Are Jobs Still Hard To Fill In 2022?

Guest blog from Terkel.io

Are you still having a hard time filling open positions at your company? Has hiring slowed or continued at a fast rate?

To help you understand how hard or easy it is to fill open roles in 2022, we asked hiring managers, recruiters, and business leaders this question for their insights. See the multiple perspectives and positions expressed about the current state of recruiting that can help your business better know to achieve its recruitment goals for the remainder of the year.

 

Here are 12 experiences and insights these leaders shared about filling job positions in their companies in 2022:

• Hiring Is Strong, But Tech Is Still the Golden Nugget

• Remote Work and Supportive Culture Is Attracting More Applicants

• Improved Hiring Process Through Social Media Is Yielding Great Results

• Focusing on Transferable Skills to Maintain Growth

• Leveling Up With Conservative Hiring and Automation

• Certain Roles Are Impossible to Fill

• Personalizing the Careers Portal for Remote Roles

• Competition for Talent Has Not Eased for Most Positions

• Giving Attention to Internal Talent Keeps Things Steady

• Adapting to the Increased Hiring Pace

• Hiring Slowed Due to High Employee Expectations

• Recruitment Is Up With Fast-Track Hiring and Flexible Work Offers

Hiring Is Strong, But Tech Is Still the Golden Nugget

Hiring at our company never stopped. It did slow down, but we are getting back to what we consider an expected level based on our growth strategy. Filling up those open positions has not been difficult as we had the opportunity to take advantage of the talent that, unfortunately, lost their position during the pandemic or are ready to take on a new challenge. However, Tech is still a very difficult area to fill. I dare to say that this is a global phenomenon. Talent is scarce and demand is high and rising. This is where we need, as a company, to differentiate ourselves to become top of mind for them.

Badia Rebolledo, Chief People Officer at Krispy Kreme Mexico

Remote Work and Supportive Culture Is Attracting More Applicants

We are currently hiring for our busy holiday season and have not had problems finding great candidates! Part of the thousands of applications we get for open positions is owing to the fact that we are a 100% remote company and work from home jobs are in high demand. Since we operate online, we are not geographically limited and pull a diverse talent pool. We also nurture an employer brand for being a fun, positive, and supportive workplace, and benefit from many internal referrals and return hires for seasonal roles.

Tasia Duske, CEO of Museum Hack

Improved Hiring Process Through Social Media Is Yielding Great Results

Leveraging social media for recruitment has improved our hiring process. It has been a tool to strengthen our employer brand and reach better mileage of potential job candidates. By focusing our efforts on optimizing our LinkedIn page, we could reach out to a broader audience. Along the way, we could encounter some with impressive credentials when posting job invites or job descriptions. In fact, some of our best employees are talented professionals whom we met through the platform. We regularly post long-form content on our LinkedIn page. This way, we could rank higher among search engines. We could introduce our brand further, remain likable to a growing audience, and inform them of our workforce needs.

Ryan Stewart, Managing Partner of Webris

Focusing on Transferable Skills to Maintain Growth

Our business has continued to grow at a fairly steady pace and we have managed to keep up with that growth through acquiring new employees by focusing on transferable skills. Many companies hiring slowed as they struggled to find new talent based on the criteria of finding those individuals that had similar experience or specific qualifications, which greatly reduced the pool of available candidates. However, we have found that candidates who have transferable skills they acquired from long-term projects, customer interaction, team building, or even interpersonal abilities, can be trained to become high-quality team members.

By focusing on transferable skills rather than specific educational requirements or experience in the same field, we have been able to successfully fill our staffing needs and maintain our growth.

Matt Miller, Founder and CEO of Embroker

Leveling Up With Conservative Hiring and Automation

We’ve slowed hiring, but it hasn’t halted altogether. While we’re hopeful that we can continue sustaining big growth, we don’t want to leap on massive hiring rounds until we get a better idea of where the economy is headed. Layoffs are something we want to avoid at all costs. To keep building our business with our strong team, we’re focused on finding solutions to help keep us as lean as possible without losing steam. By adopting cloud-based tools that help automate many of our repetitive tasks across departments, we’re poised for strong growth without overloading our team with too much and hiring as necessary.

Marina Vaamonde, Founder of HouseCashin

Certain Roles Are Impossible to Fill

In our company, we continue to build our team for growth. Fortunately, we have continued to exceed our revenue goals, so there has been no slowing down on the hiring front. However, it has become increasingly difficult to recruit for certain roles. Particularly UX/UI Designers and Senior Product Managers. Candidates actively looking for new opportunities that have recently been laid off have received generous severance packages reducing their urgency to start a new role.

Most candidates are seeking compensation packages that are highly inflated when compared to the compensation reports we leverage to determine level and salary. This perfect storm has resulted in roles remaining open for 6+ months. Historically, UX/UI Designers and Senior Product Manager roles took longer to fill than other roles; however, this year we’ve seen that timeline more than double. We saw a drastic reduction in incoming applicants over Q2 and Q3.

Venesa Klein, Head of Talent Acquisition at Mixbook

Personalizing Our Careers Portal for Remote Roles

Thanks to our new, updated careers portal, we’re hiring at a steady rate. With a remote business, attracting employees is all about building a fun culture and communicating that with potential applicants up-front. By creating a unique career portal that tells candidates exactly who we are, we differentiate ourselves from your average joe remote employer. We get a lot of interest for each job opening and a lot of positive feedback about our portal. We even share our furry “teammates” (pets) on there.

Fernando Lopez, Marketing Director at Circuit

Competition for Talent Has Not Eased for Most Positions

Contrary to most headlines, we are still experiencing a talent shortage. Sure, a few well-known companies like Snapchat have gone through layoffs, which have caused big headlines. However, my experience from being a board member at two recruiting firms with over 100 employees is that companies are still struggling to fill open positions. This is not only for professional services jobs, but also for blue-collar jobs. We were speaking with a mining company in early September that had 80 open positions, a number that had stayed at the same level for at least six months.

Atta Tarki, Founder & Author of “Evidence-Based Recruiting” at ECA Partners

 

Giving Attention to Internal Talent Keeps Things Steady

As a small business with a dedicated workforce, we have never been in the position where we have had an issue with employee churn and, therefore, our hiring rate has always remained relatively steady. The difference we have noticed recently however is that when we do have a vacancy, we appear to be attracting fewer applications than we would have expected in the past. Although we do receive initial queries, very often these are not followed up with a solid application.

To us, it appears that the main reasons for this are because we are unable to offer all the benefits that a larger company could offer. The expectations of job seekers have changed and many now expect flexible working arrangements on top of all the benefits that only the biggest of companies can provide. Our solution to this problem is to increase the in-house training for employees and look to promote internally, leaving us to hire for junior positions externally.

Colin Palfrey, Chief Marketing Officer of Crediful

Adapting to the Increased Hiring Pace

At the outset of the new financial year, we observed fast-paced recruitment sessions with much larger participation than the previous years. This may be attributed to the lockdown, which had a catastrophic effect on the job market. Our process of hiring had to be upgraded in terms of assessments to filter out the right fit for the job. In this pursuit, we have introduced a new communication and automata round along with the conventional aptitude, technical, managerial interviews, and Group discussions. To supplement the loss of workforces in the last two years, our company has also increased the vacancies and opportunities for the freshers and other working professionals.

Charlie Southall, Founder and CEO of Dragonfly

Hiring Slowed Due to High Employee Expectations

The process of hiring has definitely slowed down. There are numerous new hurdles that HR now faces that weren’t there a decade ago. The newer generation has a very different set of requirements from organizations. A standard paycheck is no longer the criteria for enticing job offers. Companies have to go as above and beyond as the interviewees. They have to advertise a proper work culture and ethics. They also have to provide employee benefits. Along with these, organizations have to now develop good training programs and sufficient growth opportunities. If they simply offer a monotonous, dead-ended job, with a standard paycheck, they’ll never hire good employees.

Chris Heerdegen, Owner of OnDemand Painters Midwest

Recruitment Is Up With Fast-Track Hiring and Flexible Work Offers

Ever since we opened positions to a flexible and remote work setup, our recruitment has increased at a significant rate. This shift in our strategy has helped my company bounce back from the rippling effects of the pandemic and The Great Resignation. We made adjustments after we observed that candidates have since preferred working at home because of the work-life balance that it offers. These changes on our part were necessary to make in order for us to adapt to the current hiring climate. We saw that resuming business as usual in our hiring strategies would set us back. The quality and quantity of hires were poor prior to this, so we knew that something had to change.

Josh Tyler, CEO of Tell Me Best

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