The bites were constant like when you were fishing. A digital marketing agency’s CEO Carolyn Lowe used to post a job ad and wait for more than 100 applications to come rolling in. After the COVID-19 pandemic, the flood of emails from candidates thinned out to perhaps a dozen. Fortunately, Lowe has a new strategy: She scours LinkedIn for potential candidates and entices them to join her small, Austin-based company, called ROI Swift. She says, “We’re poaching people actively.”

Employers are ramping up hiring as the health care epidemic spreads and the economy begins to turn around, although relatively few people are applying. When the outbreak is still raging, many people are wary of switching jobs because they are concerned about their health and finances. Others take advantage of generous unemployment benefits. As a result, many firms are engaging in cross-merging – hiring employees and hiring low- and mid-level managers to compete with them like they were top-level executives. Remote work has become more popular due to pandemic injuries. The change allows companies to target candidates halfway across the country who don’t have to relocate. According to Manpower, a top staffing firm, some 21% of online job postings don’t specify a location.

Currently, people are not open to change, says Jim McCoy, director of talent solutions for Manpower. The market does not have many candidates currently available, so managers must recruit candidates who are not currently available. According to Chris Forman, CEO of Appcast, which creates job advertising technology, as demand for workers has spiked, many companies have seen a 20% drop in the number of people applying to jobs after clicking on an ad. According to a survey conducted by the National Federation of Independent Businesses in March, 42 percent of small businesses had unfilled positions.

I have never seen the job market change so much, he says.

McCoy says headhunter tactics are forcing companies to pay higher starting wages and provide better benefits to attract employees and keep staffers who could just as easily be snatched up by competitors. Software developers, cyber-security specialists, salespeople, financial managers, health care providers, legal employees, warehouse and truckers are among those sought after by companies, McCoy says.

Photo by stock photo / Shutterstock.com