It’s always better to be prepared than surprised.

By definition, being strategic requires that you look forward — identifying trends, opportunities, and threats. With the December lull looming, now is a great time to plan for the future. I’ve listed the “top 10 talent management trends” I foresee that require your attention.

But you should certainly do your own thinking. I recommend that you start by examining this past year…

2011 Was The Year of Social Media

2011 was a tough year for many in talent management, but despite compressed budgets, organizations continued to hire and develop talent. One factor that seemed to invade nearly every high-level functional discussion was social media. It’s clear that Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter will play a dominate role in recruiting and development best practices in years to come.

Not surprisingly, 2011 saw no fewer than 40 new vendors emerge to help organizations use social media to attract referrals. We also started to see early stage tools to use social media in talent assessment (pre/post hire) as well as applicant/candidate/employee experience management. New tools brought much enhanced visibility into talent issues, but most talent-management metrics continue not to resonate with key leaders outside of the HR function.

2012 Will Be “The Year of the Mobile Platform”

By the end of next year, even the skeptics will have to admit that the mobile platform will have become the dominant communications and interaction platform by early-adopting best-practice organizations. The capabilities afforded users of smartphones and tablet devices grows immensely day by day. Long before unified inboxes existed for the desktop, smart device users could see all incoming e-mail, social messaging, text messaging, and voice and video messaging in a single place.

Tablets will become the virtual classroom, and an emerging class of tools will let employees manage almost every aspect of their professional life digitally. During the next year, talent management leaders need to invest heavily supporting execution of talent management initiatives across mobile.

The Additional Top Nine!

Intense hiring competition will return in selected areas — global economic issues will persist for years to come, but the global war for talent will continue spiking in key regions an industries. While growth has slowed somewhat in China, Australia and Southeast Asia — including India — continue to see dramatic demand for skilled talent. In the U.S. and Europe, demand is still largely limited to certain industries where skills shortages have been an issue for years.

In high tech inclusive of medical technologies, 2012 will see a significant escalation in the war for top talent. As innovators and game changers step out of established tech firms like Facebook, Apple, Google, Twitter, and Zynga, a whole new breed to tech startups will be born each vying for the best of the best. While recruiting will move forward at a breathtaking pace, so too will “rapid” leadership development.

Retention issues will increase dramatically — almost every survey shows that despite high engagement scores, more than a majority of employees are willing to quit their current job as soon as a better opportunity comes along. I am predicting that turnover rates in high-demand occupations will increase by 25% during the next year and because most corporate retention programs have been so severely degraded, retention could turn out to be the highest-economic-impact area in all of talent management.

Rather than the traditional “one-size-fits-all” retention strategy, a targeted personalized approach will be required if you expect to have a reasonable chance to retain your top talent.

Social media increases its impact by becoming more data-driven — most firms jumped on the social media bandwagon, but unfortunately the trial-and-error approach used by most has produced only mediocre results. Adapting social media tools from the business coupled with strong analytics will allow a more focused approach that harnesses and directs the effort of all employees on social media. Talent leaders will increasingly see the value of a combination of internal and external social media approaches for managing and developing talent.

Remote work changes everything in talent management — the continued growth of technology, social media, and easy communications now makes it possible for most knowledge work and team activities to occur remotely. Allowing top talent to work “wherever they want to work” improves retention and makes recruiting dramatically easier.

Unfortunately, even though it is now possible for as much as 50% of a firm’s jobs to be done remotely, manager and HR resistance has limited the trend. Fortunately, managers and talent management leaders have begun to realize that teamwork, learning, development, recruiting, and best-practice sharing can now successfully be accomplished using remote methods. Firms like IBM and Cisco have led the way in reducing and eliminating barriers to remote work.

The need for speed shifts the balance between development and recruiting — historically, best practice within corporations has been to build and develop primarily from within. However, as the speed of change in business continues to increase and the number of firms that copy the “Apple model” (where firm is continually crossing industry boundaries) increases, talent managers will need to rethink the “develop internally first” approach.

In many cases, recruiting becomes a more viable option because there simply isn’t time for current employees to develop completely new skills. As a result, the trend will be to continually shift the balance toward recruiting for immediate needs and the use of contingent labor for short-duration opportunities and problems.

Employee referrals are coupled with social media — the employee referral program in many organizations is operated in isolation as are the organizations’ social media efforts, but talent managers are beginning to realize that the real strength of social media is relationship-building by your employees.

With proper coordination, employee relationships can easily be turned into employee referrals. This realization will lead to a shift away from recruiters and toward relying on employees to build social media contacts and relationships. The net result will be that as many as 60% of all hires will come from the combined efforts. The strength of these relationships will lead to better assessment and the highest-quality hires from employee referrals.

Employer branding returns — Employer branding and building talent communities are the only long-term strategies in recruiting. True branding is rarely practiced (hint: it’s not recruitment marketing) especially in the cash-strapped function of today, but years of layoffs, cuts in compensation, and generally bad press for business in general may force firms to invest in true branding. The increased use of social media and frequent visits to employee criticism sites (like Glassdoor.com), make not managing employer brand perception a risky proposition. While corporations will never control their employer brand, they can monitor and influence in a direction that isn’t catastrophic to recruiting and retention.

The candidate experience is finally getting the attention it deserves — Organizations have never treated candidates as well as they did their customers, but the high jobless rate has allowed corporations to essentially abuse some applicants. As competition for talent increases and as more applicants visit employer criticism sites like Glassdoor.com, talent leaders will be forced to modify their approach.

At the very least, firms will more closely monitor candidate experience metrics as they realize that treating applicants poorly can not only drive away other high-quality applicants but it can also lose them sales and customers.

Forward-looking metrics begin to dominate — Almost all current talent management and recruiting metrics are backward looking, in that they tell you what happened in the past. Other business functions like supply chain, production, and finance have long championed the use of “forward-looking” or predictive metrics and the time is finally coming when talent management leaders will shift their metrics emphasis. Forward-looking metrics can not only improve decision-making but they can also help to prevent or mitigate future talent problems.

Other Things to Keep Your Eye On…

In addition to the major trends highlighted above, there are 12 additional “hot” topics to keep your eye on:

• Risk identification — almost every other business function has already adopted a risk management strategy. So the time is coming when talent management will be forced to adopt a similar strategy and set of metrics. This program will not only cover HR legal issues but also the economic “risk” associated with weak hiring, the absence of developed leaders, and the cost of turnover of key talent.
• Prioritization — continued budget and resource pressure will force talent management leaders to prioritize their services, business units, key jobs, and high-value managers/employees.
• Integration — there will be increasing pressure for talent management functions to more closely integrate and work seamlessly.
• Expedited leadership development — as more baby-boom leaders and managers actually begin to retire, there will be increased pressure for expedited leadership development — specifically solutions that develop talent remotely using social media tools and within months rather than years.
• Competitive analysis — the increasingly competitive business world has forced almost every function to be more externally focused. Although HR has a long history of being internally focused and not being “highly competitive,” there is increasing pressure to become more business-like and to adopt an “us-versus-them” perspective. That means conducting competitive analysis and making sure that every key talent management function produces superior results to those at competitors.
• Contingent workers — as continuous business volatility becomes the “new normal,” the increased use and the improved management of contingent workers will become essential for agility and flexibility.
• Unionization — there is a reasonable chance that actions by the NLRB will increase union power and make it easier for unions to gain acceptance at private employers.
• Recruiting at industry events — as industry events return to popularity, recruiting at them will again become an effective tool for recruiting top and diverse talent.
• Location software — talent managers will begin to realize that software that allows you to check-in and see who is within close geographic proximity has great value and many still unidentified uses.
• Hire before they do — most firms will restrict their hiring until the turnaround actually begins. However, your firm must have a talent pool or pipeline developed, so that you can hire immediately and capture the top talent right before your competitors realize the downturn is over.
• Assessment continues to improve — vendors, software, and tools continue to improve in this area that will become increasingly important.
• Increase your revenue impact — increased economic pressures will continue the trend of forcing all functions (including talent management) to convert their functional results into business impacts in dollars. Talent management will face increasing pressure to directly demonstrate how their hiring, retention, development, etc. is focused, so that it directly increases and maximizes corporate revenues.

Final Thoughts

A recent survey of CEOs rates talent management as the No. 1 area where CEOs expect dramatic change during the next year. Given this increased attention, it’s even more critical that talent management and recruiting leaders set aside time to conduct a SWOT assessment (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to identify where they are and where they need to be.

The “new” talent management leader must be more strategic, more proactive, and more business-like, and that means getting your entire staff to begin thinking about and planning for the game-changing events, trends, and opportunities that will occur during the next year. It’s time to realize the “but-we-are-overwhelmed-and-too-busy” excuse for not forecasting and planning is wearing thin.

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.

Providing the tools and technology are easy. The tough question an employer must answer is: how do we hire and manage the right teleworker?

Like employees who fill every other job, some workers are natural fits, while others seem to be the square peg forced into a round hole. Telecommuting requires different skills than working out of an office, even if the job responsibilities and requirements are exactly the same.

Recent research out of Global Integration Inc. identified the traits of successful virtual workers and telecommuters. The most successful virtual workers are self-reliant and self-motivated. That sounds like the perfect fit for an ambitious introvert, but the “lone wolf” tends not to perform very well on virtual teams. Having the knack of keeping things to themselves is not a virtue of the virtual team member. Effective virtual work teams require interdependency on others. So while self-reliance and self-motivation are critical success traits, the employee must also appreciate the need to collaborate and willingness to share common goals and responsibilities.

The ability to deal with ambiguity is another critical personality trait. People who like fixed schedules, explicit instructions, and predictability won’t generally perform very well in the virtual work setting. Virtual work requires independent thought and a willing to take initiative. That means sometimes the employee will make a mistake or go off in the wrong direction. Effective virtual workers can’t wait for every instruction or wait to be told what to do.

But both the manager and employee must acknowledge that taking initiative has risks, and that personal accountability and accepting responsibility are must-have characteristics. Employees who take feedback and criticism personally will struggle if not fail when working far from the maddening crowd.

Communication skills are also must-have job skills. Since much of the interaction a virtual worker does is verbal and written, not visual or face-to-face, he must have the ability to draft easy-to-understand and to-the-point communications. While dealing with ambiguity is a working style asset for the telecommuter, it can be a liability when it comes to communicating with others.

While offering flex time and telecommuting as an employee retention strategy has significant benefit, not all candidates or current employees can make the transition. The onus for selecting the right candidates to work from home falls upon the employer, and more specifically, human resources.

Obviously one good indicator might be experience. Has the employee worked remotely before? What were the circumstances? How effective was he or she? Was this a full-time virtual position or was the employee allowed to work from home just a day or two a week? What were his/her responsibilities? Did both the candidate and employer benefit from the arrangement, or just the worker? If the manager had an opportunity to re-hire this person again, would telecommuting even be an option they would offer?

Unfortunately most workers don’t have a solid track record on working virtual. An estimated 2.9 million employees worked primarily from home in 2009, while as many as 33.7 million worked from home at least once a month. The requirements to work remotely every day versus only on the days your child is sick or the weather is bad are vastly different. So how can an employer identify employees and candidates who are cut out for virtual work and telecommuting if past experience is not a factor?

Personality tests offer a reliable indicator of job fit for the virtual worker. Referring back to the Global Integration research I mentioned earlier, self-reliance, self-motivation, flexibility, collaborative tendencies, dealing with ambiguity, criticism tolerance, multitasking, and task closure (follow-through) are all traits and characteristics that can be assessed using a validated pre-employment assessment test. While the results of such a personality assessment are not conclusive (nor should they ever be used as the only hiring indicator), they are very accurate at identifying the high-risk candidates. And should the manager offer telecommuting as a work option, the results of many employee assessment offer insight about how best to manage, develop, and mentor the employee.

Fortune’s 2011 list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For” offer telecommuting opportunities to employees. The U.S. Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey reports an increase of employees who worked from home of 61 percent from 2005. With more and more companies struggling to find and retain qualified workers as well as manage costs, the number of virtual workers is sure to rise. But as with every job, not every worker is qualified to fill the position. Companies must add the ability to work virtually to their list of job competencies and be able to assess accurately the candidate’s ability or potential. Otherwise, the advantages of employing virtual workers will quickly be outweighed by lost productivity and turnover.

95% of the Qualified Candidates Are Not In Your Backyard

While there are pockets of industrialization that attract a greater percentage of highly educated and trained professionals, the vast majority of talent remains dispersed around the world. If your organization forces only local talent to be considered, there is no way your organization can claim to be hiring only top talent. Such an approach dictates that your organization is missing out on a huge group of qualified applicants (the 95% that exists elsewhere) simply because:

1. They do not live within a commuting distance of your job
2. They are not willing or they cannot relocate to the job location due to relocation costs, living preferences, underwater mortgages, or family issues
3. Possible immigration/visa issues

Restricting recruiting to only local communities can have dramatic effects on results. For example, if you are the head coach at the college basketball powerhouse University of North Carolina, and the team was restricted to recruiting only players who currently lived within a commuting distance of the campus, how many months do you think it would take until the team would begin its slide into mediocrity?

If you want to have a strategic impact as a recruiter, you need to recommend any low-cost action that would dramatically increase the size of the qualified candidate pool: remote work. While many assume geography is an unavoidable barrier, the truth is that for most knowledge jobs, it simply isn’t. Allowing more remote work could literally increase the quality of your applicant pool by several hundred percent.

What Percentage Would Want to Work for You

Whether your talent pool is local and small or global and large, you still must convince the qualified individuals to want to apply and work for your firm. For the local-only talent pool, flexibility, work/life balance, and commute time/costs would be among the potential selling points. If you were offering remote work, you would likely immediately meet each of these three selling points.

In addition, if you are a global firm with relatively high pay, benefits, and outstanding management practices, you will find that an extremely large percentage of those qualified individuals around the globe would jump at the opportunity to work for you (provided that they didn’t have to relocate).

Great Brand, But Location an Application Killer

Zappos is a wildly successful online shoe retailer, with a powerful employer brand built on unusual but highly effective management practices. If you were one of the best online marketing experts in the world, chances are that an opportunity to affiliate with the brand would be attractive. Unfortunately, Zappos isn’t in New York or Chicago. It’s in Las Vegas, a place that gets an automatic reaction (often a negative one) when mentioned. Despite a great brand and exciting culture, there are a number of location attributes that negatively impact the size of the talent pool willing to work in Las Vegas, including the historical role of gambling, and extreme temperatures.

For those outside the U.S., immigration issues could prevent application. However, remote work by itself could be such a compelling draw to overcome most if not all barriers.

Remote Work Makes the Best Even Better

The European Champions League employs the most effective and powerful recruiting model in Europe. In an environment where winning the championship for a club is nearly a life-and-death experience, teams like Barcelona and Manchester United have developed a “cherry pick” global recruiting model, recruiting the single best player from the best football countries around the world.

Unlike offshoring, this model focuses on recruiting a single “game changer” from other countries. This approach, coupled with great team management, results in a level of performance that could never be reached if the club recruited players solely from their home country. A good as it is, this model also suffers from the “location problem.” Imagine if you could build a team as powerful, but allow players to remain in their home country; could the team be even more powerful? This is not possible in a physical game like football, but in business, where many of the professional jobs can be converted to remote work, it’s quite possible.

Obtaining a High ROI

Many assume that remote work jobs are expensive and that remote workers average lower levels of productivity, however, the data suggest otherwise. The most famous case of remote work, Best Buy, reported that by offering remote work options at its headquarters, resulted in as much as a 35% increase in productivity and a 90% decrease in turnover. McGraw-Hill and Cisco have both reported multimillion dollar increases in productivity as a result of remote work options.

Almost every firm that offers remote options has also realized that the practice dramatically increases retention and reduces real estate and office expenses. So overall, not only will you attract and hire better quality candidates, you are also likely to see an increase in productivity and a reduction in costs.

Offering 100% remote work options for mission-critical professional jobs may be the highest ROI recruiting solution there is.

Tips on Creating Remote Work Jobs

IBM has taken the most scientific approach to remote work and have found that there are steps that you can take to make any remote individual or team more effective. My research has also come up with a list of do’s and don’ts that you should consider when creating or implementing remote work jobs. Here are some recommended actions.

• Selecting  jobs – obviously professional, knowledge-based, and white-collar jobs are the most likely targets for conversion to remote work, but you should also consider converting call center jobs (like JetBlue did), security, and customer support. Before you make any decision, develop a checklist for qualifying jobs for the treatment.
• Periodic communications — remote workers need to feel like they are an important part of the team, so you should require periodic communications and interactions among team members.
• Who can handle the independence — because no one is physically watching over your shoulder, remote work requires a different level of drive and self-management then traditional jobs. Some individuals simply miss the personal contact and face-to-face interaction. As a result, the hiring process needs to be rigorous enough to ensure that remote workers have the right skills and mindset to thrive under remote work.
• Technology is required — getting high productivity levels from remote workers requires that they have access to many types of hardware and software.
• Managers need convincing – first reaction on the part of most traditional managers is resistance. Because the support of hiring managers is essential, the recruiting function must make a clear business case that demonstrates to individual managers that they will see a significantly increased quality of hire, improved retention, and increased innovation and productivity. You’ll also need to provide them with a toolkit to help them quickly learn how to manage remotely located employees.
• Metrics and rewards are essential — you can’t assume that remote workers are productive, so you need more sophisticated metrics and measurement processes to spot weaning productivity long before he gets out of hand. You might also find that remote workers require more recognition and individualized rewards then workers that see the boss every day.

Final Thoughts

Whether your organization has embraced remote work or not, it is a trend that will not be reversed. Nearly 25% of American workers have remote work options and over 60% would like to. Young workers and those who support a family are among the strongest supporters of this option.

A few leading firms are approaching the point where more than 50% of their employees can participate in remote work options. Although the trend is clear, the most surprising aspect of the increase in remote work is that the recruiting function has been almost invisible supporter of the approach. This is surprising because the recruiting benefits of remote work appear to be much greater than the benefits received, due to increased flexibility and work-life balance. If you’re not convinced about the recruiting advantages of remote work, try a split sample. After hiring is completed, measure the dramatic increase in quality of hire observed as a result of broadening your talent pool through remote work.

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.

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!

This recession is our real introduction to the 21st century. For the first eight years of this century, most things stayed as they were with a few small modifications. The Internet infiltrated relatively slowly into the lives of ordinary people. Traditional work remained central, organizations replaced and added workers according to traditional formulas; travel got more uncomfortable, but remained a requirement for those who worked nationally or globally; and the media remained dominated by movies, DVDs, and paper. Energy and the environment became issues — but primarily only for the educated and wealthy. Few of us could identify really major differences between, for example, 1995 and 2005.

But the differences between 1999 and 2009 will be obvious.

We will become aware of how deep the changes have already been to employment, travel, entertainment, politics, and the media. These changes are not new or sudden; in fact, almost everything that we are feeling and living today has already been with us for at least five years. It just takes time and a crisis for us to realize them in our daily lives.

Work

Work has been changing for a decade. Telecommuting has slowly become permissible, for some on a part-time basis and for a tiny few as a normal way of work. Working virtually is still not something most of us are comfortable with, yet it will be the dominant working style of the future. Gen Y — those under 30 — is most comfortable with this working style but many older people also enjoy it once they try it.

In 2009, in the interests of saving energy, reducing overhead costs, and employing people on a global basis, organizations will ask fewer and fewer people to come to a central location to work. This will give both employers and employees flexibility over work schedules, and time wasted in commuting will be become useful time for family, personal pleasure, or for that second or third job many will have. We will never return to working at a central location. A dispersed workforce creates the need for a workforce more capable of independent work, and for a recruiting model that can source, assess, and hire people without actually seeing them in person.

This virtual workforce will also reduce the number of employees an organization needs. It will need many fewer facility people, real estate agents, secretaries, receptionists, maintenance people, foodservice folks, groundskeepers, as well as fewer supervisors and managers. Some firms may see a 20 to 30% reduction in overall employee needs, and this will further stimulate the acceptance of virtual work.

Recruiting

Recruiting will undergo massive change over this year and those that follow. The change will begin with a rapid movement to virtual sourcing, which is already well established and practiced by most recruiters. Virtual sourcing includes such things as Internet search, job posting, and website attraction. It also includes cold calling and the development of sophisticated marketing and CRM tools. Fewer recruiters will use conferences or meetings as a sourcing mechanism as there will be fewer and much smaller conferences this year and in the future. Blogs and even simple tools such as Twitter will become part of a complete sourcing strategy.

Social networks will continue to expand and become the core of a recruiter’s working space. In the social network, a recruiter will be able to communicate with candidates, screen them, get recommendations, refer them to others when appropriate, and stay in touch when nothing is available. I see 2009 as being the Year of the Recruiting Social Network fueled by cost-cutting and a steady demand for good candidates.

The next and simultaneous movement will be to online, virtual screening and assessment. This may take the form of short tests and simulations followed by video interviews or, for some organizations it may mean a video panel interview. Career websites will contain more complex screening tools such as video job previews, short interviews, virtual interviews with hiring managers, or the management team. On-line chat using VoIP will become normal this year. Many organizations will revisit the use of virtual worlds such as Second Life, and find that they do have a place in recruiting. Very few candidates will ever meet a recruiter face-to-face unless they already have a natural physical proximity.

This year and forward, a significant number of people will be recruited, assessed, and made an offer to work without actually seeing anyone in person. They may not have even met their boss face-to-face prior to starting work and they may not have seen the headquarters or office as they will telecommute from home.

Computers and office equipment will either be delivered to them or they will pick it up from authorized distribution places.

Recruiters need to become very accomplished and comfortable in the virtual worlds that will continue to grow and dominate the way we work.

Performance and Compensation

Telecommuters’ biggest concerns have been visibility and the lack of ability to casually chat with the boss and get to know him or her on a personal basis. These are real concerns, given how most of us are paid as much for attendance and our relationship to our boss as we are for our actual accomplishments.

While there has been a trend to pay for performance, e.g. the achievement of goals and objectives, for a long time, it has always been mitigated by politics. Managers will now have to find new ways of fairly assessing the work of the many that will be telecommuting. This will mean more focus on establishing realistic goals, on pre-determining the requirements for success, and a more streamlined approach to setting pay. In 2009, I see smaller base pay and more bonus pay based on goal achievement. Stock options will steadily decline as a form of compensation due to tax laws and their unpopularity with Gen Y and X who prefer cash — today.

Travel and Teleconferencing

These trends, combined with security concerns, the price of energy, and the cost, will cause business travel to plummet this year and over the next five years. Businesses will introduce video conferencing and spend more money on teleconferencing equipment than on travel. Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard have seen a rise in the sale of teleconferencing systems recently and the technology is so good that the objections to using it are falling. We will interview candidates using these systems or even VoIP-based applications such as Skype.

This year we will see airlines cutting capacity and reducing the frequency of flights as an early effort to avoid meltdown. Business sections of airlines may be reduced as fewer organizations pay for business travel, and economy sections may get more legroom and amenities.

We will still continue to travel for pleasure and some airlines may become focused on this segment and develop novel ways to entertain us and make flying more attractive than it has been.

2009 will be a seminal year — a year that will install and make mainstream the trends and applications that have been infiltrating but not really taking hold over the past five years. Successful recruiters will grasp the implications of this recession: we will never go back to what was because it was too expensive, wasteful of resources, time-limited, and no more effective than the virtual tools now at our disposal.

I have been noodling for quite some time over the work/life balance movement. I call it a movement because it really was not even something anyone mentioned or thought about when I entered the workforce in the 1970s. It has come about over the past 15 years and has swept corporate America and the world.

I can’t think of any organization that has not had to change policies or at least address its employees on the issue of work/life balance. Perhaps it emerged because more Gen X employees moved into leadership positions and were more aware of the precariousness of employment and about how quickly corporate can swing from breakneck hiring to layoffs.

But whatever the causes, the issues involved are core to whether people accept offers, stay with an organization, or decide to work for themselves.

Over the past few weeks most recruiters have had to spend some time thinking about their own employment situation and assessing its relative security, engagement, and continuity. They have also had to deal with reluctant candidates, uncertain retirees, and fearful employees. How we think about work is fundamental to almost everything else we do.

The work/life balance movement is based on set of assumptions that aren’t questioned very often, yet are very strange from the perspective of a Baby Boomer such as myself or from that of anyone who has studied or thought about the history of work.

If I were to state the assumptions that underlie the work/life balance movement, they would go something like this: Work is something we do for money, is generally not very enjoyable, and interferes with more important things like family. Work, therefore, should be regulated and time with our families should be mandatory. The work/life balance cause assumes a more or less digital world: work is on or off, family is on or off.

Yet, for centuries work and life were co-joined. Men toiled in fields, small shops, bazaars, and at home without paychecks, labor laws, or a day off. Women and men often shared skills and children were almost always part of the working and life equation as soon as they were old enough.

Work might not have been fun in our modern sense, but it was a family activity and it was the fabric of life. Most people chose to do something they liked, or at least something that provided them food and shelter and employed members of their family. Even learning was a family activity and fathers and sons often co-invented things or passed their knowledge to each succeeding generation.

The modern separation mindset is new and is a result of the physical isolation of work in factories and offices. It is the result of physical and mental separation from family. It is the result of over specialization to the point where your spouse cannot understand what work you do.

Yet I see that the Gen Y folks, the Millennials, seem to have an intuitive understanding that you should seek out work you care about. They are rejecting the work/life notions, much to the chagrin of their elder Gen X colleagues. Gen Y tends to look for work they are passionate about and then they tend to work in ways foreign to Gen X. They take any sense of balance away and may work for days without a stop or not work much at all for some time. They try to choose meaningful and interesting work and embrace it with a passion only seen once in a while with Gen X or Baby Boomers.

In order to most effectively deal with the questions this economic turmoil raises, be able to answer these questions:

Question #1: If I am able to make an adequate living doing whatever I am now doing, what does your organization offer me beyond that?

You should have a clear understanding of the contributions employees can make to society or to fulfilling an employee’s long term career goals. Every recruiter should encourage the organization to commit to funding and supporting social and environmental improvements and activities. Google, for example, allows employees paid time to work for charitable organizations on a regular basis.

Question #2: Can you accommodate my preferred work style?

Many younger employees and also many Gen X and Baby Boomer workers are asking for flexible working schedules and telecommuting opportunities. These will be core benefits offered by successful organizations over the next decade. Without these you will find it very hard to hire and retain your most productive and valuable people. As soon as any competitor offers them an opportunity for these, they will leave you.

Question #3: What opportunities are there for me to fulfill my life ambitions here?

Work is no longer all about the employee doing things only for the organization. It is also about what the organization is doing for the individual. Some corporations offer employees college programs in areas that have nothing to do with work. For example, some pay for things like nursing school or law school while the employee is doing some totally different type of work.

Others offer cross-functional movement and provide the training and coaching needed to make the person successful. And they make this a significant part of the employment experience, not just a perk for the privileged few.

This is the out-of-the-box stuff that will keep the best people, at least for awhile, and improve the productivity and engagement of everyone.

I am not the only one predicting that it will be increasingly difficult to convince younger people to work for large corporations unless they have more input to the type of work and the conditions they work under. As work returns slowly to individuals, entrepreneurs, small shops, and small organizations, we will see more and more integration between work and life. More spouses will work together and more children will be part of that work. The days of specialization, physical separation, and mental isolation are ending, I think and hope. We have traversed across a century of change to return to where we started.

Problem solved? Not exactly … the conversation turned political and heated up this past week when Amanda Blazo and others recommended using an RPO firm operating in either the Philippines or India. Charles Hillman was left asking, “Why utilize an India based RPO when there are a ton of quality researchers right here in the USA that can do the job.” Jeff Altman responds with a call for patriotism…why aren’t we creating more jobs in the United States? Hope Blaythorne argued that we are in a global economy, and encouraged cooperation with overseas markets. While Josh Letourneau supported Jeff and noted that many of the responses in favor of outsourcing come from outsourcing vendors. According to Josh, “Arguing about whether offshoring is good or bad isn’t going to solve the problem — it’s overall job LOSS that is the issue (which comes in many forms), and I hope we can figure out a solution.”

Where do you stand on this issue? We would love to hear from you…

Unethical Competitors
Who knew recruiting could get so ugly?

Laura Nyp has a competitor who sends her great candidates who “ditch their interviews at the last minute without any warning.” Jill Gilliland, Paul Lipman, and Joseph Ray offer some simple advice that many others echo … stop working with them! Joseph Ray and Pam Claughton recommend doing your homework on both the client and the candidate. The reputation of a client can turn off a candidate before the interview process. Tracy McKenn and Jim Cargill want to know more … Is Laura sure the competitor is sending these candidates? What would be the motivation? How long have they been working together. We would love to hear an update, Laura!

Employer-paid Benefits
Tami Heyden wants to know what potential candidates would look for in a benefits package. What are the pros and cons of employee vs. employer-paid benefits? Peter Raloff’s company offers 80% of employer-paid benefits plus three weeks of vacation time … not too shabby for the D.C. area. However, Scott Robinson and Pam Claughton feel that companies can do better. Scott had a candidate who accepted a job where the employer paid 100%, in addition to country club membership, company cars, and flex time. Hmmm….are they hiring? Pam feels that 100% coverage is a “huge selling point.”

I Am Sensing a Freaking Out
Maureen Sharib is … from people in the industry. Times are tough and Maureen is noticing dramatic cuts in departments. I have been talking to companies that are “going back to basics” and cutting anything that doesn’t fall under recruiting basics (i.e, campus recruiting). Jim Constantine and Karla Baierl warn us of the negative impact of the media. “Keep your head down, deliver great value, and ride it out!” is Jim’s advice to staying afloat. Amanda Blazo would agree with Jim and shares a positive story in the construction industry. Maureen concludes by reminding us that “those recruiters that don’t embrace the fact that we’re in a sales business are gonna have a hard time.”

Monday’s Question of the Day
The discussion last week about keeping recruiting costs down is still hot this week … what’s your strategy?

• Non-compete clauses
• “Color tests”
• Internal recruiting
• Resume search/software tool
• Working from home
• Job board debate

Non-Compete Clause
Non-compete agreements are always a hot topic of debate on the ERE discussion boards. This week, Les Noonan wants assistance on updating his company’s non-compete clause. David Rees offers some practical advice: get a lawyer. Although not an advocate of non-competes, he understands that it can be a complex issue since most states have very different rules. He also wonders why “employers are willing to constrain the freedom of a departing employee for the purpose of protecting their financial interests.” Les agrees with David’s comments and clarifies his request. He is actually looking for advice on a non-solicitation agreement. He wants to protect the “time and money” his company has invested in their current clients. Seems like a fair request to David but Nick Cobb feels that companies need to focus more on retaining their current employees. Maureen Sharib directs our attention to a recent case in California that you might want to check out if you are facing similar challenges.

Wednesday’s Question of the Day
I wanted to know if anyone thinks “The Color Career Counselor,” CareerBuilder’s latest tool that links job choices to favorite colors, would benefit recruiting. David Rees does not feel that this tool is validated. “Can you imagine going to an interview for a career as a computer programmer and they ask you why you choose the profession and you say…’well…I have always loved the color green.’” He later takes the test and comes to the same conclusion. Paul Davenport agrees that it is just for fun, not based in reality. Stephanie Wolf disagrees and feels that this tool can benefit college students who may feel lost with a career decision. John Kennedy wants to know if there are any tests that can predict job-based personalities. You might want to read John Zappe’s article from August 13 on the topic. Just curious…did anyone else take the test?

Internal Sourcing
David Hafernik wants to know the general policy of “internal recruiting” in most companies. Can employers recruit away from another internal manager? Are there limits? Pam Claughton worked for a large bank that had strict rules around internal recruiting. Employees had to work for a certain amount of time before they could post their resume internally. However, recruiters had great success working with the hiring managers and their direct reports to locate candidates from direct competitors. Each employee was then rewarded with an employee referral bonus. JB Smith agrees with Pam and adds that “we posted all positions internally for the first seven days then posted for external candidates. Employees were still allowed to apply after externally posting.”

Resume Search/Software Tool
Amit N is looking to purchase “resume search software” that will search multiple job boards, and wants to know if anyone has suggestions. According to Ashley Schettler, the decision will depend on the specific industry. She recommends TalentHook for IT but needs a more effective tool for recruiting in health care. Ken Kimbrough disagrees. TalentHook is “superb” and should generate resumes for all industries. According to Ken, “if you had databases, sites, etc that you wanted to search, they would accommodate your desires without much hassle.” Carly Eriksen recommends AIRS Sourcepoint. Does anyone else have other suggestions? We would love to hear them!

Work From Home Jobs
This topic always interests me since I work from home! Mack Will is also interested in learning of any “legit work from home jobs other than virtual recruiting.” Apparently, this is a very popular nationwide topic. Tim Esse referenced a local CBS show that addressed the topic and Christy Grimske reminded us that Google’s “Rat Race Rebellion” publishes a weekly list of legit work from home jobs. Susan Carson and Cassandra Firnstah both shared success stories of a virtual advertising company run by a group of women, and a customer call center.

Monday’s Question of the Day
The debate on whether or not job boards are obsolete is still going strong! It’s not too late to post a comment.

“. . .we can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.      It is shocking to find how many people do not believe  they can learn, and how many more believe learning     to be difficult.”
-Frank Herbert, Dune

This quote from the well-known science fiction novel Dune underlines the difficulty many people have in learning. Learning means change, examining what we are now doing, and being open to explore what we could do differently.

Very few of us have ever learned to learn and most of us live in fear of learning. This fear has roots in embarrassment, fear of failure, fear of ridicule, our society’s worship of “book” learning over experiential learning, the desire to be like everyone else, the need to be liked, and many other needs and fears.

Children have the wonderful gift of total trust that they can, through interaction with their environment, learn. They experiment, test, challenge, and in the process, learn. Their natural curiosity and excitement over piecing together the world as they discover it is a wonderful thing to witness. Yet, somehow as we go through our formal schooling that innate belief in our own ability to learn, and most of our curiosity, is taken out of us.

Our organizations reflect this as well. Only a few are true learning organizations that invent the future and do so regularly. One that comes to mind is Apple. Perhaps fueled by Steve Jobs and his seeming less-ruthless focus on perfection, it remains youthful and exciting, even now that it is into middle age. It has programmed into itself the ability to take risks, be bold, and go where others are afraid to go.

Recruiting remains a transactional and traditional function for most of us. Not much learning, and consequently change, has taken place despite huge changes in how organizations design, manufacture, and sell their products and services.

Talent remains local. Competencies reflect yesterday’s needs. Sourcing is still a reactive process based on templates designed in the past. And hiring happens the same way it did 50 years ago.

If you want to be a mover and shaker in this profession, you have to learn to learn. You have to take some chances and do things differently.

Here are some slightly out-of-the-box thoughts on how you can create a learning environment and stimulate discussion and change by challenging the traditional and by boldly acting differently:

1. Hire people from the same spectrum of countries you purchase raw materials from or where you sell your products. Whatever else these employees are doing for your organization, they are also eyes and ears for product development and for sales growth. They may have fresh ideas about uses for products or have ideas for new services you can offer. And, given the talent shortages, it may be easier to find certain skills in those countries than in your own. To make this work, develop a sourcing strategy that works in multiple countries and a career site that is in multiple languages and has different recruiting messages for different countries. Encourage leadership to embrace virtual employment and let employees work in their native countries.
2. Hire people from parallel occupations. Try and expand your hiring managers to think more broadly than they do now about the kinds of people they want to hire.  Too often I find job requirements that are narrow and way too specific. These descriptions often list very specific competencies and precise skills that a candidate must have, along with a certain level of experience, to qualify for a job. In a few cases this kind of specificity may be necessary, but for the most part it is wasteful and not creative. By encouraging hiring managers to think out the box (for example, hiring music majors and training them to be programmers as Cisco and IBM have done) expands your talent pool, can lower starting salaries, and makes it more likely that some creative new concept will emerge because these people have not been trained that something cannot be done. The time to productivity curve may be longer, but the quality of thought and the morale of employees will be higher.
3. Rehire retirees or retain baby boomers. Many organizations could realize gains in product development, time-to-market, and other areas by bringing back experienced ex-employees who have retired or by hanging on to experienced boomers who are thinking about retiring. Transferring knowledge to younger workers is a major undertaking for many organizations and the best way to do this is to utilize the older worker’s experience as mentors or coaches for younger workers. By putting a few experienced employees on a project with younger workers, learning happens automatically. No time is used in classrooms or seminars. Work remains the focus with learning a significant byproduct.
4. Get rid of job titles and levels. Put people into project teams with only broad titles such as engineer, planner, statistician, marketer, and so forth. Let the team collaboratively decide who does what based on the team’s goals and desired outcomes. Hire people with broad skills and experience or with only a little experience (e.g., new college graduates). Creativity and change most often come about when there is a significant contrast or gap between people, ideas, or needs.

If you are looking for greater satisfaction and commitment to your profession, be open to learning and actively practicing it.

You practice learning by taking chances, experimenting, measuring the results against a standard, and trying again. Being open to learning and making changes is what differentiates the movers and shakers from everyone else.

It’s almost impossible to pick up a newspaper or magazine and not read about the economic conditions that are putting a strain on almost everyone’s budget and way of life.

Rather than ignoring it or hoping it will go away, look upon it as a chance to “turn lemons into lemonade” and to further strengthen your employment brand image.

It has been common for corporations to offer benefits to their employees to ease their commutes or to help save the environment. However, the recent dramatic rise in gas prices provides corporations with an opportunity to really amp up their offerings, and to demonstrate to those they wish to attract and retain that the organization “cares” about them.

In fact, one study by Dr. Wayne Hochwarter, of Florida State University, found that high gas prices led to more stress on the job, thus impacting employee performance. In his research, Dr. Hochwarter found that one-third of the employees surveyed said they would quit their job for a comparable one closer to home.

Research by outplacement consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found that 34% of employers had potential candidates who turned down jobs because of long commutes and added nearly 8% of employers report turnover caused by high transportation costs.

Acting now provides an opportunity to build your employment brand because the combined topics of gas prices, food prices, and the mortgage crisis are hot in the media. As a result, any bold action by a corporation is likely not just to be viewed positively by employees and potential applicants but also by those covering consumer confidence and spending in the media.

Efforts by employers to help workers cope with these economic factors will likely be written up in the press and in business publications. Not only would you be helping your workers, but you will also be building employee loyalty while getting free PR to further strengthen your employment brand image. It’s an opportunity that won’t last long, so it shouldn’t be missed.

Many firms have already been recognized for excellence in these areas, including Google, Intel, Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, Nike, and HP. There are many actions to consider, and I’ve separated the various options into broad categories below.

Promoting Drive-Less Options

The first group of options is relatively cheap, but they can have a significant impact on the amount of money your employees need to pay in commute costs. 12 “drive-less” options include:

1. Compressed workweek options. Offer schedules that allow commuters to reduce the number of days they come in to work. A 4-day, 10-hour workweek is the most popular, but some professions also use 3-day, 12-hour weeks. The key is to not just offer these programs, but to encourage individual managers to allow their employees to actually take advantage of them. If coverage is an issue, consider allowing employees to alternate on/off alternative schedules.
2. Work at home. A related option is to allow employees to choose on their own to work one or more days at home. In addition to saving commute costs, firms like Best Buy have found that telecommuting can generate up to a 35% increase in employee productivity, and research by the Gartner Group found up to a 40% improvement. Allowing employees to take periodic “planning” or innovation days where they spend their time thinking and planning for the future can also be an effective option. Benchmark firms in this area include Best Buy, Sun, IBM, Agilent, and HP.
3. Satellite offices. By establishing satellite offices closer to where employees live, firms can offer opportunities for employees to use restricted computer and communications networks that cannot be accessed remotely while reducing the mileage employees drive to and from work. Employees that need to use company equipment (but do not necessarily need to meet with coworkers) can decide on which days they will work from these remote corporate locations. Microsoft’s touchdown space is an excellent example of this practice; however, Sun is the benchmark firm in this area, locating offices on all major access routes into major metropolitan areas.
4. Bike/walk to work. This can both improve health (reducing benefit costs) and help employees save on gas. Companies can facilitate this practice by offering maps that highlight the flattest and quickest routes. They can also help by providing relaxed dress codes that allow employees to wear athletic clothes, as well as providing bike storage space and showers for their peddling employees. Walk to work or walk to mass transit location programs can have similar positive impacts.
5. Make all-day meetings remote. Rather than requiring everyone to commute to all-day meetings, use conference calls and Web-based tools to allow some workers to attend meetings from home. These options can also save airline travel costs. HP and Cisco are the benchmark leaders in this area.
6. On-site services. Dry cleaning, concierge, flowers, and take-out food can reduce the need for employees to run errands during lunch and after work. Also, consider vendor-provided gas-saving services like engine tune-ups and tire inflation. Google is a leader in this area.
7. Offer online training. This can save on travel costs. Also, consider offering university classes on-site, so that your employees can improve themselves without the increased costs associated with driving to a local university.
8. Reduce lunchtime and snack travel. For firms with few on-site lunch options, consider inviting lunch wagons that can sit in the parking lot. Other options include providing box lunches and snacks on site, as well as menus from local restaurants that deliver, shifting the cost of ordering out to the food provider.
9. Increase company car usage. Firms can help their employees reduce their personal gas costs by liberalizing or expanding the number of opportunities for employees to use company cars.
10. Job transfers. In organizations with many outlets (like retail), reduce employee gas usage by offering a one-time option to facilitate transfers to locations closer to the employee’s home. Consider offering internal “save on gas” job fairs where workers can meet with managers from other locations to see if relocation is a viable option that provides mutual benefits.
11. Shift the organization’s start time. In congested areas, starting your commute an hour earlier or later can result in significant gas savings as a result of fewer backups and less congestion.
12. Live close to work facilitation. Firms can offer services or work with local Realtors in order to make it easy for their employees to find apartments and housing close to the workplace. The leading firm in this area is Facebook, which offers an astonishing $700 per month salary supplement for employees who live within a mile of their headquarters. University Hospitals in Cleveland is also a benchmark organization.

Share the Commute

• Coordinate shared commuting. Firms can help their employees to both save on gas and tolls by facilitating employee carpools, van pools, or a company shuttle. In many large cities, tax breaks encourage corporate van-pooling programs. An additional benefit is the reduced need for employee parking. Microsoft, Yahoo, and HP are benchmark firms. Also, offer a company-sponsored shuttle bus from transit stations close to work or from strategic locations.
• Coordinate schedules. More individuals would share rides if they could share similar schedules with individuals who live close to them. This option requires you to work with individual managers to ensure that they make commuting part of their scheduling decision criteria.

Facilitate Opportunities for Cheaper Gas

• Negotiate group discounts. Because corporations with many employees have significant buying power, work with local fuel suppliers and individual gas stations to negotiate volume discounts for employees who use targeted stations. Incidentally, try similar options for bulk food items to help employees deal with the rising cost of food.
• Buy “company” gas. Some organizations have their own fueling facilities and these firms might be able to find a way to offer that gas to employees. By buying “gas futures,” firms can successfully hedge against future price increases (i.e., Southwest Airlines has successfully done this for its aviation fuel).
• Allow employees access to “fleet” stations. Some firms utilize gas stations that provide gasoline for fleet cars. Negotiate with their vendors to identify opportunities where employees can get gas at these low-priced fleet stations.
• Negotiate “buy” options. Use the company’s volume buying power to help negotiate lower-cost deals with vendors that allow your employees to lease or buy more gas-efficient vehicles. Vehicles might include scooters, electric segues, bikes, and compact or hybrid cars. (Note: there federal and in some cases state tax advantages associated with purchasing hybrid cars.)
• Subsidize mass transit. Offer subsidies to individuals who use mass transit. Some government agencies provide tax advantages to firms that facilitate the use of mass transit (others provide penalties to those that don’t).

Increase Manager and Employee Participation

Corporations can take specific steps to encourage both individual managers and employees to participate in gas-saving options:

• Measure and reward managers. Recognize those who are “commute cost” friendly; conduct an employee survey to identify the best.
• Executive participation. Have the CEO and senior executives actively participate in company programs (i.e., participating in car pools, biking to work, or occasionally driving the company shuttle).
• Gas incentives. Provide gas cards as incentives and rewards for top-performing employees and managers.

Miscellaneous Options

• Conduct a survey and ask employees what they think you should be doing.
• Benchmark other firms to see what else is possible.
• Allow compacts, hybrids, and scooters to park closer to the building to send a message that you care about the environment.
• Help them sell their gas-guzzler car or subsidize the purchase of fuel-efficient vehicles.
• Add saving gas as a criterion for selecting new facility sites.
• Consider reducing nepotism restrictions so that family members can work together and thus, commute together.

Provide Employees with Opportunities to Earn More Money

Because rising costs are essentially lowering your employees’ “real” standard of living, provide your employees with more opportunities to earn more money during these tough economic times:

• Opportunity for overtime. Encourage managers to develop more opportunities for employees to work overtime to help them offset the rising cost of living.
• Pay for performance. Offer increased opportunities for performance-based pay. Although giving employees “more money” is always a high-cost item, if any additional pay is based strictly on improved performance, both firms and employees can come out ahead.
• Increase mileage allowance. The IRS has recently recognized a higher cost of gasoline by increasing the amount of reimbursement that it allows per mile traveled. Companies can help their employees by not waiting and increasing their mileage allotment immediately.
• COLA. A final option to consider is offering your employees periodic cost-of-living adjustments. Sometimes this is necessary in order to decrease your employees’ need to look for a second job (or even a job at another firm) in order to meet their family needs.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, there are many options available to corporations. For the best impact, implement a comprehensive program with many elements. Not only will this approach have a larger impact on employees, but it also increases the odds of your effort receiving positive exposure.

“It isn’t unusual to find employees driving 50, 75, even 100 miles each way to work and that can cost them $5,000 a year just in gas,” says Chuck Wilsker, president and CEO of the Telework Coalition, a Washington DC-based organization that supports telework options.

“When telecommuting is an option, it eliminates the geographic recruiting boundaries and increases the pool of prospective candidates. I have heard of specific situations where employers have been able to offer 15% less salary, simply because the employee will no longer need to absorb the daily commute cost.”

Employees who commute 30 miles or more to work are likely to turn-over at higher rates now that gas prices have sky-rocketed, according to Wilsker, and it will only get worse when the job market and the economy rebound. If more firms begin offering telecommuting options to appease employees, the competition for top talent will literally have no boundaries, since proximity to the office will no longer be a major recruiting criterion.

In addition, with no ceiling on gas prices projected anytime soon, Wilsker says that commute costs are starting to concern highly skilled employees, not just hourly workers. In the past, employees making $150,000 to $250,000 might not have considered long commutes when weighing an offer, now they are now thinking about it long and hard before accepting.

Fuel and commuting expenses are also making it harder to close offers made to relocating candidates says Mickey Matteson, account executive for Recruiter Relocation, a third-party relocation company. She says candidates are scrutinizing the cost of living in prospective urban areas, and in the past, most candidates would have accepted the offer, opting to live in less-expensive suburbs or outlying areas. Now, given the commute costs, more are either turning down offers or negotiating for higher salaries.

Matteson says relocation costs are also escalating and those increases are impacting recruiting. The average moving company fee is now $10,342, and many of the quoted prices have jumped so dramatically by the move date that some candidate deals are unraveling at the last minute. The total cost of relocating an employee or candidate is now $55,165, and given the steep price tag, Matteson says that 81% of companies are requiring relocating candidates sign repayment agreements, forcing them to repay the relocation costs, if they quit before completing one year of employment.

“Candidates are being more cautious and many are opting to rent out their existing homes rather than selling them,” says Matteson. “That’s making employers nervous because they don’t feel the candidate is committed, but at the same time, candidates want to try out their new employers and new surroundings. Some employers are allowing new workers to fly back and forth, but given what’s happened with the airline industry recently, I’m not sure that decision will make sense for very long.”

The Winners

Some employers are organizing car pools and offering employees the opportunity to purchase discounted mass transit passes, and the most progressive companies, are offering full or part-time telecommuting programs, which helps to attract and retain talent.

REI, the outdoor clothing retailer based in the Pacific Northwest and a perennial winner of Fortune magazine’s Best Places to Work Award, installed a customized work environment program (CWE) in some departments at its headquarters several months ago.

Initially, the program’s main goal was to help employees achieve greater work-life balance; now, the employees are saving money on gas. CWE allows employees to select alternate commute times to avoid traffic or the opportunity to work from home a few days a week, based upon each department’s need. CWE along with REI’s other subsidized transportation programs, such as van pools and paying 50% toward the cost of mass-transit passes, is a strong selling point with applicants, according to Bruce Bobzien, senior recruiter for REI.

So if telecommuting attracts applicants, lowers costs and increases employee satisfaction, what’s holding companies back from offering the option to everyone? Command and control. Employers are often reluctant to allow people to work remotely, beyond the constant watch of managers.

Jay Horowitz, CEO of Strategic Legal Solutions, a New York-based provider of outsourced legal services and staffing, recommends easing into telecommuting to get started, offering the arrangements on a case-by-case basis, perhaps a few days each week, to trusted workers. He also suggests employers make certain the telecommuting employee has a properly outfitted home office to assure effective communications.

Strategic Legal built a practice around experienced telecommuting attorneys who provide remote support for large cases and projects, such as class-action law suit discovery. Horowitz says that law firms are cognizant of all the indirect costs of employment including space, furniture, computers, and parking, so increasingly, the firms requested offsite attorneys for project work. Now, given the current gas prices, the concept makes even more sense.

“I wouldn’t hesitate to allow an employee to telecommute now that I’ve done it before,” says Horowitz, who allows the firm’s account executives to telecommute. “But I think you should have them come into the office for the first few weeks, train them, expose them to the culture and be very clear about the expectations. Maybe have them come into the office one morning each week after training, so you can stay connected. I think the more flexibility you show as an employer, the more likely it is you’ll be able to secure top talent.”

New Tools for Remote Supervision

Information technology has traditionally offered remote work opportunities, yet even the tech industry hasn’t had all the tools it needs to supervise telecommuting workers. oDesk, an online tool businesses use to build and manage remote teams, received $15 million in funding last week. The oDesk Web-based collaboration tools enable project managers to visually track and verify all work performed, both historically and in real-time.

The company built a tree-house office in a park in London, and the software giant‘s message is that corporate decisions don‘t always need to be dictated within the confines of four walls and harsh fluorescent lighting.

In the United Kingdom, Microsoft research shows that nine out of 10 British workers desire an out-of-office setting — with 75% saying this flexibility is a huge factor in deciding whether to accept a new job opportunity.

It is expected that by 2012, the United Kingdom will have over 5.5 million remote workers.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s recently released American Community Service analysis shows that approximately 4% of Americans worked from home in 2005.

This is despite a Korn/Ferry survey of 1,320 executives showing that 61% believe telecommuters are less likely to be promoted, compared to their on-site colleagues.

The Census Bureau report shows the cities with the highest rates of home-based workers include Austin, Texas (5%); Colorado Springs, Colorado (5%); Portland, Oregon (5.3%); San Francisco (6.3%); and Seattle (5.1%).

(The Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act to prohibit states from taxing non-residents on the income they earn at home is one piece of pending legislation that might remove obstacles to the growth of interstate telework.)

Although the short-lived stint in the tree has ended (the tree-house office was recently dismantled), your company can still champion the MOOF movement. To read more about users’ MOOF-ing experiences, the blog www.moof.mobi offers advice, questions, and feedback.

While completing the research for the third edition of my book, Hire With Your Head (Wiley & Sons, June, 2007), I found out a lot has changed. The thing that stands out most is the profound increase in workforce mobility in the U.S. labor market.

Company loyalty has declined. Changing jobs for short-term and superficial reasons is on the rise. Turnover is on the increase. Accepting counteroffers is now acceptable and expected.

The hidden job market is no longer hidden. The barriers and prohibitions to leaving a company are no longer present. Everyone can now find the new jobs and new opportunities.

Passive candidates are no longer hidden, either, which is an even bigger problem if you’re trying to compete for them. Anyone can now find them on ZoomInfo or LinkedIn.

These changes will have a profound effect on how companies design their sourcing and recruiting programs. From what I can tell, most companies are not handling this increase in workforce mobility too well. The bad news: things will get worse as the baby boomers start retiring en masse.

To address these changes, recruiting managers need to understand how the marketplace for talent is shifting, and then develop flexible sourcing programs to respond to these changes.

Segment Candidates Based on Their Need for a Job

Many years ago, I wrote an ERE article on semi-sourcing. In it, a distinction was made between active and passive candidates and the difference in candidate quality within each group. Knowing how these people looked for jobs then became the basis for developing targeted sourcing programs for each group. These groups are described below:

• Very Active. These are people who need a job and are aggressively looking. They tend to be less discriminating and focus on short-term issues, like compensation and benefits, when considering a new job. This pool represents about 15% to 20% of the total employment market. People in this group are either unemployed or severely under-employed. The best people are under-represented in this pool. Traditional boring advertising is sufficient to attract and hire this type of person.
• Semi-Active. These are people fully employed who want a better job. They look infrequently, generally on bad days, or just to test the market. However, while they use job boards, they are more selective. Compelling advertising and systems designed to bring these people to the top of the list is a key aspect of hiring them. This pool is big, about 25% of the employment market, and it’s growing. It doesn’t take much anymore to get someone to considering leaving and start looking. This is the sourcing sweet spot, since the best people are over-represented in this pool. To capture them, your ads need to be visible and you must move fast. Corporations should implement programs to excel at sourcing people from this group.
• Semi-Passive. These are people who want a better job and a better career. They are not actively looking, but they will accept a phone call to discuss future career opportunities. Who you call and what you say is a critical part of hiring these types of people. The best people are fairly represented in this pool, but it takes more effort and time to find them. This pool includes about 25% of the employee market, and it’s growing as well. Semi-passive candidates want to be found and pursued, so they’ll post their names on LinkedIn and somehow get their profiles listed on ZoomInfo. Make sure when you call or email you have something compelling to offer, though, or else your efforts will be fruitless.
• Very Passive. These people don’t want another job. It takes lots of effort and time to call and convince them to pursue your opportunity. The best people are fairly represented in this pool, but it’s not worth the effort if you can find an equally strong person using some lower-cost approach. These very passive people represent about 30% of the market, but it’s declining. Everybody seems open to explore new opportunities, which is not necessarily a good thing.

Sourcing Ideas for Semi-Active Candidates

If you want to maximize candidate quality and reduce cost and time to hire at the same time, you need to be great at sourcing from the semi-active candidate pool. But there’s competition here, so you’ll need to become a semi-active sourcing expert to hire a disproportionate share of the top people in this pool. Here are some quick ideas on how to pull this off:

1. Visible advertising. If your jobs can’t be found, they’re worthless. To test your job visibility quotient, conduct a Google search including an open job title, a few required skill terms, the word “jobs,” and the name of the city. If your job isn’t on the returned search listing, put it on the boards that do show up and then figure out why some other job outranks yours. Better: contact Jobs2Web.com to find out how they’ll clone your site and make it visible to everyone using search engine optimization techniques.
2. Compelling advertising offering better jobs. While it’s important that your jobs be found, it’s more important that they’re compelling. So if you’re just posting traditional job descriptions, don’t waste your money on any search engine optimization techniques. The best semi-active candidates are looking for better jobs, not another job. To differentiate your jobs, make the point quickly with an outrageous title and a first paragraph so compelling the person can’t wait to respond.
3. Simple application process. If the person decides to apply, make sure the resume is parsed into a completed application process. According to monster.com, you’ll get a 75% completion rate this way, versus 20% if the candidate has to fill in the application from scratch.
4. Instant response. Make sure you’ve set up your automatic searches to bring this person to the top of the list by screening on performance terms, not just skill words. Email me if you don’t know how to do this, but the point here is you must call the person within 24 hours of applying. Speed is of the essence when recruiting semi-active candidates. You’ll know you’re too slow if the candidate says she’s taken another job by the time you called.
5. Massively upgraded career web site. Most company websites are designed to eliminate unqualified candidates, not to attract the best. A career website is the critical hub of a company’s hiring efforts. A survey of over 500 candidates we took a few years ago showed that about 65% of all candidates checked out a company’s web site before applying for a job that they found on a job board. Half decided not to apply because the career section was poorly designed. Even passive candidates will check out a company’s career web site before getting too serious about a job. If your career website is weak, you’re probably losing good candidates for easily corrected reasons.

Sourcing Ideas for Semi-Passive Candidates

You might want to try these ideas in parallel. They’ll help you hire more of the best semi-passive candidates available.

1. Compelling advertising offering better jobs and better careers. A good job is not enough to attract semi-passive candidates. They’re looking for a career move that will enable them to obtain four to five years of growth in only two or three years. This is a great pitch if you can prove it, but watch out. Once you get a semi-passive candidate into your game, she’ll find some competing jobs using the simple Google search process described above.
2. Implement a proactive employee referral program. Ask your best people for the names of the best people they’ve ever worked with. Then call these people and recruit them. They’ll listen if you have a better job and a better career to offer. Don’t bother making the call if it’s just another job.
3. Become a targeted networking fanatic. How many people are you connected with directly on LinkedIn who are potential candidates for your open jobs, or know them personally? If you’re not a power user on LinkedIn, JigSaw, and ZoomInfo, you’re not networked enough to hire semi-passive people. I talked to an agency recruiter last week who makes one $100,000 placement per week in one narrow field and gets a $25,000 fee for each one. Everybody in the industry knows he is the best in his field. He’s my prototypical fanatic.
4. Get your hiring managers committed and involved. You can’t source and recruit top semi-passive candidates alone. Hiring managers must take the lead role here. This means they must clearly understand real job needs; they’re willing to spend time conducting exploratory meetings; they conduct in-depth interviews; they know how to recruit and close, not just sell and charm; and they can point to other top people who they have developed.

We’re undergoing a major increase in workforce mobility. To compensate for this, every aspect of your hiring process must change if you want to hire and retain more top people. Retention is now as important as hiring. But you can’t solve one problem without solving both.

The solution is to offer great jobs that grow and change with the person. While this effort starts by posting more compelling jobs, it certainly doesn’t end there. But that’s still a great start.