In this episode, Marcus Edwardes speaks with Julia Pollak, Labor Economist at ZipRecruiter, a leading online employment marketplace that uses powerful matching technology to connect millions of businesses of all sizes and job seekers every month.

Julia is a Harvard graduate, and Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University, and an enlisted helicopter mechanic in the U.S. Navy Reserve. She is also the winner of the Military Excellence Award as the top recruit of more than 800 people at the Great Lakes cohort.

Julia’s job is to use data accumulated through billions of these interactions to gauge the health of the labor market and also to generate insights that can help job seekers and employers stand out and succeed in that market.

Listen in as Julia shares the state of employment as uncertainties of all kinds persist in our day-to-day lives. She discusses which roles and markets are currently experiencing a high volume of applications and which of these verticals are unable to accommodate these sizable talent pools. She also touches on job seeker confidence, best practices for applicants today, and the paradox of remote work.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

●      [03:15] Julia’s role at ZipRecruiter

●      [04:42] What the data shows regarding employment rates throughout 2020

●      [07:30] Are there more applicants per advertised role today?

●      [09:51] Roles that are attracting more candidates now

●      [12:09] Markets with a glut of quality applicants struggling to find work

●      [15:33] Sectors experiencing the largest decline in the labor market

●      [17:26] The current demand for recruiters

●      [19:46] Markets that agency recruiters should be focusing their efforts on

●      [23:14] What is job seeker confidence and why is it so important?

●      [28:16] Common misconceptions about the current labor economy

●      [31:11] Job seeker sophistication and education

●      [34:32] Other common missteps by job seekers

●      [36:24] How job seekers should set their expectations on ZipRecruiter

●      [38:52] What candidates should do if they do not get any feedback

●      [41:41] The dramatic increase of work-from-home opportunities

●      [45:50] The impact of prolonged forced remote working on mental health

●      [49:16] What a potential post-COVID office paradigm would look lke

Key quotes:

●      “One of the roles of a marketplace like ZipRecruiter is to allow employers to look through the database of job seekers and reach out proactively to job seekers who would be a good match. Those kinds of innovations allow smaller companies who don’t stand out to get ahead.”

●      “Nobody trains people on how to look for a job and most people only learn what to do and what not to do the hard way.”

●      “About 60% of jobs have been gotten through networking.”

Resources Mentioned:

●      ZipRecruiter