How employers can be best prepared for a candidate-selective market

While many assume employers hold the advantage in today’s labour market, a Gartner expert has revealed that candidate behaviour is shifting in unexpected ways – and organisations must adapt quickly to keep up.

As labour markets cool in line with broader economic trends, many employers assume they hold the upper hand.

Yet despite this shift towards a seemingly employer-friendly environment, today’s candidates are approaching the job market in entirely new and unexpected ways.

Dion Love, vice president of research and advisory services at Gartner, warned that in a market favouring employers yet rife with uncertainty, candidates are cautious, steadfast on pay, and slow to commit – behaviours that defy past expectations and force companies to rethink recruitment strategies.

“Today’s market is an employer’s market, but it’s also a highly uncertain market. Right now, candidates are responding more to the uncertainty than they are to the employer market or the cooling of the market,” he said.

“That means organisations need to get ready for candidates who are not searching more, who are not lowering their expectations for an increase in compensation as a result of their move, and who are not readily accepting offers as we might expect them to be and as we’ve certainly seen them to be in past employer markets.”

Why the shift? Love explained that while the reasons are complex, a major factor is the human-centric recruitment approaches organisations embraced during the pandemic – candidates experienced what effective, people-focused employers could offer and are now unwilling to settle for anything less.

“It’s hard to say just why they are responding more to the uncertainty than the cooling,” he said.

“It could be that we saw a highly human-centric approach to recruitment during the pandemic. We saw organisations sharing talent and doing their best not to lay off employees during the pandemic.”

However, Love stressed that the broader driver behind this shift is the mixed signals emerging from today’s labour market, indicating that the future relationship between employees and employers will look very different from the past.

“I tend to think it’s more than that; there are mixed signals in labour markets today. On the one hand, we’ve got a cooling market which is following the economic cycle, but on the other hand, we’ve got a market that is structurally changing as a result of demographic shifts, technological innovation and socio-political change,” he said.

“That means that the relationship between employees and employers is potentially going to be very different in the future than it’s been in the past.”

While industry-specific data is still emerging, Love suggested that selectivity is most pronounced in sectors undergoing shifts in their value propositions – whether through changes to products, channels, or internal operations.

“It would be exacerbated in industries that are going through significant change right now, when I say significant change, [its] organisations facing changes that impact their value proposition.

“So the products that they take to market, the channels through which they bring those products to market, and the way that their own internal functions operate.”

Although it’s unclear whether this behaviour will become the new normal, Dion emphasised that employers should brace for prolonged selectivity and use data-driven insights to understand and navigate current candidate behaviour effectively.

“Given that there is uncertainty, what we should prepare for is more selectivity than we’ve experienced in the past in employer markets,” he said.

“I want to make sure that CHROs and their recruiting leaders are armed with data to understand just what candidate behaviours actually are as opposed to what they’re assumed to be.”