With each new year comes the opportunity to take a look back on the previous twelve months and reflect on the good, bad, and everything in between. As a company, CareerPlug experienced wins and plenty of lessons learned in 2022, and we continued to live our core values, hone and share our hiring expertise, and improve our product. 

We’re excited about the year ahead and all it will bring, but before moving fully forward, let’s take a look back at some of our major milestones and changes in 2022. 

Hiring in 2022

Compared to 2020 and 2021, many business owners felt a little more stability in 2022. However, hiring remained one of the most challenging parts of running a business. Many of our clients still dealt with lower applicant counts that plagued the last two years. 

They also struggled with some new frustrations – increased competition for quality talent and changing expectations of job seekers. This means they were no longer just competing with other businesses in their own industries for jobs; they were also competing with giant companies that are always hiring like Amazon, Walmart, and DoorDash. Additionally, many employers found that they had to take a closer look at their offerings, as job seekers of today expect higher wages and better benefits than job seekers of years past. 

Helping our clients make the right hires 

In the ever-changing landscape of the last year, CareerPlug is proud to still be a consistent source of hiring help for our over 42,000 clients including 6,500 new accounts that we partnered with in 2022! 

We were able to streamline their hiring processes and provide hiring expertise so that they could attract the best candidates and compete with larger companies for top talent. Our applicant tracking system helped them easily sort through thousands of applications, schedule thousands of interviews, and make thousands of the right hires. 

Sharing our hiring expertise

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’re excited to offer our clients 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.

We made huge strides this year towards becoming an authoritative resource for all things hiring, including an increased focus on original research. This effort was well received, as our content was cited nearly 300 times in a variety of business publications! 

We’re proud to be industry leaders 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. In 2022, this meant a big focus on automatic interview scheduling so that our clients could hire faster. 

We launched a new version of our product, CareerPlug Premium and the game-changing Autopilot feature. Autopilot syncs with your calendar to automate the back and forth of setting up interviews and sends follow-ups and reminders over text and email to help reduce interview no-shows. 

In 2022, more CareerPlug clients made use of our text recruiting feature, which allows employers to reach candidates faster than ever before. Watch the video below to learn more about how text recruiting works!

The CareerPlug team 

In many ways, 2022 was a year of growth for CareerPlug and that includes the continued expansion of our fully remote team. We were excited to bring on 30 new pluggies this year. 

The CareerPlug team is now spread across 31 different states! One of the ways we are able to stay connected across the country is through Slack’s messaging platform. In 2022, we communicated by sending over 846,229 direct messages and 114,451 channel messages. 

We love to show each other gratitude, and “shout-out” team members that go above and beyond in living our values each week. In 2022, there were 652 shout-outs given out by our team through Assembly’s Employee Recognition software! 

CareerPlug gives back 

Giving back is extremely important to us. CareerPlug employees contributed $26,619 to charity this year which was matched by CareerPlug (and double-matched during the last quarter) to equal an additional $36,965 donated. 

As a company, we contributed a grand total of $151,157 in charity donations to some amazing causes. 

We also came together to sponsor 12 foster teens and 2 babies for Christmas through our partnership with Foster Angels of Central Texas. Each team shared a Christmas list and everyone helped to shop for gifts to donate. 

But it wasn’t just monetary donations our team made this year. We were super excited to put on our first ever Give Back Week (organized by the Give Back Committee) where team members volunteered time and resources for daily events like a trash pick up day and card making for hospitalized children. 

2023 and beyond 

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.  

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.