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With all due respect to Lou Adler, there’s not much evidence in today’s labor report that there’s any recovery in sight. Besides confirming economists’ expectations that about 524,000 jobs were lost in December, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised its November jobs report to say the U.S. lost 51,000 more jobs than the 533,000 it initially reported.

The December numbers pushed the nation’s unemployment rate to 7.2 percent, a rate that jumps to 13.5 percent when you include the underemployed — those involuntarily working part time or at temporary jobs or are otherwise marginally attached to the workforce.

As many news organizations pointed out, the 2.6 million jobs lost last year was the largest jobs loss since the end of World War II, when 2.75 million jobs disappeared. The pain would have been worse in 1945, however, since the nation’s population then was 132.5 million. Today the population is 301.6 million with 135.5 million non-farm workers.

A more telling statistic is the rate of job loss. More than 1.9 million jobs were lost in the last four months alone. In the last eight years 3 million jobs were created, compared to the 22.8 million in the eight years previous.

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Hiring will start to recover in Q2, 2009, and now is the time to rebuild your recruiting team and massively upgrade your sourcing and hiring processes.

If you’re still considering cutbacks in your recruiting staff, think again. Recruiting top people is a repeatable sales process that’s fundamentally different than hiring average people. Instead of cutting back, replace the underperformers with people who can sell complex intangibles and services, those who can learn solution selling, and those who have demonstrated they can follow a realistic sales process including meeting quotas and being managed by the numbers.

Forget the Lone Rangers and those experienced recruiters who have not gotten significantly better over the past two years. Hiring top people is a business process, equivalent to selling your firm’s products and services. Now is the time to start implementing new training programs and changing your outdated pre-recession recruiting processes.

The amount of stimulus Obama, Bernanke, and Paulson/Geitner have already induced and are planning to induce into our economy system will jumpstart the recovery faster than can be imagined. So get ready to rumble. The best people are now sitting on the sidelines waiting for some reason to think about the future, rather than holding onto the past. (Take our annual recruiting challenges survey if you want some instant insight on what’s happening.)

Instead of minor changes and improvements, I’m going to suggest a wholesale rebuilding of your recruiting department is in order. This will give you a chance to hire the best people as soon as there is evidence the economy is changing direction. So starting with a fresh clean slate, here are three things you should be doing right now to get ready for the upcoming hiring recovery.

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We’re already a week into 2009, and everyone else has already published their predictions for the year. In the spirit of better late then never, here are a few of mine:

1. 2009 will be a painful year for recruiters. It’s obvious, but how could I leave this off the list? We’re in a recession, and as employment numbers continue to fall it will get worse for recruiters before it gets better. When will the turnaround come? Hiring typically lags behind corporate profits, so don’t expect recruiting activity to pick up again until after companies’ profits start rising again.
2. There will be less of us. As was pointed out to me today on the Recruiting Animal Show, I’m an old salt in the recruiting world at the not-so-tender age of 34. The last time I saw our profession contract was in the recession of 2001, when we simply had too many recruiters trying to fill too few open positions and thousands of professionals moved on to greener pastures. The strong and the lucky will once again survive, and those who are not at the top of their games will move on. In the last recession, many went into real estate. This time it will be different. keep reading…

Ah, another recession — maybe the mother of all recessions – is upon us. Predictions for recovery range from a few months to two years, but however long it is it will permanently change how we work and recruit.

This recession is our real introduction to the 21st century. For the first eight years of this century, most things stayed as they were with a few small modifications. The Internet infiltrated relatively slowly into the lives of ordinary people. Traditional work remained central, organizations replaced and added workers according to traditional formulas; travel got more uncomfortable, but remained a requirement for those who worked nationally or globally; and the media remained dominated by movies, DVDs, and paper. Energy and the environment became issues — but primarily only for the educated and wealthy. Few of us could identify really major differences between, for example, 1995 and 2005.

But the differences between 1999 and 2009 will be obvious.

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From Janco Associates, a Nevada consulting company specializing in information systems.

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How are you doing with those New Year’s resolutions? We mean the work ones, not those “lose-weight-eat-healthy-get-more-exercise” ones.

If “Reevaluate background screening program” isn’t on your list, add it now because you can bet that should the EEOC come calling it will do it for you.

Ever since 2006 when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission adopted a series of changes that have come to be known as the “Systemic Initiative,” EEOC field offices have been aggressively pursuing cases where one or more forms of discrimination permeate a company’s hiring practices. These can be as overt as the $20 million settlement last month against LA Weight Loss Centers for refusing to hire men. Or they can be as unintentionally discriminatory as refusing to hire anyone with a violent criminal record.

This latter instance was the heart of the leading U.S. case on background screening, El v. SEPTA.

Douglas El was fired as a driver of the mentally and physically disabled when a criminal check turned up a juvenile murder record. His attorneys sued showing that the policy has a disparate impact on Blacks who are more likely to have a record than whites. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia upheld the employer in the case, but recruiters should take little comfort in that decision.

“The third circuit dropped lots of hints,” says EEOC attorney Carol Miaskoff, that it would have ruled differently, but for a lack of expert witnesses on the part of El’s attorneys. They chose not to counter testimony by noted criminologist Dr. Alfred Blumstein that a person with a criminal record is more likely to recidivate, even if, as in El’s case, the conviction was 40 years old.

So why should this prompt a new year’s review of hiring practices?

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A year ago it was business as usual for most of us in the staffing industry. My how things change! Of course the big news for 2009 is the economy. This coming year is going to force all of us to start getting creative and perhaps re-think the way we do things in order to accomplish our goals with fewer resources. But what, if anything, do these changes mean for the world of pre-employment assessment?

The most significant change I expect to see in pre-employment assessments in 2009 is a slowing of uptake as some organizations slow their hiring to a trickle or cut things seen as non-essential (i.e., assessment) from their budgets. I am not going to miss the opportunity to suggest that cuts to the budget for assessment are unwarranted because a well-designed assessment program can provide ROI — no matter what the economic context may be. My thoughts about a slight slowdown in the use of assessment are just speculation; it will be interesting to see if hard data such as that provided by our 6th Annual Screening and Assessment Usage Survey supports this speculation. If you have not taken the survey yet, I encourage you to do so. It only takes about 10 minutes and the information you provide is very valuable.

Despite the possibility of a slowdown in the purchase of assessments, there are a number of trends, nine in all, that will help mark 2009.

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With the use of cents-off coupons soaring it’s probably no surprise that someone would think to offer them for job postings. But for its sheer size alone, the Job Board Savings Book is an audacious effort.

It offers discounts ranging from 5 to 50 percent on the price of a job posting for over 1,000 niche, diversity, and regional job boards. Most of the boards are part of the JobTarget (profile; site) network, which is to be expected since the coupon book was produced by JobTarget and the Society for Human Resource Management. The two have been partnering on a job posting service since 2007. The majority of coupons are redeemable there.

Included in the coupon book are such national job boards as Monster, offering a 5 percent discount, and Jobster, Net-Temps, and SnagaJob. There are also hundreds of job boards offered by professional organizations, as well as several dozen regional boards powered by JobTarget.

Anyone can use the coupons to get the discount. Simply choose the job boards you want, then look up the discount codes and enter them at the SHRM job posting site when you place your order. Besides downloading the book, which will be updated periodically during 2009, printed copies will be inserted in the January issue of SHRM’s HR Magazine and the Winter issue of SHRM’s Staffing Management magazine.

In late 2000 and 2001, several dramatic events occurred simultaneously: the dotcoms became the “dotbombs,” the economy took a steep downturn, and the tragic events that occurred on September 11th pushed the country into war and significantly impacted the already battered economy. Corporate layoffs were announced daily. Companies stopped hiring, cut spending on marketing and training, and placed restrictions on travel and other non-essential spending. Some companies shut down their campus recruiting programs entirely.

Sound familiar? This is not unlike what we are seeing today. According to the newly-released Michigan State University 2008-2009 Recruiting Trends Survey, total college hiring will decrease by 10% in the coming year. While belt-tightening during an economic downturn is unavoidable, we argue that campus recruiting activities should not be eliminated altogether. We have been in the staffing business for 25 years and run large-scale campus recruiting programs at Fortune 500 companies, such as Agilent Technologies, Ernst & Young, CIGNA, and Honeywell. We have experienced as many down-markets as we have market upswings.

When faced with tough financial conditions, here are five reasons why smart companies continue to recruit on campus.

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ERE is starting off the new year by hosting a Meetup — a chance for recruiters in the Cincinnati area to do a little networking after hours. Thanks to our sponsor Taleo, we’ve got drinks and appetizers — all you need to do is show up to meet and network with familiar faces (and some new ones) in our industry!

Over the past few months we have held ERE Meetups in Boston, New York City, Miami, San Francisco, and most recently Dallas. They have had a great turnout and the recruiters who joined us had a fantastic time!

We will be holding this Meetup at the gorgeous Cincinnatian Hotel in downtown Cincinnati. Here’s the info:

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Monster (profile; site) has signed a Chicagoland newspaper group to its burgeoning alliance and in so doing has wounded, if not killed, a regional job board that was created, in part, as a response to Monster itself.

The Sun-Times News Group, whose largest property is Chicago’s second daily, the Sun-Times, launched the co-branded Monster job boards today on all of its 70, mostly small, suburban newspaper sites. The additions bring to about 250 Monster’s newspaper partner sites. In addition it has co-branded sites with some 100 television stations.

Until today’s launch, Sun-Times papers were in a regional job board founded in January 2004 by Shaker Recruitment Advertising and Communications (profile; site). Of the 11 papers participating in ChicagoJobs.com, 10 are owned by the Sun-Times News Group and are now Monster affiliates.  A Sun-Times spokeswoman said the company is no longer working with the Shaker-sponsored job board.

What that means for the future of ChicagoJobs.com is not known. Joseph G. Shaker, company president, couldn’t be reached. However, the loss of the papers will undoubtedly hit hard on traffic to the site. Many of the estimated 160,000 unique visitors come from the newspaper sites, although Chicagojobs.com does rank first on Google’s organic search results. It will also cut the number of listed jobs, since many of them came from the participating papers.

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Most fear to even to use the word “depression,” but now is the time for corporate HR to begin thinking about such an eventuality. As most people know, there are two key economic drivers that impact our economy: 1) productivity (product and service output) and 2) employment.

The government has done a great deal recently to boost the productivity (output) of the economy through its trillion-dollar bailout and coordination of merger activity, but freeing up credit and keeping well-known firms alive have not halted job losses in many industries, including those in the housing, mortgage, and financial sectors.

Both government and corporate leaders have under-emphasized the role of the job market in the economic downturn to the point that in my opinion, the time has come that we must consider the real possibility that the job market will move from a recession into a depression.

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Originally published April 8, 2008.

It’s a great day at Newman Industries! For the last month, it has been actively recruiting a hot candidate to join its sales team. Today, Steven Harmon agreed to join. Newman sees him as a true rainmaker. The recruiter and sales manager share high-fives. Mission accomplished! Spike the ball in the end zone. The job is done! The competition was fierce for Steven, but Newman Industries won.

While Newman Industries was celebrating, Steven resigned his position with his present employer and enjoyed a celebratory dinner with his wife. That night, Steven lay in bed wondering if he made the right decision. He came to terms with his decision and looks forward to his first day at the company.

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