Recruiter.com's Recruiter Index for October 2021 is giving us some hope.

• Candidate sentiment, a measure of how open candidates are to new roles, continues its upward trend. After an extended period of decline, sentiment is up for the second month in a row, from 3.4 last month to 3.5 this month.
• Applicant volume per open role also continued to climb, with 31.5% of recruiters reporting they're seeing higher volumes of candidates, a 6.5% increase over September.
• 49% of recruiters said average salaries are increasing, a minuscule decline from 50 percent last month.
• For the first time since the Recruiter Index began tracking, recruiters reported the majority of their roles (53%) were backfill. Seasonal hiring efforts may be compounding with the Great Resignation to drive turnover.
• Demand for recruiting and staffing talent fell between September and October, but talent acquisition professionals are still the third-most in-demand type of talent today - indicating employers need plenty of hiring help.
• The average recruiter worked on 21 open roles in October 2021, a 30% increase over October 2020.

Compensation, always a key driver for job seekers remains high (30%), but motivators which tended to lag others pre pandemic - remote work (27.2%) and work-life balance (23.9%) - are now in the top four drivers, along with and new experiences (14.7%).

Recruiters remain in high-demand overall. The top-10 most in demand roles are:

• IT/software engineering: 31% (-4 from September)
• Healthcare/Medical: 17% (+2 from Sept.)
• Recruiting/Staffing: 15% (-6 from September)
• Accounting/auditing: 11% (+1 from September)
• Architecture/engineering: 11% (+5 from September)
• Business services: 10% (+0 from September)
• Sales: 10% (+10 from September - biggest jump)
• Pharmaceutical / Biotech: 9% (+1 from September)
• Automotive: 8% (+5 from September)
• Restaurants / food and beverage: 8% (-2 from September)

Hybrid roles have decreased in availability - but this could be due to seasonal retail hiring which tends to require in-person work.

“While candidate volume increases, we found a decline in available hybrid roles by nine percentage points,” the company said. “Even with the decrease they still continue to outpace remote roles.”

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