Hunting for work and loving it: why job hunters' optimism is at a high

What’s it like, trying to find work these days? Careers expert Tara Jalali has seen a remarkable upturn in the past 18 months.

“It was a little disheartening a year ago,” she recalls. Candidates weren’t sure how to get their strengths across in video interviews. Employers’ requirements didn’t match the skills of available workers. An overwhelming number of applications didn’t even get responses.

Now, “everything’s improved,” Jalali says. Work-from-home opportunities have vastly increased. The skills mismatch is easing, as companies rewrite job requirements to meet candidates halfway. And a lot more employers are offering sign-on bonuses – including some as big as $5,000.

What Jalali is seeing in her job (as university relations manager at PAE, a government contractor) turns out to be a powerful national trend as well. Confidence among active job seekers has reached a record high, according to LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index, which surveys about 5,000 members of the U.S. workforce every two weeks.?

On a confidence scale ranging from -100 to +100, the cohort of active job seekers surveyed from Dec. 5 to Dec. 18, 2021 averaged +29. That’s more than double the reading in the earliest days of the survey (April 2020), when active job seekers’ confidence registered at a mere +12.

As the chart above shows, this upturn in confidence has been a drawn-out process, with zigzags along the way – but also with an unstoppable push toward better times.

Granted, other economic indicators, such as the jobless rate or private-sector hiring, have moved faster. It’s taken a while for job hunters to feel more convinced that things are getting better. (And more stumbles in the efforts to subdue the COVID pandemic could mean more backtracking ahead.) But for now, it’s a good time once again to be a job hunter.

“There’s been a shift in power” when it comes to job searches and hiring negotiations, says Jerry Lee, cofounder and chief operating officer of Wonsulting, which provides career advice to people from non-traditional backgrounds.

It’s easier now to get reliable information about pay and working conditions at potential employers, Lee observes. Better online job-search tools – and the rise of career influencers who offer lots of free, bite-size advice online – also are making the job hunt easier and more productive, Lee adds.

Add it all up, says Jonathan Javier, Wonsulting’s CEO, and “many job-seekers are now able to obtain hybrid/remote roles, plus roles that are more tailored towards their values.”

Strikingly, the most vulnerable active job hunters — those who don’t currently have a job – are the ones showing the greatest uptick in optimism. Their latest confidence reading, in December, was +19. That’s a big rebound from a low of just +1 in November 2020.

But the mood is brightening, too, for people with current full-time employment who are hoping to find something better. Their confidence levels had climbed to +35 last month, up from a more hesitant +18 in July 2020.

It’s important to note that active job seekers’ optimism hasn’t quite caught up to the average level of all respondents in the Workforce Confidence survey. That gap currently stands at 11 points (+40 for all respondents; +29 for active job seekers). It was as wide as 20 points in July 2020 (+31 for all respondents, versus a mere +11 for active job seekers).

Tiffany Thompson, president of Indianapolis-based DaMar Staffing Solutions, says she’s still encountering job seekers with unrealistic views of their marketable skills – or what they might earn in a new job. “We constantly need to have conversations about pay,” she says.

Even so, she says, a lot of her clients in fields such as professional services, insurance and health care are just looking for a chance to switch into a more reasonable work environment.

Often those clients have been at companies that cut staff early in the pandemic, increasing individual workloads without boosting pay. Business is improving now at these companies, but work conditions aren’t getting lighter. In such cases, she says, a better job is often within reach.

Methodology

LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index is based on a quantitative online survey distributed to members via email every two weeks. Roughly 5,000 U.S.-based members respond to each wave. Members are randomly sampled and must be opted into research to participate. Students, stay-at-home partners and retirees are excluded from analysis so we can get an accurate representation of those currently active in the workforce. We analyze data in aggregate and will always respect member privacy. Data is weighted by engagement level, to ensure fair representation of various activity levels on the platform. The results represent the world as seen through the lens of LinkedIn’s membership; variances between LinkedIn’s membership & overall market population are not accounted for.

Alexandra Gunther and Adam Cohen ?from LinkedIn Market Research contributed to this article.