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On this subject, here is an article about post-pandemic hiring: For recruiters — at least the ones who kept their jobs and weren’t in the industries that were hit hardest by Covid-19 — a temporary hiring advantage in the wake of massive unemployment was a change of pace.
I’d say some employers got, dare I say, comfortable with it. I saw a few recruiters even lamenting the number of applications they were receiving for positions. Don’t worry, though. That seems unlikely to last until the end of the year.
Coming Soon: A Competitive Job Market
Early last month, Manpower released a report that showed more than half of employers were expecting to get back to pre-pandemic hiring levels by the end of the year. Driven by optimism about vaccination success in the U.S., hiring in the hardest-hit sectors like travel, hospitality, retail and restaurants seems slated for something reminiscent of normal for the latter part of 2021.
More good news came as the March jobs report from the U.S. Department of Labor showed that the economy added nearly a million jobs. After adjustments to January and February, the first quarter of 2021 brought nearly 1.5 million new jobs. I wouldn’t be surprised to see March’s numbers revised up in May.
That outlook is positive but doesn’t take into account the industries that weren’t as affected, like the tech industry, which still has talent acquisition leaders scrambling for talent. It also doesn’t take into account a potential avalanche of turnover that has been held back due to economic uncertainty. With the demand starting to really increase and the economy slowly reducing supply, the difficulty level is only going to increase.
New Hiring Challenges Coming to Recruiting
I wrote back in September that recruiting and the tech that supports hiring weren’t ready for a mass rehiring. I still don’t think that either the tech or the processes are ready for back-to-normal hiring on top of getting everyone back. Companies certainly aren’t ready to lose staff who would’ve likely already moved if it weren’t for the pandemic.
Of course, my crystal ball was a little cloudy. I missed a new set of challenges that are going to affect recruiting. Here are the newest hiring challenges talent leaders are facing and the tech that’s impacting them.
1. What to do about hybrid work recruiting
Companies have shifted their office strategy significantly since Covid. While the death of the office and commercial real estate in big cities is probably overexaggerated, there is a shift in attitudes from workers.
As organizations allow more people to work from home for all or part of their time, it’s easy to figure out how to accommodate current employees. You simply ask what they want, and then you look at the results in aggregate.
For a company planning on adding more staff, it’s a lot more difficult to plan how many seats you’ll need in a new location, for example. Would an organization pass on talent because their preferred working-in-the-office days are Tuesday and Thursday, but given the current amount of space, they can’t be accommodated?
Even for companies with sophisticated workforce planning technology, I’ve yet to see one that applies the complication of hybrid work schedules to inform recruiting. Talent acquisition leaders will be doing this one manually for a while.
