Recruiter.com CEO on recruiter sentiment following the October jobs report

Evan Sohn, Recruiter.com Chairman and CEO, joined Yahoo Finance Live to break down October's jobs report.

Video Transcript

JARED BLIKRE: And by the way, if you're in the market for a new job or career, our next guest might be of interest here. They got some data they're going to show to us. The chairman and CEO of Recruiter.com, Evan Sohn, joins us now. Evan, first of all, I just want to get your reaction to the job numbers this morning. On the surface, the headline numbers beat, you dig into it. A couple of hiccups there. I'm just wondering what your opinion is of it.

EVAN SOHN: Look, we're elated to see that the numbers are higher. So that's always good, better than the opposite. You know, I think the disappointing for us is that if you look back a year ago, right, October 2020, so here we are, no masks-- sorry, no vaccines, no COVID pills, none of those things, and we added 635,000 jobs-- 638,000 jobs last year. So, at this time last year, there were 638,000 jobs added in October versus the, really, 20%, 17% less than we're doing now, or 551,000. So something's actually happening there.

And when you dig in, you look at the leisure and hospitality sector, which really led this month's, or last month's, jobs. It added 164,000 jobs in that leisure and hospitality sector. Last year, it actually added 271,000, so almost 60% less leisure and hospitality jobs this year than last year. So I think there's a long way to go to really get this episodic event of, really, the people that are outside the job market back into the overall jobs.

KARINA MITCHELL: And sir, why do you think that rate has sort of dropped off? Because it was really high in the beginning, particularly with leisure and hospitality, which is a big part of making up jobs in this country. Why is it that the labor participation rate is just flat? It doesn't seem to budge at all? What is that telling us?

EVAN SOHN: So we started tracking with our-- we have our recruiter.com recruiter index that we survey our recruiters every month, and we started pulling up other data with a partnership with a company called Revelio Labs. And we started tracking about four months ago the workload of a recruiter. Are they new jobs, so a company expanding. Is this a new job or a backfill, meaning someone quit. And we need to replace that role.

And four months ago, it was 40% backfills, 60% new. Three months ago, it was 44% backfill and 56% new. Last month, it was 50-50. So in the recruiter index last month, we actually said, hey, guys, there's a big headwind coming, right? The headwind is that we're trying to fill all these roles that people left. And we sort of said, hey, this great resignation is upon us. Well, this month, we actually through our recruiter index saw that it was 53% were actually backfill. So more roles were being backfilled than were actually new jobs.

And this is, again, from the recruiter index itself. That's going to create this headwind that's being created by this great resignation. So you're seeing some data now, and that's with our partnership with Revelio Labs, to really look at the sectors with the highest job demand, right? So you're seeing hospital and health care, you're seeing retail, you're seeing staffing and recruiting as, really, those are the top three places where companies need to hire more people.

But if you looked at the great-- what we started calling the great resignation tracker, we're seeing where people leaving, you're really seeing that hospital and the hospitality is the second most that people are actually leaving. So you have lots of people leaving those jobs for a variety of reasons. It could be work-life balance. It could be they're tired, et cetera, and then the open jobs themselves. And that's really going to cause this sort of bottleneck in being able to really get those numbers to where they really, really need to be.

JARED BLIKRE: And I'm wondering if your data reveals anything in regarding skills-based jobs versus unskilled jobs, those that require a college degree versus those that don't.

EVAN SOHN: Yeah, it's a great question. And we started tracking that a couple of months ago. Of the jobs that the recruiters are working on, how many require a college degree? Really nice to see that it was 27% did not require a college degree. So 27% of the jobs that recruiters are working on-- and keep in mind, you know, you use the recruiter when you can't do it yourself, right, or when you need more people to help, you need to augment your overall recruiting. Those are the independent recruiters that we're really tapping into.

So you look at when you need a recruiter, it's harder to actually find those. So we start to see over the last bunch of months, using recruiters, talent acquisition professionals for more and more jobs in the lower salary buckets, that $40,000 to $60,000 run, we start to see salaries increase. And then we really start to see the requirement for college degree to come down. And again, I think we're really shifting towards this skills-based society where I need someone to do that job, whether they have a college degree or not.

JARED BLIKRE: Some great insights here. We've got to leave it there, Evan Sohn, recruiter.com chairman and CEO.