Kevin, I agree with you that the mindset of recruiting needs a reboot. While recruiters are overwhelmed with an onslaught of applicants, they DO need to find the right balance between ignoring most resumes and finding the skills and competencies that may be hidden in the resumes they receive. I published an article yesterday about the “black hole” of resume submissions(http://plasticskyscraper.wordpress.com/2009/03/10/apply-now-the-black-hole/), and my contention is that over-automation of the recruiting process benefits no one — except saving recruiters the time and effort of actually reading resumes. HR says they must focus on finding skilled (or trainable) people, but instead rely on keywords to determine an applicant’s potenntial fit in an organization. With the difficulty in finding qualified applicants it will be necessary to identify basic abilities & competencies and groom candidates to become the employees that are needed to fill the gap.

As simply as I might say it, value is making someone’s life better and easier. Companies should be about doing this. So should employees. In the current state of things, neither really is.

Employees pursue employment as if they are attempting to get something. “I’m looking for a job.” “I need to find a job.” “Where can I get a job?” These are the kinds of statements and questions associated with employment from an employee’s perspective. Most employees don’t really know how their job contributes to the value received by the company or its customers.

The autoworker is suffering as a result of this misunderstanding of value. These workers have, for years, been paid to do a job, not to serve the company or its customers. Their pay is tied to some codified historical wage scales, not to anything actually associated with value delivered.

Companies aren’t that much different. They are trying to find customers. Salesmen attempt to “get an order.” “We need more customers!” This, too, is too common a comment made by those who hire.

When I ask companies to tell me what they do, I am bombarded with statements about their product. What I am asking, and what they should be telling me, is “How does your offering make your customer’s life better and easier.” “Why your product?” “Why me?” “Why now?” The answer gives me an expected outcome, the way that my life will be better and easier if I become a customer.

How would this enhanced understanding of value correct virtually all employment problems?

Both employer and employee would become more concerned with providing value than with getting something. No longer would an individual desiring to be aligned with an enterprise present himself to get something at all. She would come, rather, to offer an outcome, a value, the way that her participation with the enterprise would make it, and its customers’ lives, better and easier.

When a prospective employee approaches a potential employer, the offer would be presented as the assurance of an outcome. The applicant, knowing his strengths and aspirations, and confident that the value of the company is aligned with his desire to be a part of it, would intentionally communicate “how” having him as a part of the team would impact the company and its customers. He would communicate exactly what he would you see himself doing to contribute to the cause. She could answer, “Why me?” “Why now?” She could describe the impact that would ‘automatically’ come to the company, or to its customers if she were part of our team.

This would change the hiring decision. No longer would the hiring organization be making a decision to hire based on an opening in the corporate org chart. (Those are being eliminated in the tough economy as we speak.) Instead, the decision would be one tied inextricably to the impact promised. The question wouldn’t be, “Do we need another person?” It would be, “Do we need the impact this person will produce?”

If applicants would better know themselves, and confidently communicated their ability to deliver valued outcomes, jobs would open up, even jobs that seemed not to exist.

This is the Organic Business Model discussed in The Squaredime Letters.

January was one of the worst months for layoffs ever, with nearly a quarter-million job-cut announcements grabbing headlines.

But the real problem in the U.S. labor market today isn’t layoffs. It’s a hiring freeze that is gripping most work places – and has not gotten nearly as much attention as the job cuts.

“The hiring rate has caved. That’s why the job market is as bad as it is,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist with Moody’s Economy.com. “Given this low hiring rate, unemployment would still rise even if layoffs were falling.”

The government’s key employment report, released Friday morning, doesn’t detail hiring and job openings. It instead gives overall change in the number of workers on U.S. payrolls.

It was another terrible report, with employers shaving 598,000 jobs off of U.S. payrolls, the biggest drop in 34 years. The unemployment rate climbed to 7.6%, which was a 16-year high. Both results were worse than economists’ forecasts.

But since 2000, the Labor Department has also tracked hiring, job openings and layoffs. And the most recent readings on those statistics show that the level of hiring and job openings has actually tumbled more than layoffs have soared.

Through November, the number of layoffs was up 17% from year-earlier levels. But the amount of workers who were hired during November was down 26%, and the number of job openings tumbled 30%.

While layoffs are likely up from the November levels, the hit to hiring has also gotten much more severe, according to experts. And that means that once people do lose their job, it’s going to be even tougher to find a new one.

The Conference Board’s tracking of online job listings shows a decline of more than 1 million listings in the last two months alone. That’s a 23% decline in postings since November. The weakness in job postings is widespread, with only two states, North Dakota and Wyoming, having fewer unemployed people than advertised job openings.

During the last recession in 2001, there was not nearly as sharp a drop in hiring and job openings. In fact, the hiring and job opening rates, which compare new hires and openings to the overall number of workers, are both at their lowest level on record.

And economists say that even if the number of layoffs peaks soon, the pace of hiring and job openings may remain soft for months to come.

“The issue of hiring is often overlooked,” said Gad Levanon, senior economist for The Conference Board. “But it’s the key to the labor market. In the last recession, layoffs reached their peak in late 2001. But hiring didn’t reach its lowest level until 2003, and that’s when the job losses finally ended.”

Andrew Reina, practice director for job placement firm Ajilon Finance Solutions, said hiring freezes are now the rule at most companies.

“A lot of our clients are looking at hiring freezes, certainly in the short term, and most likely through the first half of this year,” he said.

Economist Robert Brusca of FAO Economics added that hiring freezes are an easier way for many companies to reduce work forces than layoffs, since even in bad times people will leave companies on their own.

And he said the hiring freezes won’t end until companies have some confidence that the economy and demand for their products are ready to turn around.

“It’s pretty clear that fear is running the show right now,” he said.

“our most fundamental economic challenges — the crushing cost of health care, the inadequate state of so many of our schools, our dangerous dependence on foreign oil.”

However, Kevin’s question is a political one, and that’s a bit of a problem because people don’t like talking politics on this site. Back (way back) what we call politics were referred to as “Political Economy”, and the notion of talking about one without the other would have been impossible.

Read Mish’s Global Economics Analyis blog or The Oil Drum, and after a few hours, you will have an answer to your questions Kevin.

In one paragraph, here you go: We have global overcapacity in everything but healthcare and the energy complex. We have built our economy around cheap oil, which is going away for good because while there may be plenty to burn, there is only one atmosphere to burn it in. In our efforts to avoid the results of these facts, we have bankrupted the country on every level, and that has caused a global deflationary spiral to begin. Firms are laying off because the raw numbers are awful- look at shipping rates, rail rates, auto and housing production, energy use, confidence, and debt-to-equity and you will see that this is not a typical recession.

But it’s not all gloom and doom- while we are bankrupt at the moment, we have vast untapped sources of wealth and answering the health and energy issues will create a far better, more sustainable world. It will be a rough ride for awhile and it will never be the same as it was, but there is plenty to look forward to on the other side.

The really hard part will be the politics- so why not start talking about what business needs to do to foster the kind of politics needed to answer the challenge ?

Growing talent from within and building stronger alignment between recruiting and training and development provides a competitive advantage. In most cases the cost of on-boarding an entry level associate is much less than a mid or upper level individual. In addition, the contextual knowledge existing associates bring to their new assignment can never be purchased nor transferred via some “Vulan mind-link”.

The emerging jobs needed to address the new ways we work require some serious attention. Both in corporate experimentation and in the educational career prep track. This is a great opportunity for internships and collaborative partnerships with local schools, colleges and universities. Call your local institutions to discuss how best to align your needs with their curriculum.

While your company may be faced with reductions in the workforce, keep an open mind to low cost-no cost opportunities to develop future workers with some on-the-job experiments and experience. In times like these, internships, and co-op jobs send a message of hope for those about to enter the workforce.

Joseph P. Murphy
Shaker Consulting Group
Developers of the Virtual Job Tryout®