How Will Hiring Trends In Marketing, Sales and Tech Be Redefined: Featuring Kevin Harrington, CEO At Joblist

Hiring trends in tech have undergone a shift during the Covid-19 pandemic, moreover, with the changing needs involved while shaping teams across multiple departments, for instance, marketing and sales, in light of the pandemic and in light of increased dependence on hybrid and remote work models, it’s important for business and HR leaders to reconsider their choice of tools, Kevin Harrington, CEO at Joblist shares more:

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Tell us a little about yourself Kevin…we’d also love to hear more about the Joblist platform?

Hello, I’m Kevin Harrington, the CEO of Joblist. Prior to launching Joblist, I was the Head of R&D at Wilbur Labs, a startup studio in San Francisco. Between Joblist and earlier ventures, I have spent much of my career trying to help people find and land jobs.

Joblist is a job search platform that seeks to address some of the biggest challenges that confront today’s job seekers, including the significant amount of time and effort that it takes to find relevant opportunities and the lack of guidance or help in this process.

In building Joblist, we started by reimagining the typical set of generic job site features — including search, user profiles, and email alerts — to be more personalized and helpful. We also wanted to make it easy to create your own personal “job list” to organize your search and share that list with friends and family who can also help look for jobs on your behalf.

We started working on Joblist before COVID-19, but as unemployment exploded in the last year, the need for what we were building had only become that much more urgent. In particular, we hope that our collaboration features that allow people to search for jobs with their friends and family will help reduce stress and anxiety and drive quicker, better results. Although we’re still early, everything we’re doing with personalization and collaboration is to make the job search process feel more human and supportive.

Can you take us through the key highlights of Joblist’s job market report and can you share a few of your own thoughts/upcoming predictions surrounding jobs in tech worldwide?

At Joblist, we closely follow job market trends through our regular reports. In our most recent January Job Market Report, there were two big takeaways:

• 2020 was a difficult year for career advancement across the board. Overall, nearly 40 percent of all job seekers thought their job prospects were worse now than at the beginning of 2020, while only 21 percent thought their job prospects were better.
• Vaccine rollout is generally not making job seekers more optimistic about this year’s job market, with only one-third of job seekers reporting that they feel more hopeful about 2021 job prospects due to vaccines.

The job market as a whole is off to a slow start in 2021, but tech is one industry where hiring demand remains strong and will continue to be strong this year and beyond. COVID-19 caused a sudden shift to remote work and mass adoption of technology as many businesses moved their company and processes online for the first time. As both of these trends continue, we should expect more technology-related job opportunities generally and in more places, due to the proliferation of remote work.

What are some of the biggest changes since 2020 and the pandemic that will shift tech hiring instances for marketing, sales and other departments, around the world?

The biggest general trend is the expansion of remote work opportunities. Even many companies that historically had concentrated the majority of their workforce in a single headquarters location have quickly embraced remote-only or hybrid models. For smart companies, this shift brings certain advantages, including widening the available talent pool and enabling them to hire the perfect people to fit each new role on the team regardless of location. Moving forward, we should expect a flattening of tech opportunities, with many jobs and companies that were formerly restricted to Silicon Valley and other major tech hubs now being open to people around the world.

Can you share some light on how leading tech brands are innovating their global hiring strategies during this time?

Virtual job fairs, video interviews with collaborative whiteboards and interactive pre-hire assessments are just a few of the innovations that are helping leading tech companies hire remotely. These solutions allow companies to replicate aspects of the in-person hiring experience in an entirely virtual way. For instance, in September, Amazon held a virtual career event to help fill 30,000 corporate and tech roles. The event mimicked an in-person career fair and included both an informational session and a Q&A portion where candidates could speak directly with recruiters at Amazon. We may expect more companies to look for ways like this to market themselves, attract candidates and fill roles quickly through a remote process.

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As tech hiring and recruitment trends evolve in light of the Covid-19 pandemic: what are some of the top factors that you feel today’s hiring and tech leaders must keep in mind?

As we move out of this pandemic, remote work will continue to be very common but fully remote teams will likely not be the dominant model for most companies. In a recent Joblist survey of workers currently remote full-time, we found that 20 percent were hoping to go back to the office full-time after the pandemic, 34 percent wanted to remain fully remote, and 46 percent said that a hybrid model would work best for them and their company.

In a world where some employees are in the office and others are working from home, hiring and tech leaders need to make decisions for their organizations that work for both groups. This affects everything from office design, to software and technology choices, to hiring practices — it’s a transformational shift.

While hiring for remote jobs, given the bloom on remote staff and gig work what are some of the core technologies and hiring tools that you feel HR and other business leaders hiring for marketing, sales or other roles need to be adept with, to ensure better management of full-time remote staff and their part time workers?

There are a range of online tools that will be important for HR leaders moving forward. This includes marketing solutions and job boards, such as Joblist, to attract the right candidates online, video conferencing and other virtual interview apps, remote onboarding software and remote workforce collaboration tools.

For HR leaders who are deciding on their organization’s HR tech stack — with so many potential solutions out there, it can be tempting to quickly sign up for new software or services. However, there are many small differences in remote tools that can have a big impact on team happiness and success. The better you know how your team members work and the larger needs of your organization, the more likely you are to choose software tools that stick long-term.

Before we wrap up, we’d love to hear a little about your top-of-mind thoughts on leading product and tech teams more effectively during a global pandemic!

My biggest advice for those in charge of leading product and tech teams right now is to do all that you can to proactively reach out to people working on your team, make sure they’re doing okay, and be as supportive as possible.

In the sudden shift to remote work, it can be easy to forget about all the little check-in conversations that used to happen naturally in an office setting. These informal conversations — about employee satisfaction, wellbeing, growth, and any number of other topics — are important. As a leader, it’s now more important than ever to go out of your way to make sure that your employees feel connected and supported.