Staffing Trends: Mondo’s 2023 Year in Review

The past 2 years have made one thing clear: uncertainty is the new normal. And for business leaders, constant uncertainty can feel especially daunting.

From the ever-evolving status of the pandemic to staffing trends like The Great Resignation, companies are struggling to identify the right solutions to strengthen their culture and remain productive.

For Mondo, the key to the continued success and growth of our staffing agency has been staying true to our core values, getting bold, innovating the way we work, and supporting the evolution of our people.

Our core service is helping people find the right people, and we can’t do that successfully without embracing our changing environment and ensuring our people—and our culture—are set up to thrive.

Here’s a look at ways we were able to stay ahead of the curve with US employment trends and what’s worked for us in hopes that it helps other organizations.

5 Staffing Trends That Shaped Mondo’s Future

While the Covid-19 pandemic has driven dozens of nuanced shifts within the staffing industry there are a few that impacted Mondo more than others and informed the way we decided to innovate and pivot throughout the pandemic.

Below are the trends in staffing that we were able to get ahead of and ended up impacting the staffing industry as a whole.

Virtual Recruiting
Internal Re-Shuffling
Redefining Success
Historic Resignation Rates
Demand for more flexibility

1. Virtual Recruiting

Due to the limitations that the Covid-19 pandemic placed on in-person meetings, Monster reports that 70% of employers are now doing at least 50% of their recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding virtually. Not only did this lead to a need for new technologies and a shift in internal re-structure for many companies, but it also presented an opportunity for creative and innovative ways to improve the remote candidate experience and give new hires an inside look at company culture and engagement before they onboard to ensure a good fit.

How Mondo Innovated:

Moved our entire workforce and workflow to a 100% remote environment.

While many organizations across different industries resisted shifting to a virtual setting, Mondo had the IT infrastructure and technology to go remote immediately.

Since March 2020, we’ve embraced a fully remote environment with no plans to return to the office because we trust our people to work from anywhere and realized early on that we don’t need a physical office to foster a sense of community and nurture company culture — more on that later.

Not to mention, through regular employee surveys, we get feedback directly from our remote workers on what matters to them, which work environment they prefer, and how we can best support them.

Revamped and doubled down on our new hire onboarding process.

We realized how important it was to ensure new hires feel like a part of the company culture from the start, especially in a fully remote environment. As a result, we implemented a high-touch, new hire onboarding process that ensures new employees have the hands-on training and support they need to feel welcome and engaged right from day one. That, coupled with regular one-on-one check-ins at one-week, 30-days, 60-days, and 90-days, we were able to improve our employee retention by 20%.

2. Internal Re-Shuffling

With countless corporations and businesses feeling the effects of The Great Resignation, many organizations used this time as an opportunity to make key shifts in their internal org structure to fill talent shortages that had been left empty from resignations and to create new positions to fill the needs of the new and changing online landscape.

How Mondo Innovated:

Internal reorganization to put the right people in the right roles.

Even before the pandemic, we realized we needed to shake things up internally. As a result, we’ve spent the last three years focusing on an infrastructure rebuild to ensure we have the right people in the right roles. By doing so, we found that aligning our people with their purpose and passion is essential to driving reliable results, but—more importantly—it’s how you enable your people to find true fulfillment in their roles. When that happens, the results you’re after become inevitable regardless of changing circumstances.

Getting clear on our core company values.

Our core values, Mindset, Accountability, and Process, are the MAP that guides Mondo culture and drives our future. By defining each of these values and communicating them to our team, we’re all able to make decisions and take actions that work collectively to foster our company culture and aid in our company’s growth.

3. Redefining Success

Moving into the new virtual world made it necessary for many corporations to redefine success and how to measure it. With so much shifting internally and externally, businesses began to re-imagine their goals and KPIs.

How Mondo Innovated:

Organization-wide KPI development & alignment.

While we always had KPIs for our sales and recruitment teams, true KPI alignment became a goal for all of our departments companywide. Evaluating how we measure success in every single role within our business and holding each individual accountable has transformed the way we work. This meant building out KPIs for our back-of-house departments as well to encourage more cross-collaboration among each department.

And what we found was that this allowed for us all to have a better understanding of the company’s overall goals and how each department informs the other to collectively work toward achieving them.

Prioritizing transparency and clear communication on results creates an agile environment where our people aren’t afraid to make mistakes. Instead, we value failing forward and the ability to adapt as needed based on what our results are telling us in real-time, which has been central to our incredible growth and success during an economic downturn.

Investing in a culture that champions KPIs and core values.

Maintaining work culture while remote is a challenge most companies weren’t prepared for when COVID fully hit, and neither were we. But our guiding principle has been to double down on investments in a culture that champions our core values and a renewed focus on KPIs with the goal of making us feel connected even while remote.

For Mondo, that translated to the following:

Emotional intelligence (EQ) training for management to help develop and strengthen trust among team members
Nationwide communications training to humanize how we communicate while remote
Enhanced process and role-based trainings for our people to help them adapt their methods to a remote environment
Transitioning from a monthly All Hands Call to a weekly virtual company-wide ritual to prioritize transparency, results, and nationwide bonding
Creating our Thought Leadership podcast series, Mondo Minute which provided weekly and monthly opportunities for us to come together and hear from a guest speaker on impactful topics
Unique, culture-focused events like virtual tie-dye, paint and sip, and even a scavenger hunt, so our employees still get a chance to have fun together

Enhanced career mapping structure for professional growth.

We wanted to provide a customized approach to every single employee’s professional growth at Mondo. This is when we decided that there would be no prescribed or linear path at Mondo. Since then we’ve developed career mapping in which roles are not defined by location and a person can evolve professionally based on their skill sets, value to the organization, and personal interests.

Giving our employees a say in how they grow and evolve within our organization has allowed us to place individuals in positions that we otherwise would have overlooked and has enabled our growth along with theirs.

4. Historic Resignation Rates

As we covered in our recent piece on The Great Resignation, 2021 saw more resignations in the American workforce than it has in a generation. This left many organizations with recruiting efforts that failed to meet their new talent shortages leading them to seek the help of staffing firms.

How Mondo Innovated:

Support for our clients as they navigate these challenges.

As a way to meet our clients where they’re at and to set them up for success in the changing and unpredictable landscape, we put significant time and resources into enhancing and customizing our approach to recruiting and staffing in a completely remote landscape.

What that looked like was:

An updated and enhanced Annual Salary Guide that was customized to the staffing trends being driven by the pandemic to inform hiring managers on the best path forward
An overhaul in our recruitment and staffing training to allow for a more streamlined and personalized virtual talent acquisition process

A completely re-imagined sales process that not only saved time but is more environmentally friendly, cutting out travel to offices for in-person meetings as well as doing away with printed deliverables and sales materials.
A reprioritized internal sales strategy that shifted us away from traditional sales pitches to cultivating more intentional partnerships with clients.
A large-scale investment in revamping our company website to provide a clearer, more streamlined user experience for hiring managers, consultants, job seekers, and tech and digital marketing enthusiasts.

5. Demand for more flexibility

The Great Resignation coupled with shifting workforce mindsets around flexibility and work-life balance gave employees leverage in the hiring process leaving employers to re-think their hiring and retention strategies.

How Mondo Innovated:

Taking care of our people.

Arguably the most important strategy on this list. Truly caring for our employees and their well-being has unlocked a new level of autonomy across our staffing agency because the fundamental building block is trust. Trust is everything, and we’ve found it to be the pivotal driver of results.

Basically, we’ve gotten creative with trying out new solutions like…

Stipends for home office needs – one-time stipend to purchase items to make the transition to working from home more comfortable and efficient.
Flex Fridays – a meeting-free day to take time to catch up on work and whatever life stuff that needs attention.
Mandatory Mental Health Days – periodic days where the entire company is instructed to go offline to take some time to recharge.
Internal mental health campaigns & contests – designed to empower our people to have more autonomy and to get proactive about caring for their well-being.

By embracing the uncertainty we’re living through rather than acting out of fear, we’ve found a way to pivot, innovate, and thrive while helping our people do the same.

Navigating Uncertainty

The world and the workforce are changing in ways we didn’t think were possible. It’s time to stop asking when things will go back to normal and, instead, focus on staying agile, getting creative, and caring for your people. The results will take care of themselves when you do.

To learn more about how Mondo National Staffing Company can help you stay on the cutting-edge of staffing and US employment trends visit us here to take the next steps toward finding out how our staffing professionals can match you with top-tier IT, Tech, Digital Marketing, and Creative candidates from our talent pools.

Looking to hire top-tier Tech, Digital Marketing, or Creative Talent? We can help.

Every year, Mondo helps to fill over 2,000 open positions nationwide.

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Continued Reading on industry insights, tips, and strategies:

By Sarah Magazzo

Digital Marketing Manager for Mondo National Staffing Agency | AI Drafted & Human Crafted

Staffing Trends: Mondo’s 2023 Year in Review