3 trends shaping the global recruitment sector in 2022

This year has been dominated by widespread candidate shortages, declining job application rates and changing career priorities as The Great Resignation continues to impact many markets across the globe.

To examine and better understand this tight talent market, we recently launched our?Global Recruitment Industry Report 2022 , which explores aggregated data from our agency users over Q1-Q2 2022, including quarter-by-quarter and year-on-year comparisons.

This report is also accompanied by a supplementary report that examines in-house user data in Australia and New Zealand specifically.?You can access both reports and our on-demand webinar here .?

In the meantime, our report’s analysis uncovered three key trends that are shaping the recruitment sector in 2022. Discover what these trends are and what they mean for recruiters below.

1. New jobs are outstripping candidate demand?

The average number of new jobs created per JobAdder account has remained strong in the first half of 2022, with Australian agency users creating an average of 65.86 jobs in Q2, while New Zealand users created an average of 56.47 jobs.?The UK shows little movement with 58.54 in Q2, while the US and Canada stabilise at 60.82 and 43.43 accordingly.

Unfortunately, this job growth was not met with increasing candidate interest and applications. The first six months of 2022 ended with an average applications per job rate of 14.80 for in-house users and 10.50 for agency users?

This reflects what many recruiters have reported, a tight talent market with fewer applications and interest from candidates.?

Recruitment thought leader Greg Savage believes that these numbers reflect an inconvenient truth for anyone involved in hiring. “Traditional tactics to attract candidates are simply no longer sufficient. Organisations, both agency and in-house, that rely on job boards and LinkedIn only to attract candidates are being left far behind.”?

“The science and art of candidate attraction, engagement and management is a complex cocktail of branding, outreach and consistent communication, and will be the differentiator going forward. Even though it’s true that an economic slowdown might free up candidate supply, the shift is a fundamental one, and superficial and knee-jerk responses to hiring needs will lead to failure.”

2. Recruiters are leveraging proactive sourcing to find talent

As a result of these market conditions, more and more recruiters are turning to proactive sourcing rather than ad posting to find talent.?

This could mean searching through their JobAdder database to find candidates they already have or utilising two-way integrations with SEEK or LinkedIn to proactively find talent.?

According to our analysis, 45% of agency users were finding candidates through proactive sourcing channels in Q2 2022, a big jump from pre-pandemic levels which hovered around 20%.?

Additionally, those agency users sourcing through their JobAdder database are seeing significantly faster days to place than those using external sources like ad posting. For example, in the US, agency users filling permanent placements in Q2 2022 took 47.70 days to place when using external sources, compared to 34.90 days when using their JobAdder database. In Australia, those using external sources took an average of 42.40 days to place permanent roles while those using their database took 27.20 days.

3. Agency fees are rising steadily as demand grows?

The Australian market has seen consistently steady growth in average agency fees over the last 12 months, rising incrementally each quarter over the last 12 months.?

In comparison, the New Zealand market saw more fluctuations in average fees. While it saw a big dip in Q2 and Q3 last year (0.90% and 2.20%), this then bounced back in Q4 by 2.30%. In 2022, there was another dip of 2.10%, followed by another slight rise by 0.70%.?

Greg Savage states: “In Australia and New Zealand, we can see that average fees have trended upwards over the past year. This isn’t a sign of agencies taking advantage of a tight candidate market and pushing fees up across the board. What we’re seeing is the majority of agencies simply firming up on their resistance to pressure to discount their fees and walking away from customers who don’t recognise that finding candidates in this market has real value.”