Hi, my name is Mark Mitford. I spent 25 years working in corporate America as a high level HR executive. I work for many fortune 500 and middle market size companies. During that time, if you are a small business owner, CEO, or any other professional, and given the task of solving your company's HR issues, then you're in the right place. Today.
Our episode is going to be around really trying to dissect and really peel back the onion on the hiring challenges that are going on currently within 2022. So I just wanted to go ahead and, and share a couple of ideas there that may be helpful for you as a business owner or a leader in an organization. So let's go ahead and get started on that. When you look at it right now, earlier this year in 2022, there were in one month alone, there was 11.3 job openings.
And that was slightly down from December of last year, where there was 11.5 million job openings, and those were just job openings themselves. So you think about it. There weren't enough workers to actually fill all those positions that were advertised.
So that's one of the critical challenges that are going on right now is just so simply supply and demand for every a hundred openings earlier this year for every a hundred job openings in January, there were only 60 unemployed workers available to fill those jobs. So right there just do the math and you see why it's, there's more way more job openings than there are employees to fill those. And that was actually used to be even tighter than that.
But now what we found there is that we have a number of people who are unemployed, who are less unemployed people than there are for positions to fill. So it's just, again, it's becoming a somewhat of a numbers game. One of the key things too, is the, what we've all heard so much about the great resignation people are resigning still in heavily. It's interesting because this is being recorded in the summer of 2022.
The number of people resigning is actually slowing down a bit because there are a lot of economic pressures on the us economy now. So the good thing is with that trend happening, it's actually slowing down. People resigning slightly, but people are still leaving the organizations. And also a few other companies are, they are actually laying off people. So there are some things that could work in the favor longer term , even though it's becoming a much more challenging economy.
And a lot of companies are starting to do hiring freezers, slowing down their hiring. The other thing we wanted to talk about too here is call the growing divide within our workers. When you think about it, a lot of employees are looking only because they work in a knowledge type workforce. They work with computers. So they're a knowledge worker. A lot of them are strictly working.
They want to work a hundred percent remotely, and this is something we didn't even think about three, four years ago, but now this is becoming very, very , um, a trend that's probably going to be here to stay. A lot of companies are very comfortable with the changes in technology, having their workers work someplace else, and they never come into the office. So that's one of the key things.
If you have employees who are coming into the office, you really need to be thinking about what are the expectations and what are you doing to make sure you can actively recruit employees. That's actually number three, it's really creating great changes in the workforce. As we know it today and great expectations for the workers. And a lot of them are they wanna work flexible hours. They want to be able to work certain days in the office and certain days outside of the office.
So a lot of companies are calling that a hybrid workplace or a hybrid workforce where they work maybe one day in the office, four days out or two days in the office, three days out. And so employees are actually starting to be able to call the shots more because as employees are so desperate, they are doing a lot of things that are probably good in the long term , but it's very painful.
Especially a lot of employees have thousands and thousands of square feet of space, office space that is almost like a ghost town. So economically it really is challenging for organizations as employers, employees, excuse me, are looking for a different, very different definition of work. And it's not the same as it was just a few years ago. Number four is actually that so many companies, especially larger companies that hire all the time.
They actually have robots who are doing the pre-screening and they're actually called an ATS or applicant tracking system. And what happens is they're the robots or AI or bots are actually doing a lot of the screening.
And if you don't have certain words in your resume or keywords that they're searching for, they find that people on paper, they may be highly qualified, but if your resume doesn't match up well with the keyword that are in the job description or the keywords that the company's looking for, you may be a great employee, but there's a chance that a lot of times when they use, when companies that are doing a lot of hiring, they actually kick out about 90% of the employee.
They kick out or candidates they kick out could have been very, very good employees. And it's simply because the robots doing some of the lifting up front versus an actual person, because as we all know, recruiters are hard to find and recruiters, you have to pay them money, whereas robots, you don't, and they can be doing robots work , uh, 24, 24 by 7, 365. So that's another key thing.
Another big thing that companies need to do within hiring is do a much better job of retaining their top employees. One of the key things that's unique is that some companies that are really innovative are actually doing stay interviews, simply asking employees, why do they stay with the company? Why do they like the company?
Are there any things we can do for you differently to help, to ensure you'll stay longer and companies who want to do that, it's almost like doing an engagement survey with employees, but doing it one on one and actually doing it with your key employees, what is gonna make you stay longer? And why are the reasons you stay? And it's amazing. A lot of times, it's not just because I know that I'm gonna get a raise every year.
There could be very small things that that could be a reason why an employee stays and it could be flexibility. It could be flex hours. It could be the hybrid work environment. It could be a number of things, but unless you ask an employee why they're staying and why do they enjoy their work? You're not gonna know the answer .
So doing stay employees is really something that I would highly endorse for companies, especially with their key people, to making sure you can try to lock them in for as long as possible. And then lastly, it is a lot of companies are scared. They see what the going market is, the going rate for paying competitively.
And some employers are simply scared to do that because for a number of reasons, we won't go it into detail just now, but you've got to make sure that you're paying what the outside market is doing. We actually do at HR catalyst, we do competitive compensation benchmarking on positions and the information, the tool we use is cloud based . So the nice thing is we're getting continuous data. That's actually real time versus very old.
So making sure you're paying your new candidates and your recruits competitively is critical because if you're not guess what, you're gonna be. One of those people who has to wait for months and months, and chances are you're going to , you're gonna be getting a mediocre employee versus one of the top employees who are the ones that you really wanna focus on. So when you think about it too, those are some of the ideas around hiring challenges that I wanted to bring up today.
The other one too, and this is something I get really frustrated with. My clients we work with at HR catalyst is that sometimes they take weeks and weeks to do a hiring, to do first contact, to hiring. You've gotta be able to streamline that. Ideally, you have that an entire process done in less than a week. And I did say less than a week, whereas some companies can think, Hey, I'm the employer. I get to call the shots. Nowadays, the tables have turned folks.
You don't get to call the shots anymore. And if there's an attractive candidate, you're trying to recruit, guess what chances are. They're attractive to a lot of other employers. And by the time you get around to it, if you take your time, you take 2, 3, 4 weeks to recruit. There's a strong likelihood that person would've already taken another job with another employer. So making sure you do a good job of making your recruiting process is streamlined as focused as possible.
And again, that's something that we do with our candidates when we're working with a client and we really push on them very heavily to streamline the process as much as possible. Well , that about covers a topic for today. Thanks for listening for more on all things pertaining to HR , visit our website, HRcatalystconsulting .com . And don't forget to like us to the subscribe to our podcast until next time I'm Mark Mitford. Thanks for listening. Take care. Bye .