Lessons - Today’s Dynamic Job Market | Evan Sohn - CEO of Recruiter.com

Let's talk about some of the things that have come out of the past two years, and some of the things that I'm assuming companies hire recruiter.com to actually solve for. What is a current job market like? How many people are leaving their jobs, is it just as volatile as it was at the beginning? You hear about the great resignation, everybody leaving on mass, everybody going virtual. What's the current state? Because you're in this. You have a pretty good perspective on it. Yes. There are three macro events going on today in the US. Two of them are episodic, and one is systemic. The first one is really talent shortage. You had all these companies that furloughed their people or shut down totally, and now you have 4% unemployment, you have 10 and a half million open jobs, hard to get people to come back to work, salary increases, wage inflation, ghosting, all these other things that you're hearing about. That's episodic because that will get resolved probably in the next year or 18 months. The notion that this restaurant can't open on after 10 o'clock as they can't staff, they'll find the staff, they'll figure that out, they'll get that balance between wage and quality life and all these other things. The second, and by the way, we have a lot of clients in that manufacturing space and hospitality space, etc, that are in that hourly economy side of things, the working work collar. The second really is the great resignation. What most people don't recognize is that the US churn, there are 160 million working adults in the US, something like that. The annual turnover is somewhere between 22 and 25%. That means that every month people quit, voluntarily quit, forget the layoffs, voluntarily quit. That was pre-COVID. That was just regular. Pre-COVID, always. In 2019, I think the average was 3.5 million people quit every month, 3.3 to 3.5 million people quit every month, there's just a regular number. What's interesting is that, and we reported this, we do a recruiter index every month. In November, in October, we said the great resignation is upon us and about two weeks later, they announced that 4.5 million people quit in August. It was like, oh my God, 4.5, the reality is, it's greater, the greater resignation. More people quit in August than before, not people quit every single, no, it's a million more, it's a lot, but still it's more, but what's interesting is that it's the who was quitting that, let's break out those numbers. What you started to see is the knowledge worker start to leave. In other words, why? Well, guess what? I moved to Florida, I worked for a bank in New York, I moved to Florida because of COVID. The bank says, you have to come back full time, I said, I'm never going back full time. There are a lot of reasons, grandma used to watch the children, grandma doesn't want to, she's too scared, I can't work from, I have to work remotely, I like working remotely, I want to work life balance, there are a lot of reasons why this is all happening. But we're seeing these things like it's never happened before, this notion of work from anywhere is really fostering this great resignation of why people are leaving, I want my priorities have changed. We call it the great re-evaluation, companies are changing what they're thinking, employees are changing what they're thinking. That too is actually episodic. We believe the great resignation will really slow up probably by the summer, so you'll start to see those numbers come down of how many people are quitting, slightly ticket down. What's not changing is what we call the job hopper economy, so pre-pandemic, if you went to Silicon Valley and you saw Resume of someone for 12 years and they were at three or four companies in 12 years, you would say, oh my god, that's software engineer is awesome. That's an awesome software engineer. If you saw, and again, I'm generalizing to prove a point, but like 60% of all millennials now have no problem leaving a company within six months. Hearing clients say, yeah, an employee started and two weeks later they left because they got a better job from someplace else, like incredible. We might have had parents or grandparents that said, oh, you got to stay your employer for at least two years or four years, that's out the door now. This job hopper economy is really fueling so much craziness on the actual hiring and talent acquisition side of things. Let me explain. Five years ago, I don't know where you were working five years ago, but let's assume you work for a company five years ago, right? And now you were going for an interview. Let's think about what was the interview like five years ago? You brought a suit to the office, right, and you lied, right? Then you told your manager, well, it's my uncle's wife's die, and I got to go to a funeral, it's really sad, et cetera, and you took off the afternoon. The next day, there's a head hunter calling you up, and you're like, your boss is like, well, who is that? Oh, it's my mother. She's really upset about my uncle's wife's, like, it's a whole cloak and dagger. And by the way, you can tell when somebody's leaving a company because they start taking days, and they start walking out of the office or out of the cubicle to take the phone calls or whatnot. That's right. That's right. You know, and look, we knew that, right? Oh, someone's getting sick a lot, gee, maybe they're actually interviewing, right? So the expression finding a job as a full-time job would not be offered in February of 2022. Right? It would just not be offered now. Why? Because what's interviewing today? Interview today is a 15-minute video interview, right? It's a Zoom screen for 15 minutes. So let me get this right. If I could interview anytime I want, if I'm home or I'm working remotely or hybrid, if geographically undesirable jobs don't exist anymore, right? Think about that, Scott. Think about how many jobs you didn't even look at because it was geographically undesirable. So here's the thing, everyone in this country today is more valuable than they were three years ago. Everybody. And the reason is that, again, it's the factory worker, the dishwasher at a restaurant, the waiter, the Java developer, everyone's more valuable. The reason is that, let's assume you want to work remotely, right? But if I want you to work for my company, it doesn't matter to me where you work because I want your skills. So think about all of a sudden now, I could work from anywhere, I could work at any company I want, I could interview any time I want. By the way, how easy is it to apply for a job now? It's clicking on a indeed and it's like a piece of cake. So the only thing that was holding you back from leaving was the stigma of, oh, I can't just leave that company. I've only been there for a year. Once that's removed, holy crap. And by the way, it's gone now. It's absolutely gone. There is no, there is no longer a stigma of leaving a company. You know, Kevin O'Leary, Mr. Wonderful, wrote an article about three months ago, baking employees, please stay at your company for at least 24 months, 24 months, that's nuts. So you're going to see now people leaving companies at a far more rapid basis. So by the way, if the number, if the number of the annual churn in the US, the annual churn over is 22%. If it goes up to 30%, and I actually think it's going to go further, 30% increase will actually cost the US economy $50 billion more in 22 than in 2019. And we blogged about it. I presented it on CNBC a couple of weeks ago. You know, that's an incredible investment that companies are now making into these things. And what this is really doing is really driving a tremendous demand for recruiters and for HR tech is now hot, you know, but I'll give you my sound bite is, you know, if it used to be that finding a job was a full time job, the today's response is finding people is a full time job. It is no longer something that if you're running a company with 30 or 40 people in it and used to hire three people a year or four people a year, you're now going to be hiring eight to 12 people a year. And that's just to keep up with the people that are leaving. Now if you're hiring one person a month, that's a job. That's an actual. Who's going to have to be doing that? And I actually predict the same way that we all take, we all outsource, you know, every company has something doing with security, whether it's email security, desktop security, hosted VPN services, managed service providers all the way up to achieve security officer. I believe every company of a certain size will be allocating money towards something in talent acquisition and retention.