E362 Recruiting Community: Michael Woodrow, Trends and Insights from Data

🎧 Show Notes

Transcripts and/or show notes

Gerry Crispin, CXR 
It’s always fun, Mike

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:01
It is this is we’re throwing Mike right into the deep end of the conversational pool. That’s what’s happening.

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 0:06
It’s good.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 0:07
And where are you physically Mike?

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 0:09
I’m in Aspen, Colorado.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 0:12
Boy, well, you know, and obviously that could mean what why you call it Aspen Labs. So got it.

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 0:20
Exactly.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 0:21
Do you have any snow yet, Mike?

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 0:28
You know, I’m a Chicago guy and I moved to Aspen about 25 years ago when I just didn’t enjoy the cloudy weather that rolled in in November and rolled back out in March. And so we came up to Aspen for a year or so on a trial and 25 years later, we are still here. Quite a bit of snow. There’s a huge amount of snow in the Rockies this year, we got early snow and we got a lot of snow. So usually February always, there’s always great kind of snow and skiing in February. But um, this year is particularly good.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:04
Do you do a lot of skiing?

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 1:06
you know I do a bit. There’s you know, people don’t kind of think about it if you’re not from here, but I do up pilling, we do touring, we kind of do a bunch of different stuff cross country. So one of my one of my kind of regular workouts is to climb up halfway up Snowmass. And then you know you have skins on your skis, and then you pull them off at the top and then ski down. It’s pretty popular, but you don’t know about it unless you live here, you know, so

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:34
I never could I not I’m not a good skier couldn’t do it, I can skate, but the skiing for me, I can go down and go fast, can’t stop. And the turning is difficult. Also,

Gerry Crispin, CXR 1:45
I used to do winter camping with my cousins up in New Hampshire and we would do cross country. And I’m not much from an athletic point of view. And you know, so So a six mile trail through the mountains and forests was not my not the best thing. And then and then this trail was also the trail that these athletes used. And the guy would go past you so fast on that six mile and you would only go a mile further and he coming back from a six mile and you’re going yeah, this is a little out of my league.

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 2:24
They’re they’re crazy athletes. I mean, my kids who grew up skiing or to a completely different level, I always make the joke of my oldest son, I when he says do you want to go skiing? I’m like, do you mean you want to ride the gondola up once with me and then I don’t see you. And then there was there’s this crazy race that it’s once a year and it was this week this past weekend. It’s called the power of four we have four mountains here and you they skin up to the top of one and over down up down up down all the mountains it takes like I don’t know seven or eight hours for those same people who are running past you on your thing. And you know I’ve some my friends have done and are in pretty good shape and most miserable experience my life.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 3:09
Well, my I can promise you in the next 20 minutes you will see less exertion than even putting a pair of skis on how’s that? Alright, you guys ready to go?

Gerry Crispin, CXR 3:20
Ready to go.y

Chris Hoyt, CXR 3:21
Alright, let’s do it.

CXR Announcer 3:23
Welcome to the CXR channel, our premier podcast for Talent Acquisition and Talent Management listen in as the CXR community discusses a wide range of topics focused on attracting engaging and retaining the best talent We’re glad you’re here.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 3:52
Everybody, we’re gonna jump right in. We’ve got a lot to talk about today. My name is Chris Hoyt. I am your host for the next 20 minutes or so, as you join us for the recruiting community podcast. We are streaming on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and of course cxr.works/podcast. You can of course go there as well to see past and future episodes that are scheduled. And what we have noticed I’m gonna mention this because somebody called me out last week. Well, we have noticed a lot about podcasts, even the ones that we really, really love is there is about 20 or 30 minutes of really great conversation. And the rest of the show seems to have a lot of ads. Now we’re just doing the conversation part so there is no sponsorship. So if you are hearing from a founder or a CEO like today that might be at a solutions company. It’s because we love what they have to say. And we think it should be heard not because they necessarily paid to be here or there was any kind of trade now there that does come apparently with one exception, and I’m going to bring that up simply because this is what somebody called me out on my my show drink cup has apparently been a standing red branch media ad This was a gift. I don’t even remember how many, maybe two years ago. So Maren Hogan can maybe chime in over at Red Brand. So apparently that is the only ad placement that we have ever had on the show and continue to have there. So I’ll bring in my partner in crime. Mr. Crispin. Gerry, how are you?

Gerry Crispin, CXR 5:15
I’m wonderful. And yeah, Maren is a good good one to have a permanent little ad for sounds good.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 5:23
Yeah, it’s does good work. She’s good people. And she’s she’s all in in the space. We’d love it. I had no idea we’d been doing product placement. For her that this whole shows you have to be paying attention. You have to be watching. I guess to catch that.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 5:35
I have to think about that. I have some old sweatshirts I should be wearing of companies that once were in our space, but no longer are. So it might be product placement for those that are gone.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 5:48
Yeah, that would that could be kind of like those. Well, like last week, we talked about the CareerBuilder dolls, but yeah, no longer in circulation.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 5:57
OCC, you know, we’re good,

Chris Hoyt, CXR 6:00
The OG the OG stuff in our space. So you got to pay the piper. So the first couple of minutes on the show, I do want to I do want to announce two things Jerry and I want to talk about really quickly, we have a new initiative. It’s a new membership level at CareerXroads. And we’re calling it CommunityUp. You can find the details out at CXR.works/up. But the idea here is it’s for displaced ta professionals who are either alumni or who may current or former CXR leader refers, right. So these are for this membership is specifically for folks who are no longer currently working, and are referred by a leader from within our existing community or alumni community.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 6:43
I’m sure right its at a special price,

Chris Hoyt, CXR 6:47
Special price of free. It is if free. It is a full membership, live virtual content, the whole thing and the membership is valid through the 60th day at their new employer. Right, so every person will still get interviewed, and each refer is going to get contacted directly. And we have that one requirement because we do maintain that CXR is not a community for everyone. But that everyone within that community obviously needs to be vetted. It is very curated list of folks that are in there. I don’t know Gerry, if you want to share anything else about

Gerry Crispin, CXR 7:22
Yeah, I was just thinking about whether we want to vet the you know, the displaced person, but I probably not. But I would probably whisper in their ear that you know, you won’t make a good member when you come here.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 7:35
It’s gonna be great. We’re excited about it. So cxr.works/up There is a form there for you to fill out. If you’re referring somebody or if you’re interested in someone has referred you over, you can fill that out, let you know, we were excited to welcome you. And in some cases welcome you back. So check that out. The other thing, I think we want to call out CXR lectures now for those who don’t know monthly, we do a lecture series we bring in a speaker, we bring in several one a month from around the world. And that is typically a members only benefit. However, on March 16, Glen Cathy, who is currently the SVP consulting, principal workforce advisory digital strategy over at Randstad, and a good friend of ours whom we have known for quite a long time, he is going to do a session on including introversion within DE&I strategies. And we’re pretty pumped about that I’ll give you I’ll just for those who are listening, I’ll give you the quick spiel and the description that goes with that. So if you want to share this forward, but introverts apparently account for for one in three people of all genders, ethnicities, races and ages and unfortunately the unconscious extrovert ideal present in many of those organizations sort of leads to environments, I guess we’re introverts feel as if they they don’t belong, or where they earn or get promoted less than their counterparts, their extroverted counterparts. So Glenn’s going to do is share his experience and insights from navigating that world of work as an introvert. And he’s going to help folks to make the case for including introversion in neuro diversity, diversity and inclusion efforts, right and even offer up a couple of practical suggestions for creating environments in which introverts can actually thrive, right and brand bring their completely authentic selves to work.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 9:31
It’s great. I, you know, I’ve been watching the transparency with which Glenn has talked about introversion over probably 10 years, and I’ve continued to see it evolve to a point where I am constantly amazed and inspired every time he talks about this subject, as well as how it leaks over to so many other areas within diversity and inclusion. And I think informs us in a way that we can take some action.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 10:04
Yeah, yeah, I love that. Well, I mean, anytime Glenn gets on stage, it’s just knowledge bombs left and right, so, so March 16, is part of neurodiversity week. And we’re celebrating by opening that lecture up to everybody. So anybody that wants to attend alongside our members is encouraged to head over to CXR.works/events, and register for that March 16. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Alright, so with that, we’re gonna go and jump in. We’ve got a pretty great guest today, who has never been on the show yet. Please go ahead and welcome, Mike. Mike Woodrow. How are you, Mike?

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 10:37
Doing great. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Gerry. Thanks for inviting me, I appreciate it.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 10:41
So we’re excited to have you, you’ve got some really cool data points you’re gonna share today for TA leaders and practitioners. But before we jump in, Mike, can you can you kind of give us an escalator pitch of who is Mike Woodrow? And why should our watchers and listeners care what what you have to say?

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 10:58
Sure, thanks. So yeah, Aspen Tech labs, we’ve been around for about 15 years. And we’re very well known in the TA tech space, but not so well known in corporate employer space. And why is that we actually power the back end of online recruitment advertising. So what does that mean? We, our customers are job boards, advertising agencies, firms like that. And they ask us to collect jobs data from probably many of the people who are watching this, your companies and clean that data delivered to them in their format, so that they can post those jobs, on their advertising platforms to get most of you candidates. So just to give you some scope, we collect jobs every day from about 130,000 companies globally, in about 120 countries. So it’s a lot of jobs data right now, you know, given the slowdown in the market, you know, there’s about 9 million jobs, and are what we call our jobs index. down from, you know, some bigger numbers, you know, a few months ago, I can show you some data on that. So we’re really all about jobs, data, that’s who we are. We’re not about candidate data. We’re not about candidates, we’re about the job state and just kind of putting it in a good format, making it easy for candidates to apply because the jobs data is clean. Does that make sense?

Chris Hoyt, CXR 12:24
Oh, I think you’re muted Gerry. Yeah, looks like

Gerry Crispin, CXR 12:32
As you’re talking about what you’re you’re you’re doing, what occurred to me is that for probably 5060 years, the Conference Board has had a jobs index. And in the 2000-2002 range, they started to shift over to a digital approach to that from a paper approach that had been around for about 50 years. And I wonder if you’ve ever had some conversations with the Conference Board? Because it seems to me that the base of what you do could supply an economic indicator?

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 13:07
Yeah, absolutely. So when I talk about kind of the things that that are going now, one of the things that’s interesting is, we used to just collect those jobs for our customers and deliver them. Now in the last year or so we’ve pooled those jobs. And, you know, it sounds easy, you know, maybe it doesn’t sound that easy, but you collect all these jobs from these different companies, but they’re all different in different formats and everything. So aggregating them and bringing them together in one format, is a little bit complicated. So we just kind of, we really kind of covered that last year. So now we’ve got this large pool of jobs that that we can make sense from and do things like that. We’re working with the Colorado Chamber of Commerce to provide them accordingly, report what’s going on in Colorado with jobs? How many jobs are, you know, have salary transparency, who’s hiring, who had the largest new employers, you know, versus last quarter, that kind of thing? So yes, there’s lots of cool stuff that we’re that we’re doing. And hopefully, I’ll show you a little bit of it. But yeah, that’s, that’s kind of what we’re up to. And, you know, just one one aside that I think it’s kind of interesting. You guys can go down this road if you want to, but January 1, last year, 99% of our employees were living and working in Ukraine. So that was January 1, 2022. So basically, everyone except for me, or me, and a few other people were living and working in Ukraine. So 20 That was January 1, 2022. Right. And so we have had kind of a crazy, you know, last year or whatever. I mean, everything you read about the Ukrainian people, I can attest to hard working, loyal, caring, you know, and so we move some people out we move some people out before the war. During the war. It’s difficult to do that because men can’t leave. But we’ve moved a lot of people around I always make the joke we moved Grannys we moved cats, we moved anybody we wanted to move around that we could. And so while we were pulling out this job status together, we had this Ukrainian effort that was going on. So it’s been an interesting year. So for us, for sure.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 15:17
Good for you.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 15:18
I love that. Yeah. And I will tell you, so I have had some interactions, because we’ve looked at this report. And Mike, you know, I’ve been talking on and off for months, but I’ve had some interaction with your team. And I have to tell you, they’re, they’re all fantastic. So I really love the team that’s over at Aspen techniques. They’re great.

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 15:34
Yeah, we’ve been really fortunate. And I think it just an example. I mean, if you take care of your people, you know, people pull together. And so yeah, we feel pretty good about that. And, but you know, it’s also you read about all this in the news, but I talk to these people every day. And one of my most senior people is, has an apartment. That’s right near a kind of a, like an anti missile battery. So, you know, three nights a week for that period, like from October to December, you know, that thing was firing. And so you just, you know, we’re all sitting here. I’m in Aspen, Colorado, right. So, you know, you have to just, I don’t know, appreciate what you have, and do the best you can.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 16:17
Sure. It’s quite surreal. WkeYeah.

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 16:19
Yeah.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 16:20
Okay, so I do I do want to jump in this because you do have a report, this business intelligence report that teams put together and I think it’d be really helpful, I think, and correct me if I’m wrong, Mike, the reports available to anybody write anybody.

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 16:32
The report is available to anybody. And not only that, you know, our business has been built on free trials. So we always say to anybody, if you have something that you think we might be able to help you with, just ask for it. We’ll do it for you. And you know, if it works out over the long run, great. If it doesn’t, then hey, we learned something, you learned something, and we can we can park friends. So yeah, so we’re going to show you some data here. But if it if it piques some interest in one area or another, even something that we don’t, that we’re not showing you just let us know, we’ll put together a custom report for you. And, and then we’ll see what comes from that.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 17:04
Okay, so I’ve got so you sent it to me, so I’ve got it, I’m gonna go ahead and throw it up on the screen. Let’s do this. Let’s share so we can still see our faces. And then I’m going to put a URL up for anybody at cxr.works/aspensnapshot all one word aspensnapshot where you can download a copy of this, it’ll direct you over there to grab it. So. So Mike, we’ve got it up on the screen. If I was going to ask you, well, I’m just going to ask you, if you’ve got three bullets, three, three big powerful data points or data stories that you would want to showcase to ta leaders and practitioners out of this of this report. What would what would those be? What would you share and say, Hey, heads up, you should be paying attention to this.

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 17:44
I mean, sure, so. So I think you know, the most important thing to TA leaders would be kind of who’s hiring what’s going on in your market? That’s something that we can put together. So we have market a market summary. And let me just see which, which page are we talking about? So I can jump? I can jump to any slide? Yeah, if you if you jumped to number seven, is kind of show that. Let’s see. So you know, in a market, we can say, hey, who you know who’s hiring in the market? How many jobs are there in various places. So really kind of competitive information, from who’s hiring, how many IT jobs are there available in your market, maybe you’re looking for, maybe you’re looking for IT people in Chicago, and gosh, you’re having a really hard time filling the positions, and you’re getting a lot of pressure from management about that, you can go look and see, hey, these are the other firms that are hiring. This is one of the challenges that we’re having in our market. So. So that’s something that’s certainly interesting, I think, probably, you know, and then go to the next slide number eight, this is just kind of some trend information that we were talking about before. This is the s&p 500 we track this. So if you look, I mean, it’s really no surprise, you know, the numbers peaked, you know, November and December, you know, over a million open vacancies, and then you can see how they’ve slid down towards that 800,000 number right now. So still a lot of jobs available in the Fortune 500. But, you know, 20% is a pretty big drop over a short period of time. So that’s something that, you know, that’s interesting. You know, the, the most interesting thing is really what we call wage benchmarking. So as most of you know, their salary transparency requirements, and a lot of states like Colorado and New York City in California, and that’s a trend that’s coming the chambers of commerce and, you know, are fighting it, you know, in some cases, because most small and medium sized employers aren’t really big fans of salary transparency, but it’s common, and it’s really here to stay and candidates want salary transparency. So that’s something so a couple of things moving, you know, in the same direction, regulation and employee and candidates wanting it. So that’s going to keep going But what the the power of that for you as employers is to find out, you know, your competitive the competitive stuff we were talking about a few minutes ago, what are people offering? What are your competitors offering in the same markets, you can just go look and find that information with with wage benchmarking. So that’s really, that’s really I think the most powerful thing for for talent acquisition managers is being able to do wage benchmarking, it was really never available before. Sure. Salary.com. And there was historical, you know, you know, self reported salary, that kind of stuff that was all out there. But it was old, it was a little bit out of date. And now we’re saying, Hey, we got wage benchmarking. When you talk about out of date, it’s yesterday’s job posting. So it’s, it’s it’s real time, and, and you’ll see what people are offering now, it’s only 26%, as we’re showing here, but that’s that’s going to be growing.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 20:58
You know, anecdotally, we’re seeing and more and more candidates who by and large are learning about the importance of pay transparency from their perspective. And as a result, employers are starting to realize that that they are if they’re a laggard, if they’re not showing pay transparency in their postings, for whatever reason. They’re starting to get a pushback. And they’re also starting to see fewer candidates from some of the cohorts applying as a result of that. And so from my perspective, I’d be interested in seeing a percentage of job openings that have pay. So what sort of like the an index of the degree of transparency of pay in job postings, how that’s growing over time? Because it’s influencing, if you will, candidate behavior at this point?

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 21:58
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we can share that with you. I mean, you see 26%. Now, and that’s certainly up from about 15%. Last year, because California, and some other states have come online. But I mean, even even in those states, you’re not seeing full transparency. So but yeah, it’s it’s, it’s here, it’s coming. And the information is super valuable, super valuable.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 22:19
And let me just add, for those who are listening and not watching, so we’ve got a slide up that the Aspen tech team has put together, it does show 5.6 million total vacancies that are included in this. And Mike, tell me if I get this wrong, but we’re showing 1.4 million of those, those vacancies with salary. So those have been included, which is about a 20-26%. But what it goes a little step further, I think this is Gerry, what you were talking about is it’s showing by state, the transparency levels. And what’s really interesting to me is like Colorado was only at 62%. Yeah, right. 62%, California, just over 50%. Right, these are jobs posted with salaries in them. Washington 45, New York at 41. And those four states, as it shows here, it’s visually displayed there, blue bars, which means those are where states actually require salary, transparency.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 23:17
And it is showing as a result of that, but they are at the top of that scale. It unfortunately, it tells you also that in order to move the needle, you’ve got to you got to pass a law as opposed to an agreement on people to do it. But it is what it is.

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 23:33
Companies don’t generally want to do it. But what candidates do and you know, so it’s common, and it like I said, it’s super interesting. And then you asked me for three things. And so the third thing that I would say, and I think this is a pretty important takeaway for talent acquisition people is you need to make sure that your jobs are formatted properly for Google for jobs schema, there’s no reason that you should be paying for clicks with advertisers, when Google for jobs will deliver these jobs directly to your ATS for free. And so if your tech teams not on that, or your ATS isn’t you need to get in touch with them. Because there’s, there’s like, you know, because all we deal with their jobs data, we just we wake up every morning kind of thinking about this. And I mean, just there’s there’s another slide that’s up here, there’s something we call jobs control, and this is an assembling pitch. But knowing knowing where your jobs are, you know, we’re collecting jobs, we’re delivering them, you know, hopefully they’re in places that you want them to be for your brand. But you should know about that. And then here’s another important thing other than just the Google schema. Google now cares about street address. Okay, and so a very small percentage of jobs have street address listed in them. And why does Google care about it because it Google is getting very specific about jobs near me, and location, etc. They want to know where these jobs are. And it’s not just Google wants to know Google cares about it, because people care about it. So you need to get your street address and your location information in your job postings, it will deliver huge amounts of traffic over time.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 25:23
So I’m just gonna ask you, I got interrupted, as I remember, was it like five years ago, when this five or six the whole Google jobs, they’re taking pictures, I help wanted signs on maps. And if you don’t have your location, and you’re going to suffer, and this is going to be game changing for jobs near me, I mean, are we was that just wildly aspirational, and you think we’re finally to a point where that really has an impact, because it kind of seemed like the last couple years, or just sort of a rounding error.

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 25:53
I mean, it has a huge impact for the high volume jobs, like retailers, Target, Amazon, Home Depot, those kinds of people, those kinds of companies, people look for those jobs, jobs near me. And if the Home Depot comes up, they’re going to be more likely to apply. And so Google for jobs is for real. And people go to Google. So you know, sure, you know, indeed, is a powerhouse. There’s no question about that. But you want to have your jobs. And it’s easy to do it, right. Put the street address, you know what the street address of the Starbucks location is, because you put store location 3240. You know what that street address is? So get it in there. And let’s get it on the internet, because we’re collecting all these jobs. And we’re going to deliver it through to the advertisers.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 26:44
The irony, Mike, is that because so many employers aren’t paying Google, if you will, because it’s free. They’re only tracking the the use of places where they’re paying for it. And so Google becomes the other. So it’s the it’s the stuff we’re not tracking. That’s getting us the most response. But we don’t know what that is, because we’re not tracking it. If we can learn one thing, you should be tracking the return that you’re getting from Google. And what you’re saying is that with a number of fixes, in terms of how you position yourself, you can significantly increase the return you’re getting from Google, which is free.

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 27:30
Yeah, exactly. And I mean, Indeed was, you know, all oh, we’re not going to be on Google for jobs. Well, that’s changed. So if you’re paying indeed for applications, and that job is on Google for jobs, why wouldn’t you want your direct ATS shown up on Google for jobs, get that application for free, and use your talent acquisition dollars most effectively? So no, that’s not the point here. But it really is a big takeaway is get your jobs data in order on your end, and we’ll make sure to collect it through and deliver it through so that you can get the best bang for your buck.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 28:04
I love when really great nuggets of wisdom boiled down to one of the things that has been a challenge in recruitment for the last 30 some odd years is just a good job description. Just just the details that people need to make informed decisions. It’s some of the lowest hanging fruit that none of us seem to be able to tackle efficiently and really, really well at scale. It just comes down to get get your shop in order clean it up.

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 28:30
Yeah. All right. Yeah, if somebody if somebody needs some help with that, click on one of the links or something and just say, Hey, I don’t know where to start. And we’ll give you a few tips to get going. And then you can run off. And you know,

Gerry Crispin, CXR 28:41
We might Chris, we might want to look at a quick, a quick small workshop on you know, how to improve your Google return ROI.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 28:51
Could be could be look, if you haven’t if you haven’t grabbed the URL already, if you’re interested, get a copy of this report. And I think Mike you also said you do some custom reports and you’re in the land of the free trials over there. He’s the king of the land of the free trials, it cxr.works/aspensnapshot, all one word, and that’ll redirect you to the report. Mike, I’m going to put you on the spot. We didn’t warn you in advance. If you’re going to write a book about the state of things right now, and it could be an output of your report some big findings just what you think’s going on in the space right now what would the title of the book you would write be what would you title that book

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 29:33
I would probably just title it something like Hang in There. Love this is you know the for those of us on the service side of the talent acquisition and advertising online advertising space, the market held up extraordinarily well through COVID through all this, you know we so I mean just to give you a quick snapshot I mean, we add scripts and cancel scripts every month, right? Because we’re adding not, our customers are adding new customers, and they’re losing customers. So, um, so in a typical, you know, in a regular month, for the last few years, we’ve been grown, you know, like 20%, something like that, you know, annually. And so, but for the last few months, you know, we added like 400, scrapes, and we lost about 500. So just a, you know, a little drop in the numbers, but you know, it’s still, it’s, we’re still adding 400, new scrapes. So people are signing on, and, you know, people are hiring. And so I would say hang in there. I mean, there’s the other thing, one thing I’ll say is, there’s a big difference between the kind of rank and file workers at Target and Walmart, and those folks and software engineers, you know, there’s just a big difference in that. And so, target and those guys, they’re hiring, there’s just a lot of movements, they’re hiring, they need people and everybody, friends of mine who own restaurants, they were always one or two, for the last year, they’ve been one or two people short, in the kitchen or in the, you know, dishwasher, whatever. So all those jobs are kind of filling up, all again, at that lower level, the higher level, you know, the IT people in the product managers and all those folks, it’s a different market, it’s still hard to hire those people. It’s still, you know, it’s still challenging. There. There are some people out from the layoffs, but um, they’re picky. And in the best people are still at their employer. So you kind of can’t look at just the entire employment market and be like, Okay, what’s happening? So there’s different things happening in the different parts of the market, but but the market held up really well. And companies are still hiring them. You saw that 800,000 jobs in the s&p 500. That’s not a small number. So yeah, so I just to kind of hang in there depends kind of who you are. If you’re, if people are listening, maybe they can hang in there. They gotta keep firing, you know, take advantage of this market where there are some more people in the market and really go after them and hire them.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 32:07
Question. Yeah, well, it does. And I’ll throw one thing in and it’s not the plug Aspen Tech, but I feel like get some data that’s not on the you know, news headlines at night. Not everything that’s happening in the space is only happening in Silicon Valley are only happening in tech companies. There’s just it’s a tremendous world of work out there. And a lot of times the headlines don’t don’t reflect what’s really happening on the broader scale. Mike, Mike, if you if you’re if you’re gonna write that book, who you’re gonna give the first signed copy to?k

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 32:34
give it to you, of course

Chris Hoyt, CXR 32:36
no, no, you can’t give it to us.

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 32:38
That’s the only rule the first time copy you know, I wouldn’t give it to I wouldn’t give it to indeed. They haven’t.. everyone else in the world, I think has been a customer of ours or is a customer of ours. It seems like but those guys just like hey, we’re gonna collect the job state ourselves. We’re gonna keep it keep it in. But um, you have some really good friends at zip recruiter. So I would say maybe somebody over there.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 33:09
The CEO a zip recruiter just had a little cameo in The Last Week Tonight episode John Oliver’s HBO, where he does this AI if you haven’t seen that, you should check it out. Yeah, it’s really great. Well, Mike, thank you so much. We’re so grateful for your time we know you’re busy guy we really appreciate you jumping on and sharing with our with our listeners and watchers.

Mike Woodrow, Aspen Tech Laboratories 33:29
Alright, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 33:30
All right, good. So hang out don’t go anywhere yet. Yeah, stay in the greenroom stay in the greenroom. There we go really quickly. Just to remind everybody, before we wrap up CXR.works/up that is a new membership for folks who have been displaced in the space. We’re anxious to help them network, strengthen their community and keep those skills sharp in between employers. So if they’re on the move, check that out. And then of course, the upcoming lecture and any other series and events we have coming up. You can see it CXR.works/events, Did I miss anything Gerry?

Gerry Crispin, CXR 34:01
Nope, you’re good.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 34:02
Okay, that’s it. We’re gonna say goodnight Gracie.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 34:05
Goodnight Gracie,

CXR Announcer 34:09
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