But, almost three years later, the global pandemic’s lingering effects continue to impact the job market. Enter long Covid.

According to the Brookings Institute, about 16 million working-age Americans suffer from long Covid, with anywhere from two to four million out of work because of Covid’s lingering symptoms. The cost to these employees? Lost wages ranging from $170 billion to $230 billion annually, creating a “meaningful drag on U.S. economic performance and household financial health.”

Add to that:

• 260,000 working-age adults that have been lost to Covid
• The slowdown of immigration, costing another three million workers
• Baby Boomer retirements
• Lower birth rates

And, the job market just received another gut punch, along with suffering from its own lingering, seemingly incurable viral symptoms.

Long Covid and the Job Market:  Going Hand in Hand

In the U.S. alone, the coronavirus infected almost 102 million people, putting the brakes on the economy. However, doctors and scientists (and economists) thought that once people started feeling better, they’d get back to work.

A reasonable assumption, no doubt.

However, this hasn’t exactly happened.  Much like long Covid itself, the job market just can’t shake this sick feeling.

U.S. job openings are holding pretty steady at just over 10 million jobs (e.g., 10.3 million in October 2022 and 10.5 million in November 2022), just under the record high of 11 million job openings in 2021 and early 2022. But, where are the workers?

Well, some employees are being laid off by America’s largest companies, such as Amazon, Meta, Twitter, and Peloton. But, employees are quitting their jobs in droves as well – with quits exceeding “the pre-pandemic high for 21 consecutive months, as more than 4 million Americans voluntarily left their jobs in each of the past 18 months.”

In 2022 alone, 46.6 million employees voluntarily quit their jobs.

That’s shocking, to say the least, but the tides have turned. Employees are no longer willing to put up with inflexible, unfair working conditions, causing both workers and companies to re-evaluate the employer-employee relationship.

From the Great Resignation to the Great Reshuffle to the Great Layoffs, the job market is still trying to figure out how to heal itself, getting back to “normal.”

But is there a getting back to normal?  Or just learning to live with long Covid?

Looking for a Cure (or just a way to stop the bleeding)

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, “[i]f every unemployed person in the country found a job, we would still have 4 million open jobs.” Wow-za.

How do you solve that?  What’s the cure?

We are definitely living in unprecedented times – but is it a crisis?  According to HR expert Josh Bersin, yes – almost.

Last fall, Bersin said:

[Q]uite simply, we cannot “manufacture more people” in a flash. We can solve the global supply chain problem by building a factory, buying a ship, or scaling up a distribution center. People don’t work that way. We need to educate them, train them, and coach them to perform at work. And as all the data now shows, when you “push” people too hard, they just quit, check out, or change careers.

The cure? Treat people like an asset, according to Bersin. Perhaps easier said than done…

The post Lingering Symptoms & Long Covid: The Job Market Continues to Struggle With its Own Chronic Illness appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

The US Department of Labor calculates the labor participation rate as: “the percentage of the population that is either working or actively looking for work. The labor force participation rate is calculated as: (Labor Force ÷ Civilian Noninstitutional Population) x 100.” That’s somewhat wonky, but it matters. Because it impacts how much your next car loan is going to cost you.

Typically, the Fed knows what to do with a red-hot hiring market that’s pushing salaries higher. It’s a fairly simple model (on the surface). The idea behind hiking rates is that it increases the cost of doing business for companies. So they slow down hiring. This in turn acts as a brake on the economy, which should cool inflation a bit.

But that doesn’t appear to be happening the way it should under normal circumstances. Because it’s post-2020 and “normal circumstances” is now an oxymoron. November’s jobs report gives some indications around why that might be. The labor market is missing a bunch of laborers.

The Troubling Numbers

The report highlights an issue: there aren’t enough people to fill the jobs being advertised. The labor force participation rate – how many working-age Americans have a job or are seeking one – is stuck at just over 62.1%. That’s about where it’s been, as the report puts it: “little net change since early this year.” That’s down 1.3 percentage points from pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels. Only in August did the work force return to its prepandemic size, which is millions short of where it would have been had it continued to grow at its prepandemic rate.

Meanwhile, job listings continue to remain at or near historical highs. This doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon – as recent above-expected job gains indicate.

Some estimates say as many as 8 million people in the US alone have left the workforce since the dawn of COVID. Where’d they all go?

Exit(s), Stage Left

First They Ghost – Then They Goblin

Ghosting used to be rare when it came to candidates. Now, it’s rare if a req a recruiter works doesn’t contain multiple ghost stories. It’s a thing. But the question that’s been nagging is: where are they? Some find new jobs, sure, but some just stop looking entirely.

“A lot of workers are still disconnected, and we’re just not seeing them come on,” said Jesse Wheeler, an economic analyst with the polling and analysis firm Morning Consult. “It’s unclear how all of them are making ends meet, but I think it has a lot to do with consolidation of households and cutting costs. It would’ve been difficult to change if they weren’t forced into it.”

In other words, 2022’s Word of the Year: goblin mode. Okay, it’s two words. Which kind of fits, since part of the definition includes  things like:”oh, just give up trying – tell people your webcam fell into your three-day-old bowl of soup next to your laptop and that’s why you they can’t see you on Zoom anymore. Not that any of them have showered in a week, either…”

Think of goblin mode as quiet quitting, but with an attitude. Life’s thrown enough at you. If you’re in China it’s possible you’ve been locked in your apartment for three months. If you’re in Ukraine you’re apartment may have been blown up three months ago. If you’re in the US, you’re living in the most powerful country in the world, armed to the teeth, and there’s this creeping sensation that you’re slouching towards Civil War 2: Qanon Boogaloo. There are something like three potential apocalypses on the table (war, pestilence, and climate – so, three horsemen are approaching). Some of these things were smoldering prior to 2020, but then we threw gasoline on top.

Meet Them Under the Bridge

That, my friends, is where we begin to see the root of things – and the implications. The analogy might be someone who thinks they might smell smoke from deeper in the woods, but its stay there or jump off a cliff into a river. They aren’t sure what’s down there, how deep the water is, the currents., hidden rocks, etc. It’s risky. So, they naturally hesitate. Then the fire flares up and a somewhat fatalistic decision is made for them: they jump. For some of them, the water turns out to be quite nice as it turned out. They were able to swim with the current, and now they’ve found themselves a nice, quiet bridge to settle under.*

Leaving work behind didn’t mean the end of the world – just that they had to adapt to a new way of living. Couples found themselves able to make do with a bit less financially, and/ or you took advantage of remote work to move somewhere with a lower cost of living. It’s reasonable to assume that with some of those couples, one of them left the workforce in order to have time to manage the household, return to school, etc. If that’s the case, this is talent that may well stay off the workforce for at least the short term. There’s a push for balance happening, and that’s a hole in the labor force that we can’t fix quickly.

All that said: there’s plenty of skill out there in that group. And while they’re likely not coming back full-time, the possibilities for gig, flex work, and/ or skill-specific project-based roles are definitely there. Consider my neighbor, a 60 year-old mortgage attorney who found himself needing some extra cash for the holidays because he hadn’t had much work due to the slumping housing market. They didn’t really want to change jobs or launch a whole new careers. They’d been thinking about slowing down as it was. When they tried to apply for jobs, just in case, the process was frustrating and inconsistent. So he gave up on that.

But then they were shopping on Amazon, and saw an ad for seasonal work delivering for UPS. Gig work using their own vehicle. He grabbed it. Once that’s done, he’ll likely pick up some more gig work as he needs it in 2023, and wrap up his “career”. He’s thrilled, by the way. And less goblin-like, as a result.  It just took a push to make the leap.

* (Okay, right – trolls traditionally do the whole “live under a bridge thing”, versus goblins, just trying to stay somewhat on-analogy here).

The post Goblin Mode and Ghosting Haunt Labor Force Participation Rates appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

The Numbers

Here’s the raw data for September. According to the DOL’s September Jobs Report, the US economy added 261,000 jobs in October while the unemployment rate rose to 3.7%. That’s up a tic from September’s 3.5% – the lowest rate in 50 years – and still considered historically low. Economists had expected a smaller rise in the unemployment rate, to only 3.6%.

In recent months, job growth has downshifted from a robust average monthly pace of more than 400,000 for most of this year to about 290,000 the past three months. The unemployment rate has been kept low by persistent worker shortages. (That, and a recruitment market that often feels like a game of whack-a-mole, one where the moles can turn into ghosts the moment you make contact with them). This, in turn, has led companies to avoid layoffs on fears they won’t be able to fill openings when the economy bounces back.

That may be changing. New job creation is at the lowest in a year-and-a-half. Layoffs are starting to become hip again. And we’re hearing reports that interview processes are being deliberately slowed by hiring managers who, just a scant few months ago, were willing to accept “can fog a mirror with breath” as an acceptable minimum qualification.

This is where it gets a bit weird. While there are rumbles of slowing job creation, and a loosening labor market: we’re still dealing with historic numbers in both categories. Critical skill-shortages will continue to keep labor shortages in the news, side-by-side with layoff reports. Talent acquisition leaders will find themselves with whiplash.

into the storm

Consider Forrester’s Predictions 2023: Future of Work report. The research and advisory firm envisions a coming hurricane for talent professionals as we enter into what looks to be a  “a perplexing, talent-constrained recession” in 2023. Forrester VP and principal analyst Katy Tynan adds:

“The demographic changes that underpinned the “great resignation“ and the ongoing impact of COVID-19-related absenteeism will continue to constrain the talent market in a tight economy. The outcome is a bullwhip effect in the talent market: Actions that respond to a constraint create an overcorrection in the other direction, keeping the market out of balance. We are navigating uncharted waters. Some of the things that organizations would expect to do and get good results out of will actually have the opposite effect.”

What this means, team, is that we never got around to really addressing skills. Skills needed for roles that are mushrooming to address an economy that is radically different than the one we had just a few years ago – and part of that radical change is the ability to keep changing geometrically. Lacking a more nimble approach to how we find the skills we need when we need them, we find ourselves with some pretty damn dry talent pools. Ones where we’re all fighting each other for the remaining fish. It’s not sustainable – somebody has to starve for somebody else to eat.

To address this, employers, talent acquisition leaders, product firms, heck, the government have to start to move together in lockstep to discover solutions. Because we aren’t there yet – and that’s going to keep hurting us as this new weird economy moves along. If we don’t, we face a sort of near-term dystopia: one where a small group with the right skills continues to thrive, and a majority move into a limbo of gig work, unemployment, seasonal roles, etc to survive.

Employers dig talent with skills

Understandably, companies cannot be expected to function as charities – they will continue to need appropriate talent. That said, we do need to manage through the near-term. Labor unbalances, with people who find themselves

We recommend forward-leaning talent acquisition leaders across sectors connect into working groups with actionable items as outcomes. Work out the steps to take to move past the theoretical to the practical. Answering questions around how to manage skills transformations where possible, while understanding that some communities and locations simply cannot shift rapidly to new industries. How do we develop the former, while finding solutions that provide meaningful labor to the latter? What should our education system look like in the future? Is the current skills development model broken? And, what does a balanced labor force truly look like – how do we measure success?

For a long, long time, talent leaders have requested to have their voices heard – and now, we have much to say, and a little time to say it. 2023 looks to be wildly complex series of storms around talent and hiring. We will  need to manage to continue to keep our fleet afloat, concurrently steering our ships to new harbors in search of more navigable waters.

The post Get Ready For a Bumpier Ride – What October Job Numbers Tell Us appeared first on RecruitingDaily.