Small businesses can benefit from tools that help them streamline hiring, but they don’t always need  complex solutions to support their hiring efforts. Often, it’s in between these two options where SMBs should focus on improving their recruiting and hiring processes.

Growing companies need an easy-to-use, yet powerful applicant tracking system (ATS) that serves as their go-to hiring hub to attract and engage qualified candidates.  

The trick for your small business is finding the right ATS — purpose-built recruiting technology that your staff and hiring managers can both use to connect with job seekers and hire top talent. 

What to look for in recruiting technology

Nearly half of employers indicate they will invest in new recruiting technology and processes in 2024 to future-proof their hiring strategies, based on findings from the 2023 Employ Recruiter Nation Report.

Given how many growing companies are looking to invest in recruiting software and advance their hiring approach, your small business should consider how to strengthen your recruiting tech stack and set your hiring team up for success.

With this in mind, here’s what your SMB should look for in new recruitment technology today.

Configurable options to align with all current hiring processes

One thing preventing some small businesses from adopting an ATS is uncertainty around how they can configure the solution to align closely with their existing recruiting and hiring processes.

In other words, SMBs need an ATS that allows them to tailor the solution, so that hiring team members can use the tool with ease and workflows can be seamlessly synced in the system. 

• Consider how JazzHR customers customize our ATS to sync up with their processes.

Recruiting software from JazzHR offers role-based permissions and privileges to make the ATS accessible to all hiring stakeholders while factoring in their specific function in the hiring process.

For instance, recruiters, hiring managers, interviewers, offer approvers, and ATS admins can all be auto-assigned to their distinct roles in JazzHR, which informs their data/screen access.

This simple user management functionality also ensures JazzHR customers can comply with consumer data regulations and avoid any issues with inappropriate data access across their team.

Automation to streamline hiring and help engage candidates

Reaching and connecting with candidates where they are is the foundation of a strong small business recruitment process today. The problem SMBs often face is that manual approaches have been used to publish job postings, promote job ads on social media, schedule interviews, and message candidates to keep their hiring efforts moving along at the desired pace.

• With JazzHR, you can move past these manual efforts.

For instance, JazzHR’s applicant tracking system helps SMBs create Workflow Helpers. This recruitment automation functionality creates reminders for and triggers emails to specific hiring team members to take certain actions, like providing candidate feedback.

Workflow Helpers also allow growing companies to set up custom hiring funnel stages tied to screening, interviewing, and evaluating candidates throughout the recruiting lifecycle.

This standardizes the typical hiring process and ensures it matches the hiring process of the business.

In terms of engagement, Workflow Helpers can be used to auto-send emails to recent applicants to alert them of application receipt, invite them to self-schedule an initial phone screen or other interview, and deliver rejection letters to passed-on job seekers.

Built-in talent analytics and hiring reporting capabilities

“By collecting data and tracking KPIs in an automated way, recruiting software provides decision-makers with visibility into the effectiveness of their current [hiring] initiatives,” Employ SVP, People & Talent Corey Berkey wrote for business and industry news publication SpiceWorks.

And Corey’s right. Using top-rated recruiting technology with out-of-the-box talent analytics, your business can access real-time insights tied to your hiring efforts.

JazzHR even offers Advanced Visual Reporting (AVR) with easy-to-use filters and rich data visualizations that provide insight into recruiting workflows, timing, and sources. This data can then inform changes that should be made to certain hiring activities and processes. 

• Let’s say you’re analyzing your candidate sourcing channels in AVR.

The analytics dashboard can show which sources, including specific internal referrers, job boards, and career communities, actually lead to the most and best candidates.

Channels that add a high volume of qualified candidates to your talent pool should be prioritized as top sources for talent. On the flip side, those that AVR reveals as leading to lower-quality candidates should be typically eliminated from your sourcing strategy altogether. It’s as simple as that.

Administrative features, seamless integrations, and helpful support

Small business ATS software like JazzHR simplifies and streamlines hiring teams’ work with powerful applicant tracking functionality. That said, these solutions also provide:

• Administrative features: Because strengthening employer branding and providing a positive candidate experience should be a top priority for your business, it’s essential to leverage automated recruiting technology that fits your hiring workflows and allows you to focus on other important initiatives. With JazzHR, you can automate these admin tasks with ease.
• Direct integrations: Video conferencing tools, assessment solutions, background check platforms, job boards like LinkedIn: Best-in-class applicant tracking systems help hiring teams ensure they can easily sync their ATS with other critical recruiting tools, so they can strengthen their candidate sourcing, engagement, interviewing, and analysis.
• Hands-on customer support: Top small business ATS providers like JazzHR aren’t just vendors you buy from once and the relationship is over. You need a talent acquisition partner you can trust for the long term to help you make the most of your investment and enhance your recruiting efficiency and hiring results over time.

Reduce friction in the recruitment process, streamline repetitive tasks, and help your business realize its hiring goals faster: That is what top HR recruiting technology offers today. 

And that’s why so many small businesses invest in JazzHR.

Get insight into what makes JazzHR a leading small business recruitment technology provider — and discover how our ATS can transform your SMB hiring efforts for the better. Book a demo today.

On the art side, experience leads to knowledge. But, the science component — using data-driven recruiting technology that provides analytical insights into each individual hiring cycle and candidate engaged — is equally important to your long-term talent acquisition success.

How to recruit employees: 5 tips for your small business

Looking to learn how to recruit employees in a more scalable and repeatable way? You’ve come to the right place. Here are five expert SMB recruiting tips to help your human resources team.

Specifically, ones that can lead to more efficient interview processes, smarter candidate sourcing and nurturing efforts, and higher hiring conversion rates for your small business in the long term.

1) Eliminate manual recruiting processes — and invest in an ATS

Some small businesses continue with manual recruitment processes because they can’t see just how inefficient their current approach (likely one that utilizes spreadsheets) truly is. Others think moving to an actual hiring software solution would be too costly or take too much time to learn.

Regardless of which reason you have for sticking with the status quo, as it relates to carrying out your recruiting activities, just know there’s a better way to execute your strategy.

• More to the point, there are built-for-purpose, easy-to-use solutions that can automate key recruitment tasks and save you time — time you can use to tackle other critical hiring-related responsibilities and HR duties.

Consider Comfort Dental. The business recognized it could streamline many daily recruiting tasks with an applicant tracking system (ATS) — specifically, JazzHR. Now, the company can now use our SMB hiring platform publish and syndicate postings to multiple job boards with a single click.

(That is to say, as opposed to having to manually promote new job openings to each individual online career community and social media site — a formerly painstaking and time-consuming task.)

“I like that JazzHR sends our job posting everywhere, so that I don’t have to have five different accounts to post to various job boards,” the Comfort Dental team noted. “I just post once within JazzHR and I am done.”

2) Optimize (and test new tactics with) your recruitment strategy

Onboarding a small business applicant tracking system is essential for your long-term hiring success.

But, remember: A purpose-built ATS for SMBs like JazzHR is much more than simply a place where you can store data tied to job seekers. It’s also your single source of truth where your HR team and hiring managers can work from to enhance every element of your recruitment strategy.

Just look at how HR teams with JazzHR make the most of our powerful ATS system:

• Customizing job applications and their careers site: Ensure your job postings feature questions of relevance to your small business and the role/team in question to ensure you can qualify and disqualify potential candidates with greater ease. For instance, many JazzHR customers use knockout questions to automatically disqualify poor-fit job seekers.
• Testing different candidate engagement messaging: Not every candidate prefers the same kind of communication from recruiters. Some like getting InMail messages on LinkedIn. Others don’t mind receiving cold emails and/or texts from HR teams. So, be sure to see which types of communications mediums
• Analyze their workflows, sourcing, and hiring speed: Using Advanced Visual Reporting, JazzHR customers can easily see how efficient their hiring workflows are, which sourcing channels generate high-quality candidates, and their average time to hire (i.e., how quickly recruiters and hiring managers have offers accepted by engaged job candidates).

The list goes on. The point is, with leading recruiting software for small businesses at the center of your HR tech stack, you can consistently strengthen your entire hiring process: from the moment you initially engage top talent regarding open positions, to when you send a formal offer.

3) Ensure your employer brand and company culture stand out

Consider this item a prerequisite to recruiting success (and use of an ATS) — but one that can’t be ignored.

Let’s start with your employer branding. How your small business is perceived externally doesn’t just impact sales. It also affects the number of qualified candidates who consider applying.

Many active job seekers certainly get sucked into postings due to an attractive job title.

• But, many of them also do additional research (e.g., checking Glassdoor reviews) beyond the application to ensure any prospective employer they consider joining is one their existing employees like working for.

So, do a bit of research to see how your employer brand is regarded internally (i.e., by sending in-house employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) surveys to current employees) and the general public (i.e., learning what customers and previously engaged candidates say about you online).

As for your company culture, well, that’s an initiative that isn’t solely owned by your HR team. Your people managers and executives also play a pivotal role in building a strong, attractive culture.

The decision tree here is fairly simple:

1. If your eNPS survey results show your employees are mostly (if not entirely) thrilled with your company culture (i.e., feel like they contribute to business growth, are rewarded for their hard work, and are satisfied with their current jobs), that means you have lots of brand evangelists who can help spread word about how great your SMB is and even promote open roles on social media.
2. If your eNPS survey results show your workforce isn’t all that happy with or excited about your culture, new employee engagement approaches and internal mobility and training programs likely need to be implemented to address workers’ concerns around work-life balance, promotion opportunities, and the like.

In the latter case, only when culture improvements are instituted can you even think about approach any employees to aid with your recruiting efforts (e.g., take part in a brand testimonial video to share how much they like working at the company).

4) Build an employee referral program to bolster your sourcing

“Finding talent is tough, and recruiters need to arm themselves with tools to find quality candidates for open roles,” Employ SVP People & Talent Corey Berkey recently wrote for Undercover Recruiter.

Yes, Corey’s referring to an ATS, but not just for the obvious reasons. Rather, he’s also referring to an advanced yet intuitive recruiting platform for SMBs like JazzHR that enables HR teams to secure referrals from existing employees — and, in turn, alleviate the sourcing stress on recruiters.

• Developing an employee referral program isn’t as daunting a task as it sounds. Well, with the right applicant tracking system in place, that is.

JazzHR gives HR generalists and hiring managers the ability to modify the referral email template in our ATS to ask existing members of their staff to share referred candidates with them using JazzHR.

Those who do get a bespoke referral link that makes it easy for recruiters to know where a referred job seeker came from (and, thus, can ensure they get paid for the referral, should they get hired.

The added bonus of generating a high volume of referred leads? Your recruiters don’t have to spend nearly as much time sourcing. Instead, they can address other pressing needs and action items.

5) Understand what “good” and “bad” hires look like using data

This is a pretty short-and-sweet tip on how to recruit employees for your small business. Use the data in your ATS of choice (ideally, one with out-of-the-box analytics) to track quality-of-hire metrics.

For example, JazzHR customers can “drill down” into their sourcing data in AVR to learn which channels led to the most candidates moving far into their hiring process (those who are hired and make it to the final selection phase) and those who “exit” their process in the early stages.

Commonalities tied to both of these types of (e.g., certain types of skills and other qualifications, the job board or career community where they were sourced) can inform where your recruiters should spend their time sourcing and posting job openings — and where they should stop doing so.

Learn how to recruit and hire employees more efficiently and effectively with our easy-to-use applicant tracking system built specifically for small businesses like yours. Schedule a demo today.

It’s become a key success metric that it’s now an evaluation category for the Fortune 500 list, reminding companies just how vital it is to consistently improve their DEI efforts — and proving that the best lead by example.

Diversity begins with recruiting: 8 things to consider with your enterprise’s DEI recruiting strategy

A diverse company begins with recruiting and focusing on its importance cannot be overstated.

Within TA, 80% of recruiting professionals said diversity hiring was a top priority last year. However, companies still struggle to build a diverse pipeline of talent to meet the standards job candidates expect.

But, the critical point to remember is that modern DEI makes considerations for much more than ever before. Here are the eight ways to look at DEI across recruiting.

1) Racial diversity

The phrase DEI usually evokes thoughts of racial diversity, a vital component of inclusion plans in any organization. Race refers to a person’s grouping based on physical traits despite races not being biologically defined. Examples of racial identifications include Caucasian, African, and Asian.

2) Cultural diversity

Cultural diversity can mean something different to everyone, but in this case, we’re using it to refer to culture in regard to ethnicity. There are a great many ethnic groups acknowledged worldwide, but examples include Black or African American, American Indian, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian, or Other Pacific Islander.

3) Gender diversity

Traditionally, gender has been depicted as either male or female. As the spectrum of gender is more inclusive, gender diversity can include cisgender, gender fluid, or agender individuals.

Companies considering gender inclusion in their company will avoid gender-specific language in job descriptions and other content to avoid accidental discrimination or alienation of any particular identification.

4) Generational diversity

Generational diversity is the concept of employing a wide range of generations at an org. Today, there are likely four different generations in your talent pipeline: Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers.

5) Sexual orientation

Diversity in sexual orientation means making space for individuals using classifications gathered under the acronym LGBTQIA+. This stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual, with the ‘plus’ indicating this list continues for many more characterizations.

6) Familial status

Familial status refers to inclusion in the workplace regardless of a person’s role outside of the home. Supporting DEI regardless of familial status includes those with or without children and allows for multiple definitions of family.

7) Physical and mental disabilities

The disability community is diverse, but very often overlooked. Disability diversity may come in physical form, from wheelchair accommodations to audio aid for visually impaired people.

But, it’s important to remember that disability inclusion also includes neurodivergence, which refers to cognitive functioning which is outside of what is considered ‘typical’. This can include conditions such as Autism, ADHD, Down Syndrome, Dyslexia, and many more.

8) Work experience diversity

Diversity of experience encompasses the breadth and depth of work experience across many roles, functions, types of organizations, industries, and more. Similarly, educational diversity demonstrates an understanding that not every role requires a certain level of education.

Inclusion in this area means understanding the many different backgrounds and experiences that can make a person well-suited for a role, rather than a single line of promotions.

The state of DEI in the workplace

When it comes to securing a job, employees often feel their race, gender or ethnicity impacts their employment. Half of employees believe their race, gender, or ethnicity has hindered them in securing a job.

Many employees have made an active effort to hide parts of their identity (e.g., removing profile pictures from LinkedIn; hiding their accent, physical disability, or natural hair) to increase their hiring odds.

Not only are candidates looking at what you say about DEI, but they’re also not shy about holding companies accountable. About 80% of job seekers have checked a company’s website for their stance on DEI before applying. And 57% ask their employer about the culture of DEI at the org in the interview.

This data reveals that companies must clearly communicate their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, but also execute these programs well to attract (and keep) top talent.

Where companies are hitting the mark with DEI recruiting and hiring efforts today

Drastic improvements have been made in recent years, ranging from DEI-centered hiring to increased training for onboarding experiences. Companies have improved communications around DEI efforts, shared their DEI stats publicly, and required DEI training as a part of their onboarding experience.

Looking forward with promise

Many thought leaders in the industry believe that progress within DEI efforts starts with a diverse pipeline.

While this is a major contributor to having a more diverse talent pool, the key to success is a strong culture of inclusivity and belonging. Improvement in these areas is a promising sign, as we look toward the future.

Discover how why your SMB should double down on DEI initiatives in the coming years. Download your free copy of our eBook to get expert insights that can aid your org’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

Sure, there are some “evergreen” trends. (An oxymoron? Perhaps.)

Take diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Organizations of all kinds and sizes have made a concerted effort in the last decade or so to ensure every prospective hire is considered solely on the merit of their qualifications and expertise. And that’s not going to suddenly change for these employers.

Outside of these ongoing recruiting trends, there are others that emerge for more timely reasons.

5 recruiting trends to know heading into 2024

So, without further ado, here are a handful of “happenings” currently affecting all companies (SMBs included) that you and other hiring decision-makers at your org should be aware of heading into 2024.

1) All eyes remain on labor market and economic conditions

It’s no secret the job market and economy have wildly fluctuated from one end of the proverbial pendulum to the other since early 2020. Look at 10 economic and labor market forecasts from “the experts” for 2024 (let alone the next few years), and odds are you’ll get 10 differing opinions on when things will return to a semblance of normality in terms of business and hiring conditions.

All that said, your small business still has to make great hires for teams company-wide in the next year-plus.

So, while there may be few active candidates checking out your job openings in recent months, there’s still plenty your talent acquisition team can do to prepare for the eventual hiring pick-up. (And, trust us: We will emerge on the other side from this maybe-recession at some point.)

Consider your recruiters’ candidate sourcing efforts across channels. Any and every successful sourcing strategy is dependent on recruiters’ not letting their collective foot off the gas. In other words, they must constantly be proactive with identifying and engaging passive prospects.

The math here is simple: The more job seekers of interest you add to your talent pool (ideally, one in a leading ATS that has dynamic candidate profiles), the more “warm” leads your recruiters can simply search for in your database down the line to engage for active and upcoming positions.

2) Employer branding and company culture a top priority

Of course, adding more talent to your candidate pool isn’t entirely in the control of your TA team. Other factors, like your employer brand and work environment, also impact your recruiting process and ROI.

That’s why countless small business leaders — from CEOs to CHROs — will make enhancements to their employer branding and organizational culture a big priority in 2024 (and the foreseeable future).

Do your employees have a strong work-life balance (and, in turn, strong mental health)? Do many active job seekers engage with your presence on the popular social media platforms (notably LinkedIn)? Do your hiring managers effectively explain your employer value proposition in job descriptions?

Asking questions like these (among many others) along with other executives and hiring stakeholders at your SMB is your best path to an improved employer brand perception and reputation.

Moreover, it’s how your leadership team and people managers can ensure your company culture is and remains strong. (Something that many candidates want to see from prospective employers today.)

3) Executive teams place an emphasis on employee experience

Somewhat tied to you culture-centric efforts is the employee experience.

Your SMB talent team (perhaps just a team of one or two) works incredibly hard to find, reach out to, interview, and collect feedback regarding prospects they deem ideal for open roles.

Put plainly, it’s a shame if, when some of those individuals join your business after the hiring process ends, they’re dissatisfied with (or even just unenthused or apathetic about) their work and the org.

That’s why this is one of the top recruiting trends top of mind with C-suites today and in the year(s) ahead: A poor employee experience only leads to low (and worsening) employee retention numbers.

“Retaining current employees typically costs significantly less than recruiting and training new employees and can be accomplished by building a workplace that aligns with workers’ preferences,” Employ SVP People & Talent Corey Berkey recently wrote in a guest post for Forbes.

That’s what your small business has in common with scaling mid-sized companies and enterprise orgs today: Improving retention is a constant battle for just about every employer out there.

And yet, knowing this won’t help you drive down your voluntary workforce attrition rate. The only way to do that is to take action with better engaging and empowering your employees to keep them happy and working on the projects and initiatives that will help them advance in their careers.

4) Artificial intelligence remains a hot topic among employers

No, artificial intelligence (nor the ceaseless conversations around its efficacy and merits for companies like yours) aren’t going away anytime soon. You may be sick of talking about AI (or ever worried about potential negative effects it could have on your workforce and/or business at large).

However, it’s important to stay up to date on all of the latest goings-on related to AI — especially as it concerns your talent acquisition efforts. That’s because leading recruitment platforms continue to augment their solutions with AI-centric capabilities to help recruiters streamline core tasks.

From resume-parsing to automating hiring approval processes, there are increasingly more and more AI use cases for today’s recruiting teams — even those at small businesses such as yours.

(Download our AI and Automation guide to learn how both technologies can actually benefit your org in both the short and long run — and help you scale headcount growth more efficiently and quickly.)

5) Talent leaders will “rip and replace” legacy TA technologies

Speaking of technology, this is another one of those “persistent” recruiting trends: the need to regularly audit one’s TA tech stack — and swap out any poor-performing software for better solutions.

More to the point, you and your HR/TA leadership must routinely (i.e., at least once every 2-3 months) assess whether your applicant tracking system is enabling your entire talent team to work smarter in their day-to-day or deterring them from effectively sourcing, nurturing, and interviewing candidates.

• The speed with which prospects move from the initial screening call all the way to a job offer
• The ease with which recruiters can set up and send personalized nurture messaging to candidates
• The time it takes TA specialists to identify top talent already in their system who are fits for openings

These are all considerations to closely examine with your ATS heading into 2024. If you find your recruiters constantly complain about having to use inadequate, unintuitive, and/or dated recruiting software — and see their individual and team hiring metrics continually diminishing — that’s a clear-cut sign that your SMB is ready for a new, more advanced ATS to replace your existing one.

In the market for a more powerful yet easy-to-use recruitment platform for your talent acquisition team? Chat with us today to discover all that our applicant tracking system for small businesses offers.

In the aftermath of a global pandemic, supply chain interruptions, the turbulent global economic and political landscape, rising inflation, and changing worker expectations, candidates have made it clear they want more from employers. And they are empowered to ask for it.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics continues to report millions of job openings from one month to the next, with approximately two job openings for every unemployed American.

• The demand for workers is projected to continue outweighing the supply for the foreseeable future. And employers continue to indicate competition for talent remains extremely tight.

For small and medium-sized businesses, in particular, it’s essential to take the opportunity to evaluate and optimize recruiting programs to better compete for available talent. SMBs that understand macro recruiting trends can better anticipate turbulence and even thrive through an uncertain hiring landscape.

To help SMBs better understand the current labor market, our in-depth Employ Quarterly Insights Report provides unique insights and in-depth analysis on hiring trends compiled from employer and job seeker activity across Employ’s 18,000 customers, including more than 10,000 small and medium-sized businesses that use JazzHR.

• The report offers a detailed look at the current state of recruiting and examines how companies should optimize recruiting efforts during one of the most difficult and demanding hiring environments in history.

Let’s take a look at some of the insights featured in the Employ Report alongside existing labor market data.

Pressure remains in unprecedented labor market

Despite the uncertainty of recession and hiring slowdowns, small business owners continue to experience record-level job openings. Experts agree that the imbalance in labor supply and demand is structural and will not be short-lived.

In addition to millions of job openings, BLS projects the labor shortfall will continue through at least 2030.

Data from the Employ Quarterly Insights Report indicates that 46% of recruiters and HR decision-makers from SMBs expect hiring levels to increase for the remainder of 2022, while only 7% said that hiring levels would decrease.

Small business recruiting teams ramp up hiring speed

Hiring is a race for talent. Competing on speed is one of the most important areas companies should seek to improve. According to Employ data, the average time-to-hire for small and medium-sized businesses is under two weeks for 42.8% of respondents and between 3-4 weeks for 44.7% of SMBs.

This means that within 30 days of posting a requisition, more than 8 in 10 recruiters expect to have their open positions filled. In addition, more than one-third of recruiters, or 33.8%, say time-to-hire is shorter today than just one year ago.

Quality of hire a concerted focus for SMBs as well

Focusing on the quality of hire is a priority for many growing businesses, with 62% of decision-makers and recruiters saying it is their top priority in recruiting now. Yet, it can be difficult to measure, especially as companies see an influx of new hires jumping ship after a short time within their role.

According to Employ survey data, 58% of SMB recruiters have had new hires leave in the first 90 days after starting their new role, and the majority of talent acquisition leaders (61%) seem to think this is a problem with candidate fit or hiring the wrong candidate for the position.

• A bad hire can come at a cost, as the average cost per hire is now around $4,700 and climbing higher to even three or four times the position’s salary, according to SHRM.

It is essential to effectively onboard new hires. In fact, more than a quarter (29%) of SMB recruiters and HR decision-makers indicate that improving their onboarding process is a top priority. The first 90 days after being hired are critical for both the employer and the employee, and are an extension of the candidate’s experience and employer brand.

The top reasons why a new hire leaves a small business role within the first 90 days include:

• Wrong candidate for the position: 61%

• A better job offer: 40%

• Lack of flexibility/autonomy: 25%

• The job description does not align with the actual day-to-day role: 21%

Many SMBs increasing investment in recruitment tech

For recruiting to function as a strategic lever within a small or medium-sized business, you must leverage the right tools and resources necessary to compete in a fierce labor market.

Recruiters recognize the need for additional tools, which is supported by Employ survey data. In fact, 48% of small business decision-makers and recruiters anticipate that an increase in recruiting technology spending is necessary over the next 6 – 12 months.

When it comes to increasing spend, it is crucial to understand where other SMBs expect to expand their recruitment technology investment. Small and medium-sized businesses indicate they plan to increase spending on these top three recruiting technologies:

• Career site: 49%

• Job boards/broadcasts: 45%

• Sourcing, including Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO): 37%

Small business recruiting teams have a huge opportunity to become more agile using data-driven insights, which proves vital in the face of bigger corporations in the fight for top talent.

For a complete look at more recruiting insights that can help you better compete for talent, download the Employ Quarterly Insights Report:  “Staying the Course In a Challenging Labor Market.”

And if you need new recruiting software to elevate your small business recruiting and hiring strategies, speak with a JazzHR rep today to get the rundown on our robust ATS software for SMBs.

• Solutions aimed to making the new employee onboarding process more seamless for HR
• Social media platforms and job boards where you can promote your latest job postings
• Inclusive language tools that ensure job descriptions avoid gender-biased terms and phrases
• Collaboration software that helps recruiters and hiring managers stay on the same page
• Video interviewing solutions (e.g., Zoom) that speed up the middle of your hiring process
• Resume parsing tools that save time for talent specialists and prevent manual assessments
• Candidate experience platforms that offer data-backed insights from potential candidates

That’s not necessarily a bad thing to have so many types of recruitment tools at your disposal. However, it does make it difficult to discern which exact recruiting software vendors and partners are the best of the best — and ones you should consider investing in for your talent acquisition team.

To help you build up and optimize your TA tech stack (and, in turn, tackle key recruiting tasks and daily hiring duties more quickly and efficiently), we reached out to the experts for their insights into what specific kinds of recruiting tools can “up” your hiring game in the months and years ahead.

1) Use employer branding platforms to reach larger audiences

Take advantage of the incredible employer branding platforms out there that provide opportunities to highlight your company culture, job openings, and what makes your company truly stand out in the market.

• When you have a smaller HR/TA team, these partnerships are especially key.

On a prior team, we used JazzHR alongside BuitlInColorado to reach a larger audience, build our employer brand, and gain recognition in the market. From The Muse, to LinkedIn, to Indeed, there is a spectrum of platforms you can partner with to build out your employer brand quickly and easily.

Maddie Stoddard, Senior Tech Recruiter at Pie Insurance

2) “Harmonize” your recruiting tools to spur partnerships

Excellent recruiting tools are readily available for your talent team. But, they must work in tandem with one another to enable the formation of partnerships that spur today’s relationship recruiting.

• The Recruiting Culture Scorecard identifies various partnerships and guides the acquisition of tools so each supports the goal of a highly visible recruiting culture.

Hiring manager and recruiter partnerships can build more effective talent pipelines, launch employees into new roles, and have job seekers bragging about feeling valued during the recruiting cycle. Measure success from the Recruiting Culture Scorecard’s 15 elements, found within multiple categories, including leadership, technology, and policy. 

Bill Gunn, Principal Consultant at G&A

3) Network with other recruiters to “barter” talent

Most recruiters are naturally great at creating and maintaining connections. Yet, many of these same recruiters with this vast network of contacts in the recruitment business neglect a great source to find great talent, which is to network with other recruiters to see if there are any candidates they can refer. 

• Some recruiters reading this might ask themselves, “Why would a potential competitor refer me to a high-value candidate?” The answer lies in reciprocity.

Creating a network of trusted recruiters where you can trade intel and candidates can exponentially increase candidates you might not have found on your own. The best part of this is it will cost you nothing.

Steven Mostyn, CEO of Career Boost

4) Collaborate with recruitment process outsourcing firms

We have enjoyed immense success over our 20-year corporate lifespan by establishing strategic partnerships with other recruiting firms who operate in the same IT space, but are prime vendors to a different client set than we have.

This “co-opetition” makes the partnership function like a much larger recruiting firm in terms of recruiters engaged in the search, yet focuses acutely on positions that may be difficult for our partner to fill.

• By having us partner with them, the time to fill is significantly reduced and the partner firm is often first to submit and thus edges out their competition at their prime client.

When they beat competitors in submission time, our partner stands a higher likelihood of filling that role.

Not only do they fill that requisition, but they also further engender loyalty from their client, which leads to an even further expansion of business with that client. This model has been a highly valuable model for MTP and one we approach every single day.

Thomas Crawford, Director of Business Development at Midwest Technology Partnership

5) Partner with agencies that are strong in DEI recruiting

An oft-overlooked facet of hiring: creating an effective partnership with a recruitment agency that takes diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) seriously and knows how to help SMBs like yours in this area.

Many companies see the relationship between themselves and the recruitment firm as transactional and are only in discussions with them when there is a role that requires filling ASAP.

Shift your thinking to this being a partnership and focus on three areas:

1. Constantly keep in touch and share future resourcing requirements so they are able to build relationships for you out in the market.
2. Share your company aspirations around DEI as well as your expectations of how the agency can support with delivery and execution.
3. Gather the data on who the recruiting agency is speaking to candidate-wise and the diversity makeup of those who get interviewed.

Charlotte Sweeney, Founder and CEO of CSA

6) Improve partnerships with hiring managers using data

Hiring managers often have an idea of what they want but lack insight into what it will take to get there. Prepare for kick-off meetings with market data around salary benchmarks, talent supply, and demands to help hiring managers understand the competitiveness of the skillset they’re requesting.

• Use ATS data to give transparency to the current pipeline and where recruiting efforts will need to start and forecast the number of applicants, screens, and interviews to set timeline expectations.

Strengthening the hiring manager partnership through data-driven chat will have an immediate impact on hiring the right talent. (And ensure everyone remains on the same page at all times.)

Tari Krupinski, Director of Recruiting at General RV Center

7) Build bridges between your company and schools

A great partnership that can increase the candidate pool is with schools, including high schools, trade schools and universities. When considering a partnership with a school, do your research internally.

• Do you have any employees who currently attend or graduated from the school? By partnering with a current staff member who is a student or alumni, you can bring a different perspective into the school.

Students want to hear from other students and this will help your org get more opportunities to connect with students. Be sure to equip the employee with the best information and company swag when s/he represents your organization at the school.

Jodi Brandstetter, Chief Talent Strategist of Lean Effective Talent Strategies

JazzHR’s built-for-purpose applicant tracking system for small businesses connects with countless popular recruiting tools. Learn how you can leverage these connections and our leading ATS to enhance your hiring.

Recruitment metrics are designed to measure successes and bottlenecks in the recruiting process. Metrics include key performance indicators (KPIs) that help measure progress of your recruiting. These metrics allow for more agility, pointing out trends and potential issues as they happen.

In response to the challenging labor market, companies have to get even more nimble and learn how to analyze talent data in real-time to adjust and improve their processes. Recruitment software that automatically reports on key metrics can empower your company to make those data-driven decisions in real-time. In fact, leveraging recruiting analytics to drive greater visibility, smarter automation, and more predictable hiring results is the ultimate goal of using a data-driven approach.

From the number of open reqs to application source to candidate conversion rates, time-to-fill, quality of candidate, source of hire, DEI data, and internal mobility, there is virtually no end to the recruiting data you can track. So it’s critical to find out the most important metrics to your business and then keep a clear pulse on that data.

When you leverage a data-driven approach, you can more easily deliver better candidates faster, and continuously improve how you hire talent for your company. Let’s dig in a bit further on what data-driven recruiting is, examine the benefits for your organization, and give you some examples of the types of recruiting metrics to measure.

What Is Data-Driven Recruiting?

Data-driven recruiting is an approach to hiring that uses analytics specifically for talent acquisition to inform and improve the recruiting process. Getting a handle on recruiting analytics, creating visibility, and shining a light on the most vital aspects of hiring performance is critically important. By tracking metrics, such as funnel, source performance, quality of talent pool, satisfaction scores, and diversity you can see how your recruiting strategy is performing, fine-tune what’s broken in the hiring process, and continuously improve.

Interestingly, seven percent of a company’s total operating budget is spent on talent acquisition, and the average cost per hire is about $4,000. According to Aptitude Research, 82% of companies say data plays a critical role in driving talent acquisition decisions. Yet despite these big numbers, only about 50% of companies measure their recruiting effectiveness at all. Not being on top of your data in today’s technology-enabled world is a disaster waiting to happen. And it gets more pronounced when you think of the perceptions, or misperceptions, of your key stakeholders, including your hiring managers.

The right recruitment software offers the capability to collect critical talent insights and provide real-time information on key recruiting metrics, making the hiring process more efficient for recruiters, more impactful for hiring managers, and more desirable for candidates.

Recruitment software can bring the data together all in one place so you can see up-to-date candidate experience metrics, sourcing effectiveness metrics, and overall hiring metrics. Tracking recruiting benchmarks can also help your business understand where their best sources of talent come from, so you can deliver more predictable hiring outcomes and get even more agile in your recruiting approach. Remember, recruiting is all about speed and knowing how to make faster, smarter decisions is the name of the game.

Top Benefits of Data-Driven Recruiting

When an organization is dedicated to increasing agility by leveraging recruiting data and analytics, it can benefit greatly. Here are a few of the most common benefits:

#1: Improved Sourcing Effectiveness

For too long, recruiters and hiring managers have had to find candidates based on feel and previous experience. But the sheer volume of open positions and time required to source quality candidates requires a better approach. What worked previously may not work any more. And finding the right talent for your business requires a more informed approach.

Data-driven recruiting can help you uncover more quality candidates by specifically understanding source effectiveness and measuring items like number and quality of sourced hires. Having the ability to measure, analyze, and refine your sourcing function is a key component to optimizing your entire recruiting operation. With solid strategies, defined processes, sourcing technology and thoughtful analytics, sourcing can become a core competency for any organization. This means you can find more talent from the places that deliver better hires consistently for your business.

#2: Enhanced DEI Initiatives

Leveraging data-driven insights and analytics can also enhance agile recruiting by better supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion. When you are laser focused on expanding the inclusiveness of your workforce, recruiting analytics can help you track and report on the diversity of your hiring funnel based on key DEI data. With insights to help identify top DEI candidates, you take the time and guesswork out diversity hiring, while also eliminating unconscious bias. And that helps ensure you hire candidates who will widen the perspectives of your organization and contribute to higher performance levels in your business.

#3: Decreased Hiring Costs

By focusing on the best sources for talent and streamlining the hiring process using data-driven insights, your business can help decrease overall hiring costs. Ensuring you identify and tackle roadblocks to hiring, you can decrease time-to-fill or the elapsed time between a job opening is posted and when it’s filled.

Measuring time-to-fill can help you understand the real cost of filling a role, especially since productivity and revenue can both suffer the longer a job remains open. Plus, starting with more qualified candidates allows you to save time and resources on talent that may be a poor fit for the role. Having those key insights into where you should post your jobs and identifying which channels bring the highest quality candidates takes the guesswork out of hiring, helping you reduce hiring costs and empowering you to fill positions more quickly.

#4: Improved Candidate Experience

When you collect data regarding your hiring process, it can help you identify pain points for candidates and create a more positive candidate experience overall. Identifying candidate conversion rates along the recruiting journey helps you identify candidate engagement levels, especially as you encourage candidates to apply.

Perhaps you are not converting at the point of application or you are seeing candidates fall off after the interview process. Or maybe candidates are not accepting offers and your offer-to-acceptance ratio has decreased. Whatever it is, understanding key areas throughout the candidate experience can help you pinpoint areas where potential hires are not receiving an optimal candidate experience so you can work to improve their interactions.

What Recruitment Data You Should Measure

It’s clear that data analytics yield powerful insights, but which of those insights should you focus your efforts on? Assess your current situation by first measuring specific items in these three categories. Examples are provided for each type below:

• Speed-based recruitment metrics: Time-to-fill, time to disqualify, time to offer, time to acceptance
• Quality-based recruitment metrics: Source of candidate, source of hire, applications per requisition, application completion, submission to acceptance rate, quality of hire, hiring manager satisfaction
• Cost-based recruitment metrics: Cost per hire, cost per channel, cost per applicant, cost per job board, cost per candidate conversion

With leading recruitment software, you can accurately capture and analyze recruitment data and take charge of identifying where you can improve your hiring process and deliver an optimal candidate experience.

Get More Agile with Data-Driven Recruiting

To get the most value from your recruiting data, you need real-time analytics that will improve your responsiveness and ability to make better hiring decisions. When you leverage the right recruiting data for your business, you can become more in tune with the performance of your talent acquisition function and also outperform your competition in connecting with candidates.

Want more insights on finding and hiring top talent? Subscribe to the JazzHR blog or check out our hiring resources to stay up-to-date on the latest recruiting insights.

In the second part of our series, we dive deeper into the biggest areas for hiring efficiency gains, how candidate experience differentiates, and what’s next for the hiring market as a whole:

How do you predict that hiring processes will change as we continue to navigate these labor market challenges?

At the end of the day, supply and demand have to equal themselves out. There are certain times when there’s more supply than there is demand—and vice versa—there’s more demand than there is supply.

Companies will either figure out a way to get work done with fewer resources than perhaps what they’ve had, or they will incentivize their workforce so that they can actually get the workers that they want.

We are seeing wholesale increases to base pay and starting pay. Amazon, for example, again raised their starting pay nationally to $18. And that’s not the first time that they’ve raised their starting wage. I do like to discuss the Amazon factor. We do a good bit of work in warehousing and supply chain.

Every single warehouse company that we talk with talks about Amazon and how they’ve got the pick of the talent they want.

Generally, they understand their labor markets really well. They understand what they need to offer in order to be able to get people in the door. It doesn’t mean that they’re a better employer, or that they’re the top payer in the field. It shows that they do analyze what it takes in order for them to attract workers, and I think a lot of companies just try to keep up with Amazon.

What we’ve clearly urged companies not to do is to race to get to the top and buy things that they, quite frankly, can’t afford. Most businesses aren’t able to just raise wages by $10 an hour just so they can get their work done — although some do.

Instead, we’re seeing a combination of raising the base pay and sign-on bonuses.

Sign-on bonuses can range anywhere from $200 up to $15,000 for frontline workers, in particular, depending on where you’re at in the country and how desperate it is. And I choose that word “desperate” strategically. I do sense a level of desperation from some employers.

They’re trying a lot of different things to be able to go after candidates and really don’t know what to do now.

Is there a certain point within the hiring process that you feel like you really see a big opportunity to use technology or improve efficiency in some way? Anything you wish clients more consistently focused on?

For me, it’s about that initial interaction. So, companies post a job on a job board or go out and do sourcing, generate candidates, etc. To the extent that you can reach out to that candidate right away and jump on the opportunity to impress them, technology clearly enables you to do that.

As soon as somebody is qualified, start communicating — schedule them for a phone screen, an onsite interview, have some type of communication with them so that they know you received their application, are interested in considering them, and have next steps.

The number one complaint of candidates is “I never heard back.” Even in these tight labor markets, we still hear of candidates that submit their qualifications and never hear anything. So, technology clearly can help you handle speed, especially with upfront communication.

For frontline positions, in particular, being able to communicate with candidates on their desired platforms—like texting—is very impactful. Email is not the preferred method of communication for most people. They want to be able to communicate on their phone through texting.

So, that’s another way that technology can clearly help you with your process.

You’ve been in the recruiting industry for decades—how does this labor market compare to past employment trends?

I’ve done a lot of research in this area, you know, if we look at the pre-pandemic labor market, unemployment rates were around 3.5%. We had been at that level for quite some time, so a lot of companies were already having difficulty sourcing. But what we’re experiencing right now are severe challenges, severe shortages of people, and I’ve 100% never seen anything like that.

I’ve been doing this for the better part of twenty years, and I’ve never seen this kind of pressure and desperation from companies seeking to hire people.

The interesting thing to me is that companies will post a job and if they get enough candidates, good for them. If not, they might go hire a recruiter. There are now more recruiter job openings now than there are software engineering openings. I’m in the recruiting field, so I have a bias, but recruiters can add a lot of value to a company.

They can help them bring in great talents and do it quickly, efficiently, at a better cost. So, if your traditional methods aren’t working — your postings, referrals, etc. — you have to look at other ways to get it done.

Now, I will say hiring a contract recruiter is not as easy as it sounds. Finding someone who’s available and within the rate that you would want to pay is also very challenging right now.

We have a number of our clients who would love to hire more recruiters, but it’s such a candidate market right now which makes it challenging as well.

When we talk about speed, it often feels like businesses prioritize hiring fast over creating a good candidates experience. Why is it still important to think about the experience you create for job seekers even when you’re in a tight spot?

If you look at the demographics of who you’re hiring, especially if we’re talking about frontline workers or younger workers, these job seekers 100% align culture to whether or not they want to work for that organization. And they evaluate that when they’re choosing an employer. Their glimpse into your culture is how you treat them during the hiring process.

Are you communicating regularly and getting back to them? Are you providing the right information? Are you transparent? Does your website have the right information? Does it really showcase who you are?

I think it goes without saying that in a tight labor market, the candidate experience becomes incrementally more important than what it would in an employer-driven market. It’s always important, but today, every candidate is gold, and you don’t want to lose someone.

We hear it all the time that candidates choose one company over another 100%, based on how they were treated in the process.

That’s also where technology can be such a differentiator for you.

You can set it up to give frequent updates to show you’re being responsive to the candidate. The candidate experience is really more important than ever.

Is it fair to say then that technology allows smaller businesses to compete with bigger companies?

Absolutely. Technology levels the playing field. In the past, larger companies had such a strong advantage because of their brand — people knew about them. But, today, smaller companies have the same opportunity to be able to promote their brand through platforms like JazzHR and Jobvite.

Also, you have the ability to treat candidates as well — if not better — than your competition based on how you use the technology and the perspective that you have on the candidate.

What’s next for NXTThing RPO?

Number one, we want to keep growing. The market is incredibly vibrant right now, and the opportunities are a match. We want to make sure that we’re getting our fair share of those opportunities.

What I really think can differentiate us in the future is our ability to bring technology to our clients and to be able to leverage that technology. If you look at JazzHR or Jobvite, for example, those are world-class technologies. But, then, having a service provider like NXTThing RPO who can take that technology and get the most out of that tool for you.

That’s something that really doesn’t exist in the marketplace.

It also allows us then to participate in steps that are further down in the process like onboarding rather than just stopping at the point of offer. It’s absolutely a market differentiator for NXTThing because none of the other RPOs has a fully embedded suite of technology to bring to clients right now.

We’re working to maximize that in every way we possibly can.

Suddenly, you’re left with multiple open roles that you desperately need to fill.

Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Sparked by the pandemic’s economic impact, businesses are facing one of the most challenging hiring markets in decades. The BLS’s September Jobs report showed a decline in the labor force participation rate, signaling that workers are continuing to leave the labor force and further complicating the already tight recruiting situation.

• But there must be a way for employers to stand out, right? Enter Terry Terhark and his team at NXTThing RPO (who recently joined forces with JazzHR.)

Besides serving as NXTThing RPO’s President, Terry is somewhat of a celebrity in the recruiting industry—and for good reason. A recognized leader in the talent acquisition field, Terry has founded and grown several highly successful enterprise recruiting brands, including The RightThing and Selective Staffing Inc. Before founding NXTThing RPO, he was president of ADP Talent Acquisition Solutions.

Needless to say, Terry has a deep understanding of the labor market and what it takes to effectively recruit — even amid the current challenges.

We were lucky enough to sit down with Terry to discuss the evolving talent acquisition space, how technology can help, and what he sees coming next. Here’s part one.

Many businesses are familiar with the idea of hiring technology, but not necessarily the concept of recruitment process outsourcing. What is an RPO, and how can an organization like NXTThing RPO help businesses that are struggling to recruit?

Recruitment process outsourcing, or RPO, is a way for a company to add expertise and capacity to its staffing function. Oftentimes, when you think of “outsourcing,” you think you’re giving up control of a function or process. And for us, that is absolutely not the case.

Instead, we bring resources to your staffing and talent acquisition functions — whether we’re just doing sourcing and screening or the whole process for a certain set of jobs.

It really depends on each client’s desire as to what they want RPO to be, which is particularly important in today’s times with the labor market as crazy as it is and recruiters in all-time high demand.

Ultimately, we provide our clients with expertise in finding the right passive job seekers.

Is the concept of passive job seekers something clients often don’t realize they should be tapping into?

I think most clients understand that in order for them to have a robust pipeline, they really have to be attracting the nonactive job seeker. If we think of an active job seeker as someone who is currently seeking a new company to go to work for — they’re actively out on job boards, networking on LinkedIn, et cetera — it’s a very small population of the working public.

In order for companies to be successful on any level, you have to go after the passive job seeker.

There are certainly ways to do that, including tools and technologies. But opening up your pipeline, or casting a wide net, really benefits every organization in connecting with the very best people for their organization. Companies understand that they should be going after the passive job seeker, but it definitely takes more resourcing to be able to do that effectively.

It’s interesting to note that since March of this year, we’ve seen a 40% reduction in candidate engagement on job boards. At the same time, jobs have almost doubled from where they were earlier this year. In fact, the BLS reported 10.9 million job openings back in July, which was the highest the U.S. has ever recorded.

Therefore, it’s much more important to be able to take a multi-pronged sourcing and recruiting strategy, not just relying on job boards.

Why is speed so important in hiring? And how does that come up in conversations with your clients?

I tell clients routinely that speed is the ultimate leveraging factor.

So, if you’re recruiting and maybe you can’t offer the best compensation in your field or don’t have the best benefits, but your processes are built for speed, you have the ability to engage with a candidate at a much higher level than what your competitors are doing.

We help a lot of clients with warehouse hiring, manufacturing hiring, retail hiring, etc. We tell customers that you should be prepared to try to have that process take no longer than one day.

So, get the candidate, get them interviewed, make a decision, and present them with an offer. It is the case today that I, as a job seeker, can go get a job anywhere. I can literally walk across the street and go get a job.

I like to tell this story to illustrate:

• We were helping one of our clients — a big chemical company — who actually pays really well. They were interviewing experienced mold operators.
• They interviewed someone in the morning and wanted him to come back later in the day to interview with somebody else.
• He left, went and got a competitive offer, and came back for his interview later that same day to share that competitive offer.

Now, they did end up hiring him, but it just goes to show the number of jobs that are available, especially for quality candidates.

So, we really try to work with our clients. If you have bottlenecks in your process, our team works to understand how to eliminate those, particularly in those high-volume areas. How can you make your process faster? Do you have multiple layers of interviews or assessments we can streamline?

It’s still about concentrating the amount of time that a person is actually in your process and accelerating how you move them from step to step.

What about teams who need more time to vet candidates? How do you help businesses that require more steps to make a decision?

There certainly are a number of companies that fall into that category. They have traditional processes with multiple rounds of interviews, and they may want to see three or four candidates before they make a decision. That’s all well and good, but you have to understand that this is a candidate’s market and it’s moving very quickly.

We have companies eliminating drug screens that are making offers contingent on the background check. They’re letting people start contingent on a background check, and all of those things take out time in the process. So, you really just have to understand what your competitors are doing.

The other thing that is such an interesting phenomenon right now is ghosting, meaning candidates will say they’re going to interview or show up for work, and then they just don’t. It’s happening at all levels and not just with high-volume positions. We’ve had software engineers who have accepted jobs and don’t show up.

You need to build that into your process. So, for example, with one of our retail clients who we just recently helped hire 10,000 seasonal workers, we over hired at 40%, meaning we hired 14,000 to get 10,000.

We overbook interviews. We overbook everything because we know there’s going to be fall-off.

Is this concentrated in any certain industry or segment?

I would say your higher volume industries — warehousing, manufacturing, retail, etc. — are typically going to see more no-shows. But, you know, even if I were hiring for a call center, I’d still probably overbook by 10%.

There are so many times you’re scrambling for candidates that you can’t even think about overbooking.

And, you know, for us, it’s about always knowing how many candidates we need at each stage in order to get to the higher volume. So, in that example where we overbooked by 40%, we knew we needed to offer 14,000, meaning we had to source 56,000 and interview 28,000.

Those numbers are just examples, of course, but we monitor those every single day to assess where we’re at with the pipelines. And then, if we’re not where we need to be in a particular area, we put more effort into that source.

Does an RPOs process stop once you extend the offers? Are you measuring the quality of these hires?

To me, that’s kind of the holy grail of recruiting — when you tie recruiting source to quality of hire. We don’t necessarily do this for every client. For most of our clients, though, we do measure other key metrics like retention of the hires.

Businesses will use performance data that we then tie back to the source of hire. But, invariably, what happens is that the recruiting system and the performance management system generally are not tied together which makes getting access to that data challenging.

I think what a lot of companies are focusing on right now is retention. We’ve all heard about the great resignation. We all know that a large number of people are looking for new roles.

So, to the extent that you can hire people who are going to stay and not increase your attrition, then you really have an opportunity to see the value that the recruiting process is bringing to you.

I personally think that we’ll see the pressures that we’re seeing in the labor markets right now for another 18 months — if not longer. I think there are demographic issues at play here.

It’s easy for us to say extra unemployment dollars are to blame for these labor crunches. And while that might be an element of it, it really is a demographic issue, meaning we have more people leaving the workforce than we do have entering.

If you look at my generation, for example, it’s a generation that has created considerable wealth.

I think COVID has caused people to reassess their situations. Parents may have worked before, but now, the kids maybe aren’t in school, or maybe they’ve figured out that one parent can stay home. All of those things impact these massive shortages that we’re seeing across the board.