Market Signals (Week 36)

The art of interpreting signals (precursors of trends) is – and always has been – important in navigating financial markets and economies. If you are an experienced manager or executive who wants to manage their career and/or job search processes wisely, look at the signals of the job market which are inseparably embedded in the VUCA landscape of today’s world.

We usually keep the collected data to ourselves. But these are not usual times, so we decided to share our insights at the end of each week. If the country / context is important, we’ll add them. Otherwise, we’ll keep it general for confidentiality.

This is not a full version of this week’s report. View the complete presentation here:

We’ve continued reaching out to CEOs, HR Directors, investors, board members and candidates that we know personally, to take the temperature. Below you’ll find their shortened quotes in no particular order.

However, we’ll start with a KPI that gives a quite good feel of the overall trend on the job market:

Number of published job ads on LinkedIn

Note: some job ads might have been taken off LinkedIn, not because the recruitment process was put on hold or canceled, but because they are costly, especially if you have dozens of them. A company might have wanted to simply cut costs and move to more cost-effective alternatives. Some local job portals are offering substantial discounts.
Initial list of 18 countriesSorted
Extended list to 38 countriesSorted
Note: the numbers are collected at the beginning of each week, on Monday afternoon. In the full version of the report, you can find separate data for regions such as: Visegrad, Baltics, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, Iberia, SEE, BENELUX, DACH, Western Europe and EU.

Worth mentioning

First an overview of the indices:

Index18: This week, 4 countries published more job ads on LinkedIn than in Week 13: Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania, Germany and Ukraine.

Index36: 53% of the countries published more job ads in Week 36 than in Week 15, which is a +14% increase compared to last week. What’s more, 80% of the countries published more job ads than last week!

The European Union: The European Union’s situation has improved over the past few weeks. It experienced a +13.64% increase since last week. The difference between the initial Week 17 and this Week 36 is +13.82%.

Winners of the week: The winner of this week, Baltics, experienced an increase of +51.54% since Week 15. It’s the biggest increase in % that we have observed in a region across 21 weeks! When it comes to countries, Slovenia that has been noting average results for the majority of our observations, noted the best result in Week 36: +54.75% more job ads were published on LinkedIn than last week.

Losers of the week: The only region that didn’t note an increase in the number of published job ads since last week was Iberia. Instead, a decrease of -0.74% was observed there. Country-wise: Italy has been a country with one of the worsts results since the beginning of our observations. It experienced the biggest negative difference between Week 36 and the initial Week 15: -46.56%.

Collected Quotes from CEOs and HR Directors:

The vast majority of executives are with market leaders in their respective industries. By default, the board members are members of local boards; if not, well indicate the exception.

IT / Financial Services: We managed to move to remote working smoothly and efficiently. Because of the financial market’s variability our costs decreased and we noted a significant increase in revenues – we didn’t have to lay anybody off.

Cinematography: Our industry has been severely affected by CV-19. Cinemas were closed since March to June and even though they were eventually opened, the screening rooms’ attendance was reduced to 50% or even 25% in CV-19 “red zones”. Many movies were moved to VOD platforms and big premieres were postponed. This have contributed to our significant loss.

IT Equipment: CV-19 only sped up our company’s transformations. Our structures on the EMEA level were closed. Locally – we had to lay a few people off.

Entertainment: Even though traditional sales channels slowed down, we observed a significant increase in online consumption.

And a candidate quote:

Expat COO / Production: My employer is taking advantage of this pandemic by being very unfair to the employees. Although it wasn’t necessary, me and my colleagues’ income was cut by 40% and all bonuses & benefits substantially reduced – it has been that way for the last 6 months. I can’t even cover my current cost base.

Useful observations & tips for candidates from one of our contacts:

Head of Talent Acquisition / International public organization

Before CV-19, sometimes we’d have only 20 applicants for a post. Now, there’s a massive increase. For some roles it’s double the amount of candidates – for HR roles, even more! A recent posting received 50 applicants within 12 hours! I can see that online interviews are more stressful for candidates because of all the technical challenges. Consequently, their performance is different. The overall candidate experience is also different – not worse, just different.

I still see two struggles for now and beyond CV-19: to formulate proper remote working policies, and to design appropriate digital onboarding processes.

About the future: everything will depend on the success of developing a vaccine. However, there are definitely elements that are here to stay: remote work if physical presence is not required (it currently saves me 5 hours per week, 20 hours per month on commuting – why would I voluntarily want to go back?) and online interviews!

Tips for candidates:

  • Cover the basics: our ATS “enforces” as complete applications as possible. Having said that, it still surprises me that approximately 30% of the candidates still don’t get the absolute basics right!
  • Don’t apply to everything. Constant rejection affects your motivation. Keep applying to the job ads where you see a fit and don’t give up!

If you want to discuss your professional situation confidentially or if you are considering hiring Career Angels for support, contact Bichl.Sandra@CareerAngels.eu who will personally match you with the most appropriate consultant. For efficiency, add your CV and availability for a Skype call.

If you want to contribute, email your signals to Sandra (everything will be kept confidential).

Market Signals published thus far:

Week 35
Week 34
Week 33
Week 32
Week 31
Week 30
Week 29
Week 28
Week 27
Week 26
Week 25
Week 24
Week 23
Week 22
Week 21
Week 20
Week 19
Week 18
Week 17
Week 16
Week 15
Week 14
Week 13