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Your Hiring Pulse report for October 2023

Keith MacKenzie — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 13:15:19 +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

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

For job openings, we’re taking a different route – simply, the average number of job postings per company. This gives us the opportunity to gauge overall recruitment activity and whether that’s going up or down.
Want a more detailed methodology? Jump to the end and check it out.

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

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

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

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

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.

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 September.

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!

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 May!

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 October 2023 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Your Hiring Pulse report for September 2023

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

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

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

How we’re looking at data

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

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

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

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

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

1. Time to Fill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Total Job Openings

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

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

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

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

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

There are two stories here:

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

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

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

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

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

3. Candidates per Hire

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s going on here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

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

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

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

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

Your Hiring Pulse report for August 2023

Keith MacKenzie — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 13:22:42 +0000

In July’s Hiring Pulse, we highlighted the staggering increase in the number of candidates per job opening – and it really is very high. This month, we look at relatively similar metrics, but we also try to draw some new context around it all.

Let’s have a look.

How we’re looking at data

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

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

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

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

Job activity is taking a bit of a dip – one half job less on average per company in July compared with June
Candidates per Hire is still at a very, very high level
Time to Fill is more stable than it normally is over a longer period

1. Time to Fill

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

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

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

We want to have a story here, but there’s not much to tell. Ultimately, July’s TTF trend sits at 82.6, which basically marks the fifth consecutive month of relative stability where it hits 84.3 at its highest point and 81.2 at its lowest point.

But you deserve an insight here, so here’s one: looking at last year, we see the same trend where the TTF trend hovered between a high of 93.2 and a low of 90.8 over an eight-month stretch from February to September 2022 before finally dropping to the higher 80s for the rest of the year.

These two time brackets are actually the most stable the TTF trend has been in our dataset dating back to the start of 2020 – apart from a few three-month stretches here and there, it’s been a regularly undulating trend month-to-month over the past three and a half years.

Let’s move on to Job Openings now.

2. Total Job Openings

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

The big takeaway this time is the drop in job activity from June to July this year, where average job postings across all companies fell from 7.6 to 7.1. At first glance, this may not mean much considering the regular ups and downs in job postings over the last few years, but what makes it significant is when we look at the June-July shifts in previous years.

As it happens, 2019 and 2020 saw nice bumps in job postings in the Workable network – increasing 0.5 in 2019 and 0.6 in 2020 from June to July. In 2021 and 2022, there was literally zero change from June to July in the trend – the average remained absolutely stable.

So, in this context, we now see how a drop of half a job in the job opening average from one month to the next is significant at this point in the year. And we see this happening across the board regardless of the company size bucket.

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

3. Candidates per Hire

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

The Candidates per Hire trend has been a focal point of the last few months because of how much it’s increased since January.

While not an increase this time – and actually a decrease from June’s all-time high of 176.6 – July’s 169.2 is still right up there in the rarefied atmosphere as the second-highest monthly trend in the history of Workable’s network data.

Except it’s starting to feel like it’s not such a rare place to be – and rather, it’s normal. When you have the last four months (158.5, 140.3, and now 176.6 and 169.2) standing so much higher than anything preceding it, then you have to wonder: will this trend continue as is? Will it keep trending up? Will it fall back down to a previous baseline?

The problem we have here is that, unlike in the other two metrics we regularly track in the Hiring Pulse, we have nothing in the past to compare this recent surge in Candidates per Hire. Let’s call it what it is: a surge. Let’s watch this space and see if we can answer the questions above.

What’s going on here?

Job openings are taking a bit of a dip. Candidates per hire are also taking a very, very small dip but still at a remarkably high point. In last month’s Hiring Pulse, we noted how both job openings and CPH were on the rise and that this indicated a crazy busy time in the hiring landscape – especially for small businesses with low-bandwidth hiring teams.

Now, it’s still busy. The job openings may be taking a small dip, but companies who announce a new opening in their company will still get inundated with candidates. Consider this: let’s say you got 100 candidates for a job opening at your company at this time last year. Now, for that same job, you’d get 178 candidates according to our data.

That, right there, is the biggest difference and that’s the way it’s been going for months. We’ve bounced all kinds of hypotheses around on this topic, and we’ll bring in a new one: remember the Great Resignation? Quit rates are still relatively high – but they’ve come down quite a bit from the times when we saw more than four million job quits per month in the United States for 19 successive months from June 2021 to December 2022.

In the six months on record in 2023, it’s gone above four million just once, in May – although it did come close in February with 3.98 million quits.

For June 2023, that number has dipped to 3.772 million quits – the lowest it’s been since March 2021.

Now, our theory: when candidate numbers were coming down and quits going up, no one was able to come to a clear consensus on where these people were going if they weren’t going to new jobs. We’ve speculated in the past that they either moved to freelance and contract work, started their own businesses, took on sabbaticals, or something else that wasn’t readily trackable.

It’s possible that those workers who dropped out are returning (or trying to return) to the full-time fold. They’ve tried out the life of Riley and either decided it was time to return or it just didn’t work out the way they hoped it would. Couple that with the increase in layoffs, and you have an abundance of new candidates applying to open roles.

That’s your food for thought for August. See you next month!

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

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

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

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

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

Your Hiring Pulse report for July 2023

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

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

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

How we’re looking at data

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

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

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

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

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

1. Time to Fill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Total Job Openings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Candidates per Hire

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s going on here?

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

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

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

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

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

See you next month!

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

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

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

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

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

Your Hiring Pulse report for June 2023

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

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

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

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

Let’s get to work!

How we’re looking at data

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

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

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

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

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

1. Time to Fill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Total Job Openings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pretty significant.

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

3. Candidates per Hire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s going on here?

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

OK, fine. Let’s talk about AI.

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

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

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

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

These are interesting times. Catch up next month!

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

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

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

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

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

Your Hiring Pulse report for May 2023

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

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

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

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

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

How we’re looking at data

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

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

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

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

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

1. Time to Fill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Total Job Openings

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, on to the candidates.

3. Candidates per Hire

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

Um. That chart says it all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s going on here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so on.

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

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

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

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

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

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

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

Your Hiring Pulse report for April 2023

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

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

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

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

Let’s get started!

How we’re looking at data

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

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

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

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

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

1. Time to Fill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, let’s move on to job openings.

2. Total Job Openings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Larger companies still anomalous

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

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

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

Medium is steady as she goes

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

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

Small and vibrant

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

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

Now, on to the candidates.

3. Candidates per Hire

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

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

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

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

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

What’s going on here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until next month…

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

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

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

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

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

Your Hiring Pulse report for March 2023

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

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

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

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

How we’re looking at data

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

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

Let’s start analyzing!

Main highlights

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

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

1. Time to Fill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Total Job Openings

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

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

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

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

Larger companies running against the norm

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

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

Medium is closer to the median

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

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

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

Small but lively

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

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

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

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

3. Candidates per Hire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s going on here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just food for thought. See you next month…

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

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

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

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

Want more? Check out our previous Hiring Pulses:

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 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 December.

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

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:

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.

Want more? Check out our previous Hiring Pulses:

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Trends Archives - Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better

Your Hiring Pulse report for October 2023

How we’re looking at data

Don’t miss the pulse

Main highlights

1. Time to Fill

2. Total Job Openings

3. Candidates per Hire

What’s going on here?

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Your Hiring Pulse report for September 2023

How we’re looking at data

Don’t miss the pulse

Main highlights

1. Time to Fill

2. Total Job Openings

3. Candidates per Hire

What’s going on here?

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Your Hiring Pulse report for August 2023

How we’re looking at data

Don’t miss the pulse

Main highlights

1. Time to Fill

2. Total Job Openings

3. Candidates per Hire

What’s going on here?

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Your Hiring Pulse report for July 2023

How we’re looking at data

Don’t miss the pulse

Main highlights

1. Time to Fill

2. Total Job Openings

3. Candidates per Hire

What’s going on here?

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Your Hiring Pulse report for June 2023

How we’re looking at data

Don’t miss the pulse

Main highlights

1. Time to Fill

2. Total Job Openings

3. Candidates per Hire

What’s going on here?

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Your Hiring Pulse report for May 2023

How we’re looking at data

Don’t miss the pulse

Main highlights

1. Time to Fill

2. Total Job Openings

3. Candidates per Hire

What’s going on here?

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Your Hiring Pulse report for April 2023

How we’re looking at data

Don’t miss the pulse

Main highlights

1. Time to Fill

2. Total Job Openings

Larger companies still anomalous

Medium is steady as she goes

Small and vibrant

3. Candidates per Hire

What’s going on here?

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Your Hiring Pulse report for March 2023

How we’re looking at data

Don’t miss the pulse

Main highlights

1. Time to Fill

2. Total Job Openings

Larger companies running against the norm

Medium is closer to the median

Small but lively

3. Candidates per Hire

What’s going on here?

The Hiring Pulse: Methodology

Want more? Check out our previous Hiring Pulses: