Workers have the most leverage they’ve had in a generation, and a recruiting expert says they should use it to their advantage

• With record-high job openings and employers struggling to hire, some workers still can't find jobs.
• However, workers at all levels are "more valuable than ever before," said Recruiter.com's CEO.
• To solve this disconnect, individuals and companies need to be willing to try something different.

The US is facing an "Alice-in-Wonderland job market," in the words of Moody's chief economist Mark Zandi.

Job openings have never been higher, but unemployment is still highly elevated, and millions of discouraged workers have given up on looking for a job and retreated to the sidelines.

Meanwhile, those with jobs are in a version of musical chairs that is complicating recruiters' efforts to hire for new positions because they're increasingly busy trying to find replacements for employees who left.

Three months ago, recruiters in Recruiter.com's monthly survey reported that 60% of the roles that they were working on were new and 40% of them were "backfill." As of last month, that ratio was 50/50.

In addition, the number of respondents working on filling positions in the $40,000 to $80,000 salary range increased sharply. Employers typically use recruiters for roles that pay more than $80,000, so using recruiters for roles below that indicates that employers are struggling to find people, Recruiter.com CEO Evan Sohn told Insider.

Sohn said workers should also realize that they now have the most leverage in a generation, and they should use that to their advantage.

"Everyone ... from the CEO, to the blockchain developer, to the person willing to walk into a factory is more valuable than ever before," he said.

Because of this labor market turmoil, businesses are casting wider nets than ever to get talent into their recruiting pipelines, but Sohn says many are probably not thinking big enough. Most will likely have to double or triple their usual metrics at the front-end to ensure they get enough people who make it through to the back-end of the talent-acquisition process, he said.

But without adequate staffing to move candidates along, businesses risk worsening the bottlenecks that have long frustrated job seekers. Whereas before the pandemic, the potential downsides of companies ghosting applicants was relatively minor, the issue has become a real liability for employers now that workers have more options than ever about where to go.

"What companies need to do is to recognize that this is the new normal, we're in a new environment," Sohn said.

And while higher compensation remains an important factor, less than a third of candidates polled by Recruiter.com said it was the "most important" consideration, which leaves more than two thirds who prioritize less tangible offerings like work-life balance, remote work, and employee experience.

Companies that understand this are already gaining an edge on those holding out for the return of a bygone era.

Now is the time for job seekers to go where hiring demand is strongest, even if it's outside their comfort zone, Sohn said.

"Go get experience doing something that's maybe tangential to what you're looking to do," he said. "Go where the jobs are."

Additionally, the pandemic has only accelerated a longer-term trend of job-switching among workers, and that means they have more opportunities to learn new skills at one job to make them more competitive for the next one.

"The thing that you and I were told not to do 30 years ago - job hop - that's becoming normal," he said.