U.S. is seeing an ‘unprecedented reality for job seekers’: ZipRecruiter CEO

Yahoo Finance’s Myles Udland, Julie Hyman and Brian Sozzi speak with ZipRecruiter CEO Ian Siegel about the company’s Q2 earnings report, outlook for the labor market, the future of remote work, and much more.

Video Transcript

All right. Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live on this Monday morning. Take a look here at shares of Ziprecruiter your company out with its latest results. Last week, of course, first since the company made its debut in a direct listing.

Back in May shares this morning under a little bit of pressure over. The company came out and raised its guidance for both revenue also raising its forecast for adjusted even. And joining us now to discuss the outlook for the company and, of course, the labor market at large is Ziprecruiter CEO Ian Siegel.

Ian, thanks so much for jumping on this morning. Let's start with the guidance and sort of how you guys are seeing your business such that you're able to come out in an environment, where many managements are still reticent to offer forecasts come out and raise that forecast for the adjusted profit and then also on the top line, of course.

IAN SIEGEL: 2021 has been a year that would be defined as a super spike of hiring interest for employers. And it's a real dichotomy playing out in the job market right now, where employers are back in a robust way. They're desperate for talent. They're pulling out all the stops they can to attract as many job seekers as they can to their open opportunities.

But the job seekers remain reluctant to return to work full time, particularly for jobs that require them to interact with large numbers of people face to face on a daily basis.

- And Ian, it warms my heart in the first paragraph of your shareholder letter to see joules cited. And of course, we've covered the jolts report extensively here on this show. And I'm curious, you know, obviously you guys are a growing marketplace in a growing market.

But how you get a sense of? What the right Comp is on? How many open jobs you see relative to whatever baseline? And how much demand for employment is there based on where you're sitting and sitting within the labor market, and in a way maybe trying to back out your growing market share within that?

IAN SIEGEL: Well, Ziprecruiter tries to make it easy for job seekers by finding all the jobs that are available anywhere across the web. So that job seekers have a single place to search. So we have our own methodologies for going out and effectively finding all the open jobs.

And then we can triangulate that with the Bureau of the BLS has data to try and figure out how many open jobs are there, and no matter which source you use right now. Fundamentally, there's 40% more open jobs right now today than there was before the pandemic began. And that was already a white hot job market.

So what you're looking at right now is sort of an unprecedented reality for job seekers, which is if you want work there is an abundance of it. If you want to make more money, there is an abundance of opportunity to go find a job that pays you more.

So this is a job seeker's market like we have never seen. And yet as I said before, job seekers remain reluctant to rejoin.

- And we've heard a good number. A good number of executives have told us that they're seeing shifts in their business because of the COVID Delta variant. A lot of travel companies telling us they're seeing an increase in cancelations. Have you seen companies pull back on the number of job postings given the market uncertainty?

IAN SIEGEL: I think the whole country is wrestling with what the impact of Delta really is going to be. If we just look at last month's data, whether you're looking at zip recruiter data or again looking at the BLS data, you had an astonishing economic recovery playing out, particularly in the leisure and hospitality category, also categories like retail, manufacturing, education. All of these jobs that have been basically downsized in terms of the number of people who were needed to do them because of COVID came roaring back.

So it's a little early to say whether Delta is going to derail that momentum. So far, the data is not showing that.

- And Ian, it's Julie here. As you're looking at matching between employers and employees, obviously, you guys have a lot of insight into. How quickly that happens? How well it happens?

What are you seeing out there works best right now for employers to attract employees? Are you able to offer them that insight, so they can then use it to attract more employees?

IAN SIEGEL: It is a complicated job market. I mean, just to give you some perspective on how wide a net employers are casting right now, the number of jobs that require either a college degree, or 5 plus years, experience have fallen in half.

The number of jobs that say no experience required. Explicitly stated in the job description has doubled. Employers are raising wages, they're offering signing bonuses, they're offering flexible schedules, and they're still in many cases struggling to attract talent.

If there is a secret weapon to attract the right job seekers to your job, no one seems to have cracked the code on it yet. It is a really interesting dichotomy that is playing out in the job market right now.

- And then Ian, and just finally, you know, from your vantage point, both with what you're doing at the recruiter and what folks on your platform are doing, where does the work from home conversation stand today as we get into the second half of 2021? Did we see that decade of change in one year as-- as so many proclaimed last year? And how do you see that shaking out longer term?

IAN SIEGEL: I mean, that is the most fascinating question in the job market right now. Every survey done of job seekers shows between 50% and 60% of them want either hybrid or fully remote work on a go forward basis. This will have a massive impact on the job market if it plays out the way the survey data is telling us that the population of job seekers wants it to remains to be seen how employers are going to respond to it.

But you can see a shift happening already. If you go back just a year and a half ago, less than 2% of jobs offered fully remote work. Right now, today, on set for more than 10% of jobs are offering fully remote work. So you see employers making that shift as they are in this dogfight to try and attract talent.