Inside The July Workforce Report With Rhea Moss of iCIMS

William Tincup: [00:00:00] This is William Tincup. And you’re listening to the Recruiting Daily podcast. Today, we have Rayon from iCIMS and we’ll be really the kind of the bit today is they do a bunch of research and we’re looking at one of their research reports from July. And it’s the workforce report. We’ve done this before. And so we’re going to get some of the, the top level things that they learned from the report. It’s inside the July workforce report from iCIMS. So Rhea, would you do us a favor and introduce yourself and [00:01:00] also what you do at iCIMS?

Rhea Moss: Yeah, thank you for having me. I’m Rhea Moss. I lead the Insights Program at iCIMS.

Like you mentioned, the Insights Program is heavily research based, but it’s really about using data to tell a story of what’s happening in the labor market, which, that’s a heavy topic to bring up, but really also just what’s happening with candidates, what’s happening with companies, who’s hiring.

So my team and I look at a pretty large data set. To give you a sense of size, it was about 180 million applicants last year that resulted in almost 6 million hires. And really just try to give a sense of, there’s a lot of news and narrative out there, but truly by the numbers, what’s happening.

Love it.

William Tincup: All right. So whenever you do a report, it’s been our experience that you it falls into three different things. Something that shocks you something that you’re like, wait a minute, check the data. Is that accurate? Can that be accurate? Yep. Yep. Things that you already knew but it validated and then things that are that were not validated like you thought that this [00:02:00] would be a certain way and it came back differently but it wasn’t shocking it’s just you just had your mind thinking like okay we look at hourly and hourly is really tough right now okay and then all of a sudden you read some report you read the findings it’s yeah hourly’s doing really it’s let’s start with let’s start with some of the things that might have been what you learned.

Let’s not even do shocking and stuff like that. What’d you learn when you looked at the data?

Rhea Moss: I think the number one thing, and we watched… The same, we start with the same slide every single report to get a sense of continuity and it’s really just about our companies hiring right now, our companies opening jobs right now, and our people applying to them.

And I feel like if you live in what I would think of as just a normal person’s bubble, and I say that as like you’re not in recruiting and you’re not actually looking for a job, you’re just listening to the overall general narrative out there. It seems and I don’t know anybody that spends five minutes on LinkedIn, it seems like all you hear is reductions it seems like this horrible time to get a job.

But then if you live in the economist bubble and [00:03:00] you read what the government is putting out every month, It’s the complete and utter opposite. We’re at the one of the lowest points of unemployment. And there’s this narrative from them. They actually came out and quoted last month and said, if someone wants a job, they should be able to find it.

So I think the one piece that we watch, and I’m begging my analysts every month, can I see it in advance, is what’s actually happening? Are, did, are companies opening jobs right now? And are people applying to them? And I think the one I would just, I’ll call it the shocker, that’s fine.

And I only say shocker because it hurts my head to make sense of it all, is that the number of job applications just continues to remain so high and it’s so elevated relative to the number of open jobs right now when unemployment is so low. So the only logical sense to make of that is I’ll call them job seekers, but they’re employed job seekers.

They’re people who have a job. They’re in it, right? They’re fully employed. But those are the folks that must be still making up this behavioral shift of increased [00:04:00] amount of applications. And I just think of it as just fascinating relative to that narrative of we’ve used the word recession for so long, right?

It’s like we’re all waiting for the other ball to drop. I don’t know. I’m not, every month we’re looking and we’re like, okay, openings and hires go up and down slightly, but that elevated number of job applications is the one each month when we sit down to really try to figure out what the numbers mean, that’s a little bit starting to stump us.

Like, where is that confidence coming from?

William Tincup: It’s same thing. I just got off a call and they literally asked me at the very end of the call. They’re like, Hey, what do you think? What do you think for the next couple of months? I think, I’m like if it’s, if we’re talking about anything hourly, There’s, I still, when I go through an airport, count shops that are closed because they can’t find people to take shifts.

During the pandemic, you needed hourly folks. Post pandemic, you need hourly folks. Nothing’s changed. Whatever, whatever’s going on. Yeah, milk’s more expensive. Yep, got it. Gas is more expensive. Totally understand. But you still need [00:05:00] hourly people. Now… In some of the other non hourly categories, the salary categories, I’m not shocked because I think it’s where people maybe overhired, maybe got too aggressive, or it’s a reshaping of priorities.

So you take something like ChatGPT and you had a whole entire team on Metaverse, a thousand a thousand people working on Metaverse and all of a sudden you’re like, you know what? Metaverse is important, but we really need to figure out this generative AI thing. So we’ll let go 500 people from Metaverse on the, on that program, if you will, and we’re going to hire 700 on generative AI.

Good luck by the way. But we’re going to hire those folks. So it’s like it balances out the losses with there’s things that are open, those things that are open are new. And I think those are some of the newer bets if we’re using a roulette analogy or metaphor, those are the new bets.

Rhea Moss: And you know what though?

Which one of those makes the [00:06:00] headlines? Oh, it’s absolutely the layoffs. It’s only a layoff, even though they’re netting out in jobs. And we’re seeing this all the time. We’re hearing in the media, these companies are letting go this large amount. The other thing to remember, some of these companies have become so incredibly large.

So while it’s really unfortunate for those people and the numbers seem very high, when you look at them relative to the size of the business. Yeah. It’s really, it’s not that much. And to your point, it is more of a reshuffle that we’re seeing. And I do, I will say it’s Extra effort for a company to say, we have these people, could we reuse them?

Could we retool them? Could we reskill them? Could we move them to another project or another task? And it seems like the general consensus is we’ll just, let go that group and go hire a new group. And then that does net out to what we’re seeing, which is still a just raw, pure number of hires being very elevated.

William Tincup: Negative sales. So Amazon has a million employees, let’s just say, round it up. And they let [00:07:00] go 5, 000 people. That is what hits the news. You look in LinkedIn and over there on the things that are trending, those are the things that are trending. 5, 000 people. Amazon lays off 5, 000 people.

It’s do you understand the percentage of a percentage that is of their total overall employee base? No, it’s not. It’s around a year. It’s nothing. Now

Rhea Moss: it is nothing to humans, right? It’s unfortunate for them, but this goes back to what I was speaking to though. There’s still so many open jobs that I think that we are more at a point of a misalignment of available talent and what the company want to hire.

then that we’re in a place where it’s not a strong labor market. And that’s going to continue to evolve. I think, and you mentioned technology like chat GPT or AI and true technical skills. To be honest, this is the same kinds of conversation we were having in 2018 or 2019 talking about how hard it was to hire tech talent.

We were just thinking tech talent then was a Java engineer or a data scientist. Now, It’s new technologies, but we know the half life of a skill in technology [00:08:00] is so short anyways not to say the last three years have been quick because they’ve been incredibly slow, but if you think about it a lot has happened in the world of technology while there was a lot happening in the rest of the world, and I think a lot of the, quote unquote new buzzwords and problems that we’re hearing talked about are things that have always been around.

They just have a new name or kind of a new face to them.

William Tincup: Yeah, and negative sales. So there’s a negative weird stuff sells so that there’s, it’s not shocking that the news leads with layoffs. It’s not shocking that those are the things that appear on LinkedIn because when you go to the grocery store and you see the rags that are there Princess Di is an alien, right?

That’s what sells.

Rhea Moss: There’s been a transparency factor that’s been included where historically, especially amongst candidates, if. There was negative news. They didn’t necessarily share it. They may not even share it with their family, let alone put it out on public social media. That was pretty taboo three years ago, right?

And now it’s the opposite. I’m seeing [00:09:00] things, unfortunately, that are like, I was let go from my job an hour ago. But you’re not seeing them post, because maybe it feels braggy, and this is just the environment social media is in right now, but you’re not seeing them post and say, I had four job offers.

You do see eventually I started a new position, right? But to your point, what are people clicking on the most and resharing the most? It’s,

William Tincup: it’s always negative. It’s always, that’s why your local news doesn’t focus on the good stories where the teacher actually did something really cool for a student, et cetera.

You’ll hear about the other stories, but not those stories. So what else with with the report? Because you’ve done this is how many years you’ve done this? Seven or eight?

Rhea Moss: You know what? Three. So it’s been about 20 in a couple of years, dog years. We’re turning 21. No, we’ve had the insights program around at iCIMS.

I’m coming up on seven years at the company and there’s been different forms and iterations of this program as a whole. It started out about helping build analytics inside our product. For a couple of years, we focused heavily on [00:10:00] pure economic data. And around when COVID happened, we really pivoted to say, What are people doing?

What are companies doing? And this separation of caring so much about what is the Bureau of Labor Statistics going to announce and more of how hard is it going to be to hire somebody this month? So yeah, three years of these reports in the general shape of where they are.

We’ve been evolving. We’ve been really excited to add a lot to the program, but three years of sharing just what’s happening and hiring in a really digestible form like this. The one I will say, and this is the third year that we’ve looked. at this specific thing from this report is when we looked at retail this year looked really different so the July report we had a focus on retailers in general and what was happening were they hiring were people applying and it’s really fascinating because last year I I took a step back when we were writing out our talk track and our storyline and we said remember this conversation last year we were talking about Holiday season is coming up.

Retailers were closing stores, cutting hours because they couldn’t staff them. And we were talking [00:11:00] about what that was going to mean for the shopping experience and for the consumer experience. And what I find really interesting this year, and I’ll share a couple of the high level numbers from the report, but this June versus last June, there were 27% less hires done in the retail space and about 14% less job openings.

But what’s interesting is there’s actually 34% more job applications. There are days that retailers can say it’s because nobody wants this job or nobody wants to work here. We’re actually seeing a significant increase in applications with a really significant, almost a quarter less. Hires happening in the space.

And to your point of what’s gonna happen in three months, the one thing I’m gonna tell you I’m sitting and watching is we were talking about there being a negative effect on the shopping experience last year. What does it mean this year when we’ve got this 50 point gap now between those two numbers?

And that’s what I’m really curious. I know there’s a lot going on in the economy and there’s a lot of things that we’re watching that have an effect on this, but it just feels knowing what we said last year and then looking at the significant difference this year, I’m [00:12:00] sitting here going, this is going to be really interesting to watch play out.

William Tincup: Love it. I love it. So what do you do when you obviously to, you’ve done the research, you get the research back. Do you do you do an internal webinar for clients? Or how do you get the. It’s

the

Rhea Moss: knowledge. Great question. We do all kinds of things. I know you’re probably not surprised to hear that.

So we do, it starts out and I do a briefing for all customer facing employees at iCIMS, a couple hundred people. We all get on the phone together and I explain, here’s what we’re seeing. Share it out with your team, share it out with any prospects, right? Let them know what’s going on out there. We then film a short video.

I do not like to call it a TikTok video because as I will not be dancing anytime soon. But we do a video every month and we actually just, yeah, oh gosh, you don’t want to see this. We put it out on LinkedIn iCIMS puts it out, I share it we’ve had some guest stars the last couple months, there’s a fun guest star coming up this next month, it’ll be out next week with just a high level of what’s happening and a link to the report, the actual [00:13:00] workforce reports are made public all of the research from the workforce reports are made public on iCIMS.

com slash insights. So every month you can go, it’s usually about the second week of the month that it goes out. And then we also have a couple of products we do offer for iCIMS customers where they can really dive deep with either a deep data set on their industry or for our premium product consulting type engagements where they can ask specific questions and we’ll go pull analysis for them as well.

William Tincup: Similar but different. The folks that are in CS and in frontline sales they’re talking, so in sales, they’re talking to prospects and just getting them up to date with what’s going on, talking about technology or whatever. CS they’re talking about all kinds of things about how you can use the product in different ways, et cetera.

How do we, how do you, it may be not with this report, but how do you optimize their. We’re going to get into the team that’s going on. So getting them like, like again, CS, they’re great with the product. They know the product really well. Fantastic. But they might not know the industry.

They might not know what’s [00:14:00] going on in hiring. So that’s a great question.

Rhea Moss: How do we bring them up to speed? Go ahead. Yeah, that’s a really great question because our CS team is absolutely fantastic. They know all about our products. They know all about our customers. They know our customers objectives and what they’re trying to do.

And part of it is helping the customer understand. Here’s your metrics, right? Your, we love, I love APO, we call it, applicants for opening. And I like to call that the measure of how hard it is to hire right now. If your APO is at six, it’s going to be incredibly hard to hire, and you’re probably hiring nurses today, right?

If your APO is at 60, you probably have a job open for a recruiter in your organization, right? But a lot of times what happens is we’ll share with the customers and we’ll say, okay, your key metric, APO, right now you’re at 30. And there’s this pause. And the next question is inherently. Is that good?

Is that bad? How’s that compared to, my competition, other industries? And so really what we try to do with the insights data is give them a sense of here’s your number. Here’s what it is relative to other customers like [00:15:00] you. And candidly, here’s when you do see big swings in the numbers. We all saw this in 21 and 22, right?

We, we had a lot of customers calling their CSM saying, where did all my applicants go? And it was using insights that we were able to say, okay, it’s not you, right? This is a trend. We’re seeing this across the board. We saw it when we saw government payouts happen, right? We saw all of a sudden in one week, some companies saw 50% less applicants because they had cash in their pocket.

They didn’t necessarily need a job as bad anymore. And what we try to do to help those teams is help the customers understand what when my numbers change, first of all, are they good? And then when they change, is it something I did? Is it something that applicants are doing? Or is it something that my competition is doing?

And then really help them understand where they fall in that. So then what levers do you turn? are very different. What do you change? What strategy change? Do you spend more money? Do you spend less money? Is about knowing this is something that’s working for me or not working for me.

And is it working for everybody or not working for everybody?

William Tincup: It’s interesting because it tracks with something that [00:16:00] I get with a lot of practitioners is it me? Or is it the industry?

Rhea Moss: Absolutely. And you know what? I will say the last couple years, the interest in talent acquisition data went from, I report the data up to my VP of TA.

And then a year or two ago, it was now I have to give this report regularly to the CHRO. And last year it was… The CEO wants to see our recruiting data, right? And there was huge talent shortages. I’ll be honest, certain industries right now, we’re seeing that slow down. Other industries, I was on with two different clients in the last 24 hours that said, my board wants these numbers.

Guess what? The board members don’t always know exactly what those numbers mean and whether it’s good or bad. So I think that’s how a lot of our customers are really utilizing this data is to say, when they do present to their CEO or their board or someone who doesn’t live in talent acquisition metrics, To say, here’s where we are, and here’s where our competition is, and help set that stage.

William Tincup: Did anything pop out from a DEI perspective with this report, or with this kind

Rhea Moss: of slice of the data? [00:17:00] We love, you know me, we love good old DEI data and it’s funny, we started with things like gender, right? Now we’ve gone all across the board, and one of my favorites lately has been looking at the ages of applicants.

I just think… Oh, cool. I think it’s so fascinating because different generations are being affected so differently by these social factors that have happened, by economic factors that have happened. As we do a report every year on the class of the graduating class of that year and what they want and how to recruit them.

But from a technology perspective, it’s so interesting because you have such different generations in the workforce right now, and not just in the workforce, but trying to apply for your jobs and communicate and schedule and feel like they belong. We actually saw an article right before we made this report that was talking about the new census data showed that the median age in the U.

S. had risen significantly. So it’s now at 38 and it was only at 30 in 1980. And we thought that was really fascinating because when we look at our data and we look at the ages of people applying[00:18:00] It’s very different by very different industries. So I’ll give you an example, right? Over two thirds of tech applicants are under the age of 35.

I’m going to say, I’ll tell you right now, that makes me feel old. Like I’m the vast minority. And I thought that was just fascinating as you think about it. And I’m like, I’m telling all of our customers, if you’re trying to hire in tech right now, it’s not managers with 15 years experience. This is where you got to skill, upskill train, new grad programs, right?

That is your space. To give you a sense, 40% of applicants right there, just under 40% are under the age of 25, right? So it’s okay, if you’re trying to hire like that, you have to hire. If you think you’re finding these senior positions, they’re just not out there looking or moving or whatnot. And then it’s interesting.

If you look at things like health services, it’s a little more balanced across the board. Again, skewing a little bit older. But this is where I always tell our customers, think about who you’re trying to attract and go look at your career site. Don’t look at it as yourself, age myself completely there, but don’t think of like yourself with two kids reading about benefits that you care about.

Look at yourself like you’re 24. [00:19:00] Does that look fun? And then think about communication. And I know I mentioned this in my talk at Inspire, but stop sending emails to millennials. That’s a guaranteed way for me to never, ever read. I

William Tincup: can’t even, I can’t even send emails to my business partners that are my age.

They don’t respond to emails and they’re my age,

Rhea Moss: but that being said, call my mom or text my mom. Oh yeah. I’ll call you back on the phone. Oh, a hundred percent. A hundred

William Tincup: percent.

Rhea Moss: Yeah. So it’s just fascinating as we think about it, in general. While we see the population getting older, we’re not seeing job seekers get older.

We’re actually seeing job seekers get younger and younger. And as you think about the external impacts of so much going on, especially during COVID, right? Spoiler alert, it wasn’t the millennials that were at home with their kids trying to get through COVID lockdowns at daycare that were out applying for jobs.

And then the same thing is happening as we keep seeing this recession word loom. Our generation is a little bit more, putting our head down and sticking where we are versus these younger generations that are really saying, [00:20:00] I’m open to try something new. Yeah. I can, I

William Tincup: can always do Uber Eats.

Oh gosh. I can, you know what I’m saying? You don’t

Rhea Moss: have a mortgage and you live at your parents house, okay, I’m unemployed for a couple of months. I do see this significant shift too in this fear of unemployment in the younger generation, not being nearly as strong as some of these older generations where the fear of unemployment is really strong.

It’s, I’ll just quit.

William Tincup: That’s and I know, you know what, I want I, first of all, I’m envious because I grew up with that fear still have that fear on some level. And I heard a word the other day that that, that kind of captures, it’s called fun employment. So if you’re unemployed because you just choose you know what, yeah, I didn’t like that.

I went there and they just weren’t nice and I just left. And then now you’re fun employed. Now you can go do something different. It’s I would have never conceived a world where unemployment and fun were combined in any way.

Rhea Moss: I think that may be the word I had used when I had walked out of my job on a [00:21:00] Friday and next one on a Monday and I had the, wonderful 48 hours that there were no emails coming in.

William Tincup: Or if they did, it doesn’t matter. I’m not responding. I think the thing with the under 25 is, especially with your clients, it’s what works with that group. It’s really a finger on the pulse of, and again, now you’re, it’s not just by generation. You want to get it down into the tactical, okay, by that particular person, how do you want communications?

You want an SMS? Great. You want a WhatsApp? Fantastic. What do you, how do you? How are you going to best respond?

Rhea Moss: I love to ask our clients, it’s a question you’ll hear me use all the time and I say, do you ever ask a candidate how they’d like to be communicated with? And you would be surprised how often people’s like head twists a little to the side and they’re like, I don’t know that I have.

I’m like, it’s that simple. You’ve got all the tools. Do you ever just ask them like, Hey, if I were to need to get ahold of you, what’s the best way? And I always I [00:22:00] always say I get it. Certain things have to be done via email. If you have to send an offer via email, you’re probably not gonna shoot that over in a text with some emojis, but you could shoot them but you and say, Hey, that’s right.

There’s a very important email. Here’s the subject line. It was sent this time, right? Yes. It

William Tincup: might be in your spam folder. Yeah.

Rhea Moss: I see the subject line. Let them just search. Or you might

William Tincup: have to reset your Gmail account because you haven’t logged in years. Got it. Totally understand. Anyhow, we have to get it’s a PDF of yet another foreign concept.

Anyhow, we’ve got to go through DocuSign or HelloSign and you’ve got to sign something. What? Yeah, anyhow, the signature, I know crazy, but you need to sign a document that says that you’re going to actually show up on this time. I know, sounds crazy, but I think Early let’s say five years ago, I would talk to recruiters and it was, they didn’t want to change their process.

Exactly. They were rigid and this is the way I do it. If they’ll bend, if they don’t want to work

Rhea Moss: here, you’ve come [00:23:00] our way. That’s

William Tincup: right. Now it’s a recruiters have been beaten into chameleons where it’s like, what do you need? Let’s just, let’s. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s just start off. What do you need?

Okay. You need 80, 000? Great. Got it. All right. What else? You want remote work? Fantastic. What how could I make this work for you? Because they, if you’re still rigid, you might be an executive search, but other than that, everything else is fair game for those types of questions of highly personalized.

And again, we can use generations, we can use gender, we can use some of those things, but really you should just ask the individual.

Rhea Moss: And I think if you look at that same kind of thing, one of the other stats I thought was fascinating out of the report right now is that, in retail specifically, 7 out of 10 job applications are done through a mobile device nowadays.

And if you really think about it, there’s this notion of, to your point, don’t make me find the job, then go open my laptop, then go apply for it there. If I find my job on my phone, I want to apply for that job on my phone. And that is also a [00:24:00] really strong… Strong shift we’ve seen. And just to give you a benchmark sense, in the overall market, it’s more than half are still that way.

So it’s easy to say that’s just retail. But overall, more than half of the applications coming into iCIMS today are done fully via a mobile device. And I think I always love I say please anybody out there that makes you upload a resume, apply for a job. Shocker, spoiler alert, no one has a resume on their phone.

You’re losing half your candidates. And I think gone are the days that it’s Fair to expect the device swap in that process. I think that’s really just how you lose people now. Oh yeah,

William Tincup: a hundred percent. So I’ll give you a stat before we leave. Read this report about CHROs and it was about it was about generative AI.

80% of them are using it to some degree. Some chat, GDPT, open AI, whatever they’re using it for something. And same 80%, not same, but 80% of them are terrified of it. So it’s interesting on one level. It’s like they’re using it, [00:25:00] they’re testing it out, they’re playing with it on the weekends, whatever, it’s interesting.

And then all of a sudden they’re also, they’re realizing, Oh my God, this is going to change everything. From the candidate experience to the employee experience. Oh, and we don’t even know how. No,

Rhea Moss: exactly. I’m okay, this is interesting. It’s cool. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. I laughed, I laugh. I was chatting with a coworker about this the other day and I said, it in a way reminds me of my high school math teacher who made me do tests without a calculator because she told me I wouldn’t carry around a calculator in my pocket my whole life, which jokes on her now, but in that same way.

There’s a piece to it, I think, that is interesting, where we don’t even know where this is going. You can’t be fearful of it?

William Tincup: No it’s 1995 and people are talking about the internet. Yeah.

Rhea Moss: www. And HR is not a space that we should necessarily be, really pushing the limits of things. You don’t know where it’s going.

William Tincup: Yeah. That’s not their, that’s not their bit. That’s all. No. No.[00:26:00]

Rhea Moss: But I agree. And we actually talked, we did a question in our class sub report about that, asking new grads if they were planning to use it to work on their resume. And many of them said yes. And then we asked recruiters, is it a deal breaker if you found out a candidate used it on their resume?

And many of them said yes. And I asked that question where’s the line? What if they just did it for spellcheck? In theory, that’s AI. Yeah. Grammarly. I would hope they did spell check. I would hope so too. But where’s that line? I think it’s an interesting call out. It’s something, we talked, we were talking before about attending events.

I’m curious to see everybody’s take on it as we attend some of these events this fall and where it’s going, what people are doing with it, because I think it’s going to be a topic that’s not going to just fade away anytime quickly. But I think it’s going to be really interesting to see how it plays itself out, especially in the world of HR.

William Tincup: Drops mic, walks off stage.

Rhea Moss: This is like me at Inspire, right? They’re like, and last question, what do we think is going to happen? I’m like, I don’t know, but it is fun to watch. [00:27:00]

William Tincup: Get a ticket. Watch it. Everyone download the report. It’s fantastic. Raya, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me.

Absolutely. And thanks everyone for listening. Until next time.