2021 earned its place in the HR history books. We watched people come back from lockdown, settle into hybrid routines that split the week between the kitchen table and the office, and then, in numbers nobody quite predicted, hand in their notice for something better. Call it the Great Resignation, call it a reset. Either way, it left recruiters scrambling.
That churn didn’t happen in a vacuum. Rising inflation, talk of higher minimum wages, and a genuinely uncertain economy pushed a lot of people to rethink what a job is worth to them.
So where does that leave us in 2022? Staring at a labour market that’s tighter, noisier, and harder to hire into than it was two years ago. Below are the HR trends we think will shape the year, and why getting your recruiting right, from the very first screen, matters more now than it has in a long time.
Why are turnover rates so high in 2022?
Turnover is the headache almost every HR leader is nursing right now. In HireVue’s 2022 Global Trends Report, 55% of the 1,657 hiring leaders surveyed said they’re seeing higher turnover this year (reported via UNLEASH, February 2022). More than half. That’s not a blip, it’s the baseline we’re all hiring against.
The uncomfortable part is what high turnover does to the hiring function itself. Every person who walks out is a role you have to fill again, usually faster than you’d like, and increasingly at a distance. Online interviews aren’t the exception anymore, they’re the default, and running a good one takes a different skill set than reading the room across a desk.
It also raises the stakes on getting the right person the first time. When you’re backfilling constantly, a bad hire costs you twice: once to onboard them, once to replace them. A solid pre-interview check, verifying what’s on the CV before you pour hours into a full interview loop, quietly tilts the odds in your favour.
Why is hiring getting harder for small businesses?
If turnover is the national story, scarcity is the local one. Through 2022, around half of small business owners reported job openings they simply couldn’t fill (NFIB Jobs Report, 2022). Half. For a lean team, one empty seat is a real chunk of capacity sitting idle.
When candidates are scarce, HR has to look where it hasn’t looked before. That means widening the net to career changers, returners, and people whose CV doesn’t follow the usual straight line. It also dovetails neatly with the diversity and inclusion push reshaping recruitment across the board. Casting wider is good practice and, right now, good business.
But a bigger pool brings its own question. How do you keep quality up while you move fast and consider people outside your usual profile? That balance, speed on one side and a trustworthy hire on the other, is the tightrope small teams walk all year. It’s also exactly where a quick, consistent screening step earns its keep: it lets you open the door wider without lowering the bar.
How is remote and hybrid work changing what HR screens for?
Covid-19 reshaped the workplace, and 2022 is the year we live with the consequences. Uncertainty still hangs over hiring decisions, and remote work, for all its upsides, has left plenty of teams feeling disconnected and a little fragmented.
Split your people between home and office and a few things surface fast. Project workflows get messier. People working from home can feel less tethered to their tasks, and without a manager nearby, feedback doesn’t always land or get acted on. The experts keep flagging the same pattern: remote staff drift toward isolation, collaboration gets patchier, and engagement takes real, deliberate effort to hold onto.
Here’s the comparison worth sitting with. In the office, culture and accountability happen almost by accident, through hallway chats, overheard context, a quick nod of approval across the room. Remotely, every bit of that has to be designed on purpose. Nothing is absorbed by osmosis anymore.
So the profile HR screens for shifts. Alongside the hard skills, you’re now hunting for the soft ones: self-management, the discipline to run your own day, and the kind of team instinct that survives a video call. Team-building and smarter onboarding aren’t nice extras this year. They’re how you stop a distributed team from quietly coming apart.
Why employee wellbeing is now an HR priority
All of this points to a more holistic view of HR, one where work-life balance isn’t a perk you advertise but a thing you actually protect. Mental wellness support and real burnout prevention have climbed the agenda in 2022, and not a moment too soon.
And wellbeing starts earlier than most people think. It starts at hiring. Bring in someone who genuinely fits the role and the team, and you’ve headed off a good chunk of the friction, the mismatch, and the burnout before any of it begins. Which loops back to the single practice sitting underneath every trend on this list: recruiting well, and recruiting carefully.
Where background screening fits into 2022 hiring
Pull these threads together, higher turnover, scarce candidates, remote-first hiring, a louder focus on wellbeing, and they share one pressure point. You have to bring the right people in, and you have to be sure about them before they start.
That’s the gap background screening fills. Verifying identity, employment history, qualifications, and the checks relevant to the role does two useful things at once. It raises your confidence in a remote hire you might never meet in person, and it catches the mismatches early, before they cost you a whole onboarding cycle.
One honest caveat: screening is not a retention strategy. It won’t fix a culture problem, and it won’t keep a disengaged employee from leaving. What it does is make sure the person you’re betting on is who they say they are, so everything else, the onboarding, the wellbeing work, the team-building, lands on solid ground instead of shaky foundations.
If you’re rethinking your hiring for 2022, that’s where we’d start. At Mindit, background screening is what we do, and we’re always happy to talk through where it fits in your process.
The 2022 HR trends at a glance
| Trend | What’s happening in 2022 | What it means for your hiring |
|---|---|---|
| High turnover | 55% of hiring leaders report more of it (HireVue) | Hire faster and more often; verify candidates before you invest |
| Candidate scarcity | Around half of small firms can’t fill open roles (NFIB) | Widen the pool, and hold quality with an early, consistent check |
| Remote and hybrid | Interviews and onboarding move online | Screen for self-management and team fit, not just hard skills |
| Wellbeing focus | Burnout and work-life balance top the agenda | Right-fit hiring heads off friction before it starts |
Frequently asked questions
Are 2022 HR trends really that different from 2021?
The themes rhyme, but the pressure is higher. Turnover is more widespread, candidates are scarcer, and remote hiring has gone from emergency measure to standard practice. The difference in 2022 is that these are now the conditions you plan around, not shocks you react to.
Does background screening slow hiring down?
Done well, no. A focused pre-interview check actually saves time, because it filters out mismatches before you commit to full interview loops. The slow, expensive path is discovering a problem after someone has started.
Is screening worth it for a small team?
Arguably it matters more. When every hire is a large share of your headcount, one wrong fit hurts far more than it would in a 500-person company. Getting it right the first time is the whole point.
Sources
- NFIB Jobs Report, 2022
- HireVue, 2022 Global Trends Report, reported via UNLEASH, February 2022
