Posting your open positions not only helps you find talent, it also helps the community analyze, understand, forecast and prepare the workforce to meet your needs.
After a four-month dip beginning with business closures in March, local job postings have rebounded, and then some. For example, in October, there were just over 24,000 unique positions posted in the Reno-Sparks area, surpassing the previous record set in the summer of 2019, according to EMSI job posting analytics for the Reno-Sparks Metropolitan Statistical Area as of Nov. 24.
There are a number of programs on the market, such as EMSI and Burning Glass, that aggregate, deduplicate and report job posting data.
That data can then be analyzed to calculate the volume and urgency of employer demand for talent within the state and region.
This data is also used to better understand the trends of specific industries, occupations and even hard and soft skills in demand by employers.
For example, since March, the top-posted occupation in our region was Registered Nurses, followed by Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers, and then Stockers and Order Fillers. Communications, Customer Service and Management are the top posted soft skills for that same period.
For jobs requiring a post-secondary degree, we still find Registered Nurses at the top, followed by Accountants and Auditors, and then Software Developers and Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers.
Why is this important? Education systems use this information to guide program development, and government agencies use this information to understand local and regional trends.
Workforce system providers use job postings to help guide job seekers in their search and direct them toward training programs to fill skills gaps. Job postings can also be used to prioritize funding and direct business attraction activity.
However, even as the posting numbers hit record highs, we know many companies are opting not to post open positions at all. Many employers were forced to restructure during the Great Recession, and the expensive and time intensive recruiting process was hit hard.
In an effort to cut costs, about 40% of U.S companies outsourced at least some of the hiring process, and almost all have turned to technology to streamline the labor-intensive recruiting process.
In the past few years, some companies have stopped posting jobs in lieu of recruiting talent directly.
If you’re in a field like HR, Technology or Healthcare, you are no stranger to active recruiting on platforms like LinkedIn.
In fact, the majority of people who took new jobs last year weren’t searching for one, according to the 2019 article, “Your Approach to Hiring Is All Wrong,” in the Harvard Business Review.
Not sure where to start? There are many resources to help you draft a description, including tools such as this job description writer (accessible here: bit.ly/36Czw1e), which will generate a complete draft based only on the occupation and location.
The more detail you can provide, the more valuable it is, not only for the job seeker, but also for the community.
Where to post?
In addition to being beneficial to your community’s ability to meet your workforce needs, posting jobs helps improve an employer’s visibility and brand for future candidates.
While there are other ways communities can access employer-demand data, they are much more resource-intensive, delayed or sometimes even less reliable than job posting data.
So, remember, your job posting is more than a cursory gesture — it’s a valuable metric to inform those who work to support your workforce needs.
“Working Together” is a recurring Voices column in the NNBW authored by the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada, where Amy Fleming is director of workforce development. Reach her for comment at fleming@edawn.org.
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