Yazad Dalal
Hi everyone, I’m Yazad Dalal, Chief Growth Officer here at Joveo and welcome to Recruiting Realities, where we bring to you the latest developments and insights in recruitment. Today we’re speaking about the state of the labor market with our own in-house labor market economist, David Garrett. Hello David.

David(Joveo)
Howdy, how’s it going?

Yazad Dalal
And for our listeners at Joveo, we publish interactive insights across all major occupations in the U.S. You can check that out on our website joveo.com/interactive-insights. Folks, the most recent U.S. jobs report came out last Friday for the month of February. It is definitely raising some eyebrows. The report, not just the shenanigans in the Labor Department, but after what seemed like a positive start to the year, Feb’s report came in with a cut of 92,000 jobs. So across sectors, information was down, federal government employment, but that’s a story that’s been going on for 13, 14 months, down transportation, warehousing, down all between 10,000 and 17,000 each. Transportation and warehousing, by the way, now having lost almost 160,000 jobs since February last year.

Also, a large portion of these losses came from healthcare, which had been the stalwart sector. I think keeping overall job growth net positive over the past few months, that lost 28,000 jobs. We understand that that’s also attributed to, I think, an almost four week strike in California and Hawaii. And that strike is now over.

Additionally, in Joveo’s own data, we’ve seen competing trends across the healthcare sector. One of the things that we look at as a kind of indicator is the data behind cost per click. So that’s how much advertising platforms are charging advertisers, in our case, healthcare systems, for a click by a target profile, in this case, a candidate. We’re seeing that increase for CNAs, for LPNs, relatively stable for LPNs. RNs have seen some pretty good declines over the past few months.

And of course, not only is it varied across those different types of nursing, but it’s also geography dependent. So Joveo’s data shows that for RNs, for instance, the median cost per click in New York is nearly three times that of Nevada. Seems like maybe it’s an obvious one, but having a geographically aware bidding strategy is key for advertising those roles. So David, I have lots of questions. Let’s get started. Share your take. What do you make of all this news?

David(Joveo)
Yeah, I feel like we finally got a report that is backing up what a lot of TA teams and recruiters have been feeling. The market’s cooling down, you know, and it’s changing how our listeners have to sort of play the recruiting game. Payrolls continue to dip. Unemployment rate has now moved up to the mid 4% of things at 4.4. And long-term unemployment in particular has been rising to the point where the average duration for unemployment is the 25 to 26 week range.

And meanwhile, labor force participation has slipped back down towards the low 62% range. And all of this really means that there are more people on the sidelines, more candidates in the market, but not all of them are confident, active job seekers who are aggressively always going and actively looking on your career site, things like that. For recruitment marketers in particular, that’s a pivot from sort of what we used to have, which was like, I’ll pay anything to get the right candidate to…I need to do some work to maybe find the right person and sort of be a little more proactive about that and give them a good reason to move. Because you’re also seeing a lot of people who are more cautious given the way the lid market has changed over the past year or so. In practice, you’re likely seeing more applications per role. You’re probably getting, especially in those white collar roles and information heavy jobs where AI has been a high concern over the past year.

You know, budgets may be staying flat or even get tighter as people start really reevaluating their hiring focus. We’re seeing a lot of hiring need and sentiment sort of slow down for the year. And those long-term unemployed people are going to continue slowly drifting out of the labor market and they will respond better to a message on stability or things like that if you can start including those in your sort of job descriptions or sort of in your targeting for candidates.

So yeah, it’s really the point where using data to spot where talent supply is loose and tightening pre-screening as volume rises and more people into that unemployment, unemployed labor market, if you will, and shifting the spins towards the roles and locations, as you mentioned with Nevada, that are genuinely hard to fill where you might get a better bang for your buck, depending on your volume.

Yazad Dalal
Got it. Well, I think having so many more people on the bench, so to speak, is hard for candidates. Waiting 26 weeks to find a job is tough. And we’ve all been there and we will all eventually be there at one point in our careers or another. It also means employers can be more picky and will be more picky. And then if you are an employer or a TA leader, it also means needing to focus much more on quality candidates because you have for better or for worse, unfortunately, such a broad variety of folks to choose from. So thank you, David. Thank you to our listeners. Don’t forget to download our recruiting benchmarks report at joveo.com and we will see you again soon.

David(Joveo)
Thanks for having me.