The major economic and business themes over the past year have been focused on the war for talent, creating an employment experience for job seekers and candidates, overtime and compensation, the end of the annual performance review, the continued skills and leadership gap, the rise of Generation Z and the shift to the on-demand workforce. These trends have all impacted how companies recruit, retain, train and structure their workforce for the future.

The top workplace trends for 2017 include:

1. Companies focus on improving their candidate and employee experiences. Companies have always created marketing experiences for customers, and prospects, in order to delight them, increase loyalty and grow their revenues. Next year, you will see the walls come down between your HR, marketing and customer service departments in order to develop experiences for both candidates and employees. A recent study found that nearly 60% of job seekers have had a poor candidate experience and 72% of them have shared their experience on an online employer review site such as Glassdoor.com. When employers don’t notify candidates of their application status, they are discouraged from ever applying for another job at that company again, which limits their future talent pool. Furthermore, a bad candidate experience can turn away customers who may be your candidates, thus resulting in a loss of potential revenue. Virgin, for instance, created a new candidate experience for the thousands of people they are unable to hire out of the 150,000 applications they receive annually, and have created a new seven million dollar revenue stream by creating a better experience for them. Aside from candidates, employee retention and engagement have become some of HR’s top issues as top talent has numerous employment options and productivity is key to growth. In another study, it was discovered that 83% of HR said that “employee experience” is either important or very important to their organizations success, and in order to enhance the experience, they are investing more in training (56%), improving their work space (51%) and giving more rewards (47%). IBM has used people analytics to predict retention risk for employees in key job roles, and notifies managers so they can prevent them from quitting, which has saved the company over $130 million dollars

To read the rest of this article from Forbes contributor Dan Schawbel, click here!