Sitting and Standing Up Jobs w/Andrew Flowers

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Recruitment Flex with Serge and Shelley. I'm Serge.

[00:00:09] And I'm Shelley. And we talk all things recruitment starting right now.

[00:00:17] Bonjour and welcome to the Recruitment technology. We manage more than a billion US dollars a year in job ads. We've been around for about 10 years. Last year, AppCast acquired Bayard Advertising and really are putting forth a premier service

[00:01:42] for recruiters when it comes to both programmatic as well as search, social and other employer

[00:01:47] brand creative services. get the latest reports, there's one that we'll be sharing, which is the 2024 recruitment trends is what is called the best in the industry. And every time one comes out, me and Shelley are always talking about it. Thank you. We had you on the podcast last year, actually right around this time. And you had two predictions.

[00:03:01] One of them was that the U S economy would not dip into a recession in 23.

[00:04:05] that there's still a lot of job openings, more job openings than unemployed job seekers, for example, and a low unemployment rate. So in the sense of having a soft landing, the US did, it seems,

[00:04:11] avoid a recession last year where we had inflation cool and trend downward, while the labor market

[00:04:18] remained strong. So that's how 2023 for the became even truer because when we started 2023, about a year ago, there was a lot of fear has been in the books for a while and there was New York and California coming on play. And I'm not as familiar with the U.S. paid transparency law. So I just Googled it quickly. And it looks like there's over 10 states now that have come online. Are you surprised by that? Because it definitely aligns with what you said at the start of the year.

[00:07:03] No, I'm not surprised, surgeon.

[00:07:05] And I think this trend could continue further. no longer dime a dozen to pick great candidates that you have to go out and find better talent to power your organization. So with the job seekers having the upper hand, there's been a movement in recent years to kind of pressure through legislation, pressure government regulation to require those recruiters, those employers to provide the job seeker with pay transparency upfront.

[00:08:20] And that macro trend of higher labor scarcity is going And so all averages can lie. And there are some postings I've definitely seen where they were transparent with the salary range. And especially if it's on the high end, if you're like, Hey, we're

[00:09:42] advertising for a CEO with a million dollar salary, that's going to

[00:09:46] attract a lot of applicants. it's 2024 recruiting trends report love, always do. Can't get enough. The number one trend, you see that hiring will slow down but not stop, and it's unlikely to get any easier. Can you talk a little bit more about what AppCast was expecting in 2024?

[00:11:01] Yeah, I like to use a color analogy.

[00:11:05] If you think of 2020, I don't expect job losses in 2024. I don't expect a major recession to lead to a spike in unemployment, at least for the US in 2024. But I do expect cooling in this normalization. We're slouching towards beige is the way I would put it. What an election happening in 2024 in the US and obviously interest rates being a key

[00:12:23] factor in how the economy runs. normalization front. So in 2024, a lot of finance people are expecting rate cuts because they think, okay, well, the soft landing is here. We avoided a recession. Now give me the lower rates because inflation is not a problem. Rates are too high. I actually think this is my take is that I don't really expect much change in interest rates for most of 2024.

[00:13:43] I think there's definitely investors who want rate cuts and there's definitely like Joe relatively high for most of this year. Thank you. Do you know something you were talking about just a minute ago and I'm wondering if we can circle back because you hit on something that really piqued my interest and that is this categorization of standing up jobs and sitting down jobs. Is that an Andrew Flowers original? I don't know if I can cite

[00:15:02] anyone. I'm sure someone else thought lackluster recently. I just love it. I love it. As soon as I heard you talking about it, and I thought, this is what we have been needing in our space, because it's almost like trying to divide

[00:16:22] blue collar, white collar,

[00:16:23] or trying to drive a wedge between us, And I think this goes unrecognized, but right now, millennials are the biggest group in the labor force in the Western world with Gen X just behind them. But as of this year, it has flipped that no longer are baby boomers, number three, Gen Z have surpassed baby boomers as the third largest generation in the labor force.

[00:17:41] And so because of that, and because it's going to cause a recession? No, I don't think it's that bad, but I do think the commercial real estate market is in for a big year of upheaval this coming year. Can you go a little bit deeper, Nat? Because we're seeing that obviously in San Francisco, New York, even here in Calgary, Alberta, we have a vacancy rate, office vacancy rate of around 30 percent.

[00:19:04] Because one of the predictions I had was we're getting back to pre-pandemic levels of people amount of remote work done in terms of working days done. Definitely it's come down a bit. So Serge, to your point, there's been a kind of seesaw correction from its heyday during the pandemic and immediately afterwards, but it hasn't gone back nearly to what it was. And so how do we correlate that impact of more remote work? How do we correlate that

[00:20:20] to the commercial real estate.

[00:21:42] Thank you for that.

[00:21:43] And I think where my prediction through to a real kind of definitive soft landing in 2024. But do I expect 2024 to be a boom year

[00:23:02] in terms of the stock market or the housing market,

[00:23:05] or even in terms of job growth from services sectors or from the government.

[00:24:21] So health care, education, leisure and hospitality. recession for Canada in 2024. Really interesting and it's not very often that I get the opportunity to talk to economists and I have a question for you that's Canadian focused. So one of the things with our housing market, we've seen like a hockey stick curve up on pricing. What's also happened

[00:25:40] is we've taken in a lot more immigration than a lot pressure in the housing market. So when you look at like house price to income ratios, right? So the thing I talk about generationally is say 50 years ago, how many years of income did it take to buy the average house?

[00:27:00] And it was like three, three to four.

[00:27:02] If you make $50,000 was an average, but inflation adjusted income that year is in Canada now, it is in the UK, at least in the major cities in the US. It's a big point of conversation. But unless we do something about our land use and how we think about both immigration and housing supply, it's not going away. So Andrew, a question for you, specifically're probably saying, wait a second, I'm just not seeing as much need for recruiting. Well, both can be true at the same time in the sense that we're at a good level, but the rate of change is slowed. So that's the kind of bad news. And I want to be realistic here that I don't think that there's going to be a 2021 in the books for 2024, where as in a year like sectors, healthcare, education, government, and if I had to add more, I would add any kind of industrial sectors, at least in the US in terms of construction and manufacturing and skilled trades, those positions have need for recruiters and need for TA leaders. But I think a lot of TA leaders or recruiters who are struggling right now,

[00:31:00] they're probably coming from like tech sectors, finance labor market. We cover the US, Canada, Europe. So check us out there. You can get in touch with me through Recruitanomics or through formerly known as Twitter or X. You can follow me on X at Andrew Flowers.

[00:32:23] Just first, last name.

[00:32:25] That's my handle at Andrew Flowers.