What a bizarre place we’re in today with a strong hiring market, low unemployment, still not enough candidates for the open jobs we have, and more tech and recruiting layoffs are happening (but still comparably low overall historically). And even with inflation coming down, a supply chain inventory glut with lower consumer demand might increase warehouse storage rates that in turn will impact prices and inflation. Again.
However, business and consumer sentiment has been contradictory to the “hard” data available. Labor Economist Andrew Flowers recently wrote, “Throughout 2022, the ‘hard’ data outperformed the ‘soft’ data consistently. The labor market was especially strong: nonfarm payrolls ending the year over 3% higher. And real GDP grew by 1% – hardly an indication of an imminent recession.”
C’mon, can’t we just get a break and align for strength and growth? No, not in this world today. But what Talent Board can do is to try to help make some sense of it all by checking in with our CandE Community to get a pulse on where they’re at with their recruiting and hiring priorities and more. So far it’s stronger than the sentiment we’ve been hearing to date.
Each month we’ll share some of our key pulse indicators with everyone, while all the monthly insights will be shared within our CandE Community. In this first CandE Community Pulse update from over 100 responses in the past 3 weeks from companies big and small across industries (50% were 2,500-100,000+ in size), when we asked employers what their current hiring status is, 82% said “we’re hiring” (see Figure 1). Only 4% said they’re laying off.
That’s some good news considering all the news about layoffs. We also asked employers whether they’ve increased or decreased the size of their recruiting team this month. 71% said there’s been no change and 17% said they’ve increased their size (see Figure 2).
Only 12% said they’ve decreased their recruiting team size, and let’s hope that doesn’t keep increasing. We’ll see how that continues to trend as we complete each CandE Pulse survey month to month.
Lastly, for this piece we’ll highlight how employers are currently rating their recruiting and candidate experience. When we compare our first pulse to last year’s CandE benchmark data of over 150 employers, those companies that felt like they were competing in their recruiting and hiring practices and their candidate experience decreased by 30%, and those that felt like they were improving their recruiting and hiring practices and their candidate experience increased by 74% (see Figure 3). While the employers surveyed varied, this is still a good indication of how employers are resetting expectations and responding to the volatility of the hiring market while working to improve.
Again, we’ll keep sharing some of these key pulse indicators with everyone each month, while all the monthly insights will be shared within our CandE Community. This is another benefit of participating in our benchmark research and you can learn more about all the benefits here.
For now, we argue that the recruiting and hiring is in better shape than what the posts on LinkedIn are stating. Of course we empathize with those who have been laid off, and we hope they find new opportunities soon, and that they have a positive and fair candidate experience along the way, too. According to our first monthly CandE Pulse results, candidate experience is the #1 recruiting and hiring initiative for those employers that responded, so let’s hope transparent communication and feedback loops are delivered to candidates each and every month.
Until the next monthly CandE Pulse survey update, be safe and well.
