Top Stories: The Impact of Tech Layoffs on the Job Market, the Shrinking Future of College, and More!


Welcome to “The Most Interesting Recruiting Stories of the Week,” a weekly post that features talent acquisition insights and information from around the web to kick off your weekend. Here’s what’s of interest this week:
“The balance of power has shifted from job seekers to tech employers,” GeekWire reports. “For quite some time, there have been more available tech jobs than people qualified to fill them, putting engineers and experienced tech workers in positions of strength when looking for work and negotiating pay. It might seem like a lifetime ago, but it was just this year that Amazon, Microsoft and others boosted compensation to keep pace with inflation and retain employees. Compared to that, the past few weeks feel like an alternative reality.”
“The population of college-age Americans is about to crash,” according to Vox. “It will change higher education forever.” As it will the labor market.
From Inc.: A new report “found that many candidates (50%) feel their race, gender, or ethnicity has hindered them in securing a job; Black (59%) and Asian (59%) employees were the most likely to feel this way. In an attempt to avoid bias in the hiring process, candidates are proactively hiding their external qualities, such as:
“If you give any leader the opportunity to increase their talent pool of potential employees by 15% — with all these new hires belonging to an underrepresented group — they’d jump at the chance, especially given tight labor markets and CEO desires to increase headcount,” Fast Company reports. “Yet too few leaders realize that, according to the U.S. government, people with disabilities are the largest underrepresented cohort in this country. Some 50 million people, that is 15% of the population, are living with disabilities.”
“Companies in the United Kingdom are about to complete the biggest trial of a four-day work week ever undertaken, anywhere in the world,” according to NPR. “The program’s thesis was a provocative one: that for six months, these companies would reduce their workers’ hours by 20%, to 32 hours a week, but continue to pay them 100% of their pay.”
“As of September, employers have been receiving 21 applications per opening, an increase of 20% since the beginning of the year,” this ERE.net article points out. “But before you deduce that the talent shortage is over, the open secret is that there never was a talent shortage to begin with. For various roles in certain industries, however, there has instead been a skills shortage.”
Read the most interesting recruiting stories of past weeks here.
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Join the conversation about all things talent acquisition in the ERE Facebook Group. It’s a great venue to gain information, support, and network with fellow peers. We’re talking about some of the stories above, as well as other hot recruiting topics, so come share your own views in the ERE Facebook Group. We’d love to see you there!
Additionally, got questions? Feedback on a story? Or want to pitch a story idea? Get in touch with ERE editor Vadim Liberman at vadim@ere.net.
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