The 10 Minute Talent Rant is live. I’m James Hornick joined by Jeff Smith, and we are on the clock. The 10 Minute Talent Rant is our ongoing series, where we break down things that are broken in the talent acquisition & hiring space, maybe even pitch a solution or two. Not today. Before we dig in, all our content can be found on talentinsights.hirewell.com. This week’s episode, are you ready, Jeff? Yeah. This one’s just going to be a bunch of, you know, James and Jeff yelling as if this is all true. Yelling at clouds. Episode 93: The fallacy of the current “employer’s market.” So before we start, I’m going to go on an anti, anti counteroffer rant into this.
So come for the job market discussion, stay for the debunking of recruiter BS. Might be the best part of the entire show. I don’t know. We’ll find out when we get there. We’ve slid like the double negative, like rumsfeldy and speed into two straight episodes. I like it. I’m not saying I’m pro counteroffer.
I’m saying I’m anti, anti, it’s a slight difference. You know what I mean? Anyways. Question I get every week. I’m sure you get every week, multiple times. I’m sure every recruiter out there does too. So how’s the job market going? I got this last- twice today already. People always ask me, like what’s the market look like?
My answer is always, well, how much time do you got? This is not a simple question to answer right now. As much as like we humans love to oversimplify things into binary choices, you know, are you a dog person or a cat person? Do you like Drake or Kendrick? Democrat or Republican? Always popular this time of year. But I mean, you can add, is this an employer’s market or a job seeker’s market, to that list.
And in reality, we’re never really in one or the other, like the state of the market completely depends on where you sit, like your skillset, your industry, your geography, your salary range, your experience level, prevailing sentiment. And what I mean, I mean we spend all of our time on LinkedIn, but in the tech forward office dork circles, might have you thinking that the employers have the upper hand right now.
Except the unemployment rate still 4.1% and counter offers and competitive offers are on the rise, which is really kind of the biggest tell for why we want to talk about this week. And those counter offers getting increasingly difficult for people to walk away from. Yeah. People ask what’s my take and my gut reaction is always to say it’s like not a good market and then we started doing research on this and I was like well, maybe not such a good market for what we recruit in, which is why we did a couple of pivots and it was enlightening and honestly, nice to see positive information outside of the doom scroll of LinkedIn.
First, as you said, outside of our monopoly money land like merger, IPO company, XYZ here, things are fine. In fact, better than fine. They’re kind of great. There’s not enough candidates for open jobs in sectors like manufacturing, consumer goods, retail, food and beverage.
Honestly, they’re all having like a ridiculous two plus year run. My friends who work in those sectors, when I mentioned, “Oh, things are tight in certain- what are you talking about? We can’t find anybody to hire.” Like, yeah. Yeah. When we talk to people in this space, and we’re like, you know, it’s a total employer’s market.
You guys have the upper hand.” They look at us like we’re from Mars. Now, in the office circles, our dorky little world, it couldn’t be further from reality. Everybody’s obsessed with cost cutting. The bottom line, shareholder confidence, and it’s been the exact opposite. It’s chewy, straight years of anxiety with no real signs of it
relaxing. Yeah. Second, the unemployment number continues to be, as you mentioned, historically low for a long period of time. So people are working and folks who have pivoted into one of those emerging sectors, i. e. pat ourselves in the back, we got into more industrial type work and it’s paid off. Or folks who have developed a side hustle and have turned that into their full time source of income are absolutely crushing it.
And in a lot of cases, this is as simple as the market saying things like, we like this and not that. So if we go back to the first point, as these office services, tech companies have shut employees, they’ve also incentivized their top performers to stay and hold down the fort. All the mission critical stuff is getting done by a very small cohort of people.
So when other firms, either externally as recruiters or companies come knocking, we’re starting to see these massive, massive opportunities internally come and it’s probably the first time in a long time that it’s worth their look. It’s this tiny little small, you know, time and place where taking a reasonable counter offer makes sense.
Yeah. So companies, and just to summarize that again, in case anyone’s not quite getting this. Companies are incentivizing the people they have left at this point to stay by giving massive counter offers, promotions, those types of things. We are seeing this across the board. Compounding, but not everyone realizes this, which is why I want to talk about it.
Because it was, I mean, six months ago, I didn’t realize it was a thing. Yeah. So to compound the problem, there’s a few what we’re calling false flags out there, signifying to companies they have full control of the steering wheel, which they really don’t. Jeff, you actually had a list of this together, kind of for these points.
I think I want you to go through each of these one by one. We can kind of talk more about them. Yep. Number one, the folks that are unemployed are wrongfully being labeled as damaged goods, but they’re also being used to further the narrative that there’s a ton of candidates out there. It’s the classic.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Number two, every company wants passive talent. The catch 22 of this is that that talent is being held onto by their current employer, but like grim death, as we’ve said. They’re the ones that are keeping the entire shop afloat. And I promise that company is going to do what they can to retain that talent.
Let me just interject as one sec real quick. So what this ultimately means is there’s companies out there who are saying, “Hey, I’m looking on LinkedIn. There’s all these unemployed people out there. Everyone seems to be able to find a job. This should be easy for us to find people.
Now go ahead, hunt people from this company.” Like those are not the same people. Right. Which is- okay. You want access to the talent you already don’t want to talk to for the dumbest of reasons. Yeah. Continue. Yeah. You got it. So again, number three is you have to expect a counter. So when you’re an employer looking for that talent, you can’t just like throw a ladder
out and be like, “Oh, it’s an employer’s market. There’s all these people looking” like that person is going to be incentivized to stay. And then the fourth thing- they’ve already survived five rounds of layoffs. Why are they going to move to a pasture that is like browning? Yeah, continue. Sorry. Number four- no good. Sourcing continues to predictably suck.
So there’s literally little to no access to the types of candidates you want anyways, unless you’re working with a well networked recruiter. So it all kind of becomes a moot point. Yeah. So this is going to sound terrible. But the people who survived layoffs are in a better position than those who didn’t, obviously.
Yeah. There’s two very different job markets out there. It’s not an indictment of who was laid off and who wasn’t. It’s based on perception of those companies. I mean, it’s often political. It’s often unfair. Sometimes it’s fair, maybe. And you have no way of discerning what the situation was, right?
Some of the people who made it through every round are the top people, but we can’t have a conversation about this without saying that aloud. Sometimes it’s role specific. Lots of great recruiters out there that there’s no demand for. When I say recruiters, as job seekers. So like top two skill sets that classically Hirewell forever would always recruit for: software engineers and internal recruiters. Every year,
like this year specifically for recruiters, there’s A+ tech recruiters in San Francisco who can’t find work right now. They’re grabbing any job they possibly can because no one’s hiring tech. No one’s hiring tech and no one needs a tech recruiter. So I mean, it’s just people who they’re very good at what they do.
They’re just got the short end of the market stick right now. Yep. Real life counter story just to further, again, just we’re reinforcing an idea versus making a statement. We had a candidate in it who’s a mid to senior level individual, like very skilled at her craft, but a mid to senior level office dork role, but specialized and got a 40k counter once offered another role. 40k.
It was a 37% increase. You can’t ignore it. She got the whole “it was coming, I swear” bit from the hiring manager and that’s probably indicative of that type of organization. But at that percentage of increase, like it’s too much to ignore. Life changing money for that- 37% increase is probably like life changing, lifestyle changing, at least for anybody.
Yeah. The point is there’s no reason not to take that. Even if she keeps looking, she’s 40k net positive. Yeah. Two more points on how it’s also a candidate’s market right now, similar to that. So we also had a candidate recently, Director of Sales. This is top of the funnel. This is someone we are reaching out to just to see if they’re interested
to like talk. This wasn’t someone who’s in the process. “I’m not looking, so what would they do to get me?” As the first response, the level of comfort you must have in your current role to be able to say that in this economy, “Well, I’m not looking. So what are they going to do to get me on board?” it’s kind of along the same lines. Like there are people in this market that they know that their current company has to retain them one way or the other. And we’re having that conversation with like a potential customer and they’re like, “Well, there’ll be room to negotiate once they find out how great we are” and we’re like, no. I don’t think they’re – they have to talk to you to find out how great they are.
Yeah. I don’t think you’re quite getting that. Number two, there’s compensation creep, the longer these sorts of things, these daily answers go, so you get a process that drags out, new steps are added, you know, time passes. That person, especially somebody who’s seated in a nice spot, they’re like, the more that I know about this role in this organization, I’m reevaluating what I’m looking for.
Okay. So I wanted to end on a discussion of counteroffers. This isn’t completely in line relevant with what we’ve been talking about but we’ve mentioned counteroffers probably 10 times throughout this conversation so far. And if I don’t explicitly talk about this, someone in the comments, is this a yell out?
“Well, you should never take a counteroffer because it’s always a bad idea”. For sure. That’s what they always say. So, wrong. So we actually did, I had to pull the archives on this. Three years ago I wrote a piece and we did like several surveys on this to get some actual data on it. But the counteroffer myth, it is a myth.
If you’re not familiar with the counteroffer myth, it goes something like this. I’ll do air quotes, “90% of people who take a counteroffer end up leaving their company within six months anyway”. Recruiters have spread this bullshit for decades.
Sometimes at 80%, sometimes they leave within three months”. Really doesn’t matter. It’s all made up. There’s no basis for this. Yeah. It’s something that recruiters have used to scare candidates out of taking counteroffers forever, because it’s bad for the recruiter if they take a counteroffer. I’m the first to admit that. We don’t want people taking counteroffers.
We want them taking our jobs. But to be fair, most recruiters have no idea this is made up. They’ve just, at some point, someone said it, they got repeated. It spread like wildfire through the industry. Now everyone who keeps repeating it has no idea where it even came from. You can go ahead and Google it. Before we did,
I was 100% in that camp. Yeah. Go ahead and Google it, try to find a source of this information. You’re going to find a blog that links to another blog that links to another blog, links another blog without actually finding the data source. Now I did at one point, I did find the background of this, I don’t know if it was on Myth Bust or something.
There was a Wall Street Journal article written about this in the 1970s. Seventies. Yeah. That was the basis of this. I couldn’t even find this specific as the article. It was just someone was linking back to the study it came from a Wall Street Journal, in the 1970s, and it’s been repeated ad nauseum since then.
So anyways, we did a poll, this was three years ago. This is more relevant than the 1970s Wall Street Journal data. We had 6,332 people answer the following question- have you taken a counteroffer to stay at your company after resigning? If so, how much longer did you stay? Long story short, 1,135 said yes.
So the rest said no, so those ones are irrelevant. Of those 1,135 that said yes, only 30%, 341 left within six months. So not quite 9 of 10. More like 3 of 10. Yeah. 30%. Not 90%. The other 70% stayed somewhere between 6 months and forever. Just kind of depends how we had to chop these questions up, so whatever.
But then, I remember when we did this, someone’s like well that’s good, but what do people think? Was it a mistake or was it a good decision? So we did another poll. If you have taken a counteroffer to stay at your company after resigning, was it a good decision? We had 1,182 people respond to that.
337 Yes, took a counter offer. The other 795 did not. So of those 387 people, 40%, 140 said yes it was a good decision. 204, basically 59.3% said no, it was a mistake. So it’s 40, 60, it was 40%. Point being, it’s not the death nail that everyone suggests that it is. So it might be- it might skew a little bit to being a mistake, but it’s still well within, I guarantee you of the 60% of people who said no, they did not get a 40k and the title increase like the example you had.
So it completely depends on the level of every individual situation. So the too long didn’t read of the entire thing is, as with everything else, it’s nuanced. But all of this fear mongering and scare tacticking doesn’t push it, it being the market, one way or the other. We are seeing in specific sectors that it’s an employer’s market, in some, it’s an employee’s market.
However, you have to have a big pool of candidates to ensure that you’re looking at all the people that are relevant and make sense. And we are short on clock. That’s a wrap for this week. Thank you for tuning into the 10 Minute Talent Rant, part of the Talent Insights series, which is always available for replay on talentinsights.hirewell.com as well as YouTube, Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon. Jeff, thanks again as always. Everyone out there, we will see you soon.
