In the 25 years that Dawn Fay has been in the recruiting business, she's seen a hot job market several times. But nothing, she says, comes close to th

There's a bidding war for jobseekers, and it's getting crazier by the day

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2021-07-18 22:00:06

In the 25 years that Dawn Fay has been in the recruiting business, she's seen a hot job market several times. But nothing, she says, comes close to the frenzy she's seeing right now, as the economy begins to boom in the wake of the pandemic. "It's just wild," Fay, a senior district president at the staffing firm Robert Half, told me. "There is so much movement in the market. The churn is amazing to see."

"Churn" may be something of an understatement: It's downright chaos at HR departments across the US. So many Americans have quit their jobs this spring that the resignation rate has skyrocketed to a two-decade high. And people aren't just looking to switch employers. Many are taking advantage of the market to supercharge their careers, landing positions with higher salaries and better opportunities for advancement. Some are jumping into new professions altogether. Others are climbing the ladder at their current workplace, snagging promotions that wouldn't have been on offer before the pandemic.

The result is an economy-wide game of musical chairs — a wholesale transformation of the job market that has left employers scrambling to retain employees and attract new ones. Call it The Great Reshuffle. Today, according to a national survey that economists at Arizona State and Virginia Commonwealth conducted with the Dallas Fed, one in four Americans works for a different employer than the one they had before COVID-19 struck. In the process, 26% of those job-switchers have ended up with a salary bump of 10% or larger.