We're almost halfway through the year, and nearly three-fourths of organizations said at the beginning of the year that they were planning to hire this year. Many of those organizations may have already made their hires. Others may still be looking to fill positions, or may not have started hiring those that they planned to hire in 2014. Companies who aren't yet finished hiring for the year need to pay attention, as any recruiting challenges you may be facing might only get tougher to overcome. The following three eye-opening statistics reflect today's hiring and recruiting landscape, and suggest acquiring the best talent isn't going to get any easier.
Statistic #1: The U.S.'s Employment Participation Rate is at 63.2%
The employment participant is defined as anyone between the ages of 16 and 64 who is employed or is currently seeking a job. Typically, the employment participation rate (which is also known as the labor force participation rate) hovers between 67 and 68 percent. With the participation rate, as of March 2014, at 63.2% it means that more than 90 million Americans are no longer employed or looking for work, instead of the normal 70 million. In the last 13 years, an additional 20 million people have taken themselves out of the workforce, for whatever reason.
"It also says we have a lower population to recruit from," said Ray Rike, chief operations officer with Accolo. "So, in those functions where there's a war for talent... it's going to force us to be even more intelligent and smart about the way we're going out and recruiting great employees today."
Statistic #2: Almost 50% of the Jobs Advertised Online are Open for More than 90 Days
As of February 2014, more than 4 million job openings were advertised online. These are specifically job openings that are publicly available on the Internet somewhere. The number of job openings has doubled since February 2010, so it's great to see that more employers are advertising online and that more openings are being advertised. The fact that these positions remain open for so long, with an average of 250 resumes sent in per advertised opening, isn't as great to see.
"There are several assumptions that one can conclude from that," Rike said. "One is that there's not enough talent... to fill those roles. The second assumption... is there's too much noise and friction to getting the right opportunity in front of the right potential candidates."
Rike said that the second assumption is what he and his colleagues focus on at Accolo so that hiring managers can meet great excellent new employees more efficiently. Rike believes that it's the second assumption, more so than the first assumption, that's contributing to the 50 percent statistics as well as the fact that so many in the United States are unemployed or underemployed.
Statistic #3: In North America, Almost 60% of Hires are With Companies With 50 Employees or Fewer
Not only are small and medium-sized businesses dominating in who is hiring, but they are also the dominant employers advertising jobs on Craigslist. Naysayers can doubt Craigslist and the sustainability of traditional job boards like Monster and CareerBuilder, but Craigslist advertises three times more job openings than CareerBuilder.
Rike noted an interesting trend where traditional job boards are still more popular as a career marketing vehicle than social media, even beating LinkedIn, which is considered the top social network for hiring and job postings. This trend doesn't mean that social networks can't be a potential source for a great candidate, or that they ought to be forgotten entirely in favor of the job boards.
"It wouldn't be prudent to not embrace every potential source of a candidate," Rike said. "One example we've seen in Silicon Valley over the past year: almost 13 percent of software developers that have been hired across our customer base have initially been identified via Craigslist, which is greater than any other source."
In the next part of this series, we will highlight statistics covering hiring efficiencies and recruiting costs. Knowing these statistics, as well as how to calculate some of the recruiting costs in your organization, will help you in making the hires you need to make for the rest of 2014.
You can listen to Ray Rike present the State of the Hiring Union here.
