A member of the Federal Reserve Board is complaining that too many of the new jobs created since the recovery began are low-wage, part-time, temporary, or all three.
Speaking last week at a conference in Washington, D.C., Fed Governor Sarah Raskin said, “Flexible and part-time arrangements can present great opportunities to some workers, but the substantial increase in part-time workers does raise a number of concerns.” These include, she said, a lack of benefits, lower pay rates, and, often, no sick or personal days off. 
Two-thirds of the jobs lost in the recession, she said, “were in moderate-wage occupations, such as manufacturing, skilled construction, and office administration jobs.” But fewer than a quarter have come back. “Recent job gains,” she observed, “have been largely concentrated in lower-wage occupations such as retail sales, food preparation, manual labor, home health care, and customer service.” keep reading…
The Federal Reserve says hiring activity in the nation generally has improved in the last several weeks particularly in some of the high tech and energy-producing parts of the country.
In its just-issued “Beige Book” report on the economic condition of the country, the Fed says that in more than half the districts, which carve the nation into 12 financial geographies, it’s seeing “modest gains in hiring.” However even in these areas, the Fed got mixed signals from the employers and staffing firms it contacts for insights on economic conditions.
For example in the Chicago district, covering the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the fed said “a number of firms were putting hiring on hold and had delayed temp-to-perm conversion decisions until next year.” In Richmond, the Fed found the employment market less positive than it did when it published its last report on October 10.
The one common thread running through each District’s report on its employment market is a reference to the shortage of skilled labor. While different skills are at issue, depending on the District, almost every one says employers and staffing firms mention shortages. keep reading…
At once swooping up two of its largest competitors, Bullhorn today became one of the largest, if not the largest, technology providers to staffing and independent recruiting firms in the world.
Describing it as “an incredible moment for Bullhorn customers,” company CEO Art Papas announced the acquisition of both MaxHire and Sendouts.
“We’re acquiring two extremely talented teams, both of whom have succeeded in delighting their large customer bases with a combination of product innovation and excellent service,” Papas said in a news release. “These acquisitions dramatically increase our ability to execute on our vision of helping recruiters be more successful, develop new products, and serve our exponentially expanding user base.”
Details of the sale weren’t disclosed, however both MaxHire and Sendouts will operate under the Bullhorn brand. MaxHire’s CEO Peter Blitz, who founded the company in 1995, will become Bullhorn’s product innovation officer. Sendouts’ CEO Brian Hopcroft will become general manager.
Customers of each company will continue to use the existing software and will be supported as they always have, assured Andrew Hally, Bullhorn’s vice president of product and marketing. “Both products (MaxHire and Sendouts) are staying… We are not shutting down the products,” Hally explained, though the individual companies will immediately be folded into Bullhorn. keep reading…
What may very well be the ultimate temp job on the planet is pretty much for men only. (Oh, look, see the HR compliance managers keeling over.)
Sure there’s a few Mrs. Clauses out there, but every kid knows Santa is a chubby guy with a white beard, ruddy cheeks, and a deep Ho, Ho, Ho. What the kids don’t know — and not a lot of the rest of us either — is that the kindly shopping mall Santa can pull in $8-$12k for the six- or seven-week season.
CareerCast, which lists playing Santa as one of the best of the seasonal holiday jobs, says a few of the jobs can pay $100 an hour at the high end. Those who get on the corporate and social holiday circuit easily make that much, and way more, like up to a few grand per gig.
The downside is there’s no advancement opportunities, it’ll never turn into a permanent job, and chances are good some of the kids are going to throw up on you. On the other hand, you be one of Santa’s elfs, a job CareerCast puts in its worst category.
Calling it the “most optimistic fourth quarter projection since 2007,” CareerBuilder said this morning that 26 percent of employers expect to add full-time, permanent workers by the end of December.
The percentage rivals those for the same quarter pre-recession, and is a full 5 points higher than the 21 percent last year who predicted their company would be adding permanent staff. keep reading…
With the acquisition announced today of Indeed.com, Recruit.com has taken a major step toward becoming a worldwide recruitment powerhouse, directly challenging CareerBuilder, Monster, and Indeed’s most direct competitor, SimplyHired, for a share of the global employment advertising market.
A curiously eclectic conglomerate with holdings in the B2C classifieds and direct sales marketplace, Recruit has been moving aggressively to expand its human resources market, and broaden its footprint from Asia Pacific and especially Japan where it is headquartered. In the last two years, the company spent more than $700 million buying American staffing firms, establishing its first U.S. presence while simultaneously become one of the top four or five staffing firms in the world.
Recruit already was the dominant staffing and placement firm in Japan, where it operates both job boards and employment agencies. It also owns a piece of 51Jobs, the leading publicly traded job board in China. Buying Indeed, the No. 1 or No. 2 most trafficked job board in the world (depending on what’s counted and how), Recruit leaves no doubt it intends to be a global player.
“I think that’s their goal,” said Paul Forster, co-founder and CEO of Indeed. “We are the No. 1 job site worldwide, which makes us a good fit with the company plans … They are looking to Indeed to be their tech platform worldwide.” keep reading…
What’s old is new again, as companies rediscover retiree re-staffing as a way of retaining the experience and skills of their Baby Boomer workers.
“Companies are losing way too much experience with the retirement of the Baby Boomers,” says Greg Doersching, founder of Bullseye Recruiting Process. “Some companies are sucking that experience back in on contract. They don’t have enough people to replace all of that experience.”
Doersching told Top Echelon that retirees will be the “contract candidate pool for the next five to 10 years, especially in areas like IT and Engineering.”
Cathy George, owner and founder of C.G. & Company in Odessa, Texas, says retiree re-staffing has been picking up steam in West Texas as the pace of hiring there has quickened. Previously it was mostly smaller firms that would rehire their retirees, but now, she says, the big service providers have entered the picture.
Besides simply finding enough talent to fill all the jobs, George says an almost even bigger challenge is housing the new workers. “There’s plenty of work, but no place to live,” she says, which is another reason the petroleum industry in the area is rehiring retirees. keep reading…
While all eyes last week were focused on the disappointing March job numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the report contained a curious blip that might be nothing more than a statistical aberration. Or it could be an early signal of employment trouble ahead.
The usually robust growth in temp jobs took a breather in March. Temp jobs dipped by 7,500 during the month, the first time since June the monthly employment report registered a decline. Out of a temp workforce of some 2.5 million, the drop is practically unnoticeable. But considering that staffing jobs grew by 91,300 in January and February, a reduction of any size is significant.
Recent history is also a factor. Looking at April 2011, the monthly jobs report said 251,000 jobs were created, the biggest rise since the census hiring of 12 months earlier. But that same report also showed the first decline in temp jobs in 19 months. Then in May, the economy added a mere 54,000 jobs. It was months before the pace of hiring returned to what it was in the first quarter of the year when 662,000 jobs were created.
Cautious employers can be forgiven therefore if they react as if last week’s Labor Department report were an omen. keep reading…
“Unemployment is expected to remain above 8 percent for the next four years.” That gloomy assessment of the U.S. economy from FedEx Chief Economist Gene Huang is echoed in any number of reports and economic predictions.
“Most predictions,” says an economic analysis by the Society for Human Resource Management, “are less optimistic now than they were when 2011 began.”
What especially worries economists is whether the slow job growth is due to employer cautiousness — in which case growth will accelerate when economic confidence returns — or whether it is structural, meaning some jobs have been permanently eliminated, much the way automation obsoleted elevator operators.
“It is a fair bet that aggregate demand remains the main problem while pockets of skills mismatches persist, despite the high number of job seekers,” says the SHRM analysis.
The latest economist to weigh in is Gad Levanon, director of macroeconomic research for The Conference Board. Last week, he dissected recoveries of the past to examine the rate of job growth across multiple industries. What he found is that “the current employment recovery is the second slowest on record.” keep reading…
Here’s a collection of odds and ends about startups, new features, and other bits and bytes of useful info.
You may remember CodeEval from a year ago, and from an update we did when part of its service became free. The company has opened up its database for searching by employers. So if you want to look up one of the thousands of developers who’ve solved programming challenges, you can view their solutions, and contact info. It’s $500 a month, though you can search free to see how many matches you get, before spending the money to get identifying information.- CareerBuilder says the staffing industry is in for a strong few months as companies ramp-up their temporary hiring. A survey commissioned by the careers publisher found 36 percent of companies plan to hire temp or contract workers this year. The first quarter may well be the easiest, as 27 percent of companies say they’ll be adding temp staff in the first three months of the year. keep reading…
From the giant IPO-bound staffing firm Staffmark Holdings, to Indianapolis’ 14-person HR services firm FlashPoint, 156 self-described human resource companies made the annual Inc. list of the 5,000 fastest growing businesses in the U.S.
Inc. ranks the companies, all privately held, by growth rate; the faster revenue increased over three years, the higher the company ranks. By that measure, HR staffing and services firm Nextaff was first among the HR companies that volunteered to participate. (Participation requires companies to divulge annual revenue, employee counts and growth, etc. Only some companies are willing to publicize that kind of proprietary information.)
keep reading…
There’s all sorts of tools for sourcing candidates. Much beloved are the resume search tools that leverage the search engines and scour pay and free sites to find resumes matching whatever criteria you select.
But when it comes to working the other direction — that is, sourcing placements and req –, the choices are pretty limited.
Now along comes BrightMove with a tool that turns resume sourcing on its head. Instead of searching for candidates to match a req, BrightMatch goes out and looks for job postings to match candidates you have in house.
How an agency might use BrightMatch is as obvious as it seems.
Say you have a particularly great candidate with unique skills, but no current req in house. With BrightMatch you can search thousands of corporate websites — more than 20,000, says BrightMove COO Mike Brandt — to see if there’s a match.
Find one, pitch the candidate, close the deal. keep reading…
Staffing and recruiting tech provider VCG Software has been acquired by British-based Bond International Software for $9 million.
Bond, a publicly traded company on the London exchange, is one of the largest providers of staffing software in the world. It also serves corporate recruiting offices with its Bond Talent recruiting program.
VCG, founded by the merger of two companies in 1991, specializes in the staffing sector. Pointwing is the company’s modular library of recruiting services, which includes a resume search, sourcing tool, job board, and ATS. StaffSuite is a complete front office tool set.
Bond’s acquisition of VCG strengthens its presence in the U.S., where it has a foothold. Out of an office in Minnesota, it marketed its StarSearcher, an ATS targeted to the smaller employer, since rebranded Bond Talent. Bond Talent is now its flagship ATS for corporate recruiting. Enhanced with additional features, primarily to streamline administrative functions, it was relaunched earlier this year. keep reading…
A member of the Federal Reserve Board is complaining that too many of the new jobs created since the recovery began are low-wage, part-time, temporary, or all three.
