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“Unemployment is expected to remain above 8 percent for the next four years.” That gloomy assessment of the U.S. economy from FedEx Chief Economist Gene Huang is echoed in any number of reports and economic predictions.

“Most predictions,” says an economic analysis by the Society for Human Resource Management, “are less optimistic now than they were when 2011 began.”

What especially worries economists is whether the slow job growth is due to employer cautiousness — in which case growth will accelerate when economic confidence returns — or whether it is structural, meaning some jobs have been permanently eliminated, much the way automation obsoleted elevator operators.

“It is a fair bet that aggregate demand remains the main problem while pockets of skills mismatches persist, despite the high number of job seekers,” says the SHRM analysis.

The latest economist to weigh in is Gad Levanon, director of macroeconomic research for The Conference Board. Last week, he dissected recoveries of the past to examine the rate of job growth across multiple industries. What he found is that “the current employment recovery is the second slowest on record.” keep reading…

I was just reviewing the predictions I made for 2011 written at roughly this time a year ago. Much of what I thought would happen unfolded as expected, except for talent management. I had thought there would more focus on integrating the employee development and recruitment functions, and more internal hiring. I still think that’s on tap for this year. I was on target regarding hiring: There was no great uptick in the volume of hiring, and unemployment remained static. And I was on target with predicting that social media would be core to recruiting success and that RPOs would thrive.

Over the past two years, the way we think about work has changed. Perhaps accelerated by the recession, there is more focus now on finding satisfying and rewarding work than on just finding a job that pays the most.

More people are thinking about finding something interesting, challenging, and perhaps even fun to do that provides enough income. The key words here are interesting/challenging and enough. Fewer expect to get rich and there is less focus on the money. There is more focus on lifestyle, flexibility, free time to pursue other learning or hobbies or sports, and less interest in family. I’ll do more columns on these trends soon, but partly because of them here are the major changes that I see happening this year.

Internal Recruiting Goes Mainstream

Perhaps one of the most significant trends will be a greater focus on finding current employees to fill existing jobs. keep reading…

For those suffering from insomnia now around 2 a.m. Eastern, we’ve dug through a U.S. government website to find a 172-page document that may help you sleep — or, if you’re a federal contractor, could possibly keep you up at night.

The draft of the proposed rules, to be printed later today (Friday the 9th), would create a big new set of rules related to hiring people with disabilities. keep reading…

Contingent workers, consultants, and independent contractors will make up as much as 35% of the total U.S. workforce within a decade. You’ve got new challenges in attracting, and retaining this diverse type of workforce to your organization. Freelancers and free agents are different from the traditional full-time workforce in many ways, which I get into more in a longer version of this post, in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.

For now, let me just take one challenge organizations will have in increasing their internal hiring of independent contractors, consultants, and free agents: branding. keep reading…

Fresh off its Inc. ranking as one of the 10 fastest growing HR companies on the magazine’s fast 5000 list, BountyJobs is announcing a $5 million round of financing.

Led by Greylock Partners, the latest financing is coming from the company’s existing investors, which also include Accel Partners and Michigan-based RPM Ventures. BountyJobs said it will use the money to expand software and services support for new and existing customers.

“Despite fragmentation and inefficiency in the contingent search market, companies still spend billions of dollars each year on headhunters in the U.S.” said Dave Strohm, partner at Greylock Partners. “By giving companies a free, streamlined way to find and hire candidates through specialized headhunters, BountyJobs is transforming a major sector of the recruiting market.”

BountyJobs provides a marketplace for contingent recruitment, connecting companies that have open reqs with vetted recruiters who bid for the jobs. When a deal is struck, BountyJobs handles the paperwork and billing. Even in the touch economy of the last few years, BountyJobs reported it grew from $1.6 million in revenue in 2007 to $16.2 million last year.

The number of  “free agent” workers has nearly exploded in the last three years, and now 44 percent of working Americans describe themselves that way.

A Kelly Services survey says  economic necessity, the desire for more freedom and flexibility, and age have driven up the number of workers not tied to a single company for their livelihood. It’s a dramatic change from 2008, when Kelly’s survey found 26 percent of workers describing themselves as free agents.

Also fueling the rise is the increasing reliance of American business on contingent and contract labor, say the authors of a whitepaper detailing the results. Companies, note Jocelyn Lincoln and Megan M. Raftery, “can scale up and down faster and easier by adopting more flexible workforce strategies.”

A significant driver is the economy. Respondents to the 2011 survey were twice as likely as their counterparts in 2008 to say they became free agents because they were laid off or couldn’t find another job.

That suggests, the authors say, that as recovery occurs, some of the newly minted free agents will return to a traditional employee role. However, “the trend toward more free agents is still very strong and is increasing worldwide. Accounting for differences in legislative frameworks and social and cultural norms, we estimate that the global free agent population is at
least 20 – 30% of the entire workforce, and growing.”

Recently, USA Today wrote about the phenomenon of well-established professionals abandoning comfortable jobs to pursue their own interests.  “Employees bid goodbye to corporate America” chronicled several workers, including two recruiters, who quit to follow their own path.

As the Kelly Services report makes clear, the move by knowledge workers to keep reading…

Negotiating the conditions of employment, hedging one job with another, being wary of accepting full-time jobs that put at risk other work or that compromise skill — those are becoming the normal patterns for accomplished professionals.

Individuals are finding new freedoms and exploring their own capacity and taste for change and entrepreneurism. Some organizations are looking for ways to adapt to all of this without endangering their own success, but it may be that these two different needs are not compatible. We will find out over the next 10 years or less. Certainly manufacturing firms and companies where hands-on work is required will not be able to be flexible enough to these changes. They will face friction between the workers whose jobs allow them to be virtual or part-time or flex-time and those whose work does not.

Here are some of the issues, paradoxes, and changes that employers, candidates, recruiters, and human resources are faced with. keep reading…

You may have heard about companies like CloudCrowd and concepts like microwork that involve new ways to staff; now, there are several more companies trying to shake up the field. They’d like to revolutionize the already-strong contingent staffing industry and in some cases the whole staffing field, making it more Internet-based, more cell phone-based, and just more sophisticated. Even 63-year-old Manpower’s getting into the act.

Three of the newer players, all based in California, include: keep reading…

If you’re out shopping today, there’s a good chance that the person helping you purchase your items or finding that deeply discounted item for you had a different, permanent job last year.

Even if you avoid all forms of in-person commerce in between Thanksgiving and New Years, like me, it is likely that the person fulfilling your order at an online retailer is in the same boat. keep reading…

When Staff Management decided it needed a social media presence, its first instinct was to be cautious.

“We knew we had to be there, but there was a real concern about the issue of reputation,” admits Jerry Wimer, VP of operations at the contingent workforce provider. “Our whole industry is apprehensive about opening up that two-way communication.”

That the staffing industry has been hesitant to jump on the social media bandwagon is not surprising, considering the odd sort of business it is. It’s a B-to-B service that hires the public to work for someone else. keep reading…

Many corporate practitioners and HR consultants talk about being more strategic, but then turn around and focus on incremental improvements to strategies, models and practices decades old. When most, if not all, of the practices that form the foundation of the typical HR function today were conceived, times were different. Economic cycles have become more volatile, the nature of work itself has shifted to be more knowledge-oriented, and product life cycles have and continue to shrink. The strategies and approaches to talent management that worked when conditions didn’t change so quickly no longer align with the realities of today.

New strategies and approaches that fundamentally alter how we organize work, resource the organization, and compensate for productivity are needed. keep reading…

Staffing and recruiting tech provider VCG Software has been acquired by British-based Bond International Software for $9 million.

Bond, a publicly traded company on the London exchange, is one of the largest providers of staffing software in the world. It also serves corporate recruiting offices with its Bond Talent recruiting program.

VCG, founded by the merger of two companies in 1991, specializes in the staffing sector. Pointwing is the company’s modular library of recruiting services, which includes a resume search, sourcing tool, job board, and ATS. StaffSuite is a complete front office tool set.

Bond’s acquisition of VCG strengthens its presence in the U.S., where it has a foothold. Out of an office in Minnesota, it marketed its StarSearcher, an ATS targeted to the smaller employer, since rebranded Bond Talent. Bond Talent is now its flagship ATS for corporate recruiting. Enhanced with additional features, primarily to streamline administrative functions, it was relaunched earlier this year. keep reading…

Three years from now can seem like geologic time for so many global companies still picking their way through today’s economic morass. Yet HR leaders of global companies are already beginning to look ahead for when their company begins to grow again.

IBM issued its biennial Chief Human Resource Officer Study last week. Its 70 pages detail the workforce challenges these leaders see ahead.

In the introduction, IBM’s senior VP for HR, J. Randall MacDonald, says, “HR leaders expect their businesses to remain focused on two equally important goals during the next three years — the need to drive growth yet, at the same time, maintain operational efficiency.”

The study is part survey, and part focus group. IBM’s researchers surveyed 707 HR leaders of companies of all sizes around the world; 600 of them were interviewed face-to-face.

Their immediate focus, as you might expect, is on present conditions. Wresting the maximum efficiency out of the operation is the overriding business challenge for 64 percent of the global HR leaders. But looking ahead three years, they expect — in almost equal measure — that their companies’ top issues will be the introduction of new products and services, expansion, and improving efficiency. keep reading…

Quality of hire is always a subject of much debate. Some argue that most of the measures in use actually measure the quality of the hiring process versus the quality of the actual hires made. We agree that some of these hire-quality measures are more process oriented, but one thing that cannot be disputed is that the vast majority of models in place today ignore the total workforce (all forms of labor that execute work in the organization’s name), focusing instead just on regular employees.

The significance of the contingent workforce is ignored in a wide variety of places. Whether you believe it is true or not, the statistics tell us that, regular employees are comprising a smaller percentage of the modern enterprises workforce. In the United States it is widely reported that between 8-10% of the workforce is contingent, but like most government-supplied data, that figure is flawed. keep reading…

It’s not a new phenomenon, but watch for the use of the cloud, and also the crowd, to grow in the coming months as more vendors vie for your cloud/crowd-recruiting business.

Hajo Engelke is trying it out. Engelke has started up an unusual company in Durham, North Carolina. It’s a website where you build your own cereal, clicking on cranberries, dried apples, pears, pineapples, and so on, add them to either granola or corn flakes, and voila, place your order.

A novel idea for a company, originating out of UNC’s business school, but you haven’t heard of it until now. So Engelke’s looking for someone to market it using a viral campaign. This weekend he plans on posting the project on a website called 31Projects. With that site, top, pre-screened students will have about three to five weeks to submit their suggestions for the build-your-own-cereal campaign, and Engelke will pick a winner. He’ll pay the winner in the neighborhood of $25/hour for implementing the campaign, and if all goes well, may end up hiring them.

Engelke heard about 31Projects through the Triangle area of North Carolina, where he says “everybody knows everybody through one or two connections.” 31Projects will launch next week. It has several hundred MBA and grad students signed up in its network, and has tested it with employers, including a non-profit research institute. Later, it hopes to expand, using undergraduate students as well. keep reading…

Have you ever gotten a video resume where the candidate brags about her gorgonzola mashed potatoes? Or another where the candidate declares his faults, one of which happens to be that he lies?

Trouble has. His given name is Nick Chiapetta. (Think about it. You’ll get it.) His job is to screen all the video resumes that the director of human acquisitions, Alina Deloris, gets, and recommend candidates to her for temp jobs with Celltons, a company that makes cellphone buttons.

Nick, or Trouble, as he prefers to be called, used to own the temp agency where Celltons is now, until an unfortunate incident involving a bus and a 33-week absence lead to the agency’s demise. Now he’s temping for Celltons.

Those of you still reading, but wondering what I’m talking about, you are excused. You may return after completing the pre-requisites for this post about what may be the most incredible branding adventure in recruiting history.

Everyone else here knows about The Temp Life, Spherion’s Internet TV show. What began as a branding effort aimed at the entry-level demographic has succeeded so well it has been declared a “bona fide phenomenon” by Fast Company. It begins its fifth season in November. keep reading…

Bill Wall was faced with two choices: take a job he didn’t really find interesting, although he was well-qualified to do it, or continue to try and build up his fledgling Internet design company. In the end he was able to do both by convincing the boss-to-be that he could do the majority of his work virtually and by agreeing to a lesser salary.

Negotiating the conditions of employment, hedging one job with another, being wary of accepting full-time jobs that put at risk other work or that compromise skills — those are becoming the normal patterns for accomplished professionals. keep reading…

by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

On January 13, 2010, nearly 800 ere.net community members converged online to participate in a webinar (embedded at the bottom of this article) discussing the trends Dr. Sullivan predicted will impact the talent acquisition profession in 2010. Over the course of that webinar a number of questions were raised, each of which is addressed here.

Q1. Your trends article highlighted what is likely to happen during 2010, but you can you go further and tell us what are the top 10 overall actions steps that you would recommend for corporate recruiting leaders take?

To summarize, we would recommend the following actions in 2010: keep reading…

Every year I try and predict what trends and topics will dominate our thinking, conversations, and technology in the coming year. Last year my three predictions were pretty much on target: Simplicity in sourcing, the rise of social networks, and internal redeployment. I am not sure how much redeployment actually took place, but it must have been significant as key positions remained filled even when external hiring was slow.

Sourcing remains a topic that I am interested in. It seems to me that the need to conduct in-depth Internet searches and apply Boolean logic to searches is no longer relevant in the majority of cases. Cold calling and other traditional methods of locating people will never go away, but are less significant. Two occurrences have changed the game. The first is social networks whose mass adoption, personalization, and ease of use have put them first in the sourcer’s toolkit. Second, jobs are being redefined and replaced with an emphasis on broader skills and on the ability of candiates to take on a variety of roles. This opens the door to more candidates, except in narrow technical areas where specific skills and training are required. A third minor factor is the recession and the short-term surplus of candidates. This will evaporate as Baby Boomers retire and more people start to work for themselves, but this will be an evolution over the next five years.

I don’t need to comment too much on the importance of social networks. This past year has proved their efficacy as sourcing tools as well as sales tools to motivate and engage candidates. What is going to change this year is the emergence of proprietary networks for specific industries or even for specific organizations, if they are large and employ a lot of people. The Facebook’s and LinkedIn’s will face competition, in a way, from networks that are designed for a specific type of person, role, industry, or geography. These more general networks are already offering this, in a way, through interest groups and pages for specific organizations.

As I wrote last year, I think that over time candidates will find that they are better treated and more completely able to present themselves via social networks than they can with a resume. This is huge as candidate dissatisfaction with recruiting and employee dissatisfaction with employers is at an all-time peak. Social networking offers some hope as a way to alleviate some of this.

The emerging trends I see for 2010: keep reading…

As we begin a new business year in 2010, if you are the slightest bit strategic, it is important to look back, analyze the trends, make a few assumptions, and begin planning ahead. Will the same issues that plagued your organization in 2009 wreak havoc in 2010? Will issues your organization has postponed addressing finally reach the point where they can no longer be ignored? Will unprecedented innovation in technologies impacting recruiting finally deliver on the value propositions long extolled by the vendor community? Will the global economy become more stable or more volatile, and how will those changes impact the labor market? These are all questions that strategic recruiting leaders and practitioners need to be contemplating and adjusting practices to deal with.

Unfortunately, I am forecasting that 2010 will be a year with at least as much turmoil as 2009, but one that will present thought-leading organizations with major opportunities. Many forecasters are predicting that 2010 will be the year social media gains a major footing in the enterprise, and that social media will help drive better ideation and execution throughout every function, but that perspective is too narrow. In 2010, the pace of literally everything will continue to increase, leading to 12 months of insane competition, endless labor churn, and boundless opportunity.

Top 2010 Recruiting Highlights

A year from now, if you were to look back and analyze the headlines of recruiting articles, blogs, and consulting guidance, I predict the following topics will dominate the content collective: keep reading…