5 recruitment trends from our 2022 Job Market Report

1 - Candidates want flexible working
2 - Where do candidates come from?
3 - The impact of videos
4 - Time-to-hire is more important than ever
5 - Salary matters
6 - Download the full report

Our Talent Intelligence Unit has published its second Job Market Trends report. This is full of candidate data, recruiting trends are broken down by industry, and statistical analysis that leads to more powerful hiring.

This report utilised a sample of 28,000 vacancies and 10,000 candidates surveyed across 18 industry sectors.

Below we’ve listed just five of the trends we’ve noticed to help talent acquisition colleagues refine their recruitment processes. The full market report is available to download for free here.

Candidates still want flexible working

Since our last report, candidates who prioritise home-working above all else have dropped from 13% to 10%. However, 80% of those surveyed said home or flexible working was important to them when choosing their next job!

For many sectors, such as care practices or hospitality and leisure, this information won’t be particularly helpful, but for office-based work, it’s never been more important. The world spent 2 years transitioning to a “new world of work,” and that was a difficult upheaval for everyone. Now that most businesses are settled, why would a candidate want to undergo another transition?

Considering the cost-of-living crisis, the most important factor for candidates will be how their new job impacts their bank accounts. The reality is that if you’re struggling to keep wages in line with inflation, the next-best thing is flexible working. Working from home removes a variety of costs for your workers, primarily travel.

Where do candidates come from?

A lot of organisations still don’t track the source of online applications, or only do so for job board postings, but not other methods, especially offline ones (though they could use QR codes). On average 76% of applications had no tracked source – this is up 3% since January!

What we can see is that Indeed continues to be a predominant factor, despite the fact it’s not the only option. In fact, considering over 3 million companies advertise on Indeed at any one time, there’s a chance that Indeed dominates applications because it’s where all the companies are, rather than all of the candidates.

• 62% of candidates hear about a vacancy through Indeed.
• 81% of tracked applications come from Indeed.
• 40% of tracked hires come from Indeed.

Asking candidates to specify where they heard about the vacancy remains a common practice. Arranged alphabetically, there is no evidence candidates choose the first one on the list. After all, the top source - Indeed - is halfway down.​

Increase candidate quality with videos

Only 1 in 3 organisations use videos in their job adverts. This means there’s a major gap in the market for this simple way to steal the best talent! Ads with video saw 33% of applications rejected, whereas ads without video saw 58% rejected! What this tells us is a video advert doesn’t just increases the quality of candidates, meaning you’re not wasting time with unsuitable applications. Videos that show off your company culture attract jobseekers who would fit with that culture!

Would-be applicants value ‘real’ information and insight in these videos, rather than corporate brainwashing. It can be achieved as easily as a staff member doing a day-in-the-life video on their phone, uploading to YouTube or Vimeo and embedding it within the advert.​

Candidate engagement doesn’t just stop at sourcing. It should be right through the process and especially between offer and starting a new job. With time-to-hire so high and candidates scarce, losing 7% of offered candidates is a time and cost drain. ​

Speed is king

Our report in January illustrated how time to hire had increased in the second half of 2021, owing either to vacancies taking longer to approve, or being overwhelmed with too many applications as companies and applicants awoke from ‘furlough slumber.’​

The first half of 2022 has seen the pendulum swing the other way, leading to a drought of applicants for most sectors. This has seen an 8% increase in time to hire – reaching an average of 80 days!

72% of our clients have been able to work with their Continuous Improvement Consultant to create effective application forms that take less than 30 minutes to complete. Some of them have even managed to implement quick-and-easy application forms that take less than 5 minutes! Time-to-hire includes application length – so don’t forget to test them before they go live. In today’s market, first stage applications shouldn’t take longer than 30 minutes!

If it takes you 80 days to get a candidate in the door, there’s a solid chance that competitors will be stealing you away – download our full report to see how you compare to the rest of your sector.

No salary? No candidates!

Survey responses tell us the advert or job alert email are a key influence along with the description of the job. This shouldn’t merely be a cut ‘n’ paste of a job specification. It needs to bring to life the role, culture, and be unambiguous about salary.

41% of candidates say that a job advert that closely matches their search specifications will get an application from them. A further 24% say that the content of the job advert itself will be a defining factor when deciding if they’re going to invest time in your application. That’s 65% of candidates that are prioritizing a clear salary range, working hours, and unambiguous expectations.

Almost 80% of candidates state that they wouldn’t apply for a job that doesn’t specify a salary. If you’re not at least giving a range – especially during the cost-of-living crisis, you’re missing out on a massive pool of candidates!

Where did this candidate data come from?

The Jobtrain platform processes hundreds of thousands of vacancies and many tens of millions of applications per annum, and that has provided our Talent Intelligence Unit access to a huge amount of data. We combine this with external research and our candidate survey data - Candidata™ - to form our JobBrain™ data engine. This delivers insights across the market and in specific sectors for recruitment activity and candidate behaviour, at both macro and micro levels, to help with benchmarking and learning insights for our clients.