You’d never know it from this month’s BLS report on the job market. A loss of 23,000 jobs hardly seems like the harbinger of a huge explosion of new hiring. To riff on Wayne Gretsky, however, that backward look at employment trends is the equivalent of skating to where the puck was, not where it’s going to be. And where it’s going to be – where the economy is heading – is to an explosion in job creation, to what I call the Big Bang in talent acquisition.
This super-creation of new hiring will be driven by the AI infrastructure build-out and the defense spending build-up that are scheduled to occur simultaneously over the next four years. It will powered by an investment of $8.2 trillion, double the amount of money the U.S. spent to win World War II over roughly the same length of time.
But here’s the rub. The BLS report also noted that the U.S. workforce is shrinking. There are now fewer job seekers in the market, at the very moment this huge expansion is set to begin. Not only are Boomers retiring at an accelerating rate, but according to The Washington Post, the number of workers in their “prime working years” or age 25-to-54, has also dropped dramatically.
This decline is not an anomaly, but rather the latest signal in a post-pandemic trend. Disillusioned by their inability to find career-advancing or even self-supporting employment, workers are opting out of the job market by the hundreds of thousands. The resulting mismatch between labor supply and impending demand could undermine the effectiveness of TA solutions companies – especially sourcing platforms – and pose a serious risk to their business success.
Can anything be done to address this situation? I mean, we’re talking about a workforce-wide and even societal shift in the perception of work availability and value, so this is not simply a result of the job search pains plaguing this year’s college graduates. The enormity of the situation seems well beyond the ability of even the entire TA solutions industry to fix, and yet, there is a potential solution. It won’t eliminate the problem, but it will provide a work-around that will help job boards and other sourcing solutions meet their customers’ hiring needs.
Sourcing success has always depended on having a large enough talent pool to find a sufficient number of credible candidates for employers’ openings. Historically, that happened naturally. Not anymore. Having a sufficient talent pool will only be possible in the Big Bang era, if job boards and other sourcing solutions are able to expand their accessible pool to include labor market dropouts among both Boomers and those in their prime working years.
These individuals are, of course, unlikely to respond to online recruitment advertising, so an alternative strategy will be required. Ironically, an old and often underutilized asset can provide a solution. What is that asset? The resume database.
Resume databases have been kicking around since the earliest days of job boards. They were initially sold as a secondary sourcing channel for employers and more recently have been used in candidate arbitrage transactions. In most cases, however, they were seen as a lower quality reservoir of talent, not because of the individuals described by the resumes (although some recruiters saw them that way), but because of the age of those documents.
More often than not, the resumes that have been stored in a database for two or more years are seen as no longer providing an accurate picture of people’s employment record or skills. While there is some validity to this view, the age of those documents is now actually an advantage. The current decline in workforce participation dates to the Great Resignation of 2021, so resumes acquired since then reflect the segment of the talent pool that is most likely to have dropped out.
Now before all of you purists rise up in righteous indignation, I admit that’s a broad generalization, but it’s also a useful one. It provides a roadmap to a larger talent pool. Out-of-date resumes – at least those collected between 2021 and 2025 – provide a connection to many of those missing (and needed) job seekers. While their experience and skill set might be (slightly) dated, recent developments in job matching technology enable us to make reasonable inferences about their what they might be capable of doing on-the-job.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that having that connection and additional insight in and of itself is not enough to reactivate the dropouts. People leave the job market because they’re grown cynical about the process and disillusioned with their prospects. What sourcing solution providers will have to do, therefore, is reengage with the people behind the documents. It isn’t what used to be called relationship-building so much as it is the refurbishment of their self-confidence That’s not a trivial task, I admit, but agentic AI provides a means of rebuilding their confidence and interest in employment at scale. It won’t happen overnight, however, so the time to begin is now.
Food for Thought,
Peter
Peter Weddle is the Founder & CEO of TAtech: The Network for Talent Technology Solutions. The author or editor of over two dozen books, he has also been a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and chaired major human-machine and leadership studies for select Federal Science Boards.
