Talent Shortage is Back and Getting Worse/ Talent Shortage is 2-5 x worse than Pre-Covid
I’ve been hearing a lot of pain about employers unable to find applicants for their jobs, or that those applicants are not very good or lack engagement. I was creating content for some webinars I did last week, and stumbled upon some research that finally came up with a metric that can be used to help people understand how hard it has become to gain buy-in from their team.
A lot of the metrics that are out there, whether unemployment rates, job openings, or as a standalone number, it is hard to get to an actionable metric.
I started digging in, and found a bunch of data out there comparing job openings versus the number of unemployed people. [link to data]
While those two numbers from a comparison standpoint may not give a clear picture of what is going on, due to the lack of consideration of industry, location, etc. - What we are looking for today is comparing where we are today versus pre-COVID (early 2020 or late
2019).
The metric I came up with was comparing the gap between job openings and unemployed people from then, to now.
Below is a list of the percentage of core change across different industries:
So what’s the solution?
The simple answer is that organizations need to create a proactive recruit marketing strategy.
This strategy can be summed up by a handful of steps:
1. Conduct a pain assessment. Figure out how bad you are today. How are you struggling? Are you Behind? Then, assess what you anticipate the future to be like as far as your needs next year. Lastly, assess the competitive landscape- is it getting more competitive? How confident is your team on actually doing it?
2. Conduct a SWOT analysis. Look at your industry and evaluate where you are in a pecking order. Figure out where you fit into the same flow, how you fit from an employer brand piece, how you fit from a size, differentiation, etc.
3. Use the pain as motivation, and come up with a short term action plan utilizing the SWOT analysis. This has to do with the low hanging fruit of changing job ads, adjusting keyword targeting, and other simple things that can decrease the friction of applying for a job. This allows you to jumpstart some easier job boards to post to just to get flow into the system.
4. Create a recruitment marketing strategy. This attack plan will give you exactly what you should be working on each week, month, and quarter to get from where you are now, to having a competitive strategy where you are seeing results.
5. Take action. Once you have that strategy, run it for 3-6 months in order to get it to where things are working.
6. Make adjustments and reassess annually. Build a drumbeat for reassessing
your strategy annually and come up with new projects to do in order to look at the rhythm each week or month as needed to make it continually better.
These steps will be one of the greatest defining moments for you as an employer as we
have a major redistribution of jobs and employees.
It is time for employers to have a major reset on their approach to recruitment marketing
and create a plan of attack on their rhythm and drumbeat of constant improvement.