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Most of you are no strangers to slashed budgets over the past few years. Yet just because budgets are reduced doesn’t mean your workload is. So how do you maintain quality of hire without the budget for your preferred tools and technology? Pacific Northwest National Laboratory did just that, by developing a carefully planned strategy and thinking outside the box. Join us as Rob Dromgoole explains how they make big hires on a small budget.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

In broad strokes, President Obama tonight outlined a $447 billion plan to bolster the economy and create new jobs.

Over half the cost comes from tax cuts for workers and small businesses. The balance is in spending on infrastructure repairs and improvements, especially to schools; at least 35,000 of them, the President said to a joint session of Congress. (The full text of his speech is here.)

He proposed a $4,000 tax credit for hiring long-term unemployed workers, and other credits for hiring veterans. He called for extending unemployment benefits and providing money to states to pay teachers, rather than lay them off. keep reading…

Whatever jobs plan President Obama unveils tonight (7 p.m. ET) when he addresses Congress and the nation, it will face a tough, uphill battle to be successful, and not just because of a skeptical, combative Republican House.

Not since Franklin Roosevelt has a presidential speech to a joint session of the House and Senate on the economy had any effect, regardless of the boldness of the plan or its details.

“It is impossible to trace any recovery to the presidential proposals in almost every case,” says 24/7 Wall St., a financial news and analysis site that conducted a review of presidential speeches to joint sessions since the end of the Great Depression. 24/7 found seven speeches dealing with business and economic issues and concluded “they had virtually no effect on the economy, despite the detailed proposals.”

That alone is bad mojo for a president who needs to hit a homerun. But as hints about what Obama’s plan will contain began to leak, economists were already expressing mixed opinions  about some of the proposals, especially the hiring tax credit. It’s not certain that will be part of the plan; presuming it will be, however, economists were divided about the effect tax credits or exemptions have in spurring hiring. keep reading…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this informative webinar, Linda Brenner shows you how to recruit the best with limited resources.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

At least no one is saying “Prosperity is just around the corner.” After Friday’s dismal jobs report, anyone even hinting that might be so would be subject to the same scorn that was heaped upon Herbert Hoover, the president of “rugged individualism,” who probably never actually uttered that phrase, though he came mightily close.

Yet despite the disheartening jobs report, news from the field, from the people in the best position to know of hiring plans, continues to point toward recovery.

Monday, The Conference Board released its Employment Trends Index for May, which rose for the ninth month in a row. The Index stands at 95.7, up from April’s 95.2 and up nine percent over the last 12 months.

“The ongoing growth in the Employment Trends Index suggests that the disappointing uptick in payroll employment in May could just be a one-month blip, and that jobs will likely expand further in the next several months,” said Gad Levanon, associate director, Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board. “However, as some of the components of the ETI have yet to signal robust gains, the pace of recovery in employment may remain moderate.”

Today, Manpower released the results of its quarterly hiring survey, which says 18 percent of the 18,000 employers polled plan on hiring in the third quarter of the year. It’s the third consecutive quarter of a positive hiring outlook.

Manpower crunches the results to come up with a Net Employment Outlook. For the upcoming quarter that seasonally adjusted outlook is +6 percent. (From the percent of employers saying they plan to hire more, Manpower subtracts the percent who expect a payroll decrease — 8 percent in the current report. The result is adjusted to smooth seasonal fluctuations.)

“Manpower’s survey results show a positive trend in employers’ hiring plans,” said Jonas Prising, Manpower president of the Americas. “Although we are still facing a difficult labor market, more employers indicate confidence about the direction of their businesses, and with that comes an intention to increase their workforces. We are in the early stages of the jobs recovery, and although we have a long way to go, the job market will continue to improve from here.” keep reading…

Fewer jobs than expected — alas, many fewer private sector jobs — were created in May, suggesting that employers are still not ready to begin hiring in any numbers. So expect a bumpy day in the financial markets.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning that 431,000 jobs were created last month. That would be a strong signal of a return to historic hiring were it not that 411,000 of those jobs are temporary positions for the U.S. Census.  “Private-sector employment changed little (+41,000),” the BLS blandly stated.

There was improvement in the unemployment rate, which fell to 9.7 percent from 9.9 percent; small consolation when economists were predicting job growth of over half a million, with at least 100,000 from the private sector.

Furthering tempering the jobs numbers was a revision to the March number, decreasing the initial 230,000 estimate to 208,000. April’s increase of 290,000 jobs added was unchanged. keep reading…

Initial claims for jobless benefits dropped by 10,000 last week. The ADP National Employment Report said nonfarm private employment increased 55,000 in May. The report also upped the April numbers from the initial 32,000 jobs added to 65,000. The Monster Employment Index rose — only by a point — but it did rise. And the U.S. Census Bureau said new orders for manufactured goods rose again in April.

Heartening, if not full-speed-ahead news? That would seem a reasonable conclusion, except on Wall Street where traders behaved as if the news should have been better. On the initial enthusiasm, the Dow rose quickly, only to give back all the early gains and drop 57 points by lunchtime.

Nevertheless, tomorrow’s jobs numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is the most anticipated of the monthly labor reports. Economists expect the report will show somewhere around 513,000 jobs were added in May. Most of the jobs — somewhat more than 300,000 is the estimate — are likely to be temporary workers hired by the Census Bureau. keep reading…

Good news is expected from three employment reports out this week. The key report will come Friday, an hour before the New York Stock Exchange opens, but already optimism about the number of jobs created in May seems to be the rule on Wall Street.

No less than the President himself said the employment report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics would not only be positive, but strongly so. “We expect to see strong jobs growth in Friday’s report,” Obama said in a speech in Pittsburgh today. “This economy is getting stronger by the day.” keep reading…

As the last strains of Pomp and Circumstance played out over college quads and athletic fields these last few weeks, more than a few of the new graduates had to be wondering: What next?

A survey of graduating seniors found only a quarter of those in the Class of 2010 who applied for a job had one waiting. Conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, this year’s results, certainly discouraging if you’re one of the grads or a parent, are an improvement over 2009, when only 19.7 percent had jobs waiting.

The ever-so-slowly improving economy is one reason for the better numbers. Another is savvier job hunting. “A greater number of Class of 2010 graduates accepted the jobs they were offered,” says Marilyn Mackes, NACE executive director. Last year, 45 percent of the students offered jobs accepted them; this year the acceptance rate rose to 59 percent. keep reading…

This morning’s monthly jobs report was a mixed bag offering something for both the bears and the bulls.The good news: Unemployment dropped from 10 percent to 9.7 percent. The bad news: The economy continued to lose jobs, shedding 20,000 in January when economists expected jobs to at least be flat, if not grow.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics also revised its reports for November and December. In November, the BLS now says the economy gained 64,000 jobs, up from its previous estimate of a 4,000 job gain.

That improvement was more than offset by the bureau’s revision to its December number. Instead of the 85,000 job loss it first reported, the BLS now says 150,000 jobs were actually lost. keep reading…

Economists expect that tomorrow’s jobs report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics will show 175,000 jobs were lost in September, the smallest since July 2008.

A Bloomberg survey also says economists expect the unemployment rate to rise to 9.8 percent, the highest since 1983. An ADP report released this morning foreshadows the lower, yet still continuing job loss. The ADP National Employment Report says the U.S. lost 254,000 private, nonfarm jobs in September, a drop of 23,000 from the revised August jobs report. It’s the lowest drop that ADP has recorded since August 2008.

Government economic reports released today showed the tentativeness of the U.S. recovery. A Commerce Department report said consumer spending in August was up 1.3 points, the biggest rise in eight years, and the fourth increase in a row. But fueled as it was by the Cash for Clunkers program, economists warn not to expect anything similar when the September results are reported at the end of this month.

Meanwhile, the Monster Employment Index, also released this morning, was down two points from September, while yet another report, this one from the Labor Department today, said 551,000 first-time claims for unemployment were filed last week, 17,000 more than the previous week and 20,000 more than the consensus of the 41 economists polled by Bloomberg.

Then there is the report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas which says fewer layoffs were announced in September than in any month since March 2008. The 66,404 layoffs tallied in the report are 10,000 fewer than in August and 30 percent lower than in September last year.

Today’s reports prompted the New York Times to start its story this way: keep reading…

David Szary says financial services companies are hiring — a lot. Here, he talks about hiring and retiring in the banking sector and in healthcare. keep reading…

You’ve heard that employment is a proverbial “lagging indicator.” Companies wait to hire until they’re sure an economic recovery is underway. Actually, that’s not true, says Stephen Lowisz, founder and CEO of Qualigence. keep reading…

Despite my optimistic view of the past few months, I’m considering the possibility that the recovery could be very long in coming and very slow in growing.

If so, it’s important that you start planning your recruiting activity and resource needs for this worst-case situation.

To take a stab at this complex issue, imagine you’re in the boardroom with your company’s senior executive team discussing the impact of the prolonged economic slowdown on your current business strategy and the current year’s annual operating plan.

Your input involves your employees’ morale and productivity, the company’s organization structure, all of the organizational development plans underway and proposed, and the overall hiring outlook.

The Big Picture: Impact on the Company

While I’m no expert at this, I suspect the initial discussions last year at the initial executive confab, right after black September 2008, focused on massive short-term expense control. Hopefully, you were part of this planning session to make your views known.

keep reading…

If you’re like some corporate recruiting leaders before the current downturn hit, you had your staff balanced with a solid mix of regular full-time staff, supplemented with contract staff to get you through the hiring peaks.

But maybe you weren’t quite as fortunate, and your crew was heavily loaded with regular staff recruiters, who were going full steam to keep up with the incredible hiring requisition load. Or maybe you have shed the contractors, but even your remaining staff is struggling to stay busy. Unfortunately, now that the economy has gone south, they’re running half the req loads they once did. Not only are they questioning their own job security, but you’re constantly fending off queries from your boss, the rest of HR, and maybe even the CFO as to just what the recruiters are doing, and why should you be maintaining the same staff you had when the current workload has shrunken so dramatically. Sounding familiar?

Hopefully, back in January of this year, you took Lou Adler’s sound advice that “hiring will start to recover in Q2, 2009, and now is the time to rebuild your recruiting team and massively upgrade your sourcing and hiring processes.” Perhaps you’ve done just that, and are now well positioned to address any coming business increase. Or possibly you didn’t get that opportunity, or your business still hasn’t begun to bounce back.

In any event, you do have alternatives — methods you can use to gainfully deploy your staff resources in ways that clearly, and measurably, demonstrate their ongoing value to the business. The challenges will be different, depending on the size of the company you’re in. In a small firm, you are likely to have more latitude in initiating change — but possibly fewer resources available. In a larger firm with more resources, you are likely to need to build a support coalition of colleagues, business partners, or executives to create the right atmosphere for change. But in either situation, it’s critical that you build the “business case” — show the ROI through well-tracked and supportable metrics.

In my more than 20 years of recruiting leadership, predominantly in hi-tech, I’ve had ample opportunity to face this challenge, given the cyclical nature of that business. And as you can imagine, I willingly responded to a blog posting earlier this year asking other recruiting veterans for their experiences in facing the same issue. 13 of us shared our stories, from a variety of industries and backgrounds. The following are a few snapshots of some of the proven practices and strategies that have been successfully implemented by others to preserve their key recruiting assets during previous business slowdowns.

Some of these are creative twists on previous themes, while others represent really out-of-the-box thinking. [NOTE: All of them are predicated on the assumption that you know your staff --- their skills, strengths/weaknesses, and backgrounds. If you're new in the role, you might want to begin with a resume review and light career discussion with each of them.]

I do hope you find some of the suggestions below fascinating, creative, and useful. I will be presenting a seminar/workshop on this very subject, and with a lot of additional detail on implementation, at the upcoming ERE Expo in Florida in September, and we’d love to see you there. keep reading…

There’s good news on this, the first day of June. The Conference Board reports this morning that online job postings rose last month by the largest amount in more than two years. It’s the first increase in the Help-Wanted Online Data Series in six months.

In May, there were 250,000 more jobs posted online than in April. The 8 percent increase brought the number of advertised jobs online to 3,367,000. Though modest, the increase dwarfs the 21,000 job posting gain The Conference Board reported in October 2008.

“The May bounce in labor demand is a very welcome sign,” said Gad Levanon, senior economist at The Conference Board. “Labor demand typically leads the trend in both employment and unemployment, so positive signals on labor demand are always important.”

While some of The Conference Board’s four U.S. regions showed more improvement than others, all had more online jobs advertised in May than in April. This extended to the state level where 43 states had more jobs. keep reading…

The job loss numbers released this morning, as deep as they are, nevertheless support the growing sense among economists and the public that the economy may be in the early stages of a recovery.

“This looks very much like an inflection point,” says Stephen Stanley, chief economist for RBS Securities, who was quoted by Marketwatch this morning. “And the corroborating evidence … all suggest that the pace of layoffs is finally beginning to abate.”

Nevertheless, the 539,000 jobs lost during April pushed the unemployment rate nationally to 8.9 percent. It could have been even higher, but for government hiring in anticipation of the 2010 census.

“It is a sobering toll,” said President Barack Obama, cautioning that, “We should expect further job losses in the months to come.” Still, “The gears of our economic engine do appear to be slowly turning once again,” the President said. “Step by step, we’re beginning to make progress.”

The American people apparently sensed that too. The Conference Board’s consumer confidence Index for April took its biggest jump up in more than year, rising from 26.9 to 39.2. The 5,000 households that were surveyed also showed more optimism about improving business conditions. Those expecting that jobs will continue to decline over the next several months decreased from 41.6 percent to 33.6 percent, while those expecting more jobs increased to 13.9 percent from 7.3 percent.

That confidence was supported by a slight rise in the Monster Index. Though the change is still far below where it was a year ago and not even as high as in February, the Index found that eight of the nine regions in the U.S. had increases. Leisure and hospitality and some increases in banking and finance were the primary drivers to the Monster Index improvement, suggesting that seasonal hiring is probably playing a role in moderating the job losses.

Everyone knows that recruiting is currently in a down cycle, but there is no doubt firms will again need to recruit significantly to fuel growth and replace aging workers.

But do you have a plan that will enable you to explode out of box immediately as the downturn ends?

If you don’t have a feasible recruiting turnaround plan, you may be hurting your organization.

Research shows that the majority of recruiting organizations don’t have a documented recruiting strategy, let alone one specifically developed to deal with a recovery of the macro-economy. While one could argue that it’s difficult to plan when you don’t know exactly when things will improve, such an excuse is just that, an excuse.

Scenario planning, or a what-if analysis, prepares you to handle the turnaround no matter when it occurs.

As a recruiting manager, ask yourself — before one of your senior executives asks you first: keep reading…

Classical Economist Adam Smith

Leading economist Dr. Robert Genetski joined us on April 1 at the ERE Expo 2009 Spring to share his wisdom regarding the current state of the economy.

Genetski began by explaining the classical principles of economics and the factors that dictate how the economy works in modern day society. From there, he proceeded to explain issues that have contributed to our current economic downtown, illuminating exactly how things became as serious as they did.

Of most interest to the audience were Genetski’s predictions on how the economy would affect labor markets in the coming months, the challenges we can still expect to face, and an idea of when we will begin to see the economy recover. Watch these highlights and prepare yourself to take advantage of the inevitable economic recovery.
keep reading…