As 2017 draws to a close, managers and human resources staff everywhere are looking toward the year ahead -- which means considering their recruitment and retention plans. What do you need to know in order to plan for the year ahead?

Here are several of the biggest HR and talent management trends shaping up to affect 2018:

A Candidate Market

• Build an employment brand. What are your company's strengths? Why do your best employees stay with the organization -- and how does it help them thrive? Don't just ask candidates to know and share their strengths; know and share your own as well.
• Communicate consistently. From job postings to offer letters, your company's hiring process must communicate your employment brand consistently. Doing so will keep top candidates engaged, and it will also help candidates who offer a good cultural fit self-select into your organization.
• Work with a recruiting partner. Your recruiting partner can tip the scales in your favor with an outstanding candidate who's on the fence.

Keeping the People You Have

Retention is set to beat recruitment as the number-one concern for HR departments nationwide in 2018.

Interest in retention has risen in recent years, as the high costs of employee turnover have become impossible to ignore. In addition to money spent on the recruitment process itself, companies face lost productivity with every open position: The position itself "leaks" value from productivity loss, and staff who pitch in to complete the open position's core tasks lose ground as they postpone or forego productive work of their own.

Keeping your best people helps you avoid having to battle for new staff. To plug the leaks, start talking to current and former staff about why they consider looking for a new job. Examine the ways in which HR provides (or fails to provide) essential support. And talk to your recruiting partner, whose perspective can identify problems you may not see.

Apprenticeships, Not Internships

Internships have been used and overused in the past decade -- with the result that the term "internship" now has a poor reputation in some industries.

Apprenticeships solve many of the problems of internships while maintaining the benefits, as many blue-collar industries have long known. An apprenticeship allows your company to:

• recruit promising young talent;
• shape their work approach to fit with your team; and
• build the kind of bonds that promote loyalty.

Connect with local schools and colleges, as well as with your recruiting partner, to build a strong apprenticeship program that incorporates your organization's values and goals.

See It, Do It: Visualization Becomes the Next Step in Data

In recent years, the "big trend" in HR has been Big Data: gathering information, analyzing it and using the results to lead companies to better candidates.

Now that the data is in, however, companies are discovering the numbers themselves aren't always the best way to utilize the information they represent. Enter 2018's upcoming shift in focus from big data itself to data visualization. Cutting-edge HR software is already expanding the possibilities of data visualization, making it easy to identify patterns and act on them by laying them out in easy-to-spot formats.

Visualization has an added benefit: it's also easier to communicate patterns -- and advocate for the resources you need to act on them -- when you can present them in attractive and accessible format.

Learn From the Best

While "learning from the best" is one of the oldest tricks in the book for top performers, it's set to become standard operating procedure for HR departments in 2018.

The top companies in the U.S. differ dramatically in their industry focus, missions, goals and values. But one thing they all have in common is their strong recruiting culture, composed of several common elements:

• a stated goal of hiring the best talent available, with CEO and executive support;
• an employee referral program that leads to a high percentage of referred candidates joining the company;
• a structured strategy for recruiting and metrics to track its success; and
• the funding and resources necessary to support the company's recruiting strategy in pursuit of its hiring goals.

To put your recruiting culture on a proactive track in 2018, examine how the best companies do their recruiting -- and emulate it. Your recruiting partner can help.