“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.”

His analysis led him to conclude that job growth this year is going to be a lot like last year.

Like Huang, the St. Louis Federal Reserve doesn’t see unemployment moving much below 7 percent before 2014 and even then, the Fed says it might even be up around 8 percent. That’s despite the Fed’s guess that real GDP is likely to be over 3 percent, possibly even up to around 4 percent.

Levanon’s analysis, though, offered some support for the SHRM view that it is weak demand that’s limiting job growth. One look at the chart and two things jump out. The first is how small the percentages are now compared to recoveries of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. The other is how robust the growth in temporary workers is.

The latter is a good sign. It suggests, at least, that the current pace of job growth is likely to continue. While a nearly 32 percent growth in temporary staffing since June 2009 would historically signal a spurt in full-time job growth, that may not be the case in this recovery. Instead, it may evidence that some structural changes are occurring in how employers manage their workforce.

This is not the same as automation eliminating jobs, but is a response to business cycles — as when retailers add staff in the fall for the holiday season — or project-based needs, or the natural ebb and flow. In other words, more employers may be including the use of temps as a strategic part of their workforce, and not merely as a precursor to fulltime hiring.

This so-called “secular growth” theory is certainly debatable. A Morgan Stanley research paper last spring challenged the notion that temporary and contract workers are becoming a strategic part of corporate employment in the U.S. and worldwide.

However, in a provocative and data-laden analysis of the staffing industry, BMO Capital Markets says “it may be different this time.” While the firm doubted the secular growth notion, now it’s not so sure. The research report issued earlier this month says:

However, by this point in the cycle, we should have seen a significant switch from “temp” to “perm,” but we have not; temp jobs represented nearly 15% of totals jobs added in the current recovery – by far the highest of the first 21 months in the past six post-recession periods – and given the current sluggish rebound, total employment may not return to its pre-recession peak for the first time ever.

There’s evidence now, says BMO, that the proponents of secular growth may be right “and the industry is seeing some secular growth as corporations use temporary staffing more strategically as part of their overall human resource policies.”

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. Rather than continue time-consuming and expensive external searches, more hiring managers will opt to go with an almost-ready internal candidate who is a good cultural fit and is willing to learn fast. Although hiring managers may push back at this, management will encourage it, and the increasing difficulty in finding and recruiting top talent will help accelerate the trend.

Over the next few years there will be a move to enlarge the skills of current employees so they can be moved around to different functions as demand fluctuates. Employee development will morph from delivering training, to providing accelerated apprenticeships, developing simulations, and finding ways to encourage informal and on-the-job learning.

Recruiters should focus on encouraging hiring managers to look at these internal employees, encourage them to hire internally, and develop better internal talent communities to expose hiring managers to talented employees and employees to opportunities.

Social Goes Mobile

When recruiting does look externally, more of it will happen on mobile devices. The explosion of Android and iPhone apps means fewer potential candidates will be using traditional computers.

Clearly candidates with technical edge and savvy — the ones you are probably the most interested in hiring — will be spending most of their time on smart phones, iPads, and other tablets. If you have not developed specific recruiting apps that take advantage of these mobile platforms, you will be at a disadvantage as we roll into the middle of 2012.

More applicant tracking systems are now capable of using a social profile rather than a resume, and as most candidates already have such a profile it only makes sense that they use it to apply for a position.

Everything from branding to screening to even doing interviews is moving to mobile platforms and using such things as simulations, video, and chat. Twitter, Google, Facebook, and other major players will introduce more mobile apps and functionality during this year.

By the end of 2012, the traditional career site will be mostly obsolete. If it exists at all will be little more than the place where the candidate makes the formal application. Smart firms will make everything they do mobile-friendly and compatible and encourage candidates to interact more with hiring managers, other employees, and even alumni in online forums, chat rooms, Twitter chats, and via video, Skype, and other similar media.

Just-in-time Sourcing and Recruiting

Sourcing has already moved from searching static databases to using social media, and this trend will continue to grow. Rather than build proprietary databases or talent pools, recruiters can participate in and look for potential candidates in many different online forums and communities. As almost all professionals have an online presence, whether in LinkedIn or Facebook or elsewhere, and as many are also likely participating in Twitter chats, Facebook conversations, and so on. Searching for talented people is getting easier each month.

A recruiter can find an interesting potential candidate, start a conversation, provide the candidate with a variety of information sources about the organization and position, and even direct the candidate to screening apps and apps that allow the candidate to apply.

Recruiters can also use their network of current employees, alumni, friends, and colleagues to crowdsource good candidates and leverage referrals.

Entire recruiting campaigns can be run in a matter of days or weeks by using referrals, crowdsourcing, social media, mobile technologies, and by rethinking the recruitment process. Through streamlining, simplification and by getting hiring managers more involved, candidates can be found, screened, assessed, and hired in days.

Continued Rise of Contingent Workers

The use of contractors, part-time employees, and consultants has soared during the recession. And it will continue to grow for two reasons: the first is that it provides employers with the flexibility they seek to manage costs and headcount easily and much more cheaply than by frequent layoffs. Second, many people are finding that contingent employment suits their lifestyle and interests well. They can plan other activities around their work schedules, they can budget according to the amount of time they are willing to work, and they get variety in the kind of work they do and who they work for.

It will be hard to return to the model of employment where just about everyone is a regular employee. Strategies changes frequently, world events and business cycles make it necessary to adjust priorities more often than ever before, and people are less and less willing to commit to a long-term employment arrangement that is uncertain and stressful.

The Beginning of Applied Analytics

Look for more vendors to offer analytical software specifically for human resources and recruiting. We will begin to see how various independent events have an effect on the quality of hire by tapping into data hidden away in their ATS and HRIS systems. They will begin to seriously track and use data to decide the best sources of candidates, what key traits lead to retention and on-the-job success, and where they can reduce costs or efforts and still get good results.

All in all, the economy and the election will dominate this year and, as a result, this should be a year of modest employment growth, a focus on hiring returning military veterans, and even more growth in outsourcing volume recruiting and hard-to-fill positions to RPOs.

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.

Federal contractors and subcontractors would have to try to have 7 percent of their workforces be people with disabilities, among other requirements. It’s not a hard mandate, but a goal to work toward for various job groups (in other words, as the proposal spells out, a company shouldn’t mask low levels of disabled employment in certain job functions by building up a high number in low-paid jobs). Contractors would have to take certain recruiting, training, and other steps to work toward the goal, “similar to those that have long been required to promote workplace equality for women and minorities,” says the U.S. Labor Department.

Page 26 describes a new requirement about surveying your employees, “providing an opportunity for each employee who is, or subsequently becomes, an individual with a disability to voluntarily self-identify as such in an anonymous manner, thereby allowing those who have subsequently become disabled or who did not wish to self-identify during the hiring process to be counted.”

There’s much more. On page 36 it says the contractor should “promptly list all of its employment opportunities, with limited exceptions, with the nearest Employment One-Stop Career Center. It also requires the contractor to engage in a minimum of three additional outreach and recruitment efforts …”

And around pages 38 and 39, it says contractors would need to “review the outreach and recruitment efforts it has undertaken over the previous 12 months and evaluate their effectiveness in identifying and recruiting qualified individuals with disabilities, and document its review.”

You’d have to look at how many employee referrals and applicants were people with disabilities, examine if your efforts are not working, investigate why, and implement changes.

There are provisions about recruitment training; for example, related to making sure you’re training people in being sensitive to applicants and recruits.

Two Months for Your Two Cents 

There’s much more in the proposed rules, which we’re sure many labor and management lobbyists will be poring over when they awaken. The process for commenting on the regulations, before a final rule is made, is spelled out briefly on page 2. Comments must be received by February 7.

Sadly, the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is 13 percent — a problem I have been interested in since being involved in lobbying in favor of a disability-related tax credit called the WOTC, championed by New York Democrat Charlie Rangel, in the 1990s.

In the meantime, for more on the topic of disabilities in the workplace, the Job Accommodation Network has long been a great source of information.

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

Recent studies show evidence that freelance talent is generally 40% to 50% more connected in their industry than their full-time peers. In other words, many of them are considered opinion and thought leaders with the potential to influence and affect positive or negative employer brand perceptions of your company.

Traditional employer brands emphasize the long-term view of working for the organization, as well as tangible and intangible assets of being part of a given corporate community. Organizations will need to increase efforts toward creating an employer brand that communicates effective messages to the contractor community. The marketing messages themselves are highly effective for the traditional workforce, but classic segmentation should be part of the process in order to ensure that different messages are communicated to the freelance community. Those messages should concentrate on the enhancements, new training, and new knowledge that the freelancer will receive if they choose to join your organization.

Companies can take advantage of their ability to use social media infrastructure such as Facebook, Twitter and many of the other platforms. Developing an employer brand and marketing message that are targeted toward the freelance community by effectively using social networks and social media can allow companies to develop a sustainable online image that can be attractive and sustainable.

Other methods of attracting the freelance community to your organization should incorporate the sponsorship of events where freelance professionals gather, meet, and exchange ideas. Freelance professionals value their own skills and their knowledge in their fields; therefore if the freelance professional feels that your organization is open and generally welcoming to their expertise they will promote your brand as the “client of choice” because they will feel that you value their profession, industry, and community.

Developing relationships with professional sources of freelance talent will also be essential. This can include generalist staffing and temporary services agencies, recruitment process outsourcing firms, and any entity that chooses to mediate between freelance talent and companies that wish to employ them.

Changes in the interviewing process must also take place. Recruiters must remember that professional freelance talent, in general, is highly engaged and will measure the potential of your company through the interview process. Attention must be paid to candidate experience measurement and metrics, and recruiters engaged in the hiring of freelance talent should ensure the continuance of a positive perception by freelancers of your organization.

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.

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 freelancer, contractor, consultant, entrepreneur or other type of free agency is not a generational issue. Gen X workers saw the biggest increase in self-described free agency. In the 2008 survey, 18 percent of the Gen X workforce so described its status. Now, 38 percent do. That’s a 111 percent increase in just three years, far ahead of the 81 percent rise among Baby Boomers and the 74 percent increase for the Silent Generation, all of whom have now reached retirement age.

Numerically, the Boomers and older workers account for the lion’s share of the free agent population. Together, they comprise two-thirds of all free agents, making the free agent group highly experienced and well educated, the authors write, noting:

More than one-third of all free agents have earned a master’s degree or higher, and compared with traditional employees, more free agents (77% compared to 62% for traditional employees) possess technical or professional skill set.

What does this trend mean for American business?

It means there’s a huge pool of available talent in nearly every discipline and industry for employers to tap. But it’s not automatic. Besides knowing how to reach these free agents, businesses need to understand what it is they want. For some, that demands a change in traditional practices.

Write Lincoln and Rafferty, “Organizations have to first learn how to adapt and integrate this flexible workstyle into their business processes and current company culture. This means forgoing traditional perceptions of employment.”

For the workers, money is only part of the equation. The Kelly survey found it’s the type of project and quality of work that most interests free agents, especially those with more experience and maturity. The third factor, after the nature of the job and the money, is the reputation of the company.

For companies wanting to  take advantage of the free agency trend, the authors make these recommendations:

1. Ensure that free agents are included in your overall workforce strategy;
2. Know how you are currently using free agents.
3. Evaluate departments, positions, and projects to see how they would benefit from free agent talent.
4. Understand the importance of your employer brand.
5. Develop options for current employees.
6. Understand the importance of properly classifying free agent workers.
7. Evaluate your workforce solutions partner.

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.

These have already complicated the employment market and created confusion as work itself is being redefined and re-calibrated.

Flexible Working Times

Everyone wants to work when they want to, whether that is at night, weekends, or during what we call a “normal” working day. Mothers want time with their children and would like to work when the kids are sleeping or in school. Others are more productive in the wee hours and want to sleep in the daytime. And still others want to vary their schedules depending on their mood or family needs.

Individual contributors who can work alone are most likely to be able to find work with flexible schedules. People who might enjoy such flexibility include data-input people, researchers, web developers, programmers, and others whose work spans time and is done individually.

Some organizations allow flexibility within defined parameters or with prior approval. Only a few are truly open to a varied, unpredictable schedule even if work is done in a timely way and all deadlines are met. My own website is coded and maintained by a person who has a full-time job that gives her flexibility and control over her time and allows her to take on additional work.

More firms are offering flexible working times and slowly are focusing on results rather than time as the measures of performance.

It will be tough to convince very good people to work for organizations that do not allow flexible work. Employment branding and messaging should be clear about the time requirements, and you should target an audience where flexibility might not be a critical consideration, such as younger men and single folks who do not have children or other responsibilities. You can also target baby boomers who have grown up in a business world without flexibility and are comfortable with that.

Multiple Jobs

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics defines multiple jobholders as people who are either hourly or salary workers who hold two or more jobs; self-employed workers who also hold an hourly or salary job; or unpaid family workers who hold an hourly or salary job as well. Currently official figures indicate that about 5% of Americans fit this category.

Organizations still expect and seek loyalty, even though they have shown their employees little of that when times get tough. Young workers, especially Gen Ys, often do have more than one source of income. They rarely make that public. They know it would be frowned on or even be the reason for getting them fired. There is very little a recruiter can do about this, but if you reject those who you suspect of having multiple jobs, you will significantly reduce your candidate pool and the quality of that pool.

Virtual Work

Having employees working from home or from remote work centers is common, and more employers are allowing this due to a variety of converging reasons, including the desire to save energy, increased travel times, skill shortages, and a global workforce.

Over the past decade so many companies have encouraged virtual work that it is almost expected. People are comfortable working with their laptops and smart phones, and have access to Skype accounts and collaborative workspaces. All of these tools make working away from a physical place practical, convenient, and cheap.

There is no doubt that this form of employment will grow rapidly and, in my opinion, may make up as much as half the U.S. workforce within a decade as most employers recognize the benefit of allowing workers to be located remotely.

Temporary Work

More employers are looking for temporary employees. This used to signal the beginning of a recovery as employers hired temps and then converted them to regular employment as the economy improved. We have seen a significant surge in temporary hiring, but very few are likely to be converted to regular employees.

Both sides are wary of commitment. Employers are not convinced that the economic recovery is sustainable and are reluctant to take on labor that may not be needed. Potential employees are not sure they will have a job that lasts and may be happier with one or two temporary jobs that spread out their risk. This article in the Huffington Post seems to bear this out and is only one of many similar ones.

Generational Mindset

As many have written, there are large differences in attitudes about work and time, between the three major generations in the workplace. Baby Boomers (those over 45) are generally traditional and are comfortable with being physically at work, in an organization, and working an 8-hour or longer day.

Gen X (those between 30-45) is also comfortable working in traditional ways, but they are more open to virtual work, and demand flexibility for their family.

But Gen Ys (those under 30) are the change agents. They do not really want to work for any organization, but especially don’t want to work for those with layers of hierarchy and reams of policies and procedures. They want flexible, virtual work, and are more likely to have multiple jobs. They are the hardest to recruit and the hardest to retain. Yet, finding ways to attract and accommodate them will be crucial because they are the future of most organizations as Baby Boomers age and move out.

Long-term unemployment will likely be the new normal, and employers, recruiters, and candidates will find a host of ways to engage people outside of “regular” employment. In fact, the term “regular employment” is becoming meaningless.

As the recession continues, many people will find ways to earn a living without relying on traditional jobs. Many of the best will find greater satisfaction in working as consultants or contractors and, while they may technically be unemployed, they may actually live and feel better while earning less. This will be a challenge to our consumer society and its associated economy.

Recruiting in this morphing environment will likewise be more and more challenging and require adaptation to recruiting people with different work and pay patterns. Recruiting the regular employee will become a smaller segment of hiring and be more of a challenge than ever before.

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

Readyforce: It says it is “leapfrogging ‘old school’ staffing agencies and making transformational changes to a $300 billion industry that has not seen meaningful business practice and infrastructure change in decades.” Ouch.

The omnipresent Craig Silverman is the VP of Sales for Readyforce, which has been quietly doing a private beta test in San Francisco. It launched the private beta January 17, but had been operating last year even more quietly, and under a different name. “We’ve raised a raised a ton of capital,” Silverman says. About $14.5 million, actually, and the company is hiring.

Silverman describes Readyforce in a number of superlatives: it is the “staffing agency of the future” and “there’s no other staffing agency like us anywhere.”

Readyforce will talk to an employer about the jobs it has open. Then, it’ll go out and find people through social media and other means, and screen them to figure out who’s best. The screening includes a video interview; Silverman says they’ve interviewed 500 people for inside sales jobs, for example, over the last 90 days. Readyforce presents employers with the top three to five people, showing employers a profile of the person, a 20-minute interview, and a highlight reel.

A typical recruiting agency, Silverman says, might get 1,000 applicants, not totally know how to winnow them down, and not do nearly the presentation to customers.

Last year, almost all the company’s money was coming from contingent employee staffing. Now, it’s closer to 50-50 contingent employees and placement. “We’ve been doing a lot of experimenting,” he says, “figuring out what we want to be when we grow up.” It’s hoping to roll out more publicly soon, and then to other geographies beyond Northern California.

WorkersNow. Founded by Stanford alums, it’s focusing on the construction industry. I suppose you could call it a cloud-based temp company. “No need to wait at a store every morning,” it tells job candidates. “Everything is done through text messages & e-mails.”

Employees apply mainly online, and WorkersNow runs a background check. Employees can build up a profile to showcase their work, which the employers view, showing such information as whether past employers would hire them again. They check in and out of the job using a cell phone.

Employers pay a rate that includes the person’s wages, as well as taxes, workers’ comp, and a fee.

The company (formerly called WorkerExpress, wrapping up a name change due to trademark issues) was selected as the winner of a technology startup contest in northern California last year, whose judging panel included TiVo recruiting director William Uranga. While other companies in the contingent staffing industry are also moving to higher-tech processes, COO and co-founder Joe Mellin says this one’s different because it’s most concerned about a “great fit between employer and worker.” Revenue is doubling every two months, and Mellin says he’s about ready to expand throughout California, not just the north.

Emergent. Unlike WorkersNow, it’s not a temp agency. It doesn’t recruit. It acts as an employer for contingent employees for other companies. This is what a Manpower or an Adecco can do themselves — they put people on their payrolls, with the employees of course spending their work days at a client’s location. But Emergent hopes to do for small staffing companies what’s not so easy for them without the infrastructure and knowledge to handle all of what’s involved in employing someone. Emergent handles (well, hopes to handle; it’s only now getting started, and will launch an expanded website any day) things like onboarding and workers’ comp for contingent employees.

The company’s president, Bill Inman, lives in Manhattan Beach, California, and is part of a team giving birth to Emergent while working for an unrelated show-biz-related company called Entertainment Partners, in Burbank.

Inman has previously been involved with companies you may know — CareerLifeTV and Ensemble Chimes Global, for example — and around 1999-2000 was involved in launching Hiring Link, an applicant tracking system where companies would share pools of candidates.

Inman thinks recruiting someone and employing someone should be separate activities in contingent staffing. “The industry,” he says, “is ready to go through a dynamic change.”

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.

Temporary staffing has always been a mainstay of the holiday shopping experience. The convergence between the traditional holiday staffing issues, consumer behavior, and corporate balance sheets continues to leave many baffled about what 2011 and beyond holds for employment in this country.

Holiday Hiring Is Up

There is at least a bit of good news coming off some continued flatness in unemployment: holiday hiring is up. Big time. SnagAJob.com, the job board for hourly workers, estimates an increase of 26 percent over last year. Employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas estimate the increase at about 20 percent. Retailers are expecting sales gains to outpace last year.

On the surface, this is great news. Stronger retailing points (at least superficially) to better economic conditions. As the Wall Street Journal points out, there is good news for those who are hoping a seasonal or temp position will help secure something a bit more stable:

“The hope of landing a permanent position is one reason people are willing to turn their lives upside down for a temp job; 40 percent of employers that are hiring seasonal workers this fall intend to offer some of them permanent jobs, up from 31 percent last year, according to a survey of 2,457 employers by CareerBuilder, Chicago, operator of a job-search web site.”

Meanwhile, temporary payrolls continued their steady growth in September and October while the rest of the employment picture continues its stop-and-go progress.

But now there is a new challenge.

The Changing Consumer

As retailers adapt to shifting consumer behavior, the impact on the workforce is unavoidable. Look at what retailer Toys “R” Us is doing to respond, according to The Courier-News (Elgin, Illinois):

“Toys “R” Us spokeswoman Linda DeNotaris said that with so much of the toy business happening at Christmas time, the company experimented with the temporary, 4,000-square-foot “pop-up” Express stores last holiday season in 90 locations.

Customers responded so well to those added locations that this year, the chain is opening 600 Express stores, more than six times as many as last year and about equal to the number of regular Toys “R” Us stores in operation. And these pop-up stores will require 10,000 new seasonal workers to staff them, DeNotaris said.

Opening up, stocking, operating for a couple months and then closing these stores down is more economical than running the operation year ’round. If the trend takes hold, that means retailers will continue to shed full-time workers for either part-timers or seasonal workers.

Analysis is mixed as to whether this is a permanent consumer change or whether it is a continued reaction to the ongoing recession, but by any estimation, it will continue to at least be a short-term concern. As the economy slowly grows back though, pressure will be on retailers from Wall Street to respond immediately and with strong competition still in place, will be a challenge for retailers to not adapt.

Companies Continue to Hoard Money

The larger concern is what companies choose to do with the massive amounts of cash they have in the bank. While not as publicized as the retail market and not as obvious, it is the 800-pound gorilla in the room when talking about employment. To quote from the Baltimore Sun:

As of June 30, the non-bank members of Standard & Poor’s index of 500 big U.S. companies were sitting on $842 billion in cash, according to Howard Silverblatt, senior analyst at S&P. Count all U.S. companies, and it’s well over $1 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve.

That was the seventh quarterly record in a row for S&P cash. The cash pile was also very high on a relative basis, making up nearly 12 percent of the market value of those companies. A decade ago, corporate cash was less than 3 percent of the S&P 500′s stock market value.

As we continue to slog through a rough economy, companies are sitting on a record amount of cash — some $1.1 trillion. And what they choose to do with it is going to have a huge impact on the employment picture in the U.S.

What’s Next?

I’m sure most people are tired of hearing about how we are going to have to wait until the next few quarters play out before we come to any conclusions, but I think in this case, it is perfectly appropriate. What we do know is:

1. Part of the response hinges on how retailers do this holiday season. Anything at or above expectations is going to be seen positively whereas anything below expectations could be a huge blow.
2. Consumer behaviors are certainly changed for the short term. Whether that impacts buying and investing in late 2011 is what is murky right now.
3. Whether temp workers get converted to full-timers is going to depend largely on how companies choose to invest on hand cash. I have a feeling that stockholders and boards are going to start pushing investment once again in 2011.
4. Could we be in store for another round of merger and acquisition activity? That’s certainly another option for that cash on hand besides hiring employees. And in certain depressed sectors, it might make more sense than bringing on new employees.

What’s your take on this? Is the workplace shifting or is our economy just taking longer than usual to recover?

“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.

The work environment, management practices, the day-to-day tasks — almost everything about the workplace is out of the control of the staffing firm, even though, in most cases, its the boss who pays the the employee.

No wonder that when the staffing industry discusses social media the first issue to come up is the fear of negative feedback from the workers it hires, places, and, often enough, lays off.

In an article in the June issue of Staffing Industry Review, Manpower’s VP of U.S. Marketing and Franchise Relations Mark Metzendorf wrote: “The tremendous popularity of social media raises serious challenges around reputation management for organizations.”

But he also notes: “There is a clear role for social networks to help build and maintain engagement and brand reputations in our industry.”

It was the value of this role that so outweighed the potential risk of negative comments that for Staff Management it was never a question of whether to get on board with social media. The question was how best to do it.

“We’ve always been very feet-on-the-street oriented,” says Wimer. “We have been very heavily involved in community outreach, getting involved in a lot of personal contact and candidate networking.”

“But at some point it dawned on us that the whole country was getting on this platform (social media) and we needed to as well.”

So early this year Staff Management, a division of SeatonCorp, set out to develop a social media presence. It started by pulling together groups from within the company, and by looking at what others had done, as it started to develop a strategic plan.

As befits a company that was named #1 this year on HRO Today’s Baker’s Dozen list of top MSP suppliers, Staff Management did its homework. It hired CareerBuilder’s consulting arm, Personified, to analyze its existing online presence, and in particular, its online reputation.

“We needed to know where we stood and what was already out there about us,” recalls Wimer. Not unexpectedly, Personified reported that the company’s brand, as far as the online world was concerned, was limited. Staff Management was told its social media presence was, in Wimer’s words, “not so strong.”

So correcting that became one of the goals of its social media strategy. Other pieces of the plan came from seeing what wasn’t working or others.

“There are so many places out there where there’s nothing new for days or weeks,” says Wimer. “We knew we wanted to be more responsive. We wanted to have someone who would comment or respond back quickly; the same day was our goal.”

Instead of deciding all the details, Staff Management concluded it needed to hire a social media professional to help with the strategy and manage the project. That turned out to be Sarah Katz, a young PR major with social media experience.

“She had a little bit of a blank slate,” Wimer adds. “We had some general guidelines, but we left a lot of it up to her.”

Since coming on board in August, Staff Management has developed a LinkedIn presence and launched a Twitter site. It launched on Facebook in September, promoting its clients and job fairs, but also adding news about hiring, openings, and bits about the company itself. It has almost 200 friends and lists of its openings.

The Facebook wall is mostly one-way, though the few two-way posts are just like eavesdropping on personal conversations. In one, a job fair attendee who didn’t leave a resume asked for and quickly got a fax number. And the name of the recruiting manager.

What the company has yet to do is to establish specific metrics to measure the impact of its social media program.

“A satisfactory result,” says Wimer, “might be a 10 percent lift (in candidate applications). That would be phenomenal.” But, “We definitely don’t have that (specific metrics) built into our plan.”

Eventually, it will. In fact, the company has already seen an increase in online responses to job postings. Wimer suspects that a good portion of that is due to the social media efforts, including the jobs the company now tweets to its followers, many of whom are company employees.

There’s still work to do. One obvious shortcoming is incorporating social elements into the company’s website. There’s no link to any of the social networks. The pleasantly inviting “Talk to Us” page is an impersonal form.

“We’re moving a little more slowly than maybe other companies would,” Wimer says. “We took a long time to decide (to go social), but once we did, we want to do it right.”

He offers three suggestions to other companies — staffing or not — who are considering a social media strategy:

1. Make sure you are fully committed. “Don’t do it all if you are not committed to provide fast and timely followup to comments and posts.”
2. Don’t sweat the negative. “You’ve got to be completely open and honest. Leave the negative comments. You will get some. Removing it will only hurt you.”
3. Involve your workforce and expect enthusiasm. Being on social networks is “exciting. The workforce is there and they’ll be enthusiastic that the company is.” Involving employees will help in spreading the message.

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

Those new strategies are often referred to as agile strategies because they enable the organizations developing/adopting them to be extremely flexible and adaptable to volatile conditions.

The Need for Agility

I first learned about the need for agility in talent management when a senior manager at Agilent Technologies asked me how our talent management strategy would shift as a result of a competitor opening a 5,000-employee facility directly across the street from ours. Obviously, such an act would encourage an uptick in attrition, but given the level of scarcity for the type of people we employed, it would also affect compensation, recruiting, development, and virtually every other aspect of managing people.

Like many organizations, all of our core processes were pegged to either annual or multi-year cycles, rigid structures and policies, limited agility, and staff had become accustomed to very predictable and stable workloads. We couldn’t change rapidly and few wanted to even try, despite the fact that our competitor was well skilled at building and operationalizing facilities in months, not years. Building on that realization, my observations over the past 10 years regarding the structure and strategy of HR functions around the world is that agility is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have.

The Concept of Agility

The concept of agility is well established in other business functions, including supply chain, manufacturing, and crisis management, but not so much in HR. In short, it means:

• Being more than just fast
• Being nimble, flexible, adaptable and responsive
• Being able to shift direction
• Anticipating a range of possible events
• Dealing with multiple fluctuations simultaneously (churn)
• Shifting direction, focus and resources accurately (into the right areas)

If you’re familiar with hunting, a shotgun would be a more agile weapon then a rifle, because it is more capable of hitting moving targets.

Apple: The Benchmark Agility Firm

Perhaps the best example of an agile firm is Apple. If you were a competitor of Apple, you would need an agile strategy just to keep up with its amazing rate of product innovation. Apple started as a computer company focusing on hardware and software (the Mac), then shifted into completely different industries starting with digital entertainment devices (the iPod/iPad) and Smartphones (the iPhone). With each foray into a new market, Apple must add significant talent capability and capacity to its roster, obsoleting older skill sets and leveraging new/existing skills in radically new ways. Skilled workers with tremendous value one month may be utterly useless to the organization months later.

Agile Talent Management Strategy Defined

An agile management strategy is defined as one that responds to environmental changes by rapidly and accurately shifting the direction and focus of talent management efforts and resources in order to increase HR effectiveness, business results, workforce productivity, and innovation.

An agile talent management strategy includes:
1.     Forecasting of and planning for a range of likely conditions/events including:

• Economic fluctuations
• Emerging business goals
• Talent competitor actions
• Labor market conditions/attitudes
• Frequent revision of operating plans and budgets

2.     Identification of stretch/next practices, i.e. researching how firms that are in growth and innovation mode prepare for each condition/event or accomplish rapid-cost reduction without negatively impacting productivity and innovation.
3.     Development of tactical plans including processes and programs that enable all of the following:

• The organization to move faster or expedite product/service delivery (time)
• Improve the quality of the output
• Change the volume of output (productivity)
• Applied innovation
• Aggressive response to competition
• Closer integration of functional interdependencies
• Shift/cut budget … or generate new resources

4.     Broader use of contingent labor, because the most powerful agility solution is the widespread use of contingent labor (temporary, contract, service provider), your plan must include the capability of rapidly add skills (capability) and work hours (capacity)to meet nonpermanent needs.

5. If/then pre-testing — you can’t assume that your plan will work, so every plan must be pretested for viability using if-then scenarios.

Examples of Agility Shifts

In Southeast Asia and China where competition for managerial talent is beyond fierce, talent acquisition, development, and reward systems have been forced to radically adapt to market driven cycle times versus annual calendars and multi-year planning processes just to enable retention. Complex processes that once took months to execute (focal review, performance appraisal, etc.) were forced to become cleaner, faster, and less painful so that they can be executed quarterly, and in some markets monthly.

Globally consumer product companies have faced drastic reductions in the typical product lifecycle, forcing internal talent pipelines to allow for faster on-the-job development, greater job mobility, shortened time in tenure, and frequent organizational restructuring.

In greater Europe, where currency fluctuations and labor disputes can cripple manufacturing operations, organizations have had to increase leverage of contingent workers and cross training so that work can be shifted quickly from location to location.

Final Thoughts

Executing agility is as much of a way of thinking as a business strategy. Rather than developing a single, consistent, enterprise-wide approach, organizations today need talent management solutions that employ multiple channels and approaches to produce a target result because relying on one rigid approach is both ineffective and in many cases inefficient. Talent management leaders need to prepare for a wide range of both positive and negative business scenarios and build staff with mastery level competency in rapid learning and strategic agility.

Staffing and recruiting tech provider VCG Software has been acquired

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.

I spoke with Tim Giehll, president and CEO of Bond Talent in the U.S., when we were at HR Tech last month. We talked extensively about Bond’s human capital ‘supply chain’ strategy and the elements the company had in place or would be releasing soon. The solutions are all web-based, and most of them are currently available.

Bond Adapt, eEmpAct, and Vantage (for executive search) are some of the original staffing programs and are in use by several thousands customers globally, including Manpower. Bond Talent is the talent management component. Still coming is Bond HR, an ambitious expansion into HRIS with performance management, workforce planning, and comp and admin components.

What the acquisition of VCG means for its existing customers in the long term wasn’t detailed. However, the announcement seemed to say the VCG product line will continue to be offered.

“The clear synergies between the two companies and their respective offerings provide us with the confidence that no changes to brands, products, company structure or delivery of the products are required,” said Bond’s CEO, Steve Russell.

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.

Much of that growth will be in India and China, as global businesses from mature countries like the U.S. and European nations broaden their market. Surprisingly, companies in China and India and other developing nations will look to expansion in the mature markets. The IBM report says:

“34 percent of CHROs in growth markets say they anticipate increasing headcount in North America over the next three years, while 37 percent plan additional investment in Western Europe. This includes companies from India, where 45 percent of respondents indicated they plan to increase headcount in North America and 44 percent in Western Europe. In China, 33 percent of CHROs we interviewed said they plan to increase headcount in North America and 14 percent in Western Europe.”

Obviously, these companies will be competing for talent at just the time most economists expect American companies to also be expanding and adding employees. Though confidence in a hiring uptick is at a nadir, as evidenced by the seesawing Consumer Confidence Index of The Conference Board, the economic signs all point to a stabilizing of the U.S. economy.

The rate of layoffs has dropped substantially since the beginning of the year. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, “The 12-month moving average (of announced layoffs) has now dropped to 46,866, the lowest since November 2000, when it stood at 43,744.”

Private sector job growth has been positive, if small, for several months now. That’s a huge change from 2009 when job losses, private industry job losses, were half a million a month.

None of that is to minimize the pain of the millions who are out of work or working part-time or working at jobs beneath their capability because they can’t find other work. Just last week, the number of first-time unemployment claims rose again, a sign that economic improvement is still very much touch and go.

Those who still have jobs may feel lucky, but they are also stressed. An Adecco survey found that 63 per cent of bosses say they are more stressed today than before the recession started. That may help explain why only 30 percent of the workers in the survey aspire to management.

Worker stress, fueled by the pressure to do more — or at least as much — with less, is not just a U.S. problem. A Kenexa Research Institute WorkTrends Report ($499) says only 53 percent of employees worldwide believe their company has enough people to get the job done. Some workers would probably say there aren’t enough no matter what. However, as the steady increase in temporary staffing suggests, employers are themselves seeing the need for more help — but not permanent help. Not just yet.

There’s evidence, in fact, that hiring in the near term is not going to grow much. Although productivity declined in the second quarter of the year (third quarter data is not yet out), the San Francisco Federal Reserve says productivity would need to slow to about 1 percent or less for there to be strong employment growth. That is unlikely, based on history, says the report’s author, senior economist Daniel Wilson.

In fact, all through the recession American businesses have wrested more productivity from their workers. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says that business output per hour, a key measure of productivity, is up. In 2009, in the depths of the depression, business output rose 3.5 percent, a greater percentage than in any year since 2003.

The Kenexa research suggests the recession has made companies more open to creativity; 52 percent of the respondents report working in an innovative climate. While India and China lead in workers reporting an innovative climate, the U.S. is 6th, well ahead of countries like Japan and Germany. It also ranks 6th in the world for employee engagement.

Kenexa’s research focused on leadership issues and how it correlates to worker engagement, effectiveness, and corporate success. On effectiveness, the managers of the world scored a cumulative index of 55 percent. On this measure, U.S. managers were somewhat above the global average, but several points behind leaders India and China. Among the 10 drivers of leadership effectiveness Kenexa measured, the U.S. was a standout in only one: motivating employees to work hard.

That is certainly borne out by the BLS productivity measures.

Third quarter productivity data won’t be released until next month. When the numbers are released, they may help make clearer the future job picture. Even if the data shows productivity growth standing still, surveys by SHRM and CareerBuilder and others say it will take a while for corporate executives to be convinced to start hiring in numbers enough to reduce the unemployment rate.

SHRM’s LINE report for October opens this way: “The pace of job growth is so slow that hardly anyone is noticing it.” While it predicts little change in hiring this month, the report does say that recruiters are experiencing more difficulty in hiring talent.

“At least for higher-level, higher-skilled job seekers, things look to be improving,” said Jennifer Schramm, SHRM manager of workplace trends and forecasting. “HR professionals reported that recruiting these kinds of workers in September 2010 was more difficult than at the same time (in 2009).”

Looking ahead, a CareerBuilder survey says 21 percent of the surveyed employers expect to add full-time, permanent workers this quarter. There’s still plenty of caution. The survey says 27 percent of employers predict they will hire contract or temporary workers. A quarter of the hiring managers expect to transition at least some of the contingent staff to permanent positions.

This brings us back to the IBM report. The report notes in its introduction that the “worldwide focus on growth will require companies to fundamentally rethink how they manage the workforce and overcome borders.”

The IBM researchers found three areas of greatest challenge for companies: leadership, workforce management, and collaboration. As the report puts it, “Based on insights from more than 700 senior HR leaders, we believe three essential capabilities will enable organizations to move beyond the remaining borders that constrain workforce effectiveness: cultivating creative leaders, mobilizing for speed and flexibility, and capitalizing on collective intelligence.”

While most of the U.S., for that matter, much of the world, sees job creation as the most important economic issue of the day, the world’s HR leaders see managing future growth and workforce management as the most important issues of tomorrow. Both the IBM and Kenexa reports intersect at the issue of leadership. Both reports offer a snapshot of what is and what needs to be done.

And in this future vision, both reports lend crucial weight to the importance of talent acquisition and the training and development of tomorrow’s corporate leaders.

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.

The 8-10% figure represents only the portion of the U.S. workforce that is employed through a temporary staffing firm, most notably in security, facilities, maintenance, and administrative roles. It doesn’t account for the millions of people that work as independent contractors, work for consulting firms, or that work for service providers.

Service Providers Must Be Counted

Analysts with the Aberdeen Group estimate that a more accurate estimate of the contingent labor force in the US is 20-25%. We argue that even that figure is conservative! Sitting in the cubicle across from you, or in the office down the hall, or on the other end of that routine Monday morning conference call is a person who isn’t employed by your company, but for all intents and purposes influences your ability to deliver and is indistinguishable as a resource from an employee. That person is employed by a service provider contracted by your organization to complete work on the organization’s behalf. While there is much talk linking outsourcing to offshoring, the truth is that the vast majority of the trillion plus dollars spent on outsourcing in the U.S. is spent on domestically staffed contracts.

When you take service provider labor into consideration, it’s quite possible that more than 50% of the work executed for your organization to deliver its goods and services to market is accomplished by a non employee. The migration to a more contingent workforce didn’t happen overnight. Following every economic contraction in the last 30 years, the use of contingent labor as a component of the total workforce has increased, often by double-digit year over year rates. While this article pertains primarily to the U.S., the same trends can be seen in the UK, Europe, and Southeast Asia.

A Trend We Must Respond to

While the use of contingent resources is dramatically changing the organizational design of organizations and the nature of work itself, the HR function played virtually no role in the transition. Weary of co-employment risk, many HR leaders have adopted a compliance-focused hands-off approach, opting to tell managers what they can’t do instead of finding innovative compliant solutions to help them do what they need to do in order to be globally competitive. Research from Aberdeen, Gartner, Deloitte, and others tell the story: less than 1 in 5 HR leaders today accept accountability for planning, sourcing, managing, and releasing “all forms of labor” in use by the organization.

It is nearly impossible today to find workforce planning processes that helps managers determine if they are organizing work in the most optimal way to take advantage of current and emerging contingent labor options. When it is time to source labor, most organizations force managers into a fractured sourcing model in which employees are sourced by staffing, contingent labor is sourced by procurement, and service providers are sourced by finance/legal. There is no uniform process for evaluating performance of resources, no accounting for labor spend ROI, and there is no process to make sure those with the most valuable intellectual capital to the organization are not transient.

All talent management systems that ignore the “total workforce” are woefully out of date and indicative of leadership that needs to be displaced!

Leveraging Performance Management as the Foundation of Total Workforce Management

Everyone hates the performance management process, not because they hate getting feedback, but because how it is approached in most organizations is downright silly and ineffective. Organizations need a foundation on which they can build a new suite of talent management offerings that speak to the needs of the total workforce and that navigates the murky, protectionist regulatory landscape. We argue that performance management can and most likely will become that foundation.

Performance management is ultimately about setting clear expectations and evaluating whether procured work, goods, and services actually perform at or above the level expected. It’s something we do in nearly every aspect of our lives, be it with our personal relationships, employer/employee relationships, or with the service provider/consumer relationship.

To enable robust labor spend ROI analysis, we need a model for performance management that can be executed across all forms of labor. We know from past practice that the employee performance appraisal isn’t that model; assessing the performance of contractors is a good way to find yourself on the losing end of a labor complaint. However, the model used to govern service provider relationships could most certainly be used to govern the employer/employee relationship.

The Statement of Work as an Assessment Tool

If you have ever worked on a project to procure services, you have hopefully had to craft or be involved with crafting something called a “Statement of Work.” The SOW is essentially a narrative description outlining expectations in detail. When you hire a contractor to complete a project for you, any task not specified in the statement of work is out of scope, and not something you can hold the contractor accountable to deliver. The SOW is the ideal framework to build a total workforce performance management framework around because:

1. A well-designed SOW template can function as an excellent discussion guide between a manager and a labor resource regardless of the labor resources engagement model.
2. Unlike an annual performance appraisal, SOWs can be tied to the actual lifecycle of the work to be performed and triggered on a project basis. An employee who works on seven projects reporting to three managers throughout the year would be governed by relationship-specific expectations versus generic expectations outlined in the static job description and annual goal/objectives setting session.
3. The SOW spells out much more than basic requirements, detailing what levels of quality, timeliness, and volume of output are expected and what measures will be used to evaluate the performance. This model makes it possible for a mix of both quantitative and qualitative measures to be employed in measuring the performance of all resources.
4. The contractor engagement model shifts the collection and reporting of performance measures off of the employer and on to the resource, again making much more robust performance measurement possible. No manager could track 3-5 measures of performance across 55 direct reports, but an individual resource could track their own performance using 3-5 agreed-upon measures. Performance reports in question could be validated by an independent audit team.
5. A decent SOW calls for periodic discussions about status relative to the nature of work being performed. If a resource is working on an extremely sensitive project, performance discussions may happen weekly, if the project has longer term deliverables, a bi-monthly discussion could be planned.

Leveraging SOWs Enables Total Workforce Quality-of-Hire Measurement

If the talent management function were to develop a robust SOW template that could be deployed across the wide spectrum of labor engagement in the modern organization and hold managers accountable for executing them, the organization would have a robust foundation on which:

• The performance of resources with like skills provided through different engagement models could be compared
• Total labor spend could be accounted for
• Labor ROI could be calculated
• Labor utilization could be optimized
• Insight into resource performance/potential could become more granular
• More routine feedback could be given

Specific quality-of-hire measures focusing on individual performance could include:

–Percentage of performance targets met/exceeded individual measures for:

• Volume of work completed
• Quality of work completed
• Timeliness (deadlines met)
• Stakeholder satisfaction (excellent time to use automated 360° surveys)
• Cost

–Performance delta compared to:

• Past hires
• Average of alternate labor types
• Previous time period

–Bonus awards (Assuming bonus amounts tied to weighted SOW performance criteria)

Specific quality-of-hire measures focusing on the performance of the labor sourcing function could include:

• Percentage of hires that met/exceeded SOW-stated performance expectations
• Labor spend reduction not resulting in organizational capability/capacity decrease
• Labor ROI (dollar or revenue per dollar of total workforce spend)
• Involuntary Turnover Rate Reduction (performance-related cause)
• Voluntary Turnover Rate Reduction (all nature of work causes)
• Vacancy Reduction (total labor hours) organized by: major job families; mission-critical roles; revenue-producing roles; location

Final Thoughts

While regulators, politicians, labor unions, the underemployed, and poor performers everywhere may fight the continued adoption of contingent labor by organizations, the trend is clear, and talent management leaders need to respond with a new breed of management solutions that acknowledge the shift. Contingent labor not only provides organizations with agility, it enables organizations to tap more specific talent on a project-by-project basis ensuring that skill gaps that often result in inefficiency and ineffectiveness are minimized. A square peg will fit in a round hole if the peg is significantly smaller than the hole, but it will leave gaps. All too often organizations craft holes that no labor peg can fill perfectly, so why not try crafting smaller holes that labor pegs more than fill?

Contingent labor also brings organizations a bevy of new insight, often from individuals who have seen how talent competitors are tackling the same the same issues, which can assist efforts to innovate immensely. Remember — if you are going down the contingent road — that you need a performance management framework that looks at the total workforce.

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.

Getting people who don’t work for you, or who at least don’t yet work for you, to do work, isn’t new. Raghav Singh mentioned in an email that “Brassring was doing something like this back in 2000,” using a big virtual network of people to clean up resumes.

But getting the masses to help you out is getting easier.

Another company in this genre, called CloudCrowd, is getting lots of press. It calls what it does “labor as a service,” touting its ability to “break large client projects into discrete tasks, and distribute them through Facebook to its workers.” It did a project for AlumWire where workers went through thousands of digital resumes to capture names, phone numbers, email addresses, employers, and education. CloudCrowd built an interface for the workers to highlight certain information in the resumes, which caused that information to automatically populate the proper field. About 35,000 workers have registered on CloudCrowd’s site.

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.

Produced by CJP Digital Media, the phenomenon tag is anything but hyperbole. The videos have been watched some 18 million times. The show was nominated this year for a Streamy Award – the online Emmys. It has a Facebook page and a loyal Twitter following.

It’s also been picked up by cable TV syndicators and is being shown to 1.9 million Marriott, Hyatt, and other hotel guests every year on in-room entertainment.

“A phenomenal success,” declares Lisa McCarthy, Director of Marketing and PR for SFN Group, Spherion’s parent, who says the success surprised everyone.

“We didn’t know what to expect,” she told me. “We didn’t know what we were dealing with.”

That was back in 2006. YouTube was a year old and hadn’t yet been bought by Google. In the recruiting world, we were all worrying about the impending “War for Talent” and the necessity for employers to brand themselves.

Spherion was worrying about that, too. One of the largest staffing agencies in North America, Spherion Staffing Services was discovering it was almost unknown among college students, few of whom even thought about temping.

Like so many other employers, Spherion knew it needed to raise awareness of itself, especially among 18-25 year-olds, the entry-level demographic.

“We were sitting around a room brainstorming ideas,” McCarthy recalls. There were thoughts of using Second Life, the virtual world that was a hot trend for a while. Videos were an obvious choice for branding. But Spherion’s push-the-envelope culture, plus the demographic it wanted to reach, meant a talking head video wouldn’t do.

What emerged was the Internet TV show you see today. “My gut instinctively said it would work,” says McCarthy. To be sure, especially considering the investment she would be asking the company to make, focus groups were conducted to see whether the idea would resonate with the target audience.

It did. The C-suite bought into the idea and, though McCarthy won’t say what the program’s budget is, it clearly has grown along with the show’s success. Still, she says it’s less costly than a full-blown ad campaign.

Branded entertainment is not new. It was pioneered in the early days of radio, later making the transition to television. Although cost and audience taste have curtailed branded broadcast TV productions — Hallmark is one of the few remaining — it’s flourishing online. IKEA, for instance, sponsors Easy to Assemble. Topps, the trading card company, and Dick’s Sporting Goods, sponsor Back on Topps, the winner in the Branded Entertainment category.

What’s different about The Temp Life is the almost complete absence of a Spherion pitch. Only at the beginning of each episode is the company mentioned. The show’s website discreetly offers a jobs tab. But that’s it. And that’s intentional.

The demographic Spherion is pursuing is savvy to obvious pitches, explains McCarthy, and easily turned off by it. That’s also why there’s no attempt to capture viewer information, either by requiring a registration or even offering a newsletter or other come-on.

“Maybe at some point we’ll do something. Maybe not,” she says. “We didn’t want to make it a commercial.”

So what’s been the results?

McCarthy says that as a branding effort, The Temp Life has accomplished more than the brainstorming group could have hoped. The viewership numbers are her primary metric. A second is the buzz. The Temp Life pops up regularly in entertainment and marketing blogs, and was named one of Brandweek’s Bright Ideas.

She wouldn’t give me any details, but she did mention that a second series, aimed at a different demographic, may be in the works. She soon heads to New York, where The Temp Life is filmed, for a meeting to discuss the new show.

Though few employers have the kind of resources to sponsor an Internet series, let alone two, McCarthy believes The Temp Life offers ideas recruiters can adapt for their own companies.

“It’s really all about content,” says McCarthy, who eschews those common and all-too-formulaic job hunting tips and ideas. “Talk about the local things in your community,” she says. “The key is to build a rapport with the people out there.”

Videos are great, but there is no silver bullet. Take advantage of all the social media available. Be useful, she counsels. And “have a little fun.”

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.

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 flex 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 recruiters and human resources are faced with. These have already complicated the employment market, created confusion, and made your job more difficult. There is very little we can do about many of these trends. Others will require you to become more creative and targeted in sourcing. And success in dealing with some may require you to be more persuasive than you have ever been with both your hiring manager and with candidates.

Flexible Working Times

Every one wants to work when they want to, whether that is at night, weekends, or during what we call a “normal” working day. Mothers want time with their children and would like to work when the kids are sleeping or in school. Others are more productive in the wee hours and want to sleep in the daytime. And still others want to vary their schedules depending on their mood or family needs.

Individual contributors who can work alone are most likely to be able to find work with flexible schedules. People who might enjoy such flexibility include data-input people, researchers, web developers, programmers, and others whose work spans time and is done individually.

Some organizations allow flexibility within defined parameters or with prior approval. Only a few are truly open to a varied, unpredictable schedule even if work is done in a timely way and all deadlines are met. My own website is coded and maintained by a person who has a full-time job that gives her flexibility and control over her time.

More firms are offering flexible working times and slowly are focusing on results rather than time as the measures of performance.

It will be tough to convince very good people to work for organizations that do not allow flexible work. Employment branding and messaging should be clear about the time requirements, and you should target an audience where flexibility might not be a critical consideration such younger men and single folks who do not have children or other responsibilities. You can also target baby boomers who have grown up in a business world without flexibility and are comfortable with that.

Multiple Jobs

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics defines multiple jobholders as people who are either hourly or salary workers who hold two or more jobs, self-employed workers who also hold an hourly or salary job, or unpaid family workers who hold an hourly or salary job as well. Currently official figures indicate that about 5% of Americans fit this category.

Organizations still expect and seek loyalty, even though they have shown their employees little of that when times get tough. Young workers, especially Gen Ys, often do have more than one source of income. They rarely make that public. They know it would be frowned on or even be the reason for getting them fired. There is very little a recruiter can do about this, but if you reject those who you suspect of having multiple jobs you will significantly reduce your candidate pool and the quality of that pool.

Virtual Work

Having employees working from home or from remote work centers is common, and more employers are allowing this due to a variety of converging reasons including the desire to save energy, increased travel times, skill shortages, and a global workforce.

Over the past decade so many companies have encouraged virtual work that it almost expected. People are comfortable working with their laptops and smart phones and have access to Skype accounts and collaborative workspaces. All of these tools make working away from a physical place practical, convenient, and cheap.

There is no doubt that this form of employment will grow rapidly and may make up as much as half the U.S. workforce within a decade.

Generational Mindset

As many have written, there are large differences in attitudes about work and time between the three major generations in the workplace. Baby Boomers (those over 45) are generally traditional and are comfortable with being physically at work, in an organization, and working an 8-hour or longer day.

Gen X (those between 30-45) is also comfortable working in traditional ways, but they are more open to virtual work and demand flexibility for their family.

But Gen Y (those under 30) are the change agents. They do not really want to work for any organization but especially those with layers of hierarchy and reams of policies and procedures. They want flexible, virtual work and are more likely to have multiple jobs. They are the hardest to recruit and the hardest to retain. Yet, they are the future of most organizations as Baby Boomers age and move out.

These are just a handful if the trends that will make your job both more critical to organizational success as well as much harder than ever before. Your only advantage is to be aware and find ways to cope with these trends and the changes they require as soon as you can.

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:

1. Plan for a turnaround — assume that a turnaround will begin mid-year, but also look internally for indicators of when your organization is likely to rebound. Next, build an “explode-out-of-the-box” plan so that you are prepared to act quickly when the turnaround begins.
2. Develop an agile plan — assume that there will be simultaneous growth and shrinkage within your organization. Plan for job growth in some departments, but also assume that additional cost reductions in other departments will be needed. Prepare a plan that includes agility and flexibility in all programs.
3. Prepare action step outlines — it’s not necessary to complete a detailed written plan for every possibility, but you should prepare an action outline highlighting the key steps that you would take for the most likely upcoming events. Develop these steps using if-then scenarios (i.e. if this happens, then we will take these actions or steps).
4. Prioritize jobs — because you will be operating with limited resources, focus your recruiting resources on the most important jobs. Start by prioritizing revenue-generating jobs, mission-critical jobs, and jobs in rapid growth business units.
5. Prioritize tools — an increase in the competition for top candidates will require you to shift away from active candidate tools and instead concentrate on the tools designed to attract and land employed top performers (passives). Focus on reinvigorating the employee referral program, recruiting at professional events, boomerangs, and mobile platform recruiting tools.
6. Social media tools — this category of tools require special attention because it is still evolving. The key is to manage the social media initiative and to take advantage of the time of your employees when they are on social network sites. Also, broaden your perspective beyond LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter and use other social and internet mechanisms like videos, wikis, talent communities, and online forums.
7. Integrate contingent labor — the most effective strategy for rapidly increasing or decreasing labor capability is the use of contingent labor. Identify the jobs where contingent labor is appropriate; then set a contingent labor percentage target that is equivalent to your projected maximum labor cost-cutting targets.
8. Dollarize recruiting impacts — work with the CFO’s office to build your business case and to dollarize the impact on corporate revenues that can be attributed to delayed or poor hiring.
9. Speed up internal movement — moving internal talent to where they can do the most good often costs less and has a more immediate impact than external hiring. The internal movement process at most organizations must be updated and targeted, so that the needed talent is more rapidly guided into the right jobs. (Improving Internal Movement article.)
10. Retention and blocking — expect your turnover rates to increase by as much as 50%, as the job market opens up. Start by identifying what excites those most likely to leave and then develop a corporate-wide blocking strategy to make it more difficult for recruiters to poach away your top talent.

Q2. What role will contingency recruiting play as we approach a recovery?

Because market volatility is likely to be a characteristic that defines the business environment for months and years to come, organizations must develop a process that guarantees flexible labor costs. If you count all types of labor in use today, contingent labor already exceeds 30% of the workforce in many organizations. The key is to integrate contingent labor management so that labor solutions that look at labor holistically can be presented to managers. Contingent labor should also allow you to rapidly increase labor capabilities that may only be needed during short growth spurts.

Q3. Managing all labor via one function is a topic that has been discussed in my organization for several years, but no action has ever been taken. Can you tell me more about how other organizations have gone about establishing a holistic talent acquisition function that oversees recruiting, contingent vendor management, outsourced vendor management, and consultant engagement?

Understanding the total labor picture is a dictate that has been emerging for several years, particularly in high-tech industries. Organizations like Microsoft, Valero Energy, and Qualcomm come to mind as benchmark firms. Developing a holistic approach generally entails putting all related functions under one leader, developing a methodology to determine in which jobs contingent labor works best, and including contingent labor in broader talent management activities like workforce planning, redeployment, and knowledge development and capture. The key to convincing executives to reorganize is to make the business case demonstrating the increased productivity and labor savings that could result from an integrated process.

Q4. What are some of the best ways to market to passive candidates to increase predisposition to working at your company?

The underlying premise here is that top performers who already have a job are not likely to entertain just any potential job opportunity. “Employed top performers with choices” (passives) have a significantly higher threshold that must be reached before they will consider a company or a new job. The starting point is to identify the job-switch decision factors that would peak their interest. Unfortunately, the attractors used to lure active job seekers (pay, security, and benefits) rarely impress these individuals. Factors more likely to work include working with an industry star or a great manager, exciting job challenges, access to new technologies, exciting learning opportunities, and a chance to lead.

You can identify job switch criteria using three basic approaches:

• ask prospects individually to list their decision factors.
• ask your own top-performing employees in similar jobs to list their job switch factors.
• ask newly hired top performers during onboarding to list the decision factors they used.

The job switch factors identified should then permeate your branding and employment marketing communications and be reinforced during every interaction with potential hires.

Q5. Several industry pundits have predicted that 2010 will be the year that sourcing as a profession dies and becomes a $10/hr job. Do you agree with those pundits, and if not, how do you see the role of the professional sourcer changing/evolving?

No I don’t. There will always be a role for top quality niche sourcers. The role of sourcing will certainly change, so that corporate sourcers evolve into network managers. Instead of doing transactional sourcing, they will use the time of others and focus their time on educating and helping employees and others to more effectively use their social networks. Having thousands of individuals source for you (crowdsourcing) is a powerful and cost-effective tool.

Q6. What do you see as the best use of third party recruiters as this market rebounds?

The ROI of third party recruiters is greatest when organizations need to shift rapidly into entirely new areas or geographic regions where recruiter and employee networks are less likely to be as developed.

Q7. What was the 2009 turnover % and what is the expected 2010 employee turnover? My organization saw no significant change in turnover. Were we an exception?

The current economic downturn has not impacted all sectors in the same way. While some industries were negatively impacted, others grew tremendously. However, numerous studies show that a majority (75%) of employees in nearly all industries are dissatisfied and open to new opportunities. No change in your turnover rate could be an indication of strong employer desirability or lack of alternate opportunities.

Regardless, targeted retention efforts that include employer branding, pre-identification of who is at risk, and redesign of jobs to make them more challenging, rewarding and flexible will be needed throughout the recovery. (Retention Strategy article.)

Q8. Could you detail different blocking strategies?

There are four categories of blocking strategies that prevent external recruiters from poaching your best employees:

• Blocking contact or access — limit access to contact information, train gatekeepers to identify inbound recruiting calls, and block known recruiter phone numbers and e-mail.
• Information gathering approaches — identify who is recruiting and what methods they are using by using poaching incident logs, post-exit interviews, and debriefing during new hire orientation.
• Training and awareness — train employees on what to expect and how to act when a recruiter calls, and continually drive awareness among employees about why your organization’s jobs are superior.
• Metrics and rewards — measure and distribute ranked turnover metrics in order to embarrass managers with high turnover. Institute manager rewards for low turnover among top performers in key jobs.

(Read more on blocking strategies.)

Q9. Haven’t heard of Green Recruiting. What does that refer to?

Green recruiting is the general term for employer branding and marketing efforts that emphasize an organization’s greenness or sustainability initiatives as a key selling tool. Highlighting greenness is important because it is often ranked in the top half of potential candidate’s decision criteria. Among college grads it’s even more important. GE, Google, and Timberland are all benchmark firms in this area. (Green Recruiting article.)

Q10. After two years of budget cuts, three-fifths of my non-labor budget is allocated to technology maintenance contracts and long-term tool/service subscriptions, leaving just 20% of my budget to deal with fluctuations in demand. How are other organizations becoming more agile when budget flexibility is almost non-existent?

In a world that requires flexibility, fixed costs are your enemy. The key is to negotiate flexible contracts based on usage, so the costs go down when your usage goes down. Some outsource vendors offer flexible SLAs, so that your firm can reduce costs rapidly when necessary and increase capabilities rapidly when sudden growth requires it.

Q11. How do you use credit card info for recruiting?

It is not really credit card data that recruiters can use, but rather consumer data that is derived from financial transactions and sold as sales leads by marketing services companies like Acxiom. Consumer profiles often include recruiting relevant fields such as employer, profession, location, annual income, etc. While not appropriate for all recruiting functions, sales lead data can be very useful in high-volume staffing environments. (Years ago such data was dismissed because it was often inaccurate, but today most data providers refresh each field at least once a year.)

Q12. Can you elaborate on the growth of ATS alternatives?

As employee referral programs, dedicated sourcing initiatives, and other forms of talent sourcing that introduce non-applicant talent to the organization grow in popularity, organizations need to build data stores on people who have not completed an online application and are not likely to. The online application is well known as a black hole, so insisting that all people who have engaged via social networking, offline networking, and high-touch referral go to your website and apply is like putting talent in a bus moving at 100 MPH on a freeway overpass that has not yet been completed: i.e., certain death.

For this type of talent, many progressive organizations are embracing CRM solutions and collaboration platforms that enable piecing together of non-applicant profiles over time by a defined group. Possible solutions include:

• CRM Platforms — Recruiting-specific CRM platforms are emerging that let organizations capture small bits of information from scalable web forms that can be embedded almost anywhere, including social network profiles and search-engine-optimized landing pages that bring search engine traffic not likely to explore your online career portal. Additional fields can be captured via follow-up interactions that ultimately help you produce a complete profile. Lead segmenting and integrated activity scheduling can help organizations craft specific interaction plans designed to drive conversion of top talent.
• Collaboration Tools — This category of tools includes robust collaboration servers and smaller web services like wikis and blogs. Organizations that use dedicated but dispersed sourcers including third-party partners can use collaborative documents like wiki entries to build searchable profiles of talent of interest to the organization. Every interaction and research find pertaining to an individual being tracked can be documented and shared in real time across the team.
• Social Bookmarking — Special thanks to Michael Specht for sharing this idea during the webinar Q&A. By defining a tagging methodology, organizations can use social bookmarking software to build robust indexes of talent profiles existing across a multitude of internet sites. Employees engaging in benchmarking efforts could bookmark the profiles of those encountered from other organizations, tagging them with their function, management level, specific skill, etc. With an entire organization contributing to the social bookmark index, a crowdsourced directory of labor could be built relatively quickly and cheaply.

These were the top questions that emerged, but we are sure there are more. If you have a question or thought that hasn’t been explored that is related to 2010 trends, share it in a comment, we’d love to hear what’s on your mind.

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:

Non-Traditional Employment

We are going to see a steady and continuing rise in temporary, part-time, contract, and consulting work. This will replace a large portion of traditional employment over this year and continue on for the foreseeable future. Employers are and will remain reluctant to hire regular employees given the economy, the constantly-changing consumer and marketplace, as well as new government regulations. I believe that new labor laws, more enforcement, and higher costs for health and disability will also pressure employers to hire people as temporaries or contractors.

This is in line, as well, with worker sentiment. Recent Conference Board research shows a record level of job dissatisfaction among current workers, with a significant number of Gen Y saying they are highly dissatisfied. More young people are opting to downsize their lives and find ways to earn a living on their own. They offer a variety of skills from programming, writing, tutoring, teaching, or doing manual labor on a part-time or temporary basis.

I predict no upsurge in regular employment. There will be hiring, but primarily for critical positions and to protect intellectual property.

Mobility Plus

We are living in a time when where we work is no longer the most important consideration. Again, young people are leading the way in demanding the opportunity to work wherever, whenever, and however they want. The most leading-edge organizations are adapting to this and allowing lots of flexibility in employment terms. These firms will prosper.

But this trend means recruiting will have to go virtual and recruiters, as I have said many times before, will need to become skilled at video interviewing, online testing, and the other components of a complete virtual recruiting process. Hiring managers may never meet face-to-face with a candidate, and once hired, the employee may work alone in some remote place with no face-to-face contact with any other employee. Others may work in small clusters located regionally, and others may choose to work this way on a part-time basis. The key will be flexibility in everything.

Visa issues will become less important because people can work from their home country. Travel is cheap and fast and, while security may be an issue, people are more mobile than ever. If there is a need to meet, it can happen easily. This mobility may make a temporary or part-time workforce even more attractive as that will eliminate the complex issues of health coverage and other benefits for a distributed workforce.

As mobile phones get even more connected to the Internet and offer more capabilities, work can take place literally anywhere: in airplanes, cars, or trains, and at all times and places. The concept of work being something done at a specific place is ending.

Fewer Recruiters: More RPOs

I see the need for far fewer recruiters as the number of employees continues to drop and there is more focus on part-time and temporary workers. The recruiters who remain will be highly skilled in using social networks, in living and working virtually, in influencing and selling, and in learning their trade more thoroughly than ever. As I wrote a few weeks ago, the internal recruiters who survive will have to have the skills of successful third-party recruiters, plus more.

There will also be a steady rise in recruiting firms who can fill all the hiring needs of an organization. The so-called one-stop-shop will become more popular to fill the needs for temporary and part-time workers. These recruitment process outsourcing centers will reduce the need for internal recruiters. And, the successful RPOs will heavily use technology to reduce their need for recruiters and keep costs low. Perhaps a fourth trend should be the rise of recruiting technology that will really improve recruiting. But I still believe that technology is only a tool that well-trained and seasoned recruiters can employ to handle more open positions, do more with less, and lower costs.

Let’s see how I do this year and let me wish you all a very happy and a prosperous new year!

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:

1. Churn: Just as seen in 2009, 2010 will be a year in which organizations both grow and contract simultaneously. Business leaders will become more adept at making surgical labor cuts and investing in labor that brings new capabilities to the table. It will be part of a multi-pronged approach that ultimately improves the agility of the organization.
2. Contingent labor: The writing has been on the wall for some time, but not everybody wants to read it! Volatile market conditions, radical competition, and rapid innovation dictate that organizations be able to flex their labor usage frequently, something traditional employees do not make possible. To further enable agility, 2010 will be the year that even those organizations that have resisted using contingent labor increase it by double-digit rates.
3. Show me the money: I have been predicting this trend for over a decade, but sadly few HR leaders get the point. The requests — scratch that, demands — from senior leaders to demonstrate strategic thinking and impact are present in the boardroom, and 2010 will be the year they trickle out despite efforts by HR leadership to ignore them. Providing tactical functional analytics will no longer cut it. Recruiting leaders will need to step forward and prove business impact presented in Dollars, Euros, or Yen.
4. The return of the War: If you’re involved in global talent acquisition, you already know that despite a global economic downturn, the war for talent never really ended. The truth is that top talent will always be in the minority regardless of market conditions, and that sought-after minority populations have power. Candidate centricity will prove a key battle concept in 2010.
5. Direct sourcing: At the start of this century, direct sourcing efforts contributed less than 5% of the candidates who were ultimately hired, but as a source, direct sourcing has grown year after year. 2010 will be the year that direct sourcing efforts on average produce 1:5 hires, and begin to challenge employee referral programs as the dominate source in leading organizations (although in many strategic talent organizations you could argue that ERPs are actually distributed direct sourcing systems.) The challenge moving forward isn’t finding people –that’s too easy — the real challenge is sorting, categorizing, contacting, and convincing the right talent that you are relevant to their wants and needs.
6. Jugaad is required: The continuous emphasis on innovation in business will spill over into talent acquisition. In 2010 you will see more and more organizations tap strategic leaders from sales, marketing, and operations groups to lead staffing initiatives. They will continue to adapt proven business tools and approaches not developed for/by recruiters for recruiting, without significant resources or budget.
7. Negative employer branding: Whether organizations acknowledge it or not, social media is a force that will impact them for better or for worse. 2010 will be a year in which employees, past and present, really start to influence how organizations are perceived by being more vocal about their experiences. As more and more online communities expose their content to search engines, transparency will abound. Is your glass house shatterproof?
8. Tool obsolescence: Not surprisingly, a large number of tools in the typical recruiter’s tool basket are obsolete and have been for years. Recruiting leaders and practitioners locked in a transactional mindset haven’t been paying much attention to new technologies both inside and outside the recruiting industry that apply to recruiting, and as a result are using tools that are profoundly inefficient. 2010 will be a year in which progressive organizations make such leaps and bounds with new technology that less-progressive organizations will not be able to ignore them. As a result, more tools than ever will push toward retirement.
9. Obsolete talent: Antiquated approaches to training and development coupled with general apathy by the vast majority of the labor force when it comes to keeping skills and knowledge current will lead to staggering levels of labor obsolescence. Jobs will abound, but talent suitable for them will be in short supply. As a result, more and more organizations will be forced to pursue workforce decentralization via remote workers, outsourcing, and offshoring.
10. Retention: Numerous employee surveys indicate that given a stable opportunity, a majority of employees today would jump ship. While the surveys likely exaggerate the percentage of the labor market who can and will make a move, the truth is that some top talent will do so and that the vast majority of organizations are not prepared to mitigate risks caused by rapid and significant turnover. As an ugly turnover tsunami is just around the corner, what’s your plan?

While this list of topics that will dominate recruiting thoughts and actions in 2010 seems overwhelming negative, the reality is that every situation presents two sides: one positive, one negative. Each of these trends to come presents unbelievable opportunity to those recruiting leaders brave enough to break rank and step forward to challenge the status quo.

To learn more about these trends, the factors driving them, and action steps to take, stay tuned for parts II and III of this series. Part II will address trends related to labor churn and monetizing recruiting impact, while part III will focus on the rising war for talent and emerging tools.