What hiring snarls can we fix in 2022? Two actions leap out from recent data

What a year! Among the many surprises of 2021 has been the robustness – and chaos – of U.S. labor markets. As we head into 2022, can we identify some improvements that could help job hunting next year? That’s the focus of today’s column.

First, a moment of appreciation for how much U.S. hiring has improved this year. The national unemployment rate was 6.3% last January; it diminished to just 4.2% as of November. Along the way, as reported in earlier editions of Workforce Insights, new urban hubs rose to prominence, job promotions became more common. And remote-work opportunities boomed.?

All the same, getting hired remains harder than it should be. Traditional starter jobs often are framed in ways that wreck newcomers’ chances. This Aug. 18 column tapped into research by LinkedIn data scientist Brian Xu, who analyzed 3.8 million job postings since 2017. His findings: 35% of entry-level job listings called for – gulp! – at least three years of experience.

If you’re saying: “But that’s impossible,” you’re right. First jobs, quite literally, are first jobs. People who take them haven’t worked full-time before. They need to start somewhere.?

There’s another vexing issue, too, which also came into visibility because of analytical work by LinkedIn’s Economic Graph data team. As this column reported Aug. 4, hiring's onramp of job applications, candidate screenings and formal interviews often drags on unduly.?

Analysis of 400,000 confirmed hires on LinkedIn from June 2020 to March 2021 shows that the full run of stages between a candidates’ initial application – and the ultimate start date – can average as much as 49 days in some industries.

So what can be done about the twin stresses of baffling job requirements and drawn-out waiting periods and impossible job requirements?

There’s no better place to look for solutions than in LinkedIn members’ own responses to each of these articles. The entry-level job listing analysis, in particular, attracted 671 comments, the most of any Workforce Report this year. Readers jumped in with personal commentaries, as everyone from CEOs to out-of-work Gen Zers spoke up.

The bluntest advice for employers came from Dan Price, chief executive of Gravity Payments, a Seattle financial-services company. “If you post an entry-level job, you can't require any experience,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “If you require experience, you need to pay more than entry-level pay.?

“I don't know when we got away from this,” Price added. “But you can't require 10 years experience for $35k and complain ‘no one wants to work.’"

?Recruiter Joe Stimac offered a gentler, but still powerful adjustment that could help career starters qualify for what are being listed as entry-jobs. Employers need to “adjust interview questions to target transferable skills,” he wrote.?

College students already prove hirable because of their campus experience making presentations, conducting research and working on teams, Stimac observed. Even if those were unpaid gigs instead of full-time paid jobs, he declared, “those experiences count,”?

What about the other big sticking point: protracted delays in candidate screening and interviews? Some 192 LinkedIn members commented on those data findings, with a lot of them expressing surprise and dismay at the current state of affairs.

“It shouldn’t take that long,” digital marketing specialist Sarah Jordan wrote. Meanwhile, security and privacy specialist Christopher Budd recounted his frustrations at having to “wait over two months to hear something from one very large tech company – after they spent a ton of time telling me repeatedly that they try to have everything wrapped up within a week”

What came through from the totality of the comments is that delays can happen at any stage of the process. Key interviews are slow to get scheduled, and often are postponed. Yes/no decisions often don’t happen in the promised timeframe. Key players take vacations unexpectedly, leaving everything in limbo.

Many commenters focused on ways of fixing each specific snarl. But one satisfied job hunter, Michael Boyink, who went from start to finish on his job hunt in 37 days, offered a more all-encompassing way of getting it right.

?“I appreciated interacting with a company that acted like they actually wanted to hire someone,” he wrote. “So many other companies I applied to took weeks and weeks to reply, which is just too slow for any applicant who is motivated to make a change.”?