2021 came and went before most of us were finished processing 2020. Along with it, interesting trends in the labor market continued. “Now Hiring” signs became a permanent fixture on the doors of many businesses. Employees left their jobs in droves, a phenomenon dubbed “The Great Resignation.” Employers continued to face uncertainty and unprecedented challenges.
Throughout the last year at CareerPlug, we continued to live our core values, hone and share our hiring expertise, and improve our product. We rolled with the punches, grew as a company, and remained a valuable hiring resource for many businesses.
Let’s take a look back at some of our major milestones and changes in 2021.
Helping our clients make the right hires
In the ever changing landscape of the last year, We are proud to still be a consistent source of hiring help for our over 33,000 clients including 16,159 new accounts that we partnered with in 2021! Our sales team continued to shine, building lasting relationships and bringing on nearly 80 new franchise networks and association partners.
We helped all of these clients automate and improve their hiring process, allowing them to easily sort through thousands of applications, schedule thousands of interviews, and make thousands of the right hires. For every client that makes their first hire with CareerPlug, we plant a tree through WeForest, and this year, we planted over 3,274!
CareerPlug team growth
CareerPlug’s year started out with a big announcement as Jenny Leman, CareerPlug’s former Senior Director of Client Operations, stepped into her current role as the company’s president. Clint Smith, our founder and first president, shifted into his new role as CEO.
The change aligned with the framework for leadership organization that the company follows called the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). This shift in leadership roles allowed for better leverage of the talents of Leman and Smith for the year to come.
CareerPlug became fully remote back in 2020 which helped us expand our talent pool. This was great since we had a lot of hiring to do this year. Our team grew by 32 people across twenty-five different states!
Sharing our hiring expertise
As Hiring Experts, educating small business owners about how to improve their hiring process and make the right hires is a big part of our mission at CareerPlug. We are happy to offer so many educational opportunities and free resources on hiring including live webinars, our blog, and original research reports that shed light on the rapidly-changing state of hiring today.
Original research reports:
Free hiring templates we shared:
We made huge strides this year towards becoming an authoritative resource for all things hiring. Our content was cited over 200 times with 60 of those citations coming from our Candidate Experience Report, including a mention in Forbes. We’re proud to be industry leaders in candidate experience research and plan to continue conducting studies that provide our clients with trustworthy up-to-date insights on recruiting and hiring.
Product improvement
Every year, we seek to improve our product based on the changing needs of our clients.
A big goal for 2021 was phasing out the “classic” version of our software. This took a lot of time and work, but we are happy that as of 2021 all clients are on the latest and best version of our product.
We launched a new “Careers Page Editor” in September that we plan to expand to everyone. This allows for easy creation of a branded careers page! Why is that so important? Our research shows that an applicant who applied through a company’s career page was 7x more likely to be hired than an applicant from a job board.
We also continued to improve text recruiting, which we implemented back in 2018, and have enjoyed seeing the impact text recruiting has made for our clients since then. 4,236 of our current clients have added the text recruiting feature which helps them hire faster than other businesses in their industries.
As of this year, clients can also now schedule text messages and send email and text simultaneously. We know that text recruiting makes hiring easier and will continue to focus on expanding this feature to all clients in the year to come.
Living our core values
The four core values at CareerPlug are: Be Kind; Speak Up, Step Up; Keep Growing; and Work Together, Win Together. We repeat these values at every meeting and allow them to guide the decisions we make as a company and as individual team members.
We love to show each other gratitude, and “shout-out” team members that go above and beyond in living our values each week. As of December 22, 2021, there were 432 shout-outs given out by our team through Assembly’s Employee Recognition software!
Giving back is also extremely important to us. As individuals, our team contributed $2,885 to charity this year which was matched dollar for dollar by CareerPlug. We donated to additional causes throughout the year, like For the Love of Alex and The Children’s Defense Fund for a grand total of $124,000 in charity donations.
We also came together to sponsor six foster teens for Christmas through our partnership with Foster Angels of Central Texas. Each team shared a Christmas list and everyone got to help shop for gifts to donate.
Looking to the future
Our core focus at CareerPlug is empowering people to reach their full potential by making it easier to hire and develop the right people, and every year we are looking for new ways to live out this mission.
In 2021, our founder, Clint Smith spent a lot of time talking with our current clients about their needs and learning how CareerPlug can provide even more support. As we look to the future, we are excited about the impact we can have on employee management and development. We know that more than anything, employees need jobs where they can grow and reach their full potential.
The future holds lots of exciting possibilities, and one thing is for certain: CareerPlug will continue to stay focused on our mission and remain a valuable resource for business owners for many years to come.
