Here is your December guide to the latest in recruitment, technology, market trends, and industry insights! Each month, we highlight the biggest news affecting the industry, and we’ll explain what to expect as new trends continue to emerge.
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Retail Sales Associate Talent Drain
We’re solidly in the throes of the holiday shopping rush. Fittingly, retail companies have been ramping up hiring to support the increased purchase volume. While the jobs report has shown a modest monthly increase in retail job growth in general merchandise stores and retailers, there have been declines in more traditional consumer retail, such as clothing and electronics.
The low national unemployment rate and wage growth (2.9% over a 12-month period), have increased the breadth of job opportunities. The pool of talent traditionally interested in retail jobs are now also applying to administrative assistant and health care roles.
To combat this talent drain, retailers anticipate extending the high-volume hiring season and have been holding more massive hiring events. They’re also offering seasonal salary increases, additional time-off and quota-based incentives to attract and retain talent. In this tight labor market, everything from the job description to offline engagement must be leveraged to effectively market added value beyond salary.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/out-of-stock-this-holiday-season-store-workers-1537176600
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Team Productivity, Retention, and Compensation
Wharton recently released a report, “Manufacturing Productivity with Worker Turnover,” focused on the impact of retention and compensation looking beyond the cost of hiring new workers. The researchers found that the impact on productivity happens at the team level, where filling a vacant position with a current employee from another team still resulted in a loss of total productivity.
While compensation can have an impact on retention, a cost-benefit analysis should extend beyond the impact of losing one employee and factor in the cost associated with the loss of productivity for the entire team.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/effects-of-employee-turnover-on-manufacturing/
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Insights: Developer Skills and Preferences
From high-volume to high-demand hiring: so far in 2018, professional and business services – which include job opportunities in tech – have added an average of 48,000 jobs per month (annual rate of 2.8%). As the demand for tech workers continues to increase, many employers are finding it difficult to find talent with the skills and background necessary to fill these positions.
In this competitive climate, it is increasingly important to understand the mentality of tech talent to hone messaging and provide insight into the unique value proposition of your opportunity.
@hackerrank recently released its Developer Skills Survey, which provides insights into the current and future pool of talent – when and how they gain their knowledge in the field, in-demand skills, skills of interest on the horizon, talent attraction challenges, and more. Some highlights:
- The U.K. has the highest share of developers who started coding as young as five to ten years old. The majority of those developers are in their 30s and 40s today
- JavaScript is in-demand by employers, but Python is the most popular language that developers want to learn
- Younger generations are flocking to YouTube. When learning a new tool, Millennials log onto YouTube (65%) while Gen Xers pick up a book (85%)
- Years of experience outweighs a degree as a top resume-based proxy for evaluating depth of skill, but may weed-out top performers who have advanced quickly
In addition to YouTube, the report mentions “Stack Overflow is the number one tool for self-learners.” Released in March, the Stack Overflow 2018 Developer Survey also contains insights on this talent segment and echoes the importance of engaging work and the opportunity for professional development.
Some things to consider:
- While there has been a decrease in the number of interviews extended to international talent, demand may require a hiring strategy that looks across the pond and beyond
- Communicate the opportunity at hand and potential and support for continued learning
- Be where they are: promote the career opportunity and work culture via YouTube ads
- Resume screening beyond years of work to include other signals of competency (e.g. portfolio on GitHub)
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Rounding Out the Scoop: Psych, Social, Markets, and Tech
- We’ve all faced rejection; tech employees are sharing their stories with tweets compiled on this site: https://rejected.us/
- Recent challenges with transparency, trust, etc. are having an impact on the perception of tech companies. Facebook has seen its standing drop on Glassdoor’s 2019 list of the “Best Places to Work”
- With tech-focused projects like autonomous vehicles, the auto industry may be able to position itself to tech candidates as a more trustworthy option: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dalebuss/2018/12/11/fords-2019-look-ahead-suggests-trust-opening-for-automakers-over-silicon-valley/#10c0b916c286
- The McKinsey Connected Car Customer Experience (C3X) framework sees the future beyond self-driving cars to an enhanced user experience in connected cars. As this tech continues to evolve, there is an opportunity to engage with candidates in their cars in a much more tailored way that goes beyond radio ads and roadside billboards: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/our-insights/setting-the-framework-for-car-connectivity-and-user-experience
- The Scoop: Recruitment Trends & Industry Insights | July 2021 - July 27, 2021
- The Scoop: Recruitment Trends & Industry Insights | June 2021 - June 24, 2021
- The Scoop: Recruitment Trends & Industry Insights | May 2021 - May 25, 2021
- The Scoop: Recruitment Trends & Industry Insights | April 2021 - April 28, 2021
- The Scoop: Recruitment Trends & Industry Insights | March 2021 - March 25, 2021
- The Scoop: Recruitment Trends & Industry Insights | February 2021 - February 25, 2021
- The Scoop: Recruitment Trends & Industry Insights | January 2021 - January 28, 2021
- The Scoop: Recruitment Trends & Industry Insights | December 2020 - December 17, 2020
- The Scoop: Recruitment Trends & Industry Insights | November 2020 - November 19, 2020
- The Scoop: Recruitment Trends & Industry Insights | October 2020 - October 16, 2020
