Riding the Recruiting Roller Coaster of 2023
Recruiting is brutal right now. Budgets and teams are shrinking while expectations and goals are intensifying. The labor market is nuts – hands down the most confusing we’ve ever seen. And then there’s remote work (and its sudden vilification), salary disclosure, and a 31% failure rate for job requisitions. (In other words, 1 in 3 job reqs ends in no hire – despite consuming valuable resources from a function already stretched thin.)
It’s a wild ride for recruiting teams. In this guide, we offer loads of useful market data (from our own proprietary database and research) and actionable tips. So you can improve your hiring outcomes while keeping costs down, efficiency up, morale high – and your sanity in tow. We hope it helps. (Keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times.)
UNPREDICTABLE LABOR MARKET
Navigating the Unpredictable Labor Market in 2023
This is the most unpredictable labor market we’ve ever seen. In fact, it’s hard to characterize. Is it a rolling recession potentially turning into a rolling expansion? Is it a “rich-session” that’s only really affecting highly paid tech talent?
Obviously, a wildly unpredictable labor market makes for some turbulent waters. Hiring teams – many already affected by layoffs or budget cuts – are struggling to navigate them. But that doesn’t have to be the case.
2023’s unpredictable, and uneven, labor market
Depending on how closely you’re looking at the data, you may be getting a misleading picture. Overall, it’s a tighter-than-average market, but it’s not tight in a uniform way. Some jobs or locations are competitive, others are incredibly competitive (we’re talking four openings for every one job seeker), and some aren’t particularly competitive at all. Even jobs at the same company can vary.
Inbound talent pipelines for some jobs and locations have ballooned so far in 2023. Candidate pools have doubled this year in most regions, growing across all seniority levels. Median inbound applicant pools are back above 50 after falling below 30 in 2021 and 2022.
Seeing that, your executive leaders or business partners might assume that hiring in the current landscape is easy. But those stats don’t tell the entire story.
As a whole, the market is tighter than average (the average since 2005, anyway). And it’s still incredibly competitive for certain types of jobs, candidates, and locations. But today’s labor market tightness isn’t uniform across the board.
For example, the transportation, health + education, and professional sectors are tight. There’s typically three or four open roles for each job seeker in those sectors. But the construction and retail sectors are relaxed. There’s typically only one or fewer open roles for each job seeker in those sectors.
Meanwhile, candidate pools are double what they were in 2021 and 2022 across all seniority levels – but not in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). In a single function like go-to-market (GTM), sales roles remain very competitive, but marketing and customer success roles have relaxed substantially. And while frontline roles are tight, general & administrative and – who thought we’d ever see the day? – technical roles have eased.
Adding yet another layer of complexity, larger inbound candidate pools don’t necessarily translate to the “employer’s market” of years past. Job seekers – especially those who’ve been laid off – may be applying to roles more liberally, but they’re still being selective when it comes to accepting interview invites and offers. (We dig into this trend in the next section.)
What to do about it
See what we mean? The competitiveness of a role isn’t just about the overall job market or your industry. It’s more nuanced than that. But no matter – here’s a few things that can make your sailing a little smoother.
See where you fit in
We crunched some numbers on this unpredictable labor market for you. Using raw data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, we compared total job seekers to total job vacancies to calculate labor market tightness.
The heat map below illustrates the job seeker to open job ratio by industry. A value of 1 means one job seeker for every job (an equalized market). A value of more than one means more job seekers than jobs (a loose market). And a value of less than one means more jobs than job seekers (a tight market).
Take a look at this data to see if it matches what you’re experiencing. It shows where you should expect the market to be tight (i.e., where to focus more effort).
Identify your unique journey
If your experience doesn’t fit into the heat map above, you may be on your own unique voyage. That can be a good thing or a bad thing. It’s good if you’re facing less competition than the map says you should, bad if you’re facing more than it says you should.
Figure out whether the market tightness you’re facing is outside of the norm.
Course-correct on job posts, if necessary
If the apparent “market tightness” you’re facing is unique to you (i.e., you’re not attracting a healthy number of qualified applicants for roles in relaxed markets, according to the data), you’ll need to course-correct, and the most likely place is your job posts. While often overlooked (e.g., post-and-pray recruiting), job posts are the most important piece of the recruiting effort. They’re also the most likely culprit of small or unqualified applicant pools.
Job posts are the first and often only piece of messaging job seekers read from your company. Not only do they have to advertise the job, they also have to introduce your company and paint a picture of what it’s like to work there. And they’re technical, as well (the job title alone can make or break your hiring effort if not optimized for search or calibrated with the rest of the content in the job ad, like qualifications).
Review your job posts for an industry-standard title, accurate location (especially if remote), clear responsibilities and requirements, inclusive language, and more.
Leverage your growing inbound pipelines
There are many reasons to focus on inbound recruiting. The vast majority of applicants come from inbound recruiting, it’s more efficient, and it’s more equitable, to name a few. Between 2019 and 2021, for example, over 80% of all applicants and 85% of all female applicants to tech jobs came from inbound recruiting sources like LinkedIn, career pages, and job boards.
Newly surging inbound talent pipelines for certain jobs and locations present a number of opportunities – if your organization is prepared for and positioned to leverage them. If you have a generalist recruiting team, refocus their time and energy away from sourcing and onto your larger inbound pipelines. (To avoid overly large, unqualified pipelines, consider adding knock-out questions to your applications.)
As inbound applicant pools grow, make sure your team has enough capacity to go through those pipelines.
Revisit your outbound recruiting strategies
If your inbound applicant pools are growing, it’s a perfect time to reassess outbound recruiting. With more inbound applicants, you can afford to dial back on – or strategically reallocate budget between – expensive tactics like employee referral programs, sourcing, and advertising. Use the heat map above to focus your spend on areas where the market is really tight.
Of course, if you don’t know where you’re spending your budget or the return on investment you’re getting, it’s nearly impossible to make thoughtful, justifiable cuts (or increases). Start by organizing and analyzing your internal data (i.e., recruiting analytics) to grasp how much referrals, job boards, third-party agencies, and other paid sourcing tactics are costing you – and how these channels actually perform when it comes to applicants and hires.
Spending bundles to advertise jobs in relaxed markets that are already attracting plenty of inbound candidates? Consider putting that money toward paid promotion or third-party searches exclusively for hard-to-fill roles. Do most of the openings in your organization currently fall into “relaxed” territory? You may want to decrease the number of seats you’re paying for on pricey sourcing platforms like LinkedIn Recruiter or Hired.
Where you can, dial back your efforts and spend on expensive employee referral programs, third-party agencies, advertising, and sourcing tools.
Navigating 2023’s unpredictable labor market
There’s nothing you can do to make the unpredictable labor market go away. But you can – informed by data – navigate it smoothly to improve your hiring outcomes while reducing spend. Besides, it’s not all bad news – inbound applicant pools are growing again, after all.
EFFICIENT RECRUITING PROCESS
Smoothing the Bumps With an Efficient Recruiting Process
One in three recruiting efforts – 31% – ends without a hire. At a time when an efficient recruiting process is more important than ever, that’s not a good stat. It means the process isn’t efficient at all – it’s highly unpredictable and more expensive than it needs to be.
Even more troubling, the average time to close for no-hire requisitions is about 20 days longer than for requisitions resulting in a hire. And wasting precious time on even one req can have a devastating domino effect on others.
Some simple math
Consider a recruiter who (for the sake of simple math) can handle a load of six requisitions at any one time. If each req takes 60 days to fill, we can expect this recruiter to make 18 hires in six months.
But if one in every three reqs closes (with or without a hire) in about three months instead of two? This recruiter only has a chance at making 14 hires in half a year. In fact, they won’t even have the capacity to start working on that eighteenth req!
The way to create an efficient recruiting process (and avoid unwanted surprises for your team, hiring managers, and company leadership) is to pay close attention to recruiting analytics. Recruiting analytics alert you to troubling trends, enabling you to stay cost-effective and productive (but not overwhelmed) even with a smaller budget and team.
(Not) an efficient recruiting process
We’re seeing a lot of changes to hiring lately. Inbound candidate pipelines, for example, are growing again for the first time in three years. Yet candidate “ghosting” is becoming more prevalent as well. (Our customers say it’s more common than ever and is impacting their ability to hire.)
Between 2019 and 2022, the overall candidate drop-off rate only increased a seemingly benign 5%. But looking closer, the rate increased by 36% in the screening stage and, crucially, by nearly 20% in the offer stage.
In other words, a fifth more candidates are dropping out at the final stage, which is a particular gut punch. It means losing highly qualified candidates whom hiring managers are excited about. It means demanding more time from interview teams to assess other finalists. And it may mean going back to square one entirely, which can be costly.
Meanwhile, again, about 31% of all requisitions are ending in failure. This isn’t skewed by just a few unusually inefficient hiring organizations, either – in fact, 75% of companies have at least 20% no-hire jobs.
What to do about it
The good news? There’s a number of things you can do to create an efficient recruiting process whatever your current circumstances.
Jump on analytics
Recruiting professionals aren’t data scientists, and no one is asking you to become one. But as with many other professions, familiarity with metrics and analytics dashboards is becoming the norm. That’s especially true in the current environment where you’re being highly scrutinized and asked to do more with less.
The hiring process has multiple stages – application, screening, assessment, and offer. It’s important to track candidates through every stage (in real time) to gather metrics and assess the efficiency (or inefficiency) of your hiring process. Without this data, you can’t identify and fix issues or create a truly efficient recruiting process.
Every talent acquisition professional should have metrics like offer acceptance rate, pass-through rate, drop-off rate, source ROI and hiring-progress-to-goal at their fingertips. If you have to build a spreadsheet to analyze this data, you’re likely behind the curve in this dynamic market.
Use analytics (such as Datapeople’s Pass-through and Drop-off Reports) to diagnose issues in your hiring process, understand historical performance, and plan for future outcomes accordingly.
Focus on committed inbound candidates
Twice as many outbound (i.e., sourced) candidates drop out of the hiring process as inbound candidates. In other words, inbound candidates from LinkedIn, your careers page, or online job boards are half as likely to withdraw.
And you’re in luck because inbound recruiting is starting to pick up again. Despite an unpredictable labor market, inbound talent pipelines for some jobs and geographies are growing by leaps and bounds in 2023.
It’s a perfect time to refocus on inbound recruiting, which is more efficient and equitable than outbound recruiting anyway. (One of the recruiting trends we’ve seen in our data is that over 85% of female applicants to tech jobs between 2019 and 2021 came from inbound sources. So there’s that.)
Prioritize inbound candidates, who are twice as likely to stick around throughout the hiring process as sourced candidates.
Control what you can: the top of the funnel
The best way to mitigate candidate drop-offs later in the hiring process is to attract and nurture more qualified candidates at the beginning. You can do that with better job posts (i.e., avoiding post-and-pray recruiting) and by phone screening plenty of applicants instead of being too conservative early on. A large pool of qualified applicants at the top of your talent pipeline yields a large (and diverse) final candidate pool at the bottom. That’s the goal. Especially when you can expect a good number of those candidates to decline your offer.
Review and improve your job posts to ensure they’re attracting as many qualified candidates as possible at the beginning of the process. And don’t be too selective with phone screens – engage as many seemingly qualified applicants as you can.
Understand your best inbound sources
Not all sources are created equal. Are you spending time and budget on job boards and syndication that are not resulting in hires? Not only are these costing you money, but they’re likely sucking up a lot of your team’s time reviewing unqualified applications.
Pay attention to the pass-through rates of the different sources and eliminate unproductive syndication channels with urgency.
Measure drop-offs cleanly
Candidate status is an important piece of recruiting information, and tracking it is the only way to get a handle on candidate drop-off. How many candidates are dropping out? When in the hiring process are they doing so? Who is dropping out? How can you prevent it?
To explore these questions, it’s important to measure your drop-offs cleanly. Only analyze drop-offs for jobs that are already closed. And exclude active candidates when you measure drop-offs because a bunch of active candidates can hide what may be high drop-off rates. (Also, if you have lots of “active” candidates still assigned to a closed req, disposition them for both data hygiene and candidate experience purposes.)
Employ some very basic data science skills to calculate drop-offs cleanly by only measuring closed jobs and excluding active candidates.
Manage recruiter capacity closely
If your inbound applicant pools are growing again, you can (and, as previously mentioned, should) shift your focus to inbound. But you’ll need enough recruiter capacity to sort through the increased applicants and avoid bottlenecks in your processes. (Again, one delayed req can have a ripple effect.)
Manage recruiter capacity closely to ensure that bottlenecks aren’t creeping in, creating compounding failures in your hiring process.
An efficient recruiting process
A 31% failure rate in the midst of a generally tight labor market won’t cut it. Competition for quality candidates is too high for that. In fact, it’s too high for anything other than an efficient recruiting process.
And in the current climate, with more pressure on recruiting teams to operate predictably and cost-effectively, simply avoiding surprises is something to aim for. Proactively securing necessary resources early instead of contracting an agency in the final hour won’t just save your organization thousands of dollars. It can save your reputation. (And make you look like the strategic talent partner you are!)
DIVERSE CANDIDATE POOL
Attracting a Diverse Candidate Pool in a Distributed Workplace
The pandemic transformed the workplace, likely for good. It’s a distributed workplace now, with onsite jobs, remote jobs, hybrid jobs, and remote jobs transitioning into hybrid jobs (often all at the same company).
And while operating in this unfamiliar landscape requires some adjustment, it also offers an opportunity to attract a diverse candidate pool.
The new distributed workplace
Nearly every organization has remote or hybrid jobs as part of their workforce today – a trend that began during the pandemic but is not likely to change soon. Even as companies return to the office, they’re not bringing all of their workers back with them (or at least not all of them at the same time). Why? Because, for one thing, their workers don’t want to come back – not full time, anyway. Remote and hybrid jobs are wildly popular.
This is especially true among women, who represent the primary caregivers in our society and need more flexibility. During the pandemic, women left the workforce in greater numbers than men to (suddenly) home-school and take care of their children. Remote and hybrid roles enable women who are also caregivers to keep working, helping level the playing field. They also offer an opportunity for you to attract a more diverse candidate pool (particularly remote work).
With onsite jobs, employees have to come into the office (or warehouse or wherever) every day. With remote jobs, employees can work wherever they want every day. And with hybrid jobs, it’s a mix of both, incorporating all combinations of remote and onsite (more on that later). In short, onsite roles are always onsite, remote roles are always remote, and hybrid roles are any combination of onsite and remote.
At their peak in 2021 (their peak to date, anyway), remote jobs represented 7.4% of all professional jobs (i.e., non-frontline roles that require onsite work, like retail sales associate or nurse), according to our remote jobs data (which we’ve updated through the first half of 2023 for this guide). Since then, they’ve decreased somewhat, representing 5.8% of all professional jobs in 2023 so far. This is likely due to the Return to Office push.
In 2022, the number of companies that had no remote jobs at all fell, but that number has risen back to 2021 levels. Broken down by company type, unicorns (privately held companies that have reached a $1 billion valuation) and Fortune 500 companies continue to offer more remote jobs. Meanwhile, public (which we define as publicly listed but not large enough to be in the Fortune 500), startup, and other private companies are requiring employees to come back to the office.
While fully remote jobs have decreased somewhat since the peak of the pandemic, hybrid jobs have increased dramatically. They’ve jumped from just 1.3% of all roles in 2021 to almost 9% of all roles in 2023.
Yet the popularity of remote jobs among professional workers hasn’t diminished one whit. (Spoiler alert: onsite non-frontline jobs are the losers here.) Remote jobs attract 4.4x more applicants overall than onsite jobs. And, crucially for a diverse candidate pool, they attract 4.5x more female applicants than onsite jobs.
But while hybrid roles aren’t quite as popular with workers as remote, they’re still far more popular than onsite. They attract 55% more applicants overall and 45% more women than onsite roles.
How to take advantage of the opportunity
There’s a number of things you can do to take advantage of remote and hybrid jobs to attract a more diverse candidate pool.
Go remote wherever you can
The easy takeaway is that remote jobs are way more popular than onsite roles, particularly among women. Again, they attract 4.5x the number of female applicants and 4.4x the number of total applicants of onsite jobs, which is an order of magnitude above even hybrid roles. (This is likely due to remote roles having fewer, if any, geographic restrictions. They’re not limited to a single labor market like onsite and hybrid jobs are, meaning they can tap into a much larger talent pool. Which is extra beneficial in today’s unusually tight labor market.)
Some data also supports the theory that remote roles attract proportionally more female candidates. Women and candidates from underrepresented groups are more likely to prioritize “remote” in their job searches, according to ZipRecruiter. Simply put, you can leverage remote roles to attract more diverse candidate pools (and more qualified ones, too).
Wherever possible, transition jobs from onsite to remote.
But leverage hybrid as a perk
Hybrid roles are materially different from remote roles in that they still limit recruiting teams to one geographic location. To meaningfully increase the size and diversity of your applicant pools, remote is the best way to go and you should fight for that option whenever possible.
However, hybrid jobs are still more popular than onsite, particularly with women (again, they attract 45% more women). So if you must return to the office, offering hybrid as a “perk” can help. (But if you’re not actually enforcing onsite requirements for your hybrid roles, consider transitioning them to remote to get the full benefit.)
Wherever possible, transition jobs from onsite to hybrid. And if you’re not enforcing onsite requirements for your hybrid jobs, make those jobs remote.
Be clear about location requirements
With three options on the table (onsite, remote, and hybrid) and an infinite number of variations for hybrid work, clarity about location requirements is more important than ever. Job seekers want to know exactly where you expect them to work.
Be upfront about job location and, particularly, about your onsite expectations for hybrid jobs. (Be very careful how you use the word “remote,” which only means fully remote – no onsite expectations at all.) And make sure your jobs are using the right location tags on LinkedIn.
By all means promote the fact that your job is remote or hybrid in the job post, but don’t mislead candidates. Lack of clarity can leave candidates feeling catfished and recruiters facing less qualified applicant pools.
Employ other non-location-related tactics
Transitioning jobs to remote (and hybrid) can help you attract more diverse candidate pools, but it’s not all you can do. One of the most overlooked tactics of all, in fact, is to write inclusive job posts and publish them widely to reach as many qualified job seekers from underrepresented groups as possible.
Wonky titling or qualifying in a job post can have a massive impact on the diversity of your applicant pool. If your job is confusing (e.g., senior title but junior responsibilities) or isn’t calibrated correctly for the market, you’ll likely see smaller and less diverse candidate pools. You’ll also likely encourage unqualified applicants to apply while deterring qualified ones.
The title you choose has to match the responsibilities and requirements of the job. (It’s vital to tell the same story throughout the job post and, in fact, the entire hiring process.) Just including the word “Senior” in the title when the responsibilities and requirements are junior (or just less-than-senior) can derail your hiring effort. In our data on financial analyst titles, including the word “Senior” attracts 29% fewer applicants, 39% fewer qualified applicants, and 27% fewer female applicants.
Also, today’s job seekers are looking for full transparency so they can easily imagine themselves in a role. They don’t assume you offer great benefits when you don’t include them in the job post. In addition to clear location requirements, they want to see a salary range, benefits, perks, and your commitment to DEI. Including DEI statements, for example, can assure job seekers from underrepresented groups that they’ll be welcome at your company.
Other things beyond inclusive job posts include blind employee referrals where hiring managers and other members of the hiring team are unaware that a candidate is a referral. Or fair chance hiring (aka second chance hiring), which encourages job seekers with arrests or convictions to apply. Also bonuses, particularly if you’re having trouble hiring for onsite jobs. And reduced education requirements (according to our remote jobs data, fewer jobs require degrees these days).
Write inclusive job posts that are calibrated for the market and include things like benefits, perks, a diversity statement, clear location requirements, and even a pay range – right up front in the job post, not at the end of a link to your website. And implement other strategies like fair chance hiring that help you cast your net even wider.
Attracting a diverse candidate pool in a distributed workplace
Remote and hybrid jobs have forever altered the workplace and the hiring landscape. Meanwhile, mixed messages around the benefits of in-person work and expectations surrounding Return to Office are making HR, talent acquisition, and job searching even more confusing.
But, as with the unpredictable labor market and the demand for a more efficient recruiting process, there’s an exhilarating rush for every steep climb on this roller coaster. Remote work represents a real opportunity to grow and diversify your applicant pools for even the most competitive roles facing the tightest labor markets. And if your jobs require onsite presence, offering hybrid options still enables you to realize the benefits of a materially larger and more diverse candidate pool.
SALARY DISCLOSURE
Cresting the Salary Disclosure Hill
Hiring teams are not only contending with evolving job-seeker attitudes, they’re also dealing with evolving employment law. While job seekers are asking for pay transparency to better judge whether to apply (totally fair – and more efficient for all involved), salary disclosure laws are transforming the recruiting landscape.
Pay equity and salary disclosure laws
Pay equity and salary disclosure laws are gaining traction faster than anyone expected. The laws mark major progress for workers – particularly those from historically underrepresented groups. Yet they come with substantial compliance burdens for even the most well-intentioned talent acquisition teams.
And the laws are a varied bunch. Some jurisdictions have few if any requirements. Others require disclosure upon request by a job seeker. Still others require salary disclosure right in the job post.
That last one is getting more popular all the time. In fact, an ever-growing list of locations now require (or will soon require) salary disclosure in job posts for all published jobs, including internal ones. The penalties for violating the laws vary by location, of course, from small to large monetary fines. But the real damage is to employer brand, which talent teams are working so hard to boost.
The varied salary disclosure landscape
Salary disclosure is a hugely positive transition meant to increase fairness in the job search and the workplace. However, it’s turning out to be more complex to put into action than expected, and talent acquisition teams are finding they need some help making the transition.
In North America, the list of jurisdictions with salary disclosure laws includes California, Colorado, New York City and New York State, Washington State, and British Columbia. In Europe, Austria now has a salary disclosure law, and Ireland is about to put one in place.
Some jurisdictions have already started tweaking the laws they only recently enacted, mostly in response to employer shenanigans. Overly wide salary ranges that tell job seekers nothing, for example, are now illegal in places, along with point salaries where statutes require ranges.
Washington State, in the vanguard of the movement, now requires employers to list all benefits, from pay to health care to retirement plans and any other compensation. The state also effectively put an end to employers excluding applications from jurisdictions with salary disclosure laws on the books. This was in response to “Coloradans need not apply” language that is still in hundreds of job posts.
“An employer cannot avoid disclosing wage and salary information requirements by indicating within a posting that the employer will not accept Washington applicants,” Washington’s Equal Pay and Opportunity Act establishes.
And according to the Colorado Sun, the state of Colorado notified hundreds of employers and even fined three for violations in the first year and a half that the Colorado salary disclosure law was in effect.
How to approach salary disclosure
So, it’s an ever-changing landscape when it comes to salary disclosure laws. What to do about it?
Audit your job posts for compliance
Employer brand is more important than ever. While a monetary fine is a problem, it pales in comparison to employer brand damage. Put simply, not complying with laws designed to promote equity in hiring is a bad look for any employer. Which can result in smaller, less qualified, and less diverse candidate pools.
Audit your job posts for compliance with the latest laws and recent clarifications of those laws (e.g., Washington State’s updates). If you don’t know where to start, Datapeople can help out with a free one-time compliance audit.
Make sure each of your job posts complies with local salary disclosure laws. If you don’t want to check each manually, products like the Datapeople Insights Compliance Report can help.
Update your job description templates
One of the biggest advantages of using job description templates is that they help with compliance. Hiring managers and recruiters can write compliant (and consistent, on-brand) job descriptions without having to reinvent the wheel every time. All of the standard copy is already written.
Take advantage of templates to stay on top of evolving salary disclosure laws. Whenever there’s a rule change, update the copy and necessary placeholders in all of your applicable templates. And if you haven’t done so already, make sure to create or refresh templates for California, Colorado, and New York City; newer geographies New York State and British Columbia; all remote jobs (which should now comply with at least Colorado’s rules); and Washington State (remember: all benefits).
Once you update a template with the right content, hiring teams don’t have to rewrite it – or risk forgetting to include it. (You can also take advantage of the moment to update other standard copy like company info, benefits, perks, and diversity and inclusion sections.)
Update your job templates any time there’s a rule change. So hiring teams don’t have to worry about compliance – they just have to use the latest templates.
Reassess your salary disclosure strategy
Salary disclosure is a growing trend, with more jurisdictions adding laws all the time. Furthermore, remote work is kind of blurring the lines between jurisdictions (e.g., the “Coloradans need not apply” thing).
But it’s not just the laws around salary disclosure – job-seeker attitudes towards it have changed as well. In an April 2022 survey by Indeed, 75% of respondents said a pay range makes them more likely to apply. And in a 2023 survey by ResumeLab, 87% of respondents said job ads should “always” include a pay range.
Consider including a pay range in all of your job posts regardless of location. To get ahead of the laws and keep in step with the shifting attitude of job seekers towards salary disclosure.
Leverage technology to mitigate risk
In a hiring landscape that’s changing all the time, compliance is no small thing. Software like Datapeople can help you mitigate the risks. (And reap the rewards of best-in-class job posts.)
You can use Datapeople to guide hiring managers and recruiters to comply with the latest laws and recent clarifications of laws. (It prompts you to add pay information where required by law and notifies you when a new law is on the way. Actually, it nudges you to include all the content that job seekers want to see in job posts like benefits, perks, and a diversity statement.) And you can use Datapeople to instantaneously audit your jobs so you can monitor and encourage compliance across your company.
Heeding our advice above to include a pay range in all job posts regardless of location? (Or already doing so? Bravo!) In Datapeople, you can customize your settings to reflect your unique company mandates – not just what’s required by law.
Use software like Datapeople to audit your jobs for compliance, encourage and monitor compliance going forward, and reinforce your strategic decisions around salary disclosure.
Check with counsel
Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t state unequivocally that we’re not employment law attorneys. We pay attention to employment law to inform our platform and help our customers with compliance wherever we can. But you should still check with internal counsel.
Consult with your internal employment counsel on recent changes to salary disclosure (and all employment) laws.
Stay ahead of salary disclosure laws, changing attitudes
In this ever-changing landscape, you have to respond to evolving employment law to ensure you stay in compliance. You also have to respond to evolving job-seeker attitudes, which are increasingly calling for more transparency like salary disclosure in job posts. The alternative is smaller, less qualified, and less diverse candidate pools, and potential employer brand damage.
RECRUITING ROLLER COASTER
The Recruiting Roller Coaster of 2023
Again, recruiting is brutal right now. It’s the most unpredictable labor market we’ve ever seen – generally tight but not in a consistent way across all jobs and locations. Budgets and teams are shrinking, yet the demands on hiring teams are increasing.
It’s a wild ride. Job-seeker attitudes are changing around remote work and salary disclosure, and employment laws are changing along with them. Meanwhile, hanging over it all is a 31% overall failure rate for job requisitions.
How do you attract a qualified, diverse candidate pool while keeping costs down, efficiency up, and morale high, all without losing your mind? It’s difficult, but it’s doable using the market data and actionable tips above. And Datapeople can help. If you’d like more guidance, we invite you to sign up for a demo.
DATA & METHODOLOGY
The Data and Methodology We Use
This report presents analyses of 30+ million job descriptions and 30+ million recruiting outcomes to detect hiring trends in job content from 2021 to today.
The job description data was deeply annotated. We extracted job attributes (role types, locations, benefits) and company attributes (what size/maturity is the company), and these annotations gave us significant depth in interpreting trends.
Our approach
Our job outcome dataset was also deeply annotated with job and company attributes (as above). It also contained annotations of applicant sources, resolution of applicant stages and inferences around gender representation in applicant pools.
Our approach provides two advantages:
1) More depth than the occupational and industry classifications available in government data.
2) Higher fidelity than using single feature attributes such as job titles to classify jobs. Job titles can be deceptive: a Sales Assistant can be a retail role or involved in administrative support in Go-to-Market functions.
Data labeling and augmentation
Job attributes
We annotated jobs in two major ways:
1) Company attributes
In this analysis, we segmented companies based on various attributes. These were based on our own internal research and classification of companies and did not correspond to government agency mappings since this was a global dataset.
2) Job attributes
We defined attributes of jobs using our proprietary job taxonomy.
- Our taxonomy does not correspond to government agency mappings (e.g., the Bureau of Labor Statistics Standard Occupational Classification) or other industry mappings.
- An example of an attribute we defined is whether a job is a remote position or not. We used a variety of contextual information including job titles, locations and job description content in addition to linguistic attributes to determine whether a role is truly remote. This allows us to annotate remote jobs with a high fidelity and exclude jobs such as those that require experience with “remote sensing” or “remote services” or that are temporarily remote
Applicant attributes
We annotated our job outcomes data in three additional ways:
1) Application sources
- ATSs define application sources in a variety of different ways. Some enable user-inputted data, which is where we get ‘LinkedIn,’ ‘Linked-in,’ ‘linkedin,’ and other ways to denote LinkedIn. Meanwhile, others define whether a source like LinkedIn is being used as a sourcing/prospecting tool or as a Job Board.
- Our platform organizes over 300,000 application sources into core categories. In this report, we present a top-level grouping focused on whether applicants applied through Inbound or Outbound sources. These categories are further specified in the Glossary.
2) Applicant gender representation
- We analyze applicant pool attributes in the context of candidate gender inferences. These were based on our proprietary inference engine.
- Comparisons against Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) self-reports suggest this is 94% accurate and does not suffer from non-response issues associated with EEO data.
- grouping focused on whether applicants applied through Inbound or Outbound sources. These categories are further specified in the Glossary.
3) Data hygiene
Because we analyzed applicant pool sizes, we excluded any recruiting data hygiene issues that would skew our ability to define the average applicant pool size/makeup for a certain type of role. These included internal-only requisitions, requisitions with a single application and requisitions with incomplete job content (e.g., don’t describe the skills/qualifications of the jobs or only include placeholder language).
Definitions
Job types and categories
We have two overarching categories of jobs:
Frontline roles
These are jobs where the role itself requires on-premises work: it may be because they need to have face-to-face interactions with customers (i.e., retail, hospitality and health roles) or their role requires physical presence in a specific workplace (i.e., often in production, transport and warehouse roles). These are also known as ‘desk-less’ jobs. Within frontline work, we have additional role types including:
- Production + Facilities roles: These include Machine/Manufacturing Operators, Maintenance Technicians, Facilities Managers, etc.
- Warehouse + Transport roles: These include Package/Materials Handlers, Order Pullers, Warehouse Workers, Couriers, Truck Drivers, Shuttle Drivers, CDL Drivers, etc.
- Healthcare roles: These include Pharmacy Technicians, Phlebotomists, Nurses, Caregivers, etc.
- Retail + Hospitality roles: These include Cashiers, Store Managers, Sales Associates, Cooks, Dishwashers, Bartenders, Servers, Housekeepers, etc.
Professional roles
These are often office-based/professional roles in companies. They include:
- Tech roles: These are roles in Software Engineering and Data functions. Some examples of common job titles include Software Engineers, Data Analysts/Scientists/Engineers, Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Technical Project Managers, etc.
- Go-to-Market roles: These are roles in Go to Market functions including Sales, Marketing, Customer Success. Some examples of common job titles include Account Executives, Sales/Business Development Representatives, Customer Success/Experience Specialists, Marketing Managers, etc.
- General & Administrative roles: Some examples of common job titles include Finance Managers, Accountants, HR Generalists, Recruiters, Administrative Specialists, etc.
Job locations
We approach job locations through a talent pool perspective, specifically considering if the job’s location restricts the talent pool to one that is local. We exclude jobs that are explicit about being temporarily remote in order to focus on permanently remote positions. We also exclude jobs that use hybrid synonymously with remote.
Hybrid
We define hybrid jobs as those that describe that the position has some remote work flexibility but also requires regular, on premises work. This can come in forms like the 3-2 model where employees are required to spend three days in the office and two days at home (or vice versa) or those which have “office occasional” policies where there are expectations for onsite presences for team/company meetings.
Remote
We define remote jobs as those that describe, either through the title, location field or job description, that the position is open to remote work. These include terms such as “remote work,” “telecommute,” “work from home,” or similar language.
Applicant sources
Inbound
These are candidates that apply to a company. This includes jobseekers who applied through the company’s career page, job boards like LinkedIn/Monster/Naukri/CareerBuilder, and social media referrals.
Outbound
These are candidates that are contacted by or on behalf of the employer. This includes candidates who are prospected by an (internal) recruiter or sourcer, an (external) agency, or a sourcing platform (e.g., Vettery, Entelo, Jopwell) or those referred by existing employees. Typically, the majority of outbound applications are sourced by internal recruiters.
