All right, 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 or five. Before we dig in, all of our content can be found on talentinsights.hirewell.com.
This week’s topic: there’s not enough experienced hires to go around. So- if you had a nickel for every time you heard that in the last two months, huh? So we’re gonna go on a rant here, but honestly I love it. This market’s amazing. Like we could, we could do this forever. No complaints here. Jeff and I are perfectly content with hiring being exactly as hard as it is now.
Yeah. You should say- when you say we, you’re meaning us as external recruiters, right? Yes, exactly. But, we do want to help solve the problems everyone out there is having. And it’s, this is unsustainable, what we’re seeing right now. So the real question is because we care so damn much, the market’s not going to bear this long-term- it’s going to change.
What’s that gonna look like? Yeah. I think back to 24 to 26 year old, Jeff and James just dial in for dollars and getting hung up on over and over and over again. And I just, when we were prepping, we both wanted to just say “I told you our time would come” and here it is! We got there. It took a while. So what are we talking about? As a result of the pandemic, onboarding and training just got so much harder, right?
So everyone out there has really leaned into it. Everyone, companies out there have really leaned into going with experienced hires for everything they can. So the people who need the least amount of training as possible, people who are like super niche experts in their space but everyone’s targeting the same people. That means
that’s how overpaying happens, that’s why salary inflation happens. So everyone’s going after the exact same pool, it’s costing more and more and we’re running out of experienced hires. Yup. Yup. Yup. They’re all getting hit up at the exact same time. They’re all getting offered at the exact same time.
Look, hiring at experience levels, I’ve been there. I’ve done that. Like it is a guarantee- is the surefire way to F up your entire internal equity structure. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do it. One, two, a few times here or there, but when you start to like set that as the strategy and you’ve like just decided that that’s how you’re going to make it, how you’re going to make things move forward,
like be prepared to piss off the rest of your team once they find out like the big sacks of cash that you’re handing out to all these folks. And if you do it at large scale, you’re going to add millions and millions of millions, of dollars of payroll to your bottom line. Just to give some numbers perspective on all this,
just according to LinkedIn, this was the meme that was going around. Number of jobs posted last 24 hours, and this was from like last week when I was kind of putting this together, recruiters: 16,000. It’s insane! Software devs and engineers: 20,000. Product managers: 14,000. BDRs and SDRs: 6,000, which makes sense because when you post one BDR job, you’re actually trying to hire 10.
So it’s probably some multiple of that 6,000 number, anyway. The story here is a lot of hiring going on. Like unemployment numbers, we’ve all seen it right around 3.9%. Like the only two years that were lower were literally two of the most successful years in our history, which was the two years right before the pandemic,
right. Yeah. And the other thing, the reason why this is not going to let up, I mean last year, 2021 record $330 billion was raised by VCs for new startup investors. Like it’s the most it’s ever been raised by like a wide margin. It doesn’t appear to be slowing down. All those companies that got that money last year,
they’re still hiring this year. So in terms of like the total demand, it’s just, there’s no reason to think this is just going to go, end overnight. Anyways. The challenge that we also have kind of on top of this, the people who are actually motivated to kind of solve business-wise, how are we going to like reach these business deliverables
if hiring gets harder, are the people who have equity or people who are bonus to actually do so. Meaning the people who are typically way up in an organization who happen to usually be the same people to say “Guys, figure it out.” Yeah. They’re the people who are the least invested in actually like changing the entire hiring philosophy of a company.
I.E their strategy is you come up with the strategy, but it better be what I want to see. I mean, I have the same conversation, it’s like a talk track. We talked to HR leadership and even line leadership in like actual competencies over and over and they get it. Like they get what’s going on right now.
But they can’t get the suits to be on board with it. They, I mean, predominantly speaking, you’re asking for- and we’re going to get into training and or payroll increases- and look, it just like everything else, it all comes from the top. All of it. If leaders can come to grips and get over the fact that this market is not fully here to stay, but probably by and large here to stay in some way shape or form like a very, very, very bad news for those folks.
All right, so let’s go through it. We’re just going to skip straight to like what we need to do as a community or what you can do as a company. Here’s a way of getting it done. So what are the options? Jeff lead off. Yeah. So, I mean, we touched on it. Like you can throw money at the problem. Like that’s, that’s a solution, I guess.
We look at compensation two ways, at least internally, by saying we, being recruiters. Like we get it via real-time calls. So like we get market data and then we get actual benchmarking from corporations. We use a great tool called comp analyst, not candidates applied. This is data that’s sourced from the actual corporations. Both of those markets concurrently
have increased exponentially quarter over quarter, like the data is there. So throwing money at the problem, like it probably is just the market correcting itself after years of stagnation. So yeah, there’ll be like a, there’ll be a comeuppance, but I do to my previous point, like there’s still a great amount of like, this is here to stay, right?
Yeah. Second thing, and I’m going to roll two things in together because they’re kind of, they’re not the same. They’re kind of related. The first one’s a little political that you can’t really do anything about anyway, but we’re a global workforce now. So immigration offshoring, like first on immigration,
we need more people, you know. I don’t know if it’s appreciated that the US has been- you know when I’m talking about like engineering, robotics, all these kinds of high tech areas, we’ve been a brain drain on the rest of the world. The best and brightest from all over the world has come to school here.
They come here to get jobs. They have come here to start companies. Actually, I had to look this up. I was actually fascinated because I didn’t realize it was this severe. 45% of fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. So Amazon, Apple, Tesla, Google, like all of these places you’ve heard of before, either the people who founded them or their parents
moved here from elsewhere. Right, this idea that like opportunity must exist, like in some vacuums that it has to be like home grown is like, it’s a fallacy. Yeah. Now obviously there’s been, the political winds have kind of changed on this and may change again, nothing you can do about it as a company
anyway. We’re kind of limited by how many people you can kind of hire. But offshoring, I mean, I’ve been in this industry a long time. When I first joined I know there was some sourness towards the idea of offshoring. I think there was an idea of kind of when the offshoring, the development specifically is what I’m talking about,
maybe it wasn’t as reliable as it is now, but I’m never hearing about that anymore. I can’t remember last time I heard a client say, “Oh we hired this offshore development team that was terrible.” So many good shops are popping up in different parts of the world. There’s just great talent everywhere.
I think the entire industry has been much more legitimized. And I think there’s no reason, but if you can’t hire devs, if you just straight up or if you need to hire a hundred of them, like, there’s just not that many. These are the types of partnerships and things I think you need to be looking at.
Yeah, totally. If you’re hiring I think, you know, I love the idea of your company’s name university. Look, 4 million people a year graduate from a four year university, more or less. Like we invest even a dollar in training, those folks that have put a lot of money into that system already
like you’re going to reap rewards. Look, even if it’s not even perfect, I think people get into this mindset where you’re going to develop a training program it has to be perfect. No, just make it real world applicable because honestly, best practices are going to change on a whim anyways. Like it coincides with loosening the requirements.
Again, we’ve talked about this in other rants, why do we have laundry lists of requirements in jobs? The job is going to change every quarter, every six months, revisit that stuff. Like get over yourself and hire somebody that can flex with change. Like look for EQ, can they let shit go? Sorry. Pardon
my French. Look for resourcefulness and creativity. And honestly, look for grit. Like somebody who will run through a brick wall for you is super valuable. And also don’t forget that no one wants to sign up to do the job they’re already doing. They want to do something different new, or they have to learn. That’s what’s attracted pretty much everyone to any job they’re announced.
Anyways. The next one, hire veterans. Like as a community, we are so bad at this, you know? These are people who literally will run through brick walls to accomplish an actual goal. I’m pretty sure they can run whatever operations role with minimal training that you need right out of the gate.
Right! Not to mention that, there’s so many good organizations out there. We’ve done some work with places like Code Platoon, which has coding for veterans. There’s lots of orgs that do training for veterans. But again, if you want people who are committed in high potential and can pick up things quickly, another excellent way to go.
Yeah. And we focused a lot on our external brand with great results, you should do it too. I mean, it’s, be a destination firm, get people to come to your conversation’s already feeling like they know who you are and what you believe. It’s super important. You don’t have to do all of this concurrently
but companies who get from point a to point B with all of this stuff in mind are going to win this battle when it comes to, you know, multiple offer situations, et cetera, et cetera. Like I said, we spent two years like working at this and working at this, and I honestly don’t feel like I’ve talked to a candidate in the last year that doesn’t come saying, “Hey, I saw your content.
I feel like I know who you are. It feels like you’d be a great place for me to end up” at a minimum. If that’s the foundation, you’re already ahead of the game. Our buddy, Matt Vaidy, he dropped, one of the best lines in the comments section. It was, “If you create some guard rails, you can open up your hiring lanes”
and I think that that just speaks to give some sort of center, give some sort of gravity to what you’re trying to do and your employees will drive right through it. Yeah. There may not be enough experienced hires to go around, but there are enough great people to go around. You just need to kind of change your thinking about it.
Anyways, we are short on clock. That is a wrap for this week. Thanks 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, see you soon.
