I love this time of year, which combines an introspective look back with a hopeful look forward at what the talent and hiring landscape looks like in the year ahead.
In this month’s newsletter, the importance of upskilling your employees, the continuing rise of wages and what it means, and what to expect from the job market in 2022.
Are You Upskilling Your Employees Like They Want You To?
97% of employees would learn a new skill if given the opportunity, according to a recent Gartner report. And that’s good, because the number of skills required for any particular job is increasing by the year. A tech job that once required 15 skills might now call for 20 or more.
As employees are expected to know more and more skills when they get hired into a job, of course, recruiting talent becomes more difficult. And in a time when talent recruitment is not easy to begin with, this puts companies in a bit of a quandary.
For this reason, companies that put a priority on upskilling their employees are at an advantage. And that might seem an odd thing for a recruiter to say, since my job depends on you needing to hire. However, when I scout candidates for roles, I like to be able to tell job seekers they’re interviewing at a company that puts a high price on learning and development.
It’s what job seekers want, and it serves your company well, too.
Wages Are Going Up, Up, Up
Unshockingly, wages are predicted to go up in 2022 — by the highest amount in over a decade. A new survey by the Conference Board notes that companies are setting aside an average of 3.9% of their total payroll just to account for wage increases. This includes high-profile companies like The Gap and Big Lots.
You have to have competitive wages, regardless of whether you’re paying entry level frontline workers or company leaders. But for the companies I recruit for at Johnson Recruiting Group, while competitive pay is table stakes, so are other factors such as:
Company culture
Diversity and equity efforts
And benefits, of course
If you’re angling to compete for talent in a competitive market — which, no matter what kind of company, you ARE — you have to look at the whole picture of what you have to offer job seekers today
This Month’s Must-Reads
What to Expect from the Job Market in 2022
As we head into 2022, the labor crunch continues. The U.S. labor market reports hundreds of thousands of new jobs in industries from leisure and hospitality to retail to manufacturing. Events will eventually come roaring back, too, triggering the need for a lot more employees in that arena.
It’s a great time to be a job seeker, but a challenging time to be a hiring manager.
Challenging, but far from impossible! Many of the leaders I work with in my role as Executive Recruiter are making it work, largely with the help of a good (ahem) recruiter, but also with proactive recruiting tactics on social media platforms, via their own websites, and through networking.
With fewer job seekers competing for the literally millions of open jobs in the U.S. right now, the job of the hiring manager is daunting, but not impossible.
Let’s rise to the task together in 2022!
James Johnson
Johnson Recruiting Group