Job Market Changes Post-Pandemic

I've been in the recruiting field long enough to remember when staying at a job less than 5 years was a red flag. What's changed? Employees today value growth, purpose, and flexibility more than loyalty. Additionally, the recent labor market has made switching jobs easier and more rewarding, while organizations often fail to provide the career development, culture, or leadership that keeps people engaged. We can see the result, but why is it different? Shift in Employee Expectations & Career Mindsets ➡️ 📉 Economic downturns & instability such as the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 global pandemic taught employees not to rely on loyalty for job security. Out of necessity, companies downsized, outsourced, or automated roles, breaking the long-standing psychological contract of lifetime or long-term employment security. 🎲 Millennials and Gen Z grew up watching parents endure layoffs or unfulfilling work, so they were influenced to prioritize purpose, growth, and balance over stability. 🏆 Social platforms and information access like LinkedIn and Glassdoor normalized career changes by highlighting opportunities and reducing the stigma of short tenures, shifting the vibe from disloyalty to ambition. Market Dynamics & Job Opportunities ➡️ 🌐 The rise of remote work, digital recruitment platforms, and gig apps expanded access to jobs beyond geography and offered perks such as flexibility, autonomy and personalized experience. 🚨 Talent shortages in many industries increased competition for skilled workers, leading to aggressive recruiting and more opportunities to choose from. 🧠 With the shift toward a knowledge economy, work became more skill-based and less location-reliant so employees with in-demand expertise could easily move to higher paying and/or more flexible opportunities. Workplace Factors Driving Turnover ➡️ ✂️ Many organizations cut middle management layers with an aim to be more efficient, limiting visible career ladders which often required employees to leave in order to advance. 💢 Increased pace & pressure of work: Technology and accessibility expectations blurred work/life boundaries, leading to burnout. 👁️🗨️ Many managers were promoted for technical skill, not people leadership. Poor management quality has become more visible and less tolerated (particularly with social channels and global audiences), especially in a values-driven workforce. 🔍 Sites like Glassdoor, Comparably, and PayScale made organizational issues more visible (bad culture, low pay, lack of development) harder to hide, empowering more proactive career decision making for candidates and employees. Parting thought: The youngest wave of talent entering the workforce often gets blamed for what makes running a business more difficult, but it's important to remember, they are a product of generations before who created the environment they enter as adults.

Fewer people are leaving companies, but more people who do (voluntarily or involuntarily) aren't finding a new role within the same calendar year. As ongoing jobless claims continue to rise, I analyzed the data on 16M+ white-collar professionals who left a company from 2019 through 2024. Here's how the data breakdown by year 📆 2019: "The Last Normal Year" What even is normal anymore? 2019 was still far from "normal" as we remained in the thick of ZIRP-era hiring and an employee-favorable job market. High departure volume was coupled with high rates of people finding their next role quickly. Then... the chaos started. 2020: "The Pandemic" The pandemic kicked off the last 5 years of job market chaos. Many people lost their jobs in the early days of the pandemic, only to have the job market tilt in favor of employees and remote work situations by the second half of the year. 2021: "The Great Resignation" The headlines in 2021 told stories of people quitting jobs on their first day, working multiple remote jobs at once, or job-hopping with >10% pay bumps multiple times a year. Everyone was changing jobs... mostly voluntarily and mostly with another job already lined up. 2022: "The Calm Before the Storm" Overall departure volume was the lowest, largely driven by the tail end of the ZIRP-era hiring binge early in the year and a lull in activity before the earliest rounds of mass layoffs started in Q4. 2023: "The Great Termination" As mass layoffs rattled the white-collar employment landscape, the share of people who left a company and didn't find a new role within the year climbed. Layoffs were the primary driver behind departure volume and hiring freezes left more impacted employees out in the cold. 2024: "The Great Stay" More people stayed at their current company, with many clutching to their existing roles, driving the total volume of departures down. But, the other side of the "stay" is that people stayed unemployed for longer with almost half of the people who left a company in 2024 not finding a role before the year's end. Will 2025 be better or worse for white-collar job seekers? A glimpse of hope comes from the data on recruiter hiring from late 2024 (previous post linked in comments). Recruiter hiring is generally a leading indicator for overall hiring. After all, you need to hire the people who will do the hiring first. #jobs #employment #hiring

The latest jobs report confirms what my experience in HR has been telling me for months: the job market has entered a turbulent phase. The numbers are clear: the U.S. added just 22,000 jobs in August, far below expectations, and layoffs surged 39% from July. As an HR professional, these aren’t just statistics—they’re a daily reality. This is why it’s now taking candidates two and a half months on average to find a new job, a duration not seen since 2017. This shift affects everyone. Here’s what it means for two key groups: For Companies and Leaders This isn't a time for panic, but for precision. Focus on retaining your top talent. A volatile market makes employee experience, internal mobility, and clear communication more critical than ever. When you do hire, be strategic, not reactive. The market demands you get it right the first time. For Job Seekers Don't be discouraged. Be strategic. While competition is high, opportunity still exists for those who adapt. Double down on networking, refine your personal brand, and be ready to articulate your value beyond a resume. Your network and your soft skills are your most powerful assets right now. This is a critical moment for us to learn, adapt, and lead through uncertainty. What are you seeing on the ground? Share your biggest challenge or observation below. #JobMarket #HR #CareerAdvice #Recruitment #Economy

I've never received so many unsolicited resumes in the 8 years I've been in #executivesearch as I have in the last 10 weeks. And yet business for us, and most of the firms I speak with, has remained steady since last year. We feel that under pressure recently as a direct result of the, I will diplomatically call it, "trade uncertainty". So it's frustrating that what could be a really great market is being muted by non-market forces with no clear objective or timeline. Yet as mind boggling and impactful as that is, it's only part of the picture. When you combine it with AI and still-evolving workforce planning after the pandemic, it just feels like an accelerant of the disruption that was already underway for the way teams are built and roles are landed. A perfect storm really. A few OTHER things to consider: 1. AI. Of course this comes in at #1 as there's a mountain of AI FOMO and the accompanying reactionary strategies to replacing human work with AI. In terms of productivity impact, some of it is brilliant, most is probably a wash in its current state, and some creates more human work in other areas than it eliminates. Everyone in the c-suite is getting blasted weekly with new pitches from AI SP's and board members demanding to know what the plan is on AI reducing costs and increasing shareholder value. This of course manifests itself in the job market as indecision on creating new roles, backfilling old ones, and modifying/repurposing active staff. 2. Fractional work hanging around as more than just a post-pandemic fad. For all the predictions that it would fade, that's not happening...at all. Some predictions now are as high as 50% of the workforce being fractional by 2030. Pandora's box has been opened - we all knew from personal experience and managing others that the vast majority of office roles can be done pretty well in less than 25-30 hours a week, a lot less in some functions. And the remote work of the pandemic ushered in new tools and processes to better track that in white collar roles, so this previously anecdotal insight is now quantified across a more than adequate sample size. So it does not look like tolerance for FTEs where less than at least 25 hours a week are clearly needed will go anywhere but down from here. 3. Three generations of the workforce still programmed on how to manage their careers based on last century, with the fourth one just trying to find their way in and not calling many of the shots on how all this works yet. This is a CRAZY amount of change for the workforce in the blink of an eye - both sides of it, actively employed and in transition. We help as many of you as we can to navigate all this each week during time we allocate to networking with new candidates. But this amount of disruption calls for better tools and better thinking than what's out there today for executives...

From the Great Resignation to Job Hugging, the job market changed a LOT in just 4 years. In 2021, people were quitting in record numbers. The pandemic helped many people set healthy boundaries around work and get clear on what kind of environment they wanted to be in. Fast forward to today, most employees can no longer afford to do that, hence the term “job hugging” that refers to holding on to your role for as long as you can. Neither extreme is sustainable. What felt like an empowering move just a few years ago feels like career suicide now — and we’ve been waiting a long while for the market to get stable. That’s why now, more than ever, preparation and timing matter. Even if you’re not looking for a new job, do: … go out there and make connections … read job descriptions for your title and see what kind of skills are in demand … prep for hypothetical interviews and get your stories straight … have an updated version of your resume at all times … try to constantly upskill and adapt to AI If you’re job hugging, don’t get complacent. If you’re in an unstable job, look for other opportunities, but don’t quit impulsively. The bottom line is that even though the market is unstable, being proactive will protect your career.