors...only using her powers for good. Jahkedda is a member of Radancy Labs: a design thinking focused innovation lab.

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