The No. 1 skill for recruiters to embrace in 2021 is adaptability, according to LinkedIn’s survey.

“This isn’t surprising, given the challenges we faced last year,” Lobosco said. “Recruiters are rapidly adding skills like bringing clarity to talent data, reshaping employer branding and fine-tuning the virtual hiring process.”

Notably, the fastest-growing pivot for recruiters during the pandemic was personal development.

“We saw recruiters massively increase their appetite for learning as soon as COVID-19 hit last March, more than doubling their normal learning consumption in the following months,” said Johnny Campbell, CEO of Dublin-based SocialTalent, a learning platform for recruiters. “Hot topics included talent advisory training, virtual interviewing, being productive while working remotely, virtual onboarding and internal mobility. Learning how to be better talent advisors is always a popular topic for recruiters, but many more sought it out for the first time as their hiring managers frantically reached out to them with a massive demand for information about the evolving labor market.”

Colleen Garrett, SHRM-CP, was a recruiter at a retirement community in Fort Myers, Fla., where hiring slowed down considerably as the coronavirus spread. She said she looked at the downtime as an opportunity to “think outside the box.”

“It was a time to take a step back, audit processes, figure out what had been working in the past, what hadn’t been working and how the future was going to change,” said Garrett, currently a recruiter at health care staffing provider Clipboard Health.

She spent time rethinking talent strategy, learning how to integrate new talent acquisition tools to workflows, developing training manuals, and learning about topics like social recruiting and how SEO factors into job posts.

She recommends that recruiters in 2021 spend time developing skills in virtual interviewing, onboarding new hires, understanding talent metrics, and showing empathy and compassion.

“Naturally, recruiters are people-centric,” Garrett said. “But 2020 wasn’t just hard because of the pandemic, but also because of the economic fallout and all the people who are jobless or displaced in their career. It is our duty to go the extra mile, to understand their struggle and what their needs are.”

[SHRM 2021]