Weirdly, even if they were personally affected by layoffs, 82% say they’re happy at work most of the time; 92% are completely satisfied with their work; 81% say their work has a clear sense of purpose; and 71% feel they aren’t stressed at work most of the time.  On top of that, the largest percentage of respondents – by far, at 27% – came from the information and communication technology sector, which has been impacted the most by layoffs. Somehow, the bulk of them are still reporting job satisfaction and optimism about their career prospects.

Behind the Numbers

We caught up with Charlotte Jones, Global Employer Brand Leader at Indeed, and she gave us some color commentary around the results.

Are employees happier due to actions of their employers, or is the possibility of recession causing employees to check themselves and reconsider if the grass is really all that greener?

“The results of this survey show us that the work employers have done up until this point is paying off with 82% of survey respondents saying they’re happier at their jobs regardless of company wide layoffs. While the looming recession could change how employees view the world around them, nearly half of the respondents said that they’d still consider going to another job in 2023. This likely indicates that employers are doing a great job at maintaining workplace sentiment but will still need to invest in it in 2023 in order to maintain their headcount.”

Considering that some of the programs in place are costly to maintain, if the perceived ROI shifts will employers begin to cut back on some of them?

“Regardless of the economic uncertainty that could come in 2023, it is still very much a job seeker’s market.  The labor market continues to hold steady with 263,000 jobs added in November and the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 3.7%. Additionally, job seekers are still finding jobs at elevated rates, and our recent Hiring and Workplace Trends Report 2023 with Glassdoor shows that employee happiness and wellbeing are still top of mind for employees. The trends report also shares that hiring will remain challenging for years to come. This tells us that workers will still have the upper hand and will demand the programs that make their lives happier.”

In a separate interview, she adds: “For HR professionals to note, any deviation from practices, processes or standards that employees have become accustomed to will be a potential threat to retention. As much as a focus was to build and strengthen offerings to attract top talent, it is equally critical to examine what is keeping employees in their current roles.”

The Sun Shone, and Hay Was Made

Some of this, of course, may be tied to wage gains. Job changers have seen meaningful income changes when they have switched employers recently.

From April 2021 to March 2022, a period in which quit rates reached post-pandemic highs, the majority of workers switching jobs – about 60% – saw an increase in their real earnings over the same month the previous year. This happened despite a surge in the rate of inflation that has eroded real earnings for many others. Among workers who remained with the same employer, fewer than half (47%) experienced an increase in real earnings.

But, behind that, employees satisfaction has improved beyond simple happiness around income. Additional Indeed-Forrester research found that 90% of people “believe how we feel at work matters,” and a majority think it’s their employer’s responsibility to create a happy work environment. “Get a bad [boss] and you are almost guaranteed to hate your job,” Gallup CEO Jon Clifton wrote as part of the company’s 2022 State of the Global Workplace report.

Good news, but keep in mind it’s more confirmation that the ongoing work is working. Don’t stop.

That said: go on, employee experience team: pop some champagne. Or – in some states, anyways – enjoy a nice edible. You’ve earned it. And then get some rest – 2023 is still one of the 2020s. It ain’t over yet.

You can find the full survey results here.

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Enter Beamery. The UK-based talent platform just closed a $50-million D-round to achieve that triple-comma designation and joins the ranks of the ta-tech elite (or, at least deep-pocketed).

Led by CEO Abakar Saidov, Beamery provides an their AI-tech powered Talent Lifecycle Management platform that empowers companies to understand the skills and capabilities they have, build more agile workforce plans, and attract, retain, upskill, and redeploy their workforce. The company’s product provides employers with intelligence to make more effective decisions about their workforce, supporting customers through recruiting, to talent mobility and development, to upskilling.

The funding round was led by Teachers’ Ventures Growth, part of the C$242 billion Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. TVG also made a Series C investment in Beamery in June 2021. TVG focuses on late-stage venture and growth equity investments in technology companies.

“With this new funding, we will continue to develop groundbreaking ways for companies to better understand their workforce today and be able to plan for tomorrow,” said CEO Abakar Saidov. That will  help them “create truly agile organizations ready to withstand any market turbulence,” he said.

Momentum

Beamery has seen a notable increase in Fortune 500 clients during 2022. Indeed, the company claims its Fortune 500 revenue has risen by more than 250% during the year while net retention of Fortune 500 rose to more than 135%.

The company has also launched a Universal Skills Platform to help employers understand the current and potential skills of their workforce, and enhancements meant to help talent teams reduce bias and identify the best internal or external candidate for any particular role.

Earlier in December, Beamery rolled out additions to its product suite that were meant to help companies personalize the candidate experience during the hiring process. The features included a new candidate portal as well as a preference center, enhanced campaign editor and AI-powered browser extension.

With the update, the company aimed to help employers create a “deep” personalization of their talent lifecycle.

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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).

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Each one of those words appears in close to one million job descriptions on Indeed. And every time somebody adds one of those words (or their synonyms), somebody kills a puppy or something. Less dramatically: you’re killing off your applicant flow. Stop it.

NO ONE WANTS YOU (THAT WAY)

Nobody is passionate about working as a procurement assistant for Panasonic Nobody. And if they are, you should be nervous about them. They need help, not access to your VMS. The people you want to attract see obvious fluff words and it dulls their, well, enthusiasm.

What they’re looking for, frankly, are details. What’s the pay? How are the benefits? Can they work from home, what’s the vibe, that sort of thing. Oh, and: what are they going to actually be doing – and why. Will any of their co-workers be passionate lunatics who insist on wearing all of their flair, and is there body-disposal reimbursement for when you finally snap and “de-passion” them permanently?

When you lean into lazy writing because you don’t really understand what the job entails (or, you do and that’s why you’re not discussing it), it’s obvious to the reader.

DATING IS HARD – DON’T BE LIKE DATING

Employers shouldn’t be out there cruising Indeed like its Tinder, looking for their next hook-up. It’s weirdly off-putting.

Remember when eharmony tried to create a job board? Or when Amazon decided it would be cool to have a few hook-ups on Tinder? Seriously – that all happened. Oh, and eharmony’s careers page is still looking for… you guessed it: passion.

Look, it’s absolutely okay to want to hire people who actually want to work for you. Fine. Normal even. But… people who are passionate?

Think about it this way. You’re on whatever dating app you find the least repellent. You see a profile, and the headline is promising. And then you read about how they’re “passionate, are you passionate too? I want someone who loves being passionate about passion, and wants to turn that passion into a mission-driven relationship with more passionate people. Also, you should be willing to spend 40+ hours a week in my house, passionately partnering in procurement”.

After you reported them to your local police, you’d screenshot (for hilarity and sharing on your “Let’s Not Date” group on Facebook) and block. Quickly.

JUST THE FACTS, PLEASE

Don’t be one of the millions who use weak language to try to impress. Respect your audience. Understand they don’t want to date you, and that’s okay. They may want to work with you, and – who knows – maybe they really enjoy their careers. That’s great. Just don’t go looking for love. It’s off-putting.

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Reflecting on the award, Paradox CMO Josh Zywien told RecruitingDaily: “We didn’t create this business to win awards, but we view things like this as acknowledgements that we’re doing the important stuff well – because growth usually comes from solving real problems for real clients, over a meaningful period of time. It’s great validation and an honor to make the Deloitte Fast 500 two years in a row, but it won’t distract us from keeping our heads down to get a little bit better tomorrow than we are today.”

The North America Technology Fast 500 is Deloitte’s annual ranking of the fastest-growing North American companies in the technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, fintech, and energy tech sectors, now in its 28th year. Talent acquisition technology has quickly become an important part of the list as the labor market has become extremely challenging.

THE WINNERS ARE

The annual review ranks companies selected based on percentage fiscal year revenue growth from 2018 to 2021.

• TrueWork: (background checking) #27 with 5,289% growth
• SeekOut: (sourcing) #83 with 2,016%
• Staffy: (on-demand talent) #111 with 1,300%
• Paradox: (conversational AI #137 with 1,061%
• HireEZ: (sourcing) #259 with 578%
• SkillJar: (learning and development) #306 with 474%
• HiredScore, Inc: (talent intelligence) #313 with 460%
• GoodTime: (scheduling) #329 with 423%
• ZoomInfo: (sourcing) #335 with 418%
• Brazen Technologies: (virtual job fairs and events) #348 with 398%
• Talent.com: (job board) #369 with 373%
• iLearningEngine: (learning and development) #480 with 252%

AS TA TECH EVOLVES, ARE JOB BOARDS STILL RELEVANT?

There are always numerous attempts to create the next disruptive technology in talent acquisition, and the trends point to where this may be heading. If you parse through the list and its categories, you see growth driven by a movement away from traditional recruiting models and beginning to adapt to a changed world of talent. Sourcing as well as learning and development are the clear winners.

Neither of those categories made the list just 5 years ago. A few job boards (The Muse, Diversity Incorporated, etc) made the list back then but didn’t crack the top 100. And both are notably absent in 2022. Post-pandemic, proactive talent acquisition and retention tools matter. Finding talent, engaging with it, and then making the offer process (background checking) painless have become critical. Learning and development, along with on-demand talent, are efforts to creatively refill increasingly dry talent pools. And job boards… well. They’re still out there, and they still get big VC dollars thrown at them, but when you look at growth there’s a suggestion their time may be plateauing.

That’s not certain, of course – having centralized hubs such as Indeed makes sense. But, niche job boards are fading – in large part because they simply don’t make sense. Aside from candidate traffic being swapped behind the scenes in order to fluff numbers (more on that in another article), they struggle to stand out, unless they’re an add-on to a more generalized site (ie, AdAge will have job listings for advertising pros who are there for something else). Increasingly, talent discovery, training, and intelligence tools are moving to the front of the line when it comes to TA tech budgets. This author expects these trends to do nothing but continue.

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According to their newly published 2023 Workforce Report, one in three workers plan to look for a new job in 2023, but another third of workers plan to dig in with their current role, taking on more hours and responsibilities. The dichotomy in the workplace, constant upheaval and mixed messages are impacting the way people work and challenging organizations’ ability to retain and grow their workforce.

Remote Will Matter

It’s important to remember that we’re in the midst of major historic change. Economies, governments, coastlines and more are being eroded by multiple forces. This type of shifting makes any sort of forecasting challenging at best. That said: the data in the report makes sense (at least for now).

Elon Musk’s “return to office or you will be exterminated by my Daleks” (or something along those lines), one thing is clear – we’re not going back to the office the way we did in the past. Too many people are looking for hybrid or full-remote roles, and job seekers are at a significant advantage when it comes to bargaining power. In addition, Gen Z is very interested in hybrid/ virtual work.

Gen Z For The Win

Much of Gen Z has never known a workplace that wasn’t flexible, and it looks like hybrid work is here to stay. It’s popular overall, but young people are especially attached: workers 18 to 34 years old are 59% more willing to walk than older colleagues if it’s taken away. With retention being a significant concern, that matters. And Gen Z hiring, especially recent grads, is clearly on employers’ minds.

The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) is reporting that employers plan to hire 14.7% more 2023 graduates compared to the class of 2022. Nearly half of employers surveyed think that the class of 2023 is entering a very good to excellent job market. This is a marked improvement from 2020, when one in four young workers lost their jobs, and graduates found themselves in a wild hiring market.

“Right now, we’re seeing a market where there are abundant opportunities,” Nicole Hall, director of career and professional development at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, which works with undergrad and grad students, told Recode. Students, she said, are confident they’ll be able to get jobs in the fields they want.

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Amazon now joins several other significant tech employers – Facebook parent company Meta, as well as Twitter – in making significant cuts to their staff. And while Amazon’s number is roughly equivalent to Meta and Twitters, they are a much larger employer. As of today, Amazon has laid off 3% of their population, Meta laid off 13%, and Twitter laid off 50%.

RecruitingDaily has reached out to Amazon for official confirmation, and will update accordingly.

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Indeed saw strong growth, with unique visitors growing from 250 million in March to 300 million in September. Recruit attributes this to several factors, from tweaks made to how they attract traffic, moving from an external measurement tool (Google Analytics) to one built internally. In addition, according to the company: “There has been a partial or full rebound in the number of people participating in the labor force and an increase in the rate of job switching in many countries in which Indeed operates websites.”

Recruit Holdings also reported continued growth and adoptions of its SMB-oriented business suite Air Business Tools, specifically driven by sales of its applicant tracking system “AirWORK ATS”. The solution is targeted at the Japanese market.

The company has also announced a share buyback of 2.5%, which began mid-October.

You can find the full report here.

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Among those taking top honors were Bristol Myers Sqibb, Booz Allen, and Comcast (ranked 1 – 3, respectively).

Bristol Myers Squibb sees competitive advantages in their ability to attract and retain veterans.

“With the talent wars so strong, we’ve needed to find other good avenues for recruiting folks,” said Patrick Krug, veterans community network lead at Bristol Myers Squibb, the New Jersey-based pharmaceutical giant and the top company on this year’s list. “And guess what? We already have that with our veterans pipeline.

“They have great transferable skills, plus they bring additional skills of leadership, flexibility, dedication and all the other intangibles that veterans bring. So in 2021 and 2022, we’re up almost 400% in veteran hiring, versus 2020 and earlier years.”

Added Jyoti Chopra, Chief People, Inclusion and Sustainability Officer for MGM Resorts, another award winner: “[Our] long-standing commitment to our nation’s service members, veterans and families reflect our company’s culture and core value to champion inclusion,” she said  “We remain intensely focused on providing resources and career opportunities for those who have sacrificed so much to protect our freedom and fundamental human rights.”

The list was compiled in partnership with the Fors Marsh Group, a research firm specializing in the veterans and the military community.

For the past two years, the rankings have been focused on areas of importance to veterans in the workplace, including areas such as mentorship programs, military-specific training opportunities, and connections with the veterans community.

The 2022 rankings included four new companies in the top five. Researchers said that was a result not of established firms doing more poorly but of many companies outperforming their past scores – a reflection of increased focus and support for veterans across the workforce.

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While there are major tech layoffs happening, the latest inflation, jobs, and unemployment numbers suggest that hiring will broadly continue through the quarter. Since most companies have woken up to the idea that they are all – at some level – tech companies, too. Which means their hiring teams need to, well, hire.

Go forth, and get these humans new jobs. It’s good and good for you.

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In a company-wide message Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced 11,000 job cuts, noting: “Recruiting will be disproportionately affected since we’re planning to hire fewer people next year.”  Similar plans have and will be unrolling across otherf companies, according to insiders. RecruitingDaily has reached out to all three organizations for official comments, and will update accordingly.

REACTIONS

Sourcers, recruiters, marketers and other affected talent professionals have been flooding social media with updates and requests for help. Some of the impacted employees have been blunt about their reaction to the news.

In addition to the recent layoffs announced by Meta, Twitter, and Salesforce, the tech industry as a whole is cutting staff. Netflix, Soundhound, Spotify, Lyft, Stripe, and many other Silicon Valley employers have announced rounds of layoffs over the past few months. Overseas, Tencent, Byju’s, Ola, and Unacademy have also laid off hundreds to thousands of employees to reduce their operating expenses as revenue and investments have dried up.

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Jobs can evolve between the time a decision is made to hire someone, and the actual hiring process itself. Hiring managers might change job duties, hire someone for a different job than the one they are applying for, or abandon the job search altogether. While this might be frustrating for job hunters, employers do this in response to uncertainties in the workplace.

At a time when employers are struggling to find employees and many people are making career changes, knowing and understanding why this happens is crucial both to those hunting for new jobs and for people trying to fill some of the many jobs that have been vacated.

Why jobs change between posting and hiring

For our study on startup hiring, we interviewed more than 100 startup founders, managers and their employees, job seekers and experts from the startup community. We analyzed the interviews to understand how and why jobs changed in this period and found two main patterns.

We found that some employers deliberately use the hiring process to figure out the needs of their organization and define their new positions accordingly. In cases like this, employers know they need to hire someone, but they don’t yet have a clear idea of what that job will look like.

Unplanned job changes

In other cases, changes in job duties are not part of a planned process. Hiring managers might start with clear descriptions of the jobs they want to fill, fail to find candidates with the skills they’re looking for and end up redefining and reposting those jobs.

One CEO we interviewed did this after he received an overwhelming number of applications above the skill level needed for a personal assistant opening. He reposted the job as an office manager position, which required a higher credential, and quickly filled it.

Some managers also change their minds about what they want in the midst of the hiring process.

One startup in our study identified problems in their sales function in the middle of the hiring process, and ended up changing the job after applications had come in. They offered one candidate — who had applied for the original full-cycle sales manager position — the new job as a lead generator. He was promised that eventually he would move into the original sales job he had applied for.

Lastly, managers sometimes stumble across great candidates who fit different positions and fill those jobs instead. One startup in our study went to a job fair hoping to find a mid-level developer, and ended up hiring an entry-level developer and a marketing director instead.

Positive and negative impacts

We found that this evolution of job descriptions during the hiring process can have mixed consequences for both the hiring organizations themselves and new hires.

Some changes, like taking down and reposting jobs, can lead to positive consequences, like more stable jobs and incumbents who remain in the organizations. It can allow the organizations to learn, create a better organizational structure and even undertake new work.

This finding is consistent with past research that found changes in job descriptions can allow organizations to adapt to a variety of situations by developing structures and strategies that fit the circumstances.

However, we observed that most of the other types of job changes in our study resulted in negative consequences, like job instability, protracted conflict over job territory and the exit of the incumbent and dissolution of the job.

For example, the job candidate mentioned earlier who was offered a job different from the one he applied for ended up in a conflict with the sales director, and his job never transitioned to the full-cycle sales job he had been promised at hiring. He was gone within a year and his position was not filled.

This finding is consistent with past research that found that changing jobs around individual job holders can result in bias, favoritism, low morale and undesirable and unpredictable power struggles.

Hiring inequality

The dynamic nature of job descriptions has the potential to produce inequality in the hiring process, since not all job applicants understand that jobs can change between posting and hiring. Those who do understand will have a distinct advantage over those who don’t because they know to apply for jobs even when their preferences and qualifications don’t line up with the job posting. This knowledge may align with individual demographics.

This may be particularly bad for women and members of other under-represented groups who are less comfortable applying for jobs where they do not fit the stated qualifications. Prior evidence has shown that women tend to apply for the jobs they are already well-qualified for while men apply to the jobs they aspire to be qualified for.

Women also may be less likely than men to apply for jobs with the expectation that the jobs will evolve to fit their skills and preferences. If more women are aware of the results from our study, it could result in more applying for jobs that seem outside their area of expertise.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The research uncovers a significant surge in job postings that require such talents since last year (an increase of 51 percent). For AI and machine learning roles, nearly 62% of job postings seek talent with collaboration, dexterity, and multitasking skills. Critical thinking and research are highly sought-after skills in cloud computing, where there is an average 73% increase in demand for these competencies.

Key Findings:

• Cybersecurity skills are among the highest-paying skill clusters, although some roles in artificial intelligence and machine learning may surpass the average for this cluster. Employers should actively review compensation levels to avoid losing these professionals.
• Women’s representation in technology skill clusters continues to be low, with just 15% of those working in mobile applications identifying as female. Helping women to pursue or reskill into this field should be a priority for employers.
• Remote work has become a thorny issue for organizations, but forcing employees to come back may be detrimental. Hybrid work arrangements will help facilitate sourcing and hiring in tight markets, especially for skill clusters like artificial intelligence and machine learning, which hold the highest share of remote working potential.
• More user interface and user experience (UI/UX) specialists in the Americas work in the IT services sector than any other. Businesses outside of this sector should differentiate their employee value proposition to attract these specialists.
• More than 60 million people work in sales and business development. Employers would be wise to consider sourcing from this cluster to fill customer-facing jobs such as account management or client support.
• Only about a quarter of business intelligence and data visualization professionals received STEM education, with many having graphic arts backgrounds instead. Employers looking to hire these specialists should consider sourcing those with design-focused experience and education.

RD Insights

Think of soft vs hard skills as Y-factor vs X-factor. The X-factor is quantifiable, measurable. The Y-factor is – to use a highly technical term – “squishier”. This makes it challenging to wrap hard metrics around. Quantifying traits such as curiosity, empathy, adaptability, teamwork, etc is a challenging task.

There’s a gut element to it that tends to make some people nervous. Regardless: it’s critical to success. Employers increasingly get it. A recent LinkedIn survey showed that 80% of HR professionals say that soft skills are increasingly important to a company’s (and a  candidate’s) success.

Thankfully, there is data to back this up – and that will help both talent acquisition as well as HR pros make the case to executives who still want hard data (ahem: hello, finance team). Boston College, Harvard, and the University of Michigan were part of  studies in communication and problem-solving. Results indicated that those who exemplified important soft skills boosted both productivity and retention by 12%. These companies reported a 250% return on investment. Lastly, research from the National Soft Skills Association reports that 85% of jobs success comes from having well-developed soft skills.

Considering how rapidly everything is shifting on a near-daily basis, the ability to change is critical. If your team-mates aren’t able to adapt, grow, and apply new skills and innovative ideas, your odds of success as an organization worsen. As noted economist Dr. Edward Demings put it:

“Survival is optional.  No one has to change.”

Adds Randstad Sourceright CEO Mike Smith: “Against a possible economic downturn, now is the time for employers to foster a resilient and adaptive workforce by doubling down on the talent experience, retention and reskilling. Finding opportunities to tap adjacent and transferable skills for the most in-demand roles will prove a critical means for overcoming talent scarcity.”

A downloadable version of the report is available here.

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The 6th annual State of Employer Branding Survey finds that while in the past, the practice was largely an output of HR/Talent Acquisition, that’s now changing for the better. This year’s response to the question “Who Was Part of Your EVP Initiative?”points to an evenly blended stakeholder team consisting of marketing, internal communications, corporate communications, and talent acquisition.

This is a sign that in a historically tight candidate market, companies have been forced into the realization that strong employer branding does more than simply fill open positions. The data shows that increases conversion, application rates, as well as retention – a trifecta of positive impact.

Among other findings are:

• The top two goals for creating an employer brand were “Recognition as an Employer of Choice” and “Ease in attracting candidates.”
• The top-mentioned materials that have changed or will change based on recent employer branding initiatives are career sites (63%) and social media (50%).

According to Brandermix founder Jody Ordioni: “The internet, including social media, has truly leveled the playing field, allowing a low barrier of entry for small companies to successfully compete for talent against more sizable, well-known firms,” says Ordioni. “That should be great news for non-profits, healthcare and start-ups.”

While it has long been given lip-service, corporate marketing teams have been notoriously dismissive of their peers in talent acquisition. With the recent pressures on labor and hiring, investments of time, dollars, and attention are finally making their way to EB. While this is a hopeful sign that “they finally get it”, the question remains if this recognition will last or if it is simply a paint-point reaction. Time will tell.

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