Recruiter.com CEO on the great resignation and hiring trends

Evan Sohn, Recruiter.com Chairman & CEO, joined Yahoo Finance to discuss the great resignation and why it's a candidate's job market.

Video Transcript

- Welcome back. Our next guest says it will continue to be an employees' job market through at least the first half of next year. But hiring will be competitive, and by and large, the great resignation will persist. Recruiter.com chairman and CEO Evan Sohn joins us now. Evan, nice to see you here in the evening here. Why do you think the great resignation will continue?

EVAN SOHN: So look, I think, as Rick just said, there's been this bent up-- or built up resignations that's been happening in the US economy, right? So there's always churn. There's, like-- there's been historic 20% to 22% voluntary churn in the US. So there's always been this churn. Every single month, there's churn.

And so people sort of stayed put, if you will, during the pandemic. They moved. They didn't move, et cetera. And now all of a sudden-- we called it at the beginning of October. The great resignation is upon us.

I think the other thing that we're starting to see, really, is what we call the great reevaluation Companies are reevaluating how they're bringing employees back. Employees are reevaluating what their priorities are. It's not just about compensation anymore. It's about new experiences. It's about work-life balance, about progression, et cetera.

And I think these are all really playing into this sort of great resignation that's really not going to go away very quickly. It might slow down in terms of the actual numbers of churn. But at the same time, we're seeing this job hopper economy. So more and more people are going to be leaving jobs sooner than they were leaving before. And I think these are all things that are really building into this demand, and it truly is a candidate's market today.

I think some other things that's really interesting is that it's much, much easier today to apply to a job. Think about the expression, it's a full-time job to find a job. That was not written in 2021 or 2022. That was written a decade ago, where, in order to interview for a job, you brought business attire to the office; you had to take the afternoon off; you had to go. It was a whole cloak and dagger thing.

Today, it's really about, gee, we're going to interview over-- over some sort of video interviewing platform. It's much, much easier to interview. And if I could work from anywhere, certainly, I could also hire from anywhere. So it just gives a lot of more flexibility to people in terms of the ability to take a job.

Think about all the jobs that one didn't look at because they were geographically undesirable. Certainly, for the knowledge workers that's not really happening. So you see here now on this chart now with our partner, with Revelio labs, looking at the sectors with the highest job numbers. Pretty exciting for us as recruiter.com that recruiting is really in the top two, not job demand.

And we reported the other day that, like, I think there are more open jobs on one platform for recruiters than there were actually for software engineers. Clearly, the hospital and the health care sector-- a lot of job demands. We're also seeing a lot of movement in that area, retail as well. So we're certainly seeing lots of demand.

As you mentioned before in the other segment, there's plenty of jobs that are actually going on in the US now-- 11 million, record highs, et cetera, in terms of open jobs. It's actually filling those jobs that are getting more complicated. We're seeing a lot-- bigger demand for a bigger funnel.

Used to be that-- let's just make an exaggerated-- let's generalize for a second. If you need to look at 50 resumes to hire one person, you might need to be looking at 300 resumes to hire that same one person, or now 400 resumes to hire two people because one's going to leave before the other one actually starts.

- Evan, isn't-- let me toss you this hot potato. Isn't the part of the problem here with this labor shortage that management still is disconnected from the employees, those employees that are burnt out? They don't understand-- those higher ups don't understand what's happening in the average lives of their workers here? How big a problem is that?

EVAN SOHN: Yeah, so again, I prefer to use the word, and/both, right? There are companies that do, and there are companies that don't.

I think when we started tracking candidate sentiment, as reported by the recruiters, we saw compensation this last month hit 24%, 25%-- really, a low as we started tracking this in the recruiter.com Recruiter Index. And what it really says is that 75% of priorities were not compensation-related. So paying someone extra money is not actually going to do it.

In fact, we saw a survey that said that people would take-- 25% of people reported would take less of a salary to have remote work or work-life balance, et cetera. So I think employers need to really change the way that they talk about the actual job itself.

Again, if we think of-- we're entering this sort of job hopper economy, you know, how do you get people coming out of college take a call center job or a job that's less, you know-- less thrilling. You have to turn into an experience. Hey, come get your first experience. Here's how you going to get your first experience. And you got to really change that.

And I think for companies to think that it's just about compensation-- that's certainly part of this great reevaluation is it's not just about compensation. It's about culture; it's about training; it's about experience; and it's about progression.

- And Evan, what's your-- what's your best advice-- before I let you go here. What's your best advice to someone who wants to quit their job today and try to find a better job? What should they be doing?

- So make sure your social media profiles are updated. LinkedIn is a great source for to find someone at the company itself. I think the statistic is-- 70% of all jobs are through a warm introduction, which include a recruiter. So you want to make sure that that's going. It also says that, if you're applying for a job online with no sort of third party in between, you probably have a 30% chance of actually getting through.

But the other is-- really figure out what's going to excite you for the next 24 to 36 months. You're not looking at something that's going to be 5, 10-year long. Look at what what's your next experience going to look like and how do you go get that experience. And I think those are really the interesting things that we could start looking at, as both from the company side and from the candidate side-- is looking at what the next experience look like, et cetera.

- Good advice, indeed. Recruiter.com chairman and CEO, Evan Sohn. Good to see you. Thanks for hopping on this evening. We'll talk to you soon.