December 22, 2022
What’s the most interesting thing in recruiting right now?
So, the most interesting thing I am seeing in recruiting right now is this perplexing paradox between the objective competitiveness of the recruiting market and the subjective feel that the recruiting market is uncompetitive right now or should be uncompetitive right now.
Transcription:
What is the most interesting thing happening in recruiting right now? So, the most interesting thing I am seeing in recruiting right now is this perplexing paradox between the objective competitiveness of the recruiting market and the subjective feel that the recruiting market is uncompetitive right now or should be uncompetitive right now. Now, this might be best exemplified through a little bit of a story.
So, a couple months ago, right when we started seeing a lot of tech companies doing really unfortunate layoffs that hit a lot of the industry, a lot of recruiting leaders in other industries at companies that were still hiring saw this and thought, “Huh, that’s interesting. Why don’t we do some focused, targeted outreach to those tech employees that might have lost their jobs in a very targeted, concerted way?”
They thought, “This is fantastic. We’re still hiring. We usually have great and very real jobs that we can reach out to them about.” So they mobilized sourcing teams. They started doing outreach. But, what was the result? What came of this? What came of it from a lot of employers was almost no responses from people who might have just lost their jobs. And this was really perplexing for a lot of leaders. They were thinking, “We’ve got great real jobs, we’ve got great jobs, we’re reaching out to people who just lost their jobs. Why in the world are we not just getting a disproportionate overflow of responses?”
We don’t have concrete data on this as to why this dynamic popped up. But I do have a strong theory, and my theory is that just because these employees lost their jobs does not mean that they lowered their standards. In other words, they weren’t just looking for a job even though they just lost a job. Rather, they were still in the mindset that they were looking for the right job. And they weren’t going to rush to take a job in the interim.
This is reflective of the broader recruiting environment that we are seeing and that we are feeling right now. There is this theory, this feeling, that because a lot of the headlines focus on layoffs and on contractions and different specific pockets of the industry, there’s this feeling that the recruiting market should be much easier right now. It’s like the recruiting leaders saying these people just got laid off from their jobs, so we should be getting an influx of responses. But the truth is actually very different because there’s actually something like 1.7 open jobs right nor for every candidate that might be looking for a job.
In other words, the recruiting market is still extremely competitive. So, that’s the most interesting thing that I’m seeing in recruiting right now is this perplexing paradox because this subjective feel that the recruiting market should be less competitive right now and the objective reality that it is actually still very, very tight.
