A lot of the conversations I have these days with HR leaders, VCs, and entrepreneurs are all about what the next six months is going to look like and if we are "getting back to normal."

While it's impossible to predict the future, sometimes the trends in various datasets can shed insights, and lucky for us we have some data this week :)

CloserIQ is an organizational strategy firm focused on building growth and engineering teams at innovative companies. They specifically do a lot of recruiting, and gave us the below chart of the number of jobs they were working throughout the last twelve months (blue line), along with the number of jobs/recruiter they had at any given time this year (red line).

As you can see, hiring slowed down a bit in Q4 during the holiday season, which is to be expected, then picked up in Q1 2020. We can very dramatically see how COVID impacted the number of roles they were working as there is an almost immediate and very drastic impact on open roles starting in March.

The interesting trend of course is what's been happening since mid summer. It's a bit hard to see with this Y-Axis, but the number of roles has more than doubled since the deep point in the valley, and is steadily increasing.

To me, this is great news as sales and engineering hiring, and especially those that require third-party help, typically correlate highly with company growth, which correlates with economic growth.

Good Benchmarking

Obviously this is just one data point, but foots to a lot of what I've heard anecdotally as well as the data we have regarding the interest in various types of HR software (more on that in a future newsletter).

Companies scaling hiring back to the point where they need outside help is a great indicator that right now, the data tells us we are in an at least temporary recovery. This is an important outlook for budgeting both for practitioners and vendors.

Here's another interesting chart that we didn't have in time for the newsletter portion of this post that details Indeed's job listings, credit to Axios for this:

Great Metric

In addition to the trends here, I thought the open roles/recruiter metric was a great one to track in general for any TA teams looking to refresh their metrics dashboards.

The people at CloserIQ are very sophisticated and I thought it very telling that this graph had these two metrics in it (I'd originally saw this on a call with their CEO earlier in the week).