Job Search |

Hiring Trends for 2022

This year is shaping up as an excellent time for many workers to grab better job opportunities, secure better pay packages, ask for additional benefits and perks, and ride out this wave before it fizzles out.

If you’re going to look for a job in 2022, adjusting your actions with these trends in mind might give you a quicker and easier result:

1. Online job search is now dominated by Artificial Intelligence. All recruiters and most companies now screen candidates into a competition with algorithms searching for keywords and other data on your application or resume. This means it is not a human being but a machine that is deciding if you are worth time and effort to interview. You may be a perfect candidate in terms of your experience and skills but if you don’t know how to get through the AI portals with a green light, then you will not make it to the next step.

2. There is an acute labour shortage in many sectors. The pandemic has produced a lot of job churn in some organizations, e.g., when older workers take early retirement or get recruited into better jobs, or when younger workers leave for family reasons or to find better jobs. This means that you can look for opportunities with your current employer, even a lateral move but ask for higher pay. It also means that new graduates should target preferred employers and ask for higher pay and perks than they could expect previously in a tighter job market.

3. Negotiating higher salaries and benefits is becoming normal for workers with significant experience as employers are more willing to negotiate to retain talent and experience. Perks and benefits have expanded to include not only health care but parenting leave, family planning, childcare support, and flexibility in terms of hybrid office/home employment.

4. Remote work has its pros and cons. Some organizations are indeed offering competitive salaries to workers who live in different geographic locations than head office. However, once this war for talent calms down, workers may find their employers reducing pay scales to level the pay gap between geographic locations or lower salaries in general by hiring more global talent working from developing countries.

Get it straight from the horse’s mouth!

How to determine if a job is a good fit for you.

If you want to know what another career field is all about, how it really works—then get it straight from the horse’s mouth. This old saying refers to the old practice of opening a horse’s mouth to check its teeth to help a buyer determine its health—whether or not it will be a reliable and dependable investment over time–and therefore it’s actual value.

Talking to workers who have been in a particular field for 5 years or more will often give you a true picture of that field. Try and find somebody who is doing a job you would love to do. Here are some questions, you can ask anybody who is doing a job you think you might enjoy:

_ How did you get into your field? Is that still a good way?

_ What are the major responsibilities of your position?

_ What is a typical workday or week like for you?

_ What do you like and dislike about your position?

_ What are the critical skills and personal characteristics needed in this kind of work?

_ What are some of the major problems or issues that someone in your position faces?

_ What are the prospects for someone entering your field today?

_ What are the career paths of this profession? With experience in this field where can a person move?

If you get into a discussion about your background, you can ask:-

_ Given my background, what do you think I need to do to become competitive for a job in this field?

_ Can you suggest anyone else I might talk to?

JOBJOY SMILE

HORSE PUNS

You’ll stirrup trouble!

Quit foaling around.

He has a colt following.

It’s pasture bedtime.

You sound a little hoarse.

I’m waiting for the mane event.

He’s my mane man!

To be or not to be…that is the equestrian.

Don’t look, I’m neigh-kid.

What most people do in first 5 years of job loss … nothing, usually!

Only 1 of 5 individuals who lose their job are pro-active in finding another. Why?

During the pandemic, millions of individuals across North America were laid off or lost their jobs. How will they respond?

Many will, of course, look for another job in the same field.

But, if they do not find one, most of us assume that they take the situation into their own hands and do one of the following:

– go back to school

– move to another city or region

– sign up for an apprenticeship or trade

– become self-employed.

Turns out our assumptions our wrong. According to Statistics Canada, which looked at what workers did during the recession in 2009; most individuals do not adopt these seemingly obvious adjustment strategies.

There were differences depending on gender, age, level of education, and length of unemployment–but, generally speaking, whether it was in the first year of job loss or the fifth year, only 1 in 5 workers adopted even one of these adjustment options.

This helps us to understand why many employers are complaining about the difficulty of attracting workers to an economy that is starting to open up. Given a choice—supported by some economic security—most workers do not want to return to a dull, dirty or dangerous job (in general, these are the types of jobs that employers now want to fill)–and will wait until they must. Big surprise! Only a few it seems will use this period of unemployment to change their careers.

However, some white-collar workers with high levels of education also lost their jobs, and more may do so if the economy slips into a post-pandemic slowdown or recession.

This study from Stats Can indicates the most people, but especially this highly educated group, will ride out the effects of the pandemic in the hopes of getting their old jobs back or something similar within a year.

In other words, most people (4 out of 5) do not change their behaviour or make significant changes in their lives when they get laid off or lose their jobs.

Patterns of adjustment

For the 1 in 5 people that adopt an adjustment strategy, I have noticed the following in my 30 years of practice, which is now backed up by some statistics (remember, this is not most people but the 20% of unemployed people who adopt a strategy after losing their jobs):

– In the first year after job loss, the most common strategy among laid-off women is to enrol in post-secondary education.

– The longer the period of unemployment, the more likely both men and women will move to another region or city.

– Older displaced workers are set in their ways and do not want to change so they are less likely to move to another region or invest in skills, in both the short and long terms.

– Those with more education are more likely to become self-employed or go back to school for another degree, especially if they already have a university degree.

Interestingly, the data from Stats Can, there appears to be little difference between people who lose a job and those who don’t when it comes to making adjustments to their work situation—neither group is inclined to make changes to their behaviour or their career.

I am here to help those in the minority who must or want to make a change.

Newcomer’s Insights to Job Search

Eight months ago, I started working with an experienced IT Business Analyst who relocated from South Africa to Canada. While his previous experience was in the banking sector, he recently landed a role with a national gaming after applying to dozens of jobs and being interviewed for 4 other roles before landing this job.

Based on his job search experience in Ottawa with me as his coach, he asked me to pass on the following advice to others facing a similar challenge. In my view, anyone looking for a job whether they are relocating from afar or have been living in the same city all their lives will find some value in his advice, and anyone who has ever looked for a job will find his advice interesting.

Job Search Tips

– Don’t assume an easy transition because there are significant entry barriers to the local job market, e.g. Citizenship status, Security Clearance, and French language skills are all necessary to work with the city’s largest employers federal, provincial, and municipal governments.

– Customize your resumé for each job posting.

– Don’t think you’re going to get a job within two months, one that is comparable to the one you left behind. Instead, be prepared to be very pro-active in your job search in terms of time and commitment.

– Don’t underestimate the value of a partner to assist with financial support and provide networking opportunities through their colleagues and network.

– Be prepared to “sell yourself” in the job market. He came from South Africa where job searchers are expected to be modest and let their resume speak for itself. His experience here is that employers want you to paint a very clear picture in interviews about your value proposition. You have to speak to your strengths and be specific about how your previous experience applies to their needs and priorities.

He feels he got this job offer because I had prepared him with PAR stories and helped him practice giving concrete examples of his experience and skills, after asking specific questions to interviewers to help him determine the right examples to give. For example, when the interviewers told him that Ontario’s gaming industry is highly regulated, he was able to communicate in clear and coherent terms how he managed certain projects in SA’s highly regulated finance sector that turned out to be directly comparable to what his interviewers were looking for.

IT is a hot sector and most people assume it is “easy” to get a job if you have tech skills. But this is not the case for many job searchers, especially those who relocate to Ottawa, or those just getting out of school, or those with any other limitations.

Getting job search assistance can reduce the time and costs (e.g. every day without a pay cheque is an opportunity cost). If you’re hitting obstacles, get help!

What should a cover letter cover?

Break through the crowd of cover letter with these tips!

Only send a cover letter if they ask for one. When they ask for a cover letter, it’s usually because your resume is going to be screened by software or a low level HR clerk, neither of which is equipped to interpret your resume to determine if it matches the job description. Instead, they want a shortcut.

The purpose of your cover letter is to give them that shortcut. Therefore, a cover letter should be a clear, concise and coherent summary of a match between you and the key/essential requirements of the position.

Think of it as a fact-matching exercise

List their key requirements in one column then correlate your experience and skills in metric terms with those requirements. For example, if they require a degree in a field, name your degree and year of completion’ if they ask for X years of experience with a certain software, provide them with your number of years; if they want to know what kinds of projects you’ve worked on, be specific (name of project, duration, objective, your role, budget, results); and so on. Once you’ve done the two-column exercise, you can formulate a one-page cover letter.

You then refer them to your resume for details. The cover letter is not for you to emote about how much you admire the company and what a great candidate you are. The purpose of the cover letter is to give them a good reason to read your resume where you demonstrate your “job specific knowledge” and provide evidence of why you can perform the required “duties and responsibilities”.

Customize

Cover letters and resumes need to be customized to a job posting. They are marketing documents that help differentiate you from other competitors. In order to optimize your chances of breaking through the glut of applications and rise above the noise, get professional help!

Interviews–listen, laugh, & land the job!

I often use this blog to talk about the importance of narrative in career development. Telling good stories in an interview can be essential to getting a job offer. Here’s why:

“I must sell myself.” This is the mindset of most individuals when they go into a job interview. They presume that the interview is primarily about them. After all, the opening question is usually some variation of “Tell us about you.”

I know it’s counter-intuitive but the interview is not really about you; it’s really about the needs and priorities of the organization conducting the interview and, more specifically, about the needs and preferences of the manager that you might report to.

When I coach my clients through interviews, I ask them to take some time after the interview to write down the questions they were asked. For example, here are some questions a client was asked at a recent interview for a Business Systems Analyst (BSA) role:

– What are some of the challenges I have had with communicating to stakeholders?

– What are some of the challenges I have had communicating with employees?

– How do I deal with not sticking to a deadline and how do I communicate this with stakeholders?

– How have I contributed to the productivity of my previous team?

It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand what a BSA does. What matters here is that these Qs reveal the concerns of the employer, they reveal the internal challenges or pain points this company is experiencing in their current client service operations. They want to make sure that this candidate knows how to deal with such challenges and can solve these problems, not make them worse.

Most people think of an interview as a test, a one-way street on which interviewers ask questions and the interviewee must give the ‘right’ answers in order to pass the test and get a job offer. Again, I know this is counter-intuitive, but an interview is actually a conversation or dialogue conducted by an employer who is trying to get to know you well enough to decide if you are ‘safe’ to hire. Your goal in the interview is to make it easier for the employer to hire you because you are, in fact, a ‘safe’ candidate, someone who will make the manager’s job easier not harder.

Because I had prepared my client for such Qs, he told stories of himself in action solving these types of issues and getting quantifiable results for his previous employers. He even managed to insert some humour into his stories.

Think about this: who is the most popular person at a party (besides the host providing the food and beverages)? It’s usually the best joke teller or storyteller. We live in a narrative culture, immersed in stories all around us—it’s what binds us together socially. The strongest communicators among us are often the most popular, sometimes the most likeable.

Everybody enjoys a good laugh—just like the strong communicator at the party, you will become instantly likeable in an interview when you share a funny anecdote that gives people a chuckle. A human hires humans not resumes.

In summary: the best way to increase your chances of landing a job offer is to tell compelling stories of you in action solving problems for previous managers that are relevant to the manager you are interviewing with while getting quantifiable results…and generating a few chuckles along the way!

Where are the jobs?

I learn from my clients about what is really happening in the job market. Based on their experiences, here are some significant trends that may help you with your career planning, job searching, or advice for your children.

Job Market: Governments claim unemployment is at record lows. Employers complain of skill shortages and their inability to fill job vacancies. Job seekers complain about finding decent jobs. What is going on?

a. More hiring is happening…if you have a professional or technical skill with work experience. Recruiters and employment agencies are definitely filling positions for employers who want experienced credentialed employees. While recruiters and agencies demand recent employment experience, many employers are more open to employment gaps from candidates—especially women who have taken time off to start or care for family.

b. E-commerce is hiring young adults with technical diplomas. There is not doubt that it is easier to get a job these days if you are a 20-something with a 1-year diploma in Mobile Application Development and Design than if you have a 4-yr Arts degree.

c. STEM (science-technology-engineering-math) careers are definitely on the rise, and so are jobs in all areas of healthcare. However, immigrants with qualifications in these areas still face formidable barriers to employment, but less so in the technology sector.

d. Employers won’t pay for training. One of the reasons that employers claim there is a shortage of skilled labour is because most of them won’t pay for training. It is cheaper to pay skilled workers a higher salary than add the costs of training.

e. Employers with rich market capital—the Googles, Facebooks, Apples of the world—will pay for training because they can afford it. They also have to pay high salaries because their offices are located in large urban centres with high housing costs, which is another reason companies are having trouble attracting skilled labour.

f. Employers are biased. Even young adults with technical skills are having a hard time landing that first career job because employers still prefer experienced workers. Having said that, ageism is alive and well in the labour market. Older workers looking for jobs have to rely less on their work history and more on demonstrating to potential employers how they can add value to their operations.

g. Beware of short term jobs. The employers that complain loudest about lack of skilled labour are often the same ones who are moving to replace labour through AI, automation and robots. It’s important for students to analyze the trends in a sector before investing in a career that can be easily replaced by technology in the near future.

h. Employers will not do what’s necessary to attract and retain young workers. Many GenZ and millennials still live at home and pay few bills, so they often leave a job if they don’t like it (because they can afford to). And they don’t seem to like cubicle cultures in big hierarchical organizations. Many millennials are starting their own companies, often with friends because they prefer smaller companies that have a more “engaging” culture of community and collaboration. Most large employers are not yet willing to make costly investments or structural changes in their practices to retain these workers; therefore, they complain about skill shortages that are due not to a lack of labour supply but a lack of employers willing to change their people management practices.

i. Growth of government siphons off skilled labour. Federal, provincial and municipal governments continue to practice deficit spending and drive up debt in order to expand programs and projects that employ lots of people who might otherwise fill jobs in the private sector. In Ontario alone, the number of public servants increased by 5 times over 10 years under the recent Liberal government. The appeal to workers is obvious—the public sector is one of the last workplaces to offer job security.

j. The gig economy is expanding. More workers in all age groups are developing multiple jobs or streams of income because certain social, technological and economic trends are forcing them to do so. Employers are learning how to embrace and manage contractors. In the war for talent and skills, employers are starting to offer contractors better terms and working conditions.

Hiring for your past success or future potential—what does your next employer want?

All employers have a hiring agenda. They want individuals who can help them reach their corporate goals by overcoming the problems, challenges, pressures and issues that get in the way.

Future potential

Context or ‘culture’ is very important in hiring decisions. For example, the newspaper industry has collapsed and thrown thousands of journalists out of work as advertisers shift to online platforms…but many social media companies don’t hire newspaper journalists because they want people with a different mindset, or employees not conditioned by ‘old’ forms of publishing. These employers often start with young people who have basic technical skills and hire for future potential.

Such employers often profile their top 3-5 employees to identify their success factors, and then formulate interview questions to uncover those attributes because they are looking for certain traits, capabilities or values that match the culture of the company. This is especially true for the ‘disruptors’ that are creating new markets, such as Apple or Google, or companies eating into the market share of traditional sectors, the way Netflix is challenging broadasters or Amazon is replacing retailers.

Many of these ‘new’ economy employers focus on the role of their interviewers to ask questions that will uncover future potential to operate in emerging or creative industries requiring a higher level of cognitive tasks. They often use a rating system when interviewing candidates about their interests, values, and outside activities, more than their previous job experiences. They are often looking for signs of adaptability, flexibility and creativity because these jobs require individuals who can be trained to the shifting context they will be working in.

Past success

Most traditional employers use a behavioural-based methodology when interviewing candidates. This approach is based on the idea that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior in similar circumstances, e.g. “tell me about a time when you had to….” These employers identify what competencies and behaviors are important in a job and then ask questions to see if the candidate has behaved in the desired way in the past.

This is especially true for roles that use metrics as measures of success–the kinds of problem, service, and incident management tasks that make up so many IT, customer service, social work, health, public administration jobs, including sales reps, tech troubleshooters, call center agents, case workers, nurses, border agents, or airline pilots. Often these tasks are routine, methodical, sometimes manual, and sometimes administrative. Employers of this type might give tests, call previous employers, and conduct behavioral-based interviews to get a clear picture of past behaviors beyond what candidates present on a resume. These employers focus on the role of the candidate in the interview.

What to do

When preparing the interviews, it is important to research the culture of a potential employer, to find out their approach to interviewing. Will they focus on past success or future potential?

It is also important for you as a candidate to communicate with clarity and confidence. This means you need to know the right questions to ask a potential employer in order to uncover their hiring agenda. You need to answer their questions with compelling stories that demonstrate specific ways that you can add value to their operations, whether they are looking for concrete examples from past experience or trying to uncover certain attributes.

Having the right strategy and tactics in place before an interview can help you win a job offer in a very competitive job market. Jobjoy provides a range of services to mine your story for the best material to present to potential employers.

If you are trying to make a career or job change, it is important to prepare for interviews accordingly.

How To Leverage Your Goodwill Network Into A New Job

Don’t overlook the obvious. Reach out to people you know, including family and friends, as well as people you have worked with or helped in the past. This is your goodwill network, i.e. people who want to help you because they like, love, respect you. Your job is to make it easy for them to help you!

Let me illustrate with a real-life example. I recently worked with a young woman who moved from Vancouver to Toronto in August this year. She had a specific job target to work as an Underwriting Assistant in commercial insurance.

She started applying to postings online in September but got no callbacks. She was convinced that employers would not hire her until she had completed a CIP credential (she was 1/3 of the way through). I assured her this was not a major obstacle to her job search.

Instead, I explained to her how employers get hundreds and often thousands of resumes in this kind of stagnant economy and look at only a few, maybe the first 25-50. In this kind of economy, employers can afford to be choosy and they will not hire until they feel ‘safe’ with a candidate. It is so important to understand why this is the case and how to overcome it.

Her previous job had been with a B.C. regulatory agency but she did have 1.5 yrs experience with an insurance company prior to that. I suggested a more effective job search would be to contact her previous employer and other insurance industry contacts in Vancouver and ask them if they knew anyone in Toronto that she could talk to.

I revised her resume to highlight the knowledge, skills and experience she offered as an underwriting assistant, specifically how she could help underwriters do their jobs better, get more clients, serve them better, and make more money.

She started by contacting family members that worked as insurance brokers, which led to several referrals and 2 interviews but no job offers. I suggested that she follow up with people that she’d contacted the first time around but who did not respond, to remind them what she was looking for. It’s sometimes difficult, I said, to understand that your job search is your top priority but other people are busy with their own priorities. Reminding them of your request is not bothering them, it’s simply making it easier for them to help you.

By doing exactly this, she learned from her previous supervisor at an insurance company that they were opening a small office in Toronto. He immediately forwarded her new resume to the head of that office. She was invited to an interview. I prepped her, a week later she got a job offer, and she started her new job the following week!

In summary, make a list of everyone you know and tell them your job target, i.e. a specific role with a specific org or kind of org, then ask them, “Do you know anyone I can talk to?” Make it easy for them to help you. By giving them this targeted niche, all they have to do is go through the Rolodex in their head and pull out names. Then follow up!

If you need help following up in an efficient and effective manner, then call me 1-800-798-2696 or email george@jobjoy.com

Job search success! A true story of the right mix of strategy & tactics

Looking for job postings online, following up on tips, asking for referrals, attending workshops in your hometown is still hard work, even in such familiar surroundings with a built-in goodwill network of family, friends and former colleagues.

Imagine how much harder it is to job search when you move from another country, even with solid credentials and experience. I experienced this very challenge myself when I moved to Australia from Canada in the 80s with no prospect of a job. It took me 8 months to land something commensurate with my degree and experience.

Each person is different of course and has a specific set of credentials and experience, and each one is operating in a unique set of circumstances. But, in my personal and professional experience, the right mix of pro-active job search strategy and tactics executed with persistence and patience always pays off in a good job. Here’s a true and recent case:

In May 2015, Paul relocated from the UK to Toronto when his wife got transferred with an international company (can’t use his real name due to his wife’s terms of confidentiality). Paul had resigned his UK position as a Senior Building Surveyor with an engineering company that managed construction projects in the public sector.

After getting his two young sons settled into T.O. school and life, he started looking for work in his field in line with his visa conditions. He did a smart thing and followed up on leads from his UK contacts but they did not materialize into any job prospects.

He also sent out dozens of resumes but got no call-backs. When I looked at his resume, there was an obvious issue—Building Surveyor is not a job category in Canada, so he wasn’t getting screened in for interviews. But, more importantly, there is an oversupply of construction professionals in Canada, so employers didn’t need to consider prospects from the UK.

We quickly modified his resume and LinkedIn profile to better position/package him for the T.O. market as a Senior Project Manager-Construction because it combined the key technical, account management, and leadership responsibilities of his UK role.

When he sent out his resume and followed up with phone calls, employers now took his calls and talked to him. These conversations taught him a lot about the employment culture in Canada, and what was similar or different to his experience in the UK. It also demonstrated to him the importance of being pro-active in a job search for senior roles.

Consequently, he dialled back his online job search and put together a list of target companies. I encouraged Paul to leverage his natural charm and strong communication skills into “networking” in his neighbourhood. I explained the benefits of doing so. Sceptical at first, he started telling his neighbours and parents at his sons’ school what it was that he was looking for and asking them directly if they knew anybody in his targeted companies.

Besides building his confidence that his UK experience offered value to the Canadian marketplace (because his neighbours took him seriously), this pro-active approach generated a number of referrals, including one to a local recruiter who specialized in placing senior people in construction. This recruiter introduced Paul to a small firm headed by two partners from the UK. They were immediately interested in Paul but didn’t have a position that fit his experience.

I explained to Paul that this was code for “we don’t know you well enough to feel safe enough to hire you.” I explained to him how 40%+ of jobs are created for senior people who walk through the door, who get into conversations that uncover a firm’s key corporate goals/priorities and the major challenges that get in the way of them achieving those goals, and who can then spot the work opportunity in the intersection between the two…because a job is nothing more than activity organized around solving problems to reach corporate goals.

After meeting both partners several times in a professional manner in their offices and in a social setting over dinner, Paul was sent a job offer, which he accepted at the end of November. Interestingly, they left him to define his job description during his first 3 months on the job!

At JobJoy, we specialize in customizing a job search to the right mix of strategies and tactics that will land you a job that corresponds with your value. Call George today to discuss your situation 613-563-0584.