Job-fillers navigate a shifting employment landscape
Job-fillers navigate a shifting employment landscape
The job market has been on quite the wild ride these past few years. But you know who’s been on an even wilder ride? The people whose job is to fill jobs: temp agency workers, recruiters, headhunters and the like.
By the end of 2021, when we were recovering from the initial shock of the pandemic, the U.S. had gained back 7.25 million jobs. Almost half a million of those were jobs related to getting people jobs.
“You see recruiting postings heading into the stratosphere,” said Ron Hetrick, vice president of staffing strategy at Lightcast, a labor market analytics firm. “You come off ’21, ’22, where there’s a shortage of people, so a lot of companies thought, well, we’re going to respond to a shortage of people by throwing more recruiters at the problem.”
But after gorging on workers, employers slowed down the hiring last year, and so did the recruiters and agencies working for them.
“You looked at high interest rates and inflation, and I think there was some natural pullback for a bit,” said Nels Olson, vice chairman of talent firm Korn Ferry.
By the end of 2023, the number of people in temporary jobs in the U.S. had fallen by 7%, and employment services companies had taken a big hit.
“The staffing companies that struggled definitely have more tech clients than those that didn’t,” said Tim Sackett, CEO of HRU Technical Resources.
Still, that plus a general hiring slowdown meant 226,000 jobs in employment services disappeared.
“We move quick when the economy moves and we fall quick as the economy drops as well,” said Ger Doyle, a senior vice president at ManpowerGroup. He said 2024 will be better.
“We do expect, overall in our industry, stabilization,” he said.
As inflation comes down and interest rates start to fall, Doyle expects that companies will want to do more hiring. “Second half of ’24 is when we start to see a bit of a rebound,” he said.
Employment in recruiting and staffing services functions as a bit of a crystal ball, he added. It’s what economists call a leading indicator.
And it’s indicating some cautiously good things right now: After declining for 14 months, the number of people whose job is to help jobs get filled increased by 9,000 last month.
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