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Here is what is going on around the ERE world this week:

• On Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. ET, our sister site is premiering its newest Fordyce TV show — No BS with Barb Bruno. She will be giving you some tips on how to double your job order flow in the next 30 days.
• On Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. ET, join us for our next free webinar, Effective Onboarding with a Limited Budget, led by Elaine Orler from Knowledge Infusion.
• Keep an eye on the site this week for an article on 5 keys to a competitive edge. Here’s what you can do today to start creating your competitive advantage within talent acquisition.

Time is running out to reserve your spot at ERE Expo 2009 Spring in San Diego at the end of the month. Join hundreds of your peers at this year’s conference. And if you are in the search and placement side of the business check out our third annual Fordyce Forum 2009 taking place in Las Vegas from June 10 – 12.

Have a great week, and feel free to leave any questions in the comments section below.

Wall Street reacted tepidly this morning to news that job losses in February were in line with expectations and were smaller than the losses in December or January. At the opening, the Dow Jones jumped 130 points, but gave back most of the gain by late morning.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 651,000 jobs were lost during the 28-day month. The government also revised its initial reports on December and January job losses and now says 681,000 jobs were lost in December, up from the initial report of 577,000 losses. In January, 655,000 jobs were lost.

Unemployment increased to 8.1 percent from January’s 7.6 percent; the additional 851,000 unemployed workers swelled the total to 12.5 million. Another 8.6 million Americans were working part time for economic reasons, a number that includes people who work part time because they can’t find full-time jobs.The unemployment rate is now the highest since December 1983. However, when the discouraged workers (those who did not search for a job in the last month) and the involuntary parttimers are added, the rate of un- and under-employed workers is 14.8 percent.

The BLS report says, “Since the recession began in December 2007, about 4.4 million jobs have been lost, with more than half (2.6 million) of the decrease occurring in the last four months.”

Economists had been expecting a February job loss of 652,000, though some reports predicted a far worse scenario. Even so, the monthly job losses are among the worst in half a century in raw numbers. But the workforce in the 1960s and 1970s was significantly smaller so the impact was worse then.

Job losses in professional and business services and manufacturing amounted to a combined 342,000 jobs. Construction losses added another 104,000 jobs to the total. Finance, retail, trucking, and hospitality accounted for another 117,000 of the losses.

Only government (9,000 jobs) and healthcare (27,000 jobs) saw any growth.

As the economy tumbles, and companies right-size their recruiting departments, the bottom-half is the first to go. Under this scenario, those formerly in the relatively secure 2nd quartile are now in the bottom-half. So be wary or get better.

With this sobering news in mind, I offer those of you in all quartiles this short, 10-point personal evaluation guide. While some of them are a bit crazy, they’re based on comparing your performance to the best in the business. It will tell you quickly whether you’re in the top 25% and how to stay there.

keep reading…

Economists are worrying and the stock market is reacting to fears that tomorrow’s February jobs report may be worse than expected. A report Wednesday from payroll processor ADP that foreshadows the numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said almost 700,000 jobs were lost during the month. A forecast by Dow Jones earlier had predicted the ADP number would be closer to 630,000.

BLS Data

Now, Dow Jones is predicting that the BLS report will show a decline of 652,000 jobs in February.

Worse is the forecast from Wanted Technologies. The company is predicting the report will show 868,000 jobs lost. Wanted’s forecast is based on measuring the changes in jobs posted online to job boards and corporate career sites. The company provides job listing data to The Conference Board.

ADP, on the other hand, uses payroll data from its thousands of clients. The company claims to handle payroll processing for a sixth of all U.S. firms.

Regardless of which estimate is closest, none of them bode well for the stock market or the economy. In January, the BLS said 598,000 jobs were lost. It was the worst jobs report since 1974. February, shorter by three days, is expected to be even worse. Losing even more than January will mean the recession is not abating despite the billions already spent on banking bailouts and the passage of a stimulus bill during the month.

“Given the usual trailing relationship, I expect several more months comparable to what we saw,” economist Joel Prakken told Forbes.com. He’s chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers, which prepares the ADP report. “I don’t think we’ll see some stabilization until later this year.”

The BLS report release is scheduled for 8:30 Eastern time Friday.

Monster launched its free, 47-city Keep America Working Tour in New York City today amidst a flurry of media attention and a jobseeker turnout that filled the Marriott Marquis and snaked into Times Square.

“This is not just a career fair,” Monster’s Eric Weingardner told us from the hotel as he stole a few minutes from the show floor. “This is a career experience.”

OK so it’s a little bit of hyperbole, but not as much as you might think. The job fair is about jobs of course, which is what prompted some 3,500 jobseekers to pre-register for the event. But the workshops occurring every half-hour covered marketing and branding yourself, career planning and, naturally, Monster’s new, online planning tools. Monster career experts circulated among the crowd while kiosks offered tutorials on using Monster.com.

More than 1,000 jobs were available from the 92 participating employers. Big names, such as Macy’s, Manpower, and Wachovia were represented, as were smaller employers some of whom may never have participated in a job fair before.

To coax employers to participate, there is no charge. Instead, says Weingardner, vice president of client adoption, “Do you have compelling work? That’s what we’re looking for.”

Any Monster customer with jobs available can participate in any of the 140 fairs the company is planning between now and the end of the year. “The only way we could do this is to bring this in-house,” Weingardner explained. In past years, planning and management of the for-fee job fairs was done by an outside firm. In New York, 40 Monster employees are running the show produced by the Global Events Team.

Monster’s partner, Adicio, is powering the registration process and hosting the career fair information site. Different elements of its virtual career fair platform will be used according to the needs of each stop on the Keep America Working Tour. A calendar of the upcoming job fairs is available here. Companies interested in participating should contact their Monster sales rep or call 1-800-MONSTER.

Even when times are really tough, most organizations are still recruiting. And, given the times, the people they are recruiting are critical to product design, service delivery, and ultimately profitability.

Keeping these people engaged from day one is the challenge. Other employees are not upbeat; many are feeling overworked and under-appreciated; and everyone has a fear of what tomorrow may bring. So how can you be positive and create an atmosphere that will build commitment and engagement?

Employees who have gone through some sort of onboarding process — one that is more than the usual paper-processing bureaucracy — report feeling better connected to corporate strategy and to the company culture. This translates into engagement and a feeling of belonging.

There at least three things that orientation or assimilation programs can do for you.

keep reading…

Holding a job in the world of finance today is a bit of a high-wire act, so it may be apt that a new site to help financial companies and candidates connect is calling itself One Wire.

As finance jobs dry up, and layoffs spread like an Australian wildfire, recruiters with the few reqs that do come along are all but drowning in applications. But use OneWire and the best matching candidates surface.

OneWire is job matching for the finance sector. It works on brute force, getting as granular in its data collection as asking for GPA scores, and details about the specific size and reach of the deals an experienced financier handled or an analyst covered.

Almost no detail of a job is too small for OneWire. You complete a personal profile by picking from pulldown menus that beget other pulldowns, which beget still more until OneWire can almost figure out which office on which floor of which skyscraper on Wall Street you worked.

keep reading…

The New York Times has a great interactive map showing how employment rates are changing across the United States.

I find it striking how the worst problems in employment seem to center around the local areas that support the industries that are the epicenters of this recession: the real estate bubble, automobile manufacturers, etc.

Lots of red…

Back in 1992-1993, during the last serious recession, I got laid off. I was out of work for approximately 13 weeks before being hired as a recruiter. My job was focused on hiring sales representatives and I had more than enough candidates for the role. Perhaps because of that, I was arrogant. I let many candidates whom I had contacted or interviewed for the role simply slip away, without calling them or following up. Not long after that, I was at a job fair and some of the candidates I had interviewed for the sales rep role came up to me. In front of my relatively new colleagues, they pulled no punches in criticizing me for not following up and getting back to them.

As embarrassed as I was to hear that then, my accusers were right! I had dropped the ball and not gotten back to them. What I had not realized (even though I had experienced the same thing during my own period of being laid off), was that during recessionary times, everything we do as recruiters gets magnified.

As a result, to me, times of difficulty do put us under a microscope in which perceptions are skewed. However, so too do they present great opportunities to build even better relationships with candidates and third party search providers, to sharpen our skills and give ourselves greater tools as recruiters, and to further enable us to be unique professionals who stand out from the pack.

But to begin, let’s be clear: It’s an ugly world out there. Your company may have gone through layoffs and decimated its recruiting department. And now you’re the one that’s left — and you still have to fill requisitions and hire people.

keep reading…

Employment tests may not be perfect, but one new study suggests they’re no more racist than we humans. I wonder what Charles, Wendell, and ERE members who are interested in assessments have to say. Leave a comment here if you have thoughts. keep reading…

“I don’t have to tell you that things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody is out of work or scared of losing their job…banks are going bust.”
–Peter Finch, “Network”

Can you hear that sound? It is the groaning reverberation of a deep and protracted recession. It is the sound of layoffs and loss. Of homes foreclosed, 401(k)s decimated, and of violent shifts in the professional and financial worlds. It is the sound of unsinkable companies … disappearing. It is deep and it is wide and it is ugly, and it has either already affected you or it will. No matter; Les Brown said it best. “It does not matter what happens to you. All that matters is; what are you going to do about it?”

So let me ask? What are you going to do about it?

I will tell you what most recruiters I am communicating with are currently doing. keep reading…

As many in the recruiting industry know, it can be challenging to implement a talent acquisition system within an organization. However, with an effective talent acquisition process in place, a company can achieve great results as well as avoiding pitfalls such as reduced responsiveness and a negative impact on the candidate experience.

Join me, along with Sean Kent and Rob Sunderland, as we examine the advantages to an effective talent acquisition system and how to go about implementing one. Rob will speak from personal experience about how Southern Company, one of the largest electricity generators in the US, recently transformed its talent acquisition process and the positive results it had.

Sean and Rob will be addressing questions at the end of the presentation, such as how an effective talent acquisition system can specifically help your organization and what factors you should be aware of when implementing one. Many have already registered but we still have space available so be sure to sign up today!

____________________________________________________________
When: Wednesday, March 4th
2:00 – 3:00 PM EST
Register Here
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If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at brendan@ere.net.

Economic downturns, mergers, and acquisitions all place pressure on organizations to curb labor costs. No time in the last decade has that tenet been more apparent than right now.

Layoffs, large or small, force organizations to cut loose the talent in which they have invested salary and training dollars. While talent released during a layoff today may seem like little more than an expense, tomorrow it could be the difference between success and failure.

keep reading…

The recently passed “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,” aka the stimulus bill, includes a provision that restricts companies receiving federal bailout funds from hiring immigrant workers on H-1B visas. This provision was added by senators Charles Grassley, from Iowa, and Bernie Sanders, from Vermont. Considering that engineers, scientists, and immigrants with advanced degrees are generally falling over themselves to get to those two hubs of technological innovation and economic growth, one can understand the motivations of these lawmakers. They clearly have an informed perspective that most others lack.

The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel

One would hope that the Messrs. Grassley and Sanders had done their homework, but that would be giving them too much credit.

keep reading…

Here is what is going on around the ERE world this week:

On Wednesday, join us for our free webinar – Implementing an Infrastructure to Transform Talent Acquisition: Balancing Strategy, Detail and the Real-world Challenges of Project Management. This session will be led by Sean Kent from The Newman Group.

Todd & the editorial team are working on some great articles for the week including Jeremy Eskenazi writing about how difficult times can provide opportunities for you. And Howard Adamsky has some great advice Tuesday on how you can be one of the recruiters who’ll come roaring back when the economy does. Some of his advice may surprise you. And some of it’s not politically correct.

We’re starting to put together the April Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. If you are into branding, you’re going to like it. There’s also an in-depth piece about hourly recruiting.

Meanwhile, if you are looking for a new opportunity, add your info here. Let’s try and help each other out through this difficult period.

If you are on the search and placement side of the business, Friday is the final day to take advantage of the $300 early bird discount for the third annual Fordyce Forum conference in Las Vegas from June 10 – 12.

And time is running out to reserve your spot at ERE Expo 2009 Spring at the end of this month in San Diego.

Have a great week, and if you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments section.

In recent months, companies have slashed deep into their organizations, cutting high-performing, highly talented individuals with the stroke of a pen. What started as a gradual decrease of the non-performing workforce has now escalated to a firing frenzy as companies struggle to stabilize losses and preserve cash flow. The results of pushing the panic button can be seen in the national unemployment rate of 7.6% and job losses of over 1.2 million since 2008. By contrast, the unemployment rate in 2008 was 5.8%. Despite the grim news, there are companies that are still in need of talent and still hiring.

The number of posted online jobs is currently in excess of 3.3 million. This number is probably underestimated as this does not account for the jobs posted via other methods. The public sector (government agencies) and some private sectors (medical, engineering) are still struggling with the depletion of future talent.

Companies are entering a new job market with a whole new set of challenges. Under the present circumstances, companies can’t rely on the heavy bonuses, high salaries, or other perks that have been the catalysts to attracting top performers. And, let’s face it, the talent pools are filling up with the A players. Will our tendency be to toss that “overqualified” resume to the side? Is that the right thing to do?

keep reading…