The Hiring Market Has Changed. Has Your Hiring Strategy?
There’s an assumption I hear fairly often when the job market slows:
“There are more people looking for work now, so hiring should be easier.”
On the surface, that seems logical.
But after nearly three decades in recruiting, I can tell you that more available candidates and easier hiring are not necessarily the same thing.
In fact, the challenge for many employers has simply changed.
The market has cooled – but hiring hasn’t become simple
The latest employment numbers point to a noticeably softer labor market.
U.S. nonfarm payroll employment changed little in July, declining by 23,000 jobs, while unemployment remained relatively stable at 4.1%. By comparison, payroll employment had grown by an average of 34,000 jobs per month over the previous 12 months.
At the same time, employers were still sitting on approximately 7.4 million open jobs as of June.
Those two numbers tell an interesting story.
Companies may be hiring more cautiously, but there is still an enormous amount of recruiting taking place.
And for organizations looking for someone with a very specific combination of skills, experience, leadership ability and cultural fit, finding that person can remain surprisingly difficult.
More applicants can actually create a different problem
When the labor market tightens, employers often struggle because they simply cannot find enough candidates.
In a softer market, the opposite can happen.
A job posting may generate significantly more interest – but now someone has to determine which candidates are actually worth pursuing.
That can mean sorting through dozens or even hundreds of applications, many from people who meet only a small percentage of the requirements.
And increasingly, résumés and applications are polished enough that it can be difficult to tell from the document alone who truly has the depth of experience being presented.
So the question changes from:
“How do we find candidates?”
to:
“How do we identify the right candidate among all of this noise?”
That’s a very different recruiting challenge.
The best candidate may not be applying at all
There’s another important piece employers sometimes overlook.
Even in a softer labor market, some of the strongest candidates aren’t actively searching.
They’re working.
They’re performing well.
They’re reasonably happy where they are.
And they’re probably not spending their evenings looking through job boards.
That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t consider the right opportunity.
It means someone has to find them, approach them and give them a compelling reason to listen.
This is particularly important when you’re hiring for leadership positions, specialized technical roles, experienced accounting and finance professionals, senior salespeople, construction professionals, ERP talent or other positions where a very particular background matters.
Posting the position is one recruiting strategy.
It shouldn’t always be the entire recruiting strategy.
Hiring slowly isn’t always safer
Understandably, companies have become more cautious.
An uncertain economy makes leaders think carefully before adding headcount, and that’s generally sensible.
But once the decision has been made that a role truly needs to be filled, excessive hesitation can create its own problems.
Good candidates still have options.
A hiring process involving six interviews, long periods of silence and weeks between decisions can lose exactly the candidate the company hoped to hire.
I’ve seen this play out in both strong and weak labor markets.
The companies that hire well tend to know:
- what they’re really looking for;
- which requirements are genuinely non-negotiable;
- who is responsible for making the decision;
- what will make the opportunity attractive to the right person; and
- how quickly they’re prepared to move when they find that person.
That clarity matters enormously.
The résumé is only part of the story
One of the biggest mistakes in hiring is evaluating a candidate almost entirely through the résumé.
A résumé can tell you where someone has worked and what they’ve done.
It can’t reliably tell you:
Why did they leave?
What were they actually accountable for?
How strong were they compared with their peers?
What kind of environment brings out their best work?
Why are they considering another opportunity now?
What do they need from their next employer to stay for the long term?
And perhaps most importantly:
Would the people who worked with them hire them again?
Those conversations are where recruiting becomes much more than matching keywords on a résumé.
Know what you’re actually hiring for
This is also a very good time for companies to revisit job descriptions that may have been recycled for years.
Sometimes the person a business thinks it needs isn’t actually the person it needs today.
The role may have evolved.
Technology may have changed.
The company may have grown.
Leadership expectations may be different.
Or the person who held the job previously may have been doing responsibilities that were never reflected in the job description.
Before launching a search, I encourage companies to ask a much more useful question than simply:
“Who are we replacing?”
Ask instead:
“What does this business need from this position over the next three to five years?”
That answer can dramatically change the candidate profile.
A changing market requires a more intentional hiring strategy
There’s no question that the employment market feels different today than it did a few years ago.
Candidates are behaving differently.
Employers are more cautious.
Technology is changing how people apply for jobs and how organizations find talent.
But one principle hasn’t changed:
A large candidate pool doesn’t guarantee a strong hire.
Finding the right person still requires knowing where to look, understanding what you’re looking for, asking the right questions and being able to recognize the difference between a candidate who interviews well and someone who can genuinely succeed in the role.
After almost 30 years in recruiting, I continue to believe that the best hiring decisions aren’t about finding the most candidates.
They’re about finding the right one.
Is a role proving harder to fill than you expected?
Sometimes the issue isn’t the number of candidates – it’s reaching and identifying the right ones.
If you’re hiring for a critical position and would like an outside perspective on the candidate market, the search strategy or what it may take to attract the person you’re looking for, we’d be happy to have a conversation.
Insight Recruitment has been helping companies find great people since 1998.
