Another year in the books means another opportunity to look back on the journey of the last 12 months. 2023 was a year of both successes and lessons at CareerPlug, as we continued to grow, change, and strive to make our product and company better. 

We expect great things in 2024, but before moving full speed ahead into the next year, let’s first reflect on the wins and milestones that made up the previous year. 

The state of hiring in 2023 

The job market has stabilized and recovered from pandemic shakeups, and the unemployment rate hit a nearly 55 year low in 2023. There are also still more open jobs than unemployed workers to fill them. 

This is favorable for employees, because it means there are a lot of options. However, for employers, it means that it’s still difficult to fill open roles. Just like the year before, 2023 saw tight competition for talent. 

Because of this, many employers had to get more creative with recruitment and retention efforts. Some trends we witnessed (and encouraged) include: skills-first hiring to increase the applicant pool, improving benefits and compensation, writing better job descriptions, and building a strong employer brand. 

Let’s take a closer look at how our clients fared with hiring in the last year, and the other ways that we supported them. 

How we helped our clients 

CareerPlug is proud to have partnered with 350 franchise brands and helped nearly 62,000 businesses this year, including the 13,845 new clients that came on board in 2023. Our team of hiring experts ensure that all of these clients feel supported by serving our clients through 39,142 interactions this year! 

We helped our clients streamline their hiring operations, so they could hire the best candidates more quickly than the competition. Our applicant tracking system helped employers in various industries post their open jobs, Fast-track their best applicants, schedule thousands of interviews, and of course – make the right hires. 

Sharing our hiring expertise 

As part of CareerPlug’s mission to make hiring easier, we share our hiring expertise year round. This includes conducting original research, writing articles to educate our audience of small business employers, and hosting live webinars to help educate business owners and shed light on hiring trends.

This year’s original research included two annual reports: The Candidate Experience Report and our Recruiting Metrics Report, as well as a brand new Applicant Expectations Report . This research runs the full gamut of the hiring process from job posting to hire, and provides valuable insight for both us and our clients. 

We know that other thought leaders find our content useful as well, as it’s been cited over 200 times in the last year by many other websites, including Forbes. 

Another proud moment this year was when our CEO Clint Smith published his first book, How to Hire: The Essential Guide to Recruit and Retain the Right People. This resource is the ultimate playbook for employers to help them create a great culture, attract talent, and build a winning team. 

We’re proud to be considered a leader in the space, and honored that our educational content helps so many business owners hire better. 

Product news 

We’re always making improvements to our hiring software, and 2023 was a great year for product growth. 

As an innovative way to test out new product features, we proudly launched “Labs” – an early access testing ground where clients can try out and provide feedback on upcoming releases. This helps us refine our products and make improvements based on our clients’ needs. 

Some features we’re currently testing in Labs include A.I. generated job descriptions, employee engagement and retention tools, and onboarding tools. 

Another big project this year was a new integration with ZipRecruiter that helps our clients increase visibility of their job postings. With this new sponsored jobs integration, our clients can easily promote their job on ZipRecruiter without ever leaving our software. 

We were excited to see more of our clients enjoying our new automated interview scheduling tool, Autopilot, this year. Autopilot makes it easier for candidates to self-schedule their own interviews, saves our clients time on tedious hiring tasks and allows them to make hires much faster than before. This year, we helped our clients experience 1623 “wow moments” through Autopilot – that is, having their first candidate interview appear on their calendar automatically, like magic. 

Watch the video below to learn more about Autopilot’s “wow moments”!

The CareerPlug team 

Our team continued to grow this year as well, as we brought on 15 new pluggies. Our fully remote team is now spread across 32 states. 

One way we all stay in touch during the workday is with Slack’s messaging platform. In 2023, we communicated by sending over 169,917 public channel messages. We made sure to recognize teammates that exemplified our core values via Assembly’s Employee Recognition software. There were 517 public shout-outs given by team members this year. 

We also connected through our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). Our resource groups include:

• PRIDE
• Racial and Ethnic Diversity (REDi)
• Give Back 
• CareerPlug Advancement of Women in the Workplace (CAWW)
• Spicy Brain Society (a neurodivergent community) 

These groups provide training and resources to employees, and regularly host social and team opportunities to support each other and their missions. This year there were 39 ERG meetings and various events like book clubs, lunch and learns, happy hours, and more. 

As always, we made personal and professional growth a priority, and each employee worked with their managers to complete “skill” and “dream” goals throughout the year. This ranged from reading books, taking courses, beginning new hobbies, and more. 

Giving back 

Giving back is a big part of CareerPlug’s mission, and every year, we prioritize monetary donations as a company. Part of this comes from employee donation matches. Our employees donated over $20,000 to their favorite charities, and that was matched 100%. 

We gave back in other ways throughout the year as well. And as we do every Christmas, we sponsored and bought gifts for 13 teens in foster care through Foster Angels of Central Texas. We also donated our time and resources through our annual Give Back Week initiative, where employees completed daily tasks like donating blood, picking up trash, and writing letters to children in the hospital. 

Looking ahead to 2024 

At CareerPlug, we believe that with the right people in the right seats, there’s no limit to how much your company can grow. We’re excited to see what the future holds for the next year for both ourselves and our clients. 

As the hiring landscape continues to change, we’ll continue to evolve as well, so that we can serve our clients, and make growing their team easier. Here’s to the year ahead!