Hiring Pulse - Workable

Your Hiring Pulse report for May-June 2024

Alexandros Pantelakis — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 13:00:00 +0000

April’s Hiring Pulse presented some striking observations. Job postings have significantly decreased compared to previous years, and the candidate pool returned to more manageable levels.

This double edition of Hiring Pulse will delve into these matters further, offering insights into what unfolded in the market during April and May. Let me remind you that the data we’re examining is based on the completed months prior to the current period.

Let’s begin.

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!

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: 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 May against the average of 2019, based on jobs that have been filled:

As noted in our previous edition, there is little fluctuation in the Time to Fill Metric this time around. It increased modestly by 1.1 points, from March’s 81.5 to April’s 82.6. However, in May, we see a drop of 1.8 points, mirroring last year’s pattern.

We’ve previously observed that January’s spike is likely due to hiring teams being stretched thin over the holiday season, with the return to ‘normal’ levels in February and beyond resulting from teams catching up on filling crucial roles within their organizations.

This month follows the same trend – just business as usual. This is reassuring until you examine the next metric – 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 May.

As usual, examining the four company size categories – 1-50, 51-200, 200+, and the overall average – reveals interesting insights.

The key statistic to focus on is the average number of job postings across all company sizes within the entire Workable network. This figure has decreased to 8.1 job postings per company on average in April and May, down from 8.6 in February and 8.2 in March. Notably, this shows stability compared to the same period last year, when the numbers were down by almost 1 point.

However, trends differ within the enterprise-level category (200+ full-time employees). This group saw an average of 16.5 new job postings in March, increasing to 17.3 in April and slightly decreasing to 17 in May.

Medium-sized businesses (51-200) experienced a notable drop in March (6.8), followed by an increase to 7.5 in April and a slight decline to 7.1 in May.

Small businesses (1-50) have shown relatively stable activity, with 6.8 job postings in March, 6.4 in April, and 6.5 in May.

Remember the example we shared in our previous edition? Let’s update it with May’s numbers:

For a typical enterprise-level company with 250 employees, May’s average of 17 job openings means 6.8% of the payroll is looking for new hires—one in every 14.7 positions needs filling.

For medium-sized businesses with around 125 employees, 7.1 job postings in May translate to 5.7% of the workforce, or one in every 18 employees. These companies are hiring slightly more per capita than in March.

In small businesses with about 25 employees, May’s 6.5 job postings mean a significant 26% of the workforce needs replacing or hiring for new roles—more than one in four employees. Imagine in a small office, for every four people, one is a new hire. This makes quick onboarding crucial, as delays can be costly for small, agile businesses.

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.

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 April and May:

Enough with the roller coaster effect. Candidates are actively seeking new opportunities after a prolonged period of decline.

For those who need a refresher, the Candidates per Hire metric has been steadily climbing (with occasional months of moderate drops or stabilization) since around mid to late 2022. Then, suddenly, there was a dramatic drop. If the shift from January’s 189.9 to February’s 182 felt significant, then the drop to March’s 161.6 was nothing short of dramatic.

But now, rejoice! April and May show a stable increase, with 175.2 candidates per hire. This echoes figures from last August, but we’re feeling more optimistic now, hoping this trend will continue to rise. Another roller coaster ride? Hopefully not.

Since we’re conducting year-over-year comparisons in this report, let’s apply that to CPH as well.

Here’s a new observation. Through year-over-year comparisons, it’s evident that this year deviates from the trend of previous years, which typically saw a decrease during this period, suggesting a possible seasonality. Why might that be?

Candidates are actively searching for opportunities post-March, and we believe there are two main reasons for this. Firstly, there are fewer job openings this year, and secondly, layoffs are on the rise. Consequently, candidates are casting a wider net and submitting their resumes to more open positions than they did previously.

Let’s delve deeper into this.

What’s going on here?

The current job market appears to be tightening, with fewer available job openings and more candidates applying for each position compared to the typical trend for this time of year.

This shift in the job market is likely influenced by economic factors, such as layoffs, which are compelling candidates to conduct more extensive job searches. Companies may find themselves receiving more applications per open position, while job seekers may face increased competition in their pursuit of new opportunities.

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 July!

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 May-June 2024 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

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

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.

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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

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 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 September 2021

Keith MacKenzie — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 13:44:15 +0000

We know that data trends are important to you when recruiting. You and your hiring team want to know whether the trends you’re seeing in your own processes are ‘normal’. But it no longer makes sense to go back to historical data – read: pre-pandemic – as a measuring stick.

Even year-over-year and month-over-month data doesn’t make sense either, due to the dramatic spikes and valleys we’re seeing in the job market – let alone the craziness that was 2020.

So, instead, we’re taking a new approach so you can make the most informed decisions as an SMB employer when assessing your own data.

Jump ahead:

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology
Main highlights
Time to Fill
Total Job Openings
Candidates per Hire
So what’s the conclusion here?

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Got it? Great. To start, we’re looking at the worldwide trends for three common hiring metrics: Time to Fill, Total Job Openings, and Candidates per Hire. 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.

Stay tuned for more immersive analysis in the coming months – including industry-specific, function-specific, and location-specific reports.

Main highlights

The three main highlights for this month are:

A sharp downward trend in Time to Fill starting in Q2 2021
A significant spike in job openings in March 2021, followed by steady growth in job opening numbers every month after that
A drop in average candidates per hire every single month in 2021 – and dropping more significantly throughout Q2 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.

As you can see in the graph below, first of all, there’s a dramatic spike in Time to Fill coinciding with the start of the pandemic – more than likely due to many new job openings being put on hold in response to economic uncertainty.

But there’s also a clear upward trajectory in Time to Fill starting at the end of Q2 2020, followed by a dramatic downward trend in Time to Fill at the start of 2021 – and especially in Q2 2021. (Note that these trends are based on a trailing three-month average, making these changes even more dramatic.)

Let’s speculate a bit here, starting with the upward trends from mid-2020 to end 2020. We have three explanations in mind:

The recruitment process is managed by leaner teams and budgets due to drastic cutbacks in Q2 2020 – therefore slowing down the overall recruitment process.
The spike in unemployment in Q2 2020 contributed to a higher number of candidates per job opening – requiring more time to sift through candidate pools for a job.
The upwards trend towards the end of 2020 is due to slowdown in day-to-day work including the hiring process due to the holiday season.

And what about the drastic drop in Time to Fill trends in 2021? Again, we have three thoughts:

With the economy opening up again, businesses started hiring/re-hiring more quickly.
The lessons of 2020 include the need for more agile, nimbler processes requiring quicker turnaround, including in hiring.
Businesses are now hiring for stop-gap; to fill immediate needs in addition to longer-term solutions – especially when navigating a more volatile and unpredictable business environment.

(NOTE: You’re probably wondering why we stopped the numbers in July. That’s because the data is based on the time the job was opened, not when it was filled. For instance, the Time to Fill for a job opening published on August 15 would be 15 days or less – therefore skewing the data. So we’ve omitted August for this chart.)

Let’s go to the next metric: overall job openings.

2. Total Job Openings

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

What we see is a significant decline in job opening trends starting with the pandemic followed by an equally dramatic spike in the trend in Q2 2020 as the economy started to reopen after the first wave of COVID cases.

But then the numbers return to a negative trend towards the end of 2020 worldwide, which can be attributed to two factors: the exponential growth in COVID cases worldwide and particularly throughout the US and the UK, combined with the usual slowdown of day-to-day business into the holiday season.

We then see positive growth in job openings starting in January 2021, climaxing in March which saw a 42.9% increase in job postings over the previous three-month average.

Again, this is made more significant as it’s based on a rolling average of the past three months. Even as the trend appears to taper off going into Q2 2021, this chart actually show job openings are continuing to grow at an approximate 7% clip every month.

This indicates a revitalized job market. When businesses are hiring, that signals a healthier economy and growth – at first glance anyway.

With that, let’s now look at the Candidates per Hire.

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.

In 2020, we see the expected spike in candidates per hire with the start of the pandemic – after all, as a basic rule of thumb, mass layoffs lead to higher numbers of applicants. And this trend slows down towards the end of 2020, going into a negative trajectory in Q4.

But in 2021 even to July, we see a consistently negative trend in candidates per hire every single month. That downward trajectory doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.

(NOTE: Again, you’re probably wondering why we stopped the numbers in July. Again, as stated above, that’s because these data are based on the time the job was opened, not when it was filled.)

Let’s now look at both job openings and candidates per hire as an overlay. In 2020, we see some correlation between the drop in job openings and the drop in candidates per hire – understandable, because fewer job openings indicates more jobs being filled, leading to more candidates finding work, ultimately leading to fewer people looking for work.

We can theorize a little deeper, although that’s a good basic explanation for 2020’s trends. But then we look at 2021 data, and we’re not seeing that same correlation. This year, job openings are still trending upwards, but candidates per hire are trending downwards.

What’s going on here? Well, there has been a lot of talk about the “Great Resignation” and unprecedented quit rates in recent months. Let’s wrap up with a conversation on this topic.

So what’s the conclusion here?

A clear observation is that workers are leaving jobs, but they’re not applying for other work. Forbes chalks this up to worker burnout, pointing to the correlation of quit rates with increased productivity.

Perhaps this signals a disconnect between employers and employees. The old way of business isn’t working anymore, and workers are dropping out of the system in a modern version of 1960s counterculture icon Timothy Leary’s famous statement, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

To paraphrase Leary from his autobiography, Flashbacks, he explains this statement as first becoming more intimately aware of one’s internal needs and triggers (turn on), connecting with the external world in a more harmonious way (tune in), and finally, committing to one’s own priorities and sense of self (drop out).

In short: workers are finding more meaning in life beyond work, and they’re acting on it. To stay relevant as an employer, you may need to reconsider your employee value proposition because the traditional one no longer resonates in this new world of work.

The post Your Hiring Pulse report for September 2021 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

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.

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

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 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.

Hiring Pulse - Workable

Your Hiring Pulse report for May-June 2024

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Don’t miss the pulse

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2. Total Job Openings

3. Candidates per Hire

What’s going on here?

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The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

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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

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How we’re looking at data

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Main highlights

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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?

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Your Hiring Pulse report for November 2023

How we’re looking at data

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Main highlights

1. Time to Fill

2. Total Job Openings

3. Candidates per Hire

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