If you’re in human resources, your manager is likely to ask you, “What’s with the job market and how will we better manage resource planning and recruiting in 2024?” If this sounds familiar, this blog post is for you.
How’s the Job Market?
We are in a Goldilocks job market; not too hot, not too cold. Unemployment is steady, new job growth is chugging along and the U.S. economy is totally back on track from the COVID recession. (Check out the data tables at the end of this post. I love the 1938-2023 time series – wow!). Inside these Goldilocks numbers, trends in employment categories vacillate quite a bit. If you’re hiring engineers, get your checkbook out. If you’re hiring IT or HR professionals, you’ll have an easier time. (See the job posting data from Indeed at the end of this post.)
HR’s New Year Resolutions? What will we do better in 2024?
- Measure hiring success and share the data with our recruiters and hiring managers. Peter Capelli writes in the HBR, “It’s impossible to get better at hiring if you can’t tell whether the candidates you select become good employees. If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. You must have a way to measure which employees are the best ones.”
- Force our hiring managers to explain the cost of NOT hiring their open reqs. Prioritize our open roles by the biggest cost of NOT filling the role. Use external recruiting partners (like Elevation Talent Group) for these high priority roles and hold our internal recruiters to the same kind of standards we hold external recruiters.
- Track the number of fills from inside our firm. Ask your team if it is true our people can’t handle different and bigger roles? If that is the case, Capelli suggests we revisit who we are hiring and the investment we are making in their development.
- Validate our appraisal process by starting to informally ask supervisors, “Given what you know about this person, would you hire them again?” Share the observations with your team.
- Test the job requirements being used in job screening protocols. Can we expect someone with all our job requirements to accept the job offer at the salary we are posting?
- Check referral data and pay referral bonuses 6 months after the hire. Emilio Castilla and colleagues suggest that referrals work out best when the referrer is still employed at their firm. Referrers ‘look after their referrals’ when there is an incentive to do so.
- Add discipline to our interview process. Capelli writes, “Interviewers should stick to questions that predict good hires—mainly about past behavior or performance that’s relevant to the tasks of the job—and ask them consistently across candidates. Just winging it and asking whatever comes to mind is next to useless.”
This short list of process improvements will get your team off to a strong start in 2024.
Want to talk about the job market and how to raise the quality of your hiring process? Seeking a new opportunity in marketing or human resource? Talk to our CEO, Lana Johnson. The team at Elevation Talent Group is here to help you make 2024 your best year yet.
Supporting Graphs:
Source: www.bls.gov
Source: https://unemploymentdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Historical-Employment-for-Dec-23.png
Source: https://www.hiringlab.org/2023/11/15/indeeds-2024-us-jobs-hiring-trends-report/
