Top Human Resource Trends of 2024

Blind, a 5M+ member hub for tech gossip around salaries, layoffs, and company drama, solves a key problem in social media: if you're anonymous, you lose credibility, especially when talking about what's happening at specific companies—but if you use your real identity, you can get in trouble for what you say. Blind solves this through partial anonymity: new users can verify their employer by getting an email at a company email address (so an Uber employee can confirm their employment with an @uber.com email address. Blind keeps track of the verification, but doesn't otherwise link usernames to real-world identities). Anonymous social platforms are a challenging market because bad actors don't suffer real-world consequences for their behavior. Many of these apps therefore slowly devolve into gossip and bullying (Ask.fm, Formspring, Secret, etc.).

But Blind has a better shot at avoiding this type of downfall. Since users are mostly employed by the same set of companies, there's a natural target for gossip—the companies themselves. In a sense, Blind has the same amount of cyberbullying as any other anonymous platform—but the people who get cyberbullied on Blind are powerful CEOs and wealthy investors. When bullying isn't peer-to-peer, there isn't a cycle of retaliation. This means the app's users can feel like they're all part of the same team.

Blind's biggest benefit is that it lets users get credibility without sacrificing anonymity. Anyone can start a rumor about a layoff, but it's a more credible claim if it comes from a verified Lyft employee. In fact, the site ranks close to #1 when searching google for terms like "facebook layoffs" or "google layoffs". The most common discussions on Blind revolve around job offers and compensation. This is an area where there's a natural information asymmetry, since companies know what they pay but most people don't talk about how much they make. 

And sure enough, growth has accelerated in recent months, as Covid-19 has led to more career uncertainty and more free time.

The pandemic has caused an unprecedented bifurcation in the healthcare industry. Elective procedures, where hospitals make most of their margin, are down, and emergency procedures are up. With spikes in demand for certain healthcare roles, alongside furloughs and layoffs for others, there’s a dislocation in the healthcare job market that is well served by staffing agencies like Clipboard Health, which focuses on temporary healthcare workers.

The spread of the virus in different areas at different rates also makes just-in-time labor deployment more important than ever. And even after the pandemic, just-in-time labor is growing increasingly realistic as public health prediction improves. Meanwhile, the number of medical operations available keeps rising as new technologies get invented and as awareness of existing procedures grows.

Certain demographic trends are also particularly favorable for staffing agencies. Some towns age much faster than average, as young people leave, so their hospitals end up short-staffed even as demand rises. Every day, 10,000 Americans retire, and start spending less on nearly everything except healthcare where the average spend for the 75+ demographic is almost 2.5x that of the 45-54 demographic.

Historically, job seekers often added hidden keyword tags to their resumes that they expected a recruiter would be searching for. They would set the keywords to a white font color and small font size so they were essentially invisible to a human but not to the resume database search engine the recruiter was using. Much like creative SEO tactics, this worked for many years.

As applicant tracking systems (ATSs) became more sophisticated, this hack became less effective. Today, job-seekers are still concerned with if their resume will rank in the company’s ATS when a recruiter makes a search. In fact, “is my resume ATS friendly” is one of the top Google search suggestions when typing “is my resume...”

Novoresume is a resume-building site that helps people craft a resume that will get through automatic filters in applicant-tracking systems, so it has a chance at being reviewed by a human being. The vast majority of resumes submitted for jobs never get read by a single human being, and Novoresume exists to help customers escape that.

After putting so much effort into making a resume and applying to jobs, many job-seekers see it as a no-brainer purchase to make sure they’re not missing out on opportunities because of imperfect formatting.

Novoresume has been growing rapidly, with nearly 4M monthly site visits in 2021, putting it within the top 20,000 most used sites in the world.

For the first time in history, more American women are having children in their thirties than in their twenties. The shift to later births is both a cause and effect of more women in the workforce, and it has increased demand for fertility-related services. 76,000 women froze their eggs in 2018, up a staggering 15x from 2013.

Companies like Kindbody partner with companies to offer healthcare benefits like in-vitro fertilization and egg freezing, a much-discussed benefit at big tech companies like Google and Facebook. Companies have two reasons for offering these benefits. Most clearly, benefits tend to be specifically appealing in a way that cash compensation is not: they invite someone to imagine a specific scenario where those benefits would make a difference in their lives. More cynically, since the cost of recruiting new employees is high, and since some people leave the workforce either temporarily or permanently after having kids, offering healthcare benefits that encourage having kids later can be a profitable choice.

Many HR leaders report that this is particularly impactful for companies that are trying to improve their diversity numbers and that fertility benefits give them both a way to attract more women and a way to reduce attrition. Historically, egg freezing was primarily for women undergoing chemotherapy or radiation therapy but has since expanded into a way to have more control over when to have kids.