What's driving candidate scarcity?

We’ve spoken a lot about the market being candidate scarce and what this means for employers, but haven’t really touched on the reasons why there are so few jobs seekers in the market.

How many job seekers are in the market vs jobs?

There’s no denying that huge levels of growth, spurred on by Covid recovery, have led to an increase in vacancies. Whether it’s to backfill old positions or cope with an increase in demand, growth pretty much always equals new jobs.

At its peek in January 2022 the growth ratio of jobs to job seekers within 25 miles of Birmingham sat at 1.55 vs 0.73. For the same period in Manchester it was 1.42 jobs to 0.74 job seekers compared to the week previously.

Putting our data hats aside, its pretty obvious that the growth in jobs is outweighing the volume of new job seekers entering the market.

Why is job seeker growth slower?

Though Brexit has had a shockwave impact on the recruitment of some skillsets, it hasn’t impacted marketing, digital and creative recruitment nearly as much. So what’s happening?

A lot of movement in 2020/21

In 2020/21 we saw a lot of movement in the market as employees sought new jobs after being made redundant or had their hours or salaries reduced.

Many of these individuals may have been forced into the job market sooner than they had planned, and have since become comfortable and happy with their newest employer. Meaning they’re unlikely to re-enter the market for some time to come.

Feeling committed

Driven by talent shortages and longer times to recruit, many employers are adopting a talent retention strategy, ensuring their employees are happier for longer.

In 2022 alone, many businesses committed to retaining hybrid working post Covid, and are likely to increase wages as part of their talent retention and attraction strategy.

In the event that an unhappy worker finds a new job, we’re also starting to see more counter offers with promotions, salary and package increases being offered to those trying to hand their notice in meaning even the most committed of job seekers are likely to be swayed to stay.

Skills shortages

Thanks to digital transformations and a shifting of priorities towards a digital first approach, we’re seeing more businesses recruiting for digital skills than before.

It’s likely these businesses are facing challenges around the digital skills shortage as training and development in these sectors has not been increasing proportionally in line with demand.

This is impacting the recruitment of developers, digital designers, and specialist marketing skillsets such as PPC, SEO and CRM.