We are at a 20 year low of hiring yield = hires/opening. HR folks, you are not imagining it.
Both an unusually synchronized surge in hiring efforts across organizations as well as a low unemployment rate are driving this.
I am often asked: what can employers do?
Improvements to retention & recruitment can both increase your ability to be selective in hiring, rather than desperate.
For most, start with retention. You already convinced these people to work with you. You are in constant communication with them.
How?
Your employees know what they care about most. Find ways to hear them honestly (pulse surveys, supervisor evals, labor-mgmt partnership...).
Then deliver. Every employer made big operational changes in pandemic. Use job & org design to smooth rough edges created unintentionally
Labor is in the drivers seat right now.
The figure shows the ratio of employee-initiated quits to employer-initiated discharges or layoffs. Highest in 20 years.
If you don't deliver, you will lose talent.
Rub is employee asks usually eat into profit/operating margins. CFO may not want to spend but will pay in turnover.
Corporate profits at record high & grew much faster rate than comp costs since 2019Q4.
Some orgs enjoying positive productivity & demand shocks & are flush. Use $
Others are struggling to stay above water, often smaller or legacy employers or those with public goods aspects that struggle to capture value they create.
Listening & job & org design is what you have. Smooth edges. Reduce time on least productive tasks.
Improve occupational & public health. Have a healthy staff. Lose less sick & personal days.
Short staffing creates a vicious cycle where the job is worse for people there & so it's hard to hire to alleviate short staffing.
Make a push to break into a better equilibrium.
On recruitment, standard stuff. Know your competitive advantages as an employer.
Also, figure out what appeals differentially to your best hires.
Communicate those.
You've failed to attract specific people you want. Offer to pay them for a failed-hire interview. Find out why.
Smart employers are recognizing the talent of Americans with a disability.
Their employment rate is above its pre-pandemic level, unlike for those without a disability.
COVID-forced shifts toward remote work may have yielded increases in their relative productivity.
Younger American workers experienced average growth in their own hourly wages that significantly outpaced average price growth (CPI-U) over the last year.
Middle-aged workers' wage growth lagged price growth a bit.
This differs from @BLS_gov's official real wage growth measure. That focuses on change in average hourly earnings among those employed now & those employed a year ago, mixing wage changes for people employed both times (what I focus on) with changes in the kind of people employed
Zoomers' wages are growing really fast. Median over-the-year growth within worker into the last 3 months is almost 10%, but less fast than last 2 months showed.
Acceleration in prime-age and older workers too.
Splitting up the age groups more finely shows acceleration in a lot of age groups, though lots of noise.
The @AtlantaFed presents median over-the-year trends by age group averaging over the growth into the last 12 months, rather than the last 3 as I did.
What I'm doing is somewhat inadvisable due to noise & small sample. Life on the bleeding edge seeking to detect rapid change.
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) spoke about his opposition to the disaster aid bill in response to Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria and wildfires in California. c-span.org/video/?436237-…
Known: older Americans have exited the labor force in disproportionate numbers.
Unknown: how many will come back?
3.6 million more Americans are out of the labor force & not wanting a job now versus 2 years ago. Older Americans (55+) account for 90% of that increase.
What's affecting decision to work vs not?
⬇️value of Work: COVID risks, ⬇️job quality, lack of nominal wage acceleration.
⬆️value of Not Work: helping (grand)kids w/care, any new non-labor income/wealth.
A silver lining from COVID's adoption of remote working options?
A higher share of Americans with a disability are employed now than pre-pandemic, 20.4%.
Meanwhile, employment rate for Americans with no disability remain below pre-pandemic.
=> shift in relative productivity?
A source of talent employers may overlook and should investigate.
Perhaps the pandemic caused disability among previously employed people?
Doesn't look like it. The populations with and without disability have grown at about the same rate since the start of the pandemic. Both trends indexed = 100 in Feb 2020.