2023 Candidate Employment Outlook

Thought Piece Video Series Video — Watch Below

December 1, 2022

If you have decided to either replace or find new people for your company, be prepared to think very and work very hard about how to find these people. 

People — the people that you want to join your company — are very reluctant to move from their current role.

The pandemic and the global economic climate and microeconomic climates within countries is leading candidates to feel unsettled.

Candidates are feeling unsettled about giving up their security of their salary jobs, giving up the surety of being employed.

Whilst there is enthusiasm by candidates in the early stages of changing jobs and the recruitment process when push comes to shove and when the candidates are nearing the end of the recruitment process, they are getting cold feet and they are not accepting job offers.

As recruiters it means is that we must manage expectations. We manage candidates throughout the entire process to reassure them that a move is the right thing for them to do.

At De Lacy Executive Recruitment, we believe that right now, 90% of candidates that get to an offer stage with a new job will find that their current employer counter offers. The current employer gives them a promotion and a salary increase, and the temptation is for candidates is to stay where they are, take the money with the current employer, and decline the new job offer.

For most candidates, it is the wrong decision. De Lacy Executive Recruitment believes that 75 to 80% of those candidates who chose not to move to a new employer, will change their mind, and contact De Lacey Executive in the following three and six months because they realize they do want to change employers.

The original reason they considered moving in the first place, will not have changed, and they will realize that they wanted to move on.

The marketplace is currently full of people saying it is a candidate driven market. The truth is, it is not really a candidate driven market. A candidate driven market is when candidates are willing and happy to move. Which is not currently the case.

Many Executives who came through the ranks in the eighties and nineties, when it was so much easier to find people, when there was much lower employment, will be surprized about how hard it is to attract the right talent now. Times are very, very different. Companies must work hard to attract talent.

The response to job adverts when companies or recruiters put adverts into the press, onto websites, and onto job boards, is usually fairly limited. It's usually the people that you don't want who apply to the positions. It's usually people who are in the market already, and sometimes you should question why people in a high employment situation are looking for a job.

Companies will spend three months by themselves to try and find and bring that person in, but eventually realize they are not getting the candidates they need and that's when they might decide to look for a professional recruiter like De Lacy Executive Recruitment.

De Lacy Executive Recruitment's approach is to tun the project in a different way. We will do a much deeper search, but we will also manage the candidates all the way through the process.

As noted above, throughout 2022, candidates decided not to move on.

However, Goodinson believes that in Q1 and Q2 of 2023, changes will begin to occur in the marketplace. In the UK, more people may be forced into the marketplace, with some redundancies coming through across all sectors. There will be more uncertainty from candidates, less surety in their current jobs. De Lacy Executive Recruitment believes the atmosphere will change to one where candidates are confident in their decision to start to move into new positions.

There will likely be some industry consolidations in certain sectors, such as the animal feed business. There will be further consolidation and refinements in the arable sector. All these changes will mean that there will be more people looking to move and having to move on.

Goodinson believes we may start to see the market flip a little bit, and start to see the market with a few more people. He believes that by the end of January there will start to be signs of that happening.

Salary Expectations

This past year and more, candidates used their bargaining power to gain a higher salary. Salaries are creeping up because of counter offers.

Goodinson's advice to clients who are thinking about hiring is to do it now before salaries creep up higher. Clients should work with a good recruitment firm to ensure the person the company is looking for, matches the company's growth strategy.

He says a careful examination of the strategy is required and the role may need to be shaped differently. De Lacy Executive Recruitment helps its clients to shape their job position to find somebody who can do 80% of the tasks they need done at 70% of the cost. De Lacy Executive Recruitment can shape your search and shape company your aspirations to match their strategy more closely.

Now is the time to start having the conversations about your recruitment strategies for 2023. With a lead time of at least three months from starting to look for suitable candidates to actually get into a position where you can start make offers and start to on-board the new talent, the sooner company's begin their search, the better.