ZipRecruiter CEO Says Coronavirus Could Impact Hiring

so forth. But I do wonder, Um, this virus, how is it, I fit at all impacting your world? Well, obviously this is something that we're watching very closely, and so far it hasn't directly impacted the number of jobs that are being posted, but certainly it's impacting the practices that employers are using as they interview candidates. Um, Video interviewing is on a steep rise right now as employers try to cut down the number of visitors who comes

through their actual physical locations. Yeah, it's sort of amazing. We had a great story, one of the most stories of Bloomberg this entire week was about how Wall Street poaching, you know, sort of in the post bonus season, which you know well is you know, essentially ground to a halt. Uh, you know, all that sort of lateral movement or a lot of that literal movement because of that, you know, not being able to do that sort of final interview where you bring somebody in and you show them around

and they shake hands. I mean, we're not even shaking hands with people we know at this point in some ways. Yeah, I mean, this is going to be really interesting because one of the big themes in modern recruiting is around flexibility at the workplace and whether or not companies are going to allow telecommuting as an example, and the coronavirus almost as a silver lining, is going to give us a really interesting opportunity to study many companies ability to

allow telecommuting as an option. It's a great point. It's a great point. You know. It's funny we two had a UM Bureau of Labor Statistics or Labor Department statistic earlier in the weekend I just talked about. I think I think it was roughly a quarter of people can actually work from home. So it's not like, you know, we think the world has moved so easily into being able to do that. There's a lot of jobs that you can't do from home, you know. All right, So

let's talk about that monthly job report. And I'm wondering if Ian you're already starting to see kind of you know, your view on the world in two buckets, the pre virus concerns versus now what you've seen as of late. So I guess I'm wondering, what was the momentum before um the virus worry seem to overtake economic concerns, market concerns. What were you seeing in terms of labor market momentum

and what are you seeing now? Well, first this was, I mean where this has been the most tremendous run of the job market over a ten year period that any of us have seen in our lifetime. The resiliency of this job market has been extraordinary. And it doesn't matter what's happening in politics, It doesn't seem to matter what's happening with international trade. This job market has just

consistently plowed along. Now we have a pandemic, and really information about the pandemic is just starting to be collected. So I don't think we're going to see any impact in the previous month's job report. I think this is the month where we're going to start to really see

whether or not there's going to be impact. There's surveys being done in our industry left and right right now, and multiple employers are already saying it's starting to affect their hiring plans, although they are using the word moderately. So far, moderately is the word of the day. But having said that, so you said, you know you're seeing more people do in terms of interviews online, but are you seeing less postings happen yet? Are not yet? No?

So far, posting volume has stayed consistent. It's something we watch closely, literally on a daily basis, and so we aren't seeing the direct impact on hiring. However, a multitude of employers are going public with what their coronavirus response plans are, and it's everything from living limiting travel for their employees to refusing to let candidates come into the offices for final interviews. As we were discussing the requiring

that they'd be done over say video. It will be interesting to see whether or not that eliminates some percentage of hiring or merely slows it down, right, I think we're all going to be developing new muscle and how we recruit without having the opportunity to be physically co located with the candidate. Well, and as you said, Ian and you guys have done a lot of work recently as I understand it, around AI and the and the future of work. How does that play into the current environment.

And you alluded to earlier this idea that you know, this is a little bit of a test case in terms of both where we work and how we work. How does that sort of synthesize with some of your findings in your recent studies. Well, it's important note that millennials is a generation prioritize flexibility and telecommuning as their number two key requirement when they consider a job. Number

one is salary. So this is a generation that desperately wants the opportunity to work from home, and the tools have evolved, whether it's a video interviewing or it's communication platforms like Slack or collaborative docs that can be worked on by a group of people together that Google provides. Really, you're in your living in a time where it's easier to be telecommuting than it ever has been before. But uh, companies are really reluctant to allow their employees to do it.

And whether that's because of strong intuition or whether that's just because of tradition. I think we're actually about to find out, because coronavirus is effectively leading to a grand experiment where a lot of companies and really big companies are starting to loosen the reins on requiring employees to come in. So we're going to find out there's this may be a huge shift in how work happens in America over the next nine months. You are listening to

Bloomberg business Week. Let's continue our conversation with Ian Siegel, co founder and CEO of zip Recruiter, joining us on the phone from Lovely Santa Monica. So, Ian, I want to get into, you know, some of what you've also found through your Future of Work report, and specifically about where workers are going, because we get the sense from the stats that we have access to publicly that folks are leaving New York, folks are leaving California, They're headed

south or at least further into the country. Does your data Do your data back that up? Yeah? I think that the four biggest technology centers in the country are in California, New York, Washington, and mass Massachusetts. And what we're seeing is a every year migration from these four

states to uh really all reasons of the country. But there are ten states in particular that people are moving out of those four states into and as a result of that, that talent um is creating new tech centers in places where you might not have expected them to emerge. And so what we're what we're really seeing is an emerging group of would be tech powerhouse states and they are set up to disproportionately be advantaged from the changing nature of work and in particular from the impact of AI.

The states being right now it looks like Colorado, Utah, Virginia, Texas, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Nevada, Oregon, and Idaho of interesting because it's cheaper there to set up shop or what. Well, what we did a deep dive study into why those ten states are doing as well as they are, and really it's specific cities within those states that are the tip

of the spear leading those states to prominence. And in almost all case as we saw the same pattern, which was the local government took measures to become more business friendly to draw businesses in. But that was only half the equation. The other thing they did is make a conscious effort to become family friendly, low cost living destinations. So they did things like revitalize their downtowns where they

planted trees, put in bike lanes, buried the utilities. Um. They created a lot of affordable single family homes and or chief apartments. And then they also all happened to have good school districts. So you saw this perfect storm of business friendly environment plus family friendly environment. And by the way, a lot of these cities did this consciously. So it turns out this is a reality that you can create if you are a local government. UM. And

it happens really fast. If you look at places like Portland's and Austen, their transformations happened in less than seven years. Yeah, and we hear, I mean we hear about it to the point where, you know, and Nashville obviously, uh had a terrible national or natural disaster happened this week with the tornadoes, But you know, you hear about Nashville and Austin specifically, you know, struggling to even keep up with

with some of that growth. Do you guys get the sense that this is a sort of a secular thing or is it more cyclical and jobs ultimately will go back. I mean, I think especially of California, I know, and and in New York to to some extent, because these are long term, uh places. The guy in New York says rather defensively, Well, I mean, the four top states have six of the high tech ai juest currently, and the initial deployment of those technologies for consumer adoption are

happening in those four states disproportionately as well. However, Uh, if you look at the rate at which tech centers are growing in the ten emerging states that I mentioned, it's two and a half times faster than what you're seeing in any of the four current pioneer states. It's a massive, massive influx of talent to those areas. And if you look at the nature of the applications that AI is being deployed for, it doesn't seem like it's

going to be limited to the four big winners. It definitely seems like this is not just a moment in time, but this is a trend. I do wonder too, how much of you know, the migration from a state to another state in terms of tech centers and tech hubs. How much of is it? Is it because of big tech or is it just a lot of smaller players as well, Because I do wonder about and this plays into in the story the bigger, broader story big tech

and they're growing influence on our world at large. Yeah, I mean, I think big tech is really good at what they do, but innovation is the larger these companies become, the harder it is for them to do innovation, the more they go out and try to acquire innovations that have produced it internally. And then you look at and then you look at with some of these emerging technology, So like, let's take autonomous cars as an examp full um. Maybe not surprisingly, but Michigan turns out to be a

hotbed of innovation around autentomous vehicles. Even have a whole city that has been built there just to drive autonomous vehicles around the whole fake city so that they can get reps and make sure that these cars are safe. And then you look at something like drones and drone tech can be built anywhere. So I think the the big tech disruptions that are imminent, and by imminent, I mean next five years or last, like, we can see it coming and it's going to radically alter the landscape

of work. Um, those aren't currently based in the four big winners. They are spread across the country. All right, we're gonna leave it there, Thank you so much. Ian Siegel, co founder CEO of ZIP Recruiter, joining us on the phone from Santa Monica. Their recent report Future of Work. A lot of good stuff in there, and a lot of things to think about. Is we think about sort of where people are working, both in the short term owing to the coronavirus, but longer term, the geography, the

sort of sociographics of the United States are changing. I do wonder too if companies realize, wow, I can do these jobs at home as easily, and that means I don't have overhead, I can have smaller facilities. I do wonder about the longer term impact.