S4 E89 | eXpertease: Jay Denton talks about talent supply & demand trends

ThinkWhy's Jay Denton discusses talent supply & demand trends with the community.

Welcome to the CXR channel, our premier podcast for talent acquisition and talent management. Listening 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 0:20
Hi Welcome back to another CXR eXpertease. I’m Chris Hoyt, president of CXR and your tour guide on this wild 15 minute ride together, where we’ll connect with industry personalities, experts and leaders to talk about one thing that’s keeping them up at night or that they’ve learned in their career that they want to share with you, our passengers on this journey we call talent acquisition. If you’re here live, you can jump into the chat and ask whatever you like of our guest. And if we’ve got the time, we’ll try to get the question on the call if we miss you, we’ll put the question in our open public forum found at CXR.works/talenttalks. Now as a reminder, anyone can attend the live sessions, or can subscribe to our full video in podcast series anywhere you listen to podcast by joining, or excuse me, by pointing your vehicle at CXR.works/podcast. Now, as a point of clarity, each of these segments and the guests are chosen around feedback received on our 2021 priority survey that you’ll find in the reports and research section of CXR.works. If you haven’t added your own thoughts to this open survey with the hundreds of other talent leaders that have already chimed in, today is the day! We’re going to publish the results and a bit of insights by the end of this week. So with all of that, let’s jump in. Because as we know, the world is just starting to open up again after the COVID pandemic has wreaked havoc on nearly every part of our lives, both personal and professional. And from a talent and working perspective. A lot of organizations are struggling to find or even know what to expect of the new normal. So with us to talk about the talent supply and demand perspective of that challenge is market expert Jay Denton who is the chief analyst at Thinkwhy. Jay, welcome. How are you this morning?

Jay Denton, ThinkWhy 1:55
Hello, Chris. I’m doing good. Glad to be on. And I hope everyone fills out that survey for you.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:59
Yeah. We’ll get those results out pretty soon. So, Jay, before we get going, give us a little bit of background about yourself, who is Jay, and why should we give a heck or a hoot about what you think?

Jay Denton, ThinkWhy 2:14
I’ll I’ll do my best with that, Chris, for that ah, that question. I’ve been studying the labor market for almost a couple decades now. And in a variety of fashions. Previously, it was with real estate and trying to figure out, if someone wants to buy a piece of real estate, where’s the demand going to be aware of jobs really going to be created? And now ThinkWhy what we’re doing with our labor IQ product is helping, you know, with that where the jobs would be created, but then what should you actually pay those people? And so you know, I’m using that part of my background to help with the product that we have here.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 2:45
Nice. Well, look, we’ll get right to it, leaders are starting to see those job growth numbers, right, we’re starting to see rumbles and it can be a little scary when for almost the last year. Applications for many, and response rates are literally at an all time low for them. And many are scared. They’re predicting a tidal wave of attrition. At the same time, and they don’t know if they need more recruiters or if they should hold steady, should they fight for resources? Should they just be patient? Wait, what are your, what are your thoughts sort of in summary on supply and demand for labor? And how that sort of plays out from from the remainder of the year? Where should their heads be?

Jay Denton, ThinkWhy 3:23
You know, it’s interesting, we think through this because we’re projecting 73 million hires for this year. And so if you went to the five years before COVID, it was around kind of mid 60 million range, with all the people moving around the labor market. So a lot of hires this year, it sounds like it should be really easy to find people and to place people. That’s, that’s not going to be the case. This might be one of the hardest years, I think that we’ve seen in terms of finding talent acquiring getting them on board. And so yeah, it’s probably going to take a longer process with it. And I think the number one thing I would say is, just make sure you keep your people you have particularly that top talent, you know, the 73 million hires, most of those are going to come from other companies, somebody is already employed somewhere else. And you know, there’s there’s a recent survey Achievers did that said something, I think it was 52% of North Americans that they surveyed said they would be looking for a job this year. 35% of them said that their compensation was the reason why so do not let compensation be the thing that causes somebody to walk out of the door. I think that’s going to be one of the things with supply and demand to really watch out for.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 4:27
You think it’s gonna you really think it’s going to be more about more about the pay, then maybe about how organizations reacted during during the pandemic, how they sort of responded to that.

Jay Denton, ThinkWhy 4:39
It was a mix just based on this one survey. You know, compensation was a little bit higher than work life balance, which some people could say has to do with remote work and how many, you know, what are firms going to do especially once we get let’s say a year down the line, if we really do get the virus under control, vaccines work, are we in a different world a year from now than where we are today? But when I think of some of the challenges, you know, where there have been pay freezes, and there’s such a constrained supply pipeline right now. And it’s not just white collar jobs, it’s blue collar jobs, because we’ve had a lot of people leave the labor force. So finding the people’s tough getting them on board, you’re likely having to pay more to do that. Then if you even find a candidate that you like it, are they willing to come into the office or not? So there are just so many things at play this year that, again, I think it’s gonna be one of the more challenging years for hiring managers and recruiters alike to find the talent that they need.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 5:31
Yeah, I certainly don’t disagree with that. I think what what I what is really concerning is that a lot of the recruiting leaders that we talked to said that the struggle they’re having is that the response rates are really low. And I think that’s because people are sort of hunkered down because they’re not really confident enough to change jobs yet, right. For the last three years. I’ve got it good. Right now, I’m employed right now. You know, I’m holding on to my employer of choice right here. Maybe I’m partially remote, maybe I’m fully remote. And I think everybody’s scared that the people that they have managed to hold on to over the last years due to the pandemic. But now they’re starting to see these numbers rise of who they’re going to have to bring in to hire and many of them aren’t being given resources to bring in recruiters or additional teams to find that talent. Is there any, any wisdom or any nuggets, you might give a TA leader to sort of arm them with other than and we’ll link to the survey? I think we had a chat come up as for the survey, we’ll link to the survey that you mentioned. But any nuggets of wisdom or resources, we could point leaders to to say, take this to the senior leadership or take this to your, you know, financial battles to figure out how to sort of prepare for this, and I won’t call it a war for talent. I just can’t use that for I do we help them get there?

Jay Denton, ThinkWhy 6:45
Well, one of the things I would say visit some of the information that I would say that we put out as to some of the things that we’ve been highlighting would be the second half of this year, I think is we’re really going to start to hit the challenge. There. 916,000 jobs were created in March, unemployment insurance claims dropped a ton last week. So people are starting to get back to work. One of the things we’ve been highlighting along with that is, there’s still almost 4 million people out of the labor force. So if you do not start your talent acquisition efforts now whether it’s getting better tools, or getting the people in place that are going to help you with that, well, we’ve been highlighting is is and we’re getting ready for our outlook for the second half of the year. That’s going to be one of the key themes. If you do not get on it now, you’re going to really be constrained once we get to the back half of 2021.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 7:30
Yeah, I think we mentioned this a little bit in the greenroom before the call started. I remember a handful years ago, analysts were telling us but you better look out the boomers are leaving the workforce. They’re leaving in droves, hundreds of 1000’s of them eligible to retire every day, we’re going to run out of people. Now we’re compounding that with, you know, this, this huge shift here. And we got a link popped up. That’s great. Thank you. Now we’re compounding that with this big shift here. And it sounds really, really scary. Is there anything positive? as a as a recruiting leader? Or should I just cash out and say early retirement like so just say, I’m done, I’m out?

Jay Denton, ThinkWhy 8:06
No, what’s the positive thing is is hiring is going to be happening because business confidence is improving consumer confidence is improving, we’re getting a lot of numbers where this is the best for whatever number that is since the pandemic began. So the good news is we are headed in the right direction and a very positive trajectory for the economy. It’s just going to be the spot where people are getting used to what was the normal for a little bit back to maybe somewhat of a different normal in the future. It’s just going to be I think it’s going to take us a little bit of time, and then we’ll start to hit that balance, things will even out once again.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 8:39
Good stuff. Well, look, thank you so much, really appreciate you giving us some of your time. Again, any additional comments, the resources that were mentioned here, we’ll throw them, throw them into the forums on the site. I just just want to really say we really appreciate your expertise. It’s good to bring stuff in, you know, folks who aren’t necessarily ta leaders, but who are experts in the space. So it’s a lot of fun to catch up with you.

Jay Denton, ThinkWhy 8:59
Yeah, thanks a lot, Chris.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 9:01
Good stuff. So all right, tourists and locals on April 27, at 12pm PST 3pm EST, our expert Annie Lin, she is the VP of people ever she is going to share with us how leaders and HR recruiting teams can use data to make DNI initiatives more measurable and impactful her take it’s really about embedding it into absolutely everything that you do so be sure to invite everyone over together around the radio and tune in next week as we catch up with another expert on their opinion of what’s ahead until then we’ll see you online in the CXR community for talent professionals at CXR.works/talenttalks.

Announcer 9:34
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