Thinking of changing jobs? It seems almost everyone is.
CareerBuilder says 15 percent of workers are actively looking, but 76 percent of the rest would jump ship if the right opportunity comes along. Given the acceleration in hiring, that right opportunity may come along sooner rather than later.
Manpower said this week that 16 percent of employers expect to add jobs in the second quarter, which begins tomorrow. When seasonally adjusted, Manpower says its Net Employment Outlook is a plus 8 percent.
CEOs are even more optimistic, a good thing since they are the ones to give the thumbs-up to hiring. The Business Roundtable’s CEO survey found 52 percent of them expect to increase hiring over the next six months.
So if you happen to be one of those active job seekers, or you’re just waiting for the right job to come along, you should know that HR jobs generally and recruiting positions in particular are trending up.
Next week, Indeed adds HR as the 13th category to its employment trends report. We won’t know until Tuesday what the March numbers show, but last week Indeed’s Jason Whitman gave us a preview at ERE’s Expo in San Diego.
Whitman, Indeed’s VP of client services, was joined by John Younger, CEO and founder of Accolo, an RPO, in detailing where the HR and recruiting jobs are now and what the industry can expect in the coming months.
Especially for the “Where the Jobs Are” session last Thursday, Whitman offered up a look at the recruiting-related job posts. In the last 12 months, Whitman said, job postings for recruiters have increased 49 percent. HR jobs of all stripes have risen 37 percent during that same year.
The increase is not as stunning as transportation job postings (106 percent increase), but the HR category is ahead of seven other categories in percentage growth. It’s a sign that employers are, indeed, feeling more optimistic about the future. (The Business Roundtable survey found 92 percent of CEOs expect to grow sales in the next six months. Not one expects a decrease.)
With more job postings comes more interest. Because Indeed is a search engine and sends traffic back to the originating site, it can’t say how many people applied to each job. But it does track the clicks into each listing and for HR jobs those clicks jumped 59 percent since February 2010.
Curiously, clicks into the recruiting-related job postings increased only 25 percent during that same time.
Why that is, is anyone’s guess. However, it tallies with what Accolo’s Younger told the 100 or so session participants. Now is a good time to be looking for recruiting jobs, especially in IT, healthcare, and financial services. If you’re a “needle finder,” Younger may even want to hear from you, as he pointed to charts showing the rapid growth in sales jobs and the difficulty in finding top talent to fill them.
As an RPO, Accolo needs to track job growth by sector and geography so it knows what to expect and how to ramp up its recruiter force to fill reqs. Needle finders are in demand to fill reqs in sales, research, software development, and nurses.
On the other hand, Younger told the group, forget about it if you recruit sheep herders.
Check out the slides to see all the additional information on recruiting jobs as well as on resources recruiters can use to predict workforce supply and in recruitment planning.
