Dive Brief:

• Employers report optimism going into Q1 2021, according to ManpowerGroup’s Dec. 8 Employment Outlook Survey, as hiring plans continue to improve across various industries, including leisure and hospitality and transportation and utilities.
• All 12 industries tracked by ManpowerGroup reported positive outlooks for Q1 2021, with 11 of those 12 reporting improvements over last quarter’s outlooks. Outlooks year-over-year, however, are down across all recorded regions, signaling that while hiring is improving, it will still not reach pre-pandemic levels.
• "As Americans shop, socialize and work from multi-functional homes, operations and logistics roles to support e-commerce are in high demand and we are beginning to see green shoots in manufacturing too as supply chains reopen," Becky Frankiewicz, president of ManpowerGroup North America, said in a statement.

Dive Insight:

Despite the optimism, employers may be concerned that recruiting and hiring in this market will be "challenging" in 2021, according to a November survey from XpertHR; nearly two-thirds of respondents said as much. But almost half of respondents said they expected to increase headcount.

Job seekers have gone as far as uprooting themselves and joining different industries to seek out new opportunities during the economic downturn, according to a report by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, though that could further complicate employers’ efforts in hiring as uncertainty continues, the report noted. And employers are already hiring; 60% of those surveyed by The Manifest in August said they had hired at least one worker since the start of the pandemic.

But COVID-19 may have made hiring more efficient and less challenging in some respects, according to a survey by Criteria, due in part to the rise of video interviews and other new technologies. Virtual job try-outs and interviews garnered strong interest once shelter-in-place orders came down, jump-starting tech trends that HR organizations were already looking at with interest. Automation of recruitment processes could be one major consequence of the pandemic, experts have said.

"A lot of the work that recruiters have been doing historically wasn't actually interviewing people," Kevin Parker, CEO of HireVue, previously told HR Dive. "It was trying to schedule people, doing follow up phone calls, phone screens and things like that. When you can automate a lot of that process, the recruiter can really focus on people that are most qualified for the position."