Tech & Data Insights for Recruitment | Workable

Your Hiring Pulse report for April 2024

Content team — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 12:35:01 +0000

In March’s Hiring Pulse, we looked at year-over-year comparisons through different lenses in our data.

And this time, we find the differences even more striking. Let’s have a look and understand what those differences are – and more so, what they mean.

How we’re looking at data

We’ve adopted two methodologies in how we look at the Hiring Pulse dataset. For Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire, we’re measuring each month using the average of 2019, the last “normal” year, as a baseline index of 100.

For job openings, we’re taking a different route – simply, the average number of job postings per company. This gives us the opportunity to gauge overall recruitment activity and whether that’s going up or down.

Want a more detailed methodology? Jump to the end and check it out.

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings (JO)
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Job opening trend bleaker than in past years
Talent pools are shrinking – sharply
Q1 of 2024 looks very different compared with previous Q1s

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of January are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Quick clarification, because people are asking: the data in this chart shows the trendline against the 2019 average as an index of 100, not the actual number of days in TTF.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend through to the end of March against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled:

You might find this refreshing, or you might not: there isn’t much undulation either way this time around for March’s Time to Fill Metric, which dropped a humble 1.1 points from February’s 82.6 to March’s 81.5.

We noted in past Hiring Pulses how January’s spike is likely the result of strained bandwidth in hiring teams over the holiday season and the fall back to ‘normal’ levels in February being a result of teams catching up in filling crucial roles in their organization.

This month is more of the same – just business as usual Which is nice, until you look at the next metric – that of the Job Openings.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

As stated above, we’re displaying this as an average of job postings per company in the network. And because this is not contingent on job opened/filled dates like TTF and Candidates per Hire, we can simply look at the raw job open numbers up to the end of March.

As usual, when we’re looking at four different company size buckets here – the 1-50, the 51-200, the 200+, and all of them combined – we’ll always find an interesting story to tell.

The overarching stat you want to look at is the average number of job postings across all company sizes throughout the entire Workable network. That number is down to 8.2 job postings per company on average in March, which is down from 8.7 in January and 8.6 in February.

The enterprise-level bucket (with 200+ full-time employees) is also down in job activity, from 18.5 new job postings on average in January to 17.1 in February and now, 16.5 in March.

Medium-sized businesses (51-200) saw a more dramatic drop – down one full job posting on average from 7.8 in February to 6.8 in March.

The small businesses (1-50), at least, show relatively stable activity – 6.8 in January, 7 in February, and back to 6.8 in March.

And let’s put all of this in perspective: for analysis’ sake, let’s say the typical enterprise-level company has 250 employees. March’s 16.5 jobs on average would mean 6.6% of the entire company’s payroll is, technically, looking for new people to pay. That’s one in 15 job positions across the company needing to be filled/backfilled in March.

Encompassing anywhere from 51-200 employees, our medium-sized businesses bucket covers a wide spectrum, but let’s just say 125 for this analysis. March’s 6.8 job postings translates to 5.4% of the company’s employee base, or roughly one in 18 employees.

So, in a sense, companies with 125 employees are hiring less per capita than companies with 250 employees.

Now, when we look at small businesses, the difference stands out. Since we picked the middle of the range for medium-sized businesses (125, based on 51-200), let’s use 25 as our employee size for a small business. In this case, March’s 6.8 equates to a staggering 27.2% of all employees in the company. That’s more than one in four employees.

Imagine going into your office and for every Thomas, Shiloh, Hassan, and yourself, one of you is the “new hire”. That’s a sizable portion, especially impactful when you’re a small business that thrives on agility. A quick onboarding for any new hire is a must in this area – and a delayed time to full ramp (i.e. full production) can prove costly for you.

OK, enough of that. You may be wondering how all of this compares to previous years, especially since we did it last month. We talk a lot about the “new normal”, or in Ida Wolfe’s case, the “never normal”. So, what’s normal for March?

Note: this is calculated a little differently. For the sake of direct comparison, we’re using January as our baseline index of 100.

Obviously, 2020 was a gong show starting in March, so let’s set that one aside and look at the other years in our dataset. You can see how 2024 is the only year out of the five other years where there’s a drop in job posting activity. Every other year (again, 2020 excluded), we see a healthy upswing in jobs for March. Not this year.

OK, what does that look like for each of the size buckets? First, the companies with 1-50 full-time employees:

Small businesses have been a feel-good story over the last little while for the most part – but when we look at it through this specific year-over-year lens, we see that, again, the first quarter of this year doesn’t look great compared with previous years (again, ignoring 2020 as an obvious anomaly).

And moreover, this year shows the only February-March decline of any year in our dataset.

Let’s look at the 51-200 FTE size bucket now:

Like the 1-50 FTE size bucket, the mid-range companies (51-200) paint an equally bleak picture for the first quarter of the new year. Again, when omitting 2020, this year’s the only one that takes a sharp nosedive from February to March 2024. And it’s a pretty steep one, too.

Now – the 200+ FTE companies:

The enterprise-level companies also see a drop from February, but the difference from the other two size buckets is that the drop is not nearly as pronounced as the one seen from January to February. That’s the opposite of what we saw last month, where this category saw the biggest month-to-month drop not only when compared with the other sizes, but any Jan-Feb drop of any year for any bucket.

Interesting. And unlike previous Hiring Pulse reports, there’s actually even more eye-opening stuff coming up, this one in the Candidates per Hire metric.

3. Candidates per Hire

Workable defines the number of candidates per hire (CPH) as, succinctly, the number of applicants for a job up to the point of that job being filled. Again, remember, this is a trendline using the 2019 CPH average as a baseline of 100, not the actual number of candidates per hire.

Let’s look at what’s going on here through March:

Remember that time on the roller coaster in [insert town here]? How you were slowly climbing up the tracks with a rhythmic clickety-clack clickety-clack, until you reach the top and then all of a sudden you’re careening down the other side so your heart basically goes up your throat?

Well, this is the metric version of that – the Candidates per Hire metric, which has been in a steady upward climb (with a month or two here of moderate drops or stabilization) since basically mid–late 2022, is suddenly coming down in a dramatic drop. If January’s 189.9 to February’s 182 felt like a lot, then February’s 182 to March’s 161.6 is, in a word, dramatic.

That’s a drop of 20.4 points – the biggest since a 30.2-point drop from October to November 2020, and the second-biggest drop in all our records dating back to January 2019.

Since we’re doing year-over-year comparisons in this report, let’s do that for CPH as well:

Two different ways to look at this. Either candidate pools are in rapid decline, or they’re simply returning to the “normal” of previous years after being so high for so long.

Let’s now go into what we think all this may mean.

What’s going on here?

Perhaps all the tumult around layoffs, restabilization (as opposed to destabilization), the talent shift, and so on has meant new jobs popping up and those getting filled in quick order.

We mentioned the talent shift – Trevor Bogan over at Top Employers Institute wrote a little about this and we’ll get a little deeper about it here. It’s basically how old talents and skills aren’t necessarily becoming redundant or obsolete; they are simply no longer in need in some areas and in greater need in other areas. The same for goods and services – some lessen in importance and value, and others grow in value over that same time period.

So is there really job loss? Maybe to a degree, as we’ve seen in layoffs. But it’s more of a groundshift.

Think about what happened during COVID. If you were lucky enough to have a fully online platform, especially in the area of communication, delivery, or something similar, the demand for your software likely skyrocketed during the pandemic when the majority of society operated on a remote basis both at work and at play.

Now, we have AI which is one of the more exciting developments to come along in a long time. It’s also disrupted our society to a point where those already operating in AI technology are very optimistic about times ahead – a recent Deloitte report finds 62% of leaders from AI-fueled orgs are excited about what’s coming up.

And 79% expect generative AI to change the way in which they operate over the next three years. A bulk of that is in coding, especially – which is one example of a sector facing considerable upheaval (if not redundance) in the age of AI.

There’s reason to be cautious (and you’re in good company if you are – 30% feel uncertain about it all), but if you’re not one of the early adopters of new technology and able to adapt quickly to new developments, your company may fall behind.

One way to stay pace with your competition is not just to maintain product competitiveness, but to also acquire and retain the best talent that’s out there. A solid HR suite may be what you need to stay up there atop the hill.

See you next month!

Thoughts, comments, disagreements? Send them to content@workable.com, with “Hiring Pulse” in the subject heading. We’ll share the best feedback in an upcoming report. Watch for our next Hiring Pulse in April!

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

To bring the best insights to small and medium (and enterprise-level) businesses worldwide, here’s what we’re doing with the Job Openings metric: we’re taking the number of job openings in a given month and dividing that by the number of active companies in our dataset, and posting that as an average. For example, if July 2022 shows the average Job Openings per company as 7.7, that simply means each company posted an average of 7.7 jobs that month.

For the Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire metrics, we’re comparing a specific month’s trend against the full average of 2019, and we show the result using that 2019 average as a baseline index of 100. For example, if July 2022 shows an average Time to Fill of 30 days for all jobs, and the monthly average for all of 2019 is 28, we present the result for July 2022 as 107.1 – in other words, 7.1% higher than the average of 2019.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for April 2024 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for February 2024

Keith MacKenzie — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 19:14:33 +0000

In January’s Hiring Pulse, we took a full deep dive into how each of the past several years compared against each other and came out of it with interesting stuff.

Now it’s February – and we have the opportunity to look at how this year started in each of the three hiring metrics. And we have insights for you.

Let’s take a look!

How we’re looking at data

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings (JO)
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

January 2024 marked a record high in the Time to Fill metric
Job openings also saw a dramatic surge in January
Candidates Per Hire is at an all-time high and at a trend directly contrasting with past Januarys

1. Time to Fill

Quick clarification, because people are asking: the data in this chart shows the trendline against the 2019 average as an index of 100, not the actual number of days in TTF.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend through to the end of January against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled:

What we see here is a significant jump in the Time to Fill metric. January 2024’s 88.9 is at its highest point since exactly one year ago when the trend hit 90.4 in January 2024.

But that’s not the big story. The month-over-month jump from December to January is the biggest single-month climb in all our data going back to the start of 2019.

Apart from that, nothing is terribly unusual here. The January jump is fairly standard, from what we’ve seen in the past four years:

Now, let’s look at the job openings.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

The first thing to jump at us is, like in the TTF trend, the sudden jump from December’s 6.8 job postings per company on average to January’s 8.7 – that’s for all companies in the Workable network.

Again, like the TTF trend, this is normal when looking at past years. December 2021 to January 2022 was 5.2 to 6.6, and December 2022 to January 2023 was 5.2 to 6.6 again. This means one thing – the jump is not unusual, but the raw numbers are definitely higher.

The other element to look at is how each company size bucket is doing in this trend. Small businesses (with 1-50 full-time employees – or FTEs) jumped from 6 job postings on average in December to 6.6 in January, while enterprise-sized businesses (200+ FTEs) saw a dramatic jump from 13.5 to 19.4.

That last part is significant in that it’s the busiest month for enterprise companies since June 2022 which saw 20.3 job postings on average, and the single biggest month-over-month jump in average job postings in all network data.

The busy-ness of mid-sized businesses (51-200 FTEs) is the big story here. After a rather middling 2023 in terms of job posting activity where small business job activity matched or even exceeded mid-sized businesses in terms of volume, mid-sized job postings took a flying leap from 4.6 job postings on average to 7.9 in January. That’s not quite double the previous month but it’s pretty close.

Now, the Candidates Per Hire metric:

3. Candidates per Hire

Let’s look at what’s going on here through January:

This is absolutely an employers’ market and it’s the same narrative again in this new Hiring Pulse. The Candidates Per Hire trend is again at an all-time high, this time jumping to 184.8 in January.

But for once, that’s not the big story. If we’re talking about a surge in the number of candidates per job, that’s boring. If we talk about it in year-over-year comparison, then it’s interesting.

In the same way that we’ve looked at TTF and JOs, let’s have a look at what Nov-Dec-Jan look like in past years for the CPH trend:

See that? 2021-2022 aside, you can see how a rise in the CPH trend from November to December followed by a dip in January is ‘normal’.

But this time around, we do see the normal jump from November 2023’s 173.5 to December’s 180.6 – but then that’s followed by another jump from December’s 180.6 to January 184.8.

It’s not a huge jump relatively speaking. After all, we’ve seen numerous double-digit month-over-month jumps especially in the first half of 2023, highlighted by a staggering 34.8-point increase from May to June 2023. But it’s still noteworthy because it absolutely goes against the normal trend.

So what’s normal is not normal, and what’s not normal is normal. Get it? No? Never mind – it kind of makes sense if you try and think on it too much.

What’s going on here?

It’s clear that the job market is undergoing a significant transformation, marked by a volatile yet dynamic landscape. The notable increase in the Time to Fill metric coupled with a surge in job openings and an unprecedented high in Candidates Per Hire, underscores a period of intense activity and change within the job market.

Let’s take the optimistic approach: this period is characterized not only by the challenges it presents but also by the unprecedented opportunities it offers to both employers and job seekers alike.

The advent of “easy apply” (lazy apply?) and “one-click apply” options has changed the job application process. It’s not just “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” – it’s much more calculated than that, and it’s further enhanced by AI-driven platforms – even a fully AI-enabled job application experience.

Employers, too, have incorporated AI technologies like Workable to manage the influx of applications – ensuring a smoother and more effective hiring process.

You might even say we’re in a weird Cold War state where the battling technologies of the jobseeker and the hiring team continually keep pace with each other. Well, it’s not actually a Cold War since both are actively making moves – but you get the idea.

Will we reach a point where the robots will do both en masse while we languish at the beach? No, probably not – Workable’s AI in Hiring & Work survey finds that more than one in seven hiring managers still take a solely human approach to making that final hiring decision, while another 56.8% say they take a predominantly human approach with the support of AI tools.

But the more interesting part is this: 353,000 new jobs were added in January in the United States, and 141 tech companies slashed 34,250 jobs in 2024 as of this report’s publication.

These figures suggest that jobs are not disappearing. Rather, they’re changing, evolving, and migrating across industries and sectors – and yes, skill sets. This points to a highly volatile job market, and also a landscape ripe with opportunities for adaptation and growth.

This job market is absolutely in flux with all the rapid changes in the economy and emergence of new paradigms and technologies in employment. But jobs are not vanishing – they’re transforming, offering new pathways for both employers and job seekers to explore and adapt to the changing dynamics of work.

For you – agility, innovation, and a forward-looking approach are key to harnessing the opportunities that lie ahead. Enjoy, and see you next month!

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for January 2024 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for January 2024

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 22:17:05 +0000

In December’s Hiring Pulse, we took a deep dive into UK & Ireland hiring data and the lesson was clear: SMB hiring data isn’t all the same across the world’s many regions (and countries and even sectors).

It also means that with a full year of 2023 in our databank, we have the opportunity to do another kind of comparison in this month’s Hiring Pulse. In short: we can compare what 2023 looks like against preceding years in our three major hiring metrics.
So, let’s get started on that!

How we’re looking at data

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings (JO)
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Early 2020 and late 2023 both show huge variation from the norm
Small businesses were especially active in hiring in the second half of 2023
The Great Candidate Surge is the biggest story of 2023

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of December are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Quick clarification, because people are asking: the data in this chart shows the trendline against the 2019 average as an index of 100, not the actual number of days in TTF.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend through to the end of December against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled:

What’s glaringly obvious here are the years 2020 and 2023 in how much they stand out from 2021 and 2022.

First, the year that shall not be mentioned again (OK, fine, it’s 2020 if you’re wondering) saw a pretty significant shift downwards in the Time to Fill trend from the start of the pandemic through to September of that year.

Note how drastic the drop is – it’s well above the other three years in the first quarter including 102.6 in March 2020, the highest in this particular dataset.

And then, like the first drop in a roller coaster ride, it plummets to 82.7, the fifth lowest month of the 48 months and easily the steepest plunge of any period in that time period. It became incredibly quick to fill open roles – like poking holes in a dam, the water comes rushing through and those openings get filled right away.

Now, look at 2023. While it doesn’t look so unusual compared with 2021 and 2022 to start off the year, it does hover at a very low level throughout the entire year without the more significant undulations that we see in 2021 and to a lesser degree, in 2022.

Now, let’s look at the job openings.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

Let’s first look at ALL job openings across the board for each of the four years. Remember, this is average jobs per company. You can see how the years are mostly similar, apart from the dip at the start of the pandemic in early 2020 from 4.4 job openings per company in January 2020 to half that in April (2.2).

Like TTF, this is the steepest drop of any period between 2020 and 2023.

And there’s also a significant growth in the latter few months of 2023 – most notably going from 7.1 in July 2023 to a high of 8.3 in October of that year.

Job openings – small businesses

In the small business category (those with 1-50 full-time employees or FTEs), the two most interesting developments over the last four years are, again, in early 2020 and late 2023.

That being said, the drop in job openings in early 2020 wasn’t nearly as pronounced for small businesses as it was for all businesses, going from 2.1 job postings per company on average in January 2020 to a low of 1.3 in April 2020. It’s not half of what it was, but it’s still significant enough.

The jump in the latter part of 2023, while more pronounced than the overall average, is still pretty much aligned with the baseline.

What you should pay attention to is the sheer number of job postings per company in this size bucket – take October’s 6.8 for instance. Even for a company with 50 FTEs, that’s a new job posting for every seven employees. Either there’s a lot of turnover, or there’s a lot of growth in this category, or a lot of both.

Job openings – mid-sized businesses

Mid-sized businesses (51-200 FTEs) also saw a significant drop in average jobs posted in the early part of 2020, but the real story is the bump in the latter part of 2023 where average jobs per mid-sized company jumps to 6.7 in November.

The eye-opening part? Even though we’re talking about companies that essentially have five times the employee count as those in the small-business bucket, the average job postings per company here is lower than that for small businesses in three of the last four months (6.3 vs. 6.5 for September, 6 vs. 6.8 for October, and 4.5 vs. 6 for December 2023).

Job openings – enterprise-level companies

For enterprise-level companies (200+ FTEs), we see a very different story. While the early-2020 drop isn’t out of the ordinary when compared with the other size buckets, the trend for 2023 is entirely different. The others saw a jump in average job postings – this category didn’t.

Between March and October, the job posting activity barely changed from a low of 19.3 to a high of 20.7 and that’s it.

Now, the Candidates Per Hire metric:

3. Candidates per Hire

Let’s look at what’s going on here through December:

The big story in 2023 is clear. On the heels of the Great Resignation and the Great Discontent, we witnessed the Great Candidate Surge.

It’s all the more remarkable considering that, in 2020, unemployment jumped from 4.4% in March to 14.9% in April – you’d think there would be that many more candidates applying for any open job as a result, especially since job posting activity nearly came to a screeching halt.

But, instead, what we see in the second half of 2023 is a significant surge in the Candidates Per Hire trend and a jump in job posting activity during the same time.

One might even think that 2023 is much more eventful economy-wise than 2020 was, and they may be right. We saw a lot happen in the job landscape during the year.

What’s going on here?

The ebb and flow of the Time to Fill, the varied landscape of job openings, and the unexpected surge in candidates per hire in 2023 – these aren’t just numbers. They represent a vivid picture of the dynamic and ever-evolving world of hiring as of late.

The data, of course, isn’t absolute truth – but it’s a gateway to understanding the multifaceted fabric of economic shifts, industry-specific nuances, and business strategy upheavals in a labor market that’s seen numerous ebbs and flows in a short time.

So what does this all mean, anyway? It means you’re navigating a kaleidoscopic hiring environment. Imagine posting a job ad and weathering the onslaught of applications. This doesn’t have to be a Sisyphean undertaking – it’s just a call to arms for flexibility and innovation in your hiring strategy.

It means taking on cutting-edge hiring tools in your work – and yes, that does include AI in its various forms. The use of AI in the hiring process is clearly documented in this new Workable survey, and it’s no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a necessity.

Watch this space for deeper dives in 2024 as we work to find interesting trends between industries, regions, and even job function. If you like numbers, or if you want to compare your own hiring experiences with a baseline, you’ve come to the right place.

Enjoy, and see you next month!

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for December 2023 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for December 2023

Keith MacKenzie — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 17:59:48 +0000

In November’s Hiring Pulse, we noted a huge drop in new jobs in the United States from 336,000 in September to 150,000 in October.

But now that’s changed again. Last month, the United States saw 199,000 new jobs added – the bulk of it in healthcare, social assistance, government, leisure, and manufacturing, Retail, on the other hand, lost a collective 38,400 jobs in November.

UK data is not yet released to the end of November, but we do have good news: we have our own network data from the UK & Ireland which will be our deep dive for this month.

Without further ado, let’s look at the three major hiring metrics as per the Hiring Pulse tradition.

How we’re looking at data

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings (JO)
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Candidates per Hire sees its third-biggest MoM drop of the year
Time to Fill is dropping, and that’s unusual at this time of year
Small businesses are hiring much more than medium-sized businesses in the UK & Ireland

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of November are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Quick clarification, because people are asking: the data in this chart shows the trendline against the 2019 average as an index of 100, not the actual number of days in TTF.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend through to the end of October against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled:

Last month, we pointed enthusiastically to the three consecutive months of increase in the Time to Fill trend from August through to October – but now, that trend has come back down rather dramatically from a 2023 high of 85.2 in October to 82.1 in November.

November sees the year’s third-lowest TTF trend after May’s 80.6 and March’s 81.7. The drop of 3.1 points from October to November also marks the third-biggest drop from one month to the next after January’s 90.7 to February’s 86.2 (a drop of -4.5), and February’s 86.2 to March’s 81.7 (also -4.5).

So, is this… normal? Sorta. First, let’s look at the Jan-Feb-March change in the TTF for the years going back to 2020:

Looks sorta normal from here, apart from some stragglers. 2020 and 2022 look roughly the same – a dip from January to February followed by a rebound in March. 2021 and 2023 both follow the same downward trajectory for the TTF trend.

Now, look at how the different years compare for September-October-November:

Note that while September to October vary depending on the year, October to November looks very stable for 2020, 2021, and 2022.

2023 on the other hand… a huge drop that doesn’t look seasonal at all if you’re comparing it against previous years in the same time period.

Let’s move to the job openings.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

We noted last month how small businesses (1-50 full-time employees) were more active than their mid-market (51-200 FTEs) peers in October – that’s reversed now. Those in the mid-market bucket have rebounded in new job activity from 5.9 jobs per company in October to 6.6 in November.

Meanwhile, that big jump for enterprise-level companies (200+ FTEs) is now all but erased with a drop from 17.6 jobs per company in October to 16.6 in November. That’s a drop of one full job posting per company. The overall average – yes, slightly skewed by the enterprise-level data – also fell from 8.3 to 7.9 jobs per company on average.

Moving right along to the Candidates Per Hire metric:

3. Candidates per Hire

Now that Let’s look at what’s going on here through November:

The broken record has now been… broken for the moment, at least. After all those month-over-month increases dating back to the end of 2021 – with the exception of a few mostly anomalous drops – we’re seeing a pretty big drop in the Candidates per Hire trend.

In short, CPH dropped 10.8 points from 185.7 in October to 174.9 in November, the second-biggest drop since a 12.5-point drop from November to December 2021 – the only one higher was a 12-point drop from April to May this year.

Stating the obvious: a drop in CPH does not mean anything if it’s just another of the many anomalous drops over the past couple of years.

Now, let’s do our deep dive into the same data for the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Deep dive – UK & Ireland hiring metrics

Workable’s network data is broken out into five distinct regions around the world – North America, Latin & South America, Asia-Pacific (APAC), Europe / Middle East / Africa (EMEA), and finally, UK & Ireland.

The last region is our deep dive for this month. Let’s look at the three metrics in this regional bucket.

1. Time to Fill – UK & Ireland

What we saw in the worldwide data for the Time to Fill metric is reflected in UK&I as well – namely, a three-month sequence of TTF increases that end with a sharp plummet from 87.1 in October to 80.4 in November.

The difference is that the drop of 6.7 points is much more pronounced than the worldwide drop of 3.1.

2. Total Job Openings – UK & Ireland

Now here’s where things look different, in the job openings.

In the worldwide data, we noted how small companies (1-50 FTEs) and medium-sized (51-200 FTEs) were swapping spots in terms of job posting activities. And below, we’re re-sharing the chart above rather than overlay it with UK&I to reduce the amount of visual clutter:

But in the UK & Ireland, it’s very different. While companies in the medium-sized bucket are *almost* as active as in other parts of the world (5.6 job openings per company in UK&I vs. 6.6 worldwide), they absolutely pale in comparison to those in the small-sized bucket.

Small companies in UK&I are hiring at a torrid pace in September (11.5 jobs per company), October (10.7), and November (11.5) of this year, right on pace with the overall average.

Enterprise-level companies (200+ FTEs) are hiring even more in UK&I (18.9) when compared with worldwide (16.6) in November – and that’s been the case throughout most of 2023.

3. Candidates per Hire – UK & Ireland

The CPH trend, however, tells a very different story. Whi;le the CPH trend looks consistent between both UK&I and worldwide, two things stand out: first, the CPH trend topped out at 210.5 in September 2023 – a 147% increase over January 2022’s 85.2. That’s compared to a 111% increase from 84.7 to 179 worldwide.

The second thing to look at is just how much the CPH trend has dropped from 210.5 in September to 181.9 in October to 163.9 in November. That’s compared with a relatively stable worldwide trend of 179 in September to 185.7 in October to 174.9 in November.

What’s going on here?

Interesting, non? It just speaks to the reality that worldwide data can bring some insights but they do not tell the whole story. The real story is in the regions, the industries, and the functions – and especially, a intersectional approach to all of these for all three hiring metrics.

Hiring data isn’t the truth in itself and of itself – rather, it’s an opportunity for us to look at the complex interplay between macroeconomic trends, sector-specific challenges, and evolving employer strategies, particularly in the multiple undulating shifts in the global labor landscape.

So what does all that malarkey mean for you as an HR professional or hiring manager? It means you’re working in a multifaceted hiring landscape, especially if your company operates across borders and time zones. Imagine posting a job in this environment and managing the large volume of a diverse and shifting pool of candidates.

This doesn’t have to be an uphill climb – it simply underscores the importance of an adaptable, agile recruitment strategy that incorporates advanced tools and tech (including AI) in the attraction of top talent to your organization.

Enjoy the rest of the year, and see you in 2024!

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for December 2023 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for November 2023

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 20:32:05 +0000

In October’s Hiring Pulse, we noted the huge rise in total payrolls in September to the tune of 336,000 in the United States.

Meanwhile, in the UK, total payrolled employees hit 30.2 million in October – a new high for the country.

October in the US, however, sees a slowdown to 150,000 new jobs, slightly below projections but not wholly unusual, say economics.

With that perspective in the two biggest English-language job markets, let’s look at the three major hiring metrics and see what else we can learn.

How we’re looking at data

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings (JO)
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

TTF is on the rise again after a long period of steady decline
Small businesses are hiring more than their mid-sized counterparts
Candidates per Hire continues its meteoric rise

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of October are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Quick clarification, because people are asking: the data in this chart shows the trendline against the 2019 average as an index of 100, not the actual number of days in TTF.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend through to the end of October against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled:

Things are looking a little different now on the Time to Fill front, for the first time in a long while. Look at the data starting in January 2022 and just draw a line from there to the TTF metric in mid-2023. What does that line look like? It’s a very clear downward trajectory, especially this year from January 2023’s 91.0 to May 2023’s low of 80.4.

Since then? It’s not only stabilized over the next few months from May through to about July/August – it’s actually rising. The line from July 2023’s 82.6 to October 2023’s 85.0 may not initially look like a big jump in raw numbers, but it’s an indicator when you look at it from a historical standpoint. In the recent past, we’ve only seen similar upward trajectories in TTF in September-November 2020 and March-September 2021.

With the exception of past Januarys (where a monthly jump in TTF is wholly normal for that month every year), it’s been a consistent decline nearly every month in the time it takes to fill positions – right up to Q3 2023.

Last month, we called this a “non-story”, because we considered this to be mere blips in the bigger picture of the TTF radar, but now, this is worth paying attention to.

Why? It’s not only the first time we’re seeing a steady (albeit modest) increase in the metric in recent months, it’s also inconsistent with this time period in previous years:

See how 2023 trends up while the others go down? Keep this in mind as we move on to the other two metrics – which may give us more insight into why this is happening.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

All that talk of a “September Surge” last month is continuing into October in our data for job openings. While September saw an increase of a full half-job per company on average from August, we see another increase to 8.2 from September’s 7.9, making October the fourth consecutive month of MoM increases in job openings.

When we get down into the size buckets, enterprise-level companies (those with 200+ full-time employees, or FTEs) maintain their undulation in the job opening trend, this time jumping up again to 17.3 new job openings per company on average for October, a .7 increase from September.

Mid-market companies (51-200 FTEs) didn’t show as much activity, dropping to 5.9 job openings on average from 6.2 the previous month.

The real story, again, is in the smaller businesses (1-50 FTEs). Not only did their robust recruitment activity continue into October with 6.8 job openings on average compared with 6.5 in September, they’re actually more active than their mid-market peers.

Think about it: companies with fewer than 50 full-time employees are hiring more than companies with up to four times as many FTEs – and actually, it’s significantly more: 6.8 compared with 5.9. Almost a whole extra job on average.

So, we talked about looking at JOs as a potential insight into the recent increase in TTF – perhaps those small businesses don’t have a dedicated HR team or, perhaps, a small squad with limited bandwidth. It takes a little longer to get that job filled than it might take for larger businesses who have the luxury of a full-time recruiter on staff.

Keep that in mind as we look at the Candidates per Hire metric.

3. Candidates per Hire

Now that Let’s look at what’s going on here through October:

Another new high this month. With monthly adjustments in place, the Candidates per Hire metric now stands at 185.9 for October, a sharp increase of 17 points from the modest (and anomalous) dip in July 2023. It’s also a 62.4-point increase from January’s 123.5.

Just to call out the obvious: that’s a pretty big jump in a short time.

No need to beat around the bush again with fancy insights or even everyday vernacular on the data. Candidates are applying at a breakneck pace, and there are several factors for it – job loss throughout the year and AI-supported applications playing big roles.

What’s going on here?

The big story this month isn’t ultimately in the CPH increase – that’s basically expected at this point and has been discussed aplenty in past Hiring Pulses. What’s most interesting is the reversal of the TTF metric to an upward track.

When combining the three metrics above, it’s pretty clear that the more robust hiring in smaller businesses combined with that huge CPH spike means those resource-strapped smaller teams have a tougher time going through such a high number of applications in the same amount of time as before.

Think about it from an HR standpoint – or better yet, as a hiring manager who doesn’t even have the luxury of an HR professional to help you out. You open a new job for a marketing manager, and you’re slammed with a hundred applications on the very first day.

And then in the next few days, that number doubles to 200. Your plate is already full with day-to-day work and meetings and, well, that’s why you need that new manager in your team so you can start delegating.

So, you spend evenings looking through the applications. Yes, the data shows that employers spend an average of six to seven seconds looking at each resume – but that’s likely a scary headline to catch the attention of desperate jobhunters.

Let’s adjust that number to 20 seconds per application. Even at 20 seconds per review, going through 200 applications takes more than an hour of consistent, unwavering, dedicated attention.

But, by gosh, you’ve been able to do it over the span of a few days. You’ve whittled that list down to 20 very interesting candidates.

You’d like your HR professional to screen them – or in the absence of such, you send automated one-way Video Interview requests to each of them with a turnaround time of three days.

That brings us down to, say, six outstanding candidates after a few weeks.

If you’ve hired in your career, you know the drill. There are assessments, second interviews, follow-up communications, executive interviews, internal meetings, background checks, the whole shebang. It does take time, especially when you’re managing it solo.

If you smelled a shameless plug coming, then you’re right. Not only does Workable have a top-rated, plug-and-play recruitment software designed for ease of use, it also has Free Tools for Managers – true to its name, it’s a cost-free tool for hiring managers to use when tight on budget and tight on resources. Give it a whirl right now by entering the job title and industry and watch the AI-driven magic unfold.

You may also find that it’ll help optimize your hiring processes and even bring your own Time to FIll down.

Enjoy, and see you next month!

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for November 2023 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for October 2023

Keith MacKenzie — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 13:24:50 +0000

In September’s Hiring Pulse, we noted how a glut of candidates for a job posting isn’t so much of a luxury as it is a burden on employers. When you have more candidates, you don’t necessarily have the pick of the crop – more candidates means saturation, and points to desperation in the talent market.

But something interesting happened in the latest job report from the US Department of Labor – total payrolls in the United States grew by 336,000, which came as a surprise to many.

(Just in case you’re wondering – yes, some of those numbers in 2020 are literally off this chart. If you must know, March and April 2020 saw job losses of 1.4 million and 20.5 million respectively, followed by bouncebacks of 2.6, 4.6, 1.4, and 1.7 million for the four months after that ending in August 2020.)

There are many other surprises in store as well. Let’s look at the three metrics, and bring some fresh insights to the table. Ready? Let’s roll!

How we’re looking at data

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings (JO)
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Candidates Per Hire is still on a meteoric rise
Job postings are climbing rapidly, with a big chunk of that in small businesses
The “September Surge” has data to show for it

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of September are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Quick clarification, because people are asking: the data in this chart shows the trendline against the 2019 average as an index of 100, not the actual number of days in TTF.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend through to the end of September against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled:

At first glance, this looks like another month-over-month (MoM) drop – but look deeper, and you realize that it’s actually inconclusive. A change from 82.9 in August in the TTF metric to 82.6 in September is nothing to write a long letter home about. That’s really just a blip.

We talked a lot about stabilization in this metric in previous months – this shows more of the same. We’ll file this one as a “non-story” for this month at least – if for nothing more than to jump to the real stories in this month’s report.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

Now we are seeing some very interesting things here compared with previous months. Ultimately, the average number of job postings per company is up by a full half-job across the board, from August’s 7.4 to September’s 7.9.

What makes it more compelling is the drop in average job postings for enterprise-level companies (with 200 or more full-time employees) from 17.4 new jobs per company in August to 16.5 in September. That’s nearly an entire job less per company in September – which strikes us as odd because you’d expect the so-called “September Surge” (read on to learn more on that) to affect larger companies that follow a more consistent seasonal rhythm in their processes, including in budgets and employment.

So where is the job growth happening? At the other end of the size spectrum – small businesses (the 1-50 FTE bucket) posted an average of 6.5 jobs in September, up from 5.6 in August. That is a huge number – that’s a 13% growth in the actual employee base for companies that do have 50 employees.

And for companies with 25 employees – also included in this size bucket – bringing in six or seven new employees is going to have a pretty significant impact. It’s hard enough to run a smooth engine with your existing workforce – imagine onboarding and training a whole pack of new hires all at once when your existing teams are already busy doing their thing.

And, again, this is just the average for companies with anywhere from one to 50 employees. Some of these companies may be looking for just one or two new hires in the month, while others are hiring upwards of 15 or 20. And some of those companies may have just five full-time employees and looking to triple in size, while other, larger companies may not be hiring at all.

It’s a lot to unpack, to be sure. Now, let’s look at the CPH metric.

3. Candidates per Hire

Now that Let’s look at what’s going on here through September:

If there weren’t real people involved in this, we might say this is getting a little bit boring now. Every time we say “We’ve reached a new high!” or “We’re seeing a new normal in hiring!”, our dataset comes back and hits us with… another new high.

This time, the CPH trend has risen again, to 183.4 for September. That’s 83.4% more candidates per job compared with the average of 2019. And that’s 9.5 points up from just two months earlier.

Does this mean more and more people are out of work or returning from extended leave, or turnover is high? No, we won’t go with those theories this time. We actually have tangible insights which you can see in the next section.

Meanwhile, we can tell you that the industries most actively hiring *and* seeing huge CPH numbers are in SaaS, hospital & health care, and media & entertainment.

The sectors not quite seeing as many candidates despite posting a high number of jobs are in retail and consumer services. Great Resignation is perhaps still a reality for retailers.

OK, enough of that – let’s get into the conclusions.

What’s going on here?

September, of course, is traditionally a time to return to school, and also, the end of summer months. It’s ultimately a time for change for many people in our society.

LHH Recruitment Solutions head Laurie Chamberlin said as much. “I feel like September is more of a New Year’s philosophy than New Year’s … September is like back to school, back to work, back to ‘what am I going to do everyday?’ It’s like New Year’s for the workforce and education.”

“September is like back to school, back to work, back to ‘what am I going to do everyday?’ It’s like New Year’s for the workforce and education.”

Zapier recruiting manager Bonnie Dilber tells HuffPost that it’s also to do with the summer slowdown:

“Hiring slows down over the summer due to lots of vacation time for job seekers and candidates ― this makes scheduling tricky and can often lead to lengthier processes,” she says.

September, of course, marks the end of summer, and a “let’s get back to business” mode.

It’s also about budget, Laurie says,

“If there’s funds in their budget, that they’re not going to get the FTE add in 2024, but they have it in 2023, they’re looking to hire. If they’re looking at revenue, and they need [a] head count to make that revenue achievable…they need to onboard those people right now to hit their 2024 goals.”

That, in short, is the “September Surge”. This is the term given to the rise in job and jobseeker activity that traditionally happens in this month. Says Laurie: “I’ve been in the recruiting industry since ’99. And it is very real.”

We see this in our data as well.

This means you’re not only seeing more candidates coming through your hiring pipelines, but more competition in landing those A-list employees. So, you’ll probably want to understand what workers prioritize in a job right now so you can highlight those in your value proposition.

We did the homework for you. We asked 1,250 workers to understand their wants and needs at a high level, and the result is the Great Discontent for 2023. Give it a good read (both the US and UK versions), and incorporate what you’ve learned into your candidate attraction strategy.

Enjoy, and see you next month!

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for October 2023 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for September 2023

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 14:37:26 +0000

In August’s Hiring Pulse, we noted the ever-increasing number of candidates per hire and a dropping Time to Fill trend. We noted the Life of Riley and how that didn’t work out so well for many candidates, which leads to the above trends in recent months.

This month, we have a look at the three metrics again with this in mind, and bring some fresh insights to the table. Ready? Let’s get started!

How we’re looking at data

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings (JO)
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

We’re in a “new normal” when it comes to Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire
Technology may be a huge factor in both
Seasonal and sectoral hiring are potentially impacting job opening trends

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of August are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Quick clarification, because people are asking: the data in this chart shows the trendline against the 2019 average as an index of 100, not the actual number of days in TTF.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend through to the end of August against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled:

In short: the time it’s taking employers to fill open roles is still at a historically lower point. Sure, it took a relatively dramatic jump from May’s 80.5 to June’s 84.4, but it’s coming down again.

In last month’s Hiring Pulse, we noted how the TTF trend seems to be stabilizing when compared with previous years – this is still happening. What’s interesting is that the stabilization is happening at a much lower level. Cliche alert: this may be the new normal in hiring.

In short, while the undulations of the TTF trend are normal, the actual trend itself is much lower than years past. Two thoughts happening here: first, there are far more candidates than ever before meaning it’s easier to find the ideal candidate for a job.

Second, the added bandwidth due to the deluge of candidates is easier to manage because HR professionals and hiring teams are using software to optimize their processes (yes, that’s a cheap plug for Workable!).

Now, are we seeing the same trend in job openings? Let’s have a look.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

Last month, we pointed out a surprising drop in job postings across all companies from June’s 7.6 to July’s 7.1, which turns out to be anomalous when compared with previous Junes and Julys.

July to August this year is a little different – rising from 7.1 new job postings per company in July to 7.4 in August. In 2022, the change was just an increase of .1 of one job, and in 2021, it was a drop of .2.

But when we look at the size buckets, the differences start to stand out. Companies with 200 or more full-time employees (FTEs) posted 17.4 jobs in August on average, up from July’s 16.9. Small businesses (50 or fewer FTEs) also saw growth – from 5.4 to 5.6.

The big story this time is in the mid-sized businesses (51-200 FTEs). Averages in this size bucket went from 5.0 in July to 5.8 in August – moving it higher than the average for small businesses for the first time since May.

There are two stories here:

First, this jump in general which marks nearly a full new job per mid-sized business in August.

And second, that companies with 51-200 FTEs were hiring less than their smaller cousins for three months in a row from May to July.

Why? One theory is that it’s seasonal. June, July, and August are traditionally big-travel seasons and that puts a lot of pressure on a hospitality sector that’s already struggling to fill gaps in their teams. The triple-whammy of surging tourism numbers after COVID, the Great Resignation (which hit restaurants hard), and of course the traditional tourist season all lead to an increase in demand for short-term workers ahead of time.

Perhaps it’s not so much that medium-sized businesses slowed their hiring – it’s more that small businesses increased theirs. According to BLS, the leisure and hospitality sector has gained an average of 61,000 jobs per month over the prior 12 months ending in August 2023, making it one of the fastest-growing sectors in terms of hiring in the United States. And that sector has many small businesses.

Now, let’s look at the Candidates per Hire trend.

3. Candidates per Hire

Now that Let’s look at what’s going on here through August:

What we said above about a “new normal in hiring”? This is another example of it. The highest the CPH trend ever reached in our dataset before 2023 was in October 2020, when the index reached 140.3. That was also the only time it had reached more than 140 – in other words, 40% higher than the monthly average for 2019.

Now? It’s gone upwards of 140 for five straight months – and above 170 for the last three months. It’s got to come down to earth at some point once the job market stabilizes, but what interests us is that job openings aren’t coming down at all during the course of 2023. You’d think there would be a direct correlation between fewer job openings and more candidates per jobs – but not here.

This is likely a fallout of the Great Resignation. Many people dumped their jobs over the last couple of years to the tune of more than 4 million quits every single month from June 2021 to December 2022 – and that number is steadily falling throughout 2023 reaching 3.55 million quits for July, the lowest for a single month in the United States since before the pandemic. And in pre-COVID times, 3.5 million quits was pretty normal for a given month.

All these people who left their jobs and not moving on to new ones – some of them launched freelance careers, others started their own business, and others still just took off to a cabin in Maine to live the rest of their lives in solitude. And – we mentioned this last month as well – it’s either not working out so well for them, or they miss the old daily grind and the social life that can come with an interesting day-to-day job. So, back to the job hunt they go.

Combine this with the increase in layoffs this year (482K layoffs from January to July compared with one-third of that in the same period in 2022), and you have a situation where there are many more candidates looking for jobs. Hence, the rise in the CPH trend.

What’s going on here?

Whatever your experience may be in terms of hiring, you’ve got one thing at the top of your mind: find the absolute perfect candidate for the role. Yes, it’s nice to have a growing candidate pool because it means you have the pick of the crop – but is that necessarily the case? Just because you’re now getting 120 applications for a job compared with 80 for the same job last year doesn’t mean you now have 30 ideal candidates this year compared with 20 last year.

When you have a growing pool of candidates, you run the risk of saturation. There’s also desperation – on the side of candidates. There are those who are returning to work after an extended period of time, and there are those quickly trying to land on their feet after losing their job in an unfortunate reorg at their previous company.

We made a side reference to HR technology up there and how it’s helping hiring teams better manage the recruitment pipeline and that’s speeding up the process to a filled job.

Well, technology does cut both ways – candidates also have the benefits of HR technology and now have one-click-apply and resume parsing options when applying for jobs.

Add AI to the mix; candidates can just plug their resume *and* the job description into ChatGPT or Claude and tell it to create the perfect cover letter for that specific job. The AI will even calibrate the resume so it best fits the opportunity.

So, as it becomes easier to go through hundreds of resumes a day, it also becomes harder, because the applications are becoming more plentiful and sophisticated all the time. It reminds one of the old Stephen Wright joke about putting a humidifier and dehumidifier into a room and letting them work it out.

Back to the plot: you want to focus on finding the *right* candidates, not the *most* candidates. That distinction is very important. To attract the *right* candidates, you need to understand what would compel them to apply for a role with your organization.

There are tools to help you out here – including custom application forms and knockout questions so candidates self-select out of the process, candidate search functionalities, and of course Workable’s AI Recruiter.

And guess what? We already asked 1,250 workers to understand their wants and needs at a high level, and the result is the Great Discontent for 2023. Have a look, and package what you’ve learned into your careers page and your job descriptions – and reap the rewards.

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for September 2023 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for July 2023

Keith MacKenzie — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 13:22:11 +0000

In June’s Hiring Pulse, we pointed out how ChatGPT and its AI cousins are impacting the job landscape, and that the stabilization of candidate numbers could be due to an increase in job postings.

Well, this month, we have some eye-opening data for you that blows some of that out of the water. Let’s get into it.

How we’re looking at data

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings (JO)
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Job activity is back to high levels – especially for the largest and smallest companies
Candidates Per Hire is at a whole new level
The Time to Fill metric is the only one that’s relatively normal

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of June are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Quick clarification, because people are asking: the data in this chart shows the trendline against the 2019 average as an index of 100, not the actual number of days in TTF.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend through to the end of June against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled:

Last month, we pointed to relative stabilization in the Time to Fill trend especially compared with the steep drop seen in the first quarter of 2023.

Q2 tells a somewhat different story – April saw an uptick to 83.3 from March’s 81.9, with that trend dropping to 80.8 for May. And now, in June, it’s risen again to 84.

The question is: how anomalous is this? The answer: not unusual at all. Look at how 2021, 2022, and 2023 compare in the same chart:

With some minor outliers, these all follow a relatively similar trend – a steep drop-off from January to March followed by relative stabilization and a mild uptick to June.

The only thing that’s clearly different is that the Time to Fill trend is lower this year than in previous years. Jobs are getting filled quicker than before.

We’ve gone into a multitude of reasons and theories as to why – but for this month, let’s get to Job Openings and then, especially, to Candidates Per Hire which is where the real story is (yes, again).

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

Again, we see a bump in job activity, this being the second straight increase from the previous month from 7 new job postings per company across the board in May to 7.6 for June.

We’ve been at 7.6 before, in March, but what’s worth noting is that in the 18 months since January 2022, we’ve seen the average number of job postings per company go higher than 7 just four times, and three of those happened in the last four months.

There’s been a lot of talk (including in the Hiring Pulse reports) about recessions and AI impacting jobs. We’re surmising here that the impact is more in how jobs are changing rather than dwindling. New gaps and opportunities are being discovered, and new jobs are created as a result.

Now, look at the company sizes that are seeing the biggest jump in job activity. First, the big kids on the block (enterprise-level, 200+ full-time employees) are opening up more jobs over the last two months than the previous month before that – from 16.6 job postings per company in April to 17.5 in May, then 18.2 in June. If you look at 2022, you’ll see that job activity for that size bucket was higher although declining, while this year, it’s lower but rising.

Now, let’s look at the small kids on the block (>50 FTEs): they’re up to 5.8 jobs per company in June from 4.9 in May. That’s an increase of nearly one full new job posting per small business on average within a month.

We did a bit of math last month and let’s do it again: let’s say an average company in this size bucket has 30 full-time employees.

When you see the average of 4.9 new job postings for May, that’s more than 16% of that company’s entire workforce, or one in seven.

And 5.8 is 19.3% of that entire company’s workforce – nearly one in five.

Think about your own company, if you’re in a smaller one. Look at the people around you (or look at the faces on your laptop screen, if you’re working remotely). Imagine one in five of those people being new within the last month, or that you’re seeing one in five of those people leaving. That’s not an insignificant number for a small business. Hiring is very active in this bucket.

Now, let’s look at the candidates. Yes, we promised a good story, and you’re getting it now.

3. Candidates per Hire

Now that Let’s look at what’s going on here through June:

We didn’t think this was going to happen, but there it is – the Candidates Per Hire trend has just surged. The CPH trend is now at 176.7 for June 2023 (or 76.7% more candidates per hire than the average of 2019).

It’s absolutely at its highest point in, like, ever. To further demonstrate how high this is, let’s compare June’s CPH using 2020, 2021, and 2022 as benchmark averages:

Year	June 2023’s CPH against year average
2020	150.2
2021	167.4
2022	170.3

In short: where candidates per hire for June 2023 is 76.7% higher than the average of 2019, it’s 50.2% higher than the 2020 average, 67.4% higher than the 2021 average, and 70.3% higher than the 2022 average. No question about it – June is very, very high no matter what year you compare it against.

We’ve talked aplenty about the many different reasons why, and we encourage you to go to previous Hiring Pulses to better understand this trend. Right here, we’re just going to recognize that if you’re getting slammed with candidates every time you open up a new job, you’re absolutely not alone.

What’s going on here?

Job openings are up, quite significantly, especially for small businesses. And the CPH trend is, of course, at previously unseen levels. Last month, we noted the drop in new job postings and the rise in CPH and wondered if the two were related.

In this case, we’re seeing a significant rise in both. The hiring landscape is just so very, very busy. There are just so many candidates for a single job – it’s like opening a leak in a dam and having the water just come rushing through.

When a lot of that activity is happening in smaller companies with fewer than 50 employees, you can imagine the stress on those hiring teams – smaller businesses don’t have the luxury of a full HR team that can dedicate themselves to the job.

An executive in a small business can often be the hiring manager for a job – and may even themselves be the recruiter, the background checker, the assessor, the evaluator, and more.

And doing this across the company for multiple jobs (remember, nearly one in five employees per small business as we stated above) while at the same time trying to run a business – it can be a lot to pack into a day. That’s where software (cough cough) can be pretty helpful.

See you next month!

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for July 2023 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for June 2023

Keith MacKenzie — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 18:11:37 +0000

In May’s Hiring Pulse, we went all-in on how deep the candidate pool was. We even got melodramatically metaphorical with it, likening its depth to Lake Baikal, and wondering whether it’d get deeper than that – i.e. Mariana Trench, with its deepest point being nearly seven times as deep as the aforementioned Baikal.

We then talked aplenty about AI affecting the job landscape and how there didn’t seem to be as much talk about a recession as there was at the start of this year (which feels like a long, long time ago now).

Now, we’re nearly at the midway mark of 2023, and we’re going to explore our SMB hiring data and see if we can pull up some fresh insights.

Let’s get to work!

How we’re looking at data

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings (JO)
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Time to Fill is showing signs of stabilization, but remains at its lowest point in our dataset history
Job activity is particularly robust for small businesses with fewer than 50 full-time employees
Candidates Per Hire has come down significantly from last month’s surge – but remains at a high point

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of May are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Quick clarification, because people are asking: the data in this chart shows the trendline against the 2019 average as an index of 100, not the actual number of days in TTF.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend through to the end of May against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled:

The second quarter of 2023 continues to see relative stabilization in the Time to Fill trend compared with the first quarter, with May’s 80.8 just a small drop from April’s 83.1, which comes on the heels of March’s 81.8.

What’s really worth noting here is how low the TTF trend is in general. These past three months have seen what’s ultimately the fastest Time to Fill trend in our dataset dating back to 2019. What does this ultimately signify? It can be any of the following:

A glut of candidates makes it easier to find the right hire in short order
A shortage of candidates means hiring teams work faster to land the right hire before the competition snatches them up
Hiring teams are getting faster at hiring because layoffs have reduced the number of touchpoints to a hire
Hiring teams are becoming more efficient at hiring because they’ve digitally transformed their hiring process (hint, hint Workable and AI)
Hiring teams are becoming more efficient at hiring in general

There are many other potential explanations, but the above is worth thinking about.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

Once again, job activity sees a little bump: from 6.6 new job postings per company on average in April to a flat 7 in May. It’s not a lot to write home about, especially since historically a jump from April to May is relatively normal (with 2022 being an exception).

What’s more interesting than month-over-month change here is the relative busy-ness of job activity throughout 2023 compared with previous years. It’s busier this year for SMBs (<200 FTEs), but for enterprise-level companies with more than 200 FTEs, job activity is actually slower now than it was at this time last year.

We surmise it’s because larger companies tend to be slower in turnaround and response. Remember all that talk about a worldwide recession at the start of the year, followed by large-scale layoffs? And now, we see slower job posting activity as we approach the end of Q2 compared with the same time last year. That’s all part of the overall business plan.

Another way to look at it is that employees at larger companies may have greater job security in those companies. That, coupled with layoffs, will mean lower employee turnover – and therefore, fewer job postings.

Meanwhile, those smaller, nimbler companies that are more susceptible to turbulent rises and falls in the bottom line will also see greater turnover – we’re seeing that especially in the 1-50 FTE bucket where March’s 5.5 job postings per company, April’s 4.6, and May’s 4.9 are significantly higher than last year at this time (3.5, 3.3, and 3.3 respectively).

Let’s do a little bit of math to put that in perspective – let’s say the average company in the 1-50 FTE bucket has 30 full-time employees. An average of 4.9 job postings is 16% of that entire company’s workforce right there. That’s compared with last year’s 3.3 job postings being 11% of a company’s workforce.

That’s the difference between a turnover of one in seven employees this past May and one in nine employees in May 2022.

Pretty significant.

Now, let’s look at the candidate population for those jobs.

3. Candidates per Hire

Now that Let’s look at what’s going on here through May:

After many months – more than a year, even – of a Candidates Per Hire trend growing faster than a bamboo tree, we’re finally seeing that number take a plunge from one month to the next. Whether that’s due to April being so high that a drop-off was inevitable or whether that’s due to an actual depletion of the candidate pool, that’s for you to decide.

One thing we’re viscerally cognizant of, however, is that this drop in May could be related to the higher job postings in the previous chart – meaning, when there’s more job postings out there, naturally, candidates will get snatched up as well.

Another scenario worth thinking about: there are three major scenarios in which one might be looking for a job: first, they’re entering the job market because they’re entry-level, coming out of school, moved to a new location, or something similar.

Second, they’re transitioning jobs; simply put, they’re still employed but they’re looking for other jobs out there because it’s time for a change. Third, they’ve lost their job and they’re actively looking for a new one.

So, the increase in candidates per hire in general isn’t simply about a growing candidate pool. It’s also the result of those mass layoffs across the board, leading to candidates more aggressively and actively looking for a new job so they aren’t unemployed for a long period of time. Rather than selectively applying for job opportunities out there, they’re taking the spray-and-pray approach until someone hires them.

This, of course, will drive the CPH up – and it can also be challenging for employers because they need to suss out the real motive of a candidate in applying for their open role. Be careful thinking like this, however. Don’t jump to conclusions. A smartly built evaluation process will identify the real stars for your job.

What’s going on here?

Notice we didn’t touch on AI much at all this time around? While that’s still a hot topic, let’s not get too deep into this month since we’ve covered it so comprehensively in much of our other content. Plus, it remains a very nascent environment.

OK, fine. Let’s talk about AI.

Meanwhile, OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, and the rest of them are investing heavily in AI and machine learning. Out of the 38 new unicorns (startups that break the $1B company value barrier), eight of them are in AI technologies.

If you’re in AI, that’s great, but if you’re in anything else, it’s a tough ocean to navigate. That same report states that overall funding of startups has dropped 44% from May 2022 to May 2023.

We’ll just keep a finger on that AI pulse for the forthcoming months, particularly on how typical skill sets will change going forward. For example, ChatGPT is considered even more valuable than a post-secondary degree by 86% of hiring managers according to an Intellgent.com survey.

And for entry-level candidates, a full 98% of hiring managers would like to see ChatGPT experience for positions where the AI tool is applicable.

These are interesting times. Catch up next month!

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for June 2023 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for May 2023

Keith MacKenzie — Mon, 08 May 2023 20:26:35 +0000

In April’s Hiring Pulse, we talked extensively about AI at work – namely, the latest and potentially greatest destabilizer in the working environment.

And the destabilization could be even greater than COVID-19 in 2020. ChatGPT and all its AI cousins across the board are leading to unprecedented trends in our hiring data.

What’s possible is that this may only be the beginning. Remember March 2020 when those first few COVID-19 numbers started trickling in? That’s the feeling these days.

Let’s have a look at what that means, and stay on for the ride because we have a lot to say at the end.

How we’re looking at data

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings (JO)
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Candidates per Hire is at an all-time high for Workable’s hiring data
Time to Fill is stabilizing – barely
Job activity is dropping across the board

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of April are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Quick clarification, because people are asking: the data in this chart shows the trendline against the 2019 average as an index of 100, not the actual number of days in TTF.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend through to the end of April against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled:

After a pretty significant drop in the Time to Fill trend for the first three months of 2023, we’re finally seeing that metric relatively stabilizing to start the second quarter of the year.

In fact, the number has jumped upwards ever so slightly, with the trend jumping 1.1 points from 81.6 in March to 82.7 in April.

It’s still well below the general trend going back to 2020, an indicator of factors such as technology speeding up the evaluation process, more candidates in the talent bloodstream (more on that below), and – perhaps – a desperate rush to fill roles as a stopgap measure in times of high turnover.

On that latter point – there is plenty of labor instability right now. There are reorgs, layoffs, and restructuring all happening on the heels of the Great Resignation (which, while still high, is starting to level off and come down in terms of raw numbers). And a lot is happening in the age of AI as well.

What this means is, in other words, bottlenecks and breakdowns are happening, forcing businesses to move quickly to plug gaps in their workflows.

It’s one explanation, at least. Let’s look at total job openings and see for ourselves if there’s increased job activity across the board.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

After a nice levitation in job openings to start the first quarter of this year, we’re finally seeing things tapering off across all three business size buckets. In fact, job activity is down from 7.6 job postings per company in March to 6.6 per company in April.

Overall, what we see is a full point drop from March to April in the average number of jobs posted per company. That’s significant, in no small part due to it being the biggest month-to-month drop in the history of our network data.

We’ve seen nice jumps in the data from one month to the next (especially from the typically slow December to a supercharged January), but we’ve never seen anything quite so dramatic the opposite way.

We would go into depth into each of the three size buckets, but they all see the very same trend for March to April – so we’ll skip that for this month. Instead, we’ll simply point out that the impressively dynamic small business category (1-50 full-time employees) was the usual anomaly in terms of job activity, with five straight month-to-month increases in the trend.

But now, small businesses also took a dip in April. So it can no longer hold itself up as an agile upstart. Last month, we promised to keep an eye on this area – now we’re going to continue watching and see what May brings us.

Now, on to the candidates.

3. Candidates per Hire

Now that Let’s look at what’s going on here through April:

Um. That chart says it all.

After a momentary stabilization in the CPH trend from February to March, April stands out like a very, very sore thumb, hitting a new milestone of 158.2 for Apil – a huge 21-point jump from March.

To put that in perspective, the biggest jump in the CPH trend in our entire history of data was 18.9 points from February to March back in 2020. The year where the world seemingly changed and the sheer volume of job loss felt unprecedented (for this generation, at least).

And the highest CPH trend with the exception of February’s 138.8 and March’s 137.2 was in the high 120s and very low 130s from mid-2020 to early 2021.

And now? 158.2. To put it in visual perspective, look at the chart from January 2020 onwards:

Let’s go back to a quick quote from last month’s Hiring Pulse:

“We discussed the Great Resurgence in [February]’s Hiring Pulse – that’s still happening, of course, but the candidate pool is not a bottomless one. Are we finally reaching the crux of this data point? Or is this just a hiccup and more are on the way? We shall see.”

Well, we are seeing now that the bottom of the candidate pool isn’t yet discovered. It may be at a murky depth not unlike Lake Baikal in Siberia, known as the world’s deepest lake with a bottom that’s 5,315 feet (1,620 meters) deep.

We don’t really want to talk about Mariana Trench at 36,201 feet (11,034 meters) because that’s uncomfortable to think about and we can’t predict whether or not we’ve hit a certain limit in terms of depth and breadth of the candidate pool.

Instead, should we just try and understand what’s going on here?

What’s going on here?

We talked a lot about AI last month. It’s still very relevant now and will continue to be so going forward. And it is absolutely impacting the working world in myriad ways. Our day-to-day is affected, and our hiring processes are changing, and above all – jobs are ultimately changing.

Consider this – according to Goldman Sachs, 300 million jobs worldwide could be affected by this new tsunami of generative AI that started with ChatGPT in December.

Many other companies are actively encouraging the use of generative AI technologies in their working environment – including one CEO who has purchased ChatGPT licenses for his entire staff base to the tune of $2,400 a month. For the record, that CEO says productivity has gone through the roof.

Others, like IBM, are phasing out some jobs altogether – to the potential tune of 30% of non-customer-facing roles – as a result of increasing AI capabilities.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration called together the CEOs of Alphabet, Microsoft, OpenAI and other AI-driven companies to discuss the potential risks and opportunities of the new technology.

There is a lot more going on, of course, but at the core of all of this is jobs. When we started 2023, people weren’t really talking about artificial intelligence beyond how cool ChatGPT seemed to be. Some early adopters were taking on ChatGPT to help in their work, but overall, generative AI wasn’t really in the everyday lexicon. Instead, talk of a recession was.

Now, we don’t see a lot of talk about an impending recession. Is there even one happening? Who knows? What we do know now is the tremendous rise of AI and jobs in everything we’re talking about:

Our hiring data is starting to show it. Time to Fill is getting shorter – potentially because of the use of generative AI tech in the hiring process. Job openings are dropping – not because of a recession, but because some jobs are becoming redundant and companies are figuring out how to get more done with fewer people.

And finally, candidates per hire is surging – perhaps due to the double whammy of layoffs ahead of a (possible / speculated / who knows) recession and the rise of AI technologies in workflows.

Does this mean AI is coming for your job as well? Not necessarily. One saying that’s making its rounds is this one: “AI will not take your job. People who use AI will.” But humans are still at the center of it all – AI is a great enhancer to your work, not a great replacer. And the human touch is still paramount in hiring.

If humans weren’t important, then why do we still see lineups in banks for that more personable service and in supermarkets with checkout cashiers? Why do we grumble about pressing ‘1’ to do this and ‘2’ to do that when trying to get service on the phone?

And so on.

Things may change if (or when) AI gets to a point where it becomes general intelligence, but right now – we are still the drivers.

For how long, though? Let’s keep watching this space – the data is still telling us a lot.

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for May 2023 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for April 2023

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 18:39:10 +0000

Now, as if all the drama of the last few years in the form of COVID-19, the Great Resignation, the Ukraine invasion, a looming recession, inflation, yadda yadda yadda, wasn’t enough – we’re now dealing with yet another destabilizer and disrupter in the landscape. This is catastrophic for the pessimists among us, but ameliorative for the optimistics among us.

That’s, of course, the emergence of ChatGPT, generative AI and LLM AI (large language model AI) and all their many offshoots.

How this will change our landscape is really a huge amount of fodder for another large-scale discussion, but let’s keep it in mind as we dive into the latest data because it will change how we hire.

Let’s get started!

How we’re looking at data

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings (JO)
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Job activity continues to be high for small businesses
TTF is continuing to decline sharply – but at what cost?
CPH is finally ‘stabilizing’ – sort of

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of March are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Quick clarification, because people are asking: the data in this chart shows the trendline against the 2019 average as an index of 100, not the actual number of days in TTF.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend throughout 2022 against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled:

Again, we see a decrease in the TTF trend. This is the third consecutive month of decline – and it now stands at 81 for March 2023, down from 87.1 in February and 90.6 in January.

This shortening TTF may initially seem a good thing for both employers and jobseekers. For hiring teams, of course it means you’re finding candidates to fill your much-needed positions quicker than before. For jobseekers, it means you’re getting jobs quicker than before.

There are downsides, too. It may be a sign of a need to fill urgent roles ahead of a looming recession, either for that hire to provide the stopgap that’s needed to carry a company through the downturn. It could also signal a rush to get ahead of potential budget cuts and hiring freezes before they happen. Not inherently a problem, but rather, signals of problems.

But we’re already in April and we’ve been talking about that downturn for a long time now (and in multiple Hiring Pulses). It’s highly likely that the shorter TTF is due to a larger candidate pool – when a job is opened, applications start flooding in and it’s easier to lock in on someone who fits the bill.

All the same, there are caveats to this shorter TTF. Companies may not be taking the opportunity to properly evaluate candidates which means a higher risk of bad hires. That can be expensive down the line and you don’t want that.

So, consider slowing down, even in the face of increased urgency to fill roles.

Or – more apropos – consider better, more optimized ways to evaluate candidates so you can vet them more thoroughly, and quickly too. Like, for instance, incorporating (ahem) AI tech in your hiring process.

Now, let’s move on to job openings.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

Well, look at that. Steady growth across the board. Those lines at the bottom of the chart look like a group of airplanes taking off together from November 2022 at different speeds and cadences, and then ultimately falling into line with one another into March.

We’ll get into the specific details in a second, but first, the main takeaway is that the overall average jobs opened per company in March in our dataset is 7.6, up from 6.7 in February and 6.6 in January. At this time last year, we didn’t see such a consistent increase in job openings.

We’ve talked about this in previous Hiring Pulses: a downturn doesn’t necessarily mean hiring freezes for new jobs. It can also mean a recalibration – for instance, let’s look at the restructuring of teams with the objective of producing with 10 FTEs where 15 were able to do so previously.

In such a reworking, job requirements change as a result and new skill sets are discovered to be needed. Some team members can learn and grow, some get promoted, some are disgruntled and leave for other opportunities, some are let go, and finally, entire new jobs are created to fill important gaps in these new team structures.

In times of affluence, these things do happen and they are an opportunity to scale. But in times of fiscal stress, they come up as necessities as businesses clamor to find more efficient ways to carry out processes.

Anyway, interesting discussion and we’ll come back to it. Now let’s look at the company size buckets.

Larger companies still anomalous

Job activity for companies of 200 or more employees saw a roughly 10% increase from February to March. This is interesting compared with previous years, where larger companies saw averages of 15.2/15.9/19.5 for the first three months of 2021 and 21.3/21.3/23.8 for the first three months of 2022.

Yet, this year, instead of a spike in March after a roughly stable Jan-Feb trend, we’re seeing a dip from January to February and then an almost identical recovery from February to March.

Perhaps we’re splitting hairs by looking at the data like this, and perhaps it’s just one of those anomalies, but it’s still interesting to look at.

Medium is steady as she goes

For companies with 51-200 employees, we see a jump in the average job postings for March to 6.2 after a relatively stable January (5.7) and February (5.6).

We noted it last month and the insight remains the same – this is not wholly anomalous. Job activity trends for the first three months of the year is again pretty normal this year for medium-sized businesses.

Small and vibrant

Now, here’s where the interesting stuff is. Small-sized businesses with 50 or fewer employees are continuing to rise in terms of job activity. Last month, we saw a jump from 4.1 to 4.7 jobs per company from January to February, and that growth has accelerated to 5.5 in March.

We’ve talked extensively about agility in small businesses rapidly adapting to evolving economies and shifts in market trends. We’re definitely keeping an eye on this one.

Now, on to the candidates.

3. Candidates per Hire

Now that Let’s look at what’s going on here through March:

We’ve talked for months about a prominent spike in the number of applicants per job dating back to July 2022. Ultimately, a 56% increase in CPH from July 2022 to February 2023.

But now, apart from a moderate slowdown from November to December (understandable given that December is slow all around), we finally see the CPH trend coming in lower than the previous month.

Not really by a lot, but it’s there: March’s 136.6 is a drop from February’s 141.5.

We discussed the Great Resurgence in last month’s Hiring Pulse – that’s still happening, of course, but the candidate pool is not a bottomless one. Are we finally reaching the crux of this data point? Or is this just a hiccup and more are on the way? We shall see.

What’s going on here?

As the hiring landscape continues to shift and adapt to the ever-changing job market, one thing we know for sure: the use of AI in the hiring process is growing exponentially. While generative AI tools like ChatGPT can provide significant benefits to hiring teams in terms of time and efficiency, they also come with potential risks and drawbacks.

OK, full disclosure: ChatGPT was used to help write that paragraph above with some minor tweaks. However, it’s on point. We’re in a time where we’re now dealing with yet another earth-shattering development on the heels of previous ones – that being the rise of artificial intelligence in the everyday zeitgeist and lexicon. Sure, we’ve been talking about AI for years but until ChatGPT, we hadn’t really thought collectively about how AI fits into our everyday lives at work and at play.

Now, we’re exploring all the ways in which ChatGPT can be used in human resources, and all the ways in which technology can boost hiring processes. At the core of these conversations is optimization of workflow.

So, let’s go back to this month’s data analysis. We’re seeing a shorter time to fill. We’re seeing more job activity. And we’re (still) seeing a lot of candidates for each of those jobs. Combine all three, and understaffed and underfunded hiring teams are just scrambling to get it all done.

ChatGPT is a real boon for those teams, obviously. You no longer have to write those job descriptions (not from scratch, at least). You no longer need to craft lists of interview questions designed to get what you need to know from the candidate. Yes, we have templates for both and more, but that can only go so far. In these rapidly evolving times, we need something that can keep with the times and meet our current needs immediately. Generative AI tech can do that for us.

But (and of course there’s always a but) as teams grapple with these surging trends and developments in the hiring process, it’s crucial to strike that balance between speed and quality. You know the saying, “He/she who hesitates is lost”? And the other, pretty much opposite saying: “Slow and steady wins the race.”

It’s about finding a balance between both. Speed serves a purpose, and so does quality.

Now, we asked ChatGPT what actionable tips it has based on all of the above. It presented the following (without any edits):

Focus on targeted outreach: Instead of simply casting a wide net with job postings, consider a more targeted approach that identifies and reaches out to qualified candidates directly. This can help ensure a higher quality of candidates and reduce the need for rushed hiring decisions.

Implement AI tools thoughtfully: While AI tools like ChatGPT can provide significant benefits, it is important to implement them thoughtfully and carefully, with an eye toward potential risks and biases. Consider involving human oversight in the AI hiring process to ensure that the best possible candidates are being selected.

Prioritize candidate experience: In a competitive hiring landscape, it is important to prioritize the candidate experience, from the application process to the interview and beyond. By providing a positive experience, you can attract and retain top talent, even in uncertain times.

Good work, bot. And ChatGPT even has the insight to recommend caution on using itself. Ultimately, it’s a great tool to help you in your work, but only if you steer it properly and that you maintain that all-important human touch at the end.

As for how AI will change the working world – it will, in absolute, countless spades. It’s not a coincidence or an accident that everyone is talking about it right now. Jobs will change. Workflows will change. The overall interaction of society will probably change.

And will it impact the economy and in turn our three trends of time to fill, job openings and candidates per hire? Yes, it probably will. Let’s watch and find out.

Until next month…

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for April 2023 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for March 2023

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 20:25:48 +0000

We also took a deep dive into five select industries in our dataset and found that the recent surge in the Candidates Per Hire trend isn’t universal – some industries, in fact, are still struggling to hire. This isn’t a huge surprise.

But one thing we do know: recent layoffs are concentrated in the SaaS world, and CPH is rising meteorically as a result.

This month’s Hiring Pulse is going to be a short one. Of course, February only has 28 days and that’s the latest month in our dataset. Nevertheless, this report still packs a punch. Let’s get started!

How we’re looking at data

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings (JO)
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Candidates per Hire climbed for the eighth straight month – but this time, the jump from the previous month is higher than we’ve seen in a long, long time
The CPH trend has come full circle and is now higher than its previous peak two years ago
Small businesses (with <50 full-time employees) are continuing to hire at a brisk pace

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of February are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Quick clarification, because people are asking: the data in this chart shows the trendline against the 2019 average as an index of 100, not the actual number of days in TTF.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend throughout 2022 against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled:

In January, the TTF trend spiked after a steady decline throughout most of 2022. But a January spike in TTF is completely and totally normal.

And in February, the TTF score dropped from 90.8 in January to 86.8 in February. Again, totally normal.

For every year dating back to 2020, there’s always a drop from January to February in terms of TTF. Here’s what that looked like for each of the three previous years:

2020: 102 in January and 97.3 in February
2021: 95.6 in January and 88.6 in February
2022: 97.4 in January and 90.9 in February

This is not a lot to write home about, honestly. Things are ‘normal’ here. So, let’s move on to the job opening data.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

Again, we have a relatively robust month for job activity with 6.7 jobs per company on average in the network, up just a notch from January’s 6.6.

To put that in perspective, job posting activity remained steady in the latter part of last year, alternating between a low of 6.1 and a high of 6.3 from June through to November before the predicted holiday-season drop to 5.2 for December.

That of course differs based on company size. So let’s break the data down into those buckets.

Larger companies running against the norm

The big jump in job openings for companies with 200 or more full-time employees kind of continues. But while it remains high, February shows a drop to 17 jobs per company on average, down from 18.5 in January.

In past years dating back to the beginning of our dataset, job postings in February were always higher than January for those larger companies. This year, it’s the opposite.

Medium is closer to the median

Last month, we highlighted a modest bump in average job postings for medium-sized businesses (51-200 FTEs) from December to January. It’s now stabilized through February with 5.6 job postings per mid-sized company, down a smidgen from 5.7 in January.

That’s about as stable as can be, considering that over the six months ending February, the busiest month for job postings was 5.8 in September and the quietest month was 5.3 in December.

In past years, the change from January to February differs from one year to the next – but not by much. So, for mid-sized companies, 2023 isn’t anomalous so far.

Small but lively

Last month, we marveled at how those businesses in the 1-50 FTE bracket were posting jobs at an unprecedented rate – in short, higher in January than at any other time in our dataset.

And now? Small businesses are even more active in the hiring space in February, with 4.7 job postings on average compared with January’s 4.2. That’s a 12% jump.

For context: in 2020, February’s job posting average was nearly 5% lower than in January. In 2021 and 2022, February was relatively unchanged from January.

Let’s keep an eye on this interesting trendline going forward. Now, let’s look at who’s applying for these jobs.

3. Candidates per Hire

Now that Let’s look at what’s going on here through February:

We’re going to look at two full years of data here dating back to January 2021, because the CPH trend is probably the most compelling trendline right now. It starts at a high point in February 2021 at 128 and declines sharply to 84.2 a year later in January 2022.

The trend stays relatively stable for the next six months after January 2022, and then skyrockets from 91 in July 2022 to a staggering 142.3 this last February.

That means a 56% increase in the CPH trend in an eight-month span. And that increase seems to be accelerating.

For instance, the highest MoM increase before 2023 in this chart was 16.8 points from July to August last year.

And now, we see an 18.1-point increase from January to February.

We know all about the Great Resignation. We’ve written plenty about the Great Discontent (and we have a new survey report coming in that area – stay tuned!).

Now? We’re looking at the Great Resurgence when it comes to sheer number of candidates.

What’s going on here?

In last month’s Pulse, we took a deep dive into five select industries in our dataset, each of them with different numbers.

We found that Software as a Service led in terms of the CPH trend, along with Diversified Financials and Media & Entertainment as significant industries experiencing (enjoying? enduring?) a deluge of talent.

Meanwhile, companies in the Hospitals & Healthcare industry sat near the bottom of the CPH spectrum, seeing fewer candidates for their jobs than most other industries. Other industries near the bottom include Retail, Banks, and Consumer Services.

And, on the topic of growing CPH, we saw this interesting insight from LinkedIn, courtesy of Dominic Joyce, Head of Talent Acquisition at Travelex:

In short, next to layoffs and turnover, maybe the one-click apply option is a reason you’re seeing more candidates in your inbox.

To Dominic’s point, some of those may be “lazy” applications. Not all of them, of course – but some of them at least.

This doesn’t mean you should not have easy-apply options – those are appreciated at large by candidates and they have a very valuable purpose. Rather, having more candidates highlights the importance of having a good filtering system in place – one that brings those ideal candidates to the forefront of your application pile.

And, of course, a reliable selection process free of breakdowns even when candidate volume grows exponentially.

That’s especially important right now with a shorter Time to Fill (which means more competitive hiring). That’s also important if you’re hiring in an industry that’s seeing a lot of change and turnover – like in SaaS, for instance.

Just food for thought. See you next month…

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for January 2023 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for February 2023

Keith MacKenzie — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 19:00:17 +0000

We also took a deep dive into the overall data for 2022 and compared that with the three previous calendar years of 2019, 2020 and 2021. There were some interesting insights in that as well, most notably that CPH was climbing at a rate unseen since the early days of the pandemic in 2020.

This time, with the first month of the new year behind us, we get a taste of what 2023 might look like. And we also take a deep dive into five industry groups in our dataset, because different cohorts are affected differently.

Let’s dive in!

Contents

How we’re looking at data

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings (JO)
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Candidates per Hire is still climbing, for the seventh straight month
Job openings surged in January for companies with 200+ FTEs
Job activity for the Hospital & Health Care industry group is much higher than other select industry groups

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of January are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend throughout 2022 against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled:

Something’s changed here. After a steady decline in the TTF trend for nearly every month throughout 2022, we see the TTF take a nice jump in January.

Now, let’s not get too excited by this. First things first, this is normal as can be. January normally sees the TTF jump quite a bit – from 88.8 in December 2020 to 96.2 in January 2021, and from 93.2 in December 2021 to 97.2 in January 2022.

And now, the trend grew from 86.4 in December 2022 to 90.6 in January 2023.

What *is* different, however, is that in the Q4 months, TTF increased month over month in 2020 and 2021, but declined month over month in 2022. But that’s the past – the main takeaway we have for this month is that TTF increased as expected in January.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

As stated above, we’re displaying this as an average of job postings per company in the network. And because this is not contingent on job opened/filled dates like TTF and Candidates per Hire, we can simply look at the raw job open numbers up to the end of January.

Last month, we pointed out how the overall average jobs per company in the network dropped to 5.2 after a very stable six-month string where it didn’t go higher than 6.3 or lower than 6.1.

But now, it’s jumped to 6.6 job postings per company in January – the highest since 7.1 in March 2022.

Of course, that differs by company size. So let’s get into that.

A huge jump for larger companies

December saw a significant drop in job postings for enterprise-level companies (200+ FTEs) from previous months, which we’ll “blame” on slower holiday activity. But in January, that number rebounded to 18.5 job postings per company, an increase of 37% over the previous month.

That’s not something to be excited about, though. First, a rebound in job postings in January is very normal especially at the enterprise level – we’ve seen this in past years as well.

And second, past Januaries show the JO average to be at a higher point than most months in the year preceding it. That’s not the case this time – January’s JO activity would be the third-lowest in 2022 (and, it’s worth noting, the two months that were lower are the last two months of 2022).

Medium, not nearly as much

The jump from December to January is also seen in the medium-sized category (51-200 FTEs), growing from 4.7 to 5.4 job postings per company. That’s not as dramatic of a jump as the 200+ crowd, but it’s still a 15% bump.

That being said, there isn’t anything particularly eventful or surprising here. So, let’s move to small businesses.

Jobs are lively for small businesses

Now here’s where the real story lives – in the 1-50 FTE bracket. Let’s add context as to how this group differs from the others.

Small businesses were the only one of the three size categories to be relatively increasing in job postings per company in the latter half of 2022. And the December drop was not particularly dramatic as it was still higher than most months throughout 2022.

Now the story of the hour: at 4.3 job postings per company, small businesses were more active in January 2023 than at any other month dating back to the start of our dataset in January 2019. We repeat: that’s the highest in four entire years. It’s also only the second time in that time span where the JOs per business goes higher than 4.

We discussed last month how the greater agility and shorter planning tenures of small businesses mean that this category is consistently active regardless of holiday seasons and other seasonalities. That may ring true again here.

3. Candidates per Hire

Workable defines the number of candidates per hire (CPH) as, succinctly, the number of applicants for a job up to the point of that job being filled. Let’s look at what’s going on here through January:

Simply put: January sees the CPH trend climb again – from 125.8 to 128.4 – although that’s not nearly as dramatic of a jump as in the two previous months.

It’s still another month-over-month increase – for the seventh straight month since July 2022. When is this trend going to peak?

And is that happening across all industries? Well, no. That’s exactly what we’re looking at our deep dive this month. Let’s take a look.

Deep dive – how ‘normal’ was 2022?

Now, we will be transparent here – our data isn’t perfectly spread out across all industries, all countries, or all functions. I mean, we’re not a government statistical body.

That caveat aside, our dataset is comprehensive enough that we can objectively look at specific industries and get solid insights from them.

So, we’re taking a look at five major industry groups this month with a rough breakdown of what sectors are in each:

Software & Services (IT security, software, etc.)
Commercial & Professional Services (environmental, law, consulting, training, logistics/supply chain, research, etc.)
Hospital & Health Care (exactly this)
Diversified Financials (accounting, financing, investment, VCs, etc.)
Capital Goods (engineering, aviation, defense/space, construction, machinery, etc.)

And a quick second point to make: in past Pulses, when deep-diving into specific categories, we used a category’s 2019 average as the index. But we thought about it and decided it’s better here to use the overall 2019 average as the index – that way, you’re able to see which groups are trending higher or lower than the overall baseline.

Got all that? Let’s get cracking.

Time to Fill

First, of course, Time to Fill:

What really stands out here is the Software & Services (S&S) group. Two main things to look at here:

TTF was much shorter for S&S than any of the other categories for the first half of 2022 – 28.9 points lower than second-lowest Commercial & Professional Services (C&PS) in January of last year
TTF then surges to 98.1 for January 2023, higher than any other group seen here

The other takeaway is that Capital Goods went the opposite direction – the TTF trend was much higher than any other group here to start 2022 (114.4 for January) before coming down to align with the others throughout the year.

Meanwhile, C&PS started with a higher TTF trend, bounced around a bit throughout the year, and then drops to 82.4 for January 2023.

Job Openings

Now, on to job openings. This one simply looks at average job postings per company in each group.

Let’s look:

Let’s just call it for what it is. If you’re operating in the Hospital & Health Care (H&HC) group, you’re probably hiring. You may even be desperate to hire – more on that in the CPH section below.

In short – H&HC companies in our dataset posted a stunning 27.4 new jobs on average in January 2023, effectively doubling in a six-month span dating back to August 2022’s 13.5.

What’s going on? A few factors – first, jobs in health care have been projected to be on the rise and this data just proves it. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in healthcare is predicted to grow 13% between 2021 and 2031 – adding more than two million jobs throughout the decade and at a much higher rate than jobs overall.

And second, perhaps unsurprisingly, job quits in healthcare are higher than the norm due to the stress on the sector throughout the pandemic leading to burnout. Retirement is another significant factor here.

Candidates per Hire

Finally, let’s look at candidates per hire for each of the industry groups:

This, again, is unsurprising due to all the layoffs in the tech sector in the latter part of 2022 and now. The CPH trend for S&S is much, much higher than any of the other groups at 190.4, and has been in the clear number-one spot for every month since June 2022. When you take out the anomaly that is May 2022 for the H&HC group, S&S is the runaway leader in terms of CPH throughout.

Let’s not let that overshadow our second takeaway from the CPH deep dive: Diversified Financials also saw a consistent climb in the CPH trend for the latter half of 2022. Not nearly as dramatic as S&S, but it’s still there.

And because we called so much attention to the job opens for H&HC above, it’s worth noting that CPH for that group is much lower than any other except for Capital Goods.

What’s going on here?

The data is clear (and was obvious anyway): not all industries are built the same, nor do they operate the same. And likewise, they’re not affected by the undulations of the economy in the same way. The differences between S&S, enterprise-level companies, and other cohorts are convincing.

So, if you’re reading this and struggling to understand why you keep seeing news about all of the following at once, you’re not just seeing things:

surging layoff numbers (84,414 employees let go in January in the US)
high numbers of new jobs added (517,000 new jobs in January in the US)
job quits continue at high levels (50.5 million quits in 2022 in the US)
candidate attraction struggles
*and* an almost unmanageable deluge of candidates in response to job postings.

These don’t seem to align logically, do they? But alas, they are. We like to think of it as a restabilization of the system. The last three years have been certifiably tumultuous throwing the system off balance, with strong reactions that forced imbalances in other directions in an attempt to bring it all back under control.

Consider this analogy: imagine you’re carrying a wide, shallow dish filled with water across the room. It’s heavy and it sloshes back and forth with every movement you make (i.e. COVID, Great Resignation, what have you), and every action you take has the direct opposite effect rather than a calming of the waters. That’s what’s going on here.

Will the waters settle? Yes, of course. Not to the way it was before; that much is agreed on. But when? And how? Those are the interesting questions worth thinking about when we deep-dive into how the job data differs across company sizes, regions, industries, and so on.

Till next month…

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for January 2023 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for January 2023

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 18:06:07 +0000

What’s continuing now is that, even with the tech talent migration, our data shows the candidate market is absolutely flooded and the talent shortage is becoming a thing of the past. This poses challenges to hiring teams everywhere, especially in the logistical management of larger applicant numbers for every job opening. If you’re seeing your pipeline getting clogged, you’re not alone.

The data this time around is more than convincing. We’re seeing 35% more candidates per hire in December than six months earlier – that’s an astronomical increase unseen since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Plus, with the full data of 2022 on our hands, we’re able to look at how 2022 sizes up against previous years.

Let’s dive in!

How we’re looking at data

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings (JO)
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Candidates per Hire is surging at a rate unseen in nearly three years
Job openings for small businesses only start dipping in December, compared with dips in both November and December for their larger counterparts
Time to Fill normally grows in December – but not this time around

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of December are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend throughout 2022 against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled:

The main insight here is that Time to Fill once again hit a new low for the calendar year. It’s been three straight months of “lowest in 2022”, or for every month in Q4.

And looking at that chart above, it looks like it’s a total decline from the start to the end of 2022. But that’s not necessarily true if you look a little deeper. Take out the January metric of 98.9 – which is a full 5.9 points higher than the second-highest month in May – and take out Q4 altogether, and honestly, TTF holds steady for February all the way through to September.

We’ll talk more about it in our deep dive below, but suffice to say that the very high January number is normal, whereas the very low Q4 numbers are not normal.

But, in between those two extremes, TTF looks more stabilized compared with the previous two years. More on that below in our year-over-year comparison.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

As you can see, we’re making it a standard to look at the Job Openings data across the three company size buckets of 1-50, 51-200, and 200+ full-time employees (FTEs).

First, before we start looking at each of the buckets, note that the overall average jobs per company in the network plunges in December to 5.2. That’s after very little change for the six months before that, ranging from 6.1 to 6.3 jobs per account throughout that period.

A huge drop for enterprises

Now, which of the size buckets is at fault here? At first glance, it’s the enterprise-level companies (200+ FTEs) who slowed down their hiring activity throughout the month, dropping a full 3.8 points from 17.3 in November to 13.5 in December. Of course, because the big kids will normally have more job activity in either direction, this will skew that overall average

Medium, not nearly as much

But we’re also seeing a drop in medium-sized business (51-200 FTEs) job activity from 5.1 in November to 4.7 in December, albeit not as dramatic of a drop. Nevertheless, like at the enterprise level, this is a continuation of the slow and steady decline in job activity in the Q4 months of 2022.

Jobs be nimble, jobs be quick for small businesses

What stands out as different for this month’s Hiring Pulse is in the job activity for small-sized businesses (1-50 FTEs). While their enterprise- and middle-sized businesses showed decline in Q4, small-sized businesses were actually increasing up to the end of November, with 3.1 job postings on average in August, 3.6 in September, 3.8 in October, and 4.2 in November.

And here’s the interesting bit: December’s 3.5 average for small business job postings is not even the lowest for 2022 – that honor goes to June and August with 3.1 for each. That stands in stark contrast to the other two company-size buckets, which both hit convincing 2022 lows in December.

There are many different conclusions to draw from all this – the one we’ll make here is that smaller businesses tend to be more agile and their senior management are more likely to be operating around the clock because they kind of have to. They wear many different hats and may also be financially invested in their business, rather than simply being employees who can take time off in December for the holidays.

There’s sometimes a personal cost, especially when one has family, but at a strictly business level, this speaks to the strength of smaller organizations – they can be nimble and that’s crucial during recession-prone times when it’s often difficult to plan beyond the next quarter. It’s a potential generalization, but it’s a point worth considering.

3. Candidates per Hire

Last month, we pointed to four straight months of higher-than-normal CPH data points, each higher than the previous one.

You can now make it five. Five straight months of astronomical month-over-month increases to close out 2022. To put it in perspective, back in November’s Hiring Pulse, we showed that the average candidates per hire for October was 24% higher than in July. It’s now 34.9% higher.

Let’s put it into perspective: if you were getting, say, 100 applicants for a job in July, this means that last month, you’re getting 135 applicants for your open roles on average. That’s 35 more applications you need to sift through. And as you move your applicants through the recruitment funnel, you’re screening more candidates per job, and likely interviewing more of them in the first part of the funnel.

That’s maybe a good thing for companies who were struggling to find worthy candidates for their open jobs during the height of the Great Resignation, but not a good thing for resource-strapped companies who are barely staying ahead of all the additional work on their plate.

In fact, our New World of Work survey in 2022 showed that reduced capacity to recruit is more of a challenge today than in 2020, with 27.5% saying so now compared with 14.9% two years ago.

Note: that survey was conducted in early summer 2022, well before this surge in CPH. We’re now seeing cutbacks and layoffs especially in the tech sector, and consequently a huge rise in CPH – but bet your bottom dollar (or pound or euro or what have you) that companies are not adding to payroll to support their hiring teams.

So… a growing CPH necessitates optimization in the recruitment process (insert shameless plug for Workable which actually does help in terms of doing more with less).

Deep dive – how ‘normal’ was 2022?

We’ve already covered to some extent what 2022 looks like for each of the three metrics. Now, with a complete 2022 dataset, we’re taking a deep dive and comparing the most recent year with the previous three calendar years (2019, 2020, and 2021).

And for visual impression, we’re overlaying each of the years into a single chart for each of the metrics so you can really compare.

Quick note before we really dive in: the data for Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire is based on an index, that being the average of 2019 as a whole, which is set as 100. We’ve included 2019 in these year-over-year comparisons for extended analysis – yes, we’re even comparing the months of 2019 against its own annual average.

What we’re doing a little differently just for this deep dive is the job opening data. Since it’s normally based on hard averages (i.e. job postings per company) and not on a 2019 index, it becomes more awkward to do a year-over-year analysis because our network has grown substantially over the years and, with it, the job postings.

So, instead of looking at just raw averages or even lining things up against the 2019 index, we’re using the first month of the year (January) as an index of 100 for each year, and sizing each month of that year against January.

Hope that makes sense! Let’s get into what was ‘normal’ about 2022 and how ‘normal’ it actually was compared with previous years.

Time to Fill

First, of course, Time to Fill:

So, the first and most obvious commonality across all years is that TTF is naturally higher in January than any other month, takes a bit of a drop in February, and kind of fluctuates from there.

2019, being the last ‘normal’ year – and we stand by that statement – shows only minimal fluctuation. 2020, which of course was a rather cataclysmic year for anyone personally and professionally, shows a rather stable TTF right up to April as the other three years continue to drop. But then, 2020 plummeted resoundingly from roughly 100 in March and April down to 84.2, 83, and 83.8 in the Q3 months before recovering slightly in the last quarter.

The other thing that stands out is something we alluded to above: 2022 showed consecutive month-over-month declines in the TTF metric from September all the way to December. This differs from the other three years, which all show relatively stable TTFs with even an increase in TTF for December for 2019 and 2021.

So, if we’re going to talk about what even is ‘normal’, it’s kind of hard to suss that out even with the last four years on full display.

Job Openings

Now, on to job openings. Remember, instead of looking at it as raw average job openings per company, we’re simply using January of each year as the index for that year. That way, every year starts at 100, and goes up or down from there.

Also, we have four different graphs here, because we’re looking at each of the FTE size buckets:

JO trendline for all businesses

Let’s look at the overall trendline for starters:

Yeah, yeah. That dip in April 2020 needs no explanation. We all know what happened. So let’s just scrub that from memory (and we do apologize for reminding you about it).

On to the comparables: what seems to be relatively normal across all four years is how the job opening trend remains relatively steady in mid-year and in some cases even grows a little bit in the Q3 months.

Another trend that looks to be consistent regardless of year is the drop in job openings in the last month of the year – understandable because of holidays and it being a relatively slow month for business all around.

Keep that one in mind – more on that below.

JO trendline for small businesses

Now, let’s look at the small-business job opening trendline:

What’s interesting about this is how 2021 and 2022 show a very healthy jump in small-business job openings for November which stands in contrast to 2019 and 2020.

What also stands out is how the job openings for small businesses climb significantly for September, October and November in 2022, while remaining relatively stable in the other three years.

One part that intrigued us is that the 1-50 FTE bucket is the only one that showed a drop in job openings for just December and not for both November and December as in the other two size buckets (and in the overall average).

Again, numerous reasons for this – one explanation to think about is, again, that small businesses are more nimble and perhaps work on much more of a month-to-month basis than their larger counterparts. Execs may not be thinking as far into the future when they’re running a smaller kayak of 15 employees as when they’re operating a larger ocean liner of 250 employees. Again, a potential generalization, but worth thinking about.

JO trendline for medium-sized businesses

Now, let’s look at the medium-sized business job activity:

What’s markedly different here for businesses with 51-200 FTEs is how much healthier the market looked for 2021 going out from January – it rises far above the others.

This is a sign of economic recovery from 2020, of course, likely in tandem with Great Resignation fallout – this all leads to more jobs added to payroll as companies grow (or recover, rather) and also, more backfill as quit rates run through the roof towards the end of 2021.

JO trendline for enterprises

Now keep that in mind while looking at enterprise-level businesses:

See, companies with more than 200 FTEs also showed plenty of job activity in 2021, higher vs. the January index than the other three years – but not standing out nearly as much as 2021 was for companies with 51-200 employees. Again, this is likely a combination of economic recovery and the Great Resignation.

What’s a little concerning about all of these job opening graphs is how the trend looks to be lower than other years for 2022 and going sharply downhill. We’ve heard talk about a recession since the early days of Q2 2022 – and companies cutting back in preparation.

This is continuing to happen at the start of 2023, and frustratingly for the talent market, means fewer jobs on the horizon.

Which leads us to:

Candidates per Hire

Are you ready?

We will keep this succinct: the CPH metric is now trending at the same level as at the end of the catastrophic year of 2020. What’s different this time is that the CPH trend is on a consistently uphill climb since mid-2022 and hitting new highs every month since September.

In 2020, CPH was at astronomical highs and coming down pretty drastically for November and December. And with the Great Resignation, the CPH trend continued to drop throughout 2021 and then held steady throughout the first half of 2022.

And now, in complete contrast to any of the other years, CPH is climbing at a rate unseen since those early months in 2020. People talked about how 2020 showed a recession unlike any other – the difference is that at the time, the volatility hit us like a truck on a dark country road thanks to an unanticipated pandemic.

This time, we’ve been anticipating a change in the economy for many months now.

What’s the difference? Well, the huge drop in the economy in early 2020 was in direct response to a single development, and because it was so swift and severe, the rebound was also swift.

This time, it’s much more complex – it’s not just about a pandemic. It’s about supply chains, a war in Ukraine, rising food and gas prices, consumer hesitancy, and other things in what’s being called a permacrisis.

Wait, a permacrisis? What’s that? Read on:

What’s going on here?

The opening lines to a recent Economist article read as follows:

“The editors of the Collins English Dictionary have declared ‘permacrisis’ to be their word of the year for 2022. Defined as an ‘an extended period of instability and insecurity’, it is an ugly portmanteau that accurately encapsulates today’s world as 2023 dawns.”

That’s scary stuff, indeed. That’s the tone we’re also setting for 2023 – if it isn’t already, it’s going to be tough times for businesses and employers.

But there’s a kind-of glimmer for you: you may still be needing to backfill vacated roles and fill new roles opened up due to restructurings. But for many of those job openings, a flood of candidates will come crashing through.

This will add stress to your hiring pipeline every step of the way. You, of course, may be reluctant to add to your payroll that’s responsible for hiring – which is understandable,. Instead, you’ll want to optimize your existing process.

We talked last month about automation using recruitment technology – you can screen far more candidates using one-way video interviews, keep them regularly informed with automated messaging, and relieve your recruiters of scheduling hassles using interview self-scheduling.

There are flexible solutions that can rise and fall with your hiring tide. Plus, you will show your value as a hiring team member that makes you even more indispensable to a company that’s trying to survive this permacrisis.

Stay strong, and see you next month.

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for December 2022 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for December 2022

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 15:43:05 +0000

But now, we’re looking at the data and seeing some interesting ongoing trends that keep topping trends from the previous month – and we’re drawing some fresh, but not different, conclusions.

Let’s take a look:

How we’re looking at data

Want a more detailed methodology? Jump to the end and check it out.

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Small businesses are hiring more, whereas enterprise-level businesses are hiring less
Candidates are flooding the job market at a rate unseen in a year and a half
Huge numbers in Silicon Valley tech layoffs could lead to cross-border mobility not only for those laid off, but for employers as well

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of November are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled from the start of 2020 through to the end of November 2022:

Last month, we marked a new low for Time to Fill for 2022 when TTF hit 88.7 (reported as 88.4 last month – since updated with more complete data). Well, we’ve again hit another new low in November, with the TTF trend dropping to 88.2.

That’s the lowest it’s been since May 2021 when TTF was 87.8. And this is the second consecutive month that it’s been below 90.

Let’s compare to the Ghosts of Hiring Past. Note the three pretty significant spikes in that nearly three-year span in the chart above. No, those aren’t anomalies – they are all in January. This can be explained by saying that work processes slow down in December as we go through the motions of holiday season, and that adds days – weeks, even – to the normal time spent on filling open roles. So, TTF takes a leap in the post-holiday period.

But what’s curious this time around is in the months preceding January. In previous years, the Q4 months show an incline in the TTF trend and climaxing in the first month of the new year. But this time in 2022, there’s a marked decline month over month.

We’ll have to wait until February 2023 to see what January looks like this time – but if you wanted to put down a wager, it might not be outrageous to predict that the “post-holiday TTF spike” may not be as prominent as in the past.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

As we did in a Hiring Pulse a couple of months ago, we’re again looking at total job postings per business across three separate size buckets – companies with 1-50 full-time employees (FTEs), 51-200 FTEs, and 200 or more employees. And for a baseline, we’ve also included a line for all businesses put together.

What stands out here is how the smallest bucket – the one with 1-50 FTEs – is growing significantly, with four straight months of increasing job activity starting with 3.1 job postings per business in August up to 4.2 job postings per business in November. That’s more than one extra job posting per business on average.

And while medium-sized businesses (51-200 FTEs) hold steady across time, enterprise-level businesses (200+) are dropping dramatically over the past three months. In September, enterprises posted an average of 19.4 jobs, but that goes down to 17.4 in November. That’s two full job postings less on average.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or on the moon, and especially if you’re in the tech space, you’re well aware of the mounting layoffs grabbing headlines every week. As it happens, according to Visual Capitalist, November saw more than twice as many layoffs in the month (59,710 cuts) compared with the previous 2022 monthly high set in June (29,299).

But what’s noteworthy about that Visual Capitalist chart is that a good half of the layoffs are attributed to just 11 companies – all of which we’re very familiar with. Meta, Amazon and Twitter are the most prominent, followed by Carvana, Doordash, Stripe, and a handful of other tech behemoths.

What are we saying here? Yes, smaller companies lay off fewer employees, which makes a layoff event less prominent in their case. However, the flip side of the coin is that smaller businesses – those in the 1-50 FTE bucket – can be more nimble. They’re like hundreds of thousands of kayaks among a few ocean liners, adapting as they go. The ebbs and flows of the currents affect them too, but they can roll with the changes more quickly.

So, jumping from three to four job postings on average isn’t necessarily a sign of economic health, but rather, a sign of increased agility in times of turbulence.

3. Candidates per Hire

This is resounding. Four straight months of higher-than-normal CPH data points – and each month higher than the previous one. In November, we’re seeing the highest CPH trend since the beginning of last year.

And for perspective – the beginning of last year marked the end of astronomical highs in the CPH trend; you can see that in the updated chart. The start of that data mountain there can be correlated with – and directly linked to – the advent of the pandemic. Layoffs hit unprecedented highs in Q2 2020 – leading to the market being flooded with candidates.

But as things slowly reached a new normal, we saw Anthony Klotz’ Great Resignation prediction come true, with job quits going through the roof. And correlating with that – again, not purely coincidentally – was a sharp drop in candidates per job to below the 2019 average starting in August 2021 when the trend hit 97.5. In short: when people quit, they weren’t looking for new jobs. They were checking out in a big eff you to the system altogether.

The CPH metric stayed underwater all the way to August of this year, when a staggering 15.5-point jump from July brought it back up to 105.7. And from there on, as you can see, it’s hitting new recent highs, culminating in 116.2 for November.

Candidates are flooding the market again – and while many may be a result of layoffs, we’ll wager that many others are realizing that checking out of the system isn’t a sustainable option and they’re reentering the workforce.

What’s going on here?

First, let’s look at a different consequence of increased layoffs in the tech sector. It means that tens of thousands of foreign workers are having to leave the United States because they’re in the country on sponsored H1-B work visas.

According to the article, this may mean the US will fall behind in tech competitiveness. It also means a potential upside for tech companies headquartered outside of the country, such as in Canada and the European Union – because those tech workers will be looking for jobs in places with more permissive work visa policies.

We’ve kind of seen this happen in the recent past, but in very different circumstances, when the Trump administration made it more difficult to get an H1-B visa. This led to a Silicon Valley brain drain, with a good portion of talent – and companies, too – moving north to Canada to take advantage of more friendly work visa policies.

Now, on to candidates per hire – the significant growth in that metric isn’t unprecedented by a long shot – but it’s indicative of things to come. For a long time now, the major challenge that recruiters and hiring managers had faced was in candidate sourcing and attraction.

In short, they haven’t been able to pull in an adequate number of applicants when they open up a new job.

Either they aren’t sourcing those candidates in the right places, or their value proposition just isn’t up to snuff and it’s been a candidate’s market all this time.

This meant that hiring teams worked diligently on their recruitment marketing tactics, promoting their companies as great places to work. They’ve also dug deeper into the market to find – and even proactively contact – those ideal candidates, in hopes of luring them to their open roles.

But all that is changing. Let’s call COVID an anomaly and say that for the first time in actual years, the scales are tipping in the other direction. We’re seeing a situation where all someone has to do is post a job, and they get slammed with a hefty number of quality applicants within minutes.

This is no longer one-click-apply territory – these are legit jobseekers sent out to pasture by their most recent employer, and they’re actively and aggressively looking for a new job.

What does that mean for hiring teams? It means the hiring pipeline is about to get clogged. This means there’ll be more time and resources spent on screening and evaluating candidates, so as to not let good ones fall through the cracks. It also means evaluating them differently such that you try to get a sense of their motivation to work for you – is the candidate simply trying to get a job in general, or do they really want to work in your company?

Even if it’s honest to say that candidates do need jobs so they can pay rent, buy food, support families, and the like, it’s still important to the employer to hire someone who’s really keen to work at that specific job and to do a good job of it, too. And for those new hires to stick around as well, as opposed to seeing your opportunity as a stepping stone to a more permanent solution.

Not only does that change the evaluation game, it also means your hiring teams – already strapped for time and resources after cutbacks and streamlinings – will be even more stress-tested going forward. You want your hiring process to be free of breakdowns. This is where automation becomes a boon for you, the SMB employer.

Automation using recruitment technology – for example, one-way video interviews, automated messaging and interview self-scheduling features – will be incredibly useful going forward.

Have a great holiday and see you in 2023!

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for December 2022 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for November 2022

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 14:49:45 +0000

This month, we take on a similar narrative, but we also cast light on some eye-opening trends in October’s dataset.

Let’s get right to it:

How we’re looking at data

If you missed last month’s update, we’ve established two new methodologies in how we look at the Hiring Pulse dataset. For Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire, we’re measuring each month using the average of 2019, the last “normal” year, as a baseline index of 100.

Want a more detailed methodology? Jump to the end and check it out.

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Time to Fill has hit a significant new low for 2022, and is also the biggest month-to-month drop since January to February
Candidates Per Hire keeps climbing and climbing
The last time we saw such a dramatic jump in CPH in consecutive months was in early-mid 2020

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of October are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled from the start of 2022 through to the end of October 2022:

We are now at a new low for Time to Fill for the 2022 calendar year, with the average TTF for October just 88.4. It’s not just a new low – it’s significantly lower, a 5-point drop.

That’s the biggest month-to-month change in either direction since January’s 101.0 dropped 7.3 points to 93.7 for February.

The narrative we’ve carried over the last couple of months is that recession jitters are pushing the data all over the place. We’ve also said that those currently hiring were rushing to fill jobs throughout July and August as the Great Resignation opened up gaps in organizational workflows that urgently need to be filled.

After a jump in September to 93.4, the new and sudden drop can be explained as upcoming recession concerns leading to organizational (or departmental) restructurings leading to new gaps being opened up.

That’s a little different from gaps as a result of people quitting – in this case, it’s more as a result of optimization. Department leaders may be identifying ways to combine two roles into one or three roles into two as a cost-cutting measure – and these are new roles that need to be filled.

That’s one reason we may see new job openings in companies that have just laid people off. Which brings us to the second potential explanation: the layoffs themselves. Twitter wasn’t the first – just the most prominent to date. We’ve been learning about layoffs for some time now – and this leads to the market being flooded with high-quality candidates actively looking for new jobs right away.

This isn’t great for those who lost their jobs, but there’s an upside for those actively hiring. Candidate pools are now deeper than in the past. Employers don’t have to compete nearly as much or even work as much to source that newly available talent. So, it’s logistically quicker to fill those roles.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

This is a very simple graph and speaks for itself. Ultimately, what stands out is that the top two most active months for job postings via the Workable network are March with 6.5 jobs posted per company on average, and most recently October, with 6.4 jobs per company on average.

Regardless of the weird economic climate that we’re in, this chart rings as relatively normal according to our metrics history. The end of Q1 and the start of Q4 are busy hiring seasons and we’re seeing that in 2022 as well. In the past, we’ve seen that October jumps a bit, takes a dip in November, and then jumps again in December.

Let’s watch this space closely and see what it looks like as we round up 2022.

3. Candidates per Hire

Last month, we pointed out what we thought was a “pretty huge jump” in the CPH metric, somersaulting over the baseline index from 91.1 in July to 106.6 in August and 106.8 in September.

And now? It’s gone even higher – to 112.8 in October.

That’s the highest that it’s been since the metric hit 115.2 in March 2021. And the CPH metric was below the baseline from August 2021 all the way to this past July. It’s only in the last three months that we’ve seen such a dramatic reversal in CPH.

For context: in January and February 2020, the metric stood at 93.9 and 88.7 respectively. It then jumped to 102.6 in March 2020 and stayed above the baseline for 14 consecutive months to April 2021. In the midst of that was five straight 120-and-higher months from June to October 2020. July 2020 was 137.0 and October 2020 was 136.5.

This is all pandemic-related, of course. March 2020 saw many workers moved to remote work or furloughed, as a stopgap measure. When it became clear that COVID-19 wasn’t going away anytime soon, companies resorted to the painful process of layoffs en masse. This jump in CPH is the result.

Why are we talking about this two years later? Because we’re seeing similarities in how the CPH is changing now. Recession fears started a few months ago – and layoffs then started happening after that. Combine that with fewer jobs being posted, and the CPH starts to grow again. Just like it did in 2020.

What’s going on here?

Honestly, Twitter is just the tip of the iceberg of what’s going on here. Agree or disagree with Elon Musk if you will, but what’s happening in the e-hallways of that social media monolith is just a microcosm of what’s happening out there.

Layoffs are happening left, right, and center – including reports of Facebook parent Meta also turning to layoffs for the first time in its history. Lyft and Stripe are also laying off people, and Apple and Amazon are freezing their hiring processes. There is, of course, a trickle-down effect.

And, as mentioned above, those layoffs mean tens – likely hundreds – of thousands of new candidates flooding the market. This isn’t Big Quit material – these are people who are involuntarily severed from their income lifeline, and after a frustrated sob in the bathtub for an evening, are rolling up their sleeves and jumping right back into the job fray the next day.

The result is what we’re seeing here.

However, we have some kind-of good news for you. Much of the recession talk is still anticipatory, and different experts are saying different things. While more execs are bringing up the recession in their quarterly earnings conference calls, stock speculators at sites such as Yahoo! Finance are saying the talk of a recession may be greatly exaggerated and fiscal pundits at Goldman Sachs suggest we’re not necessarily doomed to a recession.

Ultimately, there isn’t clear agreement on what’s going to happen. While we know businesses don’t appreciate uncertainty, this uncertainty is good if anything. And organizations seem to be responding aggressively ahead of what *might* happen.

Let’s think of it this way: if you see your kid approaching a stove and yell at them not to touch it, and then you realize the stove wasn’t actually hot, then is that a good thing? Yes, it is. It’s good that you took the precautionary measure even if you weren’t entirely sure of the stove’s setting at that time, because the end result is the same: your kid doesn’t get burned.

In that spirit, all this anticipation and action ahead of what may be a recession could be seen as a good thing.

Let’s keep one eye on the overall conversation around recessions and the other eye on upcoming Hiring Pulse data trends, and keep all this in mind.

There’s always something in all this that can help us move forward with confidence even if we’re not sure of the danger of the hot stove.

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for November 2022 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for October 2022

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 15:16:56 +0000

Now, this month, we’re taking the plunge into SMB hiring metrics as per usual, but with an update in how we look at the dataset. Let’s get right to it:

How we’re looking at data

In past Hiring Pulses from the very beginning, we had a dilemma: how do you look at data when the economic – and therefore hiring – landscape is so tumultuous from one month to the next? The big concern was that it’s hard to establish solid benchmarks when the goalposts keep moving all the time.

So, in the beginning, instead of simply establishing historical benchmarks from years of data, we chose to look at data based on a trailing three-month average. For instance, we would compare August’s Time to Fill against the rolling average of the three previous months – in this case, May, June, and July.

Now, we’ve established two new methodologies. For Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire, we’re measuring each month using the average of 2019, the last “normal” year, as a baseline index of 100.

Want a more detailed methodology? Jump to the end and check it out.

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

TTF is coming down (again) after a jump in TTF for May, June and July
Job openings are very busy for companies with 200+ FTEs – but not so much for mid-sized businesses (51-200 FTEs)
Candidates per Hire numbers are going through the roof in the last two months

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of September are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled from the start of 2019 through to the end of September 2022:

In the most recent Hiring Pulses, we noted that the Time to Fill trend has been dropping over time. This isn’t different with the new approach to the dataset. For instance, the average Time to Fill for August is just 91.5% of the 2019 average.

It’s worth noting the small uptick in TTF for September – but that’s an increase of just .9 of a point. Also worth noting is how May, June and July saw a slight bump upwards in TTF, and there’s of course January with an above-average time to fill a role.

We speculated last month about how recession jitters, greater bandwidth in hiring teams due to business slowdowns in August, and the “rush to fill” urgent gaps in the workforce are all potential factors contributing to the drop in the Time to Fill metric in August.

However, our recently published survey report on the New World of Work for 2022 finds that depleted resources in hiring teams is a growing challenge in hiring – with nearly double the respondents citing this as a challenge compared with two years ago (27.5% vs. 14.9%).

So, that might cancel out the “greater bandwidth in hiring teams” theory. It’s gotta be recession jitters and the rush to fill jobs. And it may not even be those issues, with TTF coming up a bit in September.

What else might be going on?

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

You’ll notice right off the bat that we’re breaking the data down into three separate buckets – companies with 1-50 full-time employees (small businesses), companies with 51-200 FTEs (mid-sized businesses), and companies with 200 or more FTEs. And for comparison’s sake, we’ve also added a line showing the average across all businesses regardless of size.

Naturally, the larger businesses hire more frequently – there’s more occurrences of turnover, backfill, stopgaps, and business growth/adjustments, meaning more job postings in general.

So don’t compare sizes – that’s never a good result.

Instead, look at how the wavelengths for each FTE bucket differs. Let’s look at earlier in the year first where two notable trends stand out:

The 200+ category shows a dramatic jump in job postings at the start of the year, from 13.8 job postings in January to 14.5 in February, a .8 jump compared with a negative .5 for the 51-200 group (8.3 to 7.8) and a milder, even inconsequential -.1 for the 1-50 club (3.7 to 3.6)
Meanwhile, April to May shows a more dramatic drop for the 51-200 group (-.3) compared with just -.1 for 200+ and a flatline for 1-50

And now, some dramatic fluctuations between the company sizes reveal themselves in the three most recent months of the dataset:

The two larger buckets both saw a -.4 change in the average job postings per company from May to June, compared with the exact opposite for the 1-50 category
After that drop, the largest companies in the dataset (200+ FTEs) saw a significant rebound of .9 more job postings on average in July compared with June, while the smallest companies (1-50 FTEs) saw a -.4 shift in their own job posting average
And then, finally, while the largest and smallest companies saw more job posting activity in September compared with August, mid-sized companies (51-200 FTEs) saw the opposite trend, dropping .4 points

Speculation about the mid-sized companies is that many of them are in tech, and we know how hard SaaS companies are being hit by recession fears right now. This may be what we’re seeing here – and we know you’re likely an SMB that’s come here for insights.

So, let’s take an optimistic approach to this if we can: fewer job openings for your company size means there’s less competition with other employers when you’re opening a new job during this time. Does that mean we’ll also see more candidates now with a less diluted talent pool? Well, let’s find out.

3. Candidates per Hire

Just as we expected. The last two months see a pretty huge jump in the Candidate per Hire metric, ricocheting from a below-baseline 91.1 up to 106.6 in August and 106.8 in September.

That’s a staggering uptick – a swing of 15.5 and 15.7 percentage points. If you were getting 91 candidates in a job a couple of months ago, you’d be seeing 106 or 107 candidates just last month. And that’s just the average.

We talked last month about jobseekers becoming a surplus – this trend is continuing to happen, and that, again, may be a good sign for SMBs looking to hire right now.

What’s going on here?

It’s a bit of a no-brainer. The job market is slowing down a little bit – and consequently, candidates are becoming more available. We’re seeing this happening in our data, and in the data out there.

But what’s important is that the job market isn’t slowing down for everyone – it’s the opposite for enterprise-level companies. It’s worth noting that recessions have a disproportionate impact on smaller companies due to their lack of scalability and relatively inconsistent revenue stream, and that’s reflected in our dataset.

However, in the hiring landscape, we’ve noted that SMBs such as yourselves can take a cautiously optimistic approach to this – this developing climate actually may make it easier for healthy SMBs, in the short-term at least.

Then-CFO of Expedia Eric Hart would agree, telling investors in an August earnings call: “Not that I wish ill on any people out there from a layoff perspective or whatever else, but I think there could be an opportunity for us to ramp some of that hiring over the coming months.”

We also talked last month about how a recession would impact certain sectors, and not all of them at once. But we also talked about why we’re not really seeing a recession coming yet. We’re going to be a bit of a wet blanket and tell you that there may (will?) be a considerable setback in the global economy in 2023 according to many internationally recognized economists (including the head of the World Trade Organization) – and that the US Federal Reserve’s aggressive hikes in the inflation rate may be at the very core of it. Here’s an article outlining what’s going on.

And that’s not just in the US. That’s worldwide. Plan accordingly, including in your hiring.

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for October 2022 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for September 2022

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 20:44:44 +0000

For this month’s Hiring Pulse, we have more insights for you on all of the above, and in response to numerous queries we’re taking a deep dive into the SMB hiring trends specifically for the UK and Ireland.

Let’s take the plunge!

How we’re looking at data

First, looking at SMB hiring data allows us to see benchmarks in the hiring landscape. But when the benchmark changes regularly during these last two tumultuous years, it’s not the best measuring stick.

So, instead of looking at data YoY or even MoM, we’re looking at rolling trends. What we’re doing in the Hiring Pulse is looking at that month’s percentage increase or decrease compared with the average of the three trailing months. Want a more detailed methodology? Jump to the end and check it out.

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

TTF has significantly dropped in August – unlike in previous Augusts
Job openings are normalizing more “normally” than either Candidates Per Hire or TTF
Recession worries are still very real – but jobs themselves may not be hit as hard as feared

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of August are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at TTF based on jobs that have been filled from the start of 2020 through to the end of August 2022:

One thing that stands out: Time to Fill dropped dramatically in August, with a -3.4% change from the average of the previous three months. Last year, August’s TTF trend was nearly the opposite: 5.1%.

What accounts for this? In the northern hemisphere, where most of this dataset lives, it’s summertime – which means a slowdown in overall business and consequently a slowdown in hiring. And a slowdown in jobseeking as well, of course. Fewer candidates makes it harder to find candidates, and there are fewer people working in hiring teams throughout. Put all that together, and that explains the uptick in TTF – in other words, longer TTF – in August 2021.

This especially should be the case in 2022 with the world opening up again (to a degree), and many workers catching up on their pent-up vacation time. But, instead, TTF dropped in August. TTF is shorter this time around than in previous months.

Why?

Perhaps, the seemingly non-stop predictions of a recession made for a business slowdown, which coupled with the normal downturn in processes during the traditional vacation months, led to less work for a company’s active employees for these few months. This frees up bandwidth for employees to focus on some other important things at work.

Then, more time is spent on sourcing, attracting, and evaluating candidates – which speeds the process along.

And of course, when people quit en masse – as we’re still seeing in the US at the very least – there’s a tinge of desperation as employers rush to fill ongoing gaps in their workforce.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

So, let’s look at the raw job open numbers – which aren’t contingent on job opened/filled dates like TTF and Candidates per Hire. These are just jobs opened in a given month – in other words, a single event – and are a great indicator of the health of the economy.

This one’s interesting. We’ve been writing a fair bit in previous Hiring Pulses about this thing called a recession and how that may impact our hiring metrics. We pointed to how July saw a change of -6% (now adjusted to -5.5% with data updates) in job openings compared with the three previous months’ average – and that this is unusual considering that previous Julys all saw a relatively opposite trend.

For example, as we showed last month, the job open trend for past Julys is as follows:

July 2019: 7.2%
July 2020: 49.5% (major caveat here, it being 2020)
July 2021: 5.7%

And now, August’s job opening trend has sped up just a wee bit to -2.2%. It’s not something to scream at the rooftops about, but when we compare to previous Augusts:

August 2019: 5%
August 2020: 23% (again, remember, this is 2020)
August 2021: 1.5%

Yes, all three previous Augusts were positive trends while this August is negative – however, the change isn’t nearly as significant.

The difference between July 2021’s 5.7% and July 2022’s -5.5% is 11.2 total percentage points, while for August last year and this year, it’s just 3.7 percentage points.

Last month, we said, and we quote:

“Do we want to be nervous? Should we be nervous? Well… recessions are normal. They do happen. And businesses will respond to that with more conservative projections and austere practices. Let’s watch this space and see what August brings us.”

Well, now that we can see what August brings us, maybe there’s cause to be not as nervous as previously.

Still… the doomsayers in us like to persist. Recessions don’t just happen in a month and go away. It’s a long game and businesses need to be mindful of that.

3. Candidates per Hire

Now, this is interesting. After all that fluctuation that we pointed out in the August Hiring Pulse, we now see a considerable spike in the Candidates Per Hire trend of 13.3% for the month of August.

If you overlook the “recovery” of hiring metrics in the wake of March 2020 – basically, when the big COVID truck hit many of us – this 13.3% marks the biggest positive trend in our data for any month in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 to date.

Surely, this must be somewhat normal for this time of year, you suggest.

News flash: no, it actually isn’t, not according to the data.

Check out what the CPH trend for June, July, and August looks like over the past four years:

Last month, we saw how the data for the three previous months of May, June and July made it pretty clear that 2022 was in a state of relative normalization, with the trend somewhat comparable to the last year before COVID – that being 2019.

But now, this isn’t the case at all. There are more candidates per job in August than previous. And the last time we saw such a monumental spike in the CPH trend was in the exceptional months after March 2020.

While we’ll write off those early COVID months as anomalous, it’s worth mentioning that those months were also months of desperation; there were many candidates out there in the wake of mass layoffs, and they were scrambling to find new work.

This time isn’t so different. Under the lingering shadow of a “maybe” recession, layoffs also surged. Couple that with just-quit workers from the Great Resignation feeling nervous about the road ahead and thinking it might be smart to get back into full-time work before the well runs dry, and we have a situation where jobseekers are no longer at a premium but now potentially becoming a surplus.

Deep dive – UK & Ireland

In the last few months, we’ve received a few inquiries: “All this Hiring Pulse stuff is great and stuff, but do you have any data specifically for those of us in the UK?” Well, we heard you and we’re taking action right now.

So, in this month’s Deep Dive, we look at these three hiring metrics specifically for the UK and Ireland (UK&I).

While we know that you’re interested specifically in UK&I metrics – it helps to see how that looks against the overall data. So, we’re adding an extra line for the overall data in each of the three charts.

Let’s dive in:

1. Time to Fill – UK&I

Let’s first look at the Time to Fill trend:

When we look at the Time to Fill trendline for UK&I, it runs along a similar trajectory as the world trendline – unsurprising, to be fair, considering that the UK is home to the world’s fifth-biggest GDP (the U.S., China, Japan, and Germany being one through four) and thus, wherever the world’s economy rolls, the UK shall roll with it.

Ireland’s own economy is smaller as a whole, of course, but its GDP per capita is more than twice as much as that of the UK, and the fifth largest worldwide – so it has a presence in this data as well.

Now, if you really want to get geeky when comparing the area-specific data against the whole, let us help by pointing out two major areas where the trends differ: March through October 2020 and, yes, the last three months.

First, for UK&I’s data, we see considerable fluctuation for March through October of 2020 with a 4% uptick in April 2020 compared with a relative flatline of 0.01% for the overall CPH trend. Then, UK&I plummets considerably more so than the overall, falling to -9%, -14.7%, and -18.6% in TTF for May, June, and July 2020 compared with -6.2%, -8%, and -9.7% overall.

But then, UK&I recovers just as dramatically, rising to 3.2% and 5% for August and September 2020 with a minor -1.4% hiccup for October before falling back in line with the overall TTF metric, which saw steady recovery of -3.5%, -1% and 4.7% for those three months.

The difference in the last three months isn’t nearly so dramatic, but still worth noting because it’s just happening now: the divergence starts happening again in June 2022 with a -2.6% drop in the trend for UK&I compared with 1.5% overall.

Then, for July, we see a 3.3% uptick for UK&I compared with 0.4% overall, followed by August’s -0.7% for UK&I and -3.4% overall.

2. Total Job Openings – UK&I

Now, let’s look at job openings themselves:

For the most part, the trend for both the UK&I segment and the overall data more or less follow the same path upwards and downwards every month – but the fluctuation of the last couple of months is eye-catching.

June saw a -15.5% change in job openings in the UK and Ireland, compared with -9.6% worldwide, followed by 3.4% versus -5.5% for July, and finally, -9.5% for UK&I in August compared with -2.2% overall. Job openings are down quite a bit in UK&I compared with the rest of the world.

Pretty big differences, honestly. Does it mean anything? Not necessarily if it’s just happening for a few months as fluctuations do occur, but it’s worth watching.

3. Candidates per Hire – UK&I

Now, let’s look at the Candidates per Hire trend for the UK and Ireland:

One thing that the UK has been dealing with on top of COVID-19 is, of course, Brexit. As it happens, Brexit became official to a degree on January 31, 2020. At that time, the virus was certainly on the horizon but hadn’t hit the UK’s shores yet.

But now, the double whammy of the pandemic’s onset with the reduced options for working abroad for many Britons after Brexit is readily visible here, with the CPH metric spiking massively in Q2 of 2020 – the most obvious one being the stunning 54.5% jump in the trend for June 2020 compared with just 14.6% overall.

We don’t intend to ignore Ireland’s numbers – but in this case, with the UK’s much larger population, it’s almost certainly Brexit that contributed to this discrepancy.

Workable’s CEO, Nikos Moraitakis, told us in an email in the early days of the pandemic that books would be written about this time for years going forward. In that spirit, there will be – and already are – books written about the UK’s own unique economic experience in 2020.

What’s going on here?

Let’s wrap this up with a quick overview of the UK job market and then the US job market. First, according to latest data from the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS), July is showing full recovery and then some for payrolled employees, with an all-time high of 29.7 million employees making some level of income.

Now, the US Department of Labor reported last week that there was a gain of 315,000 jobs in US payrolls to an all-time high of 152.7 million employees – just a touch higher than the pre-pandemic high seen in February 2020.

Does this mean full recovery to pre-pandemic levels? Well, yes, kind of. And does this mean no worries about recessions?

No, absolutely not.

Sorry to break your balloon, but the worries of a recession are still very real. A good portion of those worries revolve around the housing market, with Goldman Sachs predicting a considerable crash in real estate to the end of 2022 and more so in 2023, bigger than Russia’s overall GDP crash since their invasion of Ukraine.

Likewise, analyst Ivy Zelman, otherwise known as “Poison Ivy” after predicting the 2008 market crash, is predicting another drop in housing over the next couple of years. We all know what that meant in 2008 and 2009 – a tidal wave leading to catastrophe in other economies.

But Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab, had this to say about the surge in jobs and the worries around recession:

“This is a unique period of time, where we have, still, a relatively tight labor market, where there is still job growth, but companies have started to announce hiring freezes, some companies have announced layoffs,” she said.

“This could very likely be a recession where you don’t see the kind of carnage in the labor market that you see in most recessions.”

At no other time has there been such a surplus of jobs (two job openings for every one active candidate, according to DOL data). Couple that with inflation and higher salaries, and candidates have a very powerful deck to play with.

So, the job market remains active. Many employers are desperate to hire, and this trend may not quieten down anytime soon, even with layoffs and recessions. If there’s a downturn, it’s going to happen in economic pockets – not across the whole spectrum.

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

To bring the best insights to small and medium businesses worldwide, here’s what we’re doing with our data: when looking at a specific month’s trend, we’re taking the numbers from that month and comparing it to the average of the three previous months – and showing as a percentage how that month looks in comparison.

For example, if July shows an average Time to Fill of 30 days for all jobs, and the monthly average for the three preceding months (April, May, June) is 25 days, we present the result for July as a 20% increase.

The majority of the data is sourced from small and medium businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for September 2022 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for August 2022

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 17:12:49 +0000

And here’s a sneak preview: it appears that things are actually normalizing to 2019 levels. And we’ll dig deeply into that in this month’s report, albeit with some lingering weirdness – if we go with the theme of “long COVID”, this whole thing could be termed “long disruption”.

But first, we want to tell you something important: we’re making a slight alteration in the way we look at data, specifically for the Time to Fill (TTF) and Candidates Per Hire (CPH) metrics. In past Hiring Pulses, we had measured trends based on jobs being opened.

For example, previously, if a job is opened in June, we would include that job’s data in TTF and CPH – meaning, the more recent jobs opened would naturally skew the data downwards in the latest months of the dataset because they haven’t had the time to build to normal TTF and CPH levels.

So, at Workable, we talked about this internally as a team, and decided on an adjustment – we would start looking at jobs based on the date the job was filled. So again, for example, if a job is filled in June, we would include that job’s data in TTF and CPH.

But since there’s an end date to all those jobs, we don’t have to worry about job data being skewed in recent months.

To be transparent, there’s a small catch that we do want to share – the dataset for jobs filled will be smaller than the dataset for jobs currently open, especially in more recent months. But there’s still a lot in this dataset to draw compelling conclusions from.

You saw a preview of this in the deep dive of last month’s Hiring Pulse. And this month is fully focused on jobs based on their hire date.

Let’s take the plunge!

How we’re looking at data

First, looking at SMB hiring data gives us an opportunity to look at benchmarks in the hiring landscape. But when the benchmark changes at unprecedented levels during these last two very weird years, it becomes an unreliable gauge.

So, it’s no longer helpful to look at the data YoY or even MoM. It makes more sense to look at rolling trends. Consequently, for the Hiring Pulse, we are looking at percentage increase or decrease compared with the average of the three trailing months. Want a more detailed methodology? Jump to the end and check it out.

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

We’re returning to before times – in other words, we seem to be stabilizing
The job opening trend continues to trend downwards
A surprisingly robust job market for July

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that remain open are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled will be included here.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at TTF based on jobs that have been filled from the start of 2020 through to the end of July 2022:

We’ll just keep beating the dead horse here: the last two and a half years are unprecedented times for society. That’s reflected in the wild ups and downs throughout, starting with the incredible drop in the TTF trend right when COVID hit. That’s a sign of SaaS companies rushing to hire en masse as they capitalized on the digital transformation boom early on.

But, when we look at the TTF trend in the early part of these last two years (i.e. February/March/April), TTF drops noticeably (-3.9%, -8.1%, -3.6% in 2021 and -3.4%, -3.1%, -3.9% this year).

This, after particularly positive trends in January 2021 (8.5%) and January 2022 (8%).

Rough conclusion from all this? Because we’re now looking at job data based on the date the job was filled, a job filled in January will have likely been opened a couple of months earlier. There’s a lot of activity involving numerous members of the hiring team – the recruiter themselves, maybe another HR representative, a departmental team member, an executive, and of course, the hiring manager.

And December is holiday time for many – which means delays in business processes including in recruitment. All of those job openings get pushed back to January the following year when everyone is back in the grind – therefore prolonging TTF. Mid-November to mid-January is roughly 60 days – much higher than the average TTF of 42, according to Industry Today (industrial/segmential fluctuations aside).

Another observation: the six most recent months (February through July) suggest a much more stable TTF trend than we’ve seen since the start of 2020. The times they are a-normalizing? We shall see.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

So, let’s look at the raw job open numbers – which aren’t contingent on job opened/filled dates like TTF and Candidates per Hire.

These are just jobs opened in a given month and are a great indicator of the health of the economy. So, we can include July 2022 in this chart:

In July’s Hiring Pulse, we emphasized the anomaly that was the job opening trend for June – last month, it was -10.2% which is slightly updated to -10.1% in this chart. We suggested that economic jitters and business austerity measures were a factor in that drop in job openings compared with previous months.

That’s especially noticeable since June normally shows a positive uptick in job openings based on years past (2020 excluded, of course).

We’d hoped for the sakes of businesses everywhere that June would prove to be an anomaly. Well, July has entered the chat, and again, it’s a negative trend of -6% – slightly up from June, but still attention-grabbing.

Let’s look at what July looked like in previous years:

July 2019: 7.2%
July 2020: 49.5% (Like we said – we exclude 2020 due to the economic and social cataclysms of that year)
July 2021: 5.7%

See there – generally positive trends. Except for this year. Same as what happened for June – where June normally looked robust in terms of job openings, only to see a negative trend in this year’s June.

Do we want to be nervous? Should we be nervous? Well… recessions are normal. They do happen. And businesses will respond to that with more conservative projections and austere practices. Let’s watch this space and see what August brings us.

3. Candidates per Hire

Workable defines the number of candidates per hire (CPH) as, succinctly, the number of applicants for a job up to the point of that job being filled. And now that we’re looking at jobs that are already filled up to the end of July rather than jobs opened, we’ll no longer see a skew downwards in the CPH trend in recent months.

Let’s look at what’s going on here through July:

What stands out with this one is the fluctuating CPH trend through the first seven months of 2022 with three positive-trending (February 0.5%, March 4.1%, and May 7.2%) and four negative-trending months (January -5.2%, April -1.8%, June -1.7%, and July -3.5%).

January is an easy one to explain away – as described in the TTF section, December will be a slower month for hiring, and that’s the same for candidate activity. When January rolls around, hiring teams will not have the same luxury of candidates to choose from, but because they really need to fill that job, they’ll just hire one and roll with it.

What about the negative trends seen in June (-1.7%) and July (-3.5%) of this year? We can add some perspective on those by looking back at May (7.2%). Pretty big drop from there forward.

Now, let’s look at what happened over the same period in the three years prior, with 2022 included for comparative purposes:

As stated above, 2020 is an anomalous year, with the spike in CPH very much attributable to the numerous jobs lost in the early part of that year after COVID set on the land.

But then, 2021 shows a huge drop in the CPH trend for May, and slowly rises for June and July.

Now let’s look back to pre-pandemic times: 2019 shows a positive May trend followed by a drop in CPH for June and July – and that’s the most comparable statistic to what happened this year. Is it worth noting that 2019 might be the most recent “normal” year for society and business overall? The lines for 2019 and 2022 in the chart above are visually similar.

Perhaps it is. And if that’s the case, then the fluctuations in the CPH trend for the last three months this year can be considered relatively normal if we’re comparing to 2019.

There’s a lot more data science to be conducted here, of course – but it’s worth thinking about as we move deeper into Q3.

What’s going on here?

Well, guess what? Despite widespread predictions to the contrary, the US job market is sizzling red hot. July saw 528,000 new jobs added – more than twice the forecasts of Wall Street. It’s worth looking at real job changes month-over-month in the chart below:

(If you’re wondering, April 2020 saw a negative change of 20.5 million jobs. Such a huge change that if we adjusted the chart to show it, the changes month over month in the rest of the chart would be not be nearly as discernible. So… we let it fall off the chart to where it belongs.)

In the US, we’re also seeing the highest-ever total employees ever, with a total of 152.54 million working in the country right now. Second-highest total in a given month? February 2020, at 152.5 million total employed. Third highest? January 2020, at 152.13 million.

Fourth highest all time? Um, it’s June 2022, at 152.01 million.

See what we wrote up there about things looking like 2019 and that 2019 was the last “normal” year? Plus, unemployment in the United States dropped to 3.5% – matching a 50-year low that was set just before the pandemic.

We’ll let Charles Schwab’s chief investment strategist Liz Ann Sonders take this one:

“There’s no way to take the other side of this. There’s not a lot of, ‘Yeah, but,’ other than it’s not positive from a market or Fed perspective,” she said. “For the economy, this is good news.”

But – sorry, Ms. Sonders, but we still like buts – 57.7% of the job gains for July are concentrated in four sectors: leisure & hospitality, professional & business services, health care, and government. What’s more – leisure & hospitality is still 1.2 million workers short of pre-pandemic levels.

As we know from experience (looking at you: dot-com bubble, 9/11, subprime mortgage crisis, and most recently 2020) – a good economy always has a half life. We’ve been predicting something bad in the future for a few months now – but the markets indicate otherwise. So far.

Ultimately, it’s good to be prudent. Have a contingency plan in place for whatever potential scenario may play out. After all, highs in total jobs were set just before the great COVID fall, and those highs are now being surpassed in the last two months. What goes up must come down? Maybe, maybe not.

We’ve quoted a former Workable executive in a past Hiring Pulse:

“First of all, make sure that you’ve got a number of contingency plans in place. Work out a lot of different scenarios which you are ready to deploy as the situation evolves. Secondly, don’t lose track of the more short-term or tactical objectives. Essentially, make sure that you also have a weekly plan on how you want to manage this.”

We’ll paraphrase with this: it’s always smart to be smart when managing a business, including in hiring.

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

The majority of the data is sourced from small and medium businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for August 2022 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for July 2022

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 13:36:07 +0000

Recession jitters and interest rate hikes are factors in decisions around payroll, of course, but what’s also happened is that June marks the end of the first half of the calendar year, and companies are recalibrating and implementing plans ahead of the second half according to Crunchbase.

Also worth noting is that layoffs and discharges according to U.S. Department of Labor data is not spiking across the spectrum – in fact, it’s remained at a stable pace month over month:

Plus, when you compare layoffs and discharges with previous years – and yes, “before times” – in the United States, you’ll find that the number is actually lower than the norm. Of course we’re still in highly unusual times. That crazy spike in March/April 2020 led to a pendulum swing in the opposite direction with a high number of hires soon afterwards.

And now, while layoffs are indeed happening in startups, those more established SMBs may have already optimized their worker base enough from the 2020 tempest that sudden changes aren’t as necessarily required two years later.

Meanwhile, the Great Resignation continues, especially in the United States, which has just seen its 12th consecutive month of upwards of four million job quits. Many of those quits have traditionally been at lower-level positions, but we’re now seeing the trend starting to happen at the managerial and directorial levels.

Anyway, let’s set layoffs and Big Quits aside for a moment and look at other potential fallouts from the gloomy projections of a recession ahead. Here’s this month’s Hiring Pulse, with a special and different look at SMB hiring trends in our deep dive.

How we’re looking at data

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

New job postings are down
Jobs being filled are also down – way down
Candidates per hire is going up for jobs filled in May and June

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: if a job is opened in January this year or even as early as August last year, but isn’t filled until June 2022, it won’t count in this graph. If another job is opened on the same day last January or August but is filled on May 31, it does count in this graph.

So, we’re looking at the TTF trends only up to the end of May. Got that? Good. Let’s have a look:

Rather than simply call out the sharp drop in TTF in the most recent months, let’s do what we’ve done in previous months – compare this graph to the one in May, and to the one in April, and so on. In this graph, we see five consecutive months of significantly shorter TTF metrics, down to -18.2% in April and -25.3% in May.

In June’s Hiring Pulse, we saw only four consecutive months of significantly shorter TTFs – ending in -18.5% in March and -26% in April.

In May’s Hiring Pulse, it was – wait for it – just three (four, if you really want to count the miniscule -0.8% change at the start of the drop), ending with -19.2% and -27.4% in the two latest months.

Ditto for April’s Hiring Pulse, ending with -22.8% and -29.2%.

What does this tell us? Even with the clear variable of this data being measured forward from the time a job is opened, TTF is still dropping. If you want to see what the data looks like for jobs filled and going backwards from there instead, we now have that data and we’re going into it in the deep dive below.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

So, let’s look at the raw job open numbers – which aren’t contingent on job open/close dates like TTF and Candidates per Hire.

These are just jobs opened in a given month. So, we can include June 2022 in this chart:

You know that old trope where a news editor comes running into the room and says, “Stop the printing press! Rip out the front page! We’ve got a story here!”

Well, we may have a story here in that strikingly negative -10.2% drop in the job opening trend for June.

To add context: a drop in new job openings is pretty normal – for the end of the year:

-9.5% and -23.5% in Nov-Dec 2019
-3.0% and -8.3% in Nov-Dec 2020
-0.3% and -11.9% in Nov-Dec 2021

And of course, there’s the COVID-quake that hit us in the spring of 2020 where the job opening trend was a staggering -22.9% in March, an incomprehensible -51.6% in April, and -23.2% in May of 2020.

But this is June. It bears noting that we don’t see this kind of data in previous Junes:

-8.1% in June 2019 (this being the only one closest to June 2022)
20.3% in June 2020 (an anomaly in the opposite direction, since businesses were very much rebounding from the COVID-quake)
6.8% in June 2021 (not much of a change from May 2021’s 6.9% or to July 2021’s 5.7%)

We’ve talked about fragile economic nerves and end-of-Q2 planning – maybe that’s what’s happening here as well. While layoffs and terminations aren’t hugely different from previous months, companies are definitely opening fewer jobs.

That’s interesting considering that the job quit numbers in the US remain at ruthlessly high levels. Normally, when someone leaves, that position will be backfilled. But maybe companies are seeing turnover as a blessing in disguise – rather than backfill, they see this as an opportunity to wait and see what the waters look like ahead without needing to resort to layoffs. Convenient business austerity at work, perhaps?

3. Candidates per Hire

Workable defines the number of candidates per hire (CPH) as, succinctly, the number of applicants for a job up to the point of that job being filled.

Let’s look at what’s going on here through May:

(NOTE: Again, as in the TTF chart, you’re probably wondering why we stopped the numbers in May. Again, as stated above, that’s because these data are based on the time the job was opened, not when it was filled. Moreover, even jobs that remain unfilled are included here.)

Again, interesting numbers here in this SMB hiring trend. In last month’s Pulse, we noted that the average candidates per hire for April, the most recent month of data last month, was -4.4% less than the monthly average in Q1.

This time, the most recent month of data, May, shows a much more dramatic -14.4% change from the previous three-month average. And April has changed from -4.4% in last month’s Pulse to 1.9% in this month’s report.

A clear takeaway from this is that applications to jobs opened in April grew significantly throughout June. With fewer jobs being posted in June, this suggests that there’s a spillover to older but unfilled job postings for today’s candidates.

In other words – the list of recent jobs is shorter now, so in scrolling through jobs in reverse chronological order, candidates will encounter those older job postings more frequently than in the past, driving up CPH for those earlier postings.

Maybe there’s an opportunity for SMB employers who are still trying to fill those older jobs: take a look at them, tinker with them so they’re more relevant to today, and resurface them so they’re at the top of the pile once again. Don’t make the candidate have to look backwards to find you. Be the first company they see at the top of the pile.

Deep dive – jobs filled data

The challenge with dissecting these data points is that the dataset involves all jobs that have been opened – not just the ones that have been filled.

Plus, we include jobs opened in May in this dataset – even with the luxury of one full month of extra data after that. Consider that the Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire will be much lower for a job opened just before midnight on May 31 than it would be for a job opened in March. This can create a weird variation in the data because all this falls into the same dataset regardless.

So, as we’ve mentioned umpteen times, the drop in CPH and TTF in recent months makes sense to a degree. We’ve attempted to circumnavigate that by comparing the most recent months between different reports which does lead to interesting insights.

One major reason we’ve done it this way up to now is because we get to analyze a much larger dataset – giving us the opportunity to segment the data based on industry, function, and location.

But you know what? We now have data based solely on jobs that have been filled. This gives us an opportunity to look at SMB hiring trends right up to the end of June. Let’s dive in!

1. Time to Fill

Let’s first look at the Time to Fill trend for jobs based on the date when they were filled:

What’s especially intriguing is that the TTF trend for jobs filled in January 2022 is a significantly higher 7.5% jump from the monthly average of Q4 2021. For “all” jobs whether filled or not, it’s -8%.

Other than that, the TTF trend still drops quite a bit in the months after that – coming up for air in May at 1.1% and June also at 1.1%. We’d like to sit and watch what the trend looks like for this going forward with stabilizing TTF in the two recent months – yes, that means this isn’t going to be the only time we look at jobs based on the fill date.

2. Total Job Fills

Now, let’s look at jobs themselves. This one’s a bit different from the Job Opening trend, because we’re now looking at the trend of jobs being filled in a given month:

Good news or bad news first? Let’s start with the good: Q1 2022 saw a lot of activity in job openings, with 17% in January, 14.2% in February, and 20.4% in March. For jobs filled, the trend is -1.1%, 8.9% and an eye-catching 30.8% for the same three months.

Since a job won’t usually be filled for some time after it’s opened, it makes sense that a higher trend of job openings in January and February would mean a spike in jobs filled for March. And that’s clear here.

Now, the bad: we pointed out the -10.2% for June in the Job Opening trend above – for data based on jobs filled, we see a more moderate -4.4% change in June compared with the trailing three-month average. While that doesn’t necessarily call for alarm, it’s something we should keep an eye on, because for the last two Junes, there’s a positive shift in jobs being filled:

17.7% for June 2020 (take that with a grain of salt – it was -12.4%, -55% and -36.9% for March, April and May 2020 respectively)
11.7% for June 2021 (very significant considering consistently positive trends of 17.2%, 52.5%, 22.2%, and 9.5% for February through May 2021 respectively)

Yet, this June sees a drop, on the heels of an insignificantly positive 0.2% trend for April and 3.2% for May this year. While we can explain away some of this as entrails of these crazy times, we still need to watch this space.

3. Candidates per Hire

Now, let’s look at the Candidates per Hire trend for jobs that are filled in a given month:

The CPH trend in the dataset based on the job-open date shows relatively steady decline in recent months – again, as in the TTF data, it’s because more recent job postings will not have had the time to collect candidates as older job postings.

But this time, we now get to see what the CPH landscape looks like for jobs that are already filled in a given month – and the difference is that jobs filled in May have collected more candidates than previous months, at 6.7% higher than the February-March-April average. But it goes back underwater with a 0.9% shift in June. Still, this is after negative trends in most months dating back to the start of 2021.

So, while the numbers look a little different here, it’s still true that employers hadn’t been seeing as many candidates per job as they had in the past – but the upturn in CPH for jobs filled in May combined with with the evidently unseasonable drop in jobs being filled in June is something to take note of.

What’s going on here?

Honestly, the changes in the most recent months all point to recession jitters. Companies see what’s going on in the market – the plummet of the stock market, the hike of the interest rate, the rise of inflation, etc. – and they will naturally turn to contingency measures to stay afloat and keep their bottom line out of the red zone.

We’re seeing this in the lower number of jobs being posted. This, in spite of the ongoing Great Resignation (which amounts to more than 51 million job quits in the United States over the last 12 months). You’d think more quits would equal more jobs posted as a result of backfills – but that’s not happening in recent months.

And on the candidate side, the throngs of people who have left their jobs for other pastures may be seeing the recession on the horizon and realizing that it may be a smart idea to lock in a more secure job and ride out the storm before pursuing their passion project any further. No, we haven’t grounded this in science – it’s just one potential explanation for the rise in candidates per hire along with more concentrated candidate pools across fewer job openings.

But, then, we have a new report from the US Department of Labor showing once-again strong job gains for June to the tune of 372,000 payroll additions, and those additions at higher wages to boot.

According to Reuters, Indeed economist Nick Bunker said: “If you’re looking at this report for signs we’re already in a recession, you’re likely to come up blank.”

These SMB hiring trends are not numerical soothsayers – they are merely indicators of what the road ahead may look like: first, fewer jobs are being posted; second, more candidates are applying for jobs; and third, there’s a huge drop in jobs being filled in June.

Like the holiday season, the summer months (for those in the northern hemisphere, at least) can be a relatively slow time for hiring. June is potentially just the start of that. Let’s see next month whether these changes are due to recession jitters, seasonal hiring habits, or a mixture of both (or neither).

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

The majority of the data is sourced from small and medium businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for July 2022 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for June 2022

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 23:06:32 +0000

Noted economist Robert Shiller said as much, in an interview with Bloomberg. A recession is coming, and in his words, it’s a “self-fulfilling prophecy” – because all the talk of a recession is motivating decision-makers to make decisions in anticipation of a recession… and therefore, triggering a recession.

Those decisions include layoffs, of course – the go-to formula for many SMBs who are looking to weather a prospective storm. Y’know, just in case. And the startup tech sector is especially getting hit hard, with more layoffs in Q2 of this year than any other quarter over the last two years since, of course, early 2020:

So, let’s keep that in mind as we dive into this month’s Hiring Pulse, which includes a special look at the hiring data for tech companies.

How we’re looking at data

First, looking at SMB hiring data gives us an opportunity to look at benchmarks in the hiring landscape. But when the benchmark regularly changes during these last two very weird years, it becomes an unreliable gauge.

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

The Time to Fill metric is largely the same as in previous Pulses – but the other two metrics are seeing a disruption
Job Openings are seeing a negative trend unlike what we’ve seen at this time in previous years
The tech hiring landscape has a life of its own

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: if a job is opened in October or even as early as April last year, but isn’t filled until May, it won’t count in this graph. If another job is opened on the same day in July or September but is filled on April 30, it does count in this graph.

So, we’re looking at the TTF trends only up to the end of April. Got that? Good. Let’s have a look:

We’d normally go into the usual long-winded spiel about what this chart tells us about SMB hiring up to April 2022 – but honestly, not much has changed or is different from last month. The big drop in the TTF metric begins four months earlier in January – the same trend is shown in our May 2022 report, where the drop begins four months earlier in December.

You might also see here that January’s drop is -12.3% lower than the average of Q4 2021, whereas last month, December showed a much-less dramatic -0.8% drop from the average of the three previous months. Well – we also pointed out the same thing last month. So… again, the point is null. Let’s move on.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.
So, let’s look at the raw job open numbers – which aren’t contingent on job open/close dates like TTF and Candidates per Hire, so we can include May 2022 in this chart:

The sharp drop from March (20.4%) to April (-0.8%) was noted and expected last month – and there’s also a marginal drop from April (-0.8%) to May (-2.2%).

That’s to be expected, based on last year’s trendline from Q1 to Q2 – but what’s interesting is that this time, the last two months are negative trends. It’s worth noting that over the last three years of Workable’s data, back-to-back negative months only happened in November and December – and of course, in the cataclysmic spring of 2020 which we see as a significant anomaly in hiring trends.

Is this continued negative trend a sign of an oncoming recession? It’s very, very possible.

What Mr. Shiller suggested above about companies becoming more austere in their practices is reflected here – after a seasonally normal Q1 of job opening activity, we’re seeing a relatively stark shift in the opposite direction.

3. Candidates per Hire

Workable defines the number of candidates per hire (CPH) as, succinctly, the number of applicants for a job up to the point of that job being filled.

Let’s look at what’s going on here through April:

(NOTE: Again, as in the TTF chart, you’re probably wondering why we stopped the numbers in April. Again, as stated above, that’s because these data are based on the time the job was opened, not when it was filled.)

Last month, we pointed out how the CPH metric stabilized over the first three months of 2022: -10.1% in January, -8% in February, and -13.9% in March.

That Q1 stabilization holds relatively steady this month, but now we see something: an uptick from the January/February/March average to -4.4 in April.

Nonetheless, that still signals a continued downturn in CPH, even as job posting activity slows down. As we mentioned last month, you’d rightfully deduce that fewer jobs = more candidates per job, but that’s not happening here.

Deep dive – tech hiring trends

Now, let’s dive deeper into one area that’s seeing considerable disruption in recent months – the SaaS sector. If you’re a tech SMB or tech startup, these data trends will be of interest to you.

First, a quick reminder of the layoffs mentioned in the intro. From the same website, we see this chart, this time showing layoffs month by month:

May saw a huge amount of layoffs in startups – and as of the halfway mark of June, we’re already more than halfway to May’s total layoff events.

So, is this unique to tech? Let’s see for ourselves, by comparing the tech sector’s hiring trends with the overall hiring trends in the same charts.

Time to Fill in Tech

First, let’s look at the TTF trend in tech and see if it’s any different from the overall TTF trend.

From afar, the trendlines look very similar. The huge spikes at the start of the pandemic and again going into Q4 of 2020 followed by relative normalcy throughout 2021 – this looks roughly similar for both SaaS and the overall landscape, with some relatively minor variations of course.

But then, as we venture into the last quarter of 2021, we see some noted differences. For instance, October’s TTF trend in tech and software is -4.6%, whereas the overall trend is a very different +1.8% – a point differential of -6.4.

Now, let’s look at the other two metrics.

Total Job Openings in Tech

Now, job openings (JOs) in the SaaS world:

Again, from far away, the trendlines look similar. But zoom in, and you notice some differences, for example:

The JO trend in tech doesn’t drop nearly as drastically in April 2020 (a difference of +6.7 percentage points), and doesn’t rise nearly as drastically over the next few months after that (percentage point differences of +0.5, -3.3, –4.1, and –7.7 for May-August respectively);
The JO trend in tech rose higher than the overall from October 2020 to January 2021 (point differences of +6.4, +6.5, +4.6 and +5.2 respectively);
With the exception of December 2021, the JO trend again rose higher than the overall from October 2021 to January 2022 (+4.3 points in October, +5.5 in November, -2.6 in December, and +4.6 in February;
And finally, the tech JO trend is much lower than the overall trend for February (-6.5) and April (-6.8) of this year.

Candidates per Hire in Tech

And finally, candidates per hire:

The differences between the trend in tech and overall stand out much more here. What stands out for 2020 is how CPH in tech is much higher than the overall average for May (a positive difference of +10.5 points) and June (+12.1 points), but then swings sharply in the opposite direction for July (-7.2 points), August (-5.4), and September (-8.5).

We also see a 17-point positive differential for April 2021 in favor of SaaSers, and another positive differential in February 2022 (+12.5). But then, February 2022 is followed by an almost identical pendulum swing to -12.6 points – a total shift in the tech vs. overall CPH trend of 25.1 percentage points in just two months. That’s huge and it signals something very unique happening in the software space.

Conclusion

ComputerWorld’s very in-depth analysis of the American IT job market bluntly calls out the significant growth in IT jobs in the calendar year 2021 – in fact, more than twice as high as any previous year.

A quick conclusion might be that this is job recovery from 2020, but even then, the cumulative IT job loss in the US for 2020 was just 33K – a small percentage of the 104K tech jobs added in 2018 and 90K jobs added in 2019, and of course, the 213K jobs added in 2021.

The increased digital transformation of the worldwide economy – be it in supply chain, finance, and even the cannabis trade – over the last two years since the pandemic required us to go online more often in every aspect of our lives. So that brings a lot of demand for tech – hence, more jobs for tech workers.

It follows that the tech sector is a volatile beast very much subject to boom-bust cycles – we’ve seen this dating back to the dot-com frenzy of the late 1990s. While tech is part of the overall economy, it also runs on the lifeblood of its own unique subset of the economy.

And now, tech layoffs are all over the news. It may be the first signs of an oncoming recession, with tech, being one of the most agile sectors, leading the charge in terms of austerical adjustments. If you’re one of the companies planning layoffs, you’ll probably need to think about how to go about it tactfully and without irreversibly causing damage to your reputation as an employer.

A sign of things to come? Let’s keep an eye on the upcoming Hiring Pulses and find out.

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

The majority of the data is sourced from small and medium businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for June 2022 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for March 2024

Keith MacKenzie — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 15:45:19 +0000

In February’s Hiring Pulse, we shed light on how the year started.

Now we’ll look at how the year’s going.

Let’s take a look!

How we’re looking at data

Want a more detailed methodology? Jump to the end and check it out.

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings (JO)
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

TTF falls again in February after a January spike – all very normal
JO activity pretty stable – but varies when you look at company size
CPH coming back down, but that’s unusual when looking at Februaries past

1. Time to Fill

Quick clarification, because people are asking: the data in this chart shows the trendline against the 2019 average as an index of 100, not the actual number of days in TTF.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend through to the end of February against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled:

One month after the biggest single-month jump in our data going back to the start of 2019, we see a dramatic drop in the Time to Fill metric from January’s 89.1 to February’s 82.5.

So, there’s a nice little spike there from December to January to February. We’ve talked about this in the past – how January is a very busy hiring month once hiring teams take action on new budgets to start the year, plus coming back from holidays and catching up on crucial HR work. That will result in slower turnarounds in overall work processes, including in the hiring pipeline.

And when we compare this to years past, it turns out to be very normal. Following a mostly flat November and December into a longer TTF for January, then a slight drop into February. Our data shows it pretty clearly:

Now, let’s have a look at the job openings.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

OK – we have many interesting stories going on here. The first takeaway is, of course, the average number of job postings in February was 8.6 per company regardless of employee size. That’s down just a smidgen from January’s 8.5.

Doesn’t say a whole lot month over month, does it? Aha, but it does, when you compare that with previous January-February shifts since 2019. When we use January’s job posting average as a baseline of 100, we see that every year shows a different story from January to February:

What we see here is that out of the six years, four saw a downward shift from January to February in terms of job activity, and in two of the six years, there was an upward shift. 2019, in particular, showed a dramatic drop of 5.5 percentage points, while 2021 saw a dramatic jump of 3.8 percentage points.

2024, of course, shows the smallest month-over-month change of any of the six years.

Let’s go deeper now, into the company size buckets. First, companies with 1-50 full-time employees:

We’re seeing a somewhat different story compared with all companies. Companies with 50 or fewer employees saw a jump from January to February (104 vs. the baseline, or 6.6 to 6.8 job postings per company on average). Honestly, a .2 change in average can be argued to be mostly negligible, but all the same, it’s there. Still not terribly dramatic, though.

Let’s look at the 51-200 FTE size bucket now:

Like the 1-50 bucket, there isn’t a lot to write home about here. We see a small drop in hiring activity for 2024, in line with the overall trend, and again, it’s in the middle of the pack when compared with past years.

Now – the 200+ FTE size bucket:

OK, now we’re talking. The 200+ FTE companies dropped pretty drastically, from 19.5 job postings per company on average in January to 17.9 in February this year.

Not only is that a drop of more than three jobs every two companies across the board, it’s also the biggest January to February shift of any year going back to 2019 in our dataset.

Keep this in mind as we move to the Candidates Per Hire metric.

3. Candidates per Hire

Let’s look at what’s going on here through February:

We’re very much in a one-step-forward, two-steps-backward situation here – or is it two-steps-forward, one-step-backwards? Depends on who you talk to, we suppose. What we’re seeing here is that every time the Candidates Per Hire metric climbs a certain amount, hitting new records along the way, it takes a little hiccup before starting upwards again.

In this case, January’s 188 comes down pretty sharply to February’s 178.5. Still much, much higher than in recent years, but the drop is notable in that it follows dramatic rises in previous months as we’ve seen from October to December 2022 followed by a drop of -5.1 in January 2023, a another growth in February to April 2023 to a -13.7 drop in May 2023, and two more months of growth in December 2023 and January 2024 followed by this new drop.

It’s a little bit dizzying, indeed.

Now what about year-over-year comparisons? Let’s take a look at how November-December-January-February compares over the past six years:

Now you can see how February of this year is somewhat of an anomaly. In previous years, we see moderate or significant increase in the CPH metric from January to February with the minor exception of 2019-2020 – and in 2023-2024, we see, for the first time, a dramatic downward shift.

Sure, these are erratic times. But this stands out nonetheless, particularly as you see the TTF following historical trends and job opening data falling (mostly) in the middle of the pack when compared with previous years at this time.

What’s going on here?

We see a distinct trend here: small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are ramping up their hiring, in contrast to the slowdown we’re seeing among their larger peers.

This suggests a more agile and adaptive mindset among SMBs as business picks up and they adjust to a less predictable economy – but they’re also the ones more susceptible to breakdowns; unlike enterprises, they don’t necessarily have years upon years of experience and stability to draw from, or even established processes that have stood the test of time.

Likewise, they’re the ones more affected by the fallout of a bad hire or a fine resulting from non-compliance with the vast range of employment laws – both can put a fairly severe dent in their operating budget. These financial setbacks can become more commonplace when there’s no formal HR team in place to manage all this stuff.

For instance, an ADP study finds that fewer than one-third of small businesses have a formal HR professional in their ranks – and for those companies without, there’s an “ad hoc” HR manager in place (ADP’s own words). Even scarier, 82% of those ad hoc managers (the majority of whom are CEOs and presidents) have no formal HR training.

Now, we’re not saying that SMBs like yours should take on an HR professional (yes, you should, eventually), but rather, for the time being, your increased hiring, onboarding, and employee management needs a formal system in place. That formal system can be established with a worthy, uncomplicated HRIS that scales with your business and its increasingly complex HR processes

Meanwhile, for enterprise-level businesses, this isn’t necessarily a cause for worry, but rather, an opportunity to reassess recruitment strategies, perhaps focusing on optimizing hiring processes or adapting existing workforces to meet new technological and market demands.

It’s a key phase for businesses across all sizes – but especially for smaller businesses. Act wisely, take on fresh tools, and increase the agility and effectiveness of your HR processes. You can then continue to thrive.

See you next month!

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for February 2024 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for April 2022

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 16:22:17 +0000

In short: five-year plans and even full-year strategies are giving way to quarterly shifts in practice – and employers who are quick on the ball will succeed. Your SMB workforce management strategy needs to be just as nimble, just as quick, if not more so than other elements of business strategy.

Now, as we get into this month’s SMB hiring data deep dive, we’re going to share some ideas about the importance of standardizing your recruitment flow because of that same wild unpredictability. You want a system in place that continues to hum along smoothly during slower hiring times, but you also want a system that you can quickly kick to the fifth gear as job openings spike and candidates start to flow en masse.

But first, let’s crunch away!

How we’re looking at data

First – and we explain this every month to be sure that it’s understood – looking at data gives us a measuring stick so we can see what’s going on in the hiring landscape. But when that measuring stick regularly changes during this ‘Never Normal’ time, it becomes an unreliable gauge.

It’s no longer helpful to look at the data YoY or even MoM. Rolling trends make more sense because then you’re comparing data with what’s happening in recent months. So we’re looking at percentage increase or decrease when compared with the rolling average of the three trailing months. Want a more detailed methodology? Jump to the end and check it out.

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

In this Pulse, we take a look at these three core metrics, and then we’ll share some ideas on how to run your business so it somehow stays calm and carries on through pandemics, wars, and all of the rest of it.

Let’s start analyzing!

Time to Fill
Total Job Openings
Candidates per Hire
What’s going on here?
Deep dive
Conclusion
The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Hiring is busy right now for SMBs – more than it has been since the first quarter of 2021
Job metrics are stabilizing in the first quarter of 2022 – which potentially means a normalization of the hiring market
Some sectors are seeing normalization more than others – and some not at all

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: if a job is opened in October or even as early as April last year, but isn’t filled until March, it won’t count in this graph. If another job is opened on the same day in July or September but is filled on February 28, it does count in this graph.

We’ve pointed out previously that this does explain the recent downward trend in recent months to a degree at least – but it does not explain it fully. Let’s look:

Last month, we saw that the number of consecutive negative-trending months was at six straight months – that point of data has finally started to rectify itself with the recalibration of the TTF metric for September, October and November of 2021. Take a look at the previous month and note that the TTF trend was -2.3%, -5.0%, and -5.6% for those months respectively, and now they’ve changed to 0.0%, 0.6%, and 1.8%.

Read that first paragraph again about TTF only being included once a job is filled. What we’re seeing here is that many jobs opened in Sept-Oct-Nov 2021 were filled in February 2022. A job opened at the start of September and filled on February 28 would mean a TTF of 180 days. Even a job opened at the end of November and also filled on February 28 would be a TTF of 90 days.

This means that job openings that have been languishing in the ether for months on end are getting filled at last – much to the relief of many employers, we’re sure. It’s not so much an indication of a healthier economy or better recruitment marketing or more candidates – rather, it simply reaffirms the reality that the first quarter is always a busy hiring time. And ultimately, what initially appeared to be a plummeting TTF trend is now balancing out with these new developments.

We did note last month that a lot of jobs were opened in January and were filled in January – that still holds true. But we are now in April and the TTF trend looks like it’s stabilizing. In fact, you could call it normalizing.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

So, let’s look at the raw job open numbers – which aren’t contingent on job open/close dates like TTF and Candidates per Hire, so we can include March 2022 in this chart:

Whoa, what a fiercely busy quarter for hiring teams. Last month we pointed out that businesses are starting to hire again – this is continuing to happen. The job market is flourishing, with March seeing a huge 20.4% jump in the job opening trend when compared with the trailing three-month average. And that March number is even more impressive when you consider that January and February are already high on their own.

It’s no longer a rebound from Omicron, even with new variants surfacing. It’s also the job market surging after a traditionally slow December.

We’ve talked about it many times in previous Pulses, but we can’t ignore the Turnover Tsunami, The Crisis of Quits, The Talent Shuffle or whatever you want to call it. It is still dominating the workforce. February quit numbers in the United States according to the Department of Labor (DOL) were more than four million – again.

And March also saw plenty of new jobs in the US – not 678,000 as in February, but still more than 400,000. A huge chunk of that is in retail and hospitality – keep that in mind as you read on.

In short: there’s a lot of activity in the job market both in terms of new jobs and backfills, and that shows in our data.

3. Candidates per Hire

Workable defines the number of candidates per hire (CPH) as, succinctly, the number of applicants for a job up to the point of that job being filled.

Let’s look at what’s going on here through February:

(NOTE: Again, as in the TTF chart, you’re probably wondering why we stopped the numbers in February. Again, as stated above, that’s because these data are based on the time the job was opened, not when it was filled.)

We discussed how the data can recalibrate based on recent filled jobs – which as mentioned above was happening at a steady clip through the first couple of months of 2022. This is happening here as well – and what’s different this time is the way the CPH trend is now mostly stabilized at just below zero through to the end of 2021.

This again is an indication that those jobs in the latter months of 2021 have been filled aplenty through January and February. And the big upward adjustment in the TTF metric above also means more candidates were being evaluated for those jobs.
We did say last month that we would revisit the January data to see how much it changes – it’s -11.3% now, compared with -18.6% last month.

Could it be that hiring teams simply waited until they found the right candidate, and sifted through as many as possible rather than jumping on the first one they could find? Perhaps.

What’s going on here?

Let’s quickly recap. The TTF trend is stabilizing. The job opening trend is going through the roof. And while the candidates per hire trend is still trending negative, it’s not nearly as dramatic as seen in previous Pulses. All of these things indicate a slow return to normal in the hiring world.

But we’re well aware of the vast discrepancies in hiring experiences across different industries, so we’re going to take a look at them.

The deep dive

We mentioned above the proportion of new jobs being in the retail and hospitality sectors. That’s an important reminder that not all sectors are the same.

These four sectors below were picked because they’re highly impacted by world developments and their fallouts:

Education – because we know that education workers are in short supply due to burnout
Health Care – because it’s one of the sectors that was and is hugely impacted by COVID-19
Restaurants & Hospitality (our categorization) – because of higher-than-normal quit rates as part of the Great Resignation (more on that below)
Transportation – because supply chains and transportation industries have been hit by what seems like a metric ton of different factors (more on that below).

So, let’s look at the four across all three hiring data trends.

Time to Fill

Let’s start with the Time to Fill trend:

What really stands out here is how much TTF in the Restaurants & Hospitality sector grew during the latter months of 2021, with a 15.4% positive trend in December on the heels of 5.4% in October and 6.7% in November.

This is expected – there’s more stress in this sector with increased public socialization and travel combined with holidays and colder weather. Bottlenecks in hiring are bound to happen as this area gets busier – which drives TTF up.

Meanwhile – Transportation saw a 20% positive trend in TTF in October, followed by just 2.2% in November, -12.5% in December, -25.7% in January – and finally, -27.9% in February. Supply chains worldwide have been disrupted significantly, with no signs of abatement for 2022 according to the New York Times. There’s a lot of external pressure in this area.

The transportation industry itself is also seeing wholesale developments through increased EV usage, MaaS (mobility as a service), and last-mile delivery which has grown hugely in the last two years as a result of increased online shopping.

And, of course, there’s a major shortage in trucker talent. Mass migration all around, and quick hiring to desperately fill spots to avoid the domino effect that a gap in the chain can trigger. All of this impacts TTF.

Job Openings

Now, let’s look at the job opening trends across these four sectors:

Again, Restaurants & Hospitality jumps out at us. It’s noted that the Big Quit is especially happening in this area – with twice the quit rate levels here compared with the overall US average according to the DOL. This leads to increased backfill, and more job openings as a result. We’re seeing that in our data, with a huge spike going into 2022 in the job opening trend here (36.6% in January and 63.8% in February).

Also worth noting that back in March 2021, there was a 121.1% increase in the trend – likely pandemic-driven as COVID cases cooled off and the world reopened in the springtime.

Meanwhile, the Transportation sector sees significant growth in job opens in January and February 2022 (16.6% and 14.2%) before finally coming down to relative earth levels for March 2022 (8.8%). It’s still far from what we saw in the three months of Q2 2022 – 27.1% in April, 27.9% in May, and 25.6% in June.

And Health Care? It’s spiking again in the first quarter of 2022 – topping out at 28.7% in March 2022. It’s not nearly as high as Q1 2021 (55.1% in January 2021, 66.2% in February 2021), but worth noting is that it’s very different from 2020 just before the onset of the pandemic – 9.3% in January 2020, 2.8% in February 2020, and 5.0% in March 2020.

The higher job opening trends in Q1 2021 likely was a response to the worst period of the pandemic, when we saw some 15,000 COVID-related deaths per day worldwide that January. And this time, we’re navigating Omicron and other new variants. Cue pressure on the health care system, prompting the need for more staff – hence, more job openings.

However, we’ll also wager that there are many backfills in health care. Workers in the health care sector are tired and overworked after more than two years of this COVID stuff, and opting out of the system. Same goes for Restaurants & Hospitality. Education can’t be ignored, either.

So… this Big Quit is very alive and very real in these areas.

Candidates per Hire

Finally, let’s look at Candidates per Hire across the sectors:

What stands out are two spikes – first, the CPH trend in Health Care jumped 28.3% in December 2021. Second, CPH in Restaurants & Hospitality grew 5.6% in January 2022.

Restaurants & Hospitality’s growth was after a slow November and December and the only one of the four to see a positive CPH trend in either January or February of 2022.

Education, meanwhile, sees a very interesting month-to-month shift in the CPH trend – with more candidates per job in September (13.8%), October (22.4%), and November (15.0%) followed by equally dramatic negative trends in December (-20.9%), January (-20.2%), and February (-38.7%).

So, more people are applying for jobs in Health Care and Restaurants & Hospitality, and fewer are applying for jobs in Education. We know books will be written about the impact of the pandemic on our society in the coming years – in fact, many have been published already – and this particular area deserves a deep study of its own.

For now, we will just point out that this combined with the higher job openings points to higher-than-normal turnover in these sectors.

Conclusion

We’ve got more than a few things happening here – COVID itself, the Big Quit, seasonality, the paradigm shifts stemming from the pandemic in social behavior, purchasing habits, life priorities, and all of the rest of it. We talked a lot the last couple of months about the importance of recruitment marketing and agility in the hiring process of SMBs – this time, we’re going to stress the importance of standardized recruitment using software.

Yes, we know we are a hiring software, and we know this sounds like a plug for Workable. But listen: SMB hiring teams do need a standardized hiring process that can navigate the sudden ebbs and flows of the job market. Having a largely automated system managed at the console by human hiring teams is much, much easier – and less costly in terms of finance and logistics – than adding to and subtracting from HR payroll, as well shifting longer-term business strategies.

As an SMB employer that needs to watch the bottom line closely, you want a system that operates just as smoothly in cruise control as in slower, deader times and in fast-paced, über-turbulent times. That system is, of course, the ATS.

Whether or not you’re in one of the four highlighted sectors above, standardization of hiring is crucial if you want your business strategy to execute smoothly.

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

The majority of the data is sourced from small and medium businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for April 2022 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for March 2022

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 13:03:35 +0000

We then talked about ways in which you can overcome that challenge, including this important insight: the candidates are out there, but they’re just not applying to your jobs. It’s not like the world’s available talent magically shrunk overnight – potential hires are still out there, but their priorities have changed during these times of the Big Quit.

So, we emphasized the importance of recruitment marketing, and a shift in your mindset that you have to show the value of yourself as an employer – in other words, your employee value proposition. Instead of asking candidates why they want to work for you, show them why they should want to work for you.

This trend will continue, but we’re also viscerally aware of the recent developments in Ukraine and watching how this impacts the job and talent markets. We don’t have data on this just yet, but we do have tips on what you might do as an employer to withstand any impact this might have on your organization.

Ultimately, we’re talking about managing and hiring through uncertainty (especially if you have a portion of your workforce in Ukraine or Russia – watch for an article on that soon). And more so, with the conflict happening at the tail end of an already debilitating pandemic, it’s as if the only certainty we have is that we live in uncertain times. As we shared from Ira Wolfe in January’s Hiring Pulse – it’s not the ‘New Normal’, but rather, the ‘Never Normal’.

Keep that in mind as we look at the hiring data. Then we’ll share some tips on managing through uncertainty.

How we’re looking at data

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Average Time to Fill is continuing to drop
Candidates per Hire stabilized at end of 2021 – but talent pool became saturated again as job openings skyrocketed in January
Hard to say what to expect in the next couple of months as a new crisis begins to ripple the world economy – so plan accordingly

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: if a job is opened in October or even as early as March last year, but isn’t filled until February, it won’t count in this graph. If another job is opened on the same day in July or September but is filled on January 31, it does count in this graph.

We’ve pointed out previously that this does explain the recent downward trend in recent months to a degree at least – but it does not explain it fully. Let’s look:

The first big takeaway here is that the number of consecutive negative-trending months is now at six straight months.

And that last month – January 2022 – is at -32%. Not only is that different from the latest month in the last Hiring Pulse (-21.2%), it’s also a much starker negative drop from the previous month. Last month’s report showed a 7.3-point drop from November to December in the TTF trend – but this month, the drop is from -12.2% to -32%, a staggering 19.8-point drop.

Our take is that a lot of jobs were opened in January – and were filled in January – which drives the TTF down, way down. January (and Q1 in general) is traditionally a very busy period for the recruitment process as businesses kick their respective strategies into action, and that shows here.

Shorter TTFs are the norm – but that’s also been compounded by a very healthy job market (read on for more).

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

So, let’s look at the raw job open numbers – which aren’t contingent on job open/close dates like TTF and Candidates per Hire, so we can include February 2022 in this chart:

Again, we’re seeing a healthy spike in job openings with a 14.1% upward trend in February on the heels of 17.1% in January. That’s normally good news as it indicates that businesses are hitting their stride and starting to hire again.

Data crunchers will naturally dig for the “but”. It’s probably that businesses are getting back into the hiring swing after a slow December hiring month and also are no longer feeling Omicron skittishness.

But we’re countering that by saying that a 14.1% growth in job openings in February compared with November, December and January is a good indicator that things are looking up. It’s not just a one-off thing.

We do have to point out another reason for increased job openings: the Big Quit. When someone leaves a job, that job generally becomes open for backfill. So, more job opens. Makes sense. But that’s just one part of the equation.

The US Department of Labor did announce 678,000 new jobs in February, a sharp rise from 467,000 new jobs in January. The challenge now is how the conflict in Ukraine may impact the worldwide job market. Time will tell. For now, we offer what the Washington Post reported in the first week of March:

“[E]conomists say it is unclear exactly how the war might affect American jobs, they note that skyrocketing energy prices, slowdowns in consumer spending or looming uncertainty could prompt businesses to pause hiring in the coming weeks.”

Uncertainty. That word again. Keep it in mind.

3. Candidates per Hire

Workable defines the number of candidates per hire (CPH) as, succinctly, the number of applicants for a job up to the point of that job being filled.

Let’s look at what’s going on here through January:

(NOTE: Again, as in the TTF chart, you’re probably wondering why we stopped the numbers in January. Again, as stated above, that’s because these data are based on the time the job was opened, not when it was filled.)

Important: As jobs get filled, they then are included here. In previous monthly reports, we haven’t normally seen such a huge recalibration in the CPH trend in recent months – but this time, the shift is drastic, with now only the last month in the chart (January) showing any clear drop-off. Last month’s Pulse showed double-digit drop-offs in the CPH trend for three months running:

-11.2% for October 2021
-13.6% for November 2021
-15.3% for December 2021.

That’s since changed to -7.6% for November, -1.5% for December, and -18.6% for January 2022.

Here’s our take on it: Fewer jobs mean less talent saturation. And those looking for jobs aren’t just going to take some time off in December – they still have bills to pay and food to put on the table, so they’ll keep up their jobhunt in December even as job openings dwindle for the month.

So: the candidates per hire trend recovers a little bit for the holiday season, before dropping steadily again in January as job openings again spike while the raw number of candidates remains steady. Does that make sense? Let’s check back in next month and see what happens as the data for January fills up more with more “complete” jobs data.

What’s going on here?

While nothing staggering in these numbers, they do point to how quickly data can change from month to month even with our “rolling trend” approach to the data. In other words, these are uncertain times and they have been since early 2020 – and one might even say that it’s been uncertain for much, much longer than that.

Consider some of the “earthquake moments” that have happened recently that have shifted the world economy – and your business and hiring: the 9/11 attacks, Brexit, the election of Trump, the Greek debt crisis, the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, and, of course the COVID-19 pandemic and now, the war in Ukraine. There’s more, but you get the idea.

The lessons of uncertainty

This new conflict in Ukraine is not a regional issue. It has potentially far-reaching consequences – energy costs (which we’re already seeing), migration, consumer spending, the whole bit. This brings us back to the core concern here: how do you navigate a business through uncertainty?

The good news for you is that, in a way, you’ve had some ‘practice’ from navigating the pandemic. While COVID-19 had a debilitating impact on businesses around the globe, the silver lining is that it taught businesses – and employees – how to be more agile in their work.

Employees are also leaving the workforce in droves, as we know, but the flip side of that is they’re looking for something more meaningful while continuing to collect income. They’re looking to be more autonomous and flexible in their work – hence the growth of the self-employed economy – and companies would do well to adapt to that new expectation of work.

That emerging talent pool, as a rule, meets short-term personal and business needs. That actually benefits you as a business.

Being agile means thinking month-over-month or quarter-over-quarter as opposed to year-over-year. To survive, your business strategies ultimately become shorter and more nimble – even if you’re a larger company. You want to be able to react quickly to developments – and even capitalize on them.

The importance of flexibility

That kind of agile mindset in business also means being more flexible – and even giving your employees greater autonomy to make decisions rather than needing to go through a long approval process before getting something done. Greater flexibility and autonomy in your jobs will speak volumes for your employee experience and even attract more candidates to your jobs, and that mindset and approach is also ideal for your business when navigating these uncertain times.

As Workable’s CMO Doug Ellinger wrote in an article:

“Use this as an opportunity to refocus the team on what it can organically produce through activities like content creation, enhanced distribution, email marketing, and improved alignment with the rest of the business. This is a time to get nimble and take a bare-bones approach.”

And as one-time Workable COO Grigoris Kouteris told us once in the early days of the pandemic:

Business planning is important especially now. Focus on yours, and ideally see the results in the form of talent attraction, retention and engagement – and overall success as a business.

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

The majority of the data is sourced from small and medium businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for March 2022 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for February 2022

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 19:17:56 +0000

Now, don’t ask where we got that from – we’re not sure either, but we did hear it somewhere. If you want things to go well, put together a solid framework and put some thought into it first. There’s more there if you want to take a deep dive.

This month, we want to focus on the short supply of candidates that you might be seeing in your open roles. Is that happening elsewhere as well? Oh yes, it is. We’re seeing it in our hiring data. Let’s read on and then look at the ways you can overcome this challenge so you can keep your SMB engines running at full throttle.

How we’re looking at data

First: Data, as a rule, provides us with a measuring stick for comparative purposes, but when that measuring stick changes regularly as is the case in these times, it becomes unreliable.

So, looking at the data YoY or even MoM makes for a flawed study. So, instead, we’re looking at rolling trends. This means we’re showing data as a percentage increase or decrease when compared with the rolling average of the past three months. Jump to the end for a detailed methodology on this.

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

In this Pulse, we take a look at these three core metrics, and then we’ll take a broad look at how 2021 looks compared with 2020.

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Employers are hiring faster – and that’s becoming the norm
There are plenty of candidates out there – but their numbers are diluted across numerous job openings
Job openings are about to surge in the first quarter of 2022

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important that we understand this distinction: if a job is opened in October or even as early as March, but isn’t filled until January, it won’t count in this graph. If another job is opened on the same day in July or September but is filled on the last day of December, it does count in this graph.

While this measurement strategy partially explains the recent downward trend, there’s more happening. Let’s take a look at the TTF trend:

At first glance, this chart really isn’t much different from the ones preceding it – except for one thing: the number of negatively trending months is now five consecutive months.

It was four straight months in last month’s Pulse. And in December’s Pulse, while also five consecutive months, the first two of those five months were only a sliver below zero at -1.1% in June and -1.9% in July. So, really, December’s Pulse is just three months of significantly negative trends.

This time, the first two of the five months are –3.7% and -8.2%, and nosedives after that. What’s the story here? Shorter TTFs are becoming the norm now.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

So, let’s look at the raw job open numbers – which aren’t contingent on job open/close dates like TTF and Candidates per Hire, so we can include January 2022 in this chart:

Finally, a reversal in trends: January 2022 shows 17% more job openings than the Q4 monthly average from 2021.

To be fair, December is traditionally a slow hiring season and we highlighted three reasons for that last month: holidays, Omicron, and strategic planning for 2022 – which, of course, includes a hiring plan. Now that 2022 is here, that plan turns to action – including the hiring.

Quick note: The US Department of Labor (DOL) also just announced 467,000 new jobs in the country in January – a full third of which are in the hospitality sector.

The data from past Januaries – even before the pandemic – also show the month to be traditionally strong for jobs. Keep this in mind for later.

3. Candidates per Hire

Workable defines the number of candidates per hire (CPH) as, succinctly, the number of applicants for a job up to the point of that job being filled.

Let’s look at what’s going on here through December:

(NOTE: Again, as in the TTF chart, you’re probably wondering why we stopped the numbers in December. Again, as stated above, that’s because these data are based on the time the job was opened, not when it was filled.)

We commented above that employers are really struggling to find and attract candidates to their open roles. This is pretty clear here, with just one positive month in the 17 months since July 2020.

What do we need to say here? There’s no reversal in sight – fewer candidates are the norm.

What’s going on here?

In January’s Hiring Pulse, we highlighted the importance of pre-planning the recruitment process. We’re doubling down on that message here because hires are happening faster than ever.

That’s a good thing for candidates who are (or were) frustrated with long waits for decisions from the employer side. Candidates have a plethora of job openings out there at their disposal, especially now in January. They don’t have to wait around for your next interview or your job offer – they have choices now.

As an SMB employer competing with many other employers for those candidates, you don’t have the luxury of time when evaluating candidates for roles. This means it’s time to get proactive in your hiring process – not only do the prepwork, but also work on your candidate attraction strategy. More on that below.

4. 2021 versus 2020

A debate about 2021 versus 2020 is kind of like debating King Kong versus Godzilla or DC versus Marvel. Both years have been nothing short of eventful, both significant when analyzing via a historical lens, and – closer to our own area of expertise – both come with their own specifically crazy challenges in the world of hiring, far more than anything before the pandemic.

With the full 2021 data at our disposal, let’s take a look at both 2021 and 2020 and how they measure up against each other.

Time to Fill

First, let’s have a look at Time to Fill:

Obviously, 2020 was a whack year for many SMBs. You can see the impact of the pandemic at the start – and the lengthening of the Time to FIll metric (peaking at 9.1% in March 2020) as SMBs held off on hiring until things stabilized. Then, we see some reversal (bottoming out at -5.5% in June 2020) as employers scrambled to rehire and backfill.

Finally, we see the TTF metric stabilize going into Q3 2020 with a mild uptick towards the end of the year.

In 2021, TTF metric looks relatively stable before trending down from August 2021 onwards. This is the Great Resignation at play here – more open roles and fewer candidates are forcing the hand of employers who are desperate to fill roles so they can keep business going.

Total Job Openings

Now, the job openings:

Again, you see the impact of the pandemic in early 2020, plummeting to an astonishing -51.6% in April 2020, followed by drastic recovery peaking at an equally dramatic 49.4% in July 2020. Then the job opening trend stays significantly positive until the last two months of 2020.

The other takeaway here is that with January 2020 being at 20.3% and January 2021 at 22.5% – and January 2022 at 17% – job openings get posted en masse throughout January and that’s normal. If the first quarter of 2021 are any indication (22.5% in January, 25.3% in February, 42.9% in March), this will continue to be the case throughout Q1 of this year.

Candidates per Hire

Finally, let’s look at Candidates per Hire for both years:

Huge upturn in the CPH trend, especially in April with 36.7% and May with 34.3% more candidates than the trailing three-month monthly average. The market was flooded with jobseekers in early 2020 due to mass layoffs (correlating with abysmally high numbers in jobless claims from March to May 2020 in the US).

We then see the signs of economic recovery due to the market opening up again through Q3 2020 with a mild uptick in December.

And finally, as pointed out above, the CPH metric keeps trending negative every month throughout 2021 – this is despite Delta and all of the rest of it.

What’s the lesson here for SMB employers? While job openings are relatively normal (so far, knock on wood), the CPH metric is not. There’s very little correlation between 2020 and 2021 here. There simply aren’t as many job applicants per role as there were before.

Conclusion

We’ve already talked about doing your prepwork before posting the job ad as a way to get ahead of that shorter TTF metric.

Now, with candidates at a premium, let’s talk about candidate attraction strategies once the job’s been posted.

The reality is that there are candidates out there. They’re just not applying to your jobs.

There are some factors at play here:

They’re passive candidates. They’re not actively looking or interested right now.
They don’t know that you have a job open at your company because they’ve never heard of you.
They’ve heard about you and that’s why they’re not applying for jobs at your company.
They’ve seen your job ad and they don’t like your value proposition so they’ve chosen not to apply.

Let’s go through each one by one:

1. They’re passive candidates.

Either they’re working and not looking, or they’re not working and not looking because they’ve found another way to live life. They’ve gone to the farm in Maine and started their online soapmaking business, or they bought a van and are traveling across the country. But that’s not necessarily a forever thing – just a ‘now’ thing.

Or maybe they can’t/won’t work because family takes priority (yes, we found this in our Great Discontent survey – especially for women, who are more than twice as likely to not be working because of family commitments).

But that doesn’t mean they won’t talk to you. But you still need to take the first step of reaching out to those potential candidates. Understand who these people are, and what they’re looking for in a job. Build out your talent sourcing strategies beyond the usual InMail. Establish an employee referral program. One way or another, you need to find them and strike up a conversation.

2. They don’t know about your job or company.

Unless you’re Google or SpaceX, not everyone will have heard of you or your product or service. Or your jobs, for that matter. That means it’s on you to try to get your jobs out in front of people – whether that involves smart distribution or the latest technology.

If you just post to LinkedIn, Glassdoor and Indeed, then you’ll get a segment of candidates who regularly visit those sites. But not everyone frequents those places.

There are numerous places to promote your job opportunities. Think of your job ad as a public announcement. You can’t afford $50 million to get that cherished Super Bowl spot during halftime, but it’s worth diversifying your outreach, whether that’s on niche job sites, via your extended network, through clever marketing campaigns, or even sanctioning an article talking about your company culture – think of it as an investment in your future employees.

3. They’ve heard about you and because of that, they’re not applying.

First off, this is about your reputation as an employer; in other words, your employer brand. Maybe something happened during layoffs in mid-2020 that just shed bad light on you as an employer. Maybe your salaries aren’t up to par with similar roles in other companies and people are talking about it, or you’re known for being inflexible in your work processes.

Or maybe it’s about your company brand. Perhaps your product or service is controversial. Maybe your public messaging or positioning rubs some the wrong way.

First, find ways to build (or rebuild) trust with the workforce as an employer. Maybe it’s doing some PR work. Maybe it’s getting your employees talking more about the good things in your company. Maybe it’s about marketing yourself as an awesome employer (see more below).

And second, you might emphasize something about the company that helps candidates reconcile the company’s priorities with their own. Look at Northrop Grumman, a US defense contractor that built a microsite highlighting technological innovation and creativity as a way to appeal to jobseekers with a passion in that area. Or target candidates who are more aligned with your company’s objectives.

4. They don’t like your value proposition.

Finally – what’s your employee value proposition (EVP)? In other words, what value are you giving your workers in exchange for what they bring to you? Can you pay your employees more? Can you be more flexible in your working setup? Can you offer remote or other benefits? Can you support working parents? And so on.

Study the local talent market and determine what’s competitive there. Understand the trends and developments in the world of work and see if you can evolve your own EVP to meet those expectations.

Overall, recruitment marketing is at the heart of all this. If you can market your company as a place where people *want* to work – and market it to those people specifically – then you can overcome many of the hurdles described above.

Think of it like a funnel.

Top of funnel: Are they aware of your job?
Middle of funnel: Are they interested in the job?
Bottom of funnel: Have they decided to apply?

Marketing types speak very loudly to this stuff. Go talk to them and find out how you can establish a recruitment strategy that makes candidates *want* to work for you, and motivates your current employees to stay.

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

The majority of the data is sourced from small and medium businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for February 2022 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for January 2022

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 21:59:29 +0000

We’ve suggested a couple of perspectives including:

A more concentrated – and higher quality – candidate pool as a result of applicants being more selective in their jobhunt; and
Frustrated employers just locking in on the “good enough” candidate rather than the “ideal” candidate.

In December’s Hiring Pulse, we warned SMB employers against the latter strategy – being quick to hire just to fill those looming gaps – because while it’s a great stopgap measure, it can hurt in the long run.

Instead, we recommended that employers put in the prepwork ahead of time before even posting that job ad – ideally as a collaborative hiring team. For example, you and your team can prepare for the recruitment process by:

Outlining the overall goals of the team
Identifying the gaps within that team
Determining what job opening(s) ideally fill those gaps
Crafting the “ideal candidate profile” (ICP) for the job opening(s)
Drafting a job description clearly encompassing details from all of the above – including all elements of the employee value proposition
Establishing a clear selection process – with interviewers and interview questions, assessments, screening strategies, etc.
Preparing for negotiations as needed – and budgeting for a specific salary range
Clarifying a timeline – both for the benefit of the team and the candidate

That’s a lot right there, and that’s before the Time to Fill even starts with the posting of a job ad. But as stated in December, this is future proofing – the more prepared you are for a recruitment process beforehand, the better results you will have and the less likely you’ll have breakdowns.

Part of all that is data, of course. Nothing runs without knowing the benchmarks. We know that this as important to you as any of the above when recruiting in the SMB world. If you’re finding that you’re getting X number of applicants for your open roles, is that normal? If you’re taking Y days from the point you posted a job to the point your candidate signs that job offer, is that something others are experiencing as well, or is that something you need to get better at? And so on.

To help you, we’re taking a fresh approach to hiring data to support you when you analyze your own numbers.

How we’re looking at data

‘Normal’ doesn’t really exist anymore, even if it is a ‘new normal’. In fact, Future of Work thought leader Ira Wolfe calls it the “Never Normal” – which looks to be more and more the case with every passing month.

Quick note: ‘Uncertain times’ is a damn cliche – but it’s still the case, and as Ira suggests, it’s the standard now. So, looking at the data YoY or even MoM makes for a flawed study because of the regular fluctuations in the data over short periods of time. So, instead, we’re looking at rolling trends. This means we’re showing data as a percentage increase or decrease when compared with the rolling average of the past three months. Jump to the end for a detailed methodology on this.

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

In this Pulse, we keep things short by staying with just these three core metrics. For the fancy stuff like regional trends and function-based trends, you’ll have to wait for a future Pulse.

Let’s start crunching away!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Jobs are getting filled – but there are some with very long Time to Fill
Job open trends are not correlating with job quit rates
The Candidates per Hire trend is still very, very low

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important that we understand this distinction with this graph updated to November: if a job is opened in October or even as early as March, but isn’t filled until November, it won’t count in this graph’s dataset. If another job is opened on the same day in July or March but is filled on the last day of November, it does count in this graph.

While this measurement strategy partially explains the downward trend in recent months, we’re going to sidestep that for now, and instead look at how the overall graph changed from last month.

Let’s start with a look at the new graph updated to November:

This chart really isn’t much different from the ones preceding it – except for two things:

First, the July number has now breached the surface to 2% above the trailing three-month average, indicating that jobs opened that month were finally filled in November. In other words, July’s TTF data has been updated with those newly filled jobs since last month’s Pulse data which had July at -1.9%. That’s nearly a four-point swing. That’s huge.

The flip side of it though is that those specific jobs took from July to November to be filled. That’s roughly four full months until the job was filled. And because we’re looking at a huge dataset here, it takes quite a few jobs to prompt such a significant swing from -1.9% to 2.0%.

The second big thing we want to point out is the huge drop in the CPH trend in the fourth and fifth months counting backwards from the current month’s chart. In this new chart, the drop from July to August is significantly sharper (2.0% to -8.2%) than the June-July drop (-1.1% to -1.9%) shown in the December data.

As is the case for data, we can draw a million conclusions from this. We’re open to your thoughts – please send us a note to content@workable.com and let’s chat about it.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

So, let’s look at the raw job open numbers – which aren’t contingent on open/close dates, so we can include December in this chart:

In the December Pulse, we highlighted a potential slowdown in business due to Omicron. Whether it’s correlation or causation, we do see the slowdown here. December’s job open trend is a staggering -12.5% below the preceding three-month average. That’s lower than it’s ever been since the onset of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. Even December 2020 dropped to “only” -8.3%.

In 2021, the trend stayed positive – to a high of 42.9% in March 2021 – before returning to surface level at -1% in November.

We know that job quits in November as reported by the US Department of Labor (DOL) was a surprising (for some) 4.5 million. Which would logically mean more job openings in December as companies struggle to backfill those positions, right? But that’s not happening.

We did say in December that it’s worth waiting to see what data DOL releases in January. We said that because we thought the drop in job open trends in our data in November was a predictor of lower job quit rates for that same month – i.e. a correlation between people quitting and new jobs being posted. But that didn’t seem to happen.

That’s not to say we were wrong – it’s just to ask the question: if job quit rates continue at a crazy high, then why aren’t we seeing the subsequent result of increased job openings?

Three reasons come to mind:

The holiday season – an overall slowdown in business processes, including both for hiring and for applications (and therefore, better to wait until January before announcing a new job).
Omicron – no further explanation necessary here.
And finally, businesses often do plan for 2022 rather than act at the end of 2021.

Let’s see what happens in February.

3. Candidates per Hire

Workable defines the number of candidates per hire (CPH) as, succinctly, the number of applicants for a job up to the point of that job being filled.

Let’s look at what’s going on here through November:

In December, we cried from the rooftops about candidates being at a premium, with October’s CPH trend being -26%. That’s since “recovered” to a more modest -16.6% as the month readjusted based on jobs being filled by the end of November. Still, CPH is negatively trending, with November showing a -18.6% drop.

Also: the CPH trends for October and November 2021 are at the lowest level since October 2020.

So… yes, candidates continue to be at a premium. No speculation or theorizing needed – simply put, employers are starved for candidates all around.

What’s going on here?

In the December Hiring Pulse, we pointed to candidates having the luxury of being able to wait until the perfect job comes along – they no longer want (or need) to grab whatever comes their way. It’s worth waiting just a few extra weeks to see what other jobs are out there – it’s a candidate’s market, after all.

And we challenged you, the SMB employer, to adapt to the changing rules of engagement and better understand what appeals most to today’s candidates before putting your job ads out into the wild. That’s still incredibly important, so keep at it.

The new lesson that comes with this month’s Hiring Pulse is what we highlighted at the beginning – you need to put in the work ahead of time before you kick off the recruitment process. There’s a well-known business lexicon that goes something like this: the best kind of business involves six days of planning and one day of actual execution.

The same idea applies here with job openings predicted to come raging back in Q1 2022.

So, this is a time for planning – and that’s not just polishing off your recruitment marketing strategy and evolving your employee value proposition. You also have to preplan and futureproof.

In short: don’t panic and rush to backfill roles when Cristobel in accounting or Siddiq in sales or Janie on the dev team hands in their notice. Take a step back and see this crisis as an opportunity to fine-tune and calibrate your teams. Look at where the gaps are – whether or not those are newly exposed or long entrenched – and determine the best fill for those gaps. And then get the damn job ad out.

So, one more time for effect:

Outline the overall goals of the team
Identify the gaps within that team
Determine what job opening(s) ideally fill those gaps
Craft the “ideal candidate profile” (ICP) for the job opening(s)
Draft a job description clearly encompassing details from all of the above – including all elements of the employee value proposition
Establish a clear selection process – with interviewers and interview questions, assessments, screening strategies, etc.
Prepare for negotiations as needed – and budgeting for a specific salary range
Clarify a timeline – both for the benefit of the team and the candidate

You know what to do more than anyone. Let’s make this a good 2022!

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

The majority of the data is sourced from small and medium businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for January 2022 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for December 2021

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 14:46:38 +0000

So, we’re addressing your top concern of filling the roles you need to fill, and filling them quickly. Minimizing turnover is, of course, a grave concern as well.

We know that data benchmarks are important to you when recruiting in the SMB world. If you’re finding X number of candidates applying to your open roles, is that normal in your area? If you’re taking Y days from job posted to job filled, is that something others are experiencing as well, or is that something you need to improve? And so on.

To help you, we’re taking a fresh approach to hiring data to support you when you analyze your own numbers.

How we’re looking at data

‘Normal’ doesn’t really exist anymore, even if it is a ‘new normal’. Looking at the data YoY or even MoM is a flawed study because of the regular fluctuations in the data over short periods of time. So, instead, we’re looking at rolling trends. This means we’re showing data as a percentage increase or decrease when compared with the rolling average of the past three months. Jump to the end for a detailed methodology on this.

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

And we dive deeper by looking at the data in selected job functions to see how the data differs in each. Now, let’s start crunching away!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for December’s Hiring Pulse are:

Time to Fill is still dropping steadily
Job opens are negatively trending for the first time in awhile
Candidate availability is once again trending sharply downwards after a modest recovery the month previous

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important that we understand this distinction with this graph updated to September: if a job is opened in October or even as early as March, but isn’t filled until November, it won’t count in this graph’s dataset. If another job is opened on the same day in July or March but is filled on the last day of October, it does count in this graph.

While this measurement strategy partially explains the downward trend in recent months, we’re going to sidestep that for now, and see how the trend in the latest data compares with last month’s and see how they compare.

So, let’s start with a look at the new graph updated to October:

What we see here for the Time to Fill trend is -26.4% for October compared with the previous three-month average. That’s compared with -29.6% in the last month trend of the same chart from November – suggesting that TTF is slightly longer this time around.

But is that really indicating anything? Probably not. Numbers have a habit of jumping and falling, like the stock market. What we want to point to, instead, is the consistent nosedive in the TTF trend – last month, it was four consecutive months of negative trends, and now it’s five straight months where the latest TTF data is shorter than the previous three-month average.

Employers are continuing to hire faster than before, with only two of the last 10 months showing TTF on a positive trend, and even where the trend turns positive, it’s barely at all – just 1% in April and .9% in May.

Last month, we went into a thing about how this is a good thing for employers because they’re succeeding in finding and hiring the right candidates for their open roles – and doing so quicker than before.

But you know what? We’ve also heard anecdotes from businesses that they’re just plugging holes quickly in an attempt to stem the increasing flow of quits (watch for an article on that soon). Perhaps it’s not that employers are finding the right candidates quicker than before – it’s more that they’re just grabbing anyone who walks in the door and saying, “You’ll do. Can you start on Monday?”

We also pointed out last month that candidates are moaning about the long recruitment process. This may be the answer to their grievance. But if employers are just trying to fill job holes with “good-enough” candidates, that may lead to a poorer employee experience all around as newly hired employees realize they’re not a good fit for the role or company after all – a consequence of not putting enough thought or care into the employee selection process.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

So, let’s look at the raw job open numbers – which aren’t contingent on open/close dates, so we can include November in this chart:

Look at that. A negative trend of -2% for the month of November, the first time since December 2020 that we see a negative trend in job openings. It’s not much, but it does indicate something when it’s more than a six-point drop from September’s 4.4% and October’s 4.1% trends.

Questions abound: perhaps employers have hit the ceiling in terms of how many jobs can be opened. Then again, the Great Quit / Big Resignation / Huge Whatever remains at unprecedented levels – at least according to the US Department of Labor (DOL) up to the end of October.

Is this -2% trend in the Workable network in November a prediction of lower job quit rates according to DOL once they release their own numbers in January? We’ve found that the trends for DOL and Workable network data do align throughout the year, so the answer is very potentially yes.

We won’t know for sure until January, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.

3. Candidates per Hire

Workable defines the number of candidates per hire (CPH) as, succinctly, the number of applicants for a job up to the point of that job being filled.

Let’s look at what’s going on here through October:

(NOTE: Again, as in the TTF chart, you’re probably wondering why we stopped the numbers in September. Again, as stated above, that’s because these data are based on the time the job was opened, not when it was filled.)

Last month, we pointed to what we called “modest recovery” in the September CPH trend from a 2021 low of -16.6% in August.

But that’s changed significantly in October, which shows a staggering 26% drop in CPH compared with the previous three-month average. All that blather last month about CPH not trending downwards as much as before is now obsolete. This -26% metric marks a brand-new low for all of 2021 – and even 2020 for that matter.

Maybe candidates really are at a premium after all.

What’s going on here?

Last month, we shared the explanation that candidates are more deliberate in their applications than before. They’re no longer throwing applications at the wall to see what sticks. There’s a wealth of opportunities for candidates and greater emphasis on a job that’s more suited to their priorities. So, they’re more selective in applying for openings.

SHRM points to the shifting supply and demand of the job market as a factor, as well as extended benefits going into September that gives them this luxury. But we maintain that, even in a ‘normal’ job market, candidates are feeling more emboldened in landing the perfect job they want. They’d rather go without a job than take on a ‘meh’ job that doesn’t do much more than pay the bills, and they’re willing to tough it out to get there.

And that insight of this month’s Hiring Pulse challenges you, the SMB employer, to rise up and meet those increased expectations of the jobseeker. Grabbing the first candidates as they walk in the door because “they’ll do, if they can start on Monday” may come back to bite you later.

If you want great candidates for your roles and you want them to stay with you, they are out there and they’re as interested in finding the perfect long-term arrangement as you are. With Time to Fill shorter than it’s been in a long while, it may be that you invest your time and resources into recruitment marketing and employee value proposition even before opening the job, if you want those superstars on your team.

4. Job function metrics

Of course, a business is not one single ecosystem. Different things happen in different departments and functions when the economy ebbs and flows, leading to different outcomes in the data even within the same organization.
So, with that in mind, we wanted to look at eight main functions in a business, some or all of which an SMB employer can relate to:

Accounting/Auditing
Administrative
Customer Service
Engineering
Human Resources
Information Technology
Marketing
Sales

And obviously because of the pandemic times, we decided to add the health-care provider function to the mix, just to see what that looks like against some of the others.

Time to Fill

First, let’s have a look at Time to Fill:

The obvious and predictable insight here is just how volatile the health care provider metric is. It’s an absolute roller-coaster of a trend, even in the latter half of 2021. It’s clear that with the volatility of COVID and all its variant offshoots, the need for health care jumps and falls.

As for the other functions, the TTF trend for IT is the lowest for October with a downward drop of -35.8% – and it’s also the fastest-plummeting trend across all functions in this chart (with August at -9.9% and September at -21.2%. IT workers are plentiful – and their skill set usually standardized, leading to quicker evaluation and a faster hire for an IT opening.

On the flip side, accounting / auditing sees the downward trend in TTF slowing down over the past three months (-26.6% in August, -21.9% in September, and -20.6% in October. Could it be that because we’re nearing the end of the fiscal year for many companies – therefore a sudden need for more number crunchers? The increased competition means accountants are being snapped up, leaving to unlucky employers taking longer to find fiscal talent.

Total Job Openings

Now, the job openings across these functions:

We’re seeing positive job open trends across all functions – with the most dramatic jump in Customer Service from -19% in October to 17.8% in November (perhaps due to increased shopping for holiday season?). Health care also spikes again from 1.7% in October to 27% in November.

But we really want to point out the consistent increase in the job open trend in Human Resources at 27% in November (from 1.4% in August, 8.3% in September, and 17.2% in October).

Why? The developments of 2020 and 2021 have also trickled into companies, with an increased awareness of DEI, emphasis on salary and benefits, remote work trends, increased compliance considerations, and higher turnover – much of this falls on HR’s shoulders.

So, it makes sense that employers would add to the HR payroll – and for SMB employers to make their first hire in HR earlier in their business tenure than previously.

Candidates per Hire

Finally, let’s look at Candidates per Hire across these functions:

The big change in CPH is, again, in the health care provider function, with a staggering 50% decline in the average number of candidates per job in October compared with the three previous months. Perhaps health care workers – bless ’em – are burning out and shifting their priorities in terms of work. Perhaps it means the function has stabilized and that there isn’t as much movement – or hiring – as there was before, meaning fewer candidates out there in the job market.

But then again, we know that job opens for health care providers is on the rise. That suggests that it’s more about the burnout and change in priorities than it is about stabilization. They’re leaving, but they’re not moving to other roles in health care.

Meanwhile, we also see an equally sharp decline in the CPH trend for those in accounting / auditing, from 41.4% in August to 24.5% in September to -11.9% in October. Above, we mentioned the increased demand for fiscal wizards as year-end budgeting looms; that may be the factor.

Those in marketing are also at a premium – going from .9% in August to -21.7% in September to -36.1% in October. Businesses recover and grow, meaning increased marketing spend, meaning more marketers are being hired? Perhaps; lots to talk about there as well.

Conclusion

We’ve mentioned in a previous Hiring Pulse that the onset of Delta would rock the hiring world. While it didn’t have the impact that March 2020 did, it did shift a few things. Now we have Omicron – but it’s still early to gauge what, if any, influence that will have right now. One thing we know: it’s normally flu season at this time, and COVID had a marked impact last year starting at this time, and people are bracing for a sequel.

We are also approaching the end of the year. As we delve into increased holidays for many workers and businesses, and therefore slowdown in processes and logistics combined with torrid consumer activity during the traditional holiday season. It’s also a fiscal crunch time for businesses who are thinking about plans for 2022 and doing a postmortem of 2021.

That spirit of a postmortem and thinking carefully about plans and strategy for 2021 also involves futureproofing. That’s what C-suiters and executives do – they look to maximize potential and minimize risk for as long a period as possible. Snap decisions will not do, even as businesses do look to be nimbler and more agile than ever before.

This mindset must also apply to recruitment in the SMB space. You can’t afford to make snap hires every time because, as stated above, it’ll come back to bite you in terms of turnover and workforce disillusion. It’s worse during tumultuous times. You need to build a stable ship – a strong, well-thought-out strategy that’s prepared for shifts and bumps in the road ahead.

When hiring, think like a strategist:

refine your recruitment marketing
standardize your hiring
pre-plan your processes before you even open a job
and establish a solid reporting system to help you identify areas for improvement.

Do all that – and more – and you’ll find that this “Big Quit” may not be something to worry about in the long run.

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

The majority of the data is sourced from small and medium businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for December 2021 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for November 2021

Keith MacKenzie — Sun, 14 Nov 2021 14:03:01 +0000

But what you really want to know is: what does this mean for your hiring? As an SMB, you just want to fill the roles you need to fill, and fast (good news on that, by the way – read on).

We know that data trends are important to you when recruiting in the SMB world. You and your hiring team want to know whether the trends you’re seeing in your own processes are ‘normal’. Because there’s no real ‘normal’ anymore, we’re moving away from traditional year-over-year and month-over-month data analysis and instead taking a fresh approach so you can make the most informed decisions as an SMB employer when assessing your own data.

How we’re looking at data

Remember, we’re looking at trends here. This means we’re showing data as a percentage increase or decrease when compared with the average of the three months previous. Jump to the end for a detailed methodology of how we’re doing this.

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

And we dive deeper by looking at the data in five broad regions to see how the data differs in each. Now, let’s get into the numbers.

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Time to Fill is still dropping sharply despite SMB employers saying they’re having problems finding candidates
Job openings are continuing to rise going into Q4 – as predicted in a recent Manpower report
SMBs in Latin America are having a strikingly different experience than the four other major economic regions when it comes to hiring

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important that we understand this distinction with this graph updated to September: if a job is opened in July but isn’t filled until October, it won’t count in this graph’s dataset. If another job is opened on the same day in July but is filled on the last day of September, it does count in this graph.

That *might* explain some of the downward trend in recent months, especially for jobs opened and filled within September – but it’s still not the only factor.

Let’s look at the trend graph for overall Time to Fill up to and including the month of September.

Note the dramatically negative TTF trend in August 2021 (a -19.2% shift compared with the May-June-July average – followed by an even more substantial drop of -29.6% in September 2021 compared with the June-July-August average.

That’s interesting, isn’t it? Just when you think it’s going to bottom out, this metric just keeps trending further downwards. TTF has been negatively trending for four months in a row going back to June – and seven of the last nine months. Employers are hiring faster and faster now.

Good news? Sure, let’s look at it that way. There are two reasons why it could be good:

First, and perhaps obviously, employers are succeeding in finding – and hiring – the right candidates for their open roles, at a torrid pace. That does contrast with the popular and legitimate narrative that businesses are having a hard time finding people, though. That deserves a more in-depth discussion elsewhere, so let’s set it aside for now.

Second, one of the biggest candidate gripes – on Reddit, for instance – is what they see as an excessively long recruitment process. So… the shorter TTF can be seen as good for candidates as well.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

Let’s look at job openings overall, bearing in mind that these are raw job open numbers that aren’t contingent on open/close dates. So, we can include October in this chart.

Last month, we pointed out the modest uptick in job opening trends in September 2021. We’re seeing the same for October 2021, with another 4% increase, after a 4.4% growth in job opening trends in September.

Some insight to add to that: In the United States, we’ve just seen a huge upturn in payroll for October that beat previous expectations by a good margin – with the unemployment rate at a new low since the start of the pandemic. And quit rates were still surging as of September – we won’t see quit data for October from the US Department of Labor until a bit later. But more likely, the trend of the last two months is simply skewed by August’s 2.4% trend, the lowest of any month in 2021.

Still, it’s clear: while there’s reason for optimism, this all shows considerable volatility in the job market. Not what SMB employers want to see, honestly. They’d rather hire the right people and have them stick around.

3. Candidates per Hire

Workable defines the number of candidates per hire (CPH) as, succinctly, the number of applicants for a job up to the point of that job being filled. Let’s look at what’s going on in the numbers through September:

Last month, we pointed to the sharp drop in the CPH trend – but there’s modest recovery in that area. September 2021’s the drop in CPH actually slowed down from a 2021 low of -19.8% to -15.5%.

Regardless, CPH is still trending downwards – just not nearly as much as before.

What’s going on here?

So, this begs the question: if job openings are surging and CPH continues to trend downwards, how is it that Time to Fill is growing shorter all the time? There’s one potential explanation:

Candidates are more deliberate in their applications. Perhaps we’re no longer seeing hundreds of applications thrown around like confetti, leading to recruiters’ inboxes being overfilled with irrelevant resumes.

Instead, we’re seeing jobseekers being more targeted in their job hunt as we see a greater tendency to pursue the things that really matter as a result of the pandemic. Also, it’s a candidate’s market, so they can be more precise and pursue the job they really want rather than going the route of “any job will do”.

And, in turn, they’re probably highly motivated – and even more qualified – for those jobs.

So, SMB employers benefit: they’re getting more concentrated pools of better qualified applicants for their open jobs – so hiring becomes a quicker process from job opened to job filled.

4. Regional metrics

Of course, the world is not one single economic entity. Different things happen in different areas, ultimately leading to different outcomes in recruitment data.

So, let’s look at things at a very high level, looking at the above metrics for five broad regions:

Asia-Pacific (APAC)
Europe-Middle East-Africa (EMEA)
Latin America (LATAM)
North America (NA)
UK & Ireland (UK&I)

Time to Fill

First, let’s have a look at Time to Fill:

This one’s interesting – we see a lot of differences across regions especially in March 2020, during the last quarter of 2020, and the first part of 2021, all coinciding with massive spikes in COVID cases for each of the time periods in different areas.

Correlation doesn’t mean causation, of course. Instead, it’s just interesting how the numbers start to “reconcile” during Q2 and Q3 of 2021.

There’s one significant outlier though: the Latin America group, which has a much less pronounced drop in Time to Fill (-17.7%) than the other four regions (-29% to -31.4%). Keep that in mind as we move to the next metric.

Total Job Openings

Now, the job openings across these five regions:

Of course, COVID was felt worldwide, as plainly obvious in the drop in job opens during March-April 2020. That aside, while the trends look similar across all five regions from afar, there are notables to point out here.

First, after a sudden drop in job opens in August 2021 (-13%), EMEA is seeing a positive trend of job opens over the last two months (7% and 16.1%).

Second, UK & Ireland saw significant upward trend in job opens in September 2021 (16.5%) before leveling out at 0.1% for October.

And finally, Latin America is the only one of the five regions seeing a negative trend in job openings, with a -5.3% drop in October, standing in stark contrast to the other four regions.

Candidates per Hire

Finally, let’s look at Candidates per Hire across the five regions.

Unlike the other two metrics which saw more closely aligned trends across regions, this one is more dramatically scattered with job quits, layoffs, business closures, strikes, and other factors differing significantly as the pandemic continues its waves throughout the world.

For instance, UK & Ireland saw consistently negative trends in every single month dating back to August 2020 – with the tiny exception of December 2020 where it nosed above the surface to .8% before going under again.

Meanwhile, businesses in North America also saw negative trends in every month dating back to the summer of 2020 with spikes in CPH trends in December 2020 (8.7%) and January 2021 (2.1%).

EMEA, meanwhile, jumped a bit in March 2021 (4.8%) and July 2021 (.6%), but otherwise saw regular drops in its CPH metric as well. APAC spiked in December 2020, April 2021, and July 2021 – likely due to seasonality – but otherwise stayed in the negatives.

Latin America, again, stands out – where the other four regions stayed negative, LATAM businesses saw a sharp 6.5% increase in the CPH trend compared with the previous three-month average, the only one of the five to see a positive upward trend in that metric.

Does this mean more people are looking for work there and not finding enough? Perhaps – especially with dismal news out of Brazil, LATAM’s largest economy, of a faltering economic landscape and predictions of a recession in 2022.

Conclusion

Last month, we predicted that once reliable data for September became available, we would see it as a catalytic month as a result of children returning to school, a shortage of childcare workers in the U.S., and potential economic fallout coming from the Delta variant.

We didn’t see the fallout from Delta – the opposite, in fact, since Delta was already on the wane – but there are still fears of a resurgence of the virus due to winter seasonality, waning immunity levels among the vaccinated, and overall increased mobility according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Washington.

That being said, the TTF metric is decreasing, job opens are on the rise – and we’re seeing a modest slowdown in CPH’s decline. Does that last metric mean people are starting to look for work again after quitting en masse during the Great Resignation? Maybe, maybe not. Regardless, SMB employers are still very worried.

One thing’s clear – different regions see different trends that impact hiring. That’s worth keeping in mind, especially if you’re an international employer or you’re hiring globally.

And no matter where you are, it’s always worth thinking about your ideal candidate profile, fine-tuning your recruitment marketing strategy, and really targeting those candidates so you can stay ahead of the trends.

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

The majority of the data is sourced from small and medium businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for November 2021 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for October 2021

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 21:24:01 +0000

More specific to you: we know that data trends are important to you when recruiting in the SMB world. You and your hiring team want to know whether the trends you’re seeing in your own processes are ‘normal’. Because we’re not even sure what ‘normal’ is anymore, we’re moving away from year-over-year and month-over-month data because those don’t make sense.

So, we’re taking a fresh approach so you can make the most informed decisions as an SMB employer when assessing your own data.

How we’re looking at data

Remember, we’re looking at trends, not hard numbers. This means we’re showing data as a percentage increase or decrease based on the three trailing months. Jump to the end for a detailed methodology of how we’re doing this.

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

And we’re making it more interesting by looking at the data in three specific industries to see how they differ in each.

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Time to Fill is continuing to drop overall
Candidates per job are also continuing to drop overall
Real Estate recruitment data is far more pronounced than overall data, especially in jobs opened and candidates per hire

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled.

Let’s look at the trend graph for overall Time to Fill …

… and then look at the same graph for the September edition of the Hiring Pulse. You’ll see that the numbers are slightly different across all months – that’s because the data only counts when a job is filled.

It’s important that we understand this distinction: if a job is opened in July but isn’t filled until September, it won’t show up in this graph. If another job is opened on the same day in July but is filled in August, it’ll show up here – which will partially explain the downward trend in TTF numbers in recent months.

But, that being said, in September’s Hiring Pulse, the last month recorded (July 2021) shows a negative TTF trend of -17.9% compared with the trailing three-month average. Here, the last month recorded (August 2021) shows an even more negative trend of -28.4%.

Both include the same variables described in the previous paragraph, so something’s happening here. Time to Fill is steadily dropping overall.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

Let’s look at job openings overall, bearing in mind that because these are raw job open numbers, we can include September in this chart.

Note: September is the start of the traditional hiring season as we come out of summer, when post-secondary graduates enter the job market, kids return to school enabling parents to start working, and so on and so forth. Of course, the pandemic throws a particular wrench into this as we see in the data in 2020.

But this time, there’s a gentle uptick in job openings in September 2021 – a 4.1% increase in job openings compared with the average of the three previous months. Healthier economy? Fresh hiring season? Spike in backfills due to the Great Resignation? You decide.

3. Candidates per Hire

Workable defines the number of candidates per hire as, succinctly, the number of applicants for a job up to the point of that job being filled. Let’s look at what’s going on in the numbers through August:

(NOTE: Again, you’re probably wondering why we stopped the numbers in August. Again, as stated above, that’s because these data are based on the time the job was opened, not when it was filled.)

When you compare with the same graph from September’s Hiring Pulse, you’ll see a little bump in July – because more candidates will show up on the doorstep of a job going into July for a job opened in June. That’ll update the numbers in this new graph a bit.

But as in the Time to FIll chart, the downward trend is sharper in the latest month’s data. Fewer candidates are showing up per job than before.

4. Industry metrics

Now, let’s look at all of the above across three specific industries that are considerably impacted by the pandemic, whether positively or negatively:

Software as a Service (SaaS)
Retail
Real Estate

Software as a Service (SaaS)

First, let’s look at SaaS. In the early days of the pandemic, digital transformation was fast-tracked by many organizations as teams moved to remote operations and online work. This necessitated new tech for organizations to survive and thrive – especially as emphasized by Deloitte in April 2021 – and concurrently, opened huge windows of opportunity for existing and new SaaS organizations to innovate and grow. Consider the “digital nomad” wave in Europe as described by the Economist, and you have it in a nutshell.

Time to Fill – SaaS

What does all that look like in Workable’s network data? Let’s take a look at Time to Fill:

Clearly, there’s a pandemic marker where TTF numbers shortened in the early days of COVID-19, likely as SaaS companies found it easier to fill roles quickly due to a fresh influx of recently laid-off candidates in the market (see graph below). TTF then sped up throughout 2020 until it started to drop in Q4 2020, and sped up again from the start of 2021 to end of August.

Job Openings & Candidates per Hire – SaaS

Now, let’s look at total job openings and CPH for the SaaS sector:

Pretty dramatic stuff here. Job openings plummeted at the start of the pandemic as SaaS and other SMBs reduced or froze hiring – and laid off employees – as they shifted to survival mode.

Then in June 2020 onwards, job openings surged and candidates per hire dropped measurably through to Q4 2020 likely in response to steady and increased DX needs, where SaaSers hired at a torrid pace to further develop their tech to meet that demand. Finally, the numbers start to stabilize at the end of 2020 before seeing another surge in the first three months of 2021.

As we pass through mid-2021, we’re still seeing a moderately positive trend in job openings – yet a sharp downward trend in CPH during the same time period with the exception of near-zero change in July 2021 compared with the trailing three-month average.

Retail

The second area we’re looking at is Retail, specifically because it’s one of the hardest-hit sectors when it comes to job quit rates in the United States according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to JOLTS, it’s second only to Accommodation & Food Services with a quit rate of 4.4 – meaning, 4.4% of total employment for the month of July.

Time to Fill – Retail

What does TTF for Retail look like in Workable’s network data? Let’s take a look:

Very erratic graph here that can be explained by two things: Retail TTF remained relatively stable from one month to the next throughout this period, making any shift of more than several days a dramatic one when we look at it as a trend compared with previous months.

Secondly, the retail sector is hit hard by the pandemic – as stated in another Deloitte report: “Retail orthodoxies will be challenged, and the industry will likely look much different than when we entered this crisis.” It’s a destabilized time for retail, and that’ll ultimately show in hiring data.

Job Openings & Candidates per Hire – Retail

Now, let’s look at the job opens and CPH for retail:

No surprise here. As consumerism took a dive in early 2020 and people stopped going out and spending their money, retail outlets suffered and many shut down – as in SaaS, we see a surge of candidates who had flooded the market as a result. After enduring a particularly tough COVID-19 winter in the United States and Europe, cases dropped significantly across the board and we see a surge in job openings to the end of Q1 2021 as retailers started opening up again.

Moving through Q3 2021, we see job opening trends continue at a positive rate. CPH numbers continue to trend downwards however – despite an uptick in July – likely as a reflection of the Great Resignation.

Real Estate

And finally, we take a look at Real Estate. Home prices and home sales are just going through the roof since the onset of the pandemic – we can surmise on the “why” of it, but let’s focus on the recruitment metrics here. When there’s much more activity in this sector, there’ll be more employment opportunities, right?

Time to Fill – Real Estate

So, let’s look at Time to Fill for the Real Estate sector:

Real estate sales are often seasonal – they rise in the summer months and cool down when the weather gets colder. Pandemic aside, we see this in the TTF metrics – less urgency is put on real estate hires at the end of 2020 and start of 2021.

As real estate heated at a torrid pace through March/April/May 2021, TTF dropped significantly, valleying in May with a 26.8% drop in time to fill compared with the three previous months. Don’t let that spike in July 2021 fool you – it’s still a negative trend of -3%, meaning TTF is still shortening every month even after dropping so dramatically in Q2.

Job Openings & Candidates per Hire – Real Estate

Now, let’s look at the job opens and CPH:

Now what’s very interesting here is that the numbers here for retail feel like a fun-house mirror version of the overall data. Overall, June, July and August show a positive trend for job openings with 6.8%, 6.7%, and 2.4% per month respectively, compared with -0.8%, 9.5%, and 18.4% in the real estate sector.

We see similarly dramatic differences in CPH data: overall, June, July, and August show a negative trend of -12.7%, -9.6%, and -27.3% per month respectively, compared with a much more negative trend of -34.1%, -44.7%, and -31.3% for the same three months in real estate.

That is a huge downward trend right there. One might suggest that this is partly a consequence of the Great Resignation, but JOLTS data places real estate only in the middle of the list of sectors when it comes to job quit rates.

Maybe it’s just an organic shift in career choices. Perhaps there’s skittishness about real estate in that the bubble might eventually burst – and so, job applicants are applying for jobs that have more assurance of longevity and security.

Conclusion

Something to think about: in recruitment metrics, September will prove to be a catalytic month. Reuters reported at the start of September that U.S. childcare workers are in short supply – which would have a domino effect on workers, especially mothers, who must make concessions in their working schedule to accommodate their younger children.

Combine that with uncertainty around Delta – and whatever new variant may be around the corner – and we still have a lot of uncertainty.

Yet, we don’t have all the data in front of us as the calculations for Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire data are not complete for more recent jobs – when a job takes a month or two to fill, we’ll be in November before we have reliable numbers to look at for September. Our Hiring Pulse comes out on the first Tuesday of every month – we’ll have something for you then.

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

The majority of the data is sourced from small and medium businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for October 2021 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for May 2022

Keith MacKenzie — Thu, 12 May 2022 13:03:40 +0000

This month, we’d like to keep this short and succinct, with the takeaway that times are ever-changing and we need to be like water – in other words, shape-shifting, adapting, etc. – to remain relevant, to paraphrase Bruce Lee’s famous quote.

Yes, this applies to businesses as well. Let’s get on with it.

How we’re looking at data

First – and we explain this every month to be sure that it’s understood – looking at data gives us an opportunity to look at benchmarks in the hiring landscape. But when the benchmark regularly changes during this ‘Never Normal’ time, it becomes an unreliable gauge.

So, it’s no longer helpful to look at the data YoY or even MoM. Rolling trends make more sense because then you’re comparing data with what’s happening in recent months. Consequently, for the Hiring Pulse, we are looking at percentage increase or decrease compared with the rolling average of the three trailing months. Jump to the end for a more detailed methodology on this.

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Q1 was busy, very busy – and that’s to be expected
April shows a much sharper drop in job openings than previous Aprils
The candidates per hire trend isn’t dropping as sharply as before

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: if a job is opened in October or even as early as April last year, but isn’t filled until April, it won’t count in this graph. If another job is opened on the same day in July or September but is filled on March 31, it does count in this graph.

So, we’re looking at the TTF trends only up to the end of March. Got that? Good. Now that we have the full data for Q1 2022, let’s have a look:

And then let’s compare that to what the data looks like for Q4 2021. It’s worth pointing out that December 2021 self-adjusted from -5.2% last month to -0.8% this month, which means jobs got filled en masse in March to push that TTF metric a little higher for December this time around. Also worth noting is how November 2021 also changed sharply – from 1.8% last month to a much higher 7% this month.

That’s two months of significant recalibrations towards the end of the year – indicating that TTF is actually growing as jobs opened in November and December get filled and we get a more complete picture of those latter months of 2021.

What else is happening? To gain perspective, let’s first look at last month’s Hiring Pulse report: in that report, the TTF trend for December 2021, January 2022 and February 2022 (the last three months being analyzed) were -5.2%, -22.8%, and -29.2% respectively. But this time, the last three months (the Q1 2022 months) trended at -16.6%, -19.2%, and -27.4%.

Now let’s look at another huge difference between the reports for last month and this month – the trend of the third-most recent month being analyzed here. In April’s Hiring Pulse, the third-most recent month is December 2021, which shows a -5.2% TTF trend.

This month, the third-most recent month is January 2022, which shows a -16.6% TTF trend.

That’s -5.2% versus -16.6%. Pretty huge difference.

This means that jobs opened in that third-most recent month are more likely to be filled well before the end of the most recent month now compared with last month. Why? Because the absolute maximum TTF possible for a job opened in the third-most recent month would be roughly 90 days (or three months).

Concurrently, jobs opened in December 2021 were likely being filled towards the end of February in last month’s report, whereas jobs opened in January 2022 were more likely being filled well before the end of March in this month’s report.

It’s a clear indication that jobs were getting filled rather quickly throughout Q1 of this year.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

So, let’s look at the raw job open numbers – which aren’t contingent on job open/close dates like TTF and Candidates per Hire, so we can include April 2022 in this chart:

Yowch. Now things have come down pretty sharply after that intensely busy first quarter for hiring teams. We expected that, to be honest, after a similar thing happened last year with a sharp drop from March to April.

But what’s different is that, this time, the job opening trend actually went negative, from 20.4% in March to -1% in April. Compare that to a sizzling 42.9% in March 2021 down to 17.9% in April 2021. This means job openings went *down* this April, rather than simply slowing down as seen last April.

And consider that while Q1 2022 (17.1%, 14.3%, 20.4%) was a busy quarter for hiring, it’s still nothing compared to what Q1 2021 looked like (22.3%, 25.3%, 42.9%).

We can go back further. April 2020 is not worth considering because that was a very special time in our history, so let’s just skip the year altogether and go back to April 2019. Know what it is? 6.5%. It’s down from Q1 2019, but it’s still a positive trend.

So, a negative trend for April this year after not-nearly-as-high numbers for the first quarter of 2022 is an eye-opener.

Two things to think about here – the first quarter of any year is normally a very busy year for hiring. But 2021 was extra special in that it was not only a normally busy time, but also a time of significant recovery after a disastrous 2020 for many businesses. Not to get into too much politicking, but it’s entirely possible that optimism around the incoming Biden administration at the time may have fueled businesses looking to jump ahead on what they anticipated to be a very busy – and hopefully, flourishing – 2021.

This year, however, things are different. We came out of Omicron in roughly OK shape, all things considered. And despite a recent uptick in new infections, it feels like things are starting to return to relative normalcy.

But then, two other things happened: inflation and war. Those are always going to be hard on businesses and workers. Inflation makes it harder for businesses to meet bottom lines since things cost more even in wholesale. And we’re seeing a massive ripple effect from the invasion of Ukraine, rattling economies worldwide.

Not to go too much into detail about any of that but, honestly, a negative job opening trend for April is interesting. This CNN article emphasizes that as well in its US jobs update for April: it says plenty of jobs are being added, and we’re closer than ever to what the job numbers were before pandemic hell hit, but there are predictions of a slowdown throughout the rest of 2022.

3. Candidates per Hire

Workable defines the number of candidates per hire (CPH) as, succinctly, the number of applicants for a job up to the point of that job being filled.

Let’s look at what’s going on here through March:

(NOTE: Again, as in the TTF chart, you’re probably wondering why we stopped the numbers in March. Again, as stated above, that’s because these data are based on the time the job was opened, not when it was filled.)

Last month, we pointed out how the January trend recalibrated from -18.6% in the March report to 11.3% in the April report. And the same thing is happening in February now, going from -16.1% in the April report to -8% in this month’s report.

But much more worth noting is the stabilization of CPH across the three Q1 months: -10.1% in January, -8% in February, and -13.9% in March.

Compare that with the last three months in last month’s report: -2.5% in December, -11.3% in January, and -16.1% in February – a pretty sharp decline in the trend with each month. We aren’t seeing the same kind of dramatic drop in the CPH trend this time around. Rather, it’s relatively stable month over month.

It should make sense that more jobs being opened would mean fewer candidates per job, because candidates get saturated across jobs. But that’s not happening here – even with the very high job numbers, the CPH trend is still declining but not nearly so dramatically.

Conclusion

Last month, we went into depth on how things are stabilizing in the business world and that’s reflected in the hiring trends. But the biggest eye opener is how April’s job opening trend is lower than it was for previous Aprils in our dataset. And it’s not just a slowdown – it’s an actual negative trend.

And we mentioned above the CNN report and predictions of a slowdown. Here’s the succinct quote from Daniel Zhao, senior economist at Glassdoor: “We’re in for a slower 2022.”

We’ve talked a *lot* in these reports about the importance of agility and nimbleness in business operations. That reality doesn’t change – and as a matter of fact, that’s the stability a business needs to aspire to regardless of trends in the business bottom line or in the surrounding economy.

We have been through a lot as a society. The pandemic and all its waves and surges. The devastating impacts in the early part of the pandemic, followed by a sudden resurgence and recovery. The social upheaval and activism that carry on to this day. The great resignation, with unprecedented quit rates every month exceeding four million for many months on end. Inflation – and yes, salary growth. And now, war – ugh, another war. It’s been quite a couple of years.

A widely regarded quote from noted investment advisor Robert D. Arnott applies here: “The most treasured asset in investment management is a steady hand at the tiller.” Keep that steady hand when you’re running a business – including in the hiring process – and adjust accordingly. We’re having to adjust accordingly at a clip unlike any in recent times, and we should be experts at it by now. As Bruce Lee suggested, be like water.

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

The majority of the data is sourced from small and medium businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for May 2022 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for August 2023

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 13:22:42 +0000

In July’s Hiring Pulse, we highlighted the staggering increase in the number of candidates per job opening – and it really is very high. This month, we look at relatively similar metrics, but we also try to draw some new context around it all.

Let’s have a look.

How we’re looking at data

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)
Total Job Openings (JO)
Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month’s Hiring Pulse are:

Job activity is taking a bit of a dip – one half job less on average per company in July compared with June
Candidates per Hire is still at a very, very high level
Time to Fill is more stable than it normally is over a longer period

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of June are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Quick clarification, because people are asking: the data in this chart shows the trendline against the 2019 average as an index of 100, not the actual number of days in TTF.

Got that? Good. Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend through to the end of July against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled:

We want to have a story here, but there’s not much to tell. Ultimately, July’s TTF trend sits at 82.6, which basically marks the fifth consecutive month of relative stability where it hits 84.3 at its highest point and 81.2 at its lowest point.

But you deserve an insight here, so here’s one: looking at last year, we see the same trend where the TTF trend hovered between a high of 93.2 and a low of 90.8 over an eight-month stretch from February to September 2022 before finally dropping to the higher 80s for the rest of the year.

These two time brackets are actually the most stable the TTF trend has been in our dataset dating back to the start of 2020 – apart from a few three-month stretches here and there, it’s been a regularly undulating trend month-to-month over the past three and a half years.

Let’s move on to Job Openings now.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

The big takeaway this time is the drop in job activity from June to July this year, where average job postings across all companies fell from 7.6 to 7.1. At first glance, this may not mean much considering the regular ups and downs in job postings over the last few years, but what makes it significant is when we look at the June-July shifts in previous years.

As it happens, 2019 and 2020 saw nice bumps in job postings in the Workable network – increasing 0.5 in 2019 and 0.6 in 2020 from June to July. In 2021 and 2022, there was literally zero change from June to July in the trend – the average remained absolutely stable.

So, in this context, we now see how a drop of half a job in the job opening average from one month to the next is significant at this point in the year. And we see this happening across the board regardless of the company size bucket.

Now, let’s look at the Candidates per Hire trend.

3. Candidates per Hire

Now that Let’s look at what’s going on here through July:

The Candidates per Hire trend has been a focal point of the last few months because of how much it’s increased since January.

While not an increase this time – and actually a decrease from June’s all-time high of 176.6 – July’s 169.2 is still right up there in the rarefied atmosphere as the second-highest monthly trend in the history of Workable’s network data.

Except it’s starting to feel like it’s not such a rare place to be – and rather, it’s normal. When you have the last four months (158.5, 140.3, and now 176.6 and 169.2) standing so much higher than anything preceding it, then you have to wonder: will this trend continue as is? Will it keep trending up? Will it fall back down to a previous baseline?

The problem we have here is that, unlike in the other two metrics we regularly track in the Hiring Pulse, we have nothing in the past to compare this recent surge in Candidates per Hire. Let’s call it what it is: a surge. Let’s watch this space and see if we can answer the questions above.

What’s going on here?

Job openings are taking a bit of a dip. Candidates per hire are also taking a very, very small dip but still at a remarkably high point. In last month’s Hiring Pulse, we noted how both job openings and CPH were on the rise and that this indicated a crazy busy time in the hiring landscape – especially for small businesses with low-bandwidth hiring teams.

Now, it’s still busy. The job openings may be taking a small dip, but companies who announce a new opening in their company will still get inundated with candidates. Consider this: let’s say you got 100 candidates for a job opening at your company at this time last year. Now, for that same job, you’d get 178 candidates according to our data.

That, right there, is the biggest difference and that’s the way it’s been going for months. We’ve bounced all kinds of hypotheses around on this topic, and we’ll bring in a new one: remember the Great Resignation? Quit rates are still relatively high – but they’ve come down quite a bit from the times when we saw more than four million job quits per month in the United States for 19 successive months from June 2021 to December 2022.

In the six months on record in 2023, it’s gone above four million just once, in May – although it did come close in February with 3.98 million quits.

For June 2023, that number has dipped to 3.772 million quits – the lowest it’s been since March 2021.

Now, our theory: when candidate numbers were coming down and quits going up, no one was able to come to a clear consensus on where these people were going if they weren’t going to new jobs. We’ve speculated in the past that they either moved to freelance and contract work, started their own businesses, took on sabbaticals, or something else that wasn’t readily trackable.

It’s possible that those workers who dropped out are returning (or trying to return) to the full-time fold. They’ve tried out the life of Riley and either decided it was time to return or it just didn’t work out the way they hoped it would. Couple that with the increase in layoffs, and you have an abundance of new candidates applying to open roles.

That’s your food for thought for August. See you next month!

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for August 2023 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for July 2024

Alexandros Pantelakis — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 19:07:52 +0000

Our previous edition highlighted a tightening job market, with fewer available openings and more candidates vying for each position than usual. Economic factors like layoffs are driving more extensive job searches, increasing competition.

In this edition of Hiring Pulse, we will explore these topics in depth, providing insights into the market dynamics observed throughout June.

Let’s begin.

How we’re looking at data

Want a more detailed methodology? Jump to the end and check it out.

As always, we look at the worldwide trends for three common SMB hiring metrics:

Time to Fill (TTF)

Total Job Openings (JO)

Candidates per Hire (CPH)

Let’s start analyzing!

1. Time to Fill

For this report, Workable defines “Time to Fill” as the number of days from when a new job is opened to when that job opening is filled. It’s important to understand that definition: jobs that are still open as of the end of June are not included in this graph as they don’t yet have an “end date”. Only the jobs that are filled are included here.

Quick clarification: the data in this chart shows the trendline against the 2019 average as an index of 100, not the actual number of days in TTF.

Let’s have a look at the monthly TTF trend through to the end of June against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled:

While June 2024 maintains a prominent place with 84.2, which is higher than some previous months, it still reflects an ongoing trend of relative efficiency in hiring processes compared to earlier years.

Across the dataset, a discernible pattern emerges with mid-year months often showcasing lower time indices compared to earlier and later months. This trend suggests a potential seasonal influence or strategic adjustments in hiring practices during these periods.

2. Total Job Openings

Total job openings represent the total number of job openings activated across the entire Workable network.

As usual, examining the four company size categories – 1-50, 51-200, 200+, and the overall average – reveals interesting insights.

Small Businesses (1-50 FTEs): From June 2023 to June 2024, there’s a slight decrease from 6.5 to 6.1 job openings. While still robust, this decrease might indicate a stabilization or a slight cooling off in hiring intentions compared to the previous year.

Medium Businesses (51-200 FTEs): June 2024 shows a consistent trend with 6.2 job openings, maintaining a stable demand for new hires compared to June 2023 (5.6), suggesting sustained growth or replacement hiring within this sector.

Enterprises (200+ FTEs): There’s a noticeable decline in job openings from June 2023 (17.1) to June 2024 (15.3) among large enterprises. This reduction might reflect a strategic adjustment in hiring plans or a shift in focus towards optimizing existing workforce structures rather than aggressive expansion.

You might be curious about how all of this compares to previous years, especially since we’ve covered it in the last couple of our editions.

Note: this is calculated a little differently. For the sake of direct comparison, we’re using January of each year as our baseline index of 100.

As we move into 2024, we appear to be returning to typical patterns, and the decrease you’ve noted is likely due to seasonal fluctuations.

Let’s move on to our next metric: Candidate per Hire

3. Candidates per Hire

Let’s look at what’s going on here through June:

Can you recall our previous edition? We’ll say that again. Candidates are actively seeking new opportunities and this summer isn’t an exception.

April and May showed a stable increase, with 175.2 candidates per hire and now we see a small decrease to 171 candidates per job.

Since we’re conducting year-over-year comparisons in this report, let’s apply that to CPH as well.

Up until now we thought that this year deviates from the trend of previous year, but look at the graph. The spike in June 2023 was really huge. Although the percentage of increase is different between then and now, we see that the final number is pretty much stable.

More specifically, June 2024 saw a slight decrease to 171.0 candidates per hire from the previous year’s peak. This indicates some stabilization after the sharp rise in 2023, but the number remains significantly higher than the years prior to 2023.

This could suggest a continued high level of competition in the job market.

Companies may still be facing challenges in finding the right fit for roles, requiring more extensive candidate pools.

What’s going on here?

The Hiring Pulse report for July 2024 reveals a job market marked by efficiency and strategic adjustments.

Companies are filling positions relatively quickly. This trend of lower TTF indices during mid-year months suggests that businesses may be employing seasonal hiring strategies or making adjustments to streamline their recruitment processes.

Despite economic challenges and layoffs, companies have managed to maintain an efficient hiring process, potentially leveraging technological advancements and refined recruitment strategies.

Small businesses have seen a slight decrease in job openings, indicating a potential stabilization or cooling off in hiring intentions. Medium-sized businesses maintain stable hiring demand, reflecting sustained growth or replacement hiring.

However, large enterprises show a significant decline in job openings, suggesting a strategic shift towards optimizing their existing workforce rather than aggressive expansion.

Coupled with a high number of candidates per hire, which remains significantly above pre-2023 levels, the data indicates a highly competitive job market. Companies are likely facing challenges in finding the right candidates, requiring them to sift through larger pools of applicants.

See you next month!

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Because one of the three metrics (Job Openings) is different from the other two metrics (Time to Fill and Candidates per Hire), we’re adopting two very distinct methodologies.

And we chose 2019 as the baseline because, frankly, that’s the last normal year before the pandemic started to present challenges to data analysis among other things.

The majority of the data is sourced from businesses across the Workable network, making it a powerful resource for SMBs when planning their own hiring strategy.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for July 2024 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Exploring the future of jobs and the positive impact of AI

Alexandros Pantelakis — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 12:39:00 +0000

The impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the job market is the talk of every corporate discussion. The AI job replacement scenario is real in the minds of job seekers and recruiters alike. This conundrum is more complex than it seems. But, do you really believe it is easy to wipe out the value brought by human capital in any organization?

According to the World Economic Forum, there will be no job shortage in the future, even with AI. Their discussion is focused on the disproportionate amount of new jobs created in the world. In fact, organizations can harness the power of AI and human intelligence to strike a balance.

Will AI replace jobs? This question is not pertinent in the current or future job markets. The right question to ask is – Will AI bring value? The clear answer is yes!

How does AI fit into the changing work dynamics?

Automation is the superpower of artificial intelligence. Organizations leverage it to automate mundane repetitive tasks, requiring minimal human intervention.

Does this mean AI will take over jobs? No. It simply means AI will take over jobs with repetitive tasks, enabling the human resource to be employed in more valuable tasks. It requires the reskilling of human capital to sharpen their creative bend and match the pace of technological development.

The U.S. job market supports this narrative. According to Statista, 25% of Americans, aged between 30 to 44 years, believe AI will create more jobs in the future rather than artificial intelligence replacing human intelligence. Check out 10 new jobs created with AI in the workplace.

The hiring managers’ perspective

From a business perspective, AI is a great tool to boost productivity. Businesses are looking at a more measured picture by exploring the idea of AI implementation in their operations. Based on IBM’s analysis, around 77% of organizations have either implemented or are in the process of including AI in their operations. They know its direct implication on workforce displacement and the panic amongst workers. Their immediate action is to join the reskilling revolution to upskill their workforce for valuable administrative work. They are also aware that employees are asking questions like – Will AI replace humans? So, they are leaving no stone unturned to maintain the positive mindset of their human talent.

Recruiters’ strategies to counter the AI-job loss narrative

New technology and jobs

The AI revolution paints a picture of a highly advanced world with new jobs and opportunities. According to Forbes, potential new jobs will be created to manage artificial intelligence, including AI integration specialists, AI compliance managers, VR experience designers, and AI application developers. So, artificial intelligence will not replace jobs. It will require human resources with all-new skill sets.

Skill assessment

We all know how workplace evolution takes place every few decades. To be honest, it is not a new phenomenon. It means organizations will use a skill-assessment mechanism to hire workers. The majority of businesses are using AI candidate sourcing and AI recruiting to hire the right candidate with the perfect job fit.

Talent development

Talent development is a focus area of the majority of organizations. They are aware of the fear in the job market about the uncertainties brought by AI. The World Economic Forum states that around 1.1 billion job transformations will happen in the next decade. Here, “transformation” is the operative word. Many businesses are providing on-the-job training and learning opportunities for talent development. Moreover, they are hopeful about the changes in government policies to empower employees with learning opportunities and funding.

The employees’ perspective

The workers’ perspective on AI job replacement is clearly divided. The latest survey by Statista suggests that different age groups, ranging from 18 to 65 years responded differently on the subject. While some are hopeful about the future of the job market, others are fearful.

Another survey suggests that 3 out of 4 people use AI at work to ease their tasks and fulfill work commitments. Both surveys may seem contradicting at first but if you observe keenly, transformation is already happening!

Employees’ strategies to counter the AI-job loss narrative

Upskill and reskill

Don’t you feel skills are the strongest assets of our species? We believe they save us from the uncertainties in life like no other asset can. The job market is no different. Every few decades, there is a lateral shift that requires extra effort to change the pace. The employees have gauged the reality and are already upskilling and reskilling. Many see it as an opportunity to prove their value in the organization. Online certifications, executive courses, and training programs are registering a record number of people. It shows the commitment to stay ahead of the curve.

Command a premium wage

With upskilling and reskilling, talents know their improved worth at the workplace. Will AI replace humans? This speculative concern is not on their radar. They know the changing work dynamic and the power of accepting the change. It has given them a new outlook towards the job market. New talents are looking for opportunities that match their potential. Also, employees with skills and certifications are getting acknowledgement from the management with perks, rewards, and awards.

The bright side: a future with AI at the workplace

The future of the job market suggests not to fear the change but to embrace it. It opens the door to opportunities to get better-paying jobs. The preconceived notion that AI and humans have similar qualities and abilities is misaligned. In all honesty, the nuances make it interesting by bringing intuition, emotional intelligence, and sensitivity to the workplace.

The post Exploring the future of jobs and the positive impact of AI appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

How valued is salary in the UK? Quite a bit, actually

Keith MacKenzie — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 15:33:02 +0000

The only real ‘surprise’, if there needs to be one, is that there are studies showing that other job attractors have grown in value – such as the willingness to take less salary in order to remain remote according to HR software provider CIPHR, and the value of perks over salary as a motivator, according to MetLife UK.

Our own dataset, however, finds that compensation remains a leading motivator when looking at career opportunities. A US-based respondent from our other survey report on the same topic puts it perfectly:

“Employees will go where the money is. And where they’re treated respectfully and valued. But, mostly, it’s the money.”

Money above all

As stated above, a vast majority of respondents are open to new opportunities, whether they’re passively open or actively looking. When we asked those respondents to choose from a list of top reasons why they’re open to new opportunities, more than half (53.5%) selected “I need to make more money” as a major reason.

Closely following in second place is “I need a fresh challenge”, with 43.9% citing that as a reason.

The need for more meaning in work is a distant third, at 21.9%.

We also asked respondents what would lure them from their present job to a new one, again choosing from a list of popular attractors. Again, compensation tops the list, with 70.1% of UK respondents citing that as a leading motivator when deciding to move to a new company.

Work flexibility (43.5%) and job security (39.5%) are the second and third-most popular attractors in a new opportunity.

One UK respondent noted their disappointment at their current employer cutting corners on compensation:

“The company pays less as we are touted as ‘independent contractors’, they can seemingly bend the rules.”

We know there are nuanced differences between what someone might be hoping to get in terms of a new job at a different company, and what they might want to see improved in their current capacity. It’s the difference between being ready to leave and being satisfied – albeit not 100% with one’s current working situation.

So we asked that question separately: what could be improved in your current job for a better employee experience?

Again, compensation is the number-one area where their current employer can improve, with 60.7% picking that as a top area in need of improvement.

It’s worth noting another comment from the US, on the importance of keeping salaries proportionally balanced throughout a company – especially when a company is growing and accumulating wealth:

“As a business owner, I understand that you can not cave to every whim your employees have, but instead of prioritizing balloon money bombs for executive persons, make the wealth of the company available to the people that make it happen. Smaller executive bonuses in favor of increased bonuses / benefits / perks for the workers/moving parts of a successful company.”

The different types of compensation

Now, compensation doesn’t necessarily mean only a base salary. It can also mean paid time off, paid vacations, bonuses, incentives, extra perks and benefits, company lunches, team outings, tuition or mortgage reimbursements, pre-tax benefits, and many other things.

Intangibles can include company-wide recognition, advancement potential, the ability to work remotely and on flexible schedules, mentorship, network building, and so on.

Even those intangibles – while still valued – aren’t worth as much as raw compensation. Support from their employer, whether it’s in the actual day-to-day work or moral/emotional support are at the bottom of both lists. This suggests that the traditional core elements of having a job (i.e. compensation, career opportunities, job security) remain paramount for workers.

The motivators are clear – the working population in the UK want and need to make more money. Full stop.

There’s just one little intangible that deserves a much deeper dive: work flexibility, which ranks highly across all these lists. We’ll take a deep dive into that in the next chapter.

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Is salary important to workers? Bet your bottom dollar it is

Keith MacKenzie — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 15:33:27 +0000

Compensation sits at the very core of the worker-employer relationship. And the survey results from our Great Discontent study of 750 workers in the United States cements this reality. Salary is important.

The only real ‘surprise’, if there’s one, is that other studies show a growth in value placed on job attractors besides compensation – such as the willingness to take less salary in order to remain remote according to a TeamBlind survey, and the value of perks over salary as a motivator according to Staples.

Our dataset, however, clearly indicates that compensation remains the number-one driver in career opportunities across the board. As one respondent succinctly put it:

“Employees will go where the money is. And where they’re treated respectfully and valued. But, mostly, it’s the money.”

Take a look at the dataset and see for yourself.

Money above all

As stated above, a full seven out of 10 respondents are open to new opportunities, whether they’re passively open or actively looking.

When we asked those respondents to choose from a list of top reasons why they’re open to new opportunities, nearly two-thirds (63.4%) selected “I need to make more money”.

That’s more than double the next-most popular reason, which is “I need a fresh challenge” (24.6%).

Work flexibility (20.8%), meaningfulness in work (19.3%) and career advancement (also 19.3%) are other leading factors prompting the drive to explore new job opportunities. Still, those numbers pale in comparison to compensation.

We also asked respondents what would lure them from their present job to a new one, again choosing from a list of popular attractors. Again, compensation remains the top attractor, with 62.2% of respondents in the US citing that as a top factor in deciding to move to a new company.

Again, other major attractors here are similar to the previous question, with career opportunities (38.1%), work flexibility (37.5%) and job security (32.1%) being reasons why someone would jump to a new job.

Another respondent was frank about their emphasis on salary as the dealmaker:

“If someone pays me more than I make running my own company, I’ll do it!”

We know there are nuanced differences between what an individual might want in terms of a new job at a different company and what they might want to see improved in their current capacity. It’s the difference between being ready to leave and being satisfied, but not 100%, with one’s current workplace.

So we asked that question separately: what could be improved in your current job for a better employee experience?

The answers are still very much the same. Compensation, again, is the number-one area where their current employer can improve, with 57.4% picking that as a top area for improvement.

A third respondent noted the importance of keeping salaries proportionally balanced throughout a company – especially when a company is growing and accumulating wealth:

“As a business owner, I understand that you can not cave to every whim your employees have, but instead of prioritizing balloon money bombs for executive persons, make the wealth of the company available to the people that make it happen. Smaller executive bonuses in favor of increased bonuses / benefits / perks for the workers/moving parts of a successful company.”

Is salary important? Yes, it is, but there are other forms of compensation worth noting.

The different types of compensation

Intangibles can include company-wide recognition, advancement potential, the ability to work remotely and on flexible schedules, mentorship, network building, and so on.

Even then, support from their employer – whether it’s in the actual day-to-day work or moral/emotional support – are at the bottom of both lists. The traditional core elements of having a job (compensation, career opportunities, job security) continue to be top of mind.

The motivators are clear – workers in the United States want and need to make more money. Salary is important. Full stop.

There is just one area of the intangibles that deserves a deeper dive: work flexibility, which ranks highly across all these lists. We’ll go deep into that area in the next chapter.

The post Is salary important to workers? Bet your bottom dollar it is appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Should you include salary in a job description? Let’s talk!

Keith MacKenzie — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 14:39:34 +0000

Every candidate is on the lookout for something different, and it’s impossible to tick every box. After running internal and external research, the ACELR8 team noticed that one box interests candidates more than any other part of the job description – the salary.

There are very few reasons for a candidate to apply for a job if the salary is below their threshold:

The real question is, if you want to attract top talent with high potential, should salaries be included in the job description?

As an embedded recruitment firm, the ACELR8 team works with a wide range of clients from a variety of industries. Despite this variety, there are many common themes that play a big part in creating a solid hiring strategy. One of the most well-worn paths is the discussion on salaries.

Should salaries be mentioned in job descriptions? Should it come up only in the interview stage?

Or, should they be not mentioned at all until the job offer stage?

It’s a hot-button topic right now and you’re looking for answers. To learn more, ACELR8 polled its talented team of recruiters to find those answers for you:

A third of our recruiters maintain that salaries should be shared only later in the hiring process, while twice as many believed the opposite.

To learn more, ACELR8’s Head of Marketing, Milda Skladaityte, posted the same question on LinkedIn. Here, things were a little different.

Out of 582 votes, an overwhelming majority of 91% wanted to see the salary in the job description.

This is an interesting finding, because it shows that there are completely opposing views on the market. At first, this may seem off the mark, but when you look at the reasons why, the issue becomes a lot clearer.

So, we spoke with Sara Bent, the recruitment lead at Hotjar, to learn more about Hotjar’s opinion on disclosing salaries.

“When I first started with Hotjar, I set us up with a Glassdoor account. The interview reviews that came through on it quickly highlighted one main area causing a negative candidate experience,” Sara explained.

“With candidates who we wanted to move forward with beyond the initial application stage, we’d email them to ask about their minimum compensation expectations. Our intention with this was to be sure that we would only move forward with candidates who fit within our compensation banding; we wouldn’t want to waste a candidate’s time if we knew we couldn’t match their expectations.

The Glassdoor reviews, though, made it clear that a lot of candidates felt we were doing this to ‘lowball’ them – plus these extra emails could add days to a candidate’s recruitment journey.”

That conclusion motivated Sara to be more open about salaries in job ads. And the response was quick and favorable.

“So, based on candidate feedback and guided by our own core value of building trust with transparency, we made the decision to immediately start posting all compensation ranges onto job descriptions. If we use the Glassdoor reviews as a measure of success, this change did seem to immediately make a positive difference to our candidates’ experience.”

Salaries are a tough topic to negotiate and discuss, and it’s often easy to scare away or disincline candidates. What Sara found, though, was that asking for feedback and adjusting processes to suit the candidate’s expectations was a quick, insightful, and easy step to take.

To learn more about people’s reasonings behind salaries and job descriptions, we asked our recruiters more questions. Let’s start with why many recruiters believe salaries should be disclosed in job descriptions.

Salaries in job ads: the argument for

Another recruiter made it clear – it’s about being transparent.

“I believe that transparency in hiring is the most important value. I believe that if we are hiding the salary, we know we pay less than we should or we are not transparent internally. Also, it may be that people in the company earn less than we are now offering to the new candidates.”

Transparency is a vital aspect of a well-run business. If everyone is on the same page and respects each other, the culture of the company will undoubtedly improve.

By disclosing the salary at the very beginning of the process, you start off on the right track – by creating trust. As said above, this not only allows the potential hire to understand their financial position, it can also give current employees an insight into the salary structure of the company.

This, in turn, mitigates any risk for attrition.

Moving with the times

Another important factor to take into consideration is that approaches and attitudes to disclosing salaries have changed considerably in recent years.

Another recruiter, Jonathan, explains:

“It’s something of an archaic taboo in my view,” Jonathan says. “Pay is often tied in with feelings of self-worth, so to openly discuss it manifests as either an ego boost or feeling undervalued.”

Candidates are also at a major disadvantage when it comes to salary disclosure, he adds.

“What has happened is people no longer have any real grasp of salary banding from industry to industry or role to role. The only people who know what the correct salary expectations broadly are, are recruiters. People generally have no idea whether they are under or overpaid…who can they compare to?”

And opening up that discussion from the get-go can make significant positive differences – not just for the individual candidate but overall benefits as well.

“If salaries, stock options, etc. were openly disclosed, people would then have a critical piece of intelligence required to make important career decisions. We would all be able to clearly see what is happening in the marketplace. It would also oust any disparities on account of gender, age, race or religion.”

These are some excellent points that lead to a much larger issue of diversity, equity, and inclusion. By creating a more transparent salary structure, everyone, including outside candidates, gets a better understanding of their financial self-worth.

In all, disclosing salary expectations allows for a level playing field and a transparent hiring process that ensures that time is not wasted and equal opportunities, both internally and externally, can be achieved.

Let’s look at the counter-argument. While disclosing salary does save time at the outset, but there are many eye-opening implications from our recruiters.

Salaries in job ads: the argument against

“I think companies have much more than a salary to offer … a remote-work policy, stock option, different benefits,” says another recruiter in the network. “It’s a complicated topic because I also see a potential benefit in having the salary on the job description.”

The modern company has to offer more than just a good salary. Remote-first working, equity options, and a whole host of other benefits can be just as important to potential hires.

For example, an early-stage startup will often not be able to compete with an established company for talent due to its lack of resources. However, incentives such as equity, bonuses, and remote work can level the playing field. Disclosing the salary may skew the candidate’s impression of the full value of the position.

Another recruiter shared three reasons why disclosing the salary may be problematic:

The salary can put people off of applying if it is too low or below current salaries. Then, the company also gets a reputation in the market for underpaying.
It can encourage juniors or unqualified people to apply to more senior roles if they are attracted just by salary and the bands are too high.
It can run into situations at the end of a process if you offer 80k but the candidate sees the band pays up to 90k.

Overall, disclosing the salary puts the ball in the court of the candidate. It can lead to a glut of unsuitable candidates applying for the role, can affect the reputation of the company, and can also make closing the deal significantly more difficult.

Competitive issues

Another issue that may arise is that competing companies will see your offered salary and now know the benchmark for out-offering you.

Yet, while disclosing all your cards early in the game certainly gives the other players an advantage, it also avoids spending time on candidates who are unsuitable for the role.

There is also the issue of under-offering. If a company discloses their salary offer in the job description and it is much lower than the expected amount desired by the client, they won’t bother applying for the job.

In all of these situations, it’s important to remember to take things on a case-by-case basis. Every employer is different, and one rule does not apply to all. Take the time to understand what your company really needs, and approach the salary dilemma from there.

The issue of salary trends

The other aspect of the salary issue comes into what we’ve discussed previously: salary trends are changing fast.

2020 and 2021 have been two of the most paradigm-shifting years in hiring trends, communication methods, and work environments. A large population of the world had to change their work habits, and so they have become used to a certain style of employment.

Now, many people are leaving old jobs which do not adhere to their desired lifestyle, creating a boom in candidates and employers vying for position. This has led to a wide series of changes, including in the world of salaries and salary estimates. Again, we asked recruiters what they thought.

To the future: salary trends in 2022

“Aside from a competitive salary, companies need to offer competitive benefits to stay ahead,” says one recruiter. “These can include remote work, hybrid, flexi-work, company equity, family days/additional sick days, mental health days, remote office set-up allowance, learning and development budget and room for career growth.”

As above, salary is not the one carrot which you can use to lure a great candidate into your company. After COVID, people have higher expectations for work-life balance and the availability of remote work – this is documented along with the importance of compensation in the Great Discontent study released in September 2021.

By creating a progressive offering and work environment, you can attract exceptional talent that is looking for those freedoms and benefits.

Another issue in regards to the shift of work to remote is the issue of salaries. Hiring has gone global – EU-based candidates that would recently have had no chance of getting a role with a German company, for instance, can now count on being considered.

One recruiter explains:

“A thing I have noticed is that as remote work soars, candidates who are working remotely for San Francisco/Silicon Valley start-ups are getting paid San Francisco salaries and they then will expect this level of compensation in Europe.”

Now, when you’re hiring, you have the entire globe as a talent pool. This issue is only going to become more widespread as time goes on. The world is more interconnected than ever before, and it is up to you to learn how to adjust your hiring strategy to counteract this.

Learn more about the global talent market in our podcast or read about it here.

Choose wisely

In the end, the choice of whether to disclose the salary or not is up to you and your hiring team. But, hopefully, this article has helped to shed some light on the pros and cons of each situation.

A high salary posting can certainly attract excellent candidates, but it’s important to ensure you can foot the bill when it comes to the offer stage. Additionally, the only way of maintaining this appraisal is to create a transparent salary structure throughout your company. This avoids issues of unfair pay, employee morale problems, and general miscommunication.

When it comes to keeping your cards close and not mentioning the salary, make sure that you are supplementing that with another attractor important to candidates. Excellent candidates will only respond to well-thought-out and attractive job descriptions. Promote your company values and ambitions to entice top talent into the application process before they even think of the salary.

Again, in the modern world of recruitment, salary is not everything; other benefits can become even more important to candidates – especially issues such as remote working or flexible hours.

Take the time to really understand the job position – who is the ideal candidate? Will they respond better to a high salary or company equity? Are there other benefits which haven’t been considered yet?

The world of recruitment is dynamically changing, and it’s important for each company to take a deep, introspective look at how they want to hire. Jobs descriptions need to be more than just salary postings now. Although, statistically, it may seem as though the public wants to make sure salaries stay present.

Above all: stay transparent, don’t overpromise, and remember to keep an open mind.

Lewis Mc Cahill is the Content Marketing Manager for ACELR8. With over half a decade of experience, he has worked with a range of major brands and upcoming startups alike. With ACELR8, he is helping push the Embedded Recruitment Model forward with the help of the rest of the marketing team.

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What happens when AI screens AI? 4 insights from experts

Alexandros Pantelakis — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 14:18:31 +0000

Talking about the effectiveness of AI and trying to forecast the future of it is not an easy task. It is a rapidly evolving space with many twists and turns, and it’s important to listen to those in the know.

AI is becoming a part of our professional lives, but what happens in hiring? What happens when candidates utilize AI tools to apply for a job and another AI tool will conduct the first screening?

To discuss this, David Näsström, co-founder of the reference checking platform Refapp, and Emira Blomberg, Refapp’s CSO, sat with Workable CEO Nikos Moraitakis and Hung Lee, curator at Recruiting Brainfood, in a webinar titled Hiring for Potential: When AI is screened by AI, then what? on October 25, 2023.

A quick side thought: the best-case scenario is that AI optimizes the process for both employer and candidate. Worst-case scenario may be the recruitment version of the old Stephen Wright joke about putting a humidifier and dehumidifier in the same room and letting them fight it out.

Jokes aside – here are the key takeaways to put you in the discussion.

1. Both employers and candidates are using AI tools

Recent surveys have shown that generative AI is being used by both candidates and companies in the hiring journey.

This situation has implications on both ends of the hiring spectrum, questioning whether the overlap of AI in both applying and screening processes will lead to better recruitment decisions or merely speed up the hiring process without improvement in quality.

“AI screening can analyze information so quickly. AI can screen hundreds of resumes in a matter of minutes searching for relevant experience or other useful qualities. Recruiters can identify candidates faster,” Emira states.

There’s a predicted surge in applications as candidates leverage AI to perfect and automate their applications. This can dilute the significance of known personality indicators making it harder for recruiters to identify authentic candidates in a vast pool of applicants.

“Candidates are given all kinds of tools in order to boost their own application process, like for example, ChatGPT with the cover letters, with the resumes,” says Emira. “So it is a really weird scenario that we end up with AI, screening AI, and I’m really conscious [in asking]: ‘Will this lead to better recruitment decisions?’”

This raises the possibility of needing AI-to-AI interactions to counteract this deluge or rethinking recruiting processes.

“I think what we also must focus on not just [trying] to shorten time to hire, because that’s not the KPI to rule them all. That’s one KPI, right?”, says David.

There’s also a highlighted difference in motivation between recruiters and job seekers to adopt AI, with job seekers being much more incentivized to use every tool available.

“We’re still at the very early stage of this. And with every new technology, initially you have the technology and you have people using the new tool to do what they were doing before.” adds Nikos.

2. A return to ‘real human’ interaction

The potential for AI to mimic human-like behavior and tasks, such as language translation, prompts a departure from traditional values in recruitment.

However, it should not be surprising if in-person interviews return due to trust issues and a potential re-evaluation of what matters in recruitment.

“The trust factor is going to be eroded with the ubiquitous use of AI. If we are still in the business of hiring people for growing a team, for instance, and we care about that, then yeah, we can see that the analog processes come back in.” Hung says.

“The trust factor is going to be eroded with the ubiquitous use of AI.”

While AI can handle much of the recruitment groundwork, human-to-human interactions may become a premium, valued experience especially for specific roles where soft skills play a huge part.

Nikos brings up the example of plastic, which was perceived as an invention that would end craftsmanship, but it didn’t:

“Maybe the recruiting process is going to change to be a process that is a lot more software, a lot more automation, a lot more filtering and getting machines are going to battle it out until we get to the point where we talk.”

In short, there remain many blurry lines in how AI in hiring will evolve even in a year from now.

3. The impact of AI is sometimes overestimated

Despite the advances in AI, maintaining a personal touch in the recruitment process remains crucial. Relying solely on AI could diminish the candidate experience. That is because this technology is still new to many of us.

Plus, the pace and impact of AI in hiring are sometimes underestimated or overestimated.

“You feel that, for the first time, you are witnessing something that is going to be unstoppable. But, like all technologies, it is also going to follow the same cycle of adoption. This is not about the AI itself, but rather about the way we purchase software, use it, incorporate it into our processes, lives, habits, and all the other good stuff,” says Nikos.

Emira shares a quote from Roy Charles Amara: “We tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

“We tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

On the other hand, Hung believes that there is a lack of analysis: “When you’re looking at technology innovation, oftentimes we mistake analogy for analysis.”

But what does it mean for candidates?

“What’s going to happen in the short term is that we’re [going to] start getting weaker and weaker signals from some parts of the process so we’re going to have to pay more attention to other parts of the process,” David says.

4. AI needs to be the enabler for human touch

We borrowed this phrase from a chat comment that better suits this takeaway. There’s a call for AI to be an enabler of better human interaction rather than a barrier.

While AI can handle the efficiency side of recruitment, the human touch is essential for providing experience, value, and ethics, often overlooked or undervalued in the current recruiting process.

“We always valued efficiency more than the human touch. Maybe here’s an opportunity, because AI may be able to basically take care of the efficiency, and the human touch comes in order to provide the experience, the value, the ethics, perhaps that have been missing from recruiting. So, I think there is an optimistic vision of how this ends up.”, Hung says.

“We always valued efficiency more than the human touch.”

“What are we supposed to think about when we actually implement AI? In our processes, these kinds of philosophical questions are untouchable by AI, because it’s human, right? And those are the discussions that we are not having. And that makes me feel super stressed out, because these are the discussions that we should be having,” Emira says.

However, there’s a cautionary note that recruiters must advocate for the value of this human touch, or the industry might get swayed entirely by the allure of efficiency brought by AI.

On the contrary, a solely tech-driven approach might lose sight of the personal, “human” side of hiring.

“I keep reminding myself that these things usually take enough time that we can adapt because they adapt with us. When we see a technology, we assume that everyone is going to instantly be motivated to use it in the best way like they did,” Nikos says.

“These things usually take enough time that we can adapt because they adapt with us.”

The outcome

Wrapping up on the takeaways, it’s clear that technology can’t replace the unique human connection in hiring. While there’s a hype around AI, it’s essential not to overestimate its impact.

For HR professionals, the challenge is guiding AI’s role so it supports, not supplants, the traditional recruitment process. Let’s view AI as a tool in our toolkit, not the sole game-changer.

After all, it’s not going to kill us like the T-1000. Hopefully.

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Top HR influencers you should follow in 2024

Alexandros Pantelakis — Tue, 14 May 2024 11:10:22 +0000

These influencers have demonstrated expertise in various aspects of HR, from talent acquisition and employee engagement to HR technologies and organizational development.

By following their work, HR professionals can stay informed about emerging trends, innovative practices, and best-in-class strategies for managing the modern workforce.

Why should I follow HR influencers on Linkedin?

Following HR influencers offers several benefits.

They provide valuable insights and expertise on various aspects of human resources, helping you stay informed about industry trends, best practices, and emerging technologies.

HR influencers often share practical tips and strategies that you can implement in your own work to enhance recruitment, employee engagement, and organizational culture.

Additionally, by following HR influencers, you can stay connected with a community of like-minded professionals, fostering networking opportunities and collaboration.

What are the qualities of a good HR influencer?

A good influencer possesses several key qualities that set them apart and make them effective in their role.

Authenticity is paramount, as they are genuine and transparent in their interactions, sharing their expertise, experiences, and opinions in a sincere manner.

Credibility is another essential attribute; a good influencer is knowledgeable and credible within their niche or industry, demonstrating expertise through their content and track record of success.

Engagement is crucial, as they actively interact with their audience, responding to comments, participating in discussions, and fostering a sense of community.

Consistency is key for maintaining relevance and building trust; a good influencer consistently produces high-quality content that resonates with their audience and aligns with their brand.

Providing value to their audience is also fundamental; whether it’s educational, entertaining, or inspirational, their content enriches the lives of their followers in some way.

When evaluating influencers, pay attention to these qualities to determine who is genuinely influential and worth following in your industry or area of interest. This how we came up with the following list.

Top HR influencers

Introducing our curated list of top HR influencers who are reshaping the future of human resources. We’ve compiled this list of 11 influential voices in the HR industry, each offering unique perspectives, valuable insights, and practical advice. The order is random. Let’s begin.

Suzanne Lucas

Suzanne Lucas, also known as the “Evil HR Lady,” is a seasoned HR professional renowned for her candid and practical advice.

With over twenty years of experience in HR management, Suzanne shares her expertise through her popular blog, offering straightforward solutions to common workplace challenges.

Known for debunking HR myths and advocating for both employees and employers, Suzanne’s insights have been featured in top publications like Inc. and Forbes.

Through her engaging writing and speaking engagements, she has become a trusted voice in the HR community, helping professionals navigate complex issues and foster positive workplace environments.

If you are a fan of our Resources blog, then you surely came across her articles here.

Find Suzanne Lucas on Linkedin.

Hung Lee

Hung Lee is a prominent figure in the HR and recruiting space, known for his expertise in talent acquisition, technology, and innovation.

He was the founder and CEO of Workshape.io, a recruiting platform that used machine learning to match developers with job opportunities based on their skills and preferences.

Hung is also the curator of Recruiting Brainfood, a weekly newsletter with over 30,000 subscribers that features curated content on recruiting, technology, and HR trends.

With a background in software engineering and recruitment, Hung brings a unique perspective to his work, blending technical expertise with a deep understanding of the human side of hiring.

Hung Lee is widely respected for his thought leadership and contributions to the HR community, and he influences the way organizations approach talent acquisition.

Find Hung Lee on Linkedin

Roberta Matuson

Roberta Matuson, known as the “Talent Maximizer®,” is a globally recognized leadership coach, author, and HR consultant specializing in talent management and organizational development.

With over 25 years of experience working with Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, and non-profits, Roberta brings a wealth of expertise to her work.

She is the author of several acclaimed books, including “Suddenly in Charge” (3rd edition released this year), “The Magnetic Leader,” and “Evergreen Talent,” which offer practical strategies for attracting, retaining, and developing top talent.

Through her consulting firm, Matuson Consulting, she helps organizations worldwide maximize their talent potential and achieve sustainable growth.

Roberta Matuson is a trusted advisor to executives and HR professionals, empowering them to build high-performing teams and drive business success. Through her LinkedIn newsletter, which counts over 150,000 subscribers, you can always be sure that you are updated.

Find Roberta Matuson on Linkedin

Meghan M. Biro

Meghan M. Biro is a respected HR and workplace expert known for her thought leadership, writing, and consulting work.

As the founder and CEO of TalentCulture, a leading media outlet and community focused on the future of work, Meghan provides valuable insights and resources to HR professionals, leaders, and organizations worldwide.

She contributes to Forbes, Huffington Post, and other publications, where she explores topics such as leadership, employee engagement, and the evolving role of HR in the digital age.

Meghan is also a sought-after speaker and commentator, sharing her expertise on HR and workplace trends at conferences, webinars, and podcasts.

With a background in marketing, technology, and entrepreneurship, she brings a unique perspective to her work, blending strategic thinking with a deep understanding of human behavior and organizational dynamics.

Her passion for innovation, advocacy for employee well-being, and commitment to driving positive change make her a respected voice and influencer in the HR community.

Find Meghan M. Biro on Linkedin.

Heather R. Younger

Heather R. Younger is a well-respected keynote speaker, author, and leadership expert known for her work in employee engagement, workplace culture, and leadership development.

As the founder and CEO of Employee Fanatix, she helps organizations create environments where employees feel valued, engaged, and empowered.

Heather is the author of three books, “The 7 Intuitive Laws of Employee Loyalty,””The Art of Caring Leadership,” and “The Art of Active Listening,” offering practical strategies for building strong relationships with employees and fostering a positive work environment.

Through her writing, speaking engagements, and consulting work, Heather R. Younger continues to inspire leaders to prioritize empathy, compassion, and authenticity in their interactions with employees, ultimately driving organizational success and employee loyalty.

Find Heather R. Younger on Linkedin.

Johnny C. Taylor

Johnny C. Taylor is the President and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the world’s largest HR professional society.

With a background in law and HR leadership, Johnny brings a unique perspective to his role, advocating for HR professionals and shaping policy on issues such as workplace diversity, employment law, and workforce development.

Under his leadership, SHRM has expanded its reach and influence, providing resources, training, and certification programs to HR professionals worldwide.

He authored the national bestseller, RESET: A Leader’s Guide to Work in an Age of Upheaval, offering a candid, forward-thinking vision for leaders to reimagine their company cultures amidst global upheaval. The book presents data-driven strategies to fundamentally reset all aspects of work.

Johnny is a frequent speaker at conferences and events, where he shares his insights on topics such as the future of work, talent management, and HR innovation.

Through his work at SHRM and his advocacy efforts, Johnny C. Taylor Jr. continues to drive positive change and elevate the HR profession on a global scale.

Find Johny C. Taylor on Linkedin.

Josh Bersin

Josh Bersin is a globally recognized HR thought leader, analyst, and educator, known for his expertise in the intersection of HR, technology, and business strategy.

He is the founder of The Josh Bersin Company , a leading research and advisory firm in the HR space. Josh has been at the forefront of analyzing and predicting trends in HR technology for over two decades.

He is a writer and speaker, sharing his insights on topics such as digital transformation, talent management, and the future of work.

Josh Bersin is also known for his annual “HR Technology Market Report,” which provides an in-depth analysis of the HR technology landscape and highlights emerging trends and innovations.

Through his research, writing, and consulting work, Josh Bersin continues to shape the conversation around HR technology and AI, helping organizations leverage technology to drive business success and enhance the employee experience.

Find Josh Bersin on Linkedin.

Ben Eubanks

Ben Eubanks is an HR analyst, author, and speaker specializing in HR technology, talent management, and workplace innovation.

He is the founder of HR Tech Awards and upstartHR, a blog and community focused on HR and leadership topics. He is also the Chief Research Officer at Lighthouse Research & Advisory, a research and advisory services firm specializing in HR and talent management. You can find his podcast show “We’re only human” here.

Ben is known for his in-depth research and analysis of HR technology trends, as well as his practical insights into how organizations can leverage technology to enhance their HR practices and improve the employee experience.

He is the author of several books, including “Artificial Intelligence for HR: Use AI to Support HR Functions & Improve the Employee Experience,” which explores the potential impact of AI on HR processes and practices.

Through his writing, speaking engagements, and consulting work, he helps organizations navigate the complexities of HR technology and harness the power of AI to drive innovation and achieve their business goals.

Find Ben Eubanks on Linkedin.

Liz Ryan

Liz Ryan. Liz is the founder and CEO of Human Workplace, a career advisory firm that provides coaching, training, and consulting services to individuals and organizations.

With over 30 years of experience in HR leadership roles at companies like U.S. Robotics and AlliedSignal, Liz brings a wealth of expertise to her work.

She is known for her unconventional approach to HR and career advice, challenging traditional notions of work and leadership.

Liz is a prolific writer, contributing regularly to Forbes and LinkedIn, where she shares her insights on topics such as career development, personal branding, and workplace culture.

She is also the author of several books, including “Reinvention Roadmap” and “Happy at Work.”

Find Liz Ryan on Linkedin.

Laurie Ruettimann

Laurie Ruettimann is a seasoned HR leader turned writer, speaker, and consultant, known for her bold and provocative commentary on HR and workplace issues.

With over two decades of experience in HR, Laurie brings a wealth of knowledge and a fresh perspective to her work.

She is the author of “Betting on You: How to Put Yourself First and (Finally) Take Control of Your Career,” a book that challenges conventional career advice and encourages readers to prioritize their own well-being and professional fulfillment.

Laurie contributes to publications like Forbes, Fast Company, and The Muse, where she shares her insights on topics such as leadership, employee engagement, and workplace culture.

She is a Linkedin Learning Instructor and the host of Punk Rock HR Podcast & Newsletter

Through her writing, speaking engagements, and consulting work, Laurie Ruettimann empowers individuals and organizations to rethink outdated HR practices and create more human-centered workplaces.

Find Laurie Ruettimann on Linkedin.

Jeanne Meister

Jeanne is a recognized expert in HR technology, workplace innovation, and the future of work.

She is the founding partner of Future Workplace – now part of Executive Networks – a research and advisory firm specializing in HR

She has authored several books on the topic, including “The Future Workplace Experience” and “The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today.”

Jeanne is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events, where she shares her insights on emerging trends in HR technology, AI, and the digital transformation of the workplace.

She is also a contributing writer for Forbes and Harvard Business Review, where she explores topics such as remote work, employee experience, and the impact of technology on the future of work.

Find Jeanne Meister on Linkedin.

As we conclude our exploration of these influential HR figures, it’s clear that their collective expertise, passion, and innovative thinking are driving significant change in the HR profession and beyond.

From thought leaders shaping the future of work to advocates championing employee well-being and technological innovation, each influencer brings a unique perspective and invaluable insights to the table.

As HR professionals, leaders, and organizations, we have much to gain from their wisdom and guidance.

Let us continue to learn from, engage with, and be inspired by these individuals as we strive to create workplaces that are innovative and thriving for all.

The post Top HR influencers you should follow in 2024 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

On-demand pay: the pros and cons of earned wage access

Keith MacKenzie — Fri, 03 May 2024 17:19:16 +0000

In today’s rapidly evolving workplace, employee expectations are driving significant transformations. Among these changes is the rising popularity of on-demand pay, a trend that empowers employees to access their earned wages before the standard payday.

This approach addresses the limitations of traditional pay cycles, which often fail to align with the immediate financial needs of workers. By offering flexibility and control over earnings, on-demand pay is reshaping the employee compensation landscape.

Let’s get into the meat and chaff of all the things you wanted to know about on-demand pay and were afraid to ask.

What is on-demand pay?

On-demand pay, also known as earned wage access (EWA), is a payroll model that allows employees to access their earned wages before the traditional payday.

This payroll feature enables your workers to withdraw a portion of their accrued but unpaid earnings at their discretion, often through a digital platform or app provided by their employer or a third-party service. It can also be a “trickle” of pay into your employees’ accounts on a regular basis with greater frequency than the traditional biweekly / bimonthly / monthly models.

The idea of on-demand pay is to provide financial flexibility, which has a range of benefits for both employees and employers.

Benefits of on-demand pay for employees

There are numerous reasons your employees might like an on-demand pay model. First, on-demand pay addresses the financial stress faced by many workers. When offering on-demand pay, employees are better able to manage their personal expenses on a regular basis. They don’t need to wait until the end of the two-week or monthly cycle for a paycheck as bills pile up.

According to PwC’s Employee Financial Wellness Survey 2023, 28% of full-time employees often or always run out of money between paychecks. Even among those who earn $100,000 or more per year, 15% always or often run out of money between paychecks. On-demand pay would help ease these challenges.

The culture of immediate delivery is a factor as well. Borja Perez, VP at EWA provider CloudPay, told TLNT: “People are used to instant gratification in so many aspects of their lives, and they expect the same with their pay. Instead of waiting for payday, employees want immediate access to the wages they’ve earned.”

“People are used to instant gratification in so many aspects of their lives, and they expect the same with their pay. Instead of waiting for payday, employees want immediate access to the wages they’ve earned.”

The rise of the gig economy and freelance models in today’s working world is also an influence. A more dynamic working environment brings the expectation of more flexible payment options.

People do like it – especially younger generations. According to ADP’s Earned Wage Access study, 59% of millennials put higher priority on a job offer when that employer offers on-demand pay or EWA.

Benefits of on-demand pay for employers

In the ADP study, there’s positive sentiment among employers regarding the business benefits. For instance, 96% of employers offering EWA also find that their employees like it. That same study finds 96% saying it helps with talent attraction, and 93% saying it helps with employee retention.

Also, according to Employee Benefit News, four out of five employers (80%) say EWA improved mental health in their teams, and 88% of business leaders offering EWA saw decreased stress in their employees.

There are intangible benefits as well. By offering on-demand pay, employers can alleviate financial stress, leading to a more focused, satisfied, and productive workforce.

Modernization of payroll processes is also a factor. An earned-wage access model streamlines payroll operations, potentially reducing administrative burdens and costs associated with traditional payroll cycles.

Overall, it can benefit your employer brand, positioning your company as an innovative and employee-centric organization.

The drawbacks of on-demand pay

There are, of course, drawbacks to on-demand pay. It may lead to impulsive spending on the part of employees if they lack financial literacy or discipline. While this falls more on the employee than it does on you as an employer, it’s worth thinking about.

Also, some on-demand pay services charge extra fees, which can add up over time.

And finally, in contrast to the above-listed benefit of reduced administrative work. an on-demand pay model built into an existing payroll system can lead to numerous technical and logistical headaches, at least in the short term.

On-demand pay: an evolution or just a fad?

On-demand pay is gaining traction globally. A report from Zion Market Research predicts a rise in the earned wage access software market from $22.5 billion in 2022 to $26.74 billion by 2030. That same report highlights opportunities in countries with a high rate of daily wage workers where on-demand pay models make sense.

It’s also increasingly legislated. In April 2024, the US Congress advanced the Earned Wage Access Consumer Protection Act to ensure a regulatory framework and establish consumer protections for services that offer workers access to their paychecks before their scheduled payday.

On-demand pay – or earned wage access – could mark a paradigm shift in employee compensation that empowers workers with financial flexibility and control. It could be another ingredient in how the future of work is shaped.

On the other side of the coin, employers are apprehensive about the administrative factors – although with time, practice, and guardrails, these can be resolved.

Employees may also be hesitant because of the implications it might have on their taxes. Those worries may be short-lived as the US Treasury Department continues to update the Internal Revenue Code to clarify tax treatments of on-demand pay models.

What it all boils down to is this: what do your employees want in terms of compensation? And what works best for you as an employer? Weigh out the benefits and risks from an on-demand pay model and act accordingly.

The post Pay transparency: the pros, the cons, and best practices appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The noncompete agreement ban: what you need to know

JamieLee Watson — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 17:32:14 +0000

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has made a groundbreaking decision that will significantly affect employees and employers across the United States.

The FTC has decided to limit the enforceability of most noncompete agreements in employment contracts, except those applicable to senior executives.

The FTC defines senior executives as workers earning more than $151,164 annually who are in a “policy-making position.”

Noncompete agreements for regular employees, such as those in sales or marketing or engineering teams, will no longer be enforceable.

The background

Noncompete agreements were once limited to highly paid executives to prevent them from sharing confidential information with other companies.

However, in recent years, such agreements have become more common in lower-paying jobs such as fast-food workers, yoga instructors, and maintenance workers.

These agreements can prohibit workers from taking a job with a competitor, starting their own business, or even working in the same industry for a set period after leaving their current job.

They can sometimes be so broad that they prevent workers from finding new employment in their chosen field – thereby limiting their career options.

“The freedom to change jobs is core to economic liberty and a competitive, thriving economy,” says FTC Chair Lina M. Khan.

“Noncompetes block workers from freely switching jobs, depriving them of higher wages and better working conditions, and depriving businesses of a talent pool they need to build and expand. By ending this practice, the FTC’s proposed rule would promote greater dynamism, innovation, and healthy competition.”

Employees will have more freedom to navigate the job market and explore new opportunities. The FTC believes that this change will provide more choices for employees and enable them to explore new places of work without the fear of being tied down by noncompete agreements.

However, it’s important to note that without noncompete contracts, employees may face increased competition and potential loss of job security.

What this means for you as an employer

In the current business landscape, employers are advised to be cautious about their restrictive covenants to ensure compliance with legal regulations. To safeguard their business interests, they should consider implementing appropriately tailored nonsolicitation or confidentiality clauses and limit trade secret access only to those who need it.

Employers who are concerned about the FTC rule, as well as broader legislative and regulatory efforts to restrict the use of noncompete agreements, may look into other options to protect their confidential information and business relationships. This could include nondisclosure and nonsolicitation agreements.

However, ensuring that these agreements comply with local, state, and federal laws is crucial.

The FTC hopes to encourage worker mobility, enhance competition, and stimulate innovation by limiting noncompete agreements. This decision will also benefit small businesses and startups, which often need help recruiting and retaining top talent due to their inability to offer competitive salaries and benefits.

Overall, this recent decision to limit the use of noncompete agreements in the US has been widely praised by experts as a significant move towards promoting competition and dynamism in the job market.

Noncompete agreements restrict employees from working for a company’s competitors for a certain period after leaving. While these agreements were originally intended to protect companies’ trade secrets and intellectual property, they have often been misused to limit workers’ mobility and bargaining power, resulting in reduced wages and stunted career growth.

The rule will take effect 120 days after publication in the Federal Register, which if published now, makes it effective in late August 2024. Publication typically happens several days after approval – however, legal challenges may delay enforcement. Business groups led by the US Chamber of Commerce have already taken legal action.

Disclaimer: Workable is not a law firm. This article is meant to provide general guidelines and should be used as a reference. It’s not a legal document and doesn’t provide legal advice. Neither the author nor Workable will assume any legal liability that may arise from the use of this article. Always consult your attorney on matters of legal compliance.

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Dell’s remote work ultimatum: is it the right decision?

Suzanne Lucas — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 15:02:13 +0000

Good news for Dell employees! If they like their remote jobs, they can keep their remote jobs!

They just won’t be considered for any promotions or internal transfers.

While you may be shocked at this, it’s simply Dell saying the quiet part out loud.

We know that CEOs want people in the office. We also know that CEOs want to make profits. Lots of people think that these two things are incompatible, but I’m not convinced by the numbers that insist productivity is higher at home. It certainly is higher for some people – there’s no doubt to that. But it certainly is lower for some people as well.

It’s weird that people assume CEOs are just ignoring reality because they want to control people. It makes much more sense that CEOs see something the rest of us don’t see.

CEOs like money more than anything

This is probably not entirely true. They probably love their children more than money, and maybe their cats – although I suspect CEOs are dog people. I’d say they love their spouses more than money, but CEOs have higher-than-average divorce rates, and divorced CEOs perform better than never-divorced ones.

But a CEO’s primary goal is to make money for shareholders. It defies logic that all CEOs who want people in the office would reject solid evidence that remote work is more profitable.

Kate Maddison-Greenwell, CEO of People Efficient, imagined the conversation with the CEO of Dell and the head of HR went like this:

If the HR director had legitimate data that these specific remote employees were more productive and the CEO said nope, my word is final, then that is definitely an issue with the CEO, but I doubt things are that clear or simple.

What is productivity?

You can calculate productivity by dividing output by hours (or hours by output, whatever floats your boat). That method is brilliant if you own a widget factory. For a company like Dell, it’s really easy to see how many computers you build, but evaluating the productivity of every employee is a little more complicated.

How do you evaluate the productivity of an HR manager, for example?

A good HR department can prevent sexual harassment, for instance. How do you measure how many sexual harassment complaints didn’t happen because the HR manager was highly productive? Sure, you can compare it to the year before, but that shows a change, not overall productivity. And if this year’s is the same as last, does that mean zero productivity?

It’s easy to count the number of investigations conducted but not the number of investigations that were not needed because of proactive behavior.

We can instead of looking at productivity, look at productivity or market capitalization. Let’s take a look at Dell’s market cap over the past few years.

The market cap increased after COVID until the huge drop-off when they spun off VMware, but the overall market cap shows more ups and downs consistent with large businesses.

It certainly doesn’t show that remote work was a disaster. But it doesn’t show how it was an overwhelming success either. There are too many other market forces at play – and Dell has offered hybrid work for a very long time.

Diversity and remote work

Someone at Dell with “access to staff data” said this new requirement to work 39 days in the office per quarter will disproportionately affect women.

I have no doubt that this is true. We know from Dr. Claudia Goldin’s work that women prefer flexibility over money. Women are more likely to want to remain fully remote rather than get more promotions by coming in.

Is this a bad thing? Lots of people think it is, and we should set up our systems to ensure that our employees look like the world around us. I’m not so sure.

If an employee wants to make Dell the center of their life, great! It makes sense that Dell would reward that. If an employee wants to put their family and friends at the center and use Dell to support themselves, then raises and promotions should reflect that as well.

It’s a choice.

The unfair burdens of child and eldercare falling on women are also a choice – a choice heavily influenced by society but a choice nonetheless. When we make those choices, we get those consequences.

Why do CEOs want people in the office?

Last night I hosted an improv jam – where a bunch of us get together and practice our improv comedy skills. A fairly new group member was very subtly helping other group members with their skills.

If we weren’t all in the same room, I wouldn’t have observed his skill at teaching and training others, unless the person he was coaching came to me to tell me or the person self-advocated, I would never have known.

You can’t accidentally observe with remote work because only those directly involved are in the conversation – whether via Slack or video call. Whether it’s a manager observing employee behavior or an employee observing manager behavior, it’s much easier to do in person.

As someone who trains thousands of people per year, I strongly prefer in-person training to remote training. I can easily make adjustments on the fly as I see people’s reactions, which is much more difficult when I’m speaking to a computer screen.

It’s harder to build relationships when you aren’t together. One study found it takes adults 50 hours to make a friend and 200 hours to make a close friend. While I don’t advocate managers making friends with their direct reports or HR being friends with anyone, it takes time to know and understand people. That’s harder to do remotely.

Is this the right decision for Dell? It’s a weird decision, but it’s better to say out loud that remote work will damage your career than leave people frustrated. I’m a huge fan of hybrid work because it gives you the benefits of both worlds, but Dell is foolish to punish all remote workers.

Victoria Purser, the Founder of Conquer HR points out:

“The discussion around remote productivity is more pertinent than ever, especially as companies like Dell navigate the complex decision to return to the office. The past years have undeniably demonstrated that remote work is not just a feasible alternative but, for many, a preferred mode that can lead to enhanced productivity, work-life balance, and job satisfaction.”

Dell will definitely lose employees and potential candidates over this. But most jobs are still onsite, and most people will continue to go to work, regardless of what Dell does. It will be interesting to see if Dell’s leadership changes its mind.

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People aren’t so interested in pay transparency; they only need this

Alexandros Pantelakis — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 16:37:37 +0000

While pay transparency remains a significant concern, access to a comprehensive benefits package is increasingly seen as paramount.

However, the latest reports indicate a shift in what employees value the most. Let’s discover it together.

The growing demand for pay transparency

The conversation around pay transparency is not new, but its importance and the demand for it among employees have surged to unprecedented levels.

A report by Visier paints a telling picture: 79% of surveyed employees express a desire for some form of pay transparency, with a notable 32% seeking total transparency where all employee salaries are publicized.

This growing trend is not isolated to a specific demographic; it spans across generations, with GenZ employees at the forefront, advocating for a transparent approach to compensation as a means to build trust and foster a fair workplace environment.

This demand for transparency is deeply intertwined with the notion of equity and fairness within the workplace. Employees believe that open discussions around pay can lead to more equitable compensation practices, effectively addressing disparities and biases that have long plagued salary negotiations.

Moreover, the willingness of 68% of employees to switch employers for greater transparency—without an accompanying increase in compensation—signals a profound shift in workplace values.

However, this demand for transparency represents more than just a desire for open disclosure of salaries; it reflects a deeper quest for respect and acknowledgment in the workplace.

The implications of this shift are far-reaching for employers. In an era where talent retention is as crucial as talent acquisition, the ability to offer transparency becomes a competitive advantage.

It’s a clear message to current and potential employees that an organization is committed to fairness, equity, and open communication. However, as the data will reveal, pay transparency, while highly valued, is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to attracting and retaining top talent.

The emerging workforce priorities suggest a broader definition of what constitutes a desirable employer, with benefits and perks increasingly taking center stage.

The shift towards benefits over pay raises

A pivotal shift is underway in the landscape of employee compensation preferences. According to a survey conducted by Glassdoor and cited by HRD America, an overwhelming 80% of employees would choose additional benefits over a pay raise.

This staggering figure highlights a crucial trend: while salaries are important, the value placed on non-monetary compensation is growing significantly.

This shift underscores the evolving definition of what it means to be adequately compensated in today’s workforce.

The changing preferences can be partly attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has reshaped many aspects of the workplace, including benefits offerings.

Insights from Robert Half reveal that organizations have been prompted to revise their benefits, with a notable pivot towards health coverage and work-life balance enhancements.

This adjustment reflects a broader understanding that, beyond the paycheck, employees are seeking support in navigating the complexities of modern life.

Health insurance, flexible work schedules, and mental wellness initiatives have emerged as top priorities for employees, signaling a shift towards a holistic view of compensation that prioritizes quality of life.

This reevaluation of benefits versus salary increases is not merely a response to global crises but a reflection of deeper societal changes.

Employees are seeking benefits that address their specific life circumstances, such as child care support, elder care assistance, and mental health services.

These benefits, often seen as perks, play a significant role in an individual’s decision to join or stay with an employer, highlighting the competitive edge that a comprehensive benefits package can provide.

Comprehensive benefits as a competitive edge

The strategic importance of offering a comprehensive benefits package cannot be overstated.

Data from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) in its Employee Benefits Survey illustrates how organizations are adapting their offerings in response to global challenges and evolving employee expectations.

The inclusion of new, diverse benefits reflects an awareness of the need to support employees not just financially but in their overall well-being and life satisfaction.

Moreover, the PwC Employee Financial Wellness Survey sheds light on the rising financial stress among employees, exacerbated by inflation and economic uncertainty.

An astonishing 60% of full-time employees report being stressed about their finances, with this concern spanning across income levels. This financial stress not only affects their personal lives but also their productivity and engagement at work.

By offering resources such as financial wellness programs and coaching, employers can play a pivotal role in alleviating this stress, thereby enhancing employee satisfaction and retention.

The Aon Benefits and Trends Survey further emphasizes the changing landscape of employee expectations, particularly regarding their work experience and well-being.

With 93% of companies acknowledging these evolving expectations and 95% recognizing their responsibility towards employee health and well-being, it’s clear that the bar has been raised.

Yet, 67% of employers feel they are falling short in supporting financial well-being and pensions through effective communication, pointing to an area ripe for improvement.

The emphasis on benefits over salary and the role of comprehensive benefits packages as a competitive edge highlights a critical shift in workplace dynamics.

Avoid quiet quitting with pay transparency and benefits

The State of the Global Marketplace report by Gallup provides a window into the broad spectrum of employee preferences, which extend far beyond base salary considerations.

With 28% of feedback related to pay and benefits, employees are vocalizing their need for fair compensation, but they are equally emphatic about the importance of benefits like transport cost vouchers, access to quality childcare, and health and wellness support.

The report also ties these preferences back to the larger picture of employee engagement and retention.

In an era marked by phenomena like “quiet quitting,” where disengagement manifests in minimal effort, the suggestions for workplace improvements often revolve around better engagement practices, culture enhancements, and, significantly, improvements in pay and benefits.

The value of benefits and perks cannot be understated. They offer a sense of security, demonstrate an employer’s investment in their employees’ health and happiness, and foster a positive workplace culture that values individual needs.

The effectiveness of these benefits, however, hinges on communication. Employees must be made aware of the benefits available to them and understand their value. This understanding fosters appreciation and loyalty, making employees more likely to stay with an employer who they feel genuinely cares for their well-being.

Strategic recommendations for employers and HR professionals

As the landscape of employee expectations continues to evolve, employers must adapt their strategies to remain competitive. Here are several recommendations:

Continually assess and adapt benefits offerings: Stay abreast of changing employee needs and industry trends to ensure that your benefits package remains relevant and competitive.

Enhance transparency and communication: Clearly communicate the full scope and value of the benefits package offered to employees. Consider regular information sessions and accessible resources that help employees make the most of their benefits.

Focus on holistic well-being: Expand the concept of benefits beyond traditional offerings to include initiatives that support mental health, financial wellness, and work-life balance.

Solicit employee feedback: Engage employees in discussions about benefits and compensation to ensure their needs and preferences are being met. This can also highlight areas for improvement that may not have been previously considered.

Embrace flexibility: Flexible work arrangements are highly valued by today’s workforce. Incorporate flexibility into your benefits package, whether through remote work options, flexible hours, or compressed workweeks.

Employers who recognize and adapt to these evolving preferences will not only enhance their competitive edge in the talent market but also foster a workforce that is engaged, satisfied, and loyal.

HR professionals, what will be your next move?

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Developing a future-proof HR strategy to align with trends

Keith MacKenzie — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 18:26:12 +0000

Developing future-proof HR strategies for today’s rapidly changing workplace is not easy. Employee expectations, regulatory requirements, and HR best practices are constantly evolving.

Now, more than ever, anticipating the future and addressing its needs feel like Herculean goals.

Taking up the challenge, however, can deliver huge benefits to any organization. An HR strategy that aligns with the current state of the workplace helps organizations attract top talent, enhance employee engagement, and optimize overall effectiveness.

There are steps you can take to extend the life and improve the impact of your HR efforts. They are:

1. Stay updated on emerging trends

A commitment to tracking the evolution of the workplace is a critical component of a future-proof HR strategy. The sooner HR teams can identify and understand emerging trends, the better they will be able to provide meaningful direction and support to the organizations they serve.

Flexible work arrangements are an example of a major workplace trend that has recently emerged, as reports show that nearly 90% of employees are choosing flexible arrangements, such as remote and hybrid work, when it is available to them.

Another recent survey found that 97% of employees desire some form of remote work. A future-proof HR strategy must take into account the expectations employees now have for flexible work arrangements.

AI is a hot trend now

Artificial intelligence is another topic a future-proof HR strategy should address. HR teams should be leading the conversation with internal stakeholders like Legal and IT to develop guidelines on AI use in the workplace.

Employees are using AI tools – whether their managers realize it or not – and need guidelines or at least guardrails. Any ambiguity surrounding AI use could lead to a variety of internal and external challenges, including data privacy concerns, increased vulnerability to cyber attacks, and AI-driven biases. HR strategies should include the development and deployment of a policy on the use of AI in the workplace (template here) – as well as employee training.

New trends surface anytime, anywhere

When tracking trends, HR teams should remember to pay attention to both internal and external trends, as it is vital for HR policies to align with overarching business goals and plans for future development.

For example, succession planning is a critical element of a future-proof HR strategy for organizations that have reached certain stages of their development cycle. Creating and resourcing a talent pipeline to support projects in development is another element that may be necessary.

2. Stay flexible

Fostering flexibility is central to future-proofing, but tracking emerging trends can only ever partially prepare an organization for the future. To address the unexpected, organizations must take steps to increase flexibility and adaptability.

Prioritizing employee wellbeing programs is one way to improve an organization’s flexibility. The healthier a workforce is, the easier it is to adapt to new challenges. By including employee wellbeing in HR strategies, organizations can better help their employees become physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially ready for challenges the future may bring.

Strategies that prioritize learning and development also help equip organizations for the future. Ideally, learning and development strategies will strive to make continuous learning part of the organization’s DNA, encouraging employees to engage in an ongoing cycle of exploration and growth.

3. Stay engaged

It is also important for organizations to acknowledge that the best HR strategies are those that make an impact. If something is not working now, it won’t help the organization effectively address future challenges.

To ensure strategies are effective, HR teams can draw upon workplace analytics derived from a variety of data sources, including feedback from employees. This provides insights into workforce trends, employee engagement, and retention rates.

Armed with these analytics, HR teams can use data-driven decision-making to improve the effectiveness of HR initiatives and increase their ability to drive future success.

Developing future-proof HR strategies should be a goal for every organization. Tracking emerging trends and staying flexible allows organizations to ensure their strategies are addressing the present realities of the workplace as they evolve in real time.

By staying engaged with the impact strategies they implement, organizations can better ensure their chances of achieving optimal results.

Lauren Winans is the Chief Executive Officer and Principal HR Consultant for Next Level Benefits, an HR consulting practice offering clients access to HR professionals for both short-term and long-term projects.

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Job shift shock: the trend that intimidates HR professionals

Alexandros Pantelakis — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 17:31:42 +0000

Picture Hannah, an experienced marketing specialist with a track record of success, eagerly joining a renowned tech firm. She joins the tech firm filled with hope, but soon encounters a wave of stress and self-doubt.

She grapples with feelings of being unprepared for the challenges ahead and questions her fit in the new environment.

This emotional turmoil is the crux of job shift shock. It’s about more than just a mismatch of expectations, it’s about the personal struggle of finding one’s footing in an unfamiliar setting.

What is job shift shock?

Job shift shock, also known as new hire’s remorse, is characterized by the psychological stress and emotional dissonance experienced by individuals transitioning into new roles.

This stress can stem from feeling unprepared, overwhelmed by new responsibilities, or a sense of cultural misfit.

It goes beyond the practical aspects of role alignment, delving into the deeper emotional and psychological challenges that come with adapting to a new job environment.

This term, while not historically labeled, has existed for decades, often manifesting as a brief period of adjustment.

However, in today’s rapidly evolving job market, job shift shock has emerged as a critical issue, impacting not just employee well-being but also organizational stability.

The roots of job shift shock can often be traced to a variety of factors: bad past experiences, misleading job descriptions, a disconnect between the company’s external image and internal reality, or a lack of transparency during the recruitment process.

72% of employees have experienced job shift shock

The relevance of job shift shock in today’s workforce cannot be overstated. In a rapidly changing job market, where the balance of power is shifting towards employees, understanding and addressing this phenomenon has become crucial for organizations.

A survey by The Muse in 2022 laid bare the extent of this issue: a significant 72% of 2,500 respondents experienced job shift shock, with 29% feeling a misalignment with both the job and the company culture.

These numbers are more than just statistics, they are a clear indication of the changing dynamics in the workplace.

In an era characterized by the ‘Great Resignation’, employees are increasingly willing to leave jobs that do not align with their expectations or values.

80% of respondents in the same survey stated it was acceptable to leave a job within six months if it failed to meet their expectations.

This growing sentiment highlights the urgent need for organizations to proactively address job shift shock, not only to retain their workforce but to foster a positive and productive work environment.

But how do the HR professionals play a pivotal role in all of this?

It’s the onboarding process that matters

Effective onboarding must be carefully planned and executed.

It should begin even before the employee steps into the office, with pre-boarding activities like sending out a welcome pack, company information, and setting clear expectations for the first few weeks. Pre-boarding and onboarding are your opportunities to avoid beating around the bush and get to the point.

Show your new employees that you are willing to have them in the company so that you can grow together.

The process should then be continued with structured orientation programs, mentorship initiatives, and regular check-ins.

By providing a clear understanding of the company’s values, expectations, and culture, the onboarding process can significantly reduce the occurrence and impact of job shift shock, ensuring a smoother transition for new hires.

Use tools so you can focus on the real value

In an era where technology is increasingly ingrained in our work lives, leveraging platforms like Workable for onboarding can be a game-changer.

Workable is not just a tool for recruitment, it’s a comprehensive platform that facilitates a seamless and engaging onboarding experience. By automating the mundane and time-consuming aspects of the onboarding process, Workable allows HR professionals and managers to focus on the human element of welcoming a new employee.

Workable’s features include customizable onboarding checklists, document management, and automated task assignments, which ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.

Additionally, Workable provides analytics and feedback tools, allowing HR teams to continuously refine their onboarding processes based on real data and employee feedback.

This technology-driven approach not only streamlines administrative tasks but also creates a more personalized and engaging experience for new hires, further reducing the risk of job shift shock.

Continuous improvement mindset

As we look towards the future, it’s clear that addressing job shift shock is integral to the broader conversation about employee engagement and retention.

The onboarding process is just the starting point of an ongoing journey of employee development and integration.

Companies need to adopt a continuous improvement mindset, seeking feedback and making regular adjustments to their onboarding and overall HR strategies.

Ultimately, the question remains: How will your organization evolve its strategies to address the ever-changing dynamics of the modern workforce and reduce the incidence of job shift shock?

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Augmented workforce is not the future – it’s happening now

Alexandros Pantelakis — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 15:00:52 +0000

Whenever you are asked the question “Will AI take my job?”, the answer might be, “No, thanks to the augmented workforce.”

If you are not familiar with the term, then it is about time to explain what an augmented workforce is, how skills and reskilling are playing a pivotal role in shaping the present and future of work, and whether all these advancements can secure your job.

What is an augmented workforce?

The concept of an augmented workforce transcends the traditional boundaries of human and machine collaboration. It represents a sophisticated blend where human intellect and emotional intelligence are amplified by AI’s computational power.

AI is not a substitute but a complement to human skills, taking on repetitive and mundane tasks and freeing humans to engage in more complex, creative, and strategic endeavors.

This synergy is not about replacing human effort but about enhancing and expanding human capabilities.

This synergy is not about replacing human effort but about enhancing and expanding human capabilities.

For instance, IBM’s report, “Augmented Work for an Automated, AI-driven World,” states that 40% of the workforce will require reskilling in the next three years due to AI and automation’s impact. Are the HR teams ready for it?

The augmented workforce model

The emergence of the augmented workforce is a response to the rapidly evolving business landscape, characterized by a need for agility, innovation, and heightened productivity.

This model is already being adopted across various industries, as evidenced by insights from the recent report, “Augmented Workforce: Empowering People, Transforming Manufacturing”, by the Economic World Forum in collaboration with the University of Cambridge. That report illustrates the tangible benefits of this integration, such as a 300% improvement in ergonomics and a 50% increase in quality.

These statistics not only highlight the efficiency gains but also the enhancement in employee well-being and safety.

Moreover, the deployment of augmented reality (AR) and other technologies has led to a 70% reduction in training costs and a 20% efficiency gain, as per the same report.

This demonstrates the profound impact of AI in streamlining training processes and improving operational efficiency, making a compelling case for the augmented workforce model.

Applying AI and augmentation technologies

The integration of AI and augmentation technologies in the workplace is not just a futuristic concept, it’s a present reality.

For instance, the use of AI-powered video learning platforms has led to a 50% reduction in training time and a 25% improvement in performance, as highlighted in the WEF report.

In logistics, a sector known for its physical demands, augmentation technologies like exoskeletons have made a significant impact. The introduction of exoskeletons resulted in a 30-40% immediate improvement in posture during work execution, dramatically reducing the physical strain on employees.

Furthermore, the application of augmentation technology in quality and process assurance has achieved remarkable results.

In specific cases, there was a reported 100% success rate in both quality and process assurance, underscoring the potential for significant improvements in production quality and reliability through these technologies.

Security and stability concerns

In the age of AI, one of the primary concerns for employees is job security. However, the augmented workforce model offers a reassuring perspective.

Rather than replacing human jobs, AI is augmenting them, creating new opportunities and enhancing existing roles. For instance, IBM’s report indicates that while AI is expected to disrupt 85 million jobs globally between 2020 and 2025, it is also projected to create 97 million new roles.

This shift underscores the transformative nature of AI – it’s not about job elimination but job evolution. The key is to view AI as a partner rather than a threat.

The key is to view AI as a partner rather than a threat.

By automating routine tasks, AI allows employees to focus on more meaningful, impactful work, thereby increasing job satisfaction and security.

This shift necessitates a proactive approach from HR professionals and employers in reskilling and upskilling their workforce to adapt to these new roles.

Embrace a human-centric approach

For HR professionals and SMB employers, adapting to the augmented workforce model involves strategic planning and implementation.

The first step is to embrace a human-centric approach, recognizing that the ultimate goal of technology integration is to enhance human work, not replace it.

Implementing augmentation technology involves a phased approach: starting with the concept phase to identify technologies and assess industrial challenges, followed by the pilot phase to test the technology in practice, and finally, the scaling phase to expand its use and evaluate its broader impact.

Moreover, fostering a culture of continuous learning and adaptation is essential.

As AI evolves, so must the skills and capabilities of the workforce. Investing in training and development programs that focus on both technical and soft skills will be key to ensuring that employees are equipped to thrive in an AI-augmented environment.

AI won’t take your job

According to the World Economic Forum’s prediction, the year 2025 will witness the replacement of approximately 85 million jobs by AI. However, this technological advancement is also expected to generate around 97 million new job opportunities.

The transformative impact of AI in the workforce is echoed by industry leaders and experts.

For instance, Robin Bordoli, ex-CEO, Figure Eight, supports that “It’s not about machines replacing humans, but machines augmenting humans. Humans and machines have different relative strengths and weaknesses, and it’s about the combination of these two that will allow human intent and business processes to scale 10x, 100x, and beyond that in the coming years.”

Richard Baldwin put it right.”AI won’t take your job,” he said during a panel at the 2023 World Economic Forum’s Growth Summit. “It’s somebody using AI that will take your job.”

“The most expensive, most talented workers are the ones who have 20 years experience and know how to apply that. THAT’S what #AI does overnight.”

“.. A.I. won’t take your job, it’s somebody USING A.I. that’ll take your job.”@BaldwinRE @wef
pic.twitter.com/lGPKU0UtJp

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) May 2, 2023

These perspectives highlight a common understanding among experts: AI is a tool for enhancement, not replacement.

It’s about using technology to unlock human potential and drive forward innovation in ways previously unimaginable.

The journey towards an AI-augmented workplace is an opportunity for HR to redefine its role, focusing on strategic human capital development and fostering a culture that embraces continuous learning and adaptation.

By doing so, we can ensure that our workforce is not just equipped to handle the challenges of today but is also prepared to thrive in the ever-evolving landscape of tomorrow.

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Making sense of 2023: the 7 biggest trends of the year

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 15:16:35 +0000

It’s getting boring to say that “this year has been a crazy year” – because honestly, since 2020, it feels like every year has been more turbulent than the previous one.

Nevertheless, it still calls for a breakdown of the main trends that we saw throughout the year. Without further ado, let’s have a look at the top seven developments of 2023:

1. Layoffs

2023 saw a continuation of the previous year’s trend with the tech industry experiencing more than 240,000 job losses, a 50% increase from the prior year.

Major companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, along with startups across sectors, announced significant cutbacks.

It wasn’t just that there were more layoffs – according to the layoff tracker, Layoffs.fyi, we saw 1,064 companies laying off 164,969 employees in 2022 and 1,179 laying off 261,847 in 2023. So, the number of companies hasn’t grown so much as the number of people who lost jobs.

The reasons range from economic caution to a shift from growth to efficiency. The layoffs have profound impacts on innovation, company pressures, and the availability of talent for growing businesses.

We may not see the end of it yet. Layoffs are anticipated by four of 10 companies going into 2024 according to a ResumeBuilder.com survey.

2. Job turbulence

In 2023, the job market across the UK, US, and the APAC region showcased distinct trends reflecting their unique economic landscapes, technological advancements, and employment policies. In short, 2023 was a volatile year.

United States

The US saw a mixed bag of employment changes over the year. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there was a robust increase in total nonfarm employment, with significant contributions from sectors like leisure and hospitality, health care, and professional and business services. Specific areas like retail trade and transportation also showed growth, indicating a recovering and adaptive economy.

Also according to BLS, manufacturing and construction sectors demonstrated modest growth, signifying a sustained demand for goods and infrastructure development.

Meanwhile, the information sector experienced fluctuations, reflecting the dynamic nature of the tech industry and its impact on job numbers.

United Kingdom

The UK experienced a decline in job vacancies, falling for the 17th consecutive period according to the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS), yet still above pre-pandemic levels.

This indicates a cooling job market but with a sustained demand for labor higher than historical averages.

The UK saw significant numbers of working days lost due to labor disputes, particularly in the health and social work sector, indicating industrial relations strains. Despite this, the overall number of workforce jobs reached a record high, suggesting an expanding labor market.

Asia-Pacific (APAC)

The APAC region solidified its position as a global service leader, with countries like India, China, and Malaysia offering cost-effective and skilled labor.

However, hiring witnessed a slowdown in major markets such as Singapore and India, indicating a more cautious approach to employment amidst economic uncertainties, according to the workforce consultancy group Resourc e Solutions.

The group also noted significant shifts towards a tech-driven economy, formal upskilling programs, and a surge in ESG-related job openings

It continues to be an unpredictable job market for many around the globe – and, again, 2024 will likely see the same trends as 2023.

3. Salary trends

In 2023, the conversation around salaries evolved significantly, reflecting broader economic trends, legislative changes, and shifting cultural attitudes towards pay transparency and equity.

United States

The year saw significant salary increases across industries in the United States, according to the Conference Board’s US Salary Increase Budgets 2023-2024 – with an average increase of 4.4% from 2022. That’s expected to continue into 2024, with increases predicted to be an average of 4.1% from 2023.

Why? The report points to talent shortages, inflation, and tech developments as major contributors.

United Kingdom

Meanwhile, the UK saw a notable 7.3% annual growth in regular pay according to the UK’s Office for National Statistics, showing a strong but slowing wage increase trend.

This especially was seen in the public sector, a sign of government moves to retain and attract new talent in this unpredictable environment.

Increased transparency

Salary transparency is also a thing. Notably, the UK government launched a pilot project aimed at increasing pay transparency to break down barriers for women and other underrepresented groups. It’s a step towards addressing overall salary equity, including the gender pay gap.

Meanwhile, back in the US, a number of states including California, Colorado and New York have introduced salary transparency laws – there’s more, of course. Plus, a handful of municipalities are doing the same. More legislations are coming in 2024 (Hawaii) and 2025 (Illinois). It’s likely a sign of things to come.

How do people feel about that? It’s generally positive, according to a ZipJob study – 65% of respondents say they would like to ask, or have already asked, about a colleague’s salary.

4. The four-day work week

The year also saw increased experimentation with the four-day work week.

Various companies across the US, Canada, Australia, and other countries participated in six-month-long pilot programs organized by 4 Day Week Global – with a comprehensive report from the group citing increases in work efficiency and work-life balance as a result of the project.

Governments are also backing pilot projects, including at the state level (with more than 60 UK companies trialing it to the end of 2022) and the provincial level (including Ontario’s Bill 55 – Four-Day Work Week Act).

This kind of thing will continue as companies (and employees) experiment with alternative schedules. The death knell of the 9-to-5 system has long been predicted – and we’re seeing it unfold in real time.

5. Growing skills and talent gaps

The year also saw growing skills and talent gaps across industries, thanks to tech developments, evolving work, and educational misalignments.

Meanwhile, a report from Wiley University in Texas noted an increase in employers reporting skills gaps from 55% in 2021 to 69% in 2023. It also found that one in four (26%) say they’re unable to hire qualified candidates due to skills gaps.

A Harvard Business School report emphasized the urgent need for US-based employers to actively partner with local community colleges to close the middle skills gap. The nature of middle-skills jobs is evolving faster than educational institutions can adapt their curriculums, leading to a significant disconnect.

Another study from DeVry University in Illinois took a deep dive into the state of upskilling and the barriers to professional development. It found that 97% of workers and 96% of employers say that upskilling is essential or nice to have – but just one in three workers say employers are living up to their responsibility to upskill them for the future workplace.

This means greater emphasis on on-the-job training and L&D initiatives going into 2024 – and higher value being placed on workers who are agile and willing to learn (and roll with the punches, too).

6. Increased stress for workers

Due to the economy and layoffs – and continued emphasis on productivity for those “left behind” in the workplace with an increased burden on maintaining productivity – workplace stress was a huge factor in 2023.

Stress, burnout, loneliness, and anxiousness have skyrocketed, according to Calm’s Workplace Mental Health Trends Report: The Future of Work.

Also, the ongoing seesaw between working from home – with its added emphasis on output and productivity – and returning to the office continues to be a factor in 2023, again exacerbating the mental well-being of workers.

The hybrid work model continues as a growing trend, and it’s worth watching how this develops into 2024 as a potential mitigator for stress, as well as mental health support for teams.

Our survey report from 2022 on mental health in the workplace also reveals a lot about what you can do as an employer in that area.

7. The explosion of AI

And finally – the entrance of artificial intelligence into everyday society had huge impacts, especially in the workplace. A global survey report by McKinsey titled The state of AI in 2023: Generative AI’s breakout year noted that 79% of workers have had some exposure to generative AI in their workplace, with 22% adopting it in their workflows.

Plus, two out of five (40%) organizations, meanwhile, planned increased AI investment going forward.

And we really hate to come full circle to the first highlight at the top, but this may also impact job security with 44% of employers saying AI will likely replace employees in 2024 according to a ResumeBuilder.com survey.

Meanwhile, in December 2023, Workable released a survey report on AI in Hiring and Work that found 62.5% of hiring managers utilized AI tools in their hiring processes over the past year. Nine out of 10 (89.6%) found they were able to hire more quickly, and 85.3% said they saved time and money invested in the hiring process.

Despite all the doom and gloom, there’s some interesting opportunities for optimism here.

We don’t see AI going anywhere soon – Workable has incorporated the technology into its own software with huge benefits. Watch for more developments in this area in 2024.

Meanwhile, what did 2023 look like for you and what’s in store for 2024? Share your own workplace story with us and we’ll work with you to get it published!

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Quiet quitting: if you can’t beat them, roll with them

Suzanne Lucas — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 12:54:15 +0000

Jordan Hart at Business Insider defines quiet quitting as “refusing to do more work than they’re being compensated for.”

The Washington Post reported that Kathy Kacher, founder of Career/Life Alliance Services, describes quiet quitting as a synonym for employee disengagement.

In Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald quotes a quiet quitter, software engineer, and musician, Zaid Khan, who says, “You’re still performing your duties, but you’re no longer subscribing to the hustle-culture mentality that work has to be your life.”

Then we go into a bit of humor on Twitter with, “We rebranding “quiet quitting” to “acting your wage.”

We rebranding “quiet quitting” to “acting your wage”

— Dad 2.0 – now containing more corn (@DadaBaseThought) August 19, 2022

Refusing to work more, not hustling, disengagement, doing what you’re paid to do, and nothing else, it doesn’t really matter when it comes to how HR approaches quiet quitting. Instead of arguing over where it comes from and the exact definition, you can look at your workforce and decide if you want to do anything.

Do you want disengaged employees?

Of course, you want your employees to be engaged! To be happy! To be working their little hearts out!

Do you?

I mean, we have tons of research that shows how it’s good to have high employee engagement, but engagement is not synonymous with going above and beyond.

You don’t need all your employees to go above and beyond all the time. That’s asking for burnout. That’s asking not for a quiet quit – that’s asking for a full-on “I can’t take this anymore”.

The trick, says Harvard Business Review, is to get the employees super engaged by taking ownership of their work. According to HBR, “to build an inspired, committed workforce, you’ll need middle managers who not only know the organization’s purpose but also deeply connect with it and lead with moral power.”

Here’s a secret: All your employees know that no matter how engaged they are, no matter how much purpose they feel in the work they do, and no matter how inspired they are to do and be better and make the company better, you’ll fire them without a moment’s hesitation should financial problems or a new executive’s desire to reorganize comes your way.

OK, that was a bit harsh. If you’re a normal human, you’ll feel bad as you lay off people, but you’ll still do it. And your employees know you will.

https://twitter.com/bynkii/status/1561402919597080577

When their entire self-worth is wrapped up in their job – when their job is their everything – losing that job is psychologically and financially devastating.

Maybe, just maybe, having a workforce that isn’t all-in to the company message isn’t a bad thing. Maybe having employees who are well-rounded and have outside interests are good things.

The idea that you have to go above and beyond and dedicate your life to the company is something that most of your employees will never reach and (in reality) you don’t need.

Embrace the quiet quit

Whether it’s “acting your wage” or “refusing to hustle,” this isn’t a new concept. Most of your employees probably worked this way before the advent of this term.

It’s called being an average employee.

And let’s face it, your company is probably an average company. You probably never make the top 10 companies to work for, even on those local lists where you pay $5,000 to be included in “Your Town Magazine!”

You’re average; they are average. It’s a match made in heaven.

For your leadership, you do need engaged and dedicated leaders. And that’s why many companies give stock options and other long-term forms of compensation to their senior staff members. They need actual skin in the game if you want them to make work a priority over their lives.

Then you have the few people with their eyes on the corner office. They are willing to put in the hours and sell their souls on the gamble that it will work out, and they’ll grab the brass ring – or whatever we’re calling it these days. Whether for your company or your competitor, that’s what they are after, and they’ll do what it takes to get it.

Everyone else? They have jobs.

And that’s OK.

Your concern is if they are happy, compensated fairly, and work in an environment free from bullying, harassment, and illegal discrimination. They’d probably like a promotion now and then, but they ultimately want to come in, do their jobs, and go home.

They don’t want to have meetings at 10 p.m., or 6 a.m. They don’t want to spend their weekends staring at spreadsheets. And when you push them to do so, they may quit, or they may “quiet quit” and set and keep their boundaries.

That gives you a choice: Do you demand that they dedicate their lives to the company or do you acknowledge that you hired them to do a 9 to 5 job or equivalent, and you shouldn’t be upset when they do?

If an employee isn’t meeting expectations, then, by all means, coach, help, and put the employee on a performance improvement plan if necessary. But if the employee is meeting expectations and getting the job done and just isn’t all in for the company, smile and know your employee has that elusive work-life balance that HR says they want everyone to have.

If the employee is meeting expectations and getting the job done and just isn’t all in for the company, smile and know your employee has that elusive work-life balance that HR says they want everyone to have.

If the employee is hostile or sabotaging the work, then that’s not quiet quitting. That’s subversive destruction. Termination is the answer there.

But quietly doing the job you offered them? Brilliant. Long live the quiet quit!

The post Quiet quitting: if you can’t beat them, roll with them appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

How to help employees return to office: it’s more than mandates

Suzanne Lucas — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 16:51:51 +0000

Salesforce tried to get people to come into the office by offering a donation to charity if they showed up. Farmer Group CEO Raul Vargas wanted people to return to the office – even though some had been hired as exclusively remote – and employees rebelled.

And Martha Stewart says America will “go down the drain” if companies don’t return to cubicle farms.

Then there’s the problem of empty office space because employees aren’t returning. This is a massive problem for the building owners and the restaurants and shops that sold to the people who worked in those offices.

Some restaurant owners are even moving their restaurants out of business districts and into the suburbs where their former patrons work.

In other words, we are seeing a huge cultural shift. But there is another issue with bosses wanting employees to return to the office: They need support from blue-collar staff to make this successful.

It’s not just about office workers

When people come into the office to work, there needs to be support personnel to make that happen. Someone has to clean the bathrooms, empty the trash, work as security guards, and welcome visitors at the reception desk.

The hotel I stayed at on a business trip had minimal housekeeping services. After discovering the comforter had makeup smeared on it from the previous guest, it took hours to get someone from housekeeping to change it.

(Unfortunately, I found the makeup in the morning. Shudder.)

While the hotel advertised daily housekeeping, that was the only time cleaners set foot in my room during my four-day stay.

McKinsey notes that hotel staffing is a tremendous problem at the moment. They give many ideas for fixing this, such as making the housekeeping staff clean only the rooms of people checking out and giving front desk employees cleaning responsibilities. These are probably not ideal solutions, but it speaks to the difficulty of hiring cleaning people.

help employees return to office

Offices need cleaning people as well. While cleaning office desks might be less disgusting than changing bedsheets, it’s still a low-paid labor-intensive job. With companies struggling to fill entry-level positions, people have options for employment.

Some high-level employees shared with me how their company wanted everyone in the office at least thrice per week after three years of working remotely. The bathrooms wouldn’t stay clean, and they couldn’t keep trash cans at their desks. All trash had to be in a central location to make it easy for someone to take it out.

While that might be part of running lean, paying someone earning a six-figure salary to walk across the office to throw away a piece of scrap paper is ridiculous.

And it’s not just cleaning: there is also a shortage of security guards. If you have employees in your office building, you need a security plan at a minimum and onsite security in many areas. With around two million violent acts committed in the workplace each year, it’s not practical to tell your employees to assume everything will be fine.

Even the commute is affected. For instance, Boston’s transit authority, the MBTA, is experiencing a staffing shortage that will ultimately lead to delays and cancellations – making it more difficult for workers to travel to and from their workplaces.

Your employees are not going to want to come back to the office if they don’t feel safe in their offices that they have to clean themselves.

Thinking about more than your employees

Most companies have outsourced tasks such as cleaning and security, and you may think your problem is to get your accountants and marketers back to the office. The other issues will magically take care of themselves. After all, it mostly did pre-pandemic.

But to successfully return to the office, you must ensure the buildings are clean and safe, or your employees will be even more unhappy at returning.

What you need to return

Your employees need a reason to come back, and it can’t be for your convenience or that you don’t trust them. They need to know they will accomplish more and have an excellent experience to get them excited about returning.

It’s perfectly OK to say this is the culture you want and to hire people who want to be in the office. But if you do this, you still need to ensure you have the support staff to keep the offices running.

And, of course, many jobs must be done in person to support remote workers. You still need someone to maintain company servers, and while they could stay at someone’s house, this is not a good idea in the long run. Your employees are ordering lunch from restaurants delivered by people working for DoorDash. People are out there working onsite.

It’s just white-collar workers who are not always working on location. Those people still need the cleaning, security, reliable commutes, and places to get lunch that everyone else needs. If you can’t guarantee you can meet those needs, it’s not a good time to insist that people work in the office.

The post How to help employees return to office: it’s more than mandates appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Office space trends: if you build it right, they will come

Suzanne Lucas — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 13:46:04 +0000

“It might seem counterintuitive to step up our investment in physical offices even as we embrace more flexibility in how we work,” CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post in April. “Yet we believe it’s more important than ever to invest in our campuses and that doing so will make for better products, a greater quality of life for our employees, and stronger communities.”

Pinchai isn’t the only one building office space. Builders are working on 146.6 million square feet of new office space in the United States. Are builders being hopeful or is there a point at which everyone fighting to work from home will start heading back to the office?

And maybe it’s not the office – maybe it’s the space and the location. If it’s dingy and gray and two hours from your home, of course, you don’t want to commute. But if it’s close by and bright with private space? Maybe that’s what people look for. For instance, even people who can work at home are choosing to go to a co-working space instead. You find one close by, they have all the amenities, and there’s opportunity to mingle or even collaborate with like-minded professionals.

Returning to the office gets a bad rap on social media, and some companies are recruiting directly from competitors that announce a return to the office:

From a CEO:

“Every time a competitor mentions return to office our recruiters reach out to their people. We’ve hired 15+ of their engineers in the last 2 months.”

So easy.

— Chris Herd (@chris_herd) October 3, 2021

Don’t take this to mean you don’t need an office. You may well need one, and if you do, you want an office that works for you and your business. Here are some thoughts about what your employees might want if you’re planning to be part of this new office trend.

Ban open office space

This office space trend was a money-saving plan sold on the idea that everyone would collaborate if they shared a table rather than having private space. It turns out, people hate it, and it doesn’t work. Researchers found that people interacted 70% less when they worked in open office settings. They were more likely to use email and instant messages when sitting in a shared space.

If you have a hybrid workforce, you need fewer desks, as not everyone will be in the office simultaneously. Use that to give people their own space. The point of people coming into the office is to have collaboration. Don’t waste that precious office time by having people send each other instant messages while they sit across from each other. Give people offices, or at the very least, cubicles, and watch the communication flow.

But be careful of hot-desking

Hot-desking means you come to work and set up wherever you can find it. People hate that office space trend too. And so you ask, how on earth do you set up private office space for everyone without hot-desking?

Easy. Have two workstations in an office or a cube. Set it up so Jane comes in Tuesdays and Thursdays while Jon comes in Mondays and Wednesdays. On the rare occasions where they are in on the same day at the same time, they can share that space. But, mostly, they’ll have their dedicated, private space.

After all, people like to leave their sweaters at the office or have a picture of their kids or cats on their desk. Hot-desking takes that option away from them.

Your office space reflects your brand

In some cities (for example, Boston), so much office space is empty that you can have your pick of places. What was once a premium space may be much more affordable now. You can be picky and use the cost savings to make your office space something that helps you recruit employees.

Yes, even though people clamor for remote work, remember that many do want to work in a hybrid environment and they’d like for that to be a lovely space. This doesn’t necessarily mean pool tables and bean bags in the break room, like the stereotypical tech startup, but it can mean quality office chairs, good climate control, and free parking.

It can also mean rethinking the office. The owners of a co-working space have to ensure that every person who rents a desk is happy with the space and amenities – with more value to an employee than they get if they work from home.

The owners of traditional office space only need to keep the big boss happy. Who cares if the cubicles are half size and 1970s orange? Employees do, in fact, and co-working spaces know it. When thinking about new office space trends, consider the value of coworking spaces for your employees.

Your employees need a reason to commute

Most white-collar jobs can be done at home. But, some are done better in the office. You need to give your employees a reason to come into the office – beyond just having a nice destination for work.

Maybe you have a good cafeteria or you’re near good restaurants. (Cities and restaurant owners would love it if your employees went out to lunch again.) Maybe you add a room for yoga or have an office space across the street from a fitness center. Then strike up a deal with the fitness center – your employees might appreciate that. Maybe it’s high-quality catered lunches, or a quality lunch-and-learn every Thursday for those in person.

You want to make sure your space reflects your brand. When someone walks into your office space, they should automatically know something about your business. If you’re in creaky, old, and dark basement rooms, it’s time to move upstairs and into the light – unless you’re in the business of keeping secrets.

Be honest about your office

Sometimes companies lie about remote work in their job postings – assuming everyone wants to work from home. They figure they’ll hire you, get you working for a few weeks, and then drop the bomb that you need to come into the office. Don’t do that – that will reflect poorly on your employer brand.

If employees have the choice on how they work – say so. If you want everyone in the office all the time, say so (and be prepared to see your applicants drop). If you want people to have a hybrid approach to work, proclaim that loudly on your job postings. And be honest about what that means.

If it means working from home twice a month and the rest of the time in the office, that’s very different from the opposite. Just be upfront!

For example, Gallup described a hybrid working situation like this:

“A flexible, casual and hybrid work environment that allows you to work on-site and from home (you will determine with your manager and team what hybrid looks like for you).”

Visa spells it out very specifically:

“Employees in hybrid roles are expected to work from the office two days a week, Tuesdays and Wednesdays with a general guidepost of being in the office 50% of the time based on business needs.”

That’s so much better than companies (which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty) simply have a remote/hybrid box checked off.

If your office space is welcoming and reflects a positive culture, it can be a powerful recruiting tool. People want to work at least some of the time in the office – but only if it’s a nice place to work.

Know what they want before you commit

We all love the “sunk cost fallacy.” We tend “to follow through on an endeavor if we have already invested time, effort, or money into it, whether or not the current costs outweigh the benefits.” If you have already spent big bucks remodeling office space or have three more years on your lease, you may wish to ‘protect’ your return on that investment by requiring everyone to return.

But, turnover can rapidly negate any justification for having space people don’t want to work in. Take the time to speak to your employees about what they want. You may find that the majority in fact want to be in the office. You may find the opposite. You won’t know until you ask the employees themselves.

By taking the time to speak with your current staff, you’ll be more likely to make a decision that reflects your current company culture – not just the culture you think you have. Keeping your current employees happy also goes a long way toward recruiting new ones. After all, candidates ask around about how much people like working there.

Will more and more people return to the office voluntarily, or are these builders full of wishful thinking? Is this new office space trend going to fizzle out? Only time will tell. But as you ponder what to do with your office space, think through how this reflects on your business and how it makes your employees feel. That will help you make the right decision.

The post Office space trends: if you build it right, they will come appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

4 lessons for employers from Reddit’s Antiwork community

Suzanne Lucas — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 14:29:50 +0000

Well, yes, but if you manage people or work in HR, you need to be aware of what is happening. With 1.7 million members, it’s not a majority of people overall, but it is where people are talking. Here’s what they are talking about.

1. Employees have options

Take this story: CEO said, “If you want to work from home, go work somewhere else,” so most of my team and I did just that.

The writer details how even people hired to work remotely were told they had one year to move their families to a town with an office. The employees responded by quitting in great numbers.

Is this a true story? Maybe. The number of people who quit may be an exaggeration, but it may not be. With more than 60,000 upvotes, though, it’s clear that this resonates with people.

This is a case where the CEO thought that the employees would fold and do whatever the company said. It turns out your power over your employees is limited. With lots of people hiring (the writer says he found a new job with a 50 percent pay bump), you have even less power than you did a few years ago. Don’t make an ultimatum thinking your employees will back down. They have options they didn’t use to have and a whole lot more guts.

If in-office work is important to your business, ask your employees how to go about it. Would quarterly all-hands meetings work? Monthly regional get-togethers? If it won’t, accept the turnover.

2. Insults are not the way to go

There’s this sign, for instance.

Whether this was put up by an out-of-touch owner or an angry employee, who knows? But, combined with the glut of “no one wants to work” signs and people struggling to fill positions, it’s not a smart thing to insult employees.

Or this handout from McDonald’s that reminded employees that “tax returns don’t last forever.” Yes, this is a true principle, but it’s insulting to your employees. The last thing you want to do is insult the very people you want to work for you.

You may think your employees just need to know that it will be harder to find a job again if they quit, but it comes off as condescending.

3. Don’t keep secrets

Not explaining things can also cause problems. “In the absence of information, people make stuff up,” says HR consultant Brenda Neckvatal. So, assume that when someone has a ridiculous complaint, it’s not that they are stupid or whiny, it’s that they don’t know what is going on.

Take this tweet from Jon C. Stone.

One reason people insist that you use the proper channels to change things is because they have control of the proper channels and they’re confident it won’t work

— Jon Stone (@joncstone) June 8, 2020

It’s now circulating on /r/antiwork and drawing considerable attention.

First, we need to acknowledge that in bad businesses this is absolutely true. But, in good ones, systems exist to make things better, but your employees may not understand why.

For instance, if Jon comes to his manager and says, “Look, I’ve done the research, and the market rate for this position is 10% higher,” he may feel like his manager is putting him off by saying, “I need to talk to HR.”

But, here’s what the employee doesn’t understand and you can explain to him that the manager doesn’t control the budget, jobs vary greatly even within the same title, and the company can’t adjust Jon’s salary without adjusting a bunch of other people’s as well.

Plus, it may be time to pull out the books and show that there just isn’t money left. Not all companies have fatcat CEOs that can give up a million without blinking. For companies with under $10 million in revenue, the CEO earns under $200,000. He may still be angry after you explain, but at least he’ll know.

Another place where behind the scenes processes can make things look insensitive or downright mean is with layoffs. This person said he was laid off because he didn’t meet his boss’s vision.

This is a clear case where there could be explanations, suggestions for improvement, and perhaps some coaching. But, the manager chose to use a vague term like “vision.”

4. Listen to your employees

One very important note about listening to employees: Don’t do employee engagement surveys if you are planning to ignore the feedback you receive. This person posted an obscene rant on an employee survey (click at your own risk), and again and it demonstrates the frustrated feeling employees have.

If you’re not planning to make any changes based on the results from an employee survey, do not do the survey. It’s bad to ignore your employees’ feelings, but it’s even worse to ask them about their feelings and then ignore them.

You likely won’t be able to resolve the above employee’s concerns – because the damage appears to be done. But, for every employee that spews vitriol, there are undoubtedly others who feel neglected and abused. Listen to them.

At a bare minimum, tell your employees what you learned and what things you will address. No company can solve all employee complaints (nor should they – sometime employees are unreasonable), but you can let people know that you hear them.

Don’t spend your life at /r/antiwork. But keep in mind that there are humans here who are hurting. And even if you run the best company ever, they influence your employees. So, keep an eye out, make changes, and communicate with your employees. Honesty truly is the best policy.

In short: people – including disgruntled employees – will be more likely to accommodate imperfections if they understand that you are trying.

The post 4 lessons for employers from Reddit’s Antiwork community appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

What is coffee badging – and what you can do about it

Keith MacKenzie — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 16:12:39 +0000

Coffee badging is the latest in a long line of new terminologies that have surfaced in the work world recently – joining quiet quitting, quiet hiring & firing, resenteeism, bare-minimum Mondays, lazy girl jobs, rage applying, and other linguistic hallmarks that point to how much has changed at work since the advent of COVID-19.

As an employer or hiring manager, you’re really at the heart of this new coffee badging phenomenon. While novel, coffee badging is actually just a modern echo of the old “clock in and clock out” systems of times past, with a modern twist that points to the rise of flexwork and autonomy in the modern workplace.

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Back in the day, it really was just about showing up for work (or not):

But things have evolved since then. And besides, that video is mostly in jest. Your workers aren’t necessarily partying when they’re remote working, just for the record.

That said, the message is clear: if your workers are checking in just so you can “see” that they’re working, that’s not necessarily a good thing.

Before we get into all that, let’s understand the whole trend of coffee badging and where it came from.

Unpacking coffee badging

What is coffee badging? It’s a response to the growing popularity of return-to-office (RTO) mandates we’re seeing out there. An August survey found that 47% of employees say they’ll quit if RTO is imposed on them – but that’s a luxury option that not all employees can easily afford to make, especially in a tight economy.

So, if workers must go into the office, they’ll just go in, make their presence felt, and then pirouette to alternative work environments more conducive to their working habits.

But this trend doesn’t just float on the surface. It’s a deep-dive response to the perceived rigidity that comes with RTO requirements that many find restrictive compared with the fluidity of remote-first work.

Like the bare-minimum Monday, workers just do the bare minimum to return to the office, and then go back to what they’ve been doing all this time – in other words, they’re just getting their badge for showing up at work.

Presenteeism and coffee badging

On the topic of showing up – remember presenteeism? It’s that old terminology that valued showing up over showing results. It’s primarily defined as being at work in spite of being injured, sick, or otherwise unable to be a fully contributing worker – in which case, you should stay home.

Coffee badging is presenteeism’s evolved, modern cousin, taking the act of being present to a new level while continuing to advocate for flexwork and a more balanced work environment.

It’s not just about clocking in; it’s about clocking in with choice. The card game between employer and employee has progressed step by step through COVID, remote work, the Great Resignation, and all the other workplace developments, and then slowly a Great Disconnect starts to form as a chasm between the two parties.

Now, employers are playing the RTO card – and employees are responding with the coffee badging card.

So, what can you do about coffee badging?

Navigating the currents of coffee badging requires a blend of open dialogue, trust, and a willingness to adapt. Here are three actionable steps for you to think about if you’re looking to “overcome” coffee badging in your own organization:

1. Embrace flexibility

Two-thirds of US workers love work flexibility, according to the Great Discontent survey. It’s not going away.

Acknowledge this reality by embracing flexible work arrangements. Whether it’s hybrid work models, flexible hours, or remote working options, integrating these into your organizational culture can address the root causes that drive coffee badging.

2. Foster open communication

That same survey finds that company transparency and responsiveness are high up the list in what workers value in a job.

In that spirit, create channels for honest feedback and open communication. Understand the specific needs and preferences of your team, and be open to exploring new ways of working that benefit both the individuals and the organization.

3. Prioritize outcome over presence

Often, focusing on outcomes rather than processes can make all the difference.

Shift the focus from mere physical presence to the quality and timeliness of work output. Establish clear goals, expectations, and metrics that measure what truly matters – the results.

Coffee badging isn’t the actual problem

The reality is, coffee badging isn’t itself something to be solved – it’s just a symptom, not the core issue. It’s an adaptation by employees who want to navigate what they see as increasing rigidity in their working schedules.

If your workers are coffee badging – maybe that’s fine and they’re still doing a great job, and it’s a sincere attempt to check in with their colleagues. But, honestly, if that’s why they’re doing it, then they’d do it anyway regardless of whether you’re pushing RTO or not.

The reality is: they’re checking in because you’re requiring them to. Consider engaging in open dialogue, reassessing your workplace policies, and being open to the new realities of workplace presence. If you play that card, your employees will respond in kind.

The post What is coffee badging – and what you can do about it appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Do you classify employees correctly? California’s law got stricter

Nikoletta Bika — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 10:15:22 +0000

The AB5 bill codifies the decision of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of the company Dynamex. In general, this law makes it harder for companies to misclassify employees as ICs, and thus obliging them to provide their workers with all benefits attached to employee status by California’s Wage Orders (e.g. minimum wages, rest breaks).

Please keep in mind: Workable is not a law firm. This article is meant to provide general information and should be used as a reference. It’s not a legal document and doesn’t provide legal advice. Neither the author nor Workable will assume any legal liability that may arise from the use of this article. Always consult your attorney on matters of legal compliance.

What constitutes an independent contractor in California according to AB5?

Until now, workers would be classified as ICs via the Borello test (S.G. Borello & Sons, Inc. v. Department of Industrial Relations (1989)). After AB5 goes into effect, companies and courts will mainly use the “ABC test” to properly classify workers.

The ABC test has three qualifiers, each of which have to be satisfied in order for someone to be classified as an independent contractor. A worker can be an IC if:

(A) they’re free from the control and direction of the hiring entity in connection with the performance of their work; and

(B) they’re performing work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business; and

(C) they’re customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business.

Workers are presumed to be employees, unless a company can prove otherwise via this test that a worker qualifies as an IC.

Exemptions to the AB5

The law exempts several professions including but not limited to the following:

Licensed insurance agents, lawyers, architects, engineers, private investigators, or accountants
Certain licensed health care professionals, such as physicians, surgeons, dentists, podiatrists, psychologists, or veterinarians
Securities broker-dealers or investment advisers
Direct sales salespersons
Commercial fishermen working on an American vessel

However, these exemptions from AB5 apply only to the ABC test. This means that an exempt worker still has to pass the Borello test to be classified as an IC.

Contracts for some professional services are exempted from the ABC test, too, but there are some additional factors that need to be satisfied along with the Borello test. These factors are clearly listed in AB5. “Professional services” in this case includes some creative professions (e.g. designers, writers, fine artists), travel agents and more.

There are other exemptions as well, so consult an attorney to get comprehensive information as needed.

Do independent contractors have any rights?

Yes. ICs have full control over how, where and when they work. They charge their own rates and aren’t bound to one employer. This flexibility is a strong motivation for workers to become independent contractors.

On the other hand, independent contractors aren’t entitled to unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation claims, minimum wage, overtime pay, rest breaks, working condition standards, and other benefits and privileges that traditionally are seen – or in some cases that are required by law – in full-time employee status. Consequently, many gig workers don’t have the leverage to negotiate their pay or living conditions, so, as misclassified employees, they are compromised.

Under AB5 law, these workers may benefit. And, the law will also protect companies that usually employ workers as employees against competitors that are trying to cut costs by misclassifying employees as independent contractors.

But, the road to AB5 is no bed of roses

The controversy around employee vs. contractor has lasted for decades. For example, the IRS once audited Microsoft for open tax years 1989 and 1990 and found the tech giant had misclassified its employees as freelancers. In 2013, the IRS estimated that employers misclassify millions of workers. Before Dynamex, there were many relevant cases in recent years – for example, the company Uni Floor had to repay significant sums in back pay in 2017 because of misclassifying its workers. On the flip side, in 2018, delivery company Grubhub won the case against one of its delivery drivers who the court found was properly classified as an independent contractor.

All that aside, AB5 is expected to have an impact on companies that consistently depend on independent contractors. That’s because the ABC test is stricter than the Borello test and its three conditions are much harder to satisfy. Hundreds of thousands of workers in California could be reclassified and many companies are likely to see a jump in employment costs.

Some employers object

The expected increase in costs is mainly why many employers are campaigning against AB5. For example, trucking company Western States Trucking Association (WSTA) had filed a federal lawsuit against AB5 which was dismissed in early 2019. Gig companies Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash started working on a ballot initiative for 2020 that will cost around $90 million. Their purpose is to earn an exemption to the law, providing some benefits to their independent contractors as a compromise.

But, their efforts have drawn fire – in a Vox article on the topic, Art Pulaski, executive secretary-treasurer of the California Labor Federation said:

“No corporation should be above the law, no matter how much they spend on political campaigns to rig the rules in their favor.”

The outcome of this campaign remains to be seen.

What could an employer do to comply with the law?

If you have even one independent contractor in California, you need to pay attention to the AB5’s requirements. Consult a legal expert who specializes in employment law in California – and make sure not to misclassify them (um, pardon the jest).

With their guidance, you can learn whether some workers as exempt or not, and you can start auditing your employment relationship with your independent contractors to determine whether the ABC test is satisfied. If it’s not, you need to change your workers’ status to employees as soon as possible.

If you’re interested in this, you’ll also want to know about other recently enacted laws in California, such as the CCPA. See a basic CCPA FAQ and a comparison of CCPA vs. GDPR.

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Great Discontent UK priorities: clarity, culture, & compensation

Keith MacKenzie — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 21:01:06 +0000

What are UK workers interested in right now when it comes to jobs? We have data for you from the Great Discontent 2023 worker survey.

As an employer looking to attract and – more importantly – retain talent, Workable’s Great Discontent survey report for 2023 for the UK should provide you with a sharper north star going forward. We asked 500 UK workers and we understand what’s going on in that mindset.

What the survey’s resulting dataset reveals is that your employees (and candidates) put a huge value on clarity in their jobs. This means clarity in what’s expected of them in their day-to-day work, clarity in career paths and opportunities, clarity in communications, and so on.

They also really like flexibility in working schedules and locations, connection with their colleagues and leadership, and a more humane approach to the workplace.

What else? Compensation, unsurprisingly, reigns supreme. It’s not that people love money – it’s that they want (and need) to be compensated fairly for the work they put in.

This was always the case. But it’s even more so now, and workers are indeed getting it. Flexible work is becoming standard in many jobs – especially when it comes to setting one’s hours. Compensation is growing as a major priority (even if inflation is prompting it).

But most of all: the expectation is that a job isn’t just a “job”, but a livelihood. When you’re putting 40-some hours of your life every week into work, you want it to actually mean something.

The remote work conversation is also an interesting one. It’s no longer a stopgap reaction to COVID-19. We’ve had a few years of experience with this in the UK, and now, it’s finding its groove. The workforce loves the flexibility that comes with remote work, and they want to keep it as part of the new status quo.

Community is huge as well. Company culture and executive leadership are seen as the glue that holds everything together. Career growth is also top of mind for today’s workers in the UK – and they’ll respond to that opportunity whether it’s in your company or another.

So: what does this tangibly mean for you, the employer? When your company is struggling to roll with the punches, especially during these volatile times, you’re likely calling on your teams to roll with the punches too.

That’s fair, of course. The question is – will they roll with you? Maybe, maybe not. Which begs the even more important question: how can you set it up so that they *will* roll with you?

The answer is clear from our survey. While people are more hesitant to move jobs than they were before, they will move for the right opportunity. However, they will stay with you when they’re engaged in the work and in the company – and while engagement is a two-way street, a lot of it falls on you to build that optimal experience so your teams will stay with you for the long haul. Retention is a very real thing.

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Great Discontent survey: keys to attracting and keeping top talent

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 17:18:49 +0000

What’s happening in the evolving US job market right now? We have data for you on the biggest changes from 2021 to 2023 in the worker mindset.

As an employer looking to attract and – more importantly – retain talent, the Great Discontent survey report for the United States should provide you with a north star going forward.

What we’ve learned from asking 750 US workers is that they value the following:

stability and security
flexibility in schedules and work locations
connections and humanity
and, of course, compensation.

We always knew this. But it’s become even clearer over time, including in our 2021 survey on the same topic and again in 2023. We’re seeing flexible work become the standard in many jobs – even if most employers are more hybrid than they are remote. Compensation is absolutely growing along with inflation – people are expecting to be compensated more for the work they put into a job, and they’re getting it in many cases.

Most of all: the expectation from US workers is that a job isn’t just a “job” – it’s a livelihood. When we’re spending 40 or more hours every week at the grindstone, it becomes an intrinsic part of our overall life experience. And pounding sand isn’t going to cut it – the work needs to mean something.

As remote work starts finding its groove in a more sustainable fashion, the workforce isn’t shy about saying, “We love the flexibility, keep it coming.” They’re also wearing their hearts outwards and valuing a workplace that feels like a community, where company culture and relationships glues everything together.

Plus, where an opportunity for career growth knocks, workers in the United States will answer that door whether that’s with your company or another employer altogether.

Now, here’s the big question: What does this tangibly mean for you, the employer?

When your company is struggling to roll with the punches, especially during these volatile times, you’re likely calling on your teams to roll with the punches too. The expectation is that your employees and colleagues will step up and put the work in – after all, your company’s livelihood depends on them.

That’s fair, of course. But the question is – will they respond to that call for action? And more importantly – how can you set it up so that they *will* roll with you?

The answer is clear from our survey. People are very hesitant to move jobs, but they will move for a new opportunity. They’ll stay with you when they’re engaged – and while engagement is a two-way street, a lot of it falls on you to build that optimal experience so your teams will stay with you for the long haul.

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What changed in the UK worker brain between 2021 and 2023?

Keith MacKenzie — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 18:57:04 +0000

What are UK workers interested in right now when it comes to jobs? This time, we have data for you on what’s shifted most in the UK worker mindset from 2021 to 2023.

Top 3 takeaways

People really like clarity when it comes to what they’re expected to do at work, but don’t need the support nearly as much as two years earlier
Remote work is on the downswing
Workers are increasingly looking for jobs where they can make more money – and not have to commute

Understanding the worker mindset in the UK is one thing – it’s even more compelling when we have data from two different years so we can look at what’s trending upwards and what’s trending downwards in what’s important to UK workers in a job.

And we have a lot of that information for you on hand. Our Great Discontent survey series is in its second edition, which gives us this opportunity to see what’s changing (or evolving?) in job priorities from 2021 to 2023.

In Hamlet, Claudius said: “”When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.” A bit grim, yes, but the underlying point is that when things happen, they happen in bunches. And would it be a stretch to apply that thinking to today’s workplace which has been shaped drastically by the COVID-19 pandemic? Probably not.

In other words, the amount of changes that have happened in the span of two short years between 2021 and 2023 probably is more than what’s happened in the decades preceding that.

So, what are the biggest shifts that happened in our dataset in that two-year span? Let’s first start with the biggest upward shifts. Tops is clarity of job role and responsibilities for workers in their current jobs – which nearly doubled from 17.7% to 31.1%. Clearly (and yes, we use that word deliberately), workers in the UK want more clarity in what’s expected of them right now.

Closely following in terms of raw increase is a 12.9-point upward change from 53.5% to 66.4% for active jobhunters saying their main motivation is that they need to make more money.

We’ve talked a lot about the benefits of remote work and how those have crystallized after years of experience – one of the biggest positive shifts in our dataset is, in fact, the benefits of extra hours saved from not needing to commute. That’s gone up from 41.3% to 52% of UK workers citing that as one of the major reasons they like remote work.

Meanwhile, there are some significant downward shifts as well. Tops in that list is the percentage of workers working remotely in 2023. It was well more than half (55.2%) of UK workers in 2021 – that’s now gone down to two out of five workers (40.9%). Not surprising considering we were still in the thick of COVID at the time, and the barriers to in-person work have all but disappeared since.

That doesn’t mean the return to the in-person workspace is a willing change though – the WFH vs. RTO debate continues to rage on.

Meanwhile, the need for support in their current jobs went down drastically in the two-year span, from more than two in five workers (21.9%) in 2021 to less than one in 10 (8.9%) now. Again, the pandemic factors into this – support is no longer as crucial as it was when uncertainty and volatility in the working and living environments were high.

Things are different and more stable now, of course. It’s worth coming back to this in 2025 to see where we go from here.

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69% of UK workers will come to you if you offer more money

Keith MacKenzie — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 17:05:47 +0000

What are UK workers interested in right now when it comes to jobs? This time, we have data for you on the value of compensation for workers in a job right now and how that’s changed since 2021.

Top 3 takeaways

Salary / perks / benefits remains a top attractor in a new job at 68.8%
It’s growing as a major reason why active jobseekers are hunting for new opportunities, to 66.4% from 53.5%
It’s also an area for improvement in current roles – up to 63% from 60.7%

This much is clear: money talks, and it always has – including in the UK.

And it probably will always talk. It does put food on the table and pay the bills, after all.

Compensation was already a clear priority for most UK-based workers in our 2021 dataset – and it remains so in 2023. The percentage of those who picked salary / perks / benefits as one of the major factors that would attract them to a new role remains at the top of the heap, albeit declining slightly to 68.8% from 70.1%.

And of those who say their current job could be improved, 63% say salary / perks / benefits is a top area for improvement – up from 60.7% in 2021.

But here’s the huge differentiator this time: of those who are actively looking for new opportunities, two-thirds (66.4%) say the need to make more money is the reason why. That’s up hugely from 53.5% in 2021.

What more need we say? The data resoundingly points to the importance of compensation across the board. Well-compensated employees will be happier, and jobs are more attractive when they pay well.

What can you do?

1. Reevaluate compensation packages

With the increased focus on salary, perks, and benefits, employers should periodically reassess their compensation packages to ensure they remain competitive and attractive.

This can involve benchmarking against industry standards and considering factors such as cost of living and inflation.

2. Enhance benefits offerings

Besides salary, the emphasis on perks and benefits calls for a more comprehensive and enticing benefits package.

This could include health benefits, retirement plans, wellness programs, flexible work schedules, remote work options, and professional development opportunities.

3. Create attractive offers to lure passive candidates

With a significant rise in the number of passive job seekers, employers need to craft compelling offers to attract this group.

This could mean not just offering a competitive salary, but also demonstrating the potential for career growth, a positive work culture, and a strong commitment to employee well-being.

The post 69% of UK workers will come to you if you offer more money appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The biggest shifts in US worker priorities from 2021 to 2023

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 14:11:09 +0000

What’s happening in the evolving US job market right now? We have data for you on the biggest changes from 2021 to 2023 in the worker mindset.

Top 3 takeaways

Workers aren’t outright looking for new jobs as much as two years earlier, but company culture is more important now than before
The benefits of remote and flexible work options are even clearer in 2023 than in 2021
Stabler times in 2023 mean less importance put on leadership, day-to-day support, and job security

The whole idea behind conducting nearly identical surveys two years apart is so we can understand what’s changing over that two-year period in the worker mindset.

Lenin once said: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, it really does feel like a lot happened in the span of just a few years – and no less so in the workplace. So if you’re looking at worker priorities in 2021 and then again in 2023, you’re sometimes going to feel like you’re looking at two different epochs entirely.

OK – that is an exaggeration. We didn’t have an actual revolution (although some may talk about the “workplace revolution“). Some things did stay the same – for instance, the importance of flexible work. But there were some pretty significant changes in our dataset.

For instance, workers in 2023 are much more likely to be only passively open to new work opportunities (51.1%). They’re not as aggressively looking as they were two years earlier (37.3%). That’s a 13.8-point upward change – not insignificant at all.

“Overall company culture” is far more important when considering new jobs in 2023 (48.3%) than it was in 2021 (34.7%) – an upward shift of 13.6 points. Employers should take note – maybe you’re not finding your ideal candidates, but that doesn’t mean they’re not interested. They’re just not actively applying – and you can bring them out by showing off your stellar company culture in your careers page (and living by that culture, of course).

What else? As discussed in other parts of the report, we pointed to how the benefits of flexible work really started to rise to the surface after years of experience. The integration and balance of professional and personal lives and the absence of the need to commute are even bigger benefits today for those working flexibly. Again, employers should take note.

Now, that doesn’t mean everything grew in importance. Many elements of the workplace fell in importance between 2021 to 2023. For instance, management and leadership as an area of improvement dropped as a key item in the worker priority list, from 38.7% to 31.3% – a 7.4-point negative change. This also dropped in terms of what’s attractive about a new job opportunity – from 33.1% to 28.7%.

Day-to-day worker support also came down in importance from 14% to 8.5% – not big numbers, but a big drop – as did job security (27% in 2021, 21.5% now).

Evidently, in 2021, we were in the thick of the pandemic still – which meant that worker morale was likely heavily dependent on leadership, support, and security during a very uncertain and scary time for many.

We’re seeing more stability in 2023 – even as economic uncertainty remains top of mind, it still pales in comparison to what felt like existential instability in 2020 and 2021. So, now, worker priorities are shifting.

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More money won’t solve everything, say UK workers

Keith MacKenzie — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 14:42:35 +0000

What are UK workers interested in right now when it comes to jobs? This time, we have data for you on the growing value of career paths and clarity on roles and responsibilities in a job.

Top 3 takeaways

Career advancement is surging as an area of interest for those open to new roles – up to 23.6% from 17.6%
It’s not as big an area for improvement for current employees, dropping to 19.9% in 2023 from 31.3% in 2021
Clarity is what’s needed in current roles, increasing from 17.7% in 2021 to 31.1% now

Money may be integral to the UK worker (and much more so now than previously) when making a decision to take on a new job, but it’s not the only thing. There’s another takeaway here we’d like to highlight: today’s workers have a growing appetite for advancement in their careers and acquiring new skills.

In short – growth is on their minds. And the percentage of workers saying that has grown in the two-year span between 2021 and 2023. For those actively looking for new opportunities, nearly one quarter (23.6%) say the reason is they want to move to the next level in their careers – up from 17.6%.

And when asked what would get them interested in a new opportunity (even if they’re not actively looking), the lure of a better job higher up on the ladder is a driving factor for 37.8% of respondents – up 7.5 points from 28.3% in 2021. That’s the single biggest jump out of all the attractors in the list.

So, why don’t employers just build clearer and more attractive career paths for their current employees? That might have worked in 2021, but not so much now. When asked what could be improved in their current role, 31.3% of workers in the UK pointed to advancement potential, and that’s dropped hugely to 19.9% in 2023.

The clearer the job, the better

So what could employers do instead? More than one in five workers (22.5%) say that clarity of job role and responsibilities is a big factor in choosing a new job in 2023, up from 16.8% in 2021.

And when looking at clearer job roles and responsibilities in their current job, 31.1% say this is an area ripe for improvement – up from 17.7% two years earlier.

So, it really isn’t only “show me the money”. These data points underscore that companies need to focus on being clearer about what they expect from their teams. This can be the magic that really glues a team together if they’re clear on their goals and their expected deliverables.

This means stronger leaders with organizational skills who can really pull a team together and get them collectively moving the needle.

What can you do?

1. Invest in stronger leaders

Workers are expressing a clear desire for crystallized work processes. Employers should invest in and train team leaders on their organizational and strategic skills.

This means being able to take OKRs from the top and package them into understandable and realistic to-do lists for each of their team members.

2. Emphasize growth opportunities

The potential for advancement is a key factor in attracting new talent.

During the hiring process, communicate the potential for growth in the role and within the organization to entice potential candidates.

3. Enhance training and development

Continuous learning and skills development are increasingly crucial for organizational success. Companies should enhance their training and development opportunities, offering tailored programs and resources for employees to upskill and reskill – and turn those into real actionables for their work.

This not only attracts new talent but also retains current employees by making them feel valued and invested in.

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Not just money: growth and L&D are key for US talent attraction

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 17:00:10 +0000

What’s happening in the evolving US job market right now? We have data for you on how workers value compensation.

Top 3 takeaways

Career advancement is surging as an area of interest for those open to new roles – up to 22% from 15.8%
Training & development is also a growing area for improvement in current roles, now at 23.3% from 20.9%
Overall and day-to-day support in the workplace is dropping both as a reason for a new job (14.5% now vs. 19.3% in 2021) and as an area for improvement in a current job (13.9% vs. 17.7%)

Money and balance are crucial and essential in the modern worker’s mindset – but they’re not the only things. Today’s workers have a very strong appetite for advancement in their careers and acquiring new skills. There’s such a thing as a “ladder” in the workplace and they want to climb it.

Of workers who were open to new opportunities whether passively or actively, 22% said the reason is that they are very interested in moving to the next level in their careers – and that’s up from 15.8% in 2021.

And of all workers, what would get their interest for a new job opening? The lure of a better job higher up on the ladder is a major factor for 37.9% of respondents – which actually is largely unchanged from 38.1% in 2021, albeit still very significant.

Those workers also say they want to grow in their current area of employment – 34% say advancement potential is something that could be better in their job, up from 32.3% in 2021.

Learning & development

Closely aligned with a positive career trajectory is building one’s skill set through learning & development opportunities. That desire remains significant for one in seven workers – 16% now, just a touch up from 15.6% in 2021 – when considering the appeal of a new job.

Likewise, when asked what could be improved about their current role, 23.3% pointed to L&D – up from 20.9% in 2021.

And interestingly, the need for more support at work is dropping. In 2021, 19.3% said that’s what they want to see in a new job, and the percentage has dropped significantly to 14.5% in 2023. Ditto for their current workplace – 17.7% said as much in 2021, and that’s now down to 13.9% in 2023.

So, “show me the money” isn’t the only thing. These data points underscore that companies need to focus on creating opportunities for personal and professional growth. Workplaces aren’t just workplaces – to be truly productive environments, they must be fertile ‘growth places’ where employees can see a clear trajectory for their professional advancement.

The drop in need for support indicates that workers may be feeling more confident, and/or employers have risen to the challenge of supporting their workers through the tumult of the last few years – creating a fertile ground in which employees now feel they can thrive.

What can you do?

1. Invest in career development

Workers are expressing a clear desire for advancement.

Employers should invest in systems that allow for clear career progression, such as implementing transparent career paths and promoting from within.

2. Emphasize growth opportunities

The potential for advancement is a key factor in attracting new talent.

During the hiring process, communicate the potential for growth in the role and within the organization to entice potential candidates.

3. Enhance training and development

Continuous learning and skills development are increasingly crucial for job attractiveness. Companies should enhance their training and development opportunities, offering tailored programs and resources for employees to upskill and reskill.

This not only attracts new talent but also retains current employees by making them feel valued and invested in.

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The human connection at work: half of US workers value culture

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 13:51:28 +0000

What’s happening in the evolving US job market right now? We have data for you on how workers value the human connection at work.

Top 3 takeaways

Company culture emerging as a top factor when choosing a new job – nearly half say so now vs. 34.7% two years ago
Transparency and responsiveness are increasingly attractive now, growing to 25.4% and 34.6% from 18.7% and 31.3% respectively
Worker relationships remain a key factor – and corporate leadership is diminishing in importance

The human connection is strong – including in the workplace. And it’s even more important to workers in the US now.

There are two kinds of connections in a job: first, the connection of the employee to the company where they’re working, and second, the connection between colleagues.

First, the company – nearly half of all workers in our survey (48.3%) ranked “overall company culture” as a major factor in what would lure them to a new job opportunity – that’s up nearly 14 points from 34.7% in 2021. Pretty big jump.

The importance of “company transparency” also saw a significant bump, from 18.7% in 2021 to 25.4% in 2023 as an attractive item in the list of very-nice-to-haves for a new job.

What about in their current jobs? Workers echoed the same sentiment – especially when they were asked what could be improved about their current working situation. “Overall company culture” (32.9%, up from 24.7%) and “company transparency” (28.7%, up from 20.8%) were top items in what could be made better at their current job in 2023.

Relationships a core of total rewards

Similar trends are seen in employee working relationships. While not much higher than 2021’s 37.1%, “relationships with colleagues” remained near the top at 38.7% in 2023 – the second-highest attractive item after company culture when evaluating new opportunities.

Interestingly, the relationships with those up the ladder aren’t nearly so high. “Management and executive leadership” saw a drop both as a new job attractor (from 33.1% to 28.7%) and as an opportunity to improve in a worker’s current job (from 38.7% to 31.3%).

This points to the growing importance of lateral working relationships in the total rewards package for the modern worker – perhaps that indicates a desire to build stronger connections after years of pandemic-related isolation.

What does all this tell us? Employees are increasingly interested in their organization’s decision-making process, in other words transparency. They want to know the role they’re playing in that larger company vision – and the role they’re expected to play – and they also want to feel included. They want to feel that they belong. In other words, DEIB continues to be valuable.

These shifts also highlight the value of the social aspects of work – i.e. the ‘watercooler’ – and suggest a power balance shift towards employees who want respectful and supportive environments. The rise in “coffee badging” shows this reality.

It’s understandable, considering the volatility of recent years – and when combined with the greater emphasis on job security above, we’re seeing that workers really do covet stronger professional and social foundations more now than before.

What can you do?

1. Strengthen company culture

The increased emphasis on company culture calls for organizations to put more effort into defining and communicating their values, ethos, and work environment clearly.

Building a supportive and inclusive company culture can serve as a strong attractor for potential employees.

2. Promote transparency and responsiveness

Companies should strive to be more transparent in their decision-making processes and responsive to individual employee needs.

Regular open forums, Q&A sessions with leadership, and timely response to employee concerns can help foster a culture of transparency and responsiveness.

3. Encourage collaborative relationships

The data suggests that lateral working relationships are growing in importance. Therefore, encouraging teamwork, collaboration, and social interaction among employees could be key.

This might include team-building activities, collaborative projects, and providing communication tools that facilitate better peer interaction.

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Money money money – not just funny in the US worker’s world

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 17:49:06 +0000

What’s happening in the evolving US job market right now? We have data for you on how workers value compensation.

Top 3 takeaways

Salary / perks / benefits is already a top attractor, and even more so now – up to 68.9% from 62.2% two years previously
It’s growing as a major area for improvement in current jobs too, to 63.7% from 57.4%
While money is still a top priority when actively looking for work, it’s not as high as before – 58.5% compared with 63.4% two years ago

This really isn’t surprising: money is often the great differentiator in any decision – and that’s the case in our Great Discontent study.

Compensation was already a clear priority for most workers in the 2021 dataset – and it’s even more so now. The percentage of those who picked salary / perks / benefits as one of the major reasons they’d find a new job attractive grew from 62.2% in 2021 to 68.9% in 2023.

And of those who say their current job could be improved, 63.7% say salary / perks / benefits could absolutely be better – and that’s also up from 57.4% in 2021.

Here’s where it gets interesting: the “need to make more money” actually dropped as a reason why employees are actively looking for new work, from 63.4% to 58.5% over the two-year period.

This signals that when people are looking for new opportunities, it’s not necessarily always because of money – and with active candidates dropping to 22.6% from 33.4%, this tells us that workers in 2023 are staying put where they are. It’s the safer and more secure option in this uncertain economy.

Regardless, the data is resoundingly conclusive – compensation reigns as a top priority across the board. Well-compensated employees will ultimately be happier, and jobs are more attractive when they’re paid well.

What can you do?

1. Reevaluate compensation packages

With the increased focus on salary, perks, and benefits, employers should periodically reassess their compensation packages to ensure they remain competitive and attractive.

This can involve benchmarking against industry standards and considering factors such as cost of living and inflation.

2. Enhance benefits offerings

Besides salary, the emphasis on perks and benefits calls for a more comprehensive and enticing benefits package.

This could include health benefits, retirement plans, wellness programs, flexible work schedules, remote work options, and professional development opportunities.

3. Create attractive offers to lure passive candidates

With a significant rise in the number of passive job seekers, employers need to craft compelling offers to attract this group.

This could mean not just offering a competitive salary, but also demonstrating the potential for career growth, a positive work culture, and a strong commitment to employee well-being.

The post Money money money – not just funny in the US worker’s world appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

What’s the UK worker’s ideal habitat? It includes humanity

Keith MacKenzie — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 16:23:22 +0000

What are UK workers interested in right now when it comes to jobs? This time, we have data for you on the longer-term benefits of remote work and flexible schedules for workers in a job right now and how that’s changed since 2021.

Top 3 takeaways

Company culture emerging as a top factor when choosing a new job – more than four out of 10 say so now vs. 34.7% two years ago
Executive leadership surging as a major area in need of improvement at current jobs, from 27.2% to 36.2%
Worker relationships remain a key factor – and so is overall company culture

The various facets of the “human connection” in the modern workplace are surging in importance for the everyday worker in the United Kingdom.

There are two forms of this connection: the connection of the employee to the company where they’re working, and the connection to their fellow colleagues in the workplace

Connection with company

First, let’s look at the employer connection. More than four out of 10 workers (40.8%) in the survey ranked “overall company culture” as very important when looking at new job opportunities – and that’s up from 34.7% in 2021.

“Management and executive leadership” also grew in importance over the two-year span, from 23.4% in 2021 to 29.6% in 2023 in terms of new job attractiveness.

UK workers also want to see both of these in their current place of employment. We asked survey respondents whether there was something that could be improved in their job – and of those who said yes, we asked what that improvement should be.

They also highlighted management and executive leadership as a major focal area, up sharply to 36.2% in 2023 from 27.2% two years earlier.

Connection with fellow workers

Worker symbiosis is also high in priority in the UK. For instance, relationships with colleagues grew as an item of importance, from 31.8% in 2021 to 36.2% in 2023.

Overall company culture is also high up the list, from 24.8% to 31.3%, and perhaps most dramatically of all, the percentage of those who picked brand reputation as an area in need of improvement nearly doubled from 7% to 13.8%.

What does all this tell us? Employees are increasingly interested in their organization’s leaders – a strong, transparent, and inspiring leadership has that trickle-down effect throughout the company.

Employees also want to enjoy working with their colleagues, highlighting the value of the social aspects of work – i.e. the ‘watercooler’. And the growth in brand rep can’t be overlooked here.

What can you do?

1. Strengthen company culture

The increased emphasis on company leadership calls for organizations to put more effort into defining and communicating their values, ethos, and work environment clearly.

Building a supportive and inclusive company culture that’s led from the very top can be a powerful attractor and retainer for employees in the UK.

2. Promote transparency and responsiveness

Leadership isn’t just about morale. Companies should strive to be more transparent in their decision-making processes and responsive to individual employee needs.

Regular open forums, Q&A sessions with executive teams, and timely response to employee concerns can help foster a culture of transparency and responsiveness.

3. Encourage collaborative relationships

The data suggests that lateral working relationships are growing in importance. Therefore, encouraging teamwork, collaboration, and social interaction among employees could be key.

This might include team-building activities, collaborative projects, and providing communication tools that facilitate better peer interaction.

The post What’s the UK worker’s ideal habitat? It includes humanity appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

66.7% of US workers love the flexibility of flexible schedules

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 15:31:27 +0000

What’s happening in the evolving US job market right now? We have data for you on the top benefits of remote work and flexible schedules for workers in a job right now and how that’s changed since 2021.

Top 3 takeaways

Work-life integration is growing as a major benefit of flexwork – up to 52.8% and 66.7% from 39.7% and 55.8% for flexible location and flexible schedules respectively
Saving time and money increasing as a benefit to 45.8% from 33.5%
Productivity another bonus on the rise, to 48.6% from 39.4%

Both the first Great Discontent survey from 2021 and this one in 2023 bring pretty clear insights: workers aren’t only readily adapting to remote work and flexible schedules, but also recognizing the unique advantages that these have over on-location and set schedules.

What we’ve learned now is that, in the two years of experience in these setups between the two surveys, some benefits are rising to the surface and others have sunken to the depths.

The growing benefits of remote work

What remains at the top in terms of benefits associated with remote work is the ability to integrate personal and professional priorities – described to us as “work-life integration” by one-time SmartBug Media CEO Ryan Malone in 2020. In this case, more than half of all US workers (52.8%) in the new survey cited that as a major benefit of remote work – up 13.1 points from 39.7% in 2021.

Another huge benefit is how much time workers get back in the day if they’re working remotely. For one, they don’t have to commute – and that’s also a fast-growing benefit of WFH, with 45.8% of workers calling that a major perk now compared with 33.5% in 2021.

The growing benefits of flexible schedules

Workers are also finding benefits in not being required to adhere to the traditional 9-to-5 (or 7-to-3, or 11-to-7, or what have you) grind. The ability to balance personal and professional priorities again takes center stage for workers with flexible schedules, with 66.7% calling that a major benefit in 2023 compared with 55.8% in 2021.

We know that different people are more productive at different times of the day. Some are night owls, others are early risers, and some are in between. In that mindset, increased work performance is also growing as a benefit of flexible schedules, with 48.6% of workers citing that in 2023, up from 39.4% in 2021.

Overall, it’s simply easier – if someone needs to skip out for a longer lunch or catch a doctor’s appointment, or pick up their kids from school, they’re able to do so and balance out their time commitment by investing a couple extra hours in the evening or earlier in the day.

Overall, these shifts reveal a matured understanding of the advantages of remote and flexible work. Some benefits are becoming clearer over time and with experience. Plus, as workers have become more adept at these arrangements, the benefits have expanded beyond just health and safety considerations to encompass efficiency, flexibility, work-life balance, and financial gains.

Above all, the increased autonomy that comes with flexwork appear to benefit both the employee and the employer (in the resulting productivity) – and that’s worth noting.

What can you do?

1. Emphasize work-life integration policies

With the increased emphasis on the integration of personal and professional priorities, it’s clear that maintaining work-life balance is more important than ever for employees.

Employers need to develop and promote policies that respect and encourage this balance, such as promoting “disconnect time” or offering support for family needs.

2. Reevaluate cost and time-saving measures

The increase in recognition of cost and time-saving benefits indicates the need for companies to consider how they can facilitate these advantages further.

Employers could consider allowances for home-office setup, stipends for utilities, or even “no meeting” days to maximize efficiency.

3. Promote autonomy and flexibility

Given the positive impact of flexible schedules on productivity, it is crucial for employers to promote work autonomy. This could include encouraging employees to work when they feel most productive or allowing flexibility in daily work schedules.

Businesses must continue to evolve their practices and policies to align with these changing preferences and needs of their employees.

The post 66.7% of US workers love the flexibility of flexible schedules appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

UK workers hate commuting – at least 52% of the time

Keith MacKenzie — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 17:25:57 +0000

Top 3 takeaways

Not needing to commute is growing as a major benefit of remote / hybrid work – up to 52% in 2023 from 41.3% in 2021
Cost benefits grew as a benefit to 47.6% from 35.7%
Productivity another bonus on the rise, to 44.5% from 36.5%

When looking at Workable’s Great Discontent surveys from 2021 and 2023, one conclusion is pretty clear: workers have not only adapted to the remote and flexible work arrangements but also find unique advantages in them.

And over time, some of these advantages have risen to the surface – and sunken to depths – in the two years between the surveys.

Remote saves time and money

What’s resoundingly clear in our new dataset is how remote workers enjoy the benefits gained from not needing to commute more now than before. More than half (52%) cite that as a major benefit of remote / hybrid work in 2023 compared with 41.3% in 2021.

People also say they’re saving money and that’s what they like about working remotely – 47.6% say remote is easier on their pocketbook now, up from 35.7% in 2021.

Flexible time means flexibility

Flexible work schedules also saw significant changes from 2021 – the ability to balance personal and professional priorities grew in importance for workers in 2023, with 64.9% citing that as a top benefit compared with 57.3% previously.

We know that different people can be more productive at different times of the day. Some are night owls, others are early risers, and some are in between. Likely related to this, increased work performance is also growing as a benefit of flexible schedules, with 44.5% of workers picking that in 2023, up from 36.5% in 2021.

What does all this mean? These shifts show that the understanding of the real advantages of remote work and flexible schedules have matured over time.

Plus, as workers have become more adept at these newfangled working arrangements, the benefits have expanded beyond just health and safety considerations to encompass efficiency, flexibility, work-life balance, and financial gains. Instant return is fine, but we now have the opportunity to see what the long-term gains are.

Ultimately, it’s worth noting that the increased autonomy that comes with flexwork appear to benefit both the employee in terms of increased employee experience and the employer in terms of productivity and retention.

What can you do?

1. Emphasize work-life integration policies

With the increased emphasis on the integration of personal and professional priorities, it’s clear that maintaining work-life balance is more important than ever for employees.

Employers need to develop and promote policies that respect and encourage this balance, such as promoting “disconnect time” or offering support for family needs.

2. Reevaluate cost and time-saving measures

The increase in recognition of cost and time-saving benefits indicates the need for companies to consider how they can facilitate these advantages further.

Employers could consider allowances for home-office setup, stipends for utilities, or even “no meeting” days to maximize efficiency.

3. Promote autonomy and flexibility

Businesses must continue to evolve their practices and policies to align with these changing preferences and needs of their employees.

The post UK workers hate commuting – at least 52% of the time appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Don’t rock the boat: stable and secure is the way to float

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 12:30:28 +0000

What’s happening in the evolving US job market right now? We have data for you on what’s most important to workers in a job right now and how that’s changed since 2021.

Top 3 takeaways

Job security is more important now, up to 38.6% from 32.1% two years ago
Career advancement is growing as a job attractor from 15.8% to 22%
Compensation is still the top consideration for a job across all scenarios

Job security is always important, of course – people need to put food on the table and to pay their bills, so they’re reliant on that employer-employee arrangement where they provide their services in exchange for compensation. It’s the basic structure of labor.

Naturally, it would follow that one side of that equation would have leverage over the other. One may have a luxury of choice that the other may not have. In the last few years, we saw employees exercise their leverage by pushing for higher salaries, more flexible working arrangements, and better working conditions.

But now, things have shifted again. Job security is growing in importance for US workers when evaluating the value of a new job. In 2021, 32.1% considered job security as a significant factor in what they’d find attractive about a new opportunity – and this climbed to 38.6% in 2023.

This suggests a desire for stability and predictability among workers who are rattled by the weird chaos of the post-pandemic economy. Workers now want to be able to count on a reliable income stream for the foreseeable future.

The percentage of workers looking to move to another job overall is also dropping. Why fix what ain’t broke, right? When workers would rather stick with something they already have rather than go into the wild blue yonder looking for new roles, that suggests they’re valuing stability over opportunity. It’s another effect of the uncertain times we’re living in right now.

What else is growing in importance for workers who are looking for new opportunities? Career advancement. In 2021, 15.8% of workers in the US considered this a major factor in changing jobs – that’s since climbed to 22%.

But it’s still mostly about the money

Money still talks. No matter how you look at it, compensation in the form of salary, perks, and benefits is still the top priority for all workers regardless of the situation they’re in – whether they’re looking, whether they’re staying in their current job, or anything else.

Comp is also growing in terms of attractiveness when potential candidates are being wooed to a new job – from 62.2% in 2021 to 68.9% now.

Interestingly, we asked active jobseekers why they’re looking for a new opportunity, and we found that compensation dropped in terms of importance from 63.4% in 2021 to 58.5% now. What’s growing in importance for those who decide to start looking for a new job are, yes, career advancement opportunities and meaningfulness of work (25% now compared with 20.8% two years ago).

Job security in itself is valued hugely – that much is clear. And compensation is part of that security – when a worker gets paid more, that’s security in the form of personal finance.

Even a focus on career advancement can be indirectly related to workers’ desire for greater security – people don’t want to be just mercenaries brought in to do a specific job with an end date to that job. They want to flourish, grow, and evolve in their existing role. They want to be invested for the long haul.

Today’s workers are looking beyond the financial aspects of a job, seeking roles that offer intrinsic satisfaction. Plus security and stability, too.

What can you do?

1. Promote job security

As job security grows in importance, employers should communicate the stability of their organization and roles during the recruitment process.

You can demonstrate this by showcasing a strong company history, financial stability, and a reliable pipeline of future projects. Your careers page is a great opportunity to show off all this stuff about you.

2. Highlight growth opportunities

With career advancement becoming more important to workers, employers should highlight opportunities for career growth in their organizations.

This can be communicated by promoting examples of career progression within the company, mentoring programs, and opportunities for ongoing professional development. Again, put this in your careers page in the form of employee testimonials and workplace videos.

3. Keep your salaries competitive

Despite the growth in importance of job security and career advancement, compensation remains key. Ensure ensure your compensation packages remain competitive, encompassing not just salary but also benefits and perks.

This can demonstrate your commitment to rewarding and retaining your employees – leading to a happier and more productive workforce in the end.

The post Don’t rock the boat: stable and secure is the way to float appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Flexwork in the UK: It’s staying this time – maybe

Keith MacKenzie — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 13:17:35 +0000

What’s important in the minds of UK workers? We have data for you on flexwork in its different forms, and how that’s changed since 2021.

What do UK workers want now?

Our Great Discontent 2.0 survey report contains a wealth of data revealing how employee priorities in the UK have changed since 2021. Learn more here.

View the report highlights

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Top 3 takeaways

Those working fully remote dropped from 55.2% to 40.9% – but most have been doing it for years now
Flexible schedules remains steady – and those working on flexible times have increasingly been doing so for years
More employers than before have made overall flexwork a permanent feature

Remote work, once a novelty, became a necessity with the onset of the pandemic. That much is clear, and it was even predicted at the onset of the pandemic. In our New World of Work survey in August 2020, 71.1% said remote work and distributed teams would be a major paradigm shift moving forward.

And then it became a standard for a little while – until now. In our new survey report on the Great Discontent in 2023, recent data shows a decline in remote work among UK-based workers. In short: the percentage of respondents working remotely is down 14.3 points in a two-year span, from 55.2% in 2021 to 40.9% in 2023.

Does that mean remote work is going the way of the dinosaurs? Hardly. The prediction from 2020 is still absolutely spot on.

We see this when asking workers how long they’ve been working remotely – 29.6% of remote workers have been doing so for more than two years, up a full 20.6 percentage points from 9% in 2021.

This just means that those working remotely are increasingly doing so for long periods of time.

On the flip side: the percentage of workers who say they’ve only been working remotely for less than two years has gone down from 91% in 2021 to 70.4% now.

Flexible schedules

Meanwhile, the percentage of those working on flexible schedules is largely unchanged, from 55.2% in 2021 to 55.7% in 2023.

And when asked how long they’d been in that setup, the percentage of those saying they have been working in flexible schedules for more than two years is also largely unchanged in the UK – and is drastically different from the US where 46.5% of flexible workers had been doing so for more than two years now compared with just 21.9% in 2021.

Regardless of the above, there remains a long-term focus on overall flexibility in working time and location in employer management strategy, as 35.6% of employees say their employer has always had remote / hybrid work with an additional 23.7% saying it was introduced during the pandemic and is now a permanent strategy.

Meanwhile, 50.4% of employees say their employer has always allowed flexible schedules, with an additional 10.2% saying they introduced it during the pandemic and it’s now permanent.

It’s always interesting to look at the interesting parts: in this case, 29.7% say their employer introduced remote work during the pandemic and will likely return to on-location work. And 27% say the same for flexible schedules. Those are not insignificant numbers – they suggest many companies are pushing for return-to-office and set schedules.

What can you do?

1. Embrace flexibility

The steady demand for remote and flexible work options indicates that these aren’t passing fads, but fixtures of the modern workplace. Even as some employees return to the office (or attempt to), it’s crucial for employers to maintain flexible work policies.

This flexibility could be a deciding factor for talent considering whether to join or remain with your organization.

2. Communicate clearly

Employers who introduced remote or flexible work options during the pandemic need to communicate their plans clearly.

If the changes are permanent, let employees know. If not, it’s equally essential to inform employees about any transitions back to on-site work, providing sufficient notice and support for the change.

3. Re-evaluate and update policies

The landscape of work has changed significantly over the last couple of years. Now might be a good time for employers to re-evaluate and update their policies around remote work and flexible schedules.

Consider factors like productivity, employee well-being, and company culture when making these decisions, and ensure the updated policies are in the best interest of both the company and its employees.

The post Flexwork in the UK: It’s staying this time – maybe appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Is flexwork normal or a fad? In the US, that depends

Keith MacKenzie — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 13:03:02 +0000

What’s happening in the evolving US job market right now? We have data for you on flexwork in its different forms, and how that’s changed since 2021.

Top 3 takeaways

Those working fully remote dropped from 58% to 41% – but most have been doing it for years now
Flexible schedules remains steady – and those working on flexible times have increasingly been doing so for years
More employers than before have made overall flexwork a permanent feature

At one time during the onset of the pandemic, remote work and distributed teams were necessitated for pure business survival and continuity, and was predicted by 71.1% of respondents in our New World of Work survey in August 2020 to be a major paradigm shift going forward.

But now? It’s declining for US-based workers. The percentage of respondents working remotely is at 41% now, down 17 points from 58% in 2021.

Here’s where it gets interesting: the prediction of a paradigm shift from 2020 onwards is absolutely spot on. We can see this in how long workers have been working remotely – 46.1% of remote workers have been doing so for more than two years, up from just 13.2% in 2021. That’s a long time to be working remotely, so it could be safe to say that it’s becoming standard for many.

Flexible schedules are a little different. The percentage of those working on flexible schedules hasn’t changed from 2021 to 2023 – both surveys found that exactly 57.9% are working on flexible schedules.

Again, like remote work, flexible schedules are becoming more standardized, with 46.5% saying they’ve been working on a flexible schedule for more than two years in 2023 – more than double that of 2021, when 21.9% said the same.

That long-term focus on overall flexibility in working time and location is also evident in employer management strategy. According to the new survey, 36.2% say their employer has always allowed remote / hybrid work and an additional 24% say their employer introduced it during the pandemic and has since made it a permanent fixture of work.

And 50.8% of workers saying their employer always allowed flexible schedules.

What about the whole return-to-office (RTO) discussion? A full quarter (26%) say their employer introduced remote work during the pandemic and will likely return to on-location work, and 23.2% say the same for flexible schedules.

Those are not small numbers – many companies are indeed pushing for return-to-office and set schedules. And if you’re watching the news, it’s a reality for many workers whether they like it or not.

What can you do?

1. Embrace flexibility

The steady demand for remote and flexible work options indicates that these aren’t passing fads, but fixtures of the modern workplace.

Even as some employees return to the office, it’s crucial for employers to maintain flexible work policies. This flexibility could be a deciding factor for talent considering whether to join or remain with your organization.

2. Communicate clearly

Employers who introduced remote or flexible work options during the pandemic need to communicate their plans clearly. If the changes are permanent, let employees know.

If not, it’s equally essential to inform employees about any transitions back to on-site work, providing sufficient notice and support for the change.

3. Re-evaluate and update policies

The post Is flexwork normal or a fad? In the US, that depends appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

UK workers want clarity and growth, not a hard day’s night

Keith MacKenzie — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 20:40:54 +0000

What’s happening in the seemingly ever-shifting UK job market right now? We have data for you on what’s most important to workers in a job right now and how that’s changed since 2021.

What do UK workers want now?

Our Great Discontent 2.0 survey report contains a wealth of data revealing how employee priorities in the UK have changed since 2021. Learn more here.

View the report highlights

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Top 3 takeaways

Job clarity is more important now, up to 22.5% from 16.8% two years ago
Career advancement is growing as a job attractor from 28.3% to 37.8%
Compensation is still the top consideration for a job across all scenarios

You can’t have a thriving garden if you don’t give your flowers the opportunity to blossom and your plants to grow.

Such is the same when it comes to running a business. Career growth is climbing in importance for UK workers when they’re thinking about applying for (and accepting) a new job opportunity.

According to our new survey in 2023, 37.8% of UK workers considered this a significant factor in what they’d find attractive about a new job, up 9.5 points from 2021.

Clear as the daytime sky

Also growing in importance is clarity about job expectations and responsibilities. That’s cited as a major decision factor for 22.5% of all UK workers in 2023, up from 16.8% two years ago.

This suggests greater dissonance in the workplace over the last few years leading to worker frustration about what they’re expected to do in the jobs they’re hired to do. And moreover, the increased uncertainty in the overall social and political fabric specifically in the United Kingdom (thanks to Brexit, prime minister turnover, and of course, COVID-19), and it’s understandable that a UK-based worker will find clarity in their job to be refreshing. At least something is clear!

Show them the money – and then some

Even with all of that, compensation still reigns supreme. Be it in the form of salary, perks, or benefits, what a worker gets in exchange for their work is number one in the list of job attractors in the UK with 68.8% citing that as a deciding factor in a career move. That’s only down slightly from 70.1% in 2021.

That’s not much of a change, right? Wrong. For those workers who are actively looking, we asked them why they’re actively looking. There’s a huge increase in active jobseekers citing more money as a reason – 66.4% now compared with 53.5% in 2021. That’s a phenomenal 12.9-point increase.

But tangibility doesn’t mean everything. Those actively in the hunt for new work are also putting greater value on “meaning” in their job – 23.1% cite that as a priority in 2023, up from 16.6% in 2021.

Workers today want clarity in their work, and they want to feel like their work means something to them. Add greater compensation and the three top-growing priorities are very clear in the mind of those working in the UK.

What can you do?

1. Promote the opportunity of the work

As career growth grows in importance, employers should promote the real value of working for them – in short: if you work with us, you’ve got a bright future.

This can be demonstrated by showcasing longer-tenured employees and their accomplishments, the strong company history, and a pipeline of future projects.

2. Highlight clarity and meaning of the job

In a world of seemingly unrelenting change, the least an employer can offer is stability and clarity in the job itself. And make it really mean something.

Ensure that your job expectations, responsibilities, and overall OKRs crystal clear from the get-go, and promote the value of the work beyond mere pounds.

3. Keep your salaries competitive

Compensation remains key. Employers should ensure their compensation packages remain competitive, encompassing not just salary but also benefits and perks.

This can demonstrate a company’s commitment to rewarding new employees who sign up for the long haul.

The post UK workers want clarity and growth, not a hard day’s night appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

69% employed and 51% passive: Working hard & hardly looking

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 12:18:09 +0000

What’s happening in the evolving US job market right now? We have data for you on what employment looks like, why people are not working, and what their motivations are.

What do US workers want now?

Our Great Discontent 2.0 survey report contains a wealth of data revealing how employee priorities in the US have changed since 2021. Learn more here.

View the report highlights

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Top 3 takeaways

Seven out of 10 are now working full time, compared with 55.3% in 2021
Those “not working” is down from one in five to one in 10 – more due to choice than extraneous factors
One in two workers are now only passively open to other opportunities, up from 37% two years ago

In 2023, nearly seven out of every 10 respondents (69.2%) in the United States reported that they are working full time. That’s up from 55.3% in 2021.

Meanwhile, the percentage of those who say they aren’t working dropped from 20.8% in 2021 to 9.9% now.

In short, the US job market is healthier than it’s been since pre-COVID. There’s more work out there, and it shows.

But it’s not just the raw percentages that tell the tale; it’s the reasons behind them. When those respondents were asked why they’re not working, they point to personal choices rather than job scarcity or financial pressures.

For example: the top two reasons cited by US workers for not working in 2023 are family priorities (31.1%) and health priorities (25.7%). That’s up from 30% and 18.8% respectively in 2021.

Also, it seems to be largely due to choice rather than simple necessity: the percentage of those who aren’t working because they’re focused on personal and professional development also more than doubled to 8.1% in 2023 from 3.8% in 2021.

And they’re hardly looking

Those who say they’re actively looking for new opportunities dropped from 33.4% in 2021 to 22.6% now – regardless of whether they’re currently working or not.

For those who are working, this suggests that workers in the US are now more content to be in their current work situation.

But does that also mean they’re not interested in other roles? Not necessarily. Those who say they’re passively open to new opportunities – in other words, they’re open to a conversation or are curious to see what’s out there, but not actively hunting for new roles – grew significantly to 51.1% from 37.3%.

What does that mean for hiring teams? Well, for one, the talent availability out there isn’t limited to those who actively apply for your open roles. If you open a new job and aren’t seeing those star candidates showing up in your inbox, rest assured that they’re out there. You just have to reach out to them and initiate the conversation.

What can you do?

1. Prioritize your employees’ happiness

The increase in job stability means employers should focus on enhancing retention strategies.

This could involve prioritizing employee satisfaction, job security, and providing opportunities for growth and development within the organization.

2. Allow your teams to be flexible

As personal reasons, i.e. family and health priorities, are leading factors for not working, employers need to consider flexible work policies that accommodate personal needs.

This might include offering remote work options, flexible hours, ease of commute, accessibility, or increased family and health support.

3. Market yourself as a great place to work

With more than half of the respondents only passively open to new opportunities, employers should work on making their company stand out as an attractive option.

This could involve marketing the unique benefits and opportunities of their organization, showcasing strong company culture, and emphasizing their dedication to employee well-being and personal growth.

The post 69% employed and 51% passive: Working hard & hardly looking appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Full-time’s up in the UK – but not much else is changing

Keith MacKenzie — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 12:52:10 +0000

What’s happening in the ever-changing UK job market right now? We have data for you on what employment looks like here, what other dynamics are at play, and why those who aren’t working are not working.

What do UK workers want now?

Our Great Discontent 2.0 survey report contains a wealth of data revealing how employee priorities in the UK have changed since 2021. Learn more here.

View the report highlights

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Top 3 takeaways

Seven out of 10 are now working full time, compared with 60.1% two years earlier
The percentage of those working part-time or for themselves is down
Those not working are due to health or government benefits

In 2023, nearly seven out of every 10 respondents (68.8%) report working full time, a significant growth from the 60.1% recorded in 2021. This shouldn’t come as a surprise – the data in 2021 was fresh off the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic which saw considerable job loss across numerous sectors. And of course, Brexit made for further complications in the system.

The percentages of those in part-time and self-employed work are also down in 2023.

This ultimately means we’re seeing relative stabilization of the UK job market after those two horsemen set foot on British soil – more full-time workers means greater security, after all.

Big differences between UK and US

The percentage of those who aren’t working hasn’t changed at all – it’s 10.4% in both 2021 and 2023 – this is interesting because in the same survey in the United States, that percentage is half of what it was two years earlier (9.9% now, down from 20.8%).

Meanwhile, those actively looking for new work also didn’t change much, from 29.5% in 2021 to 29.1% now – again, markedly different from US-based respondents (22.6% now vs. 33.4% two years earlier).

What did change in the UK job market over the two-year time period is the reason why those not working aren’t actively working: it’s more due to health and government benefits now. A full third (33.3%) cited “health priorities” as the reason they’re not working, up from 26.9% two years earlier – and “government benefits” also grew in importance fro 15.4% to 22.2%.

What can you do?

Retain your employees by supporting their health

The increase in employed workers means employers should focus on enhancing retention strategies. And the emphasis on health as a reason to not work highlights the need for that kind of support in the workplace.

Allow your teams to be flexible

As personal reasons, i.e. health priorities, are leading factors for not working, employers need to consider flexible work policies that can accommodate personal needs. This might include offering remote work options, flexible hours, ease of commute, accessibility, or increased family and health support.

Market yourself as a great place to work

The higher rate of employment combined with the increased emphasis on government benefits points to the latter as being potentially by choice rather than by necessity. If you market yourself as a great place to work via more generous compensation, supportive environments, flexibility, etc., you may inspire those not working to reenter the workforce.

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Three winning recruiting tips from HR Tech World

Christine Del Castillo — Tue, 27 Oct 2015 18:09:11 +0000

Last week we covered #HRTechConf from Las Vegas. This week, we’re in Paris, bringing you the best of #HRTechWorld. Our three picks from Day One include Hootsuite’s mission-driven hiring philosophy, Yves Morieux’s cure for active disengagement, and tips from Amazon and Yahoo for turning hiring managers into powerhouse recruiters and sourcers.

Hootsuite has a point of view on hiring. Do you?

.@Hootsuite rolls out the red carpet for candidates who believe that social is changing the world. #HRTechWorld #missiondriven #hiring

— Workable (@Workable) October 27, 2015

Creatives, 'out loud' thinkers, mentors, constant learners. These are the people we like too! #hrtechworld https://t.co/dcz4aCpsJE

— Hootsuite Careers (@HootsuiteLife) October 27, 2015

Richard Branson was the headliner for today’s closing session — and it’s always great to hear him talk — but it was Hootsuite’s approach to hiring that caught our attention. They know exactly who they want (people who believe that social media is changing the way the world works) and what they can offer. Ambrosia Vertesi, Hootsuite’s VP of Talent, says the company is especially committed to developing the rising generation of talent with mentorships and other career growth opportunities.

“Active disengagement” is an epidemic

Active #disengagement at companies is epidemic – Yves Morieux @bcg at #HRTechWorld pic.twitter.com/ntnBaqqxeK

— Minter Dial, Professional Speaker #YOULEAD (@mdial) October 27, 2015

Take note, leaders! Here's Yves Morieux's 6 rules for fostering #cooperation. #HRTechWorld #management #leadership pic.twitter.com/teJAitOGfn

— Workable (@Workable) October 27, 2015

According to these stats, one in five of your employees may be “actively disengaged.” The term, coined by Gallup, refers to people who are actively working against the interests of your company. Yves Morieux of BCG says this toxic situation can be fixed through cooperation. Note that cooperation isn’t about making sure people like each other. It’s about giving everyone the support and skills they need to succeed so that the entire team can devote more time to actual productivity.

How involved should hiring managers be in recruiting?

Some best practices for using hiring managers to recruit. @vlastelica #HRTechWorld pic.twitter.com/CQcfWzVCBj

— Andy Headworth (@andyheadworth) October 27, 2015

@vlastelica speaks about partnering with the hiring manager for more recruitment success #HRTechWorld pic.twitter.com/CMYjeNCJrH

— Martijn Hemminga (@martijnhemminga) October 27, 2015

4 Brilliant examples of comps who drove recruiting thru gr8 hiring manager engagement #HRTechWorld pic.twitter.com/9oZaNfOgzj

— SocialTalent (@SocialTalent) October 27, 2015

Third and last step: best practices in the area of Partership @vlastelica #HRTechWorld pic.twitter.com/51Yaf42f48

— Cecilia Spanu (@CeciliaSpanu) October 27, 2015

Hiring managers at some of the world’s top companies (Amazon, Yahoo, T-Mobile, eBay) have a massive impact on recruiting. At Groupon, candidates are three to five times more likely to open LinkedIn emails from hiring managers. At Yahoo, hiring managers devote a week of their time to “sourcing sprints.” To celebrate hiring wins, great hiring managers at Amazon are recognized on the intranet. At eBay, they get a cocktail party. Thanks, John Vlastelica, for the ideas.

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The work-abroad dream: 4 benefits of remote working for employers

Johanna Cohen — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 15:35:34 +0000

Whether you’re a multinational organization or have an office in an unsexy location, the opportunity for international remote work can be a huge appealing factor in candidate attraction and employee engagement. Sure, there’s the standard, flexible remote work and full-time remote work, but there are also benefits of remote working for employers – particularly when placements are temporary and short-term. Temporary remote work means that an employee moves to another area – or multiple areas anywhere in the world – and works from there for a defined period of time.

So, what if your company implemented a new policy where employees get the opportunity to work for a set number of months in a specific country or region if they’ve been with the company for one full year? Here are four reasons why the benefits of remote working for employers can be significant:

1) Boost your talent attraction

As a recruiter, you can market to a pool of people who otherwise might not be interested. It’s a method of talent attraction for different types of companies, whether you’re at an office park in a suburb, in a tech hub in a mega city or in a small town. You can’t compete with the recruitment marketing of the Googles and Amazons of the world — but this is one benefit where you can get ahead.

In the same way a student might choose to study abroad in college or do research in a foreign country while in a graduate program, employees can live abroad or immerse themselves in a new culture while continuing to work effectively at their jobs. It might not be as easy as having an employee in the office where their engagement can be regularly monitored, but for tough-to-fill markets, it’s a strong way to attract candidates.

2) Improve engagement and retention

Many millennials and Gen Zers dream of being able to live abroad but don’t want to put their career on hold. According to a survey from Graebel Companies, 81% of U.S. college seniors want to work abroad. The Gen Z population is keen for work-abroad opportunities and this group of people will continue to take over a larger proportion of the workforce over the next few years.

There’s a burgeoning market of startups looking to capitalize on this trend, such as Remote Year and WiFi Tribe. Their slogans expand on the desire to continue to grow professionally while experiencing the global world, with Remote Year’s “Keep your job. See the world” and WiFi Tribe’s “Design your life.” These organizations are working to make it feasible to continue building one’s professional self while abroad and at the same time keep employers comfortable.

Having such a policy in place in your company can do wonders for employee engagement and retention, especially among the younger crowd.

3) Strengthen your expansion strategy

Imagine you’re at a 50-person startup in Boston, primarily composed of millennials. Your company has just received funding with the impetus to expand your business and build a European customer base. You already have leads, but you’re missing an essential ingredient: locally based talent in that region of the world. Consider the issues that arise:

Your product requires hands-on onboarding
Your support team’s hours are US-focused
Your company doesn’t (yet) have that deep understanding of European markets

So, what can you do? You could hire local talent, but it takes time to onboard new employees and you want to hit the ground running. You can, instead, give your existing employees the chance to work abroad, act as an ambassador for your brand in the new market, and build a local network while your company establishes its presence. Another benefit is the chance to gain a deeper understanding of other cultures so your business is better positioned to expand to that location when the time comes – and moreover, remotely placed employees can help train new hires locally until they’re fully productive on their own.

In short: a policy that allows employees to move to a destination office for a fixed term opens up new opportunities to bring businesses closer to their expansion and new-market goals. Add to that the potential for round-the-clock support if you have offices around the world.

4)Boost your diversity and inclusion efforts

Imagine a scenario where a new immigrant joins your company. They’re more likely to feel included when they have colleagues who have worked in that immigrant’s home country, speak their language, and/or understand their culture. Additionally, the various challenges of traveling and living abroad open employees to experiences that take them out of their comfort zone, and that’s when they learn to think from different perspectives when approaching a situation or problem.

Shane Snow in Harvard Business Review draws the connection between living abroad and business:

Traveling a lot – or, even better, living for extended periods in foreign cultures – tends to make us more willing to revise our viewpoints. After all, if we know that it is perfectly valid to live a different way than we do, it makes sense that our brains would be better at accepting new approaches to problems at work.

Consequently, one of the main benefits of remote working for employers is that employees who temporarily work abroad can bring their new learnings back to the office and your business now has a team that is more multilateral in their thinking processes (diversity) and are more accepting of one another (inclusion).

One size doesn’t fit all

What works for one company might not work for another. For temporary international remote placements to thrive, you need to first understand where your company currently sits in its growth, what your goals and your employee’s goals are, and align all of these towards an overall vision.

It’s important to recognize that your company’s needs and the expectation of your employees in terms of relocation may not necessarily align; for instance, some employees sign up in the hopes that they’ll indeed get to work in sunny Thailand but end up being sent for a three-month stint in a mid-sized German town in the midst of winter – this alone can lead to disengagement and the opposite of what you hoped to gain in implementing a temporary remote-work policy.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution. You need to first understand whether you can offer this option, and what it is you’re trying to achieve by bringing in such a policy. You’ll also want to consider the usual variables of where they’ll work, for how long, what they’ll be doing, etc. – these can differ drastically based on company, market, goals, and so on.

That’s not to say there aren’t services available that can help your initiative. However challenging a work-abroad appointment can be, there are options that provide reliable WiFi and comfortable rooms. Instead of going the route of a fully built-out program, you can look at coworking and coliving opportunities. There are global organizations such as WeWork with coworking locations around the world, and Roam, which designs hybrid coworking and coliving spaces. GCUC, the Global Coworking Unconference Conference, reports that as of 2017, there were 14,000 coworking spaces globally up from 14 in 2007, and predicts that number to rise to 30,000 by 2022. Harvard Business Review emphasizes the meaning behind this growth, as people continue to want to work remote, coworking spaces offer professionalism, credibility and community.

The choice of how to approach this is up to the employee and you, the management at the company. Instead of seeing people leave in order to pursue travel, this type of work situation keeps good employees at the company and provides them with a unique opportunity to grow their skillset and their diverse approach to the global world.

While spending six months with penguins in Antarctica might sound enticing, they’re still working for you and the onus is on you to ensure they’ll have access to WiFi, a workspace, and a general smooth transition that works for both you and the employee.

Ultimately, having such a policy in place can make you a more attractive employer that’s willing to build trust with employees by allowing them to work remotely in such a way. Your company can also benefit from the added skills that employees bring back to your office, and you can retain great employees who can now scratch that travel itch or resolve their need to go abroad while keeping their job with you. In an increasingly competitive talent space, the benefits of remote working for employers can put you ahead of your competition.

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Challenges of remote hiring: Tech isn’t the problem

Keith MacKenzie — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 13:19:01 +0000

In this chapter, we address the following questions:

What are the biggest hiring challenges during COVID-19?
What will be the biggest challenges in hiring remotely after COVID-19?
What skills are good for remote work?

When operating remotely, unique issues surface particularly in recruitment. Finding the right people to fill those much-needed roles is crucial to business success and survival; imagine doing that entirely via your laptop. So, we asked respondents about that in our New World of Work survey.

For those continuing to hire during COVID-19, a whole new set of challenges surfaced. Remote onboarding/training challenges (37.4%) and hiring in a remote environment (33.1%) are top of mind among respondents, with uncertainty among candidates about job security (31.7%) and economic anxiety within the business (30.6%) also listed as major concerns.

In regards to challenges of remote hiring and remote onboarding as well as training, perhaps the lack of remote experience indicated in the previous graphs is a factor. The recruitment process – so familiar to entry-level and veteran recruiters alike – looks very different in a remote environment. For recruiters and hiring managers, this can be a steep learning curve.

So, we asked respondents what they thought the biggest challenges of remote hiring would be going forward. The top responses were candidate engagement (51.7%), candidate onboarding (49.7%), and candidate evaluation (42.4%), easily doubling and even tripling any tech-focused concerns such as insufficient tech stacks and lack of buy-in/adoption.

So, evidently, the problem isn’t technology itself – also shown in previous graphs where tech adoption or availability lagged behind other challenges in shifting to remote. Rather, the problem may be worker know-how in conducting standard recruitment/HR practices in a virtual world. As above, recruiters need to relearn large parts of their work. This places a greater value on soft skills around adaptability and willingness to take on new skills.

“I think it will be vastly different depending upon the sector. My company is in the technology sector so I expect there will be minimal disruption to productivity and team engagement (if the past few months are any indication) but other sectors that are not so conversant with technology may have a much more challenging experience in shifting to new models of work.” – Survey respondent

In fact, our respondents highlighted these soft skills when asked about what the most valuable traits they would be looking for in new hires. Adaptability and resilience (67.4%) and self-motivated/self-starter (54.2%) led the way as sought-after traits.

One custom response in the “Other” category put it succinctly: “Ability to work remotely with limited supervision”.

This suggests that respondents see an uncertain road ahead, that requires plenty of pivoting for businesses and their employees – in a remote environment, no less – and so, they will look for candidates who thrive in that new world.

Recruiters are themselves also operating in that ambiguous, fast-changing environment. But there are many tools available that empower hiring teams to find, evaluate, and hire candidates in the new world of work.

Want to learn more? Navigate to:

Chapter 1 on the impact that COVID-19 had on business and processes
Chapter 2 on the magnitude of the shift to remote work
Chapter 3 on the challenges of remote working and why
Chapter 5 on the role of technology in remote work going forward
Methodology and firmographics
A collection of open-ended responses from those we surveyed.

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The future of work has been foretold

Daniel Howden — Thu, 07 Jan 2016 16:48:40 +0000

If you work at a technology company you could be forgiven for thinking that all offices are slowly transforming into one big futuristic playground. Whether you’re with a startup in a co-working space or on the campus of a bonafide unicorn, the organizing principles remain roughly the same. The emphasis is on light, lounging and play. At the their best they can recall a favorite cafe or an over-sized sitting room. At worst they tend to resemble the set from the Big Brother franchise replete with primary-colored couches. You are certainly given to believe that you have entered the future.

Putting down your ping pong paddle for a moment, you might be tempted to ask whether this is necessarily a good thing?

Offices are as prone to fad and fashion as every other aspect of our life and work. And yet without fail, each revolution in our workspace is presented as the future; the inevitable destination for all smart companies; the end of working history.

Fire, steel and telephones

I blame Catherine O’Leary. An Irish immigrant who kept a few cows in a wooden barn in Chicago in 1871. She can’t have known what would follow when she is alleged to have left a lantern too close to the hay on that fated night. The Great Chicago Fire razed an area four miles long and a mile wide in what had been the center of the growing city. The blaze and the blank space it left behind came as developments in the manufacture of steel changed what was possible in architecture; and the economy tilted from blue collar to white collar.

The result was the construction in Chicago of the first recognizable American downtown dominated by grids of tall office blocks. It also came just as Alexander Graham Bell was patenting the telephone, and the typewriter was replacing handwritten ledgers. Now it just needed someone to work out the best way to organize the massed ranks of office workers that the new template and the new economy demanded.

Enter Frederick Taylor, the original management consultant and the villain of Nikhil Saval’s excellent chronicle of the office, Cubed. Taylor, whose theories were later dubbed “scientific management,” wanted the turn-of-the-century office to work like a factory, and white collar workers to be as efficient as manual labor was becoming. This called for massed ranks of desks for the clerk-class, cubicles for managers and plusher, more personalized offices for the boss-class.

The influence of Taylorism has been stubborn. Despite setbacks like the time in 1912 that the US Senate banned his methods at the Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts after a string of angry strikes, it was only after the Second World War that a different office came into view.

The coming of the furniture-makers

The next big ideas didn’t come from engineers, like Taylor, but furniture makers. Two competing notions, one of an open office from Europe and the other a series of semi-enclosed mini-offices from the US, would shape the working lives of millions of people in the decades to come.

The Burolandschaft, or office landscape movement, was born in the delightfully named Hamburg suburb of Quickborn. It was there that brothers Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle gave expression to their idea of creating a more humane and collaborative workspace.

Thought by some to be a reaction to Nazism, Burolandschaft called for an organic office with desks grouped in swirling pods, lines of sight interrupted by indoor plants and sound-proofed screens. Sound familiar? It pretty much describes Workable’s current engineering floor in Athens, Greece, and many other tech companies besides.

First it took Europe by storm, then in 1967 it crossed the pond to the US starting with the Dupont headquarters. It was around this time that the ideas of a brilliant designer at the office-furniture company Herman Miller crystalized. Bob Propst took a long look at the American office as he saw it, and as we’ve seen it in shows like Mad Men, and this was his conclusion: “It saps vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort.”

Shrinking the Action Office into a cubicle

With the benefit of hindsight, his answer may surprise you. He invented the cubicle, not that he envisaged it that way. What he actually invented was the Action Office and its cheaper sequel, the Action Office II — a highly flexible, affordable furniture system designed to democratize the privacy a personal office offered. For Propst the vision was of an office that was capable of frequent modification to suit the changing needs of the employee, without the need to purchase new furnishings.

Seen from today’s perspective the cubicle conjures up a very different image. When Mae Holland, the heroine in Dave Eggers’ dark satire of Silicon Valley, The Circle, begins her first day at the Googlesque workplace, she is shown to a burlap cubicle as part of a practical joke. Her horrified reaction is pretty typical of contemporary attitudes to the groundbreaking work of Propst.

Things looked different back in 1985, when the World Design Conference named the Action Office as the most successful design of the previous 25 years. Before Propst died in 2000 roughly 40 million Americans — and many millions more elsewhere — were hard at work in more than 40 different versions of his design. Remarkably few of them were happy about this though.

From monks to submariners

Despite the hype there is little that hasn’t been tried before. Monasteries were the earliest pre-cursors to the office and monks used standing desks to write and illuminate manuscripts. An 1856 report commissioned by the British government found that separate rooms were required for the cerebral employee who “works with his head” where as more mechanical work was best done in concert with other clerks in the same room. Even the 1980s fad for “hot-desking” was, in fact, borrowed from war-time hot-bunking where submariners time-shared their bunks.

The steel girder offices of Chicago with their sky-high ceilings were too regimented and alienating; the open offices conceived in Quickborn too noisy and distracting; the cubicles with their promise of flexibility and customization turned out to be just another way of packing as many workers as possible into the smallest space possible. As Propst’s former colleague Joe Schwartz told Fortune Magazine: “They kept shrinking the Action Office until it became a cubicle.”

Furniture, however cleverly designed, is no match for dysfunctional hierarchies and the downright arbitrary nature of power in most business settings. There is something of Mikhail Kalashnikov in the story of Bob Propst and his gradual realization of this. He would end his life as disillusioned with his own creation as the Russian gun-maker was with his lethally popular assault rifle.

“The dark side of this is that not all organizations are intelligent and progressive,” Propst said shortly before his death. “Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rathole places… I never had any illusions that this was a perfect world.”

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The state of small business hiring in 2015

Christine Del Castillo — Thu, 19 Nov 2015 16:27:48 +0000

As Small Business Saturday draws near — a day when consumers are encouraged to shop small and shop local — we’re sharing an overview of the impact of small businesses and the opportunities and challenges they face when it comes to hiring. This year, Small Business Saturday falls on November 28.

Not everyone agrees how big a business has to be before it stops being small. We like to keep things simple, so we go with the US Small Business Administration, which puts the mark at fewer than 500 employees.

This means that nine out of ten Workable customers are small businesses. We’re exceptionally proud of this. They include family-owned distributors like Comer, health centers like Sandy Hill, nonprofit organizations like Crisis Textline and travel agencies like Much Better Adventures, to name just a few.

Workable was built for them, and thanks to businesses like these, we have the fastest growing hiring software in America. In the United States, small businesses fuel economic growth and account for two-thirds of the country’s new hires. In Europe and elsewhere they make a similarly strong contribution.

Great reasons to support small businesses

Supporting small businesses (SMBs) is a powerful way to invest in your community and in the economy. In October 2015, small businesses created over 80% of all new jobs. One in two working Americans is employed by a small business. Compared to large companies, they’re likelier to hire candidates who face employment challenges, such as long-term unemployment, or part-time workers. SMBs also invest in the training and development of their staff, improving their future job prospects.

Hiring remains a hassle

image via Wasp Barcode Technologies

All this growth leaves hiring as one of the top business challenges. Finding skilled candidates is the greatest hurdle that small businesses face. A hiring team that is often one person, the lack of an employer brand, inadequate tools (email and spreadsheets) and leaner hiring budgets make it challenging for small businesses to compete with larger companies for great candidates.

The good news is that cloud computing and the business software that has come with it is helping to level the hiring field. With tools like Workable, small businesses can get set up with their own careers page, begin to develop an employer brand, get advice on writing a great job ad and get that ad seen by talented applicants.

Big growth for small businesses

2015 was a good year to be a small business, which is why they’re hiring so much. Energy prices were low, which reduced costs for small businesses and encouraged consumers to spend more. Construction, primarily a small business-driven industry, got a boost this year. They’ve been busy with single-family home construction reaching levels not seen since 2008. Small businesses also benefited from the strength of the US dollar this year because they do all their business within the US.

In 2015, most small business owners felt that their business was operating successfully. Most small businesses are also planning for growth in the next five years. The number of SMBs have increased overall and the number of small business failures has declined.

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Money for nothing: are we ready for universal basic income?

Daniel Howden — Thu, 28 Jul 2016 14:10:54 +0000

Several years ago I went to visit a radical experiment in the remote west of Kenya near the shores of Lake Victoria. A handful of villages had been chosen as among the poorest in the East African nation and given a cash windfall. Their poverty had been measured using satellite images showing they had more thatched than tin roofs — a sure sign of their indigence.

The idea was to find the poorest people on earth and see what would happen when you gave them money for nothing. When you do this in the developing world it’s called an unconditional cash transfer. It’s an approach that has been pioneered by a charity called Give Directly, that’s well connected to some of the Silicon Valley tech behemoths.

The organizing principle behind the giveaway was that development aid was inefficient, ineffective and ripe for disruption. Devising and monitoring conditionalities attached to this assistance is expensive. Why spend a fortune on foreign aid bureaucracies, development programs and workshops when you can just give $2,000 to the poorest of the poor and let them climb their own way out of poverty?

A similar idea is being touted in rich countries where it’s known as universal basic income and it’s being talked about more seriously than ever. The notion of paying everyone a fixed basic income was put to a recent referendum in Switzerland, pilot schemes are planned in Finland and the Netherlands and a private experiment is being conducted across the bridge from San Francisco in Oakland, with the backing of a well-known tech accelerator, Y Combinator.

Giving away money with no-strings attached grabs attention. Adding to the excitement and the sense that this is an idea whose time has come is its apparent appeal to groups and individuals from entirely different parts of the political spectrum.

There’s little or no common ground between Charles Murray, a U.S. libertarian and polemicist who has argued that all welfare programs fail; and Tony Atkinson, a British economist, the father of poverty studies and a firm believer in taxing the rich to reduce inequality. But they’re both interested in versions of the universal basic income.

They’re not alone. From the left, economist and popular columnist Paul Krugman, and Robert Reich, a former labour secretary who is now professionally anxious about the future of work are considering it; while from the right Yuval Levin, hailed among the most influential conservative intellectuals is also interested.

Mainstream politicians are for the most part still wary of it, which makes sense when one considers the fate of George McGovern, the Democratic candidate in the 1972 election, who ran on a version of this idea. He proposed a $1,000 popular grant to citizens (today worth $5,700 adjusted for inflation). He lost 49 states.

At first glance, the interest from the left in the UBI is more predictable. It’s a straight-forwardly redistributive program. Whether it’s set at $5,000 or $20,000 per year, it would still require the redistribution from haves to have-nots. If a way could be found to pay for it — of which more later — it would in a single stroke end poverty as it’s currently understood.

On the right its support flows in two currents. One is the vogue for simplification that has made ideas like scrapping progressive taxation in the U.S. in favor of a “flat tax” on all income levels. In its American form it would mean a huge shrinking of the federal bureaucracy, a cause dear to conservative hearts and minds.

It’s the second current that is the more interesting though, and it’s where the tech sector comes in. In recent years vast wealth has been accumulated by tech companies without correspondingly vast workforces. The reasonable conclusion that some have taken from this is that mechanization and automation will accelerate this trend. Capital will need less and less labor.

As many as half of our current occupations will disappear in the face of computerization, a recent Oxford University study argued. In this scenario, a universal basic income could help societies adjust to the disappearance of large swaths of today’s jobs in the second machine age. This view has attracted influential supporters among them Martin Wolf, the chief columnist at the Financial Times.

Even here there is a light and dark way of looking at this future.

Reich and others see a basic income as an expansion of the welfare state to battle widening inequality in a future where there are comparatively few winners and a whole gig economy of losers and flat-out unemployed. This is essentially a tech pessimistic left who believe labor is losing (or has already lost) its leverage over capital, and want to sue for peace before everyone realizes.

Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, who also believes that traditional jobs will be eliminated by technology while massive new wealth is created, is predictably more optimistic. He eschews conservative fears about a society of loafers getting by on the minimum. Many expect the Oakland research project the accelerator is paying for, to bring back data to back the hunch that recipients create more economic value than they receive.

“50 years from now,” says Altman. “I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people.”

Albert Wenger, a venture capitalist with Union Square, is one of the entrepreneurial tribe who believe that people, freed of the need to earn a basic income to survive, will use this freedom to invest in the “startup of you.”

Appropriately the ideas that are now gaining currency have been anticipated in science fiction. One author popular with libertarian thinkers is Robert Heinlein, whose 1938 “For Us, The Living,” anticipated over-production and a guaranteed basic income. Although he is much cited, this work was only published after his death in 2003.

Iain M Banks’ Culture novels, begun in 1987, are set in a post-labor future in which artificial intelligence has liberated humanoids from work and non-sentient machines run the economy, leaving people to indulge their passions or hobbies.

While it sounds futuristic the original idea of a universal income is quite old. Thomas Paine argued in an essay in 1797 that in return for respecting property rights a tax should be paid by its owners to “create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling.”

There are some solid reasons why nearly 220 years later, a universal basic income remains an idea not a policy. Chief among them is cost. When the Swiss were asked recently whether they would like to pay everyone a monthly income of $2,500 at a cost of 30 percent of GDP, more than three-quarters of them said no.

James Tobin, an economist and adviser to the ill-fated McGovern, devised a formula for estimating the cost of a UBI. Working from the basis that existing essential spending on education and policing requires taxing national income at 25 percent, he calculated that a UBI equivalent to 10 percent of the average income would require another 10 percent tax burden.

Poverty, as the residents of Lake Victoria know well, is relative. On Tobin’s scale eradicating relative poverty, defined in the European Union as beneath 60 percent of national median income, would mean an income tax of 85 percent. This is way above the taxation levels that even Scandinavian societies have been able to bear, let alone Britain or the U.S. where it’s currently 27 percent. Whatever the economic arguments mustered in its defense the political economy of this doesn’t look workable.

Before planning for life after the job-killing revolution it’s worth noting the dissonance between the reports of the gig economy and its actual scale. As Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute puts it: “evidence of an exploding gig economy is showing up everywhere but the data.”

Modern welfare states with their ugly scar tissue of incremental reform cannot possibly match the compelling elegance of a universal basic income. It’s harder to love the “earned income tax credit” but it may be worth trying. Essentially a subsidy for low-income working families in which the amount received rises alongside earnings until a fixed point where the credit reaches its maximum. The EITC achieves the tricky balance of rewarding participation, while directing dollars to those in the most need. A substantial proportion of U.S. economists favor expanding the credit but it’s a harder standard to rally to. In other words, testing and other forms of conditionality have not necessarily had their day.

In Koga village in Western Kenya there was no welfare state to reform or invest into. In this case early research showed that unconditional cash transfers worked. They didn’t create an army of layabouts addicted to handouts, the poor were less feckless than some imagined. Undoubtedly the same would be true of the poor in wealthier societies. The problem for the no-strings evangelists is that conditional cash transfers, with all their attendant messiness, have been found to work even better.

Conditions, such as tying payments to parents vaccinating children, can deliver public and private benefits simultaneously. The roots of poverty are as important as the imperative to alleviate it. There will always be a debate on the balance between the cost of administering conditions and the benefits of the outcome. And we will always be drawn to elegant solutions but the reality of poverty reduction is almost always messy.

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HR Tech innovations for finding star employees

Christine Del Castillo — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 00:48:54 +0000

On the third and final day of 2015’s HR Technology Conference, the organizers debuted the Ignite format for the closing session, Ideas and Innovations in HR. Today’s three takeaways come from that session. If you couldn’t make it to the conference, catch up with our recaps for Day 1 and Day 2.

Go ahead, hire the chaos muppets

@kris_dunn great slides/5 min presentation at #HRTechConf pic.twitter.com/ZHGfXcC5Mw

— Aliah Wright (@aliahwrites) October 21, 2015

Low rules (thrives in chaos) + high details (big picture perspective) = winning combination in #hiring via @kris_dunn. #HRTechConf

— Workable (@Workable) October 21, 2015

According to Salon.com, chaos muppets are internally chaotic. But what if they are actually experts at navigating external chaos? Kris Dunn asserted that the latter type are great people to hire. He said that “low rules” employees thrive in ambiguity and can look beyond the manual to find new solutions. He’s written about this before, but today he added that high-performers are people who are “low rules” but high on details and big picture perspective. What do you think? Do your star employees fit this profile?

Treat your job candidates like your best customers

Eric Winegardner from Monster – Candidates = Customers. We need t o treat them as such. #HRTechConf

— Culture Amp (@CultureAmp) October 21, 2015

A1: Candidates should be treated as customers too #TChat #HRTechConf #recruiting

— Harold Sinnott (@HaroldSinnott) October 21, 2015

Behemoth companies like Delta, IBM, and Marriott are candidate experience obsessives and all three chanted “candidates are customers” at #HRTechConf. The logic is that you want repeat candidates as much as you want repeat customers and so you treat them to a great experience at every opportunity. An easier job application experience (e.g. on mobile devices) was a priority. Is mobile apply just for enterprises? Nope. Workable career sites are mobile-friendly and our mission is to help ambitious companies hire like the big guys.

It’s time to get better at career pathing

86% of ees leave due to a lack of career development and … #HRTechConf pic.twitter.com/mtcdT0qISw

— Aliah Wright (@aliahwrites) October 21, 2015

talent banking vs. talent trapping – BRILLIANT @CareerEngager Too many managers hoard talent #hrtechconf JoMillsCEG

— NoMorePlz2023 (@upsydedwnerth) October 21, 2015

#HRTechConf #ignite Reimagining career pathing… @CareerEngager pic.twitter.com/SvqlzQb2pG

— MervynDinnen (@MervynDinnen) October 21, 2015

From Jo Mills, co-founder and president of Fuel50, we learned that 86% of employees leave companies due to a lack of career development, resulting in a serious internal skills shortage down the line. To prevent that, employers should be sharing clear pathways for career growth with their new hires from day one. Also, instead of hoarding talent, managers should be helping employees start conversations with other teams and encouraging lateral moves within the company.

That concludes our recap of day three. Questions, corrections, comments? Get in touch at @Workable.

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Understanding the gig economy

Daniel Howden — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 17:17:35 +0000

The future of work is clouded by two contrasting visions. One is a daydream with a laptop and a sea view, where highly-skilled work is divorced from any particular location. The other is a nightmare of drudgery, where hours are spent plodding the corridors of a giant warehouse pushing a trolley with a robotic earpiece telling us to walk further and faster. Both visions take their cue from the excitable narratives swirling around the “gig economy” an idea for which there is no simple, commonly agreed definition.

To some it means white collar piecework, to others the wild west of unregulated digital sweatshops. The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford, refers to it as “tiny amounts for tiny jobs” which doesn’t feel adequate when others are describing a connected work marketplace whose value could soon run to tens of billions of dollars.

The Human Cloud

Gigging itself has its roots in the 1920s jazz scene but its current revival is more digital than musical. Mckinsey, so often the source of excitable business language, offers the most sober definition, calling it “contingent work that is transacted on a digital marketplace.”

For its boosters, the gig economy is the beginning of “the human cloud” where employers will be able to overcome skills shortages and liberate themselves from the confines of location. The loudest of these voices are coming from the platforms on which this economy is being constructed, like MBAandCompany, whose CEO Daniel Callaghan recently told the Financial Times: “You can now get whoever you want, whenever you want, exactly how you want it,” he says. “And because they’re not employees you don’t have to deal with employment hassles and regulations.”

The development economist, Guy Standing, sees something altogether different. He has coined the term “precariat” (an unhappy marriage of the precarious and proletariat) to describe a new and expanding underclass. While most economists have fretted about jobless growth since the last financial crisis, Standing looks to the future and sees “growth-less jobs” as the real issue. He foresees the spread of low productivity jobs with basement wages and practically no benefits like health insurance or pensions.

In short, the gig economy is an idea that tends to reflect the prejudices of its observer. A quick look at its emerging hierarchy gives some perspective.

The most solid thing you can say about the gig economy is that it’s smaller than the hype surrounding it. The prominence of companies like Uber, whose fleet of drivers are not employees, and the giant digital lawn sale that is Etsy, where people can turn handicraft hobbies into a side income, has caught the public imagination. The gig economy has already featured in the US election cycle with Democrats attacking it from the left and Republicans lauding it from the right.

Showing up everywhere but the data

But a thorough examination of government data shows little has changed in the last decade, with the percentage of Americans declaring themselves self employed declining. Some 6.5 percent of America’s 157-million-strong workforce were self employed in 2015, down from a high of nearly 9 percent in the 1990s. The proportion of workers with multiple jobs is equally stagnant.

Across the pond in Britain, freelancers make up just 2 percent of the workforce, a figure that is largely unchanged in the last 15 years. It’s possible that the increase in the number of Britons declaring themselves self-employed may contain some gigsters but it could also be explained by more traditional forms of self-employment. The three growth areas in UK self employment are hairdressing, cleaning and management consultancy. Yes, it’s possible that some of these consultants are trading their services on HourlyNerd or one of its competitors but these sectors were growing before anyone said “gig”. Conversely numbers of self-employed taxi drivers are in decline. As Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute puts it: “evidence of an exploding gig economy is showing up everywhere but the data.”

Related: How to hire freelancers

When it did show up in the data it was a false alarm. Most sensible analysts are agreed that when the wonks at the US Governmental Accountability Office announced in 2015 that the percentage of contingent workers had leapt from 30.6 percent in 2006 to 40.4 percent, it didn’t mean much. Their methods were problematic and their definition of contingent work was so broad it included everyone not in full-time conventional jobs.

The revolution will not be declared

The obvious thought is that official figures are a bad place to go looking. Not everyone declares gig income, especially if the work is done alongside a traditional job. Many people don’t think of renting out their couch or their car as a form of paid work, so they don’t tell census workers about it, let alone the tax collector.

A fairer assumption is that the gig economy is in its infancy and that its growth won’t be linear. The big beast of this emerging economy, Upwork, is cited as evidence of this: the human cloud platform took 10 years to reach $1bn revenues but expects to grow those ten-fold in the next six years.

To rebut the skeptics, economists like Harvard’s Larry Katz have dug into ‘1099’ filings for evidence. When a business, non-profit or government agency pays someone more than $600 a year in non-employee compensation this is the form they file with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). These filings are on the rise. A deep dive into government data finds that non-employer businesses (sole proprietors) are up from 12 percent of the US workforce at the end of the 1990s to 16 percent in 2013 (no data since). This has prompted some observers to argue that we have a “1099 economy”.

Daniel Tomlinson, from the Resolution Foundation in London, says that: “measuring the gig economy isn’t easy and governments would do well to follow the example of the US Department of Labor who have announced that they will soon be collecting statistics on the status of contingent workers.”

But he cautions against overstating the changes in the labor market and the extent of contingent working: “This isn’t to say that the gig economy is going to stay small; adoption of new technology by existing businesses, disruption by new innovative firms and the National Living Wage are all likely to contribute to the growth of the gig economy in the years ahead.”

21st Century laws

So the rise of the gig economy is real, it’s just not as large or as rapid as some have suggested. But it does pose very real challenges to business and policymakers. We’re seeing the most obvious manifestation of this is the legal battles being waged against Uber. Are their drivers employees or not? The company says absolutely not but some of the drivers take the opposing view.

This is where the work of Alan Krueger, formerly an economic adviser to President Barack Obama and Seth Harris from Cornell University come in.

“There is currently much uncertainty as to whether your Uber driver — or Lyft driver, or TaskRabbit handy man, or Thumbtack personal trainer — will be judged an employee or independent contractor by the legal system,” writes Harris.

The Krueger-Harris answer is to create another category of worker in the gray area between “employee” and “independent contractor” called “independent worker”. Their proposal would allow gig workers to join or form a union but it wouldn’t entitle them to paid holiday or protection from being fired. It would enable firms like Lyft to offer health insurance or pensions as benefits without the worry that the courts would label them employers.

The cynics will rightly wonder how many of the sharing economy behemoths would really want to offer benefits unless legally obliged to do so. Meanwhile, the first job ads have begun to appear for C-level Chief Freelance Relationship Officers. A recent Randstad talent report found that nearly half of HR leaders were thinking about how to respond to the gig economy.

HR expert Mervyn Dinnen says that freelance relationship officer is “a role whose time has come” and foresees more attention being paid to the way companies manage their reputation among freelancers. The Freelancers Union and their #FreelanceIsn’tFree campaign have already shown how gig workers can make themselves heard and gain traction. Our world of work is being reshaped but its final form will be contested.

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AI, ChatGPT and the human touch in hiring

Keith MacKenzie — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 13:37:53 +0000

The workplace has undergone an aggressive digital transformation for some time now. Let’s take a snapshot of where we stand at present, according to Workable’s recent survey report, The New World of Work, two years on: A 2022 Worker Survey:

Tech buy-in and adoption in hiring teams is a challenge for 22.8% of businesses
The percentage of businesses citing insufficient in-house capacity to hire as one of their major challenges has increased 84.5% since 2020
And finally – nearly one in five employers (17.5%) say their existing tech stack isn’t enough to meet their hiring needs

This was all before ChatGPT hopped into the ring with great aplomb. Surely, if we carried out the same survey today, all the above numbers would be higher. And as businesses increasingly incorporate more AI tools into their fold, many will find their existing tech stack is no longer enough to meet their needs. Likewise, employees worry that they’ll become redundant.

Plus, many businesses are exercising financial restraint. Technologies that don’t have a clear tie-back to revenue are being dropped like hot potatoes. Employees are being let go. That double-whammy means teams are limited in their capacity to stay on top of work – including in hiring.

That’s not supposed to bring you down, however. Stay with us here, and let’s go a little deeper:

Gartner’s Senior Director Analyst, Sandy Shen, said this about surviving the pandemic as a business:

“Businesses that can shift technology capacity and investments to digital platforms will mitigate the impact of the outbreak and keep their companies running smoothly now, and over the long term.”

“Businesses that can shift technology capacity and investments to digital platforms will … keep their companies running smoothly now, and over the long term.”

In other words, Jack be nimble, Jack be quick. That same sentiment rings even more true now – businesses that move quickly to AI-driven tech capabilities will stay ahead of the curve especially during these recession-prone times.

We’re seeing rapid adoption already, with a ResumeBuilder survey finding half of all companies are already using ChatGPT and 93% of current users say they plan to expand their use of this savvy AI tool.

Take on that optimistic spirit of early adoption of the tech – not just ChatGPT, but all the AI and digital developments happening in the hiring space – and you’ll see a vastly improved hiring process at a time when your business most needs it.

The evolution of AI in hiring

But what exactly is changing in hiring? A lot, as it happens. ChatGPT is already being used extensively to auto-write job descriptions, interview questions, and many other elements of the hiring process that at one time required a human to create. You’re still the driver, however, and there are many elements of hiring that you can drive with the support of AI.

With that in mind, let’s look at some fundamental aspects of recruitment and the ways in which they’re being digitally transformed.

1. Sourcing and outreach

The rise of advanced search tools, AI-driven algorithms, and automation has expanded the ability to identify and target top candidates. To stay ahead, learn to leverage these technologies effectively, engage with emerging niche platforms, and build meaningful connections with candidates through online communities.

Some of the tech advances in sourcing include:

AI-based candidate matching

Platforms are utilizing artificial intelligence to analyze job descriptions and match them with the most suitable candidates from a large database. Workable’s AI Recruiter, for example, can build a list of top passive candidates for your job openings utilizing our data intelligence gathered from hosting 160 million candidates in 1.5 million jobs.

Programmatic job advertising

AI-powered programmatic job advertising platforms help you target and attract the right candidates by distributing job ads across various online channels. These platforms analyze real-time data to make intelligent decisions on where and when to post job ads, optimizing budget and reach.

Recruitment chatbots

Chatbots help automate initial candidate interactions, answering questions, and pre-screening candidates. These chatbots can engage candidates 24/7, collect necessary information, and schedule interviews, freeing up time for more high-touch interactions.

Talent pooling and candidate rediscovery

AI-powered platforms allow you to tap into existing talent pools by rediscovering candidates who have applied for previous positions. By analyzing candidates’ profiles, these platforms can identify potential matches for new job openings, reducing the time and resources spent on sourcing. A good example is Workable’s Resurface Candidates tool, which does exactly this.

Source the best candidates

With Workable's AI recruiting technology, you'll automatically get the best-fit passive candidates every time you post a job.

Start sourcing

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2. Screening and assessments

Technology can revolutionize the way you assess candidates’ skills, experiences, and cultural fit. AI-powered tools and gamified assessments offer more efficient and engaging methods of evaluation. Hiring team members must stay up to date with these tools and ensure they comply with privacy regulations to maintain candidate trust.

Some of those tech advances include:

Pre-employment assessments

Hiring teams are increasingly utilizing pre-employment assessment tools, such as Criteria Corp and Workable Assessments, to measure candidates’ cognitive abilities, personality traits, and job-specific skills.

These assessments help to streamline the screening process and identify candidates who are more likely to be a good fit for the role and company culture.

Gamified assessments

Gamification has been incorporated into the assessment process to create a more engaging experience for candidates. Tools like Pymetrics and Arctic Shores utilize game-based assessments to evaluate cognitive abilities, problem-solving skills, and personality traits.

These provide a fun and interactive way to measure candidates’ fit for a role, while also collecting valuable data to support hiring decisions.

Skill tests and coding challenges

Companies use platforms such as HackerRank and Codility to administer skill tests and coding challenges, allowing candidates to demonstrate their technical abilities in real-world scenarios. These tools enable you to objectively assess candidates’ skills and compare them against established benchmarks.

Virtual reality assessments

Virtual reality (VR) technology is being utilized in the hiring process to assess candidates’ skills and aptitudes in immersive, simulated environments. Talespin and Immerse, among others, are VR-based assessment tools that test candidates’ decision-making, teamwork and communication abilities in realistic scenarios.

Automated reference checking

Automated reference checking platforms such as SkillSurvey and Checkster streamline the reference checking process by collecting feedback from a candidate’s professional contacts. These tools use AI algorithms to analyze the feedback and generate detailed reports, supporting hiring decisions.

Evaluate candidates quickly and fairly

Workable’s new pre-employment tests are backed by science and delivered directly through our platform. Hire the best candidates without ever leaving your ATS!

Try our assessments

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3. Virtual Interviewing

Virtual interviewing tools have become increasingly popular, providing valuable insights through AI-powered analysis. Through these technologies, whether carried out synchronously or asynchronously, hiring team members can make more informed decisions about candidates.

Asynchronous video interviews

Asynchronous video interviews enable candidates to record their responses to pre-set interview questions at their convenience. Platforms like Workable’s Video Interviews allow you to review and assess these recorded responses on their own time, streamlining the interview process and eliminating scheduling challenges.

Then, AI-driven analysis of these interviews can help you identify key soft skills and communication abilities – more on that below.

Synchronous video interviews

Real-time video interviews conducted through platforms like Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams became increasingly standard during the pandemic. These virtual meetings provide a cost- and time-effective alternative to in-person interviews while still allowing for real-time interaction between the interviewer and the candidate.

AI-driven video interview analysis

AI-based platforms can analyze recorded video interviews to assess candidates’ soft skills, communication abilities, and other attributes. These platforms use natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to evaluate candidates’ responses, providing you with valuable insights and data-driven recommendations.

Likewise, AI-powered transcription services such as Supernormal can then be used to transcribe, analyze and summarize these interviews, providing you with valuable insights and data points for further evaluation.

AI-based sentiment analysis

AI-driven sentiment analysis tools can evaluate the tone, emotions, and sentiment expressed by candidates during video interviews. These insights help you to better understand candidates’ communication styles, emotional intelligence, and cultural fit.

Platforms like RingCentral and IBM Watson can integrate with video interviewing tools to provide real-time sentiment analysis during virtual interviews.

Facial and voice recognition

Advanced facial and voice recognition technologies are being utilized to analyze non-verbal cues and vocal characteristics during video interviews. Realeyes and VoiceVibes are two such tools that can help you identify key traits and behaviors that may not be evident through traditional interviewing methods, offering a more comprehensive assessment of the candidate.

Virtual interview coaching and feedback

AI-driven coaching tools provide candidates with feedback on their interview performance, identifying areas for improvement and offering personalized guidance. This helps candidates to refine their skills and better prepare for future interviews, while also providing you with a slicker pool of applicants. InterviewStream and MyInterview are two such examples of this technology.

Move the right people forward, faster

Scaling up? Hiring remotely? Keep your pipeline moving with Video Interviews, a premium one-way screening tool from Workable.

Try video interviews

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4. Onboarding and beyond

The onboarding process is also evolving rapidly, with virtual onboarding tools and personalized experiences driven by data analytics and AI.

Digital onboarding platforms

Cloud-based platforms like BambooHR and Talmundo enable companies to centralize and streamline the onboarding process. New hires can access essential documents, complete paperwork, watch training videos, and connect with team members—all from a single platform.

These tools allow HR and managers to track progress, ensuring that new employees complete required tasks and receive necessary support during their initial weeks.

Virtual onboarding events

As remote work and distributed teams continue to gain traction as a standard in the workplace, companies are increasingly hosting virtual onboarding events to welcome new hires. Organizations use video conferencing tools to conduct virtual meet-and-greets, team-building exercises, and training sessions to help new employees feel connected and engaged from the start.

Personalized learning paths

AI-driven learning management systems (LMS) like Docebo and Cornerstone can create personalized learning paths for new hires based on their roles, responsibilities and skill sets.

By leveraging AI and data analytics, these systems can track progress and adapt training content to suit individual needs, ensuring that new employees are equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills for their roles.

Employee onboarding chatbots

AI-powered chatbots like Talla can assist new hires during the onboarding process by answering common questions, providing relevant information, and guiding them through required tasks.

These chatbots can be integrated into workplace communication platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams, offering real-time support and minimizing the need for new employees to contact HR or managers for help.

Social and collaborative learning

Digital tools like 360Learning and Degreed foster social and collaborative learning experiences for new hires. These platforms allow employees to share knowledge, ask questions, and collaborate on projects, enabling new team members to learn from their peers and build relationships within the organization.

The future of hiring tech

That’s a lot of tech already. But there’s more on the horizon – and ChatGPT and its cousins are really only at the cusp of it. Let’s look at the various other ways in which digital transformation of recruitment is continuing to grow:

Advanced AI-driven candidate matching

AI algorithms are growing to the point where they can predict the success of a candidate within a company based on data analysis of past employees’ performances. This could significantly improve the quality of hires and streamline the recruitment process, allowing you to focus on the human aspects of your role.

Virtual reality interviewing and onboarding

Virtual reality (VR) technology is already revolutionizing the hiring process. Candidates can be immersed in a virtual work environment, interacting with potential colleagues, and participating in real-life work scenarios before they even get the job. This provides you with valuable insights into a candidate’s ability to adapt and perform in their new role.

Augmented reality (AR) enhanced job previews

Likewise, augmented reality can be utilized to give candidates a more immersive preview of their potential work environment, from their desks to the company’s facilities. Candidates can use their smartphones or AR devices to explore their future workplace, interacting with digital information about company culture, benefits, and team structures.

This would allow candidates to make more informed decisions about accepting job offers and help you identify candidates who are genuinely excited about joining the company.

Blockchain-based credential verification

Blockchain technology can play a significant role in recruitment by streamlining the verification of candidates’ credentials, such as education, certifications and work experience. By using a decentralized, secure and tamper-proof system, you can quickly and accurately validate the qualifications of candidates.

This reduces hours spent on background checks and minimizes the risk of fraudulent claims.

Remote workforce management through IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) could play a vital role in managing remote workforces, as companies increasingly adopt flexible and remote work models. IoT devices and wearables could be used to monitor employee health, productivity, and engagement in real-time, providing valuable insights. This data could be used to create personalized support plans for employees, addressing their unique needs and preferences.

There’s plenty more, of course, but that’s just a taste of what’s happening now and in the near future.

Lessons from Michelangelo, Borg and Ford

Let’s step out of that tech rabbit hole for a moment, and consider some real-life lessons to help assuage fears that jobs will be taken over by artificial intelligence including in hiring teams. The reality is, AI can be your friend if you embrace it.

Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel

First, let’s look at one of history’s great painters and one of history’s equally great paintworks. While Michelangelo is famous for his work on the Sistine Chapel, he did not complete the masterpiece alone. He had a team of assistants to help him bring his vision to life. He consulted with them, worked with them to prepare the “canvas”, and so on. He still led the project and directed his teams to set the foundation for what ultimately became his masterpiece.

Likewise, for you, AI can be your assistant. It’ll take care of the other work and help you focus on the human aspects of your role, including fostering a positive candidate experience and ensuring that your teams are highly engaged.

Bjorn Borg and the wooden racket

When tennis legend Bjorn Borg made a comeback in 1991 after years in retirement, he chose to stick with his wooden racket rather than adopting the modern graphite rackets that had become the standard in the sport. His insistence on staying with outdated technology led to disappointing (and even embarrassing) results.

This is a reminder to stay up-to-date with – and ahead of – the latest technologies and trends in your area of work. If you don’t stay on top of your game, you’ll fall behind and miss out on top talent.

Henry Ford and the assembly line

Car titan Henry Ford revolutionized the manufacturing industry with his innovative assembly line, which dramatically increased efficiency and reduced production costs. Ford took inspiration from meat-packing plants and a grain mill conveyor belt to divide the labor into clear steps and to bring the work to the workers, thereby reducing time wasted in moving around and leading to mass production and cheaper cars.

Likewise, you can explore and adopt new technologies that can optimize your workflow and save you an incredible amount of time and hassle – and money.

AI isn’t a threat – it’s your ally

SWOT analysis is a common element of business strategy. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats – hence, SWOT. Think about what you’re doing at work, and what your company’s doing. What are your strengths right now? What are your weaknesses? And what are the opportunities you can capitalize on to overcome those weaknesses?

The fourth one – the threat – is probably overplayed when it comes to AI. The infusion of AI in hiring need not be seen as a threat to the profession, but rather as an opportunity for growth and enhancement.

Don’t forget that the human touch continues to be a vital aspect of the hiring process, and AI technology is the tool to support and streamline your efforts.

It’s an exciting time. Embrace this age of digital transformation, including in hiring. Learn from the successes of Michelangelo and Henry Ford, and the failure of Bjorn Borg, and navigate this new road. The future of hiring sits squarely in the harmonious blend of technology and human skill. Master that balance, and you’ll do very well.

The post AI, ChatGPT and the human touch in hiring appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Not everyone in the US values the same things in a job

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 13:14:01 +0000

So, let’s take a look at what those popular features are for each demographic, according to our Great Discontent survey of 750 workers in the US.

Females want more flexibility

First, we found differences by gender identity when asking about top attractors for a new opportunity. Those identifying as male are attracted to more job-specific factors including compensation of course (67.3% vs. 61.8%), clarity of job role (23.3% vs. 19.1%) and especially job security (39.4% vs. 25.5%).

Those identifying as female pointed to factors not necessarily about the actual day-to-day job itself, but rather about the supportive aspects of working life. For instance, if a mother is able to leave work early to pick up her kids or meet other home life obligations – all with the express support and encouragement of their employer – that’s hugely valuable for them.

The data shows this: work flexibility (44% vs. 31.6%) and moral / emotional support from the company (13.6% vs. 9.4%) are more important for females than males.

This is not to suggest that job-specific factors are not important to those identifying as female – rather, these responses indicate that there are other needs that have to be met in order to make their working arrangement feasible and better aligned with their personal needs and priorities.

“With more moms in the workforce than ever, there is flexibility lacking in schedules to accommodate children related needs. Child care is astronomical and salaries are not reflecting that.”

Minorities want more support

One of the demographic questions we asked in the survey was; “Do you identify as a member of a minority group (be it race, ethnicity, language, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender, or another characteristic)?”. A full third (33%) say they do, compared with 61.6% who say they don’t, and 5.3% prefer not to say. So we also looked at responses based on those answers.

We found significant differences in minority status here as well, particularly that compensation is more important for non-minorities than it is for minorities (67.9% vs. 55.1%).

So, what’s more important in a new job opportunity for someone who identifies as a minority? Training & development (18.9% vs. 13.5%) and moral / emotional support from their company (11.4% vs. 6.1%) top the list in terms of how much they differ from non-minority answers.

Likewise, when asked about what their current employer could do to improve employee experience, minorities pointed to career growth (38.7% vs. 28.5%), work flexibility (32.3% vs. 23.5%) and day-to-day work support (21.5% vs. 14.9%) as areas in need of improvement.

Of those who are open to other opportunities, those identifying as a minority are much more likely to pick “I need more meaning in my work” (23.8% vs. 16%) as a reason for doing so.

This isn’t to suggest that compensation isn’t important for someone who identifies as a minority – it, as said above, remains the top factor across all groups. It’s also important to note that the question of “Why are you looking for – or open to – new opportunities?” asked respondents to pick just one reason from a list, whereas for the other questions, they could choose up to three items. So if they must choose one priority and disregard all others, compensation will generally top the list.

Compensation aside, these results indicate that minorities are more likely to want support from their employer in other areas than non-minorities. Plus, there’s a clear need to feel more engaged in their work – likewise something that can be delivered by a thoughtful and empathetic employer as much as the role itself. The overall amplification of voices highlighting DEI in society may be a factor in all that.

Compensation grows with age

Likewise, we found differences across ages. Salary is more valued in older generations, whereas career growth opportunities tend to be more valued by younger generations. Those in the 21-29 age bracket ranked salary significantly less than those in the 40-49 and 50-59 age brackets (51% vs. 67.9% and 69.9% respectively).

Career growth opportunities trends the opposite direction, with those in the 21-29 and 30-39 age brackets valuing that higher than those in the 50-59 age bracket (40.7% vs. 33.1%).

This makes sense, as those in older generations will tend to be past the peak of their career development and starting to migrate out of the workforce, while those in younger generations may see the opportunity to grow in a career as having much stronger long-term benefit than straight-up compensation.

Plus, younger generations tend to have fewer financial obligations than their older, more settled counterparts – and therefore can be more flexible in what they need in a job.

Why is all this stuff important?

Let’s face facts. Money makes the world go around. It’s also a powerful measuring stick when showing the value you place on what someone brings to your company. Also, the correlation between money and happiness has been established in studies, including a widely cited one by Matthew Killingsworth of Penn’s Wharton School in Philadelphia.

And the reason why, says Killingsworth:

“When you have more money, you have more choices about how to live your life. You can likely see this in the pandemic. People living paycheck to paycheck who lose their job might need to take the first available job to stay afloat, even if it’s one they dislike. People with a financial cushion can wait for one that’s a better fit. Across decisions big and small, having more money gives a person more choices and a greater sense of autonomy.”

More choices, more autonomy, more command over all aspects of life. Keep that thought in mind as you proceed in your talent attraction game.

This is an excerpt from our Great Discontent survey report – want to read the whole thing? Check it out here.

The post Not everyone in the US values the same things in a job appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Different UK workers appreciate different things in a job

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 13:09:37 +0000

So, let’s take a look at what those popular features are for each demographic, according to our Great Discontent survey of 500 workers in the UK.

Females want more flexibility

First, we found differences by gender identity. Those identifying as male lean to factors around longevity and ascension, such as job security (43.7% vs. 36.1%) and career growth opportunities (30.8% vs. 26.1%), when thinking about what would lure them to a new opportunity.

The data shows this: work flexibility (47% vs. 39.3%) and moral / emotional support from the company (13.7% vs. 9.3%) are more important for females in the UK than for males. Day-to-day work support also is preferred more by females – 11.2% choose this attractor compared with 8.1% of males.

The priority of compensation doesn’t differ all that much – both genders ranked it equally high (71.7% for males, 69.5% for females).

This is not to suggest that career growth and job security aren’t important to those identifying as female – rather, these responses indicate that there are other needs that have to be met in order to make their working arrangement feasible and better aligned with their personal needs and priorities.

Minorities want more support

One of the demographic questions we asked in the survey was; “Do you identify as a member of a minority group (be it race, ethnicity, language, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender, or another characteristic)?”. Three out of 10 (30.9%) say they do, compared with 66.1% who say they don’t, and 3% prefer not to say. So we also looked at responses based on those answers.

We found significant differences in minority status when asking about top attractors to a new job. Those identifying as a minority placed less priority on the most popular items than their non-minority peers, particularly compensation (58.7%% vs. 75.2%). We also found significant differences in work flexibility (36.8% vs, 46.8%) and job security (35.5% vs. 41.7%).

So, what’s more important in a new job opportunity for someone who identifies as a minority? Career growth opportunities (35.5% vs. 25.7%) is a big one, followed by training & development (25.2% vs. 21.1%).

Although not a popular overall item, moral / emotional support from their company (14.8% vs. 6.9%) is still a much higher priority for minority respondents than for non-minority respondents.

Likewise, when asked about what their current employer could do to improve employee experience, minorities are twice as likely to want more clarity of job role and responsibilities (28% vs. 13.3%), and more likely to want better career growth opportunities (39.2% vs. 27.6%).

Again, this doesn’t mean that salary isn’t important for those identifying as minorities. In fact, it’s actually more so. When asked to choose just one reason why they’re looking for – or open to – new opportunities, three out of five (59.5%) picked compensation, compared with half (50.6%) of non-minorities.

“I need more meaning in my work” is also a more popular reason for minorities than non-minorities (26% vs. 20%), and “I need more support in my work” is likewise a higher priority (13.7% vs. 6.4%).

On the flip side, non-minorities are more likely to say they don’t feel valued in their present capacity (15.3% vs. 10.7%).

This suggests that minorities in the UK are more likely to want support from their employer in other areas in addition to compensation. There’s also a need to find more meaning in work, something that can also be delivered by a thoughtful and supportive employer who values its people.

Compensation grows with age

Likewise, we found differences across ages among UK workers. Salary is more valued in older generations, whereas career growth opportunities are more valued by younger generations. Those in the combined 21-39 age bracket ranked salary less than those in the 40-59 age brackets did (66.9%-67.9% vs. 71.5%-77.6%).

Career growth opportunities trends sharply in the opposite direction, with those in the 21-29 age bracket valuing that significantly higher than those in the combined 40-59 age bracket (39.3% vs. 24.3%-24.7%).

Younger generations also lean to training and development whereas their older peers are more aligned with the need for job security.

This makes sense, as those in older generations will tend to be past the peak of their career development and starting to migrate out of the workforce – perhaps increasing the need to build up their financial support base as they prepare for retirement.

Younger generations, on the other hand, are heavily inclined towards progressing in their career with training & development being a logical ingredient in that.

Why is all this stuff important?

Let’s face facts. Money makes the world go around. It’s also a powerful measuring stick when showing the value you place on what someone brings to your company. Also, the correlation between money and happiness has been strongly established, including in a comprehensive survey carried out in 2016.

And the reason why, says study author Matthew Killingsworth of Penn’s Wharton School, who carried out a similar study in the US:

“When you have more money, you have more choices about how to live your life. You can likely see this in the pandemic. People living paycheque to paycheque who lose their job might need to take the first available job to stay afloat, even if it’s one they dislike. People with a financial cushion can wait for one that’s a better fit. Across decisions big and small, having more money gives a person more choices and a greater sense of autonomy.”

More choices, more autonomy, more command over all aspects of life. Keep that thought in mind as you proceed in your talent attraction game.

This is an excerpt from our Great Discontent survey report – want to read the whole thing? Check it out here.

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70.7% of US workers have one foot out the door: Great Discontent survey

Keith MacKenzie — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 13:19:25 +0000

So, we asked questions to learn the current professional situation of our respondents.

Here’s what we learned:

Most of our US respondents say they’re working full-time (55.3%), with an additional 13.5% working part-time.

One in 10 respondents (10.4%) say they’re working for themselves, whether that means they’re a contractor, freelancing, or running their own business.

One fifth of respondents (20.8%) say they’re not working right now.

Those identifying as females are far more likely to be not working (26% vs. 15.3%) or working part-time (17.7% vs. 8.6%) than males.

We also found an equally striking gender imbalance in those who are working. Those identifying as male are resoundingly more likely to be working full-time (68.4% vs. 46.3%, a difference of 22.1 in percentage points).

And for part-time workers, the opposite is true – 17.7% of those identifying as female are working part-time compared with 8.6% of males.

Of those not working, more than a third (34.4%) have not worked in more than five years.

More than a fifth (21.9%) say their current status not working began just in the last six months, with an additional 13.8% saying it’s been half a year to one year since they had been working.

And now, the important part for you, the employer: seven out of 10 (70.7%) say they are either actively (33.4%) or passively (37.3%) looking for work.

This means that when you look at your existing workforce, just three out of every 10 aren’t potentially looking for work at this time.

And many are actually just starting to look at other opportunities. Of those either actively looking or passively open to other work, 54% started within the last half year (28.1% just started now, 25.7% in the last half year).

Employers take note: this means a majority of your people are looking to leave or they’re open to that possibility. On the flip side, if you’re looking to hire or build teams, you have a wealth of available talent to tap into here.

This merits a deeper understanding of who these people are and why they’re looking, so you can evolve your recruitment and people strategy. Let’s dig in.

Minorities are looking

So we looked at responses based on those answers. Those identifying as minorities are much more likely to be actively looking (42.9% vs. 29.3%) than those not identifying as minorities.

Younger people are looking

While the “passively looking” category is equally represented across age groups from 21 to 49 years of age, it’s the “actively looking” category that is significantly represented by younger cohorts, with 42.8% of those aged 21-29 saying they’re outright looking for new opportunities.

And when combined, the numbers are striking: a staggering 80% of those aged 21-29, 74.9% of those aged 31-39, and 75% of those aged 40-49 are either actively looking for or passively open to work right now.

We know that tenures are usually shorter for younger people. Also younger people tend to be more in rank-and-file positions than managerial/upper-crust positions, and those tend to see higher turnover.

But it also means younger generations in the United States expect more from their employers and are less willing to put up with the current reality in the workplace.

All in all, people are looking

Again, this points to a clear message: seven out of 10 employees at your company have one foot out of the door at any given time. Your talent is ready to leave as soon as they find something better. That’s particularly if they’re younger or if they identify as a minority.

But again, this is a huge talent market right here that you can tap into when hiring. Which raises a new question – how do you attract them to your company?

We’ll cover this in detail in the next few articles, but if you want to read more right now, jump right into our comprehensive Great Discontent US worker survey report right here.

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74.6% of UK workers open to new work, survey finds

Keith MacKenzie — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 13:19:34 +0000

So, we asked questions to learn the current professional situation of our respondents.

Here’s what we learned:

Most of our respondents say they’re working full-time (60.1%), and another fifth (22.2%) working part time. Just one in 10 (10.4%) say they’re not working right now.

Another 7.4% of respondents say they’re working for themselves, whether that means they’re a contractor, freelancing, or running their own business.

One in 10 respondents (10.4%) say they’re not working right now.

But when we looked at the responses by gender, the numbers were more striking. Those identifying as females are far more likely to be not working (14.5% vs. 6.1%) or working part-time (31.3% vs. 13%) than males.

Females working for themselves also represented a much higher percentage than their male counterparts (10.8% vs. 4%).

On the flip side, more than three quarters of males (76.9%) are working full-time, compared with just 43.4% of females, a significant difference of 33.5 percentage points.

Of those not working, nearly two out of five (38.5%) have not worked in more than five years.

Three out of 10 (30.7%) say they last worked within the last year, with 19.2% saying they have not been working for less than six months.

And now, the important part for you, the employer: a vast majority (74.6%) say they are either actively (29.6%) or passively (45.1%) looking at new opportunities.

That’s three quarters of all respondents who might leave you at any time – meaning when you look at your current workforce, just one in four are pretty settled in their current working capacity.

And many are actually just starting to look for other opportunities right now. Of those actively looking or passively open to new work, 56.6% started looking within the last half year (26.7% just started now, 29.9% in the last half year).

Employers take note: this means a majority of your people are looking to leave or they’re open to that possibility. On the flip side, if you’re looking to hire or build teams, you have a wealth of available talent to tap into here.

This requires a deeper understanding of who these people are and why they’re looking so you can evolve your recruitment and people strategy, as Personio’s CEO recommends. Let’s dig in.

Minorities are looking

One of the demographic questions we asked in the survey was; “Do you identify as a member of a minority group (be it race, ethnicity, language, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender, or another characteristic)?”. Three out of 10 (30.9%) say they do, compared with 66.1% who say they don’t, and 3% prefer not to say.

So we looked at responses based on those answers. Those identifying as minorities are also much more likely to be actively looking (41.3% vs. 24.2%) than those not identifying as minorities. And nearly twice as many non-minorities say they’re not looking for new opportunities when compared with minorities (29% vs. 15.5%).

Younger people are looking

Those in the “actively looking” category are more significantly represented by younger cohorts. More than two out of five (41.7%) of those aged 21-29 say they’re outright looking for new opportunities, with that number skewing sharply downwards when looking at higher age groups.

When combined, the numbers are striking: a staggering 79.8% of those aged 21-29 and a significantly higher 85.1% of those aged 31-39 are either actively looking for or passively open to new work right now. This means just one in five of those aged 21 to 29 and less than 15% of those aged 30 to 39 can be seen as quite settled in their current roles.

Interestingly, the top age group passively open to new opportunities is 50-59 (54.1%).

We know that tenures are usually shorter for younger people. Also younger people tend to be more in rank-and-file positions than managerial/upper-crust positions, and those roles tend to see higher turnover.

But it also indicates younger generations in the UK expect more from their employers and are less willing to put up with the current reality in the workplace.

All in all, people are looking

Again, the message is clear: three quarters of your employees at your company have one foot out of the door at any given time. Your talent is ready to jump ship as soon as they find something better. That’s particularly if they’re younger or if they identify as a minority.

But looking at it from another perspective, this also means a huge talent market that you can tap into when hiring. That raises a new question – how do you attract them to your company?

We’ll cover this in detail in the next few articles, but if you want to read more right now, jump right into our comprehensive Great Discontent worker survey report right here.

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Die hard: the troubled history of the resume

Daniel Howden — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 18:59:28 +0000

It was the early 1980s, there was a former matinee idol in the White House and the fax machine had yet to disturb the peace of office life but the resume was already being written off. The cold war was far from over, the only digital thing in most people’s lives was a calculator and yet some experts in the world of work considered the demise of the resume imminent.

It was hopelessly outdated, the career Cassandras declared, and poorly suited to the needs of modern employers. Three decades later the fax machine is dead (outside of developing world bureaucracies) but the resume has proven harder to kill than almost anyone anticipated. A long list of modernizers from YouTube and social media to LinkedIn and applicant tracking systems, have all been poised to kill the resume.

And yet, the casual researcher will quickly discover that half the internet is filled with advice columns on how to write the perfect CV, while the other half is made up of postmortems for the resume. Surely something has to give? The answer to that is no, not really.

The Da Vinci Cover

It’s popular among romantics to trace the history of the resume back to the original renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci. He wrote to Ludovico Sforza, otherwise known as the Duke of Milan, in 1482 advertising some of his inventions for a little local military campaigning. He opened the missive as follows:

“Most Illustrious Lord, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled contrivers of instruments of war, and that the invention and operation of the said instruments are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else, to explain myself to your Excellency, showing your Lordship my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below.”

While it’s a barnstormer of an opening sentence (and he invented an absurd amount of other things), it’s quite clearly not a resume. It’s a cover letter. Others have have attempted to pass off the letters of introduction carried by 16th century British aristocrats as proto-resumes. They were clearly reference letters.

CV versus Resume

Let’s get something straight at this point. Historically the CV and the resume haven’t always been the same thing. Yes, they’re often taken as European versus American ways of describing the same thing. But as any worthy pedant knows, they also referred to entirely different formats. The resume was traditionally a one-pager whereas a CV, especially in academia, could run to more than 10 pages. The same pedants roll out the Latin meaning of curriculum vitae (course of life) and contrast it with the French origins of resume (summary). Regardless, we shall say they’re simply two names for the same thing.

Prior to the turn of the last century there wasn’t much need for resumes. Most societies were stratified enough that a career (or the lack of one) was largely dictated by birth and people were meant, in British parlance, to “know their place”.

Industrialization, wars and technology upended this lack of mobility during the first half of the 20th century. By the 1930s a resume was almost normal, although experts warned applicants not to sell themselves for fear of appearing conceited. As recently as 1950 your age, weight and the origin of your parents were considered essential elements of the CV, along with a photo of yourself wearing a suit.

From VHS to YouTube

In the 1960s the dread of the typo on your resume (which some tyrants still insist should mean instant disqualification) was partly responsible for the popularity of the new-fangled IBM Selectric typewriter. Then as now errors were common.

By 1980 VHS has arrived and some intrepid candidates start mailing video portfolios. Meanwhile, the resume writing industry had taken off, with hundreds of breathless guides promising CV perfection. In 1987 the fax machine came along and was put to use spamming companies with resumes, just as email was nearly a decade later.

To anyone who has never had to write or read one it would be legitimate to ask why so many people want the resume to die. There are oft-quoted statistics that more than half of resumes contain lies and that recruiters in any case look at them for 20 seconds each. Kevin Grossman, the author of Tech Job Hunt Handbook, captures the animosity well when he writes that “the resume is a self-serving piece of inconsistently formatted and fudged professional drivel.”

Gaming the parsers

Along came LinkedIn in 2003, which despite its unloved interface, persuaded the bulk of professionals everywhere to create profiles containing most of the details we include in our resumes. We were told that LinkedIn was the death knell for the resume. Similarly grandiose pronouncements were made about the first efforts at video bios on Youtube.

When popular job boards and online applications saw the volume of resumes arriving at HR get a little out of control companies turned to resume parsing technology to extract the relevant information from the babel of formatting. The aim was to weed out some unqualified applications. So a new industry sprung up claiming to teach candidates how to game applicant tracking systems.

As more of our lives became visible online, it became popular to argue that the need for a resume has diminished. There is much talk of storytelling replacing resumes for creatives among others. This is all true and reasonable. But there is considerable confusion between content and delivery system. The need exists for a summary of professional achievements, preferably verifiable and hinting at what a person might be like to work with. The delivery system for this information is bound to change, the need for it is less likely to go away.

And talk of the medium ignores the real struggle that has kept the resume on life support. The resume, and the cover letter for that matter, may be no fun to write but they do represent a candidate’s best chance to frame the first impression. They’re unlikely to give it up easily. Most employers know which they would rather have from these two options presented by management writer, Victor Lipman: “A lot of information about a candidate where I do the filtering, or a little information about a candidate where they do the filtering?”

All that’s relatively safe to say is that the paper resume is dying. But then again… Even at Workable, a hiring software company that champions one-click job applications, resume parsing and standardized data on candidates, we occasionally get a lovingly-printed paper resume!

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HRTech conference: innovative hiring with social recruiting and video

Christine Del Castillo — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 01:24:30 +0000

At the HR Technology Conference (#HRTechConf) in Las Vegas, we’re keeping a finger on the pulse of the most innovative hiring practices from the world’s top companies.

Could these strategies work for you? Match.com’s social recruiting helps them hire great talent from anywhere in the world. Delta’s use of video throughout their hiring process supports high volume recruiting and gets high praise from job candidates. And, UnitedHealth Group shares an employee advocacy model that really works.

Why social recruiting works for Match.com

https://vimeo.com/134969251

Social recruiting isn’t new, but the “global mobility” scenario is and we’re likely to see more of it in the future. Hiring and relocating technologists is how Match.com keeps their pipeline full of great tech talent. To entice technologists from Dallas to work in Brazil, Match.com uses social media to paint a picture of what it is like to work in Brazil. They also use social media to communicate core values and share stories about how they’re solving exciting technical problems.

How video improves Delta’s candidate experience

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC-sm4E93FA

Let tech do the heavy lifting with high volume recruiting. Delta has 800K applicants a year and they use Hirevue to make intro videos, video scenario questions, and closing videos for their candidates. They also make job preview videos (like the one above) to give candidates a better idea of what the job entails. The outcome? An improved bottom line, a shorter time to hire, and high praise from candidates.

The impact of employee advocacy at UnitedHealth Group

At UnitedHealth Group, each employee advocate gets training on content creation and content training. Employees who opt-in enjoy being consulted about the company, and UnitedHealthcare has a more authentic way of communicating with job candidates. It’s a win-win for everyone with impressive results.

WOW: +2M impressions, +500 new visitors, +152 candidates and hires from #employeeadvocacy program. cc @heatherpolivka #HRTechConf

— Workable (@Workable) October 19, 2015

For more #HRTechConf coverage, follow us at @Workable. And, check back tomorrow for our three takeaways from day two.

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Working remotely: Are you a remote-curious employer?

Christine Del Castillo — Tue, 22 Mar 2016 14:49:23 +0000

Recent technological advances have made it easier than ever to decouple offices from jobs. They have also released a surge of interest in alternative ways of work, increasingly known as “remote-curious.” This is great news for employers, who now have unprecedented access to a global talent pool and can hire the best employees, wherever they are. It also means that employees are no longer bound to look for a job within commuting distance and, in some cases, can look for a different balance between work and the rest of life.

But working remotely isn’t for everyone and because it’s so new there are kinks that still need to be worked out. Last week, we joined the remote work experts at Buffer, Ashoka, Help Scout, and Trello in a discussion about why this organizational model works for them. We also talked about remote working pros and cons as well as the best ways to work with people you don’t see every day. These are our main takeaways.

Choose your own adventure

The great promise of remote work is a policy of flexibility. “Live smarter, not harder” is one of the core tenets of Buffer’s culture, according to CTO Sunil Sadasivan. With the exception of Buffer (a fully-distributed team, with a mailing address in San Francisco but no actual headquarters), most of our speakers said that the choice to work on-site or remotely was entirely up to their employees.

Flexibility, in the case of working remotely, also means identifying the moments when in-person interaction would be more effective. Liz Hall, VP of People at Trello, says that the onboarding hires usually takes place in person, at their main hub in New York. Rob Long our VP of Growth at Workable, worked remotely in London before moving to Boston to be in the same time zone as the rest of his team.

“The best team you can assemble isn’t all in Boston. It’s everywhere in the world,” said Sunil. Access to great talent, work-life balance, and decreased office expenses are three big reasons why these companies choose to build distributed teams. But, no one thinks of remote work as the end game for their companies. According to our panel, successfully distributed organizations are inherently flexible and reevaluate their situations constantly.

Tips for hiring remote workers

"When we hire remotely, it’s because they’ve been the best person for that job," @_RobLong from @Workable #workableideas

— Help Scout (@helpscout) March 15, 2016

Remote work isn't for everyone: 45 days as a contractor before becoming @buffer employee –@sunils34 #workableideas pic.twitter.com/OSSSIf82oN

— Asha Aravindakshan (@DCasha) March 15, 2016

At Ashoka and Buffer, hiring managers look for job candidates who demonstrate a strong streak of self-sufficiency. These people are often creators of organizations, communities, and side projects. Becca Van Nyderenen, Head of People Operations at Help Scout, says that having remote work experience isn’t necessary–but that it’s a red flag when inexperienced candidates have no questions about working remotely.

Mel Larsen, who leads recruiting at Help Scout, shared an overview of how they hire. The process is the same for remote and on-site employees. Candidates must pass a culture screen, a technical screen, and a trial period or “project phase” in order to get to the final stage of the hiring process. At Buffer, candidates undergo an extended version of “project phase” called Buffer Bootcamp.

Keeping the team connected

.@Ashoka 100% cloud worldwide @Office @salesforce @FinancialForce @NetSuite @BoxHQ @Skype @WebEx #WorkableIdeas pic.twitter.com/fhF3HZagOg

— Asha Aravindakshan (@DCasha) March 15, 2016

Just like a relationship, you need to work at maintaining remote-first culture–you have to think, not just do. #WorkableIdeas

— Mercer Smith (@mercenator) March 15, 2016

Managing remote employees across locations and time zones requires the highest level of intentionality. Tech tools can take the place of an office, but they only do half the work. Scheduling face-to-face conversations, water cooler moments, and all-staff gatherings ensure that remote employees bond and contribute to virtual team building. Leaders should also resist the temptation to keep big conversations private. Asha Aravindaskhan, Global Director of Talent Operations at Ashoka, says the company practices transparency by enabling any employee to call into executive meetings.

Remote work challenges and the way forward

https://twitter.com/AnthonyMarnell/status/709894686782189568

How do you deal with differences in base pay around the world? @Buffer's post on this subject – https://t.co/vm2YdkieRC #WorkableIdeas

— Workable (@Workable) March 16, 2016

Our panelists agreed that the biggest challenge of employing remote workers is providing the same experiences for all employees at their companies, such as benefits, base pay etc. The last frontier of remote work is bridging the gap between tech and international laws pertaining to employment. “While the technology for remote teams has skyrocketed forward in the last 10 years, international laws haven’t changed: citizenship, tax laws, and insurance coverage are all still built for people to live in the country they were born in, work for a company based in that same country, and stay fixed in one spot,” said Help Scout’s Mel Larsen.

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Challenges of remote work: the tech shall overcome

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 17:56:42 +0000

In this chapter, we address the following questions:

How much can companies go remote?
Why can’t some employees go remote?
Why can some employees go remote?
Which industries are good for remote work?
Which industries aren’t good for remote work?
What helps employees succeed in a remote workplace?

We’ve established remote work as the number-one disruption going forward. But what will that new remote work world look like, and how feasible is it? We asked those questions in our survey as well.

Shift to remote is doable – to a degree

Two thirds of respondents (64.3%) reported that, of their workforce not already working remote, more than a quarter can move to a virtual environment without disruption. And 15.2% said they’d be able to move their entire workforce to remote.

But that’s just one side of the same coin. The other side is that more than a third (35.7%) of respondents can only move at most one quarter of their current non-remote workforce to a virtual environment without disruption. In other words, a full three quarters or more of their workforce cannot go virtual.

So, what’s stopping them? We asked that, too.

Challenges of remote work

Predictably, the need to be physically present for work is a dominant challenge in shifting to a remote-first environment, particularly for those in healthcare (81.5%) and education (73.9%). Yet, those same sectors didn’t consider adaptability, resilience, and readiness of workers to be a major issue when transitioning to remote-first.

“There is still value in being present. We are a route-based business and some staff must still report to the physical location. We want to avoid creating a disparity between job roles.” – Survey respondent

In the “Other” category, respondents cited logistics, the value of physically being in the same space, and lack of management buy-in as leading factors in the challenges of remote working.

When asked about what does enable them to go remote, a full 69.6% of education workers said they didn’t need to be physically present at work, tops across our four major sectors, while at the same time trailing all other sectors in terms of technological readiness.

One could dive deeper into the “why” of this, but one potential takeaway is that those in education feel they can work remotely if they have the technology to do so. There are myriad reasons for not having the technology, for instance, a digital divide among students, budgetary challenges, or lack of buy-in or support from key stakeholders and users.

What we do know is that many major schools from K-12 to college/university – including in California and at Harvard – are moving to a digital-first curriculum and may even remain so for the foreseeable future. Technology has enabled that to happen.

Perhaps that technology component marks a permanent shift and a major change in a sector that traditionally has required physical presence. We may see similar trends in other sectors.

So – the paradigm shift continues to be remote, and technology helps that shift to happen – but some sectors are not as ready as others.

Want to learn more? Navigate to:

Chapter 1 on the impact that COVID-19 had on business and processes
Chapter 2 on the magnitude of the shift to remote work
Chapter 4 on the challenges of remote hiring and why
Chapter 5 on the role of technology in remote work going forward
Methodology and firmographics
A collection of open-ended responses from those we surveyed.

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COVID-19 big shifts: The workplace will stay remote controlled

Keith MacKenzie — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 12:47:12 +0000

In this chapter, we address the following questions:

How many workers worked remotely before COVID-19?
How many workers are working remotely during COVID-19?
How many businesses plan to make the remote workplace permanent?
What are the biggest paradigm shifts due to COVID-19?
How do the COVID-19 paradigm shifts differ by industry?

COVID-19 isn’t just a health pandemic – it’s also a social and economic pandemic in that it has significantly impacted how people and businesses operate.

Shift to a remote workplace

The majority of respondents (68%) reported that, prior to the COVID-19 crisis, a quarter or less of their employees worked remotely. Just 11.2% of businesses reported that three quarters or more of their workers operated in a virtual environment before the crisis hit.

And now? A significant portion of respondents (nearly 60%) said at least three quarters of their staff currently operate in a remote working environment.

The stark difference between these two graphs (pre-COVID and current COVID environment) indicates that COVID is a major catalyst in moving to remote, and that this change was very sudden. It also tells us that many companies hit the ground running in that shift – in many cases, literally one day to the next.

Shift to the remote workplace is permanent

When asked about a permanent shift to a remote workplace, 41.3% of respondents said they will move at least some positions to a virtual environment, and an additional 9% said they will be fully remote after COVID. Just over one-fifth (21.9%) said they will not permanently move any positions to remote.

Remote work and distributed teams led by and far in a list of predicted paradigm shifts post-COVID, with a full 71.1% of respondents citing that shift as a new standard. This is well ahead of other options including rules around physical distancing, more tech adoption, and updated workplace design.

“Remote jobs will increase. Companies will adapt to remote working patterns; this will be the new normal even with the invention of a vaccine. As people become used to working from home, meeting physically will be only a matter of necessity.” – Survey respondent

Of those businesses considering a more permanent shift, one-third (33.3%) of respondents said that they plan to move half or more of their workforce to remote going forward. Another 40.8% said they will move 26% to 50% of their workforce to a remote workplace environment.

The difference in the pre-COVID remote work numbers and post-COVID plans – and the large number of businesses who moved some or all their workforce to remote during the crisis itself – tells us that COVID-19 not only is a significant catalyst in shifting to remote, but also heavily impacts future plans around remote work.

Of course, each business has their own unique experience in this shift. Three potential stories are:

Businesses were already planning to move some of their workforce to a remote environment for a variety of reasons (economics, logistics, engagement, etc.), and COVID-19 merely expedited those plans (for example, Twitter);
Businesses were considering remote as a possibility, but not as a priority until COVID-19 hit; or
Businesses did not think remote was feasible or even a good idea, but changed their perspective when forced to operate in that environment by COVID-19.

Numbers differ across industries

Although remote work was the most popularly predicted paradigm shift across all respondents in our survey, those in the healthcare sector say rules around physical distancing (63%) and tech/digital adoption (59.3%) will be as significant as remote work (also 59.3%) as major changes going forward.

And those in education tagged changes in the physical workplace as their second-most popular choice after remote work.

Still, remote work is the clear leader in terms of paradigm shift. This tells us that, regardless of industry, remote work is here to stay.

Want to learn more? Navigate to:

Chapter 1 on the impact that COVID-19 had on business and processes
Chapter 3 on the challenges of remote working and why
Chapter 4 on the challenges of remote hiring and why
Chapter 5 on the role of technology in remote work going forward
Methodology and firmographics
A collection of open-ended responses from those we surveyed.

Want to read it all in one place? Check out the full report here.

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How businesses responded to COVID-19 – and what they’re planning now

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 12:53:53 +0000

In this chapter, we address the following questions:

How did businesses respond to the COVID-19 pandemic?
What were the effects of COVID-19 on business operations?
How did COVID-19 change hiring?
And finally: how are businesses planning for a post-COVID future?

Not only was COVID-19’s impact palpable, it was also very tangible and it forced action in many aspects of business. Let’s look at what our respondents did when COVID-19 became a reality for them.

Business response to COVID-19

As is now known, a significant impact of COVID-19 on business was that it triggered a sudden transition to a fully remote working environment where all employees worked from home. Our survey confirmed this – nearly two-thirds (62.6%) of respondents cited going fully remote as one of the actions their business took.

A third (32.3%) of respondents said they moved part of their operations to a remote environment. It bears noting that nearly a third of all respondents work in IT/technology – considered to be one of the most remote-friendly sectors.

A sizable percentage of businesses introduced precautionary measures at their working location (37.9%) and/or reduced capacity at work, if remote was not an option for all workers (18%).

“It’s going to look very different without a doubt. … Personally, I think it will be good for us, we were starting to lose focus of who we were, it was becoming less important to talk to people face to face and more important to stare at phones. … Yes, we will be using technology more in our day-to-day lives due to COVID-19, but now we are focusing more on what’s actually important.”
– Survey respondent

Economic impact

The economic impact of COVID-19 is also significant in our dataset. A full 12% shut down business altogether – albeit temporarily in most cases. All but one in hospitality and 26.1% of those in education shut down. In terms of company size, 21.7% of those in the 1-9 employee-size bracket opted to shut down temporarily, a far higher rate than any of the other size categories.

More than a fifth of our respondents reported that their businesses laid off or furloughed employees. When breaking down by company size, we found those in the 50-99 and 100-499 employee-size brackets were statistically more likely to lay off workers, with percentages choosing this option being 12.3 and 10.6 percentage points more than the percentages of total respondents in those brackets. The opposite was true for those with 10-49 employees, with just 17.1% in that category choosing to lay off or furlough workers, compared with 26.1% of total respondents falling into that size bracket.

And by industry, those in hospitality (62.5%) and manufacturing (50%) were more likely to turn to layoffs and furloughs as an option, whereas those in healthcare (7.4%) and education (4.3%) were far less likely to choose that route.

Changes going forward

When asked about the changes businesses are planning going forward, the response was comprehensive, with all listed options being selected widely. The most popularly selected moves are travel reduction (59.3%) and a shift to remote (56.5%). Closely following are plans to switch to staggered/flexible work schedules (44.9%) and a redesign of the physical working environment (44.1%).

Many of those in the “Other” category stated they aren’t entirely sure yet, with one indicating they want to see how other businesses fared before taking action of their own. Others plan to increase personal protective equipment (PPE), sanitation protocols, and overall employee safety either in the field or in the workplace. One respondent in the business/consulting sector plans to require clients to be tested beforehand.

Most striking is that just 6.2% of respondents stated that nothing is being planned going forward.

Whether it’s layoffs, a shift to remote, or redesigning workplaces, this response tells us that COVID-19 impacted the majority of businesses in our survey, and drastically altered their planning.

“I think that it will change a lot in the world. Adapting as we have gave us knowledge to be more flexible and change to remote working. I think many people will adapt more wellness programs and education.” – Survey respondent

Impact on hiring

COVID-19 was also readily felt in the hiring space. Two-thirds of respondents (65.2%) said they were hiring less during the crisis or had frozen hiring altogether. Just 8.1% said they increased their hiring in response. Although our own survey results don’t reflect it in terms of healthcare hiring, it’s well documented that healthcare, supply chains, telecommunications, and the mortgage industry are sectors that aggressively ramped hiring in the early days of the crisis.

Company size also dictated responses: smaller companies (1-49 employees) and larger, enterprise-sized companies (>1,000 employees) were the most likely to report that they’ve frozen hiring completely, while a full half of companies with 500-999 employees said they were hiring less than planned.

None of the six size categories saw more than 10% of respondents hiring more than planned.

Want to learn more? Navigate to:

Chapter 2 on the magnitude of the shift to remote work
Chapter 3 on the challenges of remote working and why
Chapter 4 on the challenges of remote hiring and why
Chapter 5 on the role of technology in remote work going forward
Methodology and firmographics
A collection of open-ended responses from those we surveyed.

The post How businesses responded to COVID-19 – and what they’re planning now appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Social media recruiting: trends and features to watch

Christina Pavlou — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 14:01:22 +0000

Social recruitment can evolve as quickly as social media features do, leaving recruiters feeling overwhelmed. Here’s a roundup of standout social recruiting trends to follow and what features are worth exploring this year.

Social media recruitment trends

Live broadcast

All major social media networks have invested in live broadcasting: Facebook Live, Instagram Live Video, Snapchat Live Stories and Periscope on Twitter. You should consider doing the same. As technology advances and helps build better streaming apps, it’s safe to say that live videos will be a big trend in social recruitment for 2017.

For recruiters, live streaming could mean a 360⁰ video of your office, a live Q&A session or backstage footage of an event you’re hosting. With live streaming, you’re giving your followers the chance to participate in your company, thus increasing engagement on (and traffic to) your company’s career page.

Ephemeral interfaces

Snapchat was the first network to use content that disappears after a few seconds. Instagram has already announced a similar feature, Disappearing messages.

Ephemeral content is becoming a trend in social recruiting because of its carefree nature. You don’t have to spend too much effort creating something perfect; people are mostly looking for an authentic, raw approach. A good Snapchat “We are hiring” video doesn’t need to give much information to applicants about your open role, but should show personality and spread a playful attitude. You can pique candidates’ attention with a fun message and then route them to your official careers page.

Exclusive content

It’s no longer surprising to see a job ad on Facebook or Twitter. In fact, more people are looking on social networks for their next job opportunity. Offering a realistic glimpse into your company life is the next social media recruitment challenge. Use your company’s social media accounts to build your employer brand and share information that candidates won’t find elsewhere:

- Designer eyewear company Warby Parker uses its corporate Instagram account to showcase employees playing ping pong or wearing nap masks.
- Here, at Workable we shared some of our Halloween festivities with our Twitter followers:

Just a typical working day at @Workable..
#halloween @screeklish pic.twitter.com/XSz9CzioDq

— Eftychia Karavelaki (@Eftychia_K) October 31, 2016

You can also curate your content to reach your desired job applicants:

Build unique pages for each country, if your company has multiple international offices. Nestle is a good example: they keep a global Facebook careers page and several country-based ones.

Share career-related advice for applicants. Deloitte UK includes a “Career Inspiration” section in their Facebook page, where people can ask about the application process, career issues and what it’s like to work for Deloitte.

Create distinct tabs for different career levels. On Unilever’s Facebook page, for example, you can find sections for entry-level, senior-level and recent graduates careers.

New social media recruitment features for 2017

Here are some of the features – either already released or coming soon – that you should keep an eye on:

Facebook has recently introduced the Jobs tab feature that allows companies to post their open roles using the status updater tool on their business page. Job listings will appear in the new tab and applicants can directly send their personal information via Messenger.

Instagram has also gone through some major changes, adding Instagram stories and Disappearing messages features. With these new features, recruiters can share more spontaneous moments from their company life to grab potential candidates’ interest.

Twitter frequently releases new features, like Moments and the Connect tab. Recent changes in the Twitter interface allow you to include more than 140 characters in your tweets and to improve notifications on your timeline. These features help you curate your content to attract more followers.

Snapchat, or Snap Inc., is not just a messaging app anymore. Upgrades to their Discover feature encourage users to read their favorite publications and contribute to local news. Also, the latest Snap feature, Group Chat, facilitates team communication. Recruiters can use Snap features to offer an inside look into their company life and interact with candidates in a casual way.

Social media platforms aren’t going to replace official recruiting channels, like job boards. At least not for now. But social media recruiting will only get bigger. This doesn’t mean you have to adopt every new feature and trend. Explore the possibilities social media offers and craft your recruiting strategy based on your needs. You can take social recruiting in bite-sized chunks or go all-in and record your very own #MannequinChallenge.

Taking a PAUSE while sorting food to have some fun w/ employees #MannequinChallenge ? @ChuckRobbins @FranKatsoudas @ChrisDedicoat @rjacoby15 pic.twitter.com/UYs4ocaZxf

— We Are Cisco (@WeAreCisco) November 28, 2016

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In-House Recruitment Expo: Key takeaways from 2018 IHRE at Telford

Christina Pavlou — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 17:58:33 +0000

In October 2018, I visited Telford in England for the first time, to attend the In-House Recruitment Expo Summit. Attendees and keynote speakers from all over Europe gathered on Oct. 9 to share their ideas, challenges and best practices around recruitment.

Great morning at launch of IHRE18 Summit! Lots of great sessions to go this afternoon. Register on Site @ The TIC, Telford! pic.twitter.com/KFiHSaIc9r

— InHouseRecExpo (@InHouseRecExpo) October 9, 2018

During my time attending seminars and masterclasses, in between presentations and visiting exhibitors’ booths, here are my biggest takeaways from the 2018 HR summit at Telford:

1. Recruiters vs. Robots: the battle hasn’t started yet

And it’s highly unlikely that it’ll ever start. Technology has changed the way we hire and has even had an impact on job-seeker behavior (with 72% of candidates spending an average of 2-6 hours researching and using 14.5 sources to gather as much information as they can for their potential employers.) But we are not talking about removing the human factor from recruiting. Dave Hazlehurst, partner at Ph.Creative and keynote speaker, explains:

Tech knowledge is the enabler – not the solution. The more digital we become, the more human we must be.

There are intangible traits that make us human, like empathy, imagination, passion and creativity, and by incorporating them into the hiring process, we can make the difference in the candidate experience.

Matt Buckland, Workable’s VP of Customer Advocacy with 16 years of HR experience, agrees:

We need to have a human process, not process the humans.

Technology is here to help us hire more effectively and to optimize the process; it’s time-consuming to collect and combine data manually. Think, for example, sourcing tools that use boolean search logic. Or AI-based systems that match your requirements with potential candidates. In the end, though, we use our intelligence to reach decisions.

2. Employer branding is not a buzzword; it’s an action plan

There’s no point in identifying your employer brand and defining your core values if you don’t do anything about it. In his presentation, “How to build an employer brand in 100 days,” Dave Hazlehurst explained that you need to promote your culture everywhere: from your job ads and careers pages to your offline communication with candidates (e.g. during interviews.) Make your brand attractive to potential hires by using engaging content, pictures and quotes.

But before you get there, Dave suggests doing an in-depth research among your current staff. Identify common patterns across your company by asking questions like:

What’s the one thing you wished everyone knew about working here?
What did you hear about the company before joining?
How has this changed after you were hired?

Not everyone will answer the same way. Junior-level employees and executives will have different perspectives. Same goes for an engineer versus a marketer. But these different perspectives resonate with candidates, too. They won’t all join your company for the same reasons. So, use the data you gather to build your unique personas. And then, differentiate your employer branding tactics based on these personas.

3. Employees (should) stand at the heart of HR

Before accepting a job offer or even applying for one of your open roles, candidates will go to multiple sources to learn as much as they can about your company. This adds an extra degree of difficulty for you, as you now have to control the messaging out there about your company and create compelling and up-to-date content on various channels (such as Glassdoor, LinkedIn and Facebook) that will boost your reputation. It’s no longer only about finding great candidates; you also have to convince them that your company is an ideal fit for them.

Tomas Coulter, co-founder of 360 Resourcing Solutions, spoke of the importance of Employee Value Proposition. Or, as candidates would put it, “What’s in it for me?” According to Tomas, your EVP should center around these five pillars:

Monetary incentives
Prospect of the role
Day-to-day
Company culture
Relationships with team members

As to how you communicate your EVP to candidates, PathMotion co-founder David Rivel gave some valuable tips:

Stories have a greater impact than facts. That’s why job seekers prefer to hear real stories from real employees to determine whether they’re going to apply at your company.

For example, instead of just saying that you have a great culture, ask your current employees to describe a day at work in a personal, authentic way. This will help illustrate life at your company and attract like-minded people. After all, your employees are ambassadors for your company.

4. Recruiter and hiring manager: #RelationshipGoals

The recruiter-hiring manager relationship is a complicated one. Recruiters might complain they don’t get prompt feedback from hiring managers. On their part, hiring managers often feel that recruiting is not their job. Both parts, though, have a common goal: to hire the best candidates. So, instead of fighting or avoiding each other, they should actually be working closer together. Lee Harding, Talent Acquisition Manager at Shop Direct, put it nicely:

Recruiting doesn’t have to be painful for hiring managers. We, recruiters, need to make a plan to educate and empower hiring managers through the entire process.

This plan starts with recruiters and hiring managers sitting side by side and talking about the role. Recruiters might discover something useful – for example, that they should reach out to candidates from X company because they have built innovative products. And hiring managers will get access to valuable data they wouldn’t be able to find themselves, like salary benchmarks for the role they’re hiring for.

To make it work, this relationship shouldn’t be forced. As Lee explains, both parts should meet regularly, even when there’s no current open role, so that they build a true partnership.

Recruitment is always changing; new dynamics emerge in the space while old tactics either change or become obsolete. That’s why it’s important to stay on top of the trends as much as possible – or better yet, ahead. We’re doing that by attending numerous recruitment-focused events all over the world; next time you’re at such an event, please stop by our booth. We’d love to hear your thoughts on the current and future trends in HR and what you’re doing about them. In the meantime, we’re happy to chat with you on LinkedIn or Twitter.

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Brexit and employment: 6 things you can do today to prepare for Brexit

Keith MacKenzie — Wed, 23 Jan 2019 17:07:27 +0000

If you’re in the recruiting space, Brexit poses a unique conundrum. The lack of clarity around what’s coming up has led to, among other things, a voluntary exodus of EU talent. That’s just the tip of the iceberg: experts are anticipating a sudden involuntary exodus of EU talent once new immigration processes are implemented in Brexit’s wake, leading to a mounting skills gap in the UK-eligible candidate pool.

This is already happening; one can only rely on projections of what lies ahead for Brexit and employment, and these projections change daily as per parliamentary proceedings. As a recruiter or employer, you’re caught in the middle of all this because, somehow, business must carry on and you must meet those business needs with hiring strategies and plans for the year ahead.

But how? How? All this Brexit uncertainty means it’s hard to plan ahead – whether it’s your hiring plan, business outlook, ramping up (or down) sales projections, and so on. To address this, we talked to Louise Haycock, a Director at Fragomen. Fragomen is a leading firm dedicated exclusively to the delivery of immigration services to companies around the world. The firm has upwards of 3,800 staff in more than 50 offices and provides services to many of the world’s leading corporations. It works with clients to facilitate the transfer of skilled employees into more than 170 countries. Fragomen’s professionals are respected thought leaders in the immigration field providing evidence and expertise to governments across the world including the UK Parliament, the US Congress, the European Union and the United Nations. The firm supports all aspects of global immigration, including strategic planning, quality management, compliance, government relations, reporting, and case management and processing.

DISCLAIMER: We know the impact on your recruitment efforts is immeasurable, and we hope we can help you navigate the uncertainty of this period. With some adjustments in dates and schedules, you’ll still find a solid ally in our Brexit content.

Let’s be clear: Brexit will impact recruitment. Free movement of EEA nationals into the UK (and vice versa) will go and employers need to be ready. Businesses need a change management strategy and they should be clear on who it impacts, when and how. Employers are trying to cope with planning for the changes that would be implemented by the Withdrawal Agreement (or Plan B, C, D, E or wherever else we end up) whilst simultaneously ensuring they aren’t caught short in the event of a no deal.

What would happen under the Withdrawal Agreement?

There would be a transition period that would run until 31 December 2020. In essence, free movement would continue until the end of the transition period, during which time EEA nationals in the UK and UK nationals in the EEA register their status to allow them to stay. Individuals arriving after the transition period would apply for immigration permission under the rules in place in each of the EEA, Switzerland or the UK as applicable.

What would happen in a no deal?

In the case of a no deal, there is no transition period. Employers should prepare for free movement ending on 29 March 2019 (or when Article 50 expires) and EEA nationals in the UK and UK nationals in the EEA have to take action (most likely by registering their status). We explain further in #1 below.

Of course, Brexit isn’t just a migration problem. There are regulatory concerns and logistics issues and that’s not even scratching the surface. Businesses may consider bringing in a Brexit Project Manager who can oversee the whole process from start to finish, particularly in terms of compliance, strategy and mitigation of Brexit’s impact on your organisation. Recruiters and HR can play a huge part in this, so ensure that you and your colleagues are fully informed and updated on all Brexit developments – even highlighting the unknowns is useful in terms of strategic planning.

So, context is useful. After speaking at the Workable-sponsored event Brexit: Recruiting Through Uncertainty in London on 23 January 2019 (video below), Louise shared her recommendations on six things you can do today to prepare for Brexit and employment.

1. Plan for no deal (just in case)

If there is no deal between the UK and the EU, as stated above, free movement ends when Article 50 expires (currently scheduled for 29 March 2019). UK nationals arriving in the EEA to start work after that date would need to apply for immigration permission under the rules in place in the member state to which they relocate (and may need permission in more than one country in the case of UK nationals living in one member state but working in others). EEA nationals who arrive in the UK after 29 March 2019 will no longer have the right of free movement. At a minimum they will have to register to stay in the UK and worst case scenario, they must apply under Tier 2. You should build a contingency plan for this.

New Hires/New Assignees

Our immediate concern is new hires or those starting assignments after 29 March 2019. If you are aware of British nationals relocating to the EEA or EEA nationals to the UK, consider bringing start dates forward to on or before 29 March 2019 to ensure that they benefit from the free movement provisions. If not, manage expectations of both the individual and their line manager. The UK national relocating to work in the EEA will likely have to obtain immigration permission to start work, adding time and costs to the process. EEA Nationals relocating to the UK will be able to enter and start work, but will need to apply for European Temporary Leave to Remain if they wish to stay longer than three months (at as yet unknown cost). This will give the individual a 36-month permission to work in the UK. After this time, they would need to switch into an immigration status under the new immigration regime or leave the UK.

UK Nationals in the EEA

This bears repeating: In a no deal, free movement will end when Article 50 expires. UK Nationals residing in the EEA on or before 29 March 2019 will need to take action. The EU27 have begun to publish guidance on requirements so employers should look out for this, in particular any deadlines by which UK nationals have to make their applications which will vary from country to country in a no deal scenario.

EEA Nationals in the UK

In a deal or no deal, EEA Nationals who relocated to the UK whilst free movement provisions were in place will be required to register under the EU Settlement Scheme. Applications are expected to be accepted until at least 30 December 2020. In a no deal, only those residing in the UK on or before 29 March 2019 are eligible. The third stage of the pilot is now open (a fee of £65 is payable for applications made up to and including 29 March 2019 but will be reimbursed). Employers can encourage their EEA based populations to apply as soon as they are able.

2. Know your population

Take a look at your current workforce and check the Brexit effect on workers and who will/can be impacted, i.e. who are your UK nationals in the EEA, and who are your EEA nationals in the UK? Once you have this information, you are best placed to communicate with them and to analyse the impact that the right of free movement could have on your business.

Next, divide them into cohorts based on their needs. This could be Irish nationals – who are not impacted as their right to work in the UK is protected under legislation pre-dating the UK’s membership of the EU. They could be UK nationals in Europe (look out for any registration schemes), EEA Nationals in the UK (get applying under the EU Settlement Scheme).

You may also want to consider special categories, including VIPs, commuters, frontier workers and assignees.

3. Communicate and support

Next, communicate to each cohort based on needs. These communications should reassure, inform, educate, and encourage. It isn’t just the cohorts outlined above that you will need to contact. Others in your business who are not directly impacted may need to be educated or kept aware, including those in legal, finance, C-suite, HR directors and line managers.

There are a number of media channels you can communicate through, based on your target audience: emails, webinars, town halls (in person and/or virtual), printable/shareable guides, FAQs, posters, videos, intranet pages, and so on. These communications can include information on where your colleagues can get help and who they can talk to.

Being open in your communications and showing compassion and support for your employees and colleagues, whether present or future, will reaffirm their faith in you as an employer.

4. Plan for the future

Deal or no deal, the UK will implement a new immigration regime from late 2020 onwards which will treat EU nationals in the same way as other non-EU nationals.

In December 2018, a white paper was released by the British government on this new immigration regime. Highlights of this white paper for workers include details on:

Abolition of the cap (currently 20,700 restricted Certificates of Sponsorship – CoS)
Abolition of Resident Labour Market Test (RLMT)
Reduction of Skill Level from degree level to A-Level. Roles that could be sponsored subject to salary level would now include Air Traffic Controllers, IT User Support, Electrical and Electronic Technicians, HR Officers (but not HR Administrators)
£30K salary threshold (to be consulted on)
A transitional route which would be reviewed in 2025 that would be for all skill levels including low skilled. This route would provide a 12-month visa followed by a 12-month cooling off period for self-sponsored, low-risk nationalities

Also, keep an eye on Fragomen’s informative and regularly updated Brexit section to stay up to date on developments.

5. Update your work policies

Audit your workplace policies, and consider which ones may need updating. You’re especially looking for details that may or will be impacted by Brexit, including right to work, onboarding, mobility, visas, expenses, and so on. You might want to consider whether your policies are suitable for a post-Brexit age. Are they too generous given the expense of obtaining a visa or not generous enough if you are still looking to attract migrant talent who don’t have the ease and flexibility that they once had? Budgets need to be prepared and in place to start an immigration process, so check that your policies and financials match.

You will also want to audit internal processes and communications to ensure that everyone adheres to these new policies and is fully on board as to how to continue to smoothly operate as a business.

6. Educate your business

Talk with colleagues whose decision-making processes will be impacted. This can, as above, include legal, finance, C-suite, HR managers and line managers. Consider the needs and obligations of each in terms of their roles in the organisation.

For instance, consider that a new immigration system will have the following effects on your business operations:

Longer processes: in procuring a visa and other necessities for EU nationals in UK and UK nationals in Europe. You’ll need to manage expectations on the time it will take to hire for all relevant parties (currently it can take around three months to secure a Tier 2 visa for a new hire to the UK based overseas before they take up the role).
Higher expenses: visas are expensive (circa £9,000 for a Tier 2 visa valid for 5 years). You need to free up budget for this.
Potentially smaller candidate pools: as the UK becomes less attractive to previously visa-free candidates, the number of candidates applying for roles may drop sharply. You’ll need to establish smarter recruitment strategies.
Gaps in skill sets: many skilled jobs will be difficult to fill due to departing talent. Devise and implement training programmes where roles have typically been filled by EEA nationals.

Conclusion

The lack of certainty around Brexit and employment – particularly for organisations such as yours – means there is no perfect solution. However, if you do your homework, consider the segments in your workforce and the specific impacts on each, open up channels of communication and support, and keep your policies and colleagues regularly updated, you should have a smart short-term strategy designed to pivot quickly at the earliest sign of measurable change.

For more information on how Fragomen can help you with your business, visit their website or contact Louise Haycock at LHaycock@fragomen.com.

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The key to standing out in recruitment during Brexit uncertainty

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 10:00:00 +0000

The UK recruitment market is particularly tough right now. With continued Brexit uncertainty, many professionals are nervous about moving jobs, putting pressure on UK employers to consider new ways to attract, recruit and retain the very best workers.

What’s more, according to data from CV-Library, salaries are soaring across the UK, with average pay in 2018 jumping up by 7.6% on the previous year. It’s clear from this that companies are trying to pull out all the stops in order to secure and retain the top talent. But is this really a strategy that businesses can afford to continue with?

Alongside this, when looking at average advertised job numbers, the agriculture, legal, property and retail industries saw the biggest rise in job numbers in 2018, an increase by 38.8%, 26.6%, 23.3% and 22.5% respectively.

At a first glance, this might suggest that employers in these industries are feeling confident about their hiring efforts and growing their teams. However, we cannot ignore the fact that some of these sectors, such as agriculture, are predicted to be hard-hit by Brexit, largely because of the projected departure of EU-based talent. As such, it’s clear that companies within these industries are being impacted by ongoing skills shortages.

In light of these issues, this article will explore these trends in more detail, as well as a number of concerns that employers have around Brexit, offering practical advice on how to stand out as an employer during uncertain times.

Sourcing candidates

The second half of the double whammy facing employers already losing EU-based talent is that the current economic climate has prompted many professionals to remain in the safety of their current employer. While this is positive news for businesses in terms of retaining key employees, it does also spark real concern for the organizations that are looking to grow their teams and bring in new talent – particularly as many are already finding it difficult to access the skills they need.

In fact, according to research, 39% of hiring managers struggle to find the right skills because of Brexit, with a further 24% stating that they need confirmation and clarity on what the potentially limiting immigration rules will be around Brexit. Many organisations rely on EU talent to supply key skills, meaning a crackdown on migration will have a serious impact on these businesses, including those key industries we mentioned earlier.

So how can employers continue to source the individuals they need? Using the right tools is extremely important, whether it’s an applicant tracking system like Workable, or a job board like CV-Library. Better still, integrating the two types of platforms can ensure that you have access to both active and passive candidates, while also streamlining your entire hiring process. Alongside this, consider building out a strategy for social media recruiting or even word of mouth. Strong employer branding will also help your company be more attractive to candidates and help counteract some of the negative press toward UK organizations resulting from Brexit developments.

Attracting professionals to your roles

Are you making a job offer that candidates simply can’t say no to? In the current climate, attracting candidates beyond the usual higher salary and benefits is extremely important. After all, many companies can’t afford to keep up with the Joneses financially and instead need to look at other ways to stand out.

At the same time, while higher salaries are all good and well, all the money in the world won’t reassure a candidate who’s worried about where they’re going to be in one year’s time.

The trouble is, we are operating in a candidate-driven market. Many professionals know their worth and will use this to their advantage to find a role that ticks every single box.

In order to keep up with these demands, you need to consider what makes your business unique. Can you safely say that your workplace has a stand-out factor that makes you better than your competitors? If the answer is no, it might be time to consider investing some time in switching up your entire people processes, culture and perks.

For example, are you offering flexible working hours? Are you proactively supporting mental health in the workplace? Do you have any additional perks, such as giving staff their birthdays off? These don’t have to come at too much of a financial cost, but can do wonders for helping you stand out as an employer of choice in the current climate.

What’s more, consider some of the more unique perks that can set your business apart. Unlimited time off, duvet days, paid puppy leave, a wellness allowance and so on are quickly emerging as some of the upcoming perks in the workplace. And, outside of these admittedly quirky offerings, consider what perks can you offer a candidate that will specifically help to alleviate any concerns around Brexit.

For example, some organizations have introduced Brexit Project Managers who are on hand to help individuals sort everything they need to they can stay in the UK and particularly, with the business.

Do your research on what will be most effective and don’t just throw out a new perk for the sake of it.

If you build a strong foundation of culture and benefits for employees, your employer branding efforts and attracting qualified professionals will become easier.

Recruiting and retaining the best workers

Of course, in a candidate-short market, retaining your top employees is also extremely important, especially as the cost of recruiting someone new can be a massive cost to the business. As noted, Brexit uncertainty may have made short-term retention a bit easier, but the most qualified and best employees might still leave your organisation, especially if they’re from another country.

Retention is all about understanding what drives your employees and ensuring that you’re offering them an exciting career path that they can’t afford to leave behind. Ask yourself, how often are you sitting down with your employees and discussing their performance and goals? Are you holding regular salary reviews to reward individuals for their hard work?

Your focus should not only be on sourcing new talent, but also maximising the skills of existing employees. Investing in their development can be extremely beneficial to the organisation, helping you to remain competitive in these difficult times. For example, do you offer training programs, whether internal or external? How often are you working with your employees to discuss their progress and set new goals? Consider these factors and what you can do to enhance your employees’ careers and get the most out of their skill-sets.

Alongside this, while you don’t want to ‘scare’ your employees or make them worry about the safety of their jobs, it is important to address that the current market is a difficult one. By being honest, open, and reassuring them that you’re all in it together, you’ll stand a better chance at retaining your workforce.

Stand out as an employer during uncertain times

It’s no secret that businesses across the UK are struggling to find the talent they need right now. With ongoing uncertainty around Brexit, it’s difficult to know how the market will remain in 2019. What we do know is that organisations need to think of how they can improve their candidate attraction methods in order to fill key skills gaps within their companies.

By taking action now and focussing on standing out as an employer, whether that’s focussing on your employer brand or working with the right recruitment partners, you’ll have a better chance of attracting, recruiting and retaining the best workers in the midst of Brexit uncertainty.

Augusta Henning is PR Manager for CV-Library and Resume-Library and has been writing about career related topics for more than six years. She has a passion for communication and enjoys creating all sorts of content for her employer.

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Why millennial job-hopping shouldn’t be a warning sign for recruiters

Elizabeth Onishuk — Thu, 25 May 2017 13:18:16 +0000

Millennials have a bad reputation as entitled job-hoppers. Hiring managers can’t get past resumes that read one and a half years here, two years there. Red flags go up.

Recruiters think: Lack of experience. Hard to sell. Pass.

CEOs think: Fickle. Entitled. Hard to retain.

You know what? I’m not convinced these stereotypes are true.

I recruited 18 people in the last two quarters at Workable. Most of them are millennials. And in the last five years of my talent acquisition and consulting career, some of the best candidates I’ve presented to CEOs had short work stints.

It’s an undeniable fact – millennials are notorious for switching jobs every few years. But I actually like that. I think it’s a good thing for businesses. Here’s why.

Millennials job-hop because:

They want to grow professionally;
and they can’t grow where they are.

This group of employees is not okay with staying static. And that’s a quality all thriving businesses should want on their teams. This growth mindset is what keeps companies competitive.

Why job-hopping makes millennials good hires

Recruiters and CEOs need to reframe their thinking around why someone leaves a role. If it’s not for causing bodily harm to someone else, or embezzling, it’s because they’re restless. If millennials want to keep developing their skills, and their company is not doing that for them, then why shouldn’t they leave?

Here’s why I think recruiting job-hopping millennials is good for business:

They’re adaptive. These hires adjust well to new environments, so they’re more likely to be on-boarded quickly. They are growth-minded, so they’ve got great potential to develop within any organization.
They’re disruptors. They challenge the status quo, and are at the forefront of changing workplaces for the better. They have a unique set of needs and advocate for new policies in the workplace (e.g. LGBTQ rights, remote work and workplace wellness.)
They’re risk-takers. It says a lot about a group of people who assume the risk of switching jobs every two years. Quite frankly, I would rather hire someone who takes that risk than someone who stays in a secure micromanaged role for seven years.
They’re social responsibility-focused. Millennials are much more apt to ask—and sometimes demand—that their employer give back to the local or greater global community in some way, even if their future employer is a for-profit tech company.

In my experience, hiring millennials can also create a mentorship culture, especially at companies with older, more tenured employees. Generations learn from each other and companies grow. There truly is strength and greater output in diverse workplaces.

How to hire and retain millennials

Hiring and retaining millennials involves thinking like them. Start with job descriptions. I see too many job ads that ask for too much. An arbitrary “X years of experience” prerequisite stands in the way of recruiting amazing, talented millennials from the start, since they probably won’t have the listed three years of experience in Y. I’d rather see a candidate speak to who they are and what they’ll do for a company.

You can also focus on building your employer brand. Your employer brand is your reputation as an employer. It’s your most powerful recruiting tool. And millennials have myriad ways of gleaning what your company’s candidate experience is like. You can’t attract the best candidates until you have a good reputation.

As a recruiter, I believe in my judgment skills. So persuasion is part of my job. When I’ve got a great candidate on my hands, and the powers that be need convincing, you better believe I’ll keep convincing them. So, don’t give up if you believe in someone’s abilities. With my millennial recruits who were tough sells in the past, the CEO has always come back to me and said “Wow.”

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5 alternatives to the same old resume

Daniel Howden — Fri, 12 Feb 2016 10:04:09 +0000

Outdated, suboptimal, dysfunctional are just a few of the words readily associated with resumes. We’ve been in an unhappy relationship with the resume for most of our working lives (or all of them if you’re a millennial).

The BBC’s late, lamented tech series, Tomorrow’s World, showed us an office of the future way back in 1967, it had a robotic receptionist, computers everywhere and no CVs. Forty years later we’re most, if not all of the way there on the first two, but the resume refuses to die.

A whole cast of resume alternatives have auditioned over the years for the role of resume replacement but none of them have really landed the role. Meanwhile, we remain stuck in the wrong conversation. We discuss the form that our professional story takes — paper, VHS cassette (yeah, that was a thing) rather than the function.

So, now for the futurism. Here are some examples of interesting contenders for new types of resumes and a new functional way of telling our professional stories.

1. LinkedIn profiles

Since its appearance in 2003 LinkedIn has been championed as the scourge of the resume. “Resumes have stunk for a long time but LinkedIn may finally be their death knell,” predicts HR strategist, Dr John Sullivan. “The main problem with resumes is that it takes too long and a lot of motivation for nonactive jobseekers to update them. So by substituting a LinkedIn profile (which they constantly remind you to update) you can avoid that time delay. In addition with LinkedIn profiles, all the information is in the same place, so it is easy to compare two individuals on the same factors. There is also some data showing that because LinkedIn profiles are public, they are more accurate than resumes.”

The downside to LinkedIn profiles is that you don’t own it, LinkedIn does. This means they get to dictate layout, rules and to some extent content. This suits employers but candidates will chafe against these constraints. The resilience of the resume is partly explained by the enduring belief that it’s possible to game your way to a job you’re not qualified for.

2. Infographic resume

Suspend your disbelief. It might feel like this idea had a false start, and certainly we’ve seen some bad ones. Some hiring managers find them frustrating because they want a five-second scan of the resume and complain that design trumps content. For sure, infographic resumes don’t suit every job or every candidate but some recruiters, including Matt Buckland, see nothing wrong with them depending on the relevance to the role. For those of us who are not designers but would like to take a look at what’s possible the tools are improving. The standout is ResumUp who offer a basic visualization of your resume or LinkedIn profile for free. For a monthly fee of around $5 you can get a lot more bells and whistles working on your behalf. There are also a few decent alternatives to ResumUp.

3. Social resume

Done well via YouTube, Facebook etc. the social resume is useful. Done poorly (as it most often is) it’s painful. People have been trying video portfolios since the heyday of VHS (DVDs that looked like plastic bricks). YouTube gave fresh oxygen to this with often dreary results, as people produced home movies selling themselves. How many hiring managers do you know who hired someone on the strength of a YouTube resume?

A lot more employer branding is happening on video platforms (with General Electric showing how it should be done). So it’s fair enough the applicants respond in kind. The vogue for QR codes on resumes feels like just that, a vogue. That said, they don’t have to be black and white and ugly as Hamilton Chan from Paperlinks explains. Mashable has a meandering roundup of social media resumes being done well in varying formats. It’s hard not to think that this is a cute way to meet marketing or community manager candidates but not a good fit for everyone else.

4. Workshape

Hung Lee, the CEO of Workshape.io likes to compare text-based resumes to fossil fuels. We know fossil fuels are bad but we’re so invested in them we’re reluctant to move on. Lee has turned to developers and techies because he thinks they’re more open to swifter change. He’s right that this community has already rejected the resume in large part: “There no quicker way to end a recruiting conversation with a developer than to ask them for their resume. They will say ‘look at my website, which I built myself’ or my answers on Stack Overflow, or my repo’s on Github, or the apps I’ve built.”

His answer was a visual signature or Workshape, a graphic representing how much time a developer wants to spend on tasks such as operations, UX, front-end, back-end etc. The results make their workshape. Whether this will “lead the way in teaching the mass market that there are other ways to describe the work humans do,” remains to be seen.

5. Personal website

You know you’re approaching the end when you get something that feels like a combination of several of the previous entries. The personal website has many of the problems associated with the resume and resume alternatives: it takes time to do it well and to maintain it; it can be hard for a hiring manager or recruiter to get the information they’re looking for and the result is subjective. But it also has all the creative strengths of the previous suggestions, as well as greater flexibility. For designers and architects it’s a portfolio. For writers it’s a library. For photographers it’s a gallery and for engineers it’s a demonstration of actual skills. The point here is that for a host of different careers it’s becoming increasingly possible to show what you can do rather than tell someone you can do it. As we become more aware of conscious and unconscious bias in the recruiting process and we blind our resumes to contact details, name gender and even college background, we creep slowly towards matching jobs and people in a more objective way.

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Why I’m cautious about remote work

Nikos Moraitakis — Tue, 16 Oct 2018 10:19:00 +0000

To clarify, I’m not referring to flexible work-from-home arrangements. This is about full remote work, i.e., you don’t get to share a room with others ever, or you do so infrequently during company retreats, conferences and other once-in-awhile events.

Tech isn’t lossless

Getting to know and understand each other in “real life” is a big part of management. I’m not entirely convinced you can replace the social and interpersonal cues you get in a shared workspace with video and emoticons on a screen, no matter how good the tech has become.

Maybe experienced managers can somehow overcome this by simulating good habits they picked up years ago. But are we undermining the opportunities of a high-potential junior to grow into a good manager by letting them work remotely?

Organizations that scale beyond a dozen or so people rely on serendipity and natural socialization to widen people’s lens about what’s going on. Lunchtime conversation, work-related or not, may be the most unappreciated management tool we have. Remote makes you blind to this. It also renders the tool useless and ineffective.

Peripheral vision

Let’s be fair: tools facilitating informal/transitory socialization do exist in place of the absent in-person lunchtime conversation. HR tech will continue to evolve to support high-five, show-and-tell and such types or “peripheral vision” interactions. Slack (for all its discontents) is loved by remote workers, precisely because of their visceral need to connect.

Yet, I’m still skeptical about the inherent structure of workplace socialization tech. Its makers have incentives that don’t always align with the people and companies using them. We’ve seen this story before with social media. What drives engagement is not always what’s good for us.

Getting the job done isn’t where it should end

The most valuable part of workplace relationships extends past a single employment cycle. My co-founder, as well as some of my best colleagues, mentors, friends, and other social connections, are people I’ve met in a previous job. Are we willing to trade this for the convenience of not having to commute to the same office space every morning?

Truly remote companies will tend to be geographically spread out – or else, what’s the point? This is not incompatible with the modern business, but real life is very geographically driven. In remote work, are we sacrificing the opportunity to form lifelong friends and intellectual partners?

I struggle to articulate the last point. I can’t help but feel there’s a certain naïveté in thinking that an organization can be reduced to process and structured touchpoints. Maybe it works for some types of projects, but humans tend to resist the objectification that comes with it. We aren’t livestock, after all.

Ideological undertones?

There’s an ideological underpinning to this trend. Many corporations put results on a pedestal. Meritocracy advocates insist to focus on “pure skill”, looking at personal relationships and human dynamics with some suspicion. Skeptics like me are seen as “touchy-feely” and parochial.

Is this an inadvertent return to Taylor and the dehumanization of the workplace? The advocacy certainly does bring up some memories of 1990s business process consultancy bullshit – at least in its simplistic depiction of organization in boxes and processes. There’s more to it than that.

So, can remote work be part of an organization? Absolutely. Can you build long-lasting organizations primarily on a remote workforce? It has been done, but it may be situational or limiting in some ways. One has to be very conscious about what they’re giving up.

I’m not just an old fart, just a bit skeptical. Like many, I enjoy work from home. I often produce my best work this way. I love how it forces people to put extra structure in their work. I run a transatlantic company. I’m not a stranger to multinational teams.

What I’m trying to say is we don’t know enough about the effects of remote work. It will take time to see how it behaves at scale and what its long-term effects are. Companies taking a cautious stance are not “backwards” or parochial – perhaps they are just very thoughtful about breaking things that potentially have larger after-effects on people and organizations.

I know successful companies built on remote. I admire them. I notice they put a lot of effort to make it work and often remote is a flagship part of their corporate culture. I don’t deny their success. On the contrary, I don’t assume that their achievement is easily replicable.

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Return to office has huge benefits, says one talent director

Keith MacKenzie — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 17:57:22 +0000

Let’s start from the beginning: remote and hybrid work are all the rage right now. In fact, our Great Discontent worker survey found that 33.8% of US workers and 42% of UK workers consider it quite important to them.

But we’re also seeing many companies planning to return to an in-office setup – in that same survey, 52.8% of US and 44.7% of UK workers say their companies probably will return to the office when things return to “normal”. And HqO has already done that, back in the spring of 2021.

We joined Chris for a chat about HqO’s own RTO strategy, and we’ve pulled together the main takeaways from that conversation.

Remote work is not be-all and end-all

Despite remote work being one of the top-touted paradigm shifts for 71% of businesses in our 2020 New World of Work report, Chris says that isn’t a universal sentiment among companies or even workers. He suggests that the work-from-home phenomenon may just be an experiment that ultimately proved the value of in-office work in the end.

“There’s a lot of evidence behind work from home being increasingly challenging and not sustainable,” says Chris. He shares two statistics to back this up:

In Oct. 2020, Google found that their engineers produced 30% less code during the pandemic.

Colliers International released a survey of office professionals in early 2020 stating that 23% of respondents say their productivity had declined when working remotely.

He calls those numbers “mind boggling”.

The impact of remote work on trust

“I think most people are productive, don’t get me wrong,” Chris says. But, he does see the need – and appetite – for a shift back to in-office work.

For example, trust in the employee base took a big hit in the remote-work world.

“I’d love for someone to defend the idea that trust and empathy have not been shattered [when] working remote,” Chris says, “especially when all your interactions are either over Google Meet or Zoom or Microsoft Teams.”

And while trusting your employees is essential to success in a remote-work environment, Chris does take a pragmatic approach about the realities of remote work for a business that needs its employees to be available when needed.

“I’ve heard of stories … for some hybrid or remote employees where they’re talking about their colleagues on social media, going to the beach in the summertime, taking half of the workday to golf, heading to bars and restaurants in the early afternoon, all this happening before the workday ends.”

And that can actually hurt the overall morale in a company’s workforce.

“You’re seeing all that empathy and trust just be completely ripped apart. And I think you’ll hear more of those scenarios entering 2022.”

And even a hybrid solution isn’t the perfect solution.

“What’s going to happen when your boss wants to be in the office three to four times a week. Your team is on board with that, but maybe you’ve moved or maybe you’re just not comfortable. And you want to go in one to two days a week. What happens there? I think that’s going to be something that a lot of companies need to think about.”

The impact of remote work on mental health

The trend towards remote work has made it difficult for some companies who want or need their employees to return to on-site work.

Consider the worker backlash Apple experienced when shifting operations back to the office – although the Delta variant meant a delay in their RTO strategy, Apple still plans to return in January 2022.

And there are legit arguments for a return to office. Remote work can lead to burnout, if a June 2020 survey from Monster.com is any indication. That survey found that 69% of workers who were working from home during the pandemic experienced burnout, up 35% from early May 2020.

Of course, there are different factors at play here – the struggle to separate work responsibilities from home responsibilities and working at home with children, for instance. Plus, throughout 2020, there was a lack of options for personal leisure such as attending sporting events, going on trips or eating out, and other pursuits as societies locked down; which of course made life difficult for millions.

The power of camaraderie

While Chris acknowledges that remote and hybrid work are here to stay and there’s always going to be a place for it, there’s one significant common denominator that he’s learned from his role at HqO: the power of connectivity and teamwork between workers when they’re in the same physical space.

“These employees thrive in an office culture,” he explains. “It’s a no-brainer. The energy is so contagious. That’s fueled by probably our let’s-go rallying cry and our values as well. It’s something that we hit on just about every single day here. So that stands for learning excellence, truth, speed, goodness, and ownership.

“You get to be part of that office banter. And I think you saw that a little bit coming in and our employees and being loud a little bit. I think that’s more effective, face-to-face if that’s your manager or somebody that’s underneath you, one of your team, and just be part of that experience.”

Again, the Great Discontent worker survey backs this up – 37.1% of US workers and 47.3% of UK workers both pointed to relationships with colleagues as one of the most important factors that would attract them to a new role.

There’s room for both

HqO isn’t alone in that thinking, Chris adds. There are other companies moving back to the office as well. Unlike Apple’s experience, Chris emphasizes that there’s a lot of support for HqO’s own RTO strategy, as they added two floors to their office space during a time of aggressive growth.

“I’ve actually been really pleasantly surprised with the number of people [interested]. My team engages with that and are desperate to be back in office. … I think that the thing that people miss the most are the people in the office themselves. Bottom line, that’s never going to change.”

While the priority placed on remote work options continues to be high for many potential candidates, Chris finds that there’s no shortage of applicants who specifically want to return to the way things were.

In fact, Chris says that when the expectation was set in March of this year that HqO was going to have an office-first culture, people didn’t leave. In fact, they stayed engaged. If pandemic safety was a concern for an employee, Chris emphasizes that the doors are open for a conversation about that.

Flex work is the way to go

Plus, he adds, office-first doesn’t mean being in the office five days a week. Rather, it’s about worker flexibility – which needs to be given no matter what.

“There’s going to be some things that come up. If it’s a doctor’s appointment or the unplanned parts of life – stay home, do your work. I’d probably take it a step further and say, ‘Hey, if you know, you’re super busy and you just have that heads down work to do,’ you can take that day to stay home and actually do it. Cut back that commute time, whatever it is, and go back into the office the next day.”

There’s also flexibility in terms of work schedules – again highlighted in our Great Discontent worker survey as a significantly higher priority than remote work. That’s the reality at HqO as well.

“There’s some days that, maybe you want to come in a little bit early, so you can take off at four or maybe you’re coming in at 9:30, 10 o’clock depending on what you do and you’re leaving the office at 6, 6:30 at night.

“So there’s that degree of flexibility, but I’d say the core hours, where it’s just what everybody’s here, is that nine to five block.”

The Great Resignation and its impact

Chris is pragmatic about the reality that remote work certainly has its appeal and that the great talent shuffle is very real. He acknowledges Texas A&M professor Anthony Klotz’ prediction of the Great Resignation and that the transition to a post-pandemic workplace means many workers will prefer to leave their jobs than go back to the way things were.

However, he adds, there’s a new problem for companies who want to remain remote. He shares a story about one HqO partner in Boston about how that company’s employees are regularly being poached by companies in San Francisco, New York, Austin and Seattle.

“So now,” Chris says, “you have Boston companies that have shifted to remote that are now competing with other cities, which is just like, ‘Man, how much more complicated can this get’?”

RTO is a big differentiator

So, for in-office companies like HqO, there’s an opportunity in the unique employee value proposition of in-office work. The in-office strategy is actually a specific attractor for some talent, says Chris. He adds that HqO’s hiring teams are actively looking to recruit people who do want to work in the office.

“I’m listening for people that want to be challenged and make that significant connection there,” Chris explains about HqO’s own hiring strategy, emphasizing the importance of being proactive and innovative in recruitment marketing.

“I think, if we’re going to go out there and we’re going to attract some of these folks that want to be an office, we have to direct message folks,” Chris says.

“Again, so many people are hiring right now. You need to give your company a chance to stand out, really spark that curiosity from somebody.”

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Flexwork a must for 43.5% of UK workers – but are employers listening?

Keith MacKenzie — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 16:26:24 +0000

It’s also the third-most popular item that workers want to see improved at their current place of employment (27.4%).

It’s not just that flexible work has benefits – it’s a highly desired, and in many cases, much-needed component of work. If you, as an employer, can realistically offer this option – especially flexible schedules – your profile as a desired place to work will grow in the eyes of people looking for new work. In short, it’s a significant value prop in your arsenal.

And if you don’t offer flexible work, especially if you could, the consequences could be considerable. Consider the backlash against Apple in their initial drive to move back to an in-person working environment. Employees left in droves for other options, and the media coverage was fierce and uncompromising. This can’t reflect well on Apple’s reputation as an employer.

Sure, a return to office has its merits – and in some cases, requirements – but in many cases, businesses have the technology and wherewithal to make it work. What’s more, the many employees who kept working in a remote fashion from the onset of the pandemic to today have proven that they know how to do it.

The second lesson is that for workers, an outstanding brand reputation such as Apple’s doesn’t even matter that much (more on that below). Rather, people simply want the option to work flexibly.

“My company is unlikely to allow any home workers when restrictions end and it gives me great concern. I want to be able to work flexibly and from home at least occasionally.”

We’re going to see more of this kind of situation – a misalignment of priorities between employees and their employers – going forward. When we asked respondents about the current situation in regards to remote/hybrid work at their place of employment, 44.7% say their employer introduced remote or hybrid work during the pandemic and will (or probably will) return to on-location work once things stabilize.

The same discrepancy in expectations goes for flexible work schedules as well, with 46.8% saying flexible work schedules were introduced during the pandemic and will (or probably will) go back to set schedules when things return to ‘normal’. (Side note: ‘normal’ may not even be a reality anymore.)

This marks a vast chasm between employees and employers. Many employees like remote work and especially love flexible schedules. Many even need one or both. And a good portion of employers aren’t adapting to that new reality – the stigma against flexible work doesn’t help much, either.

“I think most office workers are able to work as productively, if not more so, than in an office environment. Bosses, who usually aren’t very good, don’t think that’s possible.”

With such a resounding voice in our dataset valuing flexible work, consider establishing it as a permanent strategy where possible if you want to attract new talent and retain your existing employee base. Your success as a company may depend on it.

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37.5% of US workers value flexwork – but companies aren’t on board

Keith MacKenzie — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 16:26:29 +0000

It’s also the fourth-most popular item in need of improvement (26.6%) at respondents’ current places of employment.

It’s not just that flexible work has benefits – it’s a highly desired, and in many cases, much-needed component of work. If you, as an employer, can realistically offer this option – especially flexible schedules – your value proposition can only grow in the eyes of candidates who have a wealth of choices at their disposal. You may even find that the Great Resignation and the much-bewailed candidate shortage are things that don’t even apply to you.

If you don’t offer flexible work, especially if you could, the consequences could be considerable. Consider the backlash against Apple in their initial drive to move back to an in-person working environment. Employees left in droves for other options, and the media coverage was fierce and uncompromising.

This can’t reflect well on their reputation as an employer. A return to office has its merits – and in some cases, requirements – but in many cases, businesses have the technology and wherewithal to make it work. Employees themselves have shown that it can work as well.

The second lesson is that for workers, an outstanding brand reputation such as Apple’s doesn’t even matter that much (more on that below). Rather, people simply want the option to work flexibly.

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We’re going to see more of this misalignment of priorities between employees and their employers – going forward. When we asked respondents about the current situation in regards to remote/hybrid work at their place of employment, more than half (52.8%) say their employer introduced it during the pandemic and will (or probably will) return to on-location work once things stabilize.

The same disconnect applies to flexible work schedules as well, with 43.8% saying flexible work schedules were introduced during the pandemic and will (or probably will) go back to set schedules when things return to ‘normal’ – whenever that may be, or whatever that may be.

There’s a clear divide between employees and employers in work setups. Many employees like remote work and especially love flexible schedules. Many even need one or both. And a good portion of employers aren’t adapting to that new reality – the stigma against flexible work doesn’t help much, either.

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HR statistics and trends: Demystifying 2020

Zina Panagopoulou — Wed, 23 Dec 2020 14:17:24 +0000

Feel free to navigate around our HR statistics:

Remote work introduced itself as the new normal
Many companies were forced to layoff people
Hiring froze but is now recovering
We’re all in this together
A big ‘thank you’
This is the end and the beginning

1. Remote work introduced itself as the new normal

According to the New World of Work survey report published in August 2020, 62.2% of businesses moved fully to a remote work environment – and 32.3% partially remote – when the pandemic hit. This transition proved a struggle for many companies which suddenly had to digitize their processes and find new ways to continue their operations in a seamless way.

Some of the biggest topics that emerged included:

Employee engagement and worker morale
Team building, recruitment and onboarding
Team collaboration and project logistics
Productivity and work-life balance

Workable also switched to a remote work environment – one of the first to do so. According to our experience we share with you what soft skills our colleagues find that are a must-have for staying productive and efficient in a virtual office — you can take those into consideration when you seek your next remote hire:

Zaharenia Atzitzikaki, our VP of Design and an experienced remote manager long before the pandemic, also shared with us the challenges of remote management, tips to maintain human connection, and thoughts around productivity and required skills:

2. Many companies were forced to layoff people

Letting people go is difficult for everyone. Many companies handled the situation one way or another. We present some of this year’s HR statistics and facts.

You can get an idea of the gravity of this situation in this chart from CNBC:

According to our New World of Work survey, those in hospitality (62.5%) and manufacturing (50%) were more likely to layoff or furlough their staff, whereas healthcare (7.4%) and education (4.3%) were less likely to do so.

3. Hiring froze but is now recovering

Hiring freeze was also a fact, but not the dominant one. 67.1% of respondents confirmed that their company continued hiring employees, either with the same or with lower/higher frequency.

Our Benchmark Report tool tracks job postings created via Workable. The good news is that after the downfall in April, it seems that hiring velocity is back to where it was compared to 2019. Hopefully, better days are coming:

You can also get an idea of how many candidates were hired per region over the last couple of years via Workable:

And how a selection of job functions were affected the most globally:

Note that while the vast majority of job postings fell from 2019 to 2020, there was job growth in:

Healthcare: This states the obvious. The pandemic called for greater mobilization of health services which meant more hiring in the healthcare sector.
Manufacturing and Production: This is perhaps due to a shift to more local manufacturing and production as the pandemic strained worldwide supply chains. Another indication is that, after numerous layoffs in the manufacturing sector in the early months, the rebound was strong with many new jobs over the remainder of 2020.
Administrative: The complex logistics of shifting to online markets and remote work environments required more administrative work than previously.

4. We’re all in this together

We’re not talking only about this year’s events; we’re talking about life. Both the Black Lives Matter movement and the pandemic underlined that nobody is alone — or at least should not be.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, allyship and unconscious bias were some of the most important topics this year that extended far beyond the sphere of the workplace.

Fadjanie Cadet was one of the experts that talked about how DEI has changed over time, how you can get started, what makes it unique now, and how to make it sustainable over time:

Mental health

The same applies to mental and physical well-being. This was a tough year and it’s OK to not be OK, plus you’re not the only one feeling like that.

Psychological safety, stress management, self care and work-life balance were all topics that initiated discussions among experts and will continue to gain attention in the future.

Here you can also find some tips to share with your team and achieve a healthy work-life balance:

5. A big thank you

This is a time for reflection – and it’s also a time for gratitude. We dedicate this to the front-line workers in the healthcare industry and all of those working to contain COVID-19.

There are no words to describe what you’re facing, nor what you’re sacrificing. None of us can even imagine.

We’d also like to thank our partners and customers for supporting us throughout this tough time.

Thank you.

6. This is the end and the beginning

Endings bring us closer to the path built for this moment and prepare us for the future. We wish you to only grow stronger from this year and never forget that we’re all in this together. You’re not alone.

Cheers to a happier new year.

The post HR statistics and trends: Demystifying 2020 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Integrating work and home a top benefit of working remotely in US

Keith MacKenzie — Wed, 03 Nov 2021 14:18:06 +0000

Because of that seismic change, we included questions around remote work in our Great Discontent survey, which surveyed 750 US workers on what matters to them in a job.

And we have interesting findings for you on what the benefits of working remotely are, whether remote work is indeed happening, and how important it is to workers in the United States.

Remote work

Are they doing it?

We asked respondents if they’re currently working remotely or in a hybrid setup. More than half (55.6%) say they aren’t – but that still leaves a significant portion (44.4%) who are working remotely or in a hybrid arrangement.

While those numbers show that remote work is still a very common trend, it’s still a significant shift from the early days of the pandemic in 2020. The aforementioned New World of Work survey found that a staggering 94.9% (62.6% fully, 32.3% partially) of businesses moved to a remote environment as a result of the pandemic.

While the survey respondents are different this time – i.e. the employable population rather than employers themselves – the data still indicates a shift to some kind of normalcy.

But that’s not to say remote work isn’t still happening. It’s very much a reality. Let’s first look at the feasibility of it according to our respondents.

Can they do it?

So, can people work remotely, regardless of whether they want to or are able to? We asked respondents to rate their response on a scale of 1 to 5 (from “not at all” to “completely”). The responses are varied, with nearly one-third (31.8%) choosing 1 (“not at all”) and a quarter of responses picking 5 (“completely”).

If there’s anything definitive here, it’s that a good portion of respondents (31.6%) are clear that their job can’t be done in a remote environment. Reasons can vary – perhaps it’s the employee themselves and they feel unable to do so, or it’s a literal requirement of the job to be on location – for instance, jobs in the hospitality or manufacturing sectors.

How important is it?

We also asked how important working remotely is. What stood out is that respondents don’t consider remote work as important as flexible schedules.

When asked to choose from 1 to 5 the importance of remote or hybrid work, only 17.8% picked 5 – “completely” – whereas 26.1% picked 1 – “not at all”. Nearly a third (32.6%) of respondents picked 3 – suggesting no strong feelings either way.

Perhaps the remote work trend is more a pandemic-driven rather than paradigm shift, and now that people have settled into remote work, it’s not as important as they once felt.

They aren’t even convinced that the ability to work remotely opens up new opportunities, with 28.8% picking 1 (“not at all”) and 16.9% picking 5 (“completely”). (Chart is not displayed.)

And what makes it important?

But sure, remote work has to be important in some ways. So, we asked what benefits can be gained from it. One understandably popular answer is that “it lowers pandemic health risks” (39.4%). Other top benefits are that it’s easier to integrate personal and professional lives (tops at 39.7%) and it’s cheaper than the alternative (36.8%).

Another major benefit is the extra hours in the day gained from not commuting (33.5%) – understandable, considering a US Census report showing the average American commute to be approaching half an hour each way, longer if in larger metro regions.

Meanwhile, “I have fewer distractions” (17.9%) and “I’m more productive” (20.1%) do not rank as highly. Since distraction is regularly cited as a major factor and inhibitor to productivity, we were surprised at this.

Likewise, the freedom to choose where to live is far down the list, with just 13.8% citing that as a major benefit of remote work – again, something we thought would rank higher.

So what does this indicate? Health during the pandemic aside, the holistic benefit of integrating work and home lives as a whole, combined with the tangible benefits of lower cost and more hours in a day are huge factors in why people like remote work.

39.7% of US workers say the ease of integrating personal and professional priorities is a major benefit of remote work

As emphasized by one respondent:

“Work/life balance is important for everyone at all levels. Work has become a part of my life vs. working to live. I get back 3 hours of my day but by not having to commute and I feel like my productivity has increased.”

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Benefits of working remotely: UK workers get back an hour a day – and they like it

Keith MacKenzie — Wed, 03 Nov 2021 14:16:37 +0000

Because of that seismic change, we included questions around remote work in our Great Discontent survey, which surveyed 500 workers in the UK on what matters to them in a job.

And we have interesting findings for you on what the benefits of working remotely are, whether remote work is indeed happening, and how important it is to workers in the UK.

And we have interesting findings for you, starting with a matter-of-fact comment from one respondent:

“Whilst financial recompense is an important factor in talent migration, I think other factors such as greater opportunities for agile working and flexible working are becoming increasingly important for career decisions.”

Remote work

Are they doing it?

We asked respondents if they’re currently working remotely or in a hybrid setup. The result was quite evenly split, with 54.6% saying they’re currently working remotely or in a hybrid setup, and the remaining 45.4% saying they aren’t.

While those numbers show that remote work is still common in the UK, it’s still a significant shift from the early days of the pandemic in 2020. The aforementioned New World of Work survey found that a staggering 94.9% of businesses – predominantly in the UK and the US – said they moved some or all operations to a remote environment as a result of the pandemic.

While the survey respondents are different this time – the employable population rather than employers themselves – the data still shows a shift back to some kind of normalcy in the UK, pandemic spikes notwithstanding.

But that’s not to say remote work isn’t still happening. It’s very much a reality – and even a new standard. Let’s look at what our respondents say about the feasibility of it.

Can they do it?

So, can people work remotely, regardless of whether they want to or whether they’re actually able to? We asked respondents to rate their response on a scale of 1 (“not at all”) to 5 (“completely”).

The responses are relatively polarized, with one quarter (25.3%) choosing 1 and nearly half (48.3%) picking 4 or 5.

If there’s anything definitive here, it’s that a good portion of respondents are clear that their job can’t be done in a remote environment (25.3%). Reasons can vary – perhaps it’s the employee themselves and that they feel unable to do so, or the job is literally required on location – for instance, jobs in the hospitality, food service, or manufacturing sectors.

As another respondent explains:

“Not everyone works in an office. Some of us have to swing off big steam valves. And you would be screwed if we didn’t because there’d be no electricity.”

How important is it?

We also asked respondents how important working remotely is. What impressed us is that respondents don’t consider remote work as important to them as flexible schedules – not that it isn’t important; it’s just not as strongly indicated.

When asked to choose from 1 to 5 the personal importance of remote or hybrid work, 42% picked 4 or 5, whereas 22.4% picked 1 – in other words, “not at all”.

The dominant choice for nearly a quarter (24%) of respondents is 3 – suggesting no strong feelings either way.

Perhaps the remote work trend is more a pandemic-driven rather than paradigm shift in the end, and now that people have become comfortable in remote work, they realize it’s not as important as they once felt.

“I enjoy working from home but would like to return to the office at least 1 day per week.”

Respondents aren’t even very convinced that the capability to work remotely opens up new opportunities for them, with 26% picking 1 (“not at all”) and 15.8% picking 5 (“completely”). A resounding 28.4% picked 3, again showing little alignment in either direction. (Chart is not displayed.)

And what makes it important?

Nevertheless, remote work has got to be important in one way or another. So, we asked what benefits are associated with it. The top answer is that “it lowers pandemic health risks” (41.5%), but other top benefits are that it’s easier to integrate personal and professional lives (also 41.5%) and it frees up time during the day (41.3%).

Freeing up time during the day is a pretty obvious benefit, considering that UK residents spend an average of 59 minutes per day on the commute to and from work – 79 minutes per day for Londoners – according to Work Wise UK.

Says Phil Flaxton, CEO of Work Wise:

“There are many ways of avoiding the misery of commuting during the dark mornings and evenings, which millions of people endure as they struggle to get to and from work. These include implementing flexitime, staggered working hours and working from home. … Clearly the government, public transport providers and employers must do more in order to address the major negative impact on the UK’s economy, lost productivity and the environment.”

Another major benefit of remote work is that it’s cheaper all around. The costs associated with commuting, parking fees, takeaway lunches, and other expenses can be mitigated and even eliminated when working remotely.

One respondent was pretty clear about their allegiance:

“Love working from home, less travel costs and stress and I can dress and eat as I want.”

Meanwhile, “I have fewer distractions” (17.6%) and “I’m more productive” (20.6%) do not rank as highly in the list of most popular benefits for those in the UK. Since distraction is regularly cited as a major factor and inhibitor to productivity, we’re surprised that these don’t rank as highly as we thought they would.

Likewise, the freedom to choose where to live is far down the list, with just 13.2% citing that as a major benefit of remote work. Again, we thought this would rank higher given the ability given by remote work to avoid the high costs of living in dense urban centres such as London where most jobs exist.

So what does this indicate? Health benefits aside, the holistic benefit of integrating work and home lives as a whole, combined with the tangible benefits of lower cost and more hours in a day are huge factors in why people like remote work.

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Flexible schedules a must for 57% of UK workers: Great Discontent survey

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 16:49:59 +0000

So far, we’ve found that changes aren’t happening as much as workers in the UK would like.

Phil Flaxton, CEO of Work Wise, spoke his mind on this.

“There are many ways of avoiding the misery of commuting during the dark mornings and evenings, which millions of people endure as they struggle to get to and from work. These include implementing flexitime, staggered working hours and working from home,” says Phil.

“Clearly the government, public transport providers and employers must do more in order to address the major negative impact on the UK’s economy, lost productivity and the environment.”

With all this, we included flexible work in our new Great Discontent survey of UK workers.

We’ve already shared insights on the value of remote work in the UK. And now we have findings for you on flexible work schedules in the eyes of our audience.

Are they doing it?

As it happens, the majority of respondents (55.2%) are working on flexible schedules right now.

This isn’t too different from the percentage of respondents working in a remote or hybrid environment (54.6%). Obviously, there’s some (or a lot of) overlap, since those working remotely are likely to be also working on their own schedules, and vice versa.

Can they do it?

Similarly to our questions on remote work, we wanted to understand what respondents thought about the real-life feasibility of flexible schedules in their own job. The results were striking, with 29.6% picking 5 (“completely”), and 14.6% picking 1 (“not at all”).

Combine the numbers and you have a convincing 53.8% picking 4 or 5 to say yes, their work can reasonably be performed on a flexible schedule, compared with just 23.8% picking 1 or 2.

The message is clear: flexible schedules are very doable for a good portion of our respondents.

“More organizations need to apply a shift system so more persons can get jobs and workers are not overworked.”

How important is it?

Again, flexible schedules showed a much stronger trend than remote work in terms of how important it is for respondents. Nearly a third (32.9%) picked 5 (“completely”), and another quarter of respondents (24.8%) rated 4 out of 5 – that means 57.7% altogether.

On the flip side, only a combined 19% picked 1 (“not at all”) or 2, meaning flexible hours are very important to many of our respondents – and more important than remote work.

And what makes it important?

It’s clear that flexible working schedules are doable, and they’re important. But why? We asked that too.

The number-one benefit by and far is that “it’s easier to balance personal and professional priorities”, with 57.3% of respondents choosing that benefit as one of their top three. “I find it less stressful” (37.9%) and “I’m more productive at specific times” (36.5%) are also popular benefits.

Common sources of stress for a fixed schedule may include needing to be at work on time, the guilt of leaving work early to pick up kids, and even feeling like they have to be productive at specific periods during the day.

Regarding productivity, that ties into the third-most popular item on the list, which is “more productive at specific times in the day”. We are all different – some of us like to start work early in the day, others peak in the mid-afternoon, others still like to burn the midnight oil and work deep into the night.

Whatever the case may be, it’s clear that incorporating flexible working hours into your business is crucial to your future success. Learn more about how to do so here, and feel free to use our flexible work hours company policy template!

The post Flexible schedules a must for 57% of UK workers: Great Discontent survey appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Flexible work hours: it’s important for 58% of US workers, survey finds

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 16:50:05 +0000

In short: we included flexible work in our new Great Discontent survey of US workers. Flexible work, however, is more complex than it sounds – it consists of two distinct areas of flexibility including location and time. They are two very different things.

For instance, some jobs can be performed remotely but require fixed timelines, such as a customer support role during business hours or a position requiring synchronous collaboration with others such as in software engineering.

Other jobs can’t be performed remotely but can be carried out at any time, such as stocking positions which tend to be more deadline-intensive (do this by X day) rather than timeline-intensive (you’re working from X to Y hours), or a restaurant with multiple shifts that can be distributed to employees.

Flexible schedules can also mean one employee arriving at work at 10:30 a.m. and leaving at 6:30 p.m., with another starting at 5:30 in the morning in order to wrap things up shortly after lunch – again, all so long as the work gets done. Knowledge workers are especially familiar with this kind of schedule.

So the difference warrants separate questions for each. We’ve already shared insights on the value of remote work in the US workforce. And now we have findings for you on flexible work schedules in the eyes of our audience.

Are they doing it?

In contrast to the numbers of those working remotely, the majority of respondents (57.9%) are indeed working on flexible schedules.

While working remotely can blur the lines between home and work – and naturally make way for a more flexible schedule as a result – the fact that flexible schedules are more common indicates more of a paradigm shift beyond COVID-19 for flexible work hours than for remote work.

Can they do it?

Similarly to our questions on remote work, we wanted to understand what respondents thought about the real-life feasibility of flexible schedules in their own job. The results were striking, with 32.1% picking 5 (“completely”), and 19.4% picking 1 (“not at all”).

Combine the numbers and you have 57.1% picking 4 or 5 to say yes, their work can reasonably be performed on a flexible schedule, compared with 31.5% picking 1 or 2.

The message is clear: flexible schedules are more doable than remote work in the minds of our respondents (with just 37.8% picking 4 or 5 for remote). Maybe that means there’s some value in on-location work after all – more on that in the next chapter.

“Unfortunately, I work for a niche market in healthcare so my ability to up and move is difficult unless a job opportunity happens to arise. Being a medical provider also limits the flexibility of my work schedule.”

How important is it?

Again, flexible schedules showed a much stronger trend than remote work in terms of how important it is for respondents. More than a third (34.3%) picked 5 (“completely”), and nearly another quarter of respondents (23.9%) rated 4 out of 5.

Combined, that makes 58.2% clearly stating that the ability to work flexible schedules is important to some degree.

“I think it’s great to be able to work flexibly from home.”

And what makes it important?

It’s clear that flexible working schedules are doable, and they’re important to people. But why? We asked that too.

The most popular benefit is that “it’s easier to balance personal and professional priorities”, with 55.8% of respondents choosing that as one of their top three. “I find it less stressful” (44.4%) and “I’m more productive at specific times” (39.4%) are also popular benefits of flexible work schedules.

55.8% of US workers say the ease of integrating personal and professional priorities is a major benefit of having a flexible work schedule.

Common sources of stress for a fixed schedule could include needing to be at work on time, the guilt of leaving work early to pick up kids, and even feeling like they have to be productive at specific times during the day.

Regarding productivity, that ties into the third-most popular item on the list, which is “more productive at specific times in the day”. We are all different – some of us like to start work early in the day, others thrive in the mid-afternoon, others still like to burn the midnight oil because that’s when they’re most productive.

Whatever it may be, it’s clear that incorporating flexible working hours into your business is crucial to your future success. Learn more about how to do so here, and feel free to use our flexible work hours company policy template!

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The in-person vs. remote shuffle – what’s next? Hybrid!

Keith MacKenzie — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 13:19:17 +0000

In the ‘before times’, in-office and on-location work was absolutely normal. Some forward-thinking organizations did push the envelope on remote work, such as Ryan Malone at SmartBug. Ryan, for example, built his entire company offsite and in a purely remote environment in the late 2000s when the idea was seen as somewhat outlandish.

Other companies did the same, presenting their employees with the opportunity to work offsite where they were able to and where it was possible. But ultimately, it wasn’t a standard at all – for most, it was either fully on site or, perhaps, one day at home every now and then and only with managerial approval.

Then something changed. In the turbulent early days of COVID-19, many organizations shifted to a fully remote model – which was labeled at that moment as a stopgap measure to begin with, and then a bold and new experiment going forward. Remote work was even described by some as something that was bound to happen sooner or later – and that the social impact of the virus (i.e. lockdowns and social distancing requirements) merely expedited it.

And then, we saw a rise in productivity and performance in the remote working environment. This comes as little surprise to those who have studied the relationship between productivity and employee engagement and remote work.

But as the pandemic dragged on, productivity started to falter. Mental health challenges also rose in remote work – and we’ve seen the rise of anxieties in this new survey. Asynchronous work also presented its own challenges – especially when it came to communication between teams.

What also rose to the surface are the challenges connected with on-location work. When we saw organizations start talking about a return to office as the pandemic loosened its grip on society, the pushback from employees was strong and defiant. Many didn’t like the idea.

Many workers – according to our Great Discontent survey report in 2021 – want to retain their flexibility in work. Why? Family commitments. Personal priorities. More time in the day. The list goes on.

In short: people just don’t want to go back to the way things were, and likewise, industries and businesses – which are irrevocably transformed – can’t envision a full return to the way things were. In other words, the cat’s out of the bag. The toothpaste’s out of the tube.

What's new in the new world of work?

With insights on hybrid work, employee engagement, and the effects of "long remote", our new survey report is packed with data insights.

Dive in!

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In the midst of all this, candidates have the upper hand with talent at a premium for employers. They’re not afraid to leverage that to their benefit – be that in terms of compensation or working environment.

So this forced a new agreement onto the world of work. The ‘agreement’, if we can call it that, seems to be a third road. A middle ground. That’s hybrid work.

Hybrid work, for all its definitions (i.e. two days in office and three days remote, office space availability for those who want it, etc.), is rising as one of the major new standards in this next world of work. Perhaps it’s the best of both work worlds. Whether that’s a temporary solution on the heels of other temporary solutions or whether that’s finally a new standard in the workplace after years of disruption – that’s yet to be determined.

Some do think this is the new status quo. One survey respondent told us: “I believe that the hybrid model is here to stay. The challenge will be to establish and develop greater empathy among remote employees.”

“I believe that the hybrid model is here to stay. The challenge will be to establish and develop greater empathy among remote employees.”

This speaks to the old axiom that for every retaliatory adjustment or new solution, fresh challenges and problems are going to reveal themselves.

This happened with in-office and on-location – a centuries-long standard – and happened again with the opposite extreme of distributed teams and remote working.

Now we have hybrid.

The more things change, the more things will change – that’s been our experience since the crazy early days of 2020. Is hybrid the next world of work, or is it just the next experiment or the next stage in the ongoing negotiation between employer and employee?

Honestly, it’ll be a bit of both.

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New overtime law: How it works and what changes for employers

Nikoletta Bika — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 10:22:18 +0000

First, the nuts and bolts: the FLSA overtime rule (Fair Labor Standards Act) clarifies which workers are eligible to receive payment for overtime work. Exempt employees aren’t eligible for overtime pay, while non-exempt employees are. Non-exempt employees must be paid time and a half for any hours they work that exceed the standard 40-hour work week.

Please keep in mind: Workable is not a law firm. This article is meant to provide general guidelines and should be used as a reference. It’s not a legal document and doesn’t provide legal advice. Neither the author nor Workable will assume any legal liability that may arise from the use of this article. Always consult your attorney on matters of legal compliance.

Who is exempt from overtime pay?

The FLSA overtime exemptions include executive, administrative, professional, computer and outside sales employees. Highly compensated employees are also exempt if they “customarily and regularly perform at least one of the duties of an exempt executive, administrative or professional employee.”

There are certain criteria – such as the duties test and the salary threshold – that determine whether an employee falls under each of these exempt categories. For example, in order to determine whether an executive employee is overtime-exempt, they need to satisfy the salary threshold, i.e. they need to be salaried and paid above a certain amount per week.

Blue collar workers are never exempt from the FLSA no matter how much they make.

How does the overtime rule work?

The salary threshold is the most significant change: the minimum threshold was previously $455 per week, but the new overtime law raises this to $684 (or $35,568 per year for a full-year worker).

The raise in the salary threshold means that employees who are paid between $455 and $684 per week – and thus were previously exempt – will now be eligible for overtime pay. According to the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), the number of employees nationwide who’ll benefit is around 1.3 million.

Another change is the salary threshold for highly compensated employees, which rises from $100,000 to at least $107,432 annually.

Also, the federal overtime law allows employers to count a portion of non-discretionary bonuses and commissions toward meeting the salary level (up to 10%) to reach the exempt status for employees.

The duties test doesn’t change with the new law.

What’s the controversy about?

In a nutshell, the new overtime law is less generous than the now-invalidated Obama-era law, which tried to bring employee compensation levels up to speed with inflation.

The overtime law signed during the previous administration aimed to double the existing salary threshold of $455 to $913 (or $47,476 per year). This meant that a much greater number of employees would have seen their paychecks increase, had this law not been eventually struck down by the United States District Court.

Also, the new law doesn’t provide for future automatic revisions once every four years, as in the original proposal. This means that any adjustments to the overtime law to the cost of living aren’t guaranteed, even despite the DOL’s commitment to start revising these guidelines (29 CFR Part 451) more often.

What does the new overtime law mean for employers?

Well, you’re likely to start paying overtime to some of your employees. Generally, if you employ previously exempt workers who are getting paid under $684 per week and work overtime, you might need to start preparing bigger paychecks.

Of course, there are things that some employers might do to avoid paying overtime, such as strictly limit their employees’ work week to 40 hours or raise salaries above the threshold. While some of these measures might have a positive impact on employees, too, (for example, by helping them achieve better work-life balance), make sure your solutions are viable and justified, instead of an attempt to game the system.

For example, calculate the costs involved in raising salaries and compare them with the costs of paying overtime to newly non-exempt employees, and how each scenario could affect employees. Morale may also be impacted if a more regimented timing system is introduced (i.e. requiring employees to submit regular work hour reports and/or finish their job within the allotted time even during high-intensity periods).

Paying overtime might also be good for business

Granted, added labor costs are a challenge for employers. But, paying employees for the work they’re doing is hardly a bad strategy; if workers receive more money for their effort, productivity and morale can increase.

And, if you’re in retail, hospitality or similar industries, you might even see a rise in revenue – after all, your workers are customers, too, and they might use some of the extra money to buy your services or products.

What should you do as an employer?

Here are some actions you can take to make the transition to the DOL overtime rule easier for you and clearer for your employees:

1. Consult an attorney

You can find helpful information online and on the DOL website, but a qualified lawyer can explain the details and provide useful advice. Remember that individual state overtime laws may have different thresholds, so look into those as well.

2. Revise employee classification

Many employers may unwittingly misclassify their employees as exempt or non-exempt (sometimes even as contractors instead of employees). Make sure your employees are correctly classified based on the exemption criteria by reviewing job descriptions (remember that job titles aren’t sufficient to determine exempt status.)

3. Communicate clearly

It’s good to have both an overtime and attendance policy to communicate guidelines to your employees. For example, you could inform employees about your approach to overtime (frequent/occasional, voluntary/mandatory, etc.) and explain how you’ll compensate voluntary overtime. Schedule trainings or meetings, too, to help workers adjust to timekeeping responsibilities.

If you already have these policies, ensure they’re updated with the new overtime law.

All in all, any legislative changes that bring about additional labor costs can be disruptive. But, the sooner you adapt, the better it’ll be for both your business and your employees.

If you do business in California, you should also pay attention to CCPA, the new privacy law. See our CCPA FAQ.

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Lost lessons from the invention of the interview

Daniel Howden — Wed, 27 Jan 2016 10:58:59 +0000

Among Thomas Alva Edison’s lesser known inventions was the modern job interview. The wizard of the original Menlo Park (New Jersey, not California) whose prodigious spree of invention and entrepreneurship helped shape the early 20th century and the American economy, developed his own pre-employment test. Edison, a self-taught genius whose most important inventions from the stock ticker and the electric light bulb to the phonograph had been developed with only a handful of assistants, had a distrust of callow college graduates that would be immediately recognizable to today’s digital titans.

At the turn of the last century, the once lowly telegraph operator, who attended school for only 12 weeks of his life, had risen to be head of his own wholly-owned electrical utility. And yet his toughest challenge was technical recruiting and he had grown disillusioned with the mathematicians and scientists who applied to Edison Lighting (these days known as General Electric).

The interview as ordeal

His response was the creation of a pre-employment test that the autodidact and polymath felt reflected the breadth of knowledge missing in the candidates he encountered. The resulting “Edison test” quickly became a thing of legend.

In 1921 the New York Times revealed details of the test in a breathless splash headlined “Edison questions stir up a storm”. The paper of record reported that “victims” of the test had complained they would need to be walking encyclopedias to have passed.

The candidates’ complaints are strikingly similar to those that have been made against firms with exacting hiring processes such as Google. One failed candidate beseeched Edison to remember that college graduates were people with interests other than “the depth of the ocean”, while another hurt and bombastic complainant invoked Socrates’ warning: “belief that because he knows one thing well he knows all things well.”

The Times published 141 questions that it claimed were remembered by a single candidate who had sat the test. The range of knowledge they demanded remains startling, from the whereabouts of the Sargasso Sea and the River Volga, to who invented the algorithm and how leather is tanned.

The test was alternately feted and denounced — usually depending on how the reviewer had scored. For those determined to measure themselves against the great man, adapted versions of the test exist online today.

Berating the bone-heads

Clearly not everyone enjoyed it. A candidate for production engineer who was invited to sit the exam described his experience: “During this time Mr Edison paced back and forth, irritably demanding why certain results were not being obtained in his factory and denouncing what he termed bone-headed moves on the part of his executives, while the latter shouted their excuses into his deaf ears.”

The would-be engineer was then told by Edison himself that he had failed and “given the air” — a lost euphemism for being asked to leave.

Of course, the Edison test controversy wasn’t the invention of the interview so much as the emergence of the aptitude test. But it was, arguably, the birth of interview as ordeal. Four years earlier the United States military had deployed the Woodworth Psychoneurotic Inventory: 116 yes or no questions, now remembered as the first personality test.

The true origins of the interview have been jokingly traced by Lucy Kellaway to the New Testament, where Jesus, at the time recruiting disciples, leaned heavily on a single question: “What do you seek?”

The hundred years war

Nearly a century on from news of the Edison test, interviewers have a bewildering amount of research to turn to in preparing to question job candidates. Intelligence Quotient tests, once in vogue, have since been largely discredited as guides to future employee performance. General aptitude tests remain in wide use.

Today’s most popular interview questions can be boiled down into a handful of categories:

• Technical questions evaluate a candidate’s ability to do the job. To fill a software engineering position it might mean a whiteboard coding test.

• Behavioral questions assume past behavior will be a predictor of future performance: “What were the steps you took to accomplish such and such task?”

• Situational questions tend to be hypothetical (the ones politicians refuse to answer), such as what would you do if the work of a teammate was not up to expectations?

• Case questions, or brainteasers, were popular with Google and would have pleased Edison, as they aim to tease out how someone would work and think through a particular case: “how many traffic lights are there in LA?”

An arms race with potential employees

Despite this arsenal of approaches there’s continuing disquiet with the effectiveness of interviews. With each reinvention of the interview, candidates and their coaches catch up and overwhelm the innovators. It’s an arms race of sorts with potential employees.

Google’s Larry Page is said to have grown so bored of rehearsed answers that took to asking candidates to teach him something he didn’t already know how to do. Naturally, plenty of people copied him, so job seekers often arrive for interview these days with their lesson for the CEO pre-cooked.

At the core of this is our suspicion that our interviews are little more than subjective fits of confirmation bias — seeing what we want to see based on a shallow initial impression. This is also referred to as the “halo effect”.

Daniel Kahneman, the behavioral economist and Nobel laureate, conducted an experiment with Israeli army recruits that he later recalled in Thinking Fast and Slow. He replaced the battery of psychometric tests that had been used to assess soldiers’ readiness for combat with a strictly structured series of factual questions. The interviewers were to be given no license whatsoever and would handover the answers to be scored according to Kahneman’s predictive system.

Curious about structured interviews? Download our free guide to learn more.

The value of intuition

The sum of his six ratings system was to lift the interviews from “completely useless” to “moderately useful”. But in the face of a rebellion from disempowered interviewers he allowed them to add one element. They were to close their eyes and imagine the recruit as a soldier and score them from one to five.

To his surprise the “close your eyes” test delivered results comparable to the six ratings test. In other words intuition has a place in interviews. Kahneman’s verdict gives this advice: “do not simply trust intuitive judgement… but do not dismiss it, either.”

The obsolescence of job interviews is by now routinely predicted. Machine learning and big data, we’re told, will remove human error from the selection of candidates. In the meantime, a mixed approach and an awareness of our flaws can help us stumble in the direction of objectivity.

With the benefit of considerable hindsight it would be easy to dismiss the interview techniques of the irascible Edison. They appear to say more about his contempt for conventional education and perceived privilege than anything else. But before doing so it’s worth noting the identities of some of those whom he did hire, they include Henry Ford, Nikola Tesla and the pioneer of early flight William Joseph Hammer.

It’s also worth remembering some who failed. Albert Einstein paid a visit to Boston during the original furore over the Edison test and was confronted by a cheeky reporter with one of the inventor’s questions on the speed of sound. He didn’t know the answer.

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HR Tech World takeaways: employer branding tools and international hiring tips

Christine Del Castillo — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 18:50:33 +0000

Did you miss Day One of #HRTechWorld? We’ve got you covered. From Day Two, we’ve sharing employer branding tools that won’t bust your budget, GoodGame Studio’s process for hiring their international team, and what HR can learn from a Digital Prophet.

Employer branding that won’t break the bank

"Time and attention of new generation – major KPI. We produced all our content in-house" @DearKat #HRTechWorld pic.twitter.com/f321sAkJkS

— Cristina (@CrisGarlington) October 28, 2015

Flipagram, 1secondeveryday, hyperlapse, thunderclap = great, free employer branding tools shared by @DearKat #HRTechWorld on iRecruit stage

— John Vlastelica (@vlastelica) October 28, 2015

.@DearKat's target candidates love non-glossy content, DIY style, videos that look like employees made it themselves. #iRecruit #HRTechWorld

— Workable (@Workable) October 28, 2015

Deep budget cuts forced Kathryn Callow and her team to look for new ways to make compelling in-house content on the cheap. They used tools like 1 Second Everyday and Hyperlapse — there’s a full list in the tweets above — to cut through the social noise and capture a hyperconnected audience. And guess what? It worked. Their data shows that their DIY content performed much better than their glossy, agency-produced content.

Global hiring at Goodgame Studios

.@Goodgamestudios recruits from 67 nations and pitches candidates in their own language. #recruitment #HRTechWorld pic.twitter.com/B5FC6ZxXbB

— Workable (@Workable) October 28, 2015

Love this concept from @Goodgamestudios "On-boarding starts at the 1st interview" #HRTechWorld

— Andy Headworth (@andyheadworth) October 28, 2015

Nice example of an international #onboarding process from @GoodGameStudios. #HRTechWorld #HRTech #iRecruit pic.twitter.com/YWee53uhKD

— Workable (@Workable) October 28, 2015

Germany’s Goodgame Studios are pros at international hiring. They recruit from 67 nations around the world and frequently hire recruiters who can pitch candidates in their own language. In addition, their hiring team gets certified sourcing training. Finally, thorough onboarding helps new team members hit the ground running. Onboarding starts from the very first interview and goes on for at least three months. There’s even an item on the list for “special task force,” which those of you who actually do onboarding may find especially relatable.

We got Shingy’ed

Alright one more funny commercial brought to you by @shingy https://t.co/zX8YHn0wTt #HRTechWorld

— Bas Westland (@basw) October 28, 2015

"If you can target the right people in the right place at the right time what is the right message?" @shingy #HRTechWorld

— MervynDinnen (@MervynDinnen) October 28, 2015

Our interconnected generation will spend $2.45 trillion by 2025, and will represent 75% of our workforce #hrtechworld

— Holly Fawcett (@HollyFawcett) October 28, 2015

Shingy once billed himself as a “Digital Prophet” (how’s that for a job title?) but for all his eccentricity it’s true that HR could take a page from modern-day advertising and marketing. The lesson is that today’s consumers need to be wooed. They’re brand-agnostic, hate advertising, but can be swayed by a good story. Geico gets it. Did you watch their “Unskippable” commercial? Many consumers are also content-creators themselves. To get their attention (and as Shingy says, “attention is currency”), the content you create for your brand should be easy to find, share, or remix as they see fit.

And that’s a wrap for #HRTechWorld. How did you find the conference? Any comments, questions, corrections? Raves? Talk to us at @workable.

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Are you getting ready for GDPR?

Matt Buckland — Thu, 03 May 2018 10:11:46 +0000

But the truth is, if you haven’t begun to action your GDPR checklist, it’s unlikely you’ll be ready when GDPR finally arrives. So what should you consider as a matter of urgency?

Carry out a data risk assessment

Start by reviewing how you manage personal data across your organisation. From understanding the data you’re requesting, to how that data is stored and what you’re using it for, a data risk assessment identifies any data protection, information security and privacy risks.

Risk assessments also help organisations classify processing activities according to the risks to the individual. Everyone who accesses and holds data is accountable. Assessments bring compliance to the fore and help teams devise appropriate mitigations. “But we’ve always done it this way” is not a good excuse. The old ways of working are no longer valid.

It’s likely you’ll uncover all manner of horrors at this stage; no, it’s not ok that your desk drawer is full of old resumes. And that folder on your desktop labelled ‘Good ones to keep for later’ might also need attention.

Choose the right hiring tool

Risk assessment complete, now’s the time to evaluate your recruiting software. You might find that your current tools aren’t quite cutting it. All the good will in the world won’t help if you’re storing your data in a leaky bucket. Using a robust recruiting tool—whether it’s a Candidate Relationship Management tool or an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)—is a great foundation for GDPR compliance.

The best tools will be GDPR-compliant. They will add efficiencies to your organisation’s recruiting processes and be flexible enough to support future compliance obligations. Better to prepare and embed change now than wait until 25 May and hope everyone can make the quick switch.

But your responsibility to regulation doesn’t stop there. Whatever tools you choose to implement, they should augment a compliant culture.

Build a GDPR compliant culture

Communications theorist and sociologist Everett Rogers argues that “diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated over time”. He identifies four main elements which influence the spread of a new idea: the innovation itself, the communication channels, time, and a social system. While the GDPR will mandate change, the compliance departments that want to make this happen should acknowledge the need to change behaviour.

For Rogers, the adoption of any new system across an organisation can be split into different adopter groups: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. The GDPR must become part of corporate culture—organisations are both the aggregate of its individuals and its own system with a set of procedures and norms. Adopting new behaviours where data and privacy are concerned is important for the whole organisation. GDPR compliant organisations simply can’t afford to have late adopters or “laggards”.

By 25 May, recruiters and human resources professionals will need everyone on the team to understand their own role in data gathering and processing. And new processes and expected behaviours will need to be written down as policy. It’s the responsibility of everyone in the organisation to take on board the regulations, adopt them as behaviours and embed them as culture. With clear standards set, everyone can align with updated expectations, from established members of the team to new recruits.

Don’t wait to take action

Changing to a modern, GDPR compliant ATS is now relatively painless. Making a cultural change can take a lot longer. Perhaps it’s finally time to sort through that folder full of resumes? However you plan to start, the time to act is now.

To find out more, watch a video of our Q&A with a leading lawyer in the field of data privacy and security:

Alternatively, try the GDPR Readiness Evaluator. Answer 14 questions to see how ready your organization is to recruit in line with GDPR. Use the results to help plan and action your own GDPR compliant recruitment process.

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2016 social recruitment trends forecast

Christine Del Castillo — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 15:42:19 +0000

Social recruitment seems to have almost slavishly followed the stages of the Gartner Hype Cycle. We’ve trekked over the “peak of inflated expectations” and waded through the “trough of disillusionment,” pretty soon the “slope of enlightenment” should rise ahead of us. We know that social recruitment isn’t going to replace everything else we’ve been doing but promoting your jobs to your most engaged audience makes sense.

How to recruit employees effectively on social media

Here’s what the landscape looks like today. A quarter of all job seekers use social media as their primary tool for job searching. And every year, a new wave of hyperconnected digital natives enters the workforce. At the moment,
seven out of ten 18-34 year olds report having found their previous job through social media. And, nearly half of all employee referrals come in through social media.

Recruiters will naturally go where great candidates are. Nine out of ten companies use some form of social media to attract, source and engage qualified talent. Plus, more than half of all recruiters rated candidates sourced from social media as “highest quality.”

The bottom line: A social media recruiting strategy drives results, is mainstream, and here to stay. The practitioners are becoming more advanced and so are the tools. We’re no fans of the phrase “war for talent”, but we can’t deny that it’s a competitive atmosphere. Keep an eye on the following social recruitment trends. Checking these boxes will put the leaders miles ahead from the late adopters in 2016.

What are the most effective social recruiting strategies?

Being less “antisocial”

Nine out of ten candidates are likely to apply to a job when it’s from an employer brand that’s actively maintained. What does that mean? It means that someone at the company is responsible for joining relevant conversations, responding to reviews and giving candidates an attractive preview of the work environment, culture and available opportunities via the company’s social media profiles. Seven out of ten recruiters agree and highlight company culture as a way to compete against other employers. Those social feeds populated by an endless stream of robotic job alerts will be yesterday’s news. Hopefully.

Smarter sourcing

Social media offers unprecedented access to millions of high-quality candidates for free if you know how to find them. In short, social networks are the new Google. In 2015, sourcers (we used to call them “head hunters”) skilled in boolean and x-ray searches were in high demand. These are applicable to the most populated channels to hunt for candidates such as LinkedIn and Twitter. Facebook Graph search deserves a worthy mention as another way for sourcers to find more candidates. This year, social sourcing will continue to be a coveted area of expertise. Diving into social sourcing? Boolean Blackbelt offers detailed and hype-free advice. We also like these tool recommendations from Sourcing Monk. Once you’re ready to reach out to candidates, there are email recruiting tools for reaching out effectively.

Moving beyond “the big three”

For years, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter have been recruiters’ top hunting grounds for socially-savvy candidates. But lately, savvy recruiters using social media for recruiting are trying out some new channels . Instagram leads the pack of newcomers (31% of job seekers have reported finding a job through this social network), with Pinterest and Snapchat not far behind. In addition, recruitment experts know that candidates for specialist jobs are on specialist networks. Several specialist job boards have been created on these networks as a means of attracting these candidates.

Social media integrations for recruitment

More recruiters will be saving time by using job boards and hiring tools that boast smart integrations with social media sites and professional networks. Workable, for example, works seamlessly with social media. The Chrome extension enables you to import prospective candidates from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Dribbble, Behance, and Github.The stack of resumes sitting on your hard drive can also be automatically enriched with social profile data when you upload them to Workable. Finally, we’ve got a Facebook Jobs tab, so that your biggest fans are automatically notified about open positions at your company.

One-click job applications via social networks

The novel-length job application form may continue to annoy job seekers this year. However, those who want to get ahead and attract today’s heavily mobile audience should feel encouraged to add the option of a “one-click apply” button to their custom job application forms. These have been around for a while, but we believe that they will start to proliferate. Some job boards, such as Indeed have this functionality, and Workable’s own forms enable job seekers to apply on mobile via LinkedIn with one click. Thought: Why should LinkedIn have all the fun? Job seekers on professional networks like Dribbble and Github should be able to apply to jobs through those networks and import their work samples at the push of a button.

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Bad news for businesses affected by Brexit uncertainty

Matt Buckland — Thu, 06 Dec 2018 09:27:30 +0000

With just months to go until the UK leaves the European Union, and no deal yet in place, many employers continue to worry about the possible impact of Brexit on UK businesses and the labour market.

Although 25% of UK businesses currently employ staff from the EU, an August 2018 survey reveals that over 50% of UK business leaders would be put off employing someone from the EU after Brexit changes the UK’s immigration laws. For some industries, this need to import talent to meet their growing demands is felt even more so. Remaining both innovative and competitive is intrinsically linked with their ability to hire the right people at the right time regardless of where they are in the world. In those sectors, businesses affected by Brexit uncertainty are feeling it much more than others.

In July, the Home Office published the new mandatory registration scheme for EU nationals. After Brexit occurs in March 2019, all 3.8 million EU nationals currently living in the UK and EU nationals wanting to enter the UK in the future will need to register for “settled status” to continue to work and live in the UK. The implications are far-reaching and go further than some had previously expected – for example, you will need to apply even if you’re an EU citizen married to a British citizen. The cost of application has been set at £65 for those 16 and over, or £32.50 if they’re under. Though these are fairly small amounts, they may prove to be non-trivial for an employer meeting additional costs when relocating a new employee and their family. Furthermore, adding to the uncertainty, the rights of citizens of Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland residing in the UK are still being negotiated.

“Settled status” and “pre-settled status”, with all supporting processes and technology, are still in the testing phase. The aim is to protect the rights and jobs of EU nationals currently working in the UK, but what about recruiting EU nationals after Brexit?

From 1st July 2021, EU citizens and their family members who are living with them must hold or have applied for UK immigration status to legally work in the UK. This new status will present a challenge for hiring managers and recruiters, who may have to alter their current attraction and selection processes to comply with changes in immigration law that will happen over the next three years. The new status will require UK businesses to adopt a longer-term talent attraction strategy that either focuses on existing UK-based talent pools, perhaps even taking the time to create training programs to cultivate their own talent, or alter their expectations of the recruitment process accommodating the required time and resources to bring EU nationals to work in the UK for the first time. This is bad news for businesses affected by Brexit lack of clarity, and this may mean some stark choices around how they are structured, where they chose to locate new satellite offices and how their products and services are brought to market.

If the recruiting pundits are to be believed, we are already in a “War for Talent” and have been since the late 1990s. The effects of Brexit could further exacerbate this talent shortage across multiple industries. Which companies will be most affected by Brexit? For example, in Aviation and Engineering, 22% of UK engineering business leaders and 42% of UK aviation industry leaders identified a labour shortage as the most urgent challenge they will face in the next five years. Global demand for aviation skills alone is set to overtake supply by 2027, and with skilled candidates already under-represented amongst a rapidly reducing workforce, skills shortages will become an increasingly dominant UK business issue.

By May of 2018, LinkedIn reported that 96% of hiring strategies had already felt the impact of Brexit. The same study found that 44% of recruiters believed that working in the UK is becoming a less attractive prospect to EU citizens, with 39% seeing international candidates now reluctant to move to the UK.

Whatever the political opinion of an individual about Brexit and business and the UK’s place within the EU, it’s clear that the uncertainty of the present for EU nationals already working here and those that might have come, is having a wide-reaching impact. For recruiters working to fill a growing number of vacancies with a diminished talent pool, the job will become harder. Despite the assurances of people like London Mayor Sadiq Khan that “London is open and no matter where you’re from, you will always belong here,” for some, the uncertainty has led to doubt and those doubts have led them to look elsewhere when considering a new role. This also means a huge impact on businesses affected by Brexit being in constant flux, and it’s long and far-reaching.

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AB25: How CCPA affects employers and recruiters

Nikoletta Bika — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 17:11:18 +0000

CCPA will go into effect in January 2020, but with important modifications. These modifications are detailed in five Assembly Bills signed by California’s Governor Gavin Newsom in mid-October 2019. AB25 is one of those five bills, and it’s very relevant to the HR and recruitment functions.

What does AB25 do? AB25 mainly provides employers a one-year exemption from their CCPA obligations (a “moratorium”) with respect to information collected by a business “in the course of a natural person acting as a job applicant to, an employee of, director of, officer of, medical staff member of, or contractor of that business.”

So, via AB25, CCPA doesn’t apply to employees and job applicants

In other words, as long as employers are collecting the data of its employees and job applicants solely for purposes relating to employment, the CCPA generally doesn’t apply to the collection of that information.

This is why recruiters can breathe a sigh of relief: employees and job applicants aren’t considered to be “consumers” under CCPA. Therefore, they don’t have the same privacy rights, such as right to deletion and opt-out.

But, you’re not completely off the hook

First, this exemption would remain in effect only until January 1, 2021. It’s a “sunset” provision that will expire on that date.

Also, AB25 upholds some rules under CCPA. These are:

Disclosure requirements

Employers are still obliged to inform people (including employees and job applicants) of the categories of personal information they collect – and the purposes for its use – at or before the point of collection.

This is usually done via a CCPA-compliant privacy policy. Recruiters will need to send it to candidates or feature it in a prominent place in their job ads.

Private right of action for data breach

Natural persons exempted via AB25 still have the right to a private civil action. For example, if your business is hacked and the personal information of job applicants is compromised, then a job applicant has two options under CCPA:

File an individual claim. This means that you may be liable to pay damages to that individual person because of the data breach.
File a class action suit. This means you may have to pay potential damages to all people affected by the data breach who are included as members in the suit.

Of course, it will be interesting to see whether class actions may end up being rare when it comes to privacy breaches – but it’s not a consequence you want to face anyway. We’ll see how this plays out, since the private right of action is available under CCPA.

The same penalties stand under AB25

AB25 doesn’t modify the penalties and fines inflicted on a business in the case of a CCPA violation. Your company can receive a fine from $2,500 to $7,500 from the competent authority, and you may also be obliged to pay $100 to $750 per consumer per incident if found to be in breach of your obligations in a civil action.

For example, the minimum amount you may be required to pay for violating CCPA after being found liable in a class action of 1,000 job applicants is $1,000 multiplied by 100 = $100,000, plus a minimum of at least $2,500.

Preparation is key

The numbers speak for themselves: to avoid the potential for expensive fines that could break your business, having a CCPA-compliant privacy policy is a priority. You also need to be sure that you use secure and CCPA-compliant vendors to collect or store personal information of consumers.

CCPA security and compliance are both measures that Workable, as a recruiting software provider, is planning to help its customers with. Stay tuned for more!

Also, keep in mind that there’s expectation a privacy law specifically applying to employees will be enacted in the year to come (possibly at the federal level). This means that there might be compliance obligations similar to those in CCPA that cover personal information of employees and job applicants.

See how CCPA differs from GDPR.

So, while AB25 softens the burden of CCPA for recruiters and employers, you aren’t necessarily in the clear. You need to take steps to ensure absolute compliance with CCPA by January 1, 2020 and any future laws as well as implement best practices. But, if you stay informed of changes and proactively implement measures, you should be in a good place going forward.

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New overtime law 2016: an employer’s guide

Nikoletta Bika — Fri, 08 Jul 2016 11:50:55 +0000

2016’s new overtime laws have shaken the US business world. Almost five million more employees will now have the right to time-and-a-half overtime pay. Many see it as long overdue. But, others aren’t ready to embrace the change.

September 2017 Update: According to Reuters.com, a Texas federal judge struck down the new overtime rule. Companies do not need to make any changes to how they pay overtime to their employees.

November 2016 Update: According to a recent Forbes article, “a federal judge in Texas has issued a nationwide junction blocking the [new overtime rule.] The injunction halts enforcement of the rule until the government can win a countermanding order from an appeals court.”

Employers are voicing concerns. How can companies like small businesses and non-profits sustain such a rise in labor costs? And won’t there be consequences for workplace culture and employee morale?

Here’s a guide to help you understand the new overtime laws a bit better:

Getting to know the basics

In 1975, the Fair Labor Standard Act (FLSA) required employers to pay almost two out of three employees overtime. This figure decreased over the years to around eleven percent. Obama’s new overtime law, which has been debated since the summer of 2015, aims to fix this.

Before the new overtime law, white collar employees had to be earning a maximum of $455 per 40-hour week to be non exempt (and therefore eligible for overtime pay). Now the salary threshold has doubled to $913 (or $47,476 per year). So, many more people could be eligible for overtime. The new law also reclassifies the cut-off for “highly compensated employees,” (HCE) from those who earn above 100,000 a year to those who earn more than $134,000. HCE are exempt from overtime pay if they meet certain requirements.

Of course, there are exceptions. Businesses that make less than $500,000 in revenue aren’t covered by FLSA rules, so they don’t have to pay overtime. Some businesses, like hospitals and schools, have to pay overtime regardless of revenue.

A quick look around the globe

Some see this policy as overly generous. Others say it’s still a long way from the standard of other countries. So, what’s happening outside the US?

UK overtime law doesn’t oblige employers to pay anything for extra hours. But employees can’t be made to work more than 48 hours per week. Everyone must get paid at least minimum wage, for all the hours they work. Employers can offer time off in lieu of overtime.

Other countries have more generous overtime laws. Mexico’s law is interesting; overtime compensation is double an employee’s normal pay, and triple if they work overtime on a national holiday.

According to Russian law, employers can ask employees to work overtime in specific instances and for a maximum of four hours over any two consecutive days (up to a maximum of 120 hours per year). Overtime pay is at least 1.5 or 2 times normal wage.

France’s overtime laws require employers to pay an additional 25% of an employee’s normal wage for the first eight hours of overtime (and 50% for every hour beyond that). But new French labor laws might change this; an issue which has sparked much debate and various demonstrations since spring 2016.

How are US employers affected by the new overtime law?

It’s natural for employers to be unhappy about laws that up their costs. In the retail and restaurant industries alone, projected costs may amount to nine billion dollars a year. Employers will also have to review current HR policies (like timekeeping).

What can businesses do?

Usually, added costs are passed on to customers. But, some employers are thinking about other ways to reduce their costs. They could raise salaries so employees can reach exempt status once again. Or they could lower salaries to make up for overtime pay. Are these options worth it, in the long term?

Probably not. Raising salaries just above the threshold is a ploy unlikely to inspire employees’ respect. Plus, this money will likely come from cutting other salaries or benefits (excluding a 10% bonus the new law allows) which employees are never big fans of. Employee engagement and productivity may suffer as a consequence.

Of course, employers could hire part-time employees to take on the extra hours, capping the working week of full-time employees.

Is paying overtime any good for business?

Added labor costs are a pain. But, businesses can pull through by making their processes more efficient and cutting redundant costs.

Imagine if there were no laws for overtime at all. Would that be good for business? Theoretically, employees could work as much as possible without extra pay for going above and beyond. This doesn’t seem like a healthy employment relationship that could boost productivity or long-term gains.

At a time when employee engagement is the holy grail for employers, complaining about having to pay a low-salaried supervisor for their work might send a bad message.

Need an additional argument? Retail, an industry heavily impacted by the new rule, can benefit from it too. Retail workers are retail customers too – if everyone is better paid, they’re likely to buy more retail products. Extra costs are a burden, but they could coincide with a rise in revenue.

How are employees affected?

Five million previously exempt employees (or many more, according to the Economic Policy Institute) can now get paid more. This should be good news for them. But, they may actually experience negative consequences.

If employers cut salaries or raise them just above the legal maximum, employees mightn’t profit much. And if employers cut back overtime, non-exempt employees may burn out trying to deal with increased workloads within normal working hours. There’s also fear that employers will eliminate some positions that require frequent overtime by automating work, or passing it to exempt employees.

Stricter timekeeping is also a pain. Nobody likes other people monitoring when they clock in and out. But this is something people can get used to, especially if they see their income rise.

There’s been some speculation that newly non-exempt employees will feel demoted and under-appreciated. Counting work hours is a normal practice for blue-collar workers. But, no matter how much prestige an employee places on their exempt status, they’re more likely to be satisfied about getting paid more. Imagine a retail store manager, making $35,000 per year working 60-hour weeks. Having to monitor their hours to get paid more isn’t likely to make them complain.

And what about public opinion?

Eighty percent of American citizens support extended overtime rules. Businesses may consider increased costs a headache but public opinion should make them reconsider their resistance to the new overtime law. After all, “the customer is always right” – catering to what 80% of the public wants is rarely a bad business move.

So where should you start?

US businesses have until December 1st 2016 to adjust to new overtime regulations. Some employers may try to get around the law. But, in the long term, it’s probably better to adjust to it and pay the new overtime rates.

Here are some actions you can take to make the transition to the new overtime law easier for you and clearer for your employees:

1. Seek legal assistance

Ever since the new overtime law was officially announced, there have been tons of articles explaining its nuts and bolts. But, a qualified lawyer can explain the rule in more detail and give useful advice on how to deal with its consequences.

2. Re-classify employees

Almost 11% of employees may be misclassified. Overtime laws set guidelines for who can be exempt. Companies should make sure all of their employees are correctly classified as exempt or non-exempt.

3. Craft clear company policies

A carefully crafted overtime policy, along with an attendance policy, is a must. Companies that already have these kinds of policies should update them as soon as possible.

What should an overtime policy include?

Define employee classifications. If you reclassify employees, let them know why you reclassified them.
Explain terminology. Employees should know what being classified as exempt/non exempt means. They should also understand other concepts like ‘standard working hours.’
Outline company overtime rules. Employees should know why and when they can be asked to work overtime. Is overtime mandatory and frequent or optional and occasional? Brief employees on your company’s legal obligations to encourage transparency.
Establish and communicate procedures. Should employees and supervisors sign written agreements when overtime is needed? Communicate all your procedures for recording and paying overtime.
Be clear on employees’ obligations. For example, tell employees how you’ll compensate voluntary overtime. Ask them to pay close attention to their timekeeping and set out rules to avoid excessive overtime.
Use the right technology. You can track hours and calculate overtime pay easily with the help of technology. ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems and timekeeping software can standardize this process and shorten your adjustment period.

Legislative changes of this scale can be disruptive. Especially for HR departments who have to rethink policies and procedures. But, the quicker companies learn to adapt, the less likely they are to suffer negative consequences.

The post New overtime law 2016: an employer’s guide appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Don’t forget the ‘human’ in Brexit HR implications

Matt Buckland — Fri, 18 Jan 2019 10:00:00 +0000

Friday, the 24th of June, 2016, wasn’t like the usual Fridays we’d had at work. The tech startup I worked for was successful, but still relatively small at 105 employees. What made it feel much larger was the 38 nationalities who worked alongside me in my daily work life. Fridays were traditionally about a longer lunch, an “all hands” meeting with the CEO and drinks, for those that wanted them, with their peers. This Friday wasn’t the same.

On waking on that Friday morning, I found my neatly curated social media bubble punctured. I’d gone to sleep at about midnight, shortly before I’d watched Nigel Farage seem to give a speech of capitulation. He later said of the moment: “I’d reached the end of my campaign, I’d physically and mentally reached the end of the road. I sank into a deep depression during the course of that afternoon… convincing myself that we’d lose.”

“Great!” I thought, as I went to sleep, fully expecting to wake up a remaining member of the happy EU family.

Instead, I remember the morning of Friday, the 24th of June, 2016, as grey and overcast. Some people didn’t come in to work at all and those that did seemed quiet and cowed by the apparent rejection of their adopted country. There wasn’t the normal “Friday Feeling”. Instead, it felt more like shellshock.

As someone who works in recruitment, the shock I felt was replaced with concern for the company and the wider workforce. In the weeks after the referendum, I felt that we were seeing fewer applications from abroad and even had a few people leave the company to return to their own countries. Although I spoke to other recruiters in the industry who expressed similar feelings, there was no concrete data to support the anecdotal evidence we all felt was so obvious.

The ensuing time since the Brexit referendum vote has been a roller coaster for those in the recruitment industry. We’ve seen changes to the existing visa system, quotas placed on that system and subsequently withdrawn, and a back-and-forth on immigration policy. Uncertainty for EU nationals was replaced with the right to remain for a price and the factions on both sides of the debate remain polarised and vitriolic.

In the time since the vote, I also changed my role and moved to Workable. I found myself speaking to people, from all levels across the UK, who were involved in hiring and trying to keep talent within their organisations. The stories that people told are of the same roller coaster I had experienced. The boom-and-bust cycle of uncertainty was seemingly more frequent as the labour market tracked the weekly Brexit newscycle. It was only in my role at Workable that I was able to see the effect of Brexit in real terms. As you can see in the following graph, published job activities in the UK on the Workable job board dropped significantly from the week following the Brexit referendum (as indicated at the point marked “Brexit referendum next week”) until finally seeing a kind-of recovery starting January 2017.

The feeling of a wider negative effect, and the feeling that when in a role like HR or recruitment you shouldn’t be “political,” meant that there wasn’t much public conversation in the HR and Recruitment industry – Brexit HR implications aside. Practitioners live with the uncomfortable duopoly of both waiting to see what others do as well as give guidance and advice to their own organisations.

For those organisations with a time to hire in the 20+ days range, the dips and peaks of this data hide the stories of the individuals caught up in the rapidly changing environment. The candidate that applies one week and withdraws the next, the candidates who simply disappear, and the candidates who we’ll never know about because the whole thing just put them off before they even hit “apply”. It’s true to say that the position I found myself in on that grey Friday morning hasn’t changed for many of the people engaged in the attempt to convince people to change jobs throughout the UK. It’s the lot of the hardworking recruiters to roll with the punches of an already tough talent market. This market made even tougher by the pressures of an educated and skilled workforce either being tempted to, or tempted back to, Europe. It was only the day after the vote when a truck towing a large sign advertising jobs in Berlin prowled the streets of London’s tech hub.

Recruiters remain the squeezed middle in a no-win game of “What is Best Practice?” Brexit, unlike most regulatory change that we face, has proven to be a game where not only do the rules change each week but one team has split into three new players and then as halftime approaches someone has run away with the ball altogether.

The true impact of Brexit – and especially, Brexit HR implications – won’t be known until the final days of March 2019 and even then extracting meaning and a tactical approach from the legal wranglings won’t be pretty… but, hey, we survived GDPR, right? Right?

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Is there meaningful progress in DEI right now? Depends on who you ask

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 16:24:26 +0000

There is near unanimous support for DEI in society and in business, according to our respondents. Statements are good and well, but they can ring hollow if there isn’t tangible progress in DEI in the workplace. So, we dug into our data to learn whether meaningful progress is being made in diversity, equity and inclusion objectives.

Business logic suggests that progress in DEI is dependent on proactively building and executing on a sound DEI strategy. So, we wanted to learn which industries put priority on DEI and which of those industries weren’t able to simply because they didn’t know how to proceed with such a strategy.

In this chapter, we address the following questions:

Are companies making meaningful progress in DEI?
Who thinks there is meaningful progress in DEI, and who doesn’t?
Which industries put higher priority on DEI in business, and which ones don’t?
Which industries want to progress in DEI, but just don’t know how?

Is there meaningful progress in DEI?

When we asked respondents if they feel their company is making meaningful progress in DEI – a clear majority (73.4%) answered “Yes”.

However, again, there are significant differences when breaking down the respondents across specific demographics. First, 71.4% of females think their company is making meaningful progress, compared with 77% of males who feel the same way.

The dataset also finds 71.1% of those who identify as a minority in both their work and home communities think their company is making meaningful progress in DEI, compared with 74.6% of those who didn’t identify as a minority.

We also identified differences in answers when breaking responses down by industry. Those in Accounting / Finance are much more likely to answer “Yes” with 85.2% seeing progress in DEI, while those in Business / Consulting Services (67.9%) and HR / Recruiting (67.7%) are less likely to answer “Yes” than overall.

Different companies, different priorities

While it’s generally agreed that DEI is the right thing to do, that people are the drivers behind that sentiment, and that progress is being made to some degree, the level of prioritization differs especially across industries or company sizes.

For instance, those in IT / Technology / SaaS are the most likely of the seven industries with a significant sample size to say that “DEI is not a priority for my company” (13.3% versus 11% overall). Those in Education, albeit a much smaller sample size, are the only ones with a higher percentage to not consider DEI a priority in their company, at 15.2%.

Those in Manufacturing are much more likely (22.4%) to report that they are interested in DEI, but don’t know where to start – more than double the percentage of any other sector.

When breaking the numbers down by company size, the disparity between numbers is more striking. Nearly one quarter (23.5%) of those in companies with more than 5,000 full-time employees say DEI is not a priority in their company, while nearly half (47.2%) of those with 1-9 full-time employees report that DEI is a permanent part of their mission / vision / values.

This doesn’t necessarily suggest that enterprise-level companies are less interested – perhaps it’s that the approval process for new initiatives takes longer or is more convoluted in a larger organization, while smaller companies are more nimble in making new decisions.

It’s also noteworthy that exactly one-fifth (20%) of those in companies of 5,000 or more FTEs report that they didn’t know what the current state of DEI is in their company, while 22.6% of those in the 1-9 FTE bracket answered the same.

“[We’re] currently in a state of exploration. We’re investors with a global portfolio, so [we’re] looking at DEI both internally and […] what it means for the companies we’ve invested in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.“

Local and regional companies (28.1% combined) are more likely to report DEI as not being a priority than their national and multinational counterparts (18.1% combined).

We hope you find our survey results on DEI at work to be helpful to you both professionally and personally. Any thoughts or questions, please feel free to share them with us via Twitter, LinkedIn, or direct email (with “DEI report” in the subject heading). We want to hear from you!

Check out the other excerpts from our survey report on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion:

1. DEI at work: It’s time to take a deep dive
2. What does DEI mean for you and your business?
4. DEI leadership – and who’s actually doing the work?
5. Your DEI strategic plan: The road is fraught with hurdles
6. What are your top DEI initiatives for the workplace?
7. Your DEI recruitment strategy: What are your action items?
8. Time for a DEI action plan: We’ll help you get there

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3 workforce trends to prepare for in the last quarter of 2021

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 14:33:55 +0000

Employers are in a tough spot. They have to recruit – the same way they did before the pandemic – and find top talent to fill all their open roles, as always. And today they have an abundance of vacancies and empty roles to fill.

What employers really want is what they’ve always wanted: to fill all their open positions with hard-working people who stay with the company, grow and pledge their loyalty. Ideally, employees who refer others, work until retirement and never consider seeking employment elsewhere.

But, in today’s workforce, is it possible for any employer to get all the things they want?

Let’s look at the employment landscape: In the United States, 1 in 4 people has been unemployed for over a year. The UK saw 1.55 million people unemployed in the three months up to July 2021. And the worldwide unemployment number increased to a documented 220.5 million people – although in reality, it’s likely much higher than that.

So, with an abundance of employers who want to hire combined with a record number of unemployed people, why can’t companies find workers? What do these job seekers want? And what benefits do they value most?

To help answer these questions, let’s look at the top three workforce trends to be cognizant of so you can fine-tune your hiring strategy into the last quarter of 2021 and beyond.

Workforce trends to watch in Q4 of 2021

The pandemic accelerated several trends and changed the future of work. But as a recruiter, what are the three most important things you should watch out for? Read on to find out.

1. The Great Resignation

Although new job openings are through the roof, workers are leaving companies in droves. In August 2021, 4.3 million workers quit their jobs. That’s the third consecutive month where the number was higher than the previous month.

In the UK and Ireland, a study from Personio of workers revealed that 38% of people surveyed intend to change roles in the next 6 to 12 months. The same study showed that 45% of HR decision-makers are worried about employees leaving their positions when the job market improves.

“COVID brought the great awakening which is leading to the great resignation. It helped us align what is really important and highlighted what brings us happiness and fulfillment,” says Rachel Halsey Bullard, Senior Recruiter at Emeritus.

“If the workforce does not provide the same fulfillment we experienced during the shutdown, then employees will go somewhere else to get it. ”

So, who exactly is resigning from their jobs? Let’s take a look.

Quit rates are highest among mid-career employees

Younger people in the workforce have high expectations from their employers. They’re done with the current system and refuse to go back to “business as usual.”

We recently surveyed 750 people – some employed, some self-employed, and some unemployed – in the United States to find out how content they were with their current jobs. The study revealed that 80% of those aged 21-29, 74.9% of those aged 31-39, and 75% of those aged 40-49 are either open to work right now or actively looking for a new opportunity.

We also surveyed 500 people in the UK and found that 79.8% of those aged 21-29 and 85.1% of those aged 31-39 are either actively looking for or passively open to new work right now. This means just one in five of those aged 21 to 29 and less than 15% of those aged 30 to 39 can be seen as quite settled in their current roles.

Tech and health care have the highest quit rates

The manufacturing and finance industries saw a slight decrease in resignation rates but the healthcare industry saw a 3.6% increase over the previous year. The tech industry also had a rise in resignations of 4.5% more than last year.

Related: Learn from Boston tech leaders on what attracts tech workers to your company.

These resignations were largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many workers – because of the extreme stress and increase in job demand – felt overwhelmed and burned out. It inevitably follows that they should drop out of the workforce as a result. It’s not a sustainable situation for them.

2. Increased competition for top talent

In March and April of 2020, millions of people also lost their jobs. Now, not only are employers looking to refill those positions back to pre-pandemic levels, but they’re also adding more jobs to their existing payroll in Q4 of 2021.

Because so many people now have the ability to work from home, the competition for top talent is continuing to increase. Candidates today have many more choices – not only are they applying to local jobs but they’re also considering opportunities nationally and internationally.

Employees with the most desirable skills and experience are most in demand.

Another thing about these job seekers is they’re more informed. They prefer to actively research companies themselves rather than relying on the word of a recruiter.

3. Labor shortages

In the United States, the unemployment rate in August was 5.2%. July’s number was slightly higher at 5.4%.

The average monthly job growth this year has been 586,000 – although that number has dropped in recent months. And while employment rates declined in the retail industry, other industries – like professional services, transportation, warehousing, manufacturing, and private education – saw job gains.

Related: Check out our Hiring Pulse for the latest in recruitment data, including job openings, candidates per hire and time to fill metrics.

In August, the number of unemployed people decreased to 8.4 million, which is lower than previous months but still much higher than the pre-pandemic level of 5.7 million.

In the UK, however, the numbers show more signs of promise. The unemployment rate fell to 4.6% in the three months ending July 2021, which was the lowest it had been since June-August 2020.

So what’s going on with this labor shortage? Let’s look at that.

What contributed to the current labor shortage?

One factor many believe played a major role in the labor shortage was extended unemployment benefits. To assist workers laid off due to the pandemic, US Congress passed several relief bills. One in particular gave people receiving unemployment benefits an extra $600 per week in addition to what they were already receiving from their state.

After a few months, the $600 amount decreased to $300 per week. But, this additional assistance expired on September 6, 2021. Consequently, it makes sense that this should increase the number of active candidates in the job market.

But, in spite of the end of extended unemployment benefits, many companies aren’t confident that factor alone will be enough to entice workers to rejoin the workforce.

What will continue to impact the labor market in Q4?

As we progress through Q4, some impending challenges still remain that may continue to impact the current labor market. These include a lack of child-care options, the surgence of the Delta variant, and the continuing threat of COVID-19.

Hiring tips moving forward

So, as a recruiter, what should you do moving forward? Here are a few tips to help you find, hire and onboard great candidates in Q4 and beyond.

1. Directly engage your dream candidates

Showcase and highlight the most important employee benefits to attract qualified candidates. Show job seekers – and passive candidates – why they should choose your company over all the others who also want to employ them.

2. Diversify your candidate sourcing methods

Are you only getting a few inquiries for your job posts – like 20 potential candidates showing interest instead of well over 200 applicants? If so, you’re not drawing enough attention. Spread the word by using a combination of methods: a wide range of job boards, social media, your company careers page, employee referrals, advanced sourcing tools, and other strategies to get the word out and draw qualified candidates.

3. Focus on the candidate experience

One in two job seekers admits to having a negative experience in the recruitment process. How you communicate with candidates, conduct interviews, and follow up with them all impact the candidate experience – and can encourage qualified candidates to either accept or decline your offer of employment.

4. Prioritize diversity and inclusion

Make your company’s environment appealing to the people you want to attract. Highlight your unique workers and show accessibility options throughout the office. Put policies and procedures in place ahead of time to show you’re an inclusive employer.

5. Offer a desirable perk or incentive

The benefits package you offer could be the reason that a candidate decides to choose your company over another. Offer the best benefits you can and make the offer as compelling as possible. In short, make it worthwhile for someone to spend their time and energy working for you.

6. Create a positive onboarding experience

Your onboarding process introduces the new hires to your company, your culture, and shows them their roles. Make new hires feel welcome and comfortable by providing continued training and consistent feedback.

Now, once you get their attention, it’s time to think about how you might attract them to your company.

Consider flexible working arrangements

Flexible work is one of the most coveted employee benefits an employer can offer. It allows workers to better integrate their home and work lives, and gives them the opportunity to meet their personal needs, family obligations, and other responsibilities.

According to our New World of Work survey, flexible work is one of the biggest and most important workplace changes derived from the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey revealed that 71.1% cited remote work and 35.7% cited flexible/staggered schedules as paradigm shifts going forward.

Our UK Great Discontent study also found that 57.7% of UK workers also crave flexible schedules and say it’s quite important to them.

Now, flexibility is a part of the compensation package many employers are offering. For jobseekers, it’s a must. Some won’t even consider an offer unless it includes some level of flexibility – like the option to work from home a few days per week.

FlexJobs surveyed 4,612 people between July and August of 2021 about their job-seeking plans. Three out of five said they want a fully remote position while 39% surveyed wanted a hybrid working arrangement. Only 3% said they wanted to forego flexible arrangements and return to fully in-person work.

The same survey found that 21% of people desire flex work so much they were willing to make significant sacrifices for it – like giving up some of their vacation time in exchange for working remotely. In addition to that, a quarter said they would even consider taking a pay cut of 10% to 20% if they could work from home.

Some of the fastest-growing career opportunities offering flexible work are computer and IT, medical and health, sales, project management, customer service, marketing, accounting and finance.

It’s not just a fad

The rate of remote work is also expected to nearly double what it was prior to the pre-pandemic number of 16.8 million. By 2025, it’s expected that 36.2 million Americans will be working remotely.

This arrangement is beneficial for both workers and employers. Some benefits for workers include no commute time, reduced stress and fewer distractions. Employers, on the other hand, get to enjoy their own benefits like increased employee engagement and more productivity.

When 20.8% of US workers and 16.6% of UK workers say the main reason they’re open to other opportunities is the need for better work flexibility, pay attention. So, plan accordingly in your talent attraction strategy.

What should you do if flex work is not an option?

We’re not naive – we know flex work isn’t always an option. To counter that, consider the different types of flexible work. It’s about more than giving people the opportunity to work from home. It includes the option to adjust the days and hours when you’re working and to modify your schedule.

If your industry can’t accommodate work-from-home arrangements, try offering flexible schedules at the employee’s discretion. And if you can’t give full flexibility, you can offer staggered schedules, especially for service and other customer-facing roles. Here’s an example: Schedule one employee to work 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. and have another come in from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Here are a few more things you can do to make your company more attractive to job seekers:

1. Pay a competitive wage

Many employees are at increased risk because of the pandemic, especially essential workers. Adjust your salary to reflect the current financial realities of your employees. This was a resounding conclusion from our Great Discontent surveys – compensation is still a top factor in jobseekers’ minds.

2. Invest in health precautions

Show your employees the health precautions you’re taking and how far you’re going to keep them safe. Include this information in your job advertisements – including details on vaccination mandates and other areas of concern – to show candidates how committed you are to their well-being.

3. Improve your company culture

A positive company culture – such as Proxyclick’s – will help to increase employee retention in your organization. It can also help you attract the best candidates – who share your company’s beliefs, goals, and values.

Workforce trends post-COVID

So, what’s the new future of work? Here’s what it boils down to: job seekers want change and evolution in their work setup. They have a new set of expectations for companies and they aren’t willing to settle. And most of all, they want to be happy and engaged.

After enduring the past year, they rearranged their priorities – and got to see the important things that matter most to them, and for many, this was a baptism by fire. Now they’re taking that attitude and those expectations into the workforce.

The things employees want aren’t groundbreaking discoveries. They want to work for companies that are sensitive to their needs. Companies that value what they do. And companies that acknowledge and appreciate their efforts.

They care about work-life balance, meeting family obligations and maintaining health and wellness. They also covet flexibility, because it allows them to do these things with simplicity and convenience. Consider these trends in your workforce planning strategy and you may find yourself ahead of the pack for the new year.

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Elon Musk’s X enters the hiring arena: what you should know

Alexandros Pantelakis — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 15:16:41 +0000

Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, has made a bold move. The platform recently unveiled its new job-hiring feature, aiming squarely at challenging the dominance of LinkedIn in the professional networking sphere.

But as with all things Musk, the move is not without its critics and skeptics. Let’s delve deeper into this development.

What is X hiring?

X’s latest offering, the “X Hiring Beta,” is not just another job-hiring tool. It’s a statement. By introducing this job-listing feature, X has opened its doors to verified organizations, allowing them to post job listings directly on their profiles.

The intent is clear: to help these companies find the most relevant candidates for their roles.

But this feature comes with a not-so-humble price tag.

A hefty monthly fee of $1,000 is required to access the job-hiring tool on X. While this might seem steep, it’s evident that X is targeting a premium segment of the market, perhaps aiming to offer a more curated experience than its competitors.

Currently, while everyone can see job ads, only US-verified organizations can post jobs.

Eager to see the first job ad? Click on the following tweet:

Meet our new job card, how you'll start to discover new jobs directly on @X.

Available today on web and iOS.https://t.co/60oWBzvOht

— Hiring (@XHiring) September 7, 2023

The bigger picture: X as an ‘everything app’

The introduction of the hiring feature is just a piece of a much larger puzzle. Since Musk’s takeover, X has undergone a series of modifications, each pointing towards a grander vision: transforming X into an “everything app.”

Drawing parallels with giants like WeChat, X’s ambition is to create a platform that goes beyond mere social networking.

Whether it’s payments, news, or video content, Musk envisions a future where X is the go-to app for a myriad of services.

This strategy is not without precedent. Platforms like WeChat have successfully integrated various services, from payments to bookings, all under one digital roof. But can X replicate this success, especially in markets outside of China where the “everything app” concept is still nascent?

Who's ready to start seeing jobs in all the places? pic.twitter.com/nrvedZL9PZ

— Hiring (@XHiring) September 1, 2023

Why the move into the hiring industry?

Musk’s foray into the hiring domain might seem sudden, but it’s a calculated move. With platforms like LinkedIn dominating the professional networking space, there’s a potential gap that Musk believes X can fill.

As a social medium with 450 millions active users, it could be the first stop for future candidates to search for a new job. Facebook tried this before but without much success. Musk believes he can do it better.

Moreover, with more than 118 million companies using X, almost double the number of companies using Linkedin (which has 61 million), there is a huge market to leverage, especially if he charges less.

If the above is not enough, his recent comments, where he labeled LinkedIn as “cringe,” highlight his desire to offer something different, something “cool” but only for a special audience until now.

Tweet of Elon Mask’s “cringe” statement:

People send me LinkedIn links sometimes, but the cringe level is so high that I just can’t bring myself to use it, so I ask for the resume or bio to be emailed.

We will make sure that the X competitor to LinkedIn is cool.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 27, 2023

But why the hiring industry? For X, it’s a strategic move. The platform has seen its ups and downs, with fluctuating user engagement and advertisers coming and going.

By introducing a premium hiring feature, X not only diversifies its offerings but also provides a fresh incentive for advertisers to return.

Potential development and challenges

While the vision is grand, the road ahead is fraught with challenges.

Currently, the “X Hiring” feature is in its beta phase. It’s still in its infancy, with many features yet to be rolled out.

As it stands – for now, at least – the tool is a far cry from being a comprehensive LinkedIn competitor.

However, Musk is no stranger to challenges. His ventures, from Tesla to SpaceX, have often faced skepticism, only to prove critics wrong.

With X, the approach seems to be similar. Despite the initial limitations of the hiring feature, there’s a method to Musk’s brain. Industry watchers might be skeptical, but if history is any indication, Musk’s unusual strategies often pay off.

And this is perhaps due to Musk’s strategy that can be identified by recurring themes in three key aspects: the alignment of his vision with the problems he aims to address, the organizational structure he adopts to tackle these problems, and his exceptional ability to mobilize resources towards achieving these solutions.

Yet, the exclusivity of the feature raises eyebrows. By catering only to verified organizations and sidelining smaller businesses or startups, X risks alienating a significant user base.

Furthermore, the high monthly fee might deter many organizations from adopting the feature, especially when platforms like LinkedIn offer a free base layer.

Is X Hiring a good option for your organization?

The exclusivity of the feature, both in terms of its target audience and its pricing, make it a difficult decision to make.

On one hand, it ensures a premium experience for users. On the other, it risks creating a walled garden, accessible only to the elite.

Comparing it with LinkedIn’s model, which offers a free base layer for all registered users, X’s approach seems restrictive. While LinkedIn does have its premium tiers, the barrier to entry is significantly lower there.

Based on our research among the top companies in the world, which are verified organizations on X, no one is currently using this feature as of the time of writing this article. Is it because it is a beta feature? Or does it require more communication?

With the backing of Elon Musk and his grand vision of an “everything app,” the potential is immense. However, the journey is just beginning, and the road ahead is filled with challenges.

As with all things Musk, the world will be watching closely. Will X redefine professional networking? Only time will tell.

But one thing is certain: in the world of tech, change is the only constant, and X is determined to be a significant part of that change.

Tip: If you decide to take the next step and start using X Hiring, you can still link it back to your favorite hiring software, as X at the moment is giving the opportunity to redirect candidates to your preferred career page.

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Candidate value proposition: how has it changed since 2020?

Keith MacKenzie — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 19:36:16 +0000

One thing that’s changed significantly over the last two years is the kind of skills that boost the net worth of a candidate when they’re trying to land a job.

The standard skills and background aren’t wholesale different than pre-pandemic, but the changing nature of the working environment (i.e. remote, hybrid, etc.) and shifting values of work (i.e. work-life balance) have changed things. Soft skills, specifically, have grown in value for employers over the last couple of years.

Let’s have a look at what skills really stood out for employers in 2022 compared with in 2020.

DIY on the rise

In 2020, a self-motivated or a self-starter mentality was valued by more than half of businesses (54.2%) when hiring.

That number’s grown significantly higher to 69% now – meaning, seven out of 10 businesses really like to see their workers take initiative without needing guidance or even motivation from their managers.

A surge in creativity

Another dramatic shift is in how employers value creativity and innovation in their teams. In 2020, 27.8% considered that to be a valuable trait when evaluating a candidate – that number’s nearly doubled to 52.8%.

Growing thirst for knowledge

Again, in the same theme of being creative and being a self-starter, there’s growth in the importance of willingness to grow / learn in a role. Employers value this more now (38.2%) than they did in 2020 (30.6%).

This speaks volumes to the growing trend of learning & development as part of an overall compensation package. If workers show they’re keen to grow, employers love that.

Adaptable and resilient? Meh

Going the opposite way, interestingly, are adaptability and resilience (down to 52.6% from 67.4%) and the ability to operate in ambiguity (22.3%, down from 26.1%).

What does all this tell us?

The overall working world is more unpredictable and perennially changing than it was in pre-pandemic times – and subsequently, businesses need to be more agile to survive and thrive.

And now that employers are operating in an agile environment as a rule rather than an exception, they need employees to be more creative and willing to learn in order to stay relevant and competitive.

But after two and a half years in this working environment, employers have developed best practices in management, and are identifying what works best in this new world of work. They’re no longer putting the onus on their teams to drive by night without the necessary guidance and leadership – but at the same time, providing just enough information for self-starters to thrive.

Ultimately, with remote/hybrid becoming the norm rather than a stop-gap exception, strategy and planning are back on the table – which calls for tighter leadership and clearer goals. But again, in that new working environment there will be gaps where an employee is working from home three days a week and must determine their own schedule and goals to align with their team’s.

In short: a self-start mentality continues to be valuable while flying by night isn’t required nearly as much. It’s a very nuanced difference.

The post Candidate value proposition: how has it changed since 2020? appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The effects of ‘long remote’: how remote’s changed since 2020

Keith MacKenzie — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 14:39:41 +0000

It’s no secret – the shift to remote work in 2020 was one of the fundamental changes in the workplace. And for many, the pandemic wasn’t the cause of it – it was simply a trigger.

Now, it’s worth another look in this area to see where we stand in terms of distributed teams.

What's new in the new world of work?

With insights on hybrid work, employee engagement, and the effects of "long remote", our new survey report is packed with data insights.

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The trend of distributed teams

The initial shift to fully remote operations was a major adjustment for business survival in response to requirements for physical distancing in 2020 during the first wave of the COVID-19 virus.

But what does that look like today?

1. Not everyone’s fully remote anymore

In 2020, the majority of businesses were working more than three-quarters remotely (57.9%).

Now, that number has decreased. Just one in five businesses (19.9%) have 75% or more of their employees working remotely.

2. The loss of remote optimism

In 2020, 33.7% of businesses said three quarters or more of their workers could work fully remotely without disruption.

In 2022, the percentage of businesses saying so shrunk to half that (17.5%).

3. Forget ‘long COVID’ – here’s ‘long remote’

In 2020, nearly three-quarters (73.2%) said employee engagement and morale would be a major struggle in a remote work world.

Businesses don’t see this as much of a challenge now (56.6%).

On the flip side, team building and morale (54.7%) and team collaboration / logistics (41.1%) were noted as anticipated challenges in 2020.

Now that businesses have some experience with remote work from 2020 to present day, both challenges have increased in 2022 (65.4% and 62.3% respectively).

What does all this tell us?

Check out those latter two insights: there’s dwindling optimism that remote work could really go as well as originally anticipated for overall business processes. While businesses and employees become more accustomed to working in distributed teams, engagement is not as pertinent an issue as it was two years ago.

But at the same time, the experience of the last two and a half years have made it clearer to employers that remote work may not be as feasible in the long term as it was initially seen to be. And more so, the specific challenges of remote work are now rising to the surface.

In short, we are seeing the effects of ‘long remote’ – and they are not all positive.

Remote employee engagement

Nevertheless, many companies are staying with the remote-work arrangement. And the above data on remote engagement warrants a deeper look at what companies are doing to overcome those challenges listed above.

Ultimately, all-around communication and results rather than processes are growing in importance.

1. The conversation is digital

Incorporation of communications technology is the number-one jump from 2020 to 2022 for businesses looking to improve their engagement of remote employees, with 75.8% saying they’re doing so now compared with just 52.6% in 2020.

2. Top-down communication

Interestingly, just 33.7% of businesses in 2020 focused on regular all-hands addresses from top management as a tool to ensure remote employee engagement.

That number’s since risen to 52.6%. The percentage of businesses introducing more team meetings to ensure sync (virtually) has gone the other direction – with 46.7% picking that as a focal point compared with 54.5% two years ago.

3. KPIs in the management’s eyes

Another shift that occurred since 2020 is the focus on results as a performance metric, with 33.2% of businesses focusing on that today compared with 26.4% in 2020.

4. But ‘breathing down necks’ still exists

Nevertheless, many companies are also turning to time-tracking and / or employee monitoring.

This year, 22.5% of businesses use this as an option, compared with 14.6% in 2020.

5. And finally – virtual social is virtually diminished

The biggest change in the other direction is that of virtual coffee dates and / or happy hours to ensure remote employee engagement.

Two years ago, more than a quarter of businesses (28.4%) picked this option – but that’s shrunk to just 15.2% of businesses today.

What does all this tell us?

Again, the tumultuous landscape that businesses are navigating from 2020 onwards may have required quick decisions, corrections and redirections at a more frenetic pace than employees (or employers) are accustomed to.

This requires clearer leadership and more frequent communications – and less micromanagement (for some, anyway). Meanwhile, social interaction is easier now with the opening up of society, of course – so that’s no longer a major concern.

Changes due to remote shift

Let’s stay with the remote conversation for a little longer – we’re now interested in understanding what is being considered by businesses who are moving or have already moved their operations to a remote environment, and how that looks different now compared with 2020.

1. The (talent) universe is expanding

Employers are now enjoying larger talent markets as a result of hybrid and remote teams, with 53.3% expanding their job postings to other locations now, up from three in 10 (30.1%) in 2020.

2. Bye bye physical office

Nearly three times the percentage of businesses are now considering closing their physical workplace – 46.4% now versus 16.3% two years prior.

Considering this was asked of businesses who are remote or will do so, this insight is very much moot.

3. Show them the (local) money

Facebook made headlines in mid-2020 when they announced they would pay their workers based on where they lived.

Turns out that move was prescient, and the start of a trend. More than one in four businesses (26.3%) are considering this as an option, up from 15.7% in 2020.

What does all this tell us?

Recruitment is ultimately impacted here. Where your candidates are working and how much you’re paying them absolutely changes when you’re operating with a distributed workforce.

And recruitment is just one section of the overall employee engagement – with engagement tactics changing and digital communication growing as a standard in the workplace thanks to the remote shift, businesses must consider the effects of “long remote” and more so, how to counter those new challenges.

The post The effects of ‘long remote’: how remote’s changed since 2020 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

COVID-19 business responses: which were ‘stopgap’ and which are permanent?

Keith MacKenzie — Sun, 29 Jan 2023 19:51:15 +0000

At the onset of the pandemic, we didn’t know for how long or how far the virus and its impact would reach, so many businesses introduced stopgap measures. As time dragged on, many introduced more permanent solutions and changes.

Let’s look at how things differed between the response in 2020 when the situation was as-yet unclear and in 2022 with more clarity in best practices. In other words, we now have an opportunity to understand what stuck to the wall and what didn’t.

The business response

A fundamental question we asked two years ago is what actions businesses took in response to the pandemic.

We asked that same question in our new survey to see if those actions look any different now.

A lot of part and parcel – not so much the whole

Businesses today are more likely to have moved to partial remote operations (59.2%), much higher than the 32.3% who did so two years ago.

The percentage of those moving to full remote operations decreased from 62.6% in 2020 to 52.4% now.

The incredible shrinking workplace

What also stands out – also related to the remote-work phenomenon – is the huge jump in the percentage of respondents who saw their business introducing reduced capacity at their working location.

Only 18% said they did that in 2020, and that’s more than doubled to 42.4% today.

Jobs are more stable now

Those who laid off or furloughed employees are on the decrease – just 10.2% of businesses resorted to this action in response to COVID-19 in 2022, compared with more than twice that (21.9%) two years ago.

What does all this tell us?

Businesses are now more likely to be partially remote, operating in smaller workspaces, and aren’t letting go of their employees to the same degree as before. This all points to the rise of the hybrid workplace as a norm.

The long-term response

What permanent moves did businesses have in their agendas in 2020 – and what did they permanently establish as of now? Let’s look.

DX is on the upswing

Two years ago, three out of 10 businesses (29.8%) said they’d digitize their customer-facing operations – and now, more than half (51.9%) have permanently established customer-facing digital transformation.

The same rings true for digitization of business operations, now permanently in place for 52.8% of businesses compared with one-third (32.6%) who intended to do so in 2020.

The workplace shrink isn’t so permanent

More than two out of five (44.1%) in 2020 said they’d reduce or eliminate their physical office. Today’s percentage is less than half that (21.3%).

This may seem to contrast to the insight above in regards to the incredible shrinking workplace, but it’s not; it just tells us that businesses are doing it, especially those operating remote-first – but they don’t see it as a permanent fix.

Business travel is back

A resounding 59.2% of businesses said they’d reduce or eliminate non-essential travel in 2020, but only 31% say that’s a permanent solution today. Not much surprise there, since travel was practically against the rules in 2020 unless you absolutely needed to cross borders, and now things are opened up again.

The times they have a-changed

Only a small fraction – 6.2% – said they would do nothing in terms of changes in 2020. Today, a similar amount – 8.5% – say they have no permanent changes in place for their business.

This means a resounding 91.5% of businesses did something – whether small or large – in response to COVID-19. Only 8.5% did nothing.

What does all this tell us?

In short, the COVID-19 stress test on businesses was so all-encompassing that very few escaped with zero impact. Some of the measures businesses have taken are clearly stop-gap – such as travel in the short term and physical office reimagining in the middle term – but there are some ultimately permanent changes, especially in the evolution of the business tech stack.

The post COVID-19 business responses: which were ‘stopgap’ and which are permanent? appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Tech & Data Insights for Recruitment | Workable

Your Hiring Pulse report for April 2024

How we’re looking at data

Don’t miss the pulse

Main highlights

1. Time to Fill

2. Total Job Openings

3. Candidates per Hire

What’s going on here?

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The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Your Hiring Pulse report for February 2024

How we’re looking at data

Don’t miss the pulse

Main highlights

1. Time to Fill

2. Total Job Openings

3. Candidates per Hire

What’s going on here?

New report: AI in Hiring 2024

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Want more? Check out our previous Hiring Pulses:

Your Hiring Pulse report for August 2023

Your Hiring Pulse report for September 2023

Your Hiring Pulse report for October 2023

Your Hiring Pulse report for November 2023

Your Hiring Pulse report for December 2023

Your Hiring Pulse report for January 2024

Your Hiring Pulse report for January 2024

How we’re looking at data

Don’t miss the pulse

Main highlights

1. Time to Fill

2. Total Job Openings

Job openings – small businesses

Job openings – mid-sized businesses

Job openings – enterprise-level companies

3. Candidates per Hire

What’s going on here?

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Want more? Check out our previous Hiring Pulses:

Your Hiring Pulse report for July 2023

Your Hiring Pulse report for August 2023

Your Hiring Pulse report for September 2023

Your Hiring Pulse report for October 2023

Your Hiring Pulse report for November 2023

Your Hiring Pulse report for December 2023

Your Hiring Pulse report for December 2023

How we’re looking at data

Don’t miss the pulse

Main highlights

1. Time to Fill

2. Total Job Openings

3. Candidates per Hire

Deep dive – UK & Ireland hiring metrics

1. Time to Fill – UK & Ireland

2. Total Job Openings – UK & Ireland

3. Candidates per Hire – UK & Ireland

What’s going on here?

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Your Hiring Pulse report for November 2023

How we’re looking at data

Don’t miss the pulse

Main highlights

1. Time to Fill

2. Total Job Openings

3. Candidates per Hire

What’s going on here?

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Your Hiring Pulse report for October 2023

How we’re looking at data

Don’t miss the pulse

Main highlights

1. Time to Fill

2. Total Job Openings

3. Candidates per Hire

What’s going on here?

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Your Hiring Pulse report for September 2023

How we’re looking at data