Hiring Data from the Field: Expect Outdoor Industry Growth

It might be hard to believe, but the swiftest economic downturn in history has already begun to reverse course. We aren’t quite seeing the “V” recovery some economists predicted as early as May—it’s more of a wide “U”—but new reports, including these five reported by Business Insider, show that the hardest-hit parts of the U.S. economy are on their way back up. Restaurant bookings are picking back up. People are starting to fly again. Hotels are starting to book, people are returning to public transportation, and perhaps most importantly, workers are going back to work.

Now, with Q2 almost wrapped up, we’ve got a whole quarter’s worth of our own hiring activity to give us some insights into how job candidates are responding to everything that has happened these past months. Combine those insights with everything we’re seeing in the recovering economy, and one clear message starts to form: It’s time to start preparing for Q3 with a solid hiring plan right now.

Our Q2 Executive Hiring Insights

A few months ago when the pandemic still had most of the country under stay-at-home orders, we were able to report some early senses we were getting about candidate behavior specifically at the VP or higher level in the outdoor industry. At the time, unemployment was at a record high of 14.7%. In our own searches, engagement rates were astronomical throughout this period. We saw much higher response rates to our emails, and we suspected that was because people were just uncertain about what would happen as the pandemic progressed. 

Now, it seems as though our suspicions were correct. Highline has never stopped conducting our searches throughout this pandemic, and that puts us in a unique position to get a real lay of the land. It’s critical to understand that those unemployment numbers represented lost jobs in those industries who felt the immediate impact of the quarantine. Millions of Americans in retail, tourism, hospitality, and service were left without work—but that didn’t necessarily mean unemployment in the outdoor industry was happening at the same rate. We saw a lot of tire kickers due to general uncertainty, but did not see a sudden surge of unemployed outdoor executives looking for new work.

The State of Executive Candidates Going into Q3

That’s not to say that the outdoor industry wasn’t impacted. Especially for outdoor brands that rely heavily on retail distribution, there were some major challenges to overcome in Q2. But many outdoor brands went into the quarantine already set up to distribute direct-to-consumer, and that seemed to have made all the difference for the industry writ large. 

Where we expect to see further stabilization and even growth for the outdoor industry is in the recovery of the rest of the economy and consumers’ comfortability in spending again. For my money, the most telling of the recent financial reports was May’s surprising jobs report. To most economists’ surprise, the unemployment rate dropped to 13.3%. May saw the creation (or maybe the better word is re-creation) of 2.5 million jobs, which is the highest monthly jump in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ recorded history. The more people are working, the better the prospects for outdoor brands—which means growth needs to be on your mind for the rest of 2020.

As Americans return to work, confidence in the U.S. economy seems to be stabilizing, as well. People who haven’t already lost their jobs—namely executives in the outdoor industry—are feeling less uncertain about their employment moving into Q3. That may mean the recent surge in not-so-serious candidates may accordingly recede, which puts our industry right back where we started 2020, with one of the tightest candidate markets we’ve ever seen.

Plan Now to Get Candidates in New Roles By Q4

So, what we do know now is that hiring for executive roles in the outdoor industry moving forward is going to be the same kind of challenge it was before the pandemic hit. As we’ve said time and time again, the best way to overcome that challenge is through a solid hiring process—but with so much we still don’t know about the coming months, that’s truer now than ever before.

Historically, summer has been an ideal time to attract candidates to your open positions. There’s a clean break between the school years, so there’s less of a challenge to relocate. But right now, we don’t even know if schools will be opening fully come fall. More than that, the prospect of uprooting a family when so much of life feels uprooted already might be more difficult to ignore. Then again, trailing spouses might be working remote now and into the foreseeable future, which is an advantage. Finally, travel is a touchy subject and could make an interview schedule even more difficult to arrange for candidates and internal stakeholders alike.

Here’s the point: Whatever your hiring timelines have been in the past, you can expect them to extend quite a bit moving forward. But since it’s hard to tell if a new hire will even need to be present in the office by September or October, now is the perfect time to move forward with a new hire. 

Start booking interview dates for August and September now just to have them on the schedule. Do some research into travel and accommodations and how you can factor those into your timelines—we’ve actually started to see candidates choosing to drive 7 hours for an interview rather than fly, which could be an ongoing reality in the coming months. Prepare for what a remote onboarding could look like for your next big hire.

The key to all of this is to expect growth. There are good things on the horizon for our industry, and the brands that position themselves to take advantage of that are the ones that will come out of COVID-19 the strongest.

—Tony O’Neill, President

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About the Author: Tony O’Neill is the Founder and President of Highline Outdoor Group — the purpose-driven executive search firm for forward- thinking outdoor industry and sporting goods companies and brands.

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