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A survey released this morning says employers are fooling themselves believing workers are content simply to have a job.

According to the survey conducted by Monster and Human Capital Institute, 84 percent of employers indicated they thought their were workers content because they were working. However, only 58 percent of workers said that.

For workers, the disconnect extends to their feelings about their workload, the longer hours required of them, and their willingness to give their employer the benefit of the doubt for layoffs.

“Today’s employers feel that employees are loyal due to the economic times, but the reality is they are not,” said Katherine Jones, HCI Research Fellow. “Because of this, there is a strong likelihood that when the economy turns for the better, employers could find themselves with valued employees jumping ship. This places pressure on them to put retention measures in place now.”

Monster and HCI conducted the survey in May and June to assess the impact of the recession on workers and companies. More than 700 companies and almost 5,000 passive and active job seekers participated, responding to questions about their attitudes to work, employees, their post-recession expectations, and purchasing plans. keep reading…

Making the news this week are announcements from Jigsaw about an overhaul of its forums to bring them into the world of Web 2.0, a coup for outplacement upstart RiseSmart, and some good news for CEOs.

JIGSAW

The business intelligence and sourcing site has upgraded its community forum, giving it a cleaner look and implementing such to-be-expected features as tagging and contributor ratings. Tags are especially welcome, given that forum posts aren’t easily searched.

No one is going to mistake the new community platform as avant garde; think of it as functional, especially so if it adopts the name “The Corner,” which is beating out “Puzzleville” in the name voting.

The company also has an iPhone app that’s going into beta. Jigsaw is looking for iPhone users willing to provide feedback to the team in exchange for being the first to use the new app to “search, download and export contacts directly.”

CEO LONGEVITY keep reading…

A raft of recent surveys shows that the recession is having a profound impact on workers and employment trends worldwide. Even though they measure different things — global hiring, immigration repatriation, and career trends — there’s a theme here, which is that the economy is global and when it recovers, things will not go back to the way they were.

There’s the report from Monster this week that says vast numbers of workers are ready to switch careers for a new job. Another survey, this one from SearchPath International and Antal International, give us a global view of hiring — and firing — trends.

The Global Snapshot offers clues to where the hottest markets in the world are for managers and professionals. (Hint: Think Russia, China, India, Egypt, and Eastern Europe.)

That report dovetails with last week’s USA Today report about an emerging brain drain of managers and professionals from the U.S. to China and India. keep reading…

There’s a report out that should be a wake-up for the procrastinators in the class of 2010. The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) says employers are cutting back next year’s college hiring plans by 7 percent.

That may not seem like much until you consider that employers reduced this year’s college grad hiring by 21 percent. That seven percent is on top of this year’s cuts, meaning that there will be almost 30 26.53 percent fewer jobs being offered to the current crop of seniors than their counterparts had in 2008.

For comparison, each NACE Job Outlook from 2004 to the spring of 2008 predicted double-digit increases in college senior hiring. The spring 2008 hiring preview predict 8.1 percent growth.

Besides cutting back on their hiring, NACE’s Job Outlook 2010 Fall Preview says employers are shifting their recruiting to the spring. Not in big numbers; only about a 5 percent change from the 2008 survey when the split was 63 percent planned to hire in the fall, while the rest were looking to the spring.

The only region of the U.S. that expects to increase college hiring is the northeast, though only by about 5 percent, which, if you are following the numbers here, will still be below the 2007 hiring level.

“Traditionally, employers tend to be conservative about their college hiring when the economy is in flux,” says Marilyn Mackes, NACE executive director. “Although employers anticipate doing most of their recruiting in the fall, we are seeing some movement to recruit in the spring. This is likely due to anticipation that the economic recovery will be underway by then.”

keep reading…

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

Warning bells are ringing. The emerging economy will be quite different from the one we have come from. There are signs of change everywhere. General Motors breaks down, and Tesla, Phoenix Motorcars, and Detroit Electric begin to make electric cars, changing the paradigm about what a car manufacturer should look like. Companies like IDEO are organizing themselves differently and deliberately to foster innovation. They are small and look for capabilities and interests and passion in the people they hire — not degrees and pedigree.

Rather than a focus on rapid growth, companies will look for sustainable growth. To achieve this, many more workers will be contractors, consultants, or work as temporaries or part-time. The average age of the workforce is going to get older as Baby Boomers stay longer and fewer young people seek regular corporate jobs. Learning to re-use and find new positions for internal talent will be important.

Many economists are worrying that we may have a jobless recovery, which means that rather than hire lots of people, companies will not seek to fill the jobs eliminated in this recession. They will try hard to maintain a small, highly productive workforce. Today’s BLS figures indicate that productivity is at an all-time high, despite the layoffs and slower economy. That means we are all working harder (and maybe also smarter). So CEOs may be asking: why do we need to add more people and lower our productivity?

What Does This Mean for Recruiting?

Recruiting is full of managers. These are the people who run their recruiting organizations efficiently and effectively. They implement processes, cautiously install technology, focus on customer satisfaction, and stay within their budgets. As long as the world doesn’t change too much, they thrive.

For many organizations, this can be outsourced. A solid, well-chosen RPO can take over the transactional side of recruiting and provide the people you need. It may cost a bit more than the internal recruiter and may not always be as tuned-in to the environment, but they will be capable and offer flexibility in times when hiring is slow.

As I have written many times before, internal recruiters will have to become competent in thinking more broadly about talent. Here are five things you can do. keep reading…

Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, created a stir at the SHRM conference in New Orleans this year by stating: “There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.”

Organizations worry about being perceived as offering a good balance between work and personal time.

Many career sites and recruiters stress the ways the organization addresses this through flexible work policies, family-friendly HR polices, child care, and so on. And, for many job seekers, finding a company that offers this magic blend is the Holy Grail.

While Jack was addressing women specifically and speaking about their opportunities for promotion and growth within traditional corporate America, he was reinforcing this assumption. He was heavily criticized for talking to women in this way, even though it is an accurate reflection of the thinking in most of traditional corporate America.

My problem is not with Jack as much as it is with the assumptions that work/life balance is based on. keep reading…

With unemployment now reaching 9.5% and on track to hit 10% in the next few months, recruiters should consider their career options for the near term. Unemployment is a lagging indicator, so it may well be that things are getting better. There are glimmers of hope that may suggest the worst is over — The Dow and S&P 500 have been rising; global markets from Japan to London have also seen gains of about 25% in the last few months; housing sales are up along with consumer confidence.

But none of this means that a recovery is in the making. All it means is that the pace of decline is slowing. The good news is that there’s less bad news, but the bad news is that there’s still plenty of bad news. keep reading…

Alan Strauss, who’s doing a talent-acquisition project for Lockheed Martin and is well-connected in the D.C.-area corporate recruiting community, talks below about bringing in “A-players” to corporations; what the best recruiters are doing to keep their jobs; and what sorts of questions recruiters should be asking their customers. keep reading…

New age dads are embracing some old-school ideas about gender roles, according to a CareerBuilder survey out just in time for Father’s Day.

More than two-thirds of the working fathers with kids younger than 18 at home say they would prefer to work even if the family could afford to have them be Mr. Mom. If you prefer to see the bottle as half-full, here’s the other side: 31 percent of the dads surveyed by CareerBuilder say they would quit their jobs to stay home if they could.

Sounds almost progressive, yes? It would be if the percentages weren’t going down. In 2005, CareerBuilder found 49 percent of the dads willing to stay home. When the survey was repeated last year, the number had gone to 37 percent.

It’s possible economic uncertainty can be blamed for dads preferring to stay on the job instead of in the house. The survey doesn’t try to explain the decline, but it offers some hints. For instance, three-in-ten working fathers bring work home at least once a week, up from the 2008 survey when 25 percent reported doing that.

Perhaps a more telling stat is that 53 percent of dads say they spend less than two hours a day with the kids. That includes the 14 percent who say they spend an hour or less. No wonder, therefore, that half the surveyed dads admitted missing at least one significant event in their child’s life during the year because of work; 28 percent have missed more than three. Even Homer Simpson doesn’t do that.

“Many working dads have to contend with heavier workloads and longer hours as businesses struggle to do more with less,” says Jason Ferrara, senior career adviser at CareerBuilder and father of two. “It’s important to have a conversation with your supervisor. Employers are placing more emphasis on work/life balance through creative benefits that encourage employees to better manage their personal and professional commitments. However, nearly half of working dads do not take advantage of any flexible work arrangements offered to them.”

There is a bright spot in the survey. Though the number of dads willing to take a pay cut to spend more time with the family has dropped by 20 percent in a year, 30 percent of the surveyed fathers say they’d take a cut; 40 percent of them would accept a 10 percent cut.

CareerBuilder surveyed only working men. But what happens to the gender roles when dad is suddenly unemployed? The New York Times said this back in February:

“When women are unemployed and looking for a job, the time they spend daily taking care of children nearly doubles. Unemployed men’s child care duties, by contrast, are virtually identical to those of their working counterparts, and they instead spend more time sleeping, watching TV, and looking for a job, along with other domestic activities.”

Feeling guilty? Need some help? There are plenty of resources to help dads with that work/life thing. You could start here.

Meanwhile, what are the takeaways from the CareerBuilder survey?

Ties and dress shirts may be more welcome this Father’s Day than in the past. And moms can still be counted on when dad is wherever.

Unemployment is an ugly thing. It not only injures people financially, but socially and emotionally. I was reading a fascinating article by Arthur Brooks entitled “I Love My Work.” He chronicles what happened to a small town in Austria in the 1920s when the local factory closed and most men were unemployed. Despite being paid unemployment insurance, their lives began to take on a very different — and not a happy — shape.

Many of us may have had a bout of unemployment and know how empty a day becomes when it is without purpose or goal. We miss the social interactions, and the distractions and diversions from our own problems. Employment, even when people are not really pleased with the work they are doing, gives meaning to life. It provides a reason to get up, to join social events, and is a primary source of happiness. Certainly, there are many people who for a while enjoy the leisure of unemployment, but almost all eventually became bored, dissatisfied, and start looking for something meaningful to do. Recruiters know this is true because every day they see people who may have the resources to not work but are seeking a job. When we ask candidates what they are looking for, they almost always, somewhere in their answers, mention the desire for a challenge or for social interaction and always for meaningful work.

Ultimately, unemployment becomes an issue that can threaten the stability of governments and lead to riots and worse. Germany’s Nazi government was partly an outcome of the unemployment created by the Great Depression, combined with massive inflation. Organizations are always caught in the space between wanting to be good citizens and keep good people employed, and the need to generate profit and increase stock prices. Many of us work (or have worked) for organizations that had every intention of not laying anyone off, yet in the end succumbed.

Yet, as the United States and other countries struggle to keep people employed, they often forget that the solution is not always about preserving the jobs that already exist. The solution to unemployment is keep reading…

We are approaching the 40th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 mission in which the world witnessed the first human to walk on the moon. This event was an historic moment for mankind and one that will live on as one of the most triumphant moments for the human race. keep reading…

A troubling new report from ExecuNet says executive longevity continues to decline at just the time companies most need an engaged, knowledgeable C-suite at the helm.

The survey of some 5,000 executives, search consultants, and corporate HR professionals says the average tenure of a business executive declined 15 percent between 2005 and 2008 to an average of 2.3 years. Meanwhile, only 29 percent of the HR professionals surveyed say their company has knowledge management and succession plans to address the loss of management skill.

“It takes roughly three years of deep entrenchment in a job to reach peak performance. With executives spending less time in organizations and often being judged on short-term stock price performance, they stop short of reaching their full potential,” says ExecuNet Vice President and Executive Editor Lauryn Franzoni.

While the economy may have tamped down the voluntary turnover rate for 2009 — executive recruiters expect their searches to be down 14 percent for the first half of the year –  it has also increased the length of time executives spend searching for a job. The report says executives now expect to spend an average of 10.1 months looking before landing. keep reading…

Fast forward to January 15, 2010. What are some of the hiring challenges you’re now facing?

As you put the list together, consider these assumptions:

1. The trough of the economic downturn was reached in April 2009.
2. Job losses continued through October 2009, but at a declining rate, with job gains finally turning positive in November 2009, at around 20,000 or so.
3. The unemployment rate peaked at 9.7% in September 2009 and although still at 8.5% in January 2010, it is forecasted to drop to 7.0% by June 2010.
4. The number of searches on Google with the words “jobs” (e.g., “jobs nurses Seattle”) peaked at 7.3mm/day in April and has been declining by an average of 10%/month since then, but started inching up again in October 2009.
5. An article by Lou Adler on ERE in November 2009 suggested that this pickup was due to people who are fully employed but now getting itchy to leave. He contends that the pent-up demand for a new job is finally being seen and that this is a new group of people entering the job market. Note: this will be unexpected for unprepared companies.
6. Hiring for critical positions will begin in earnest three to four months before a general improvement in the jobless rate is seen. This will be exacerbated by an increase in voluntary turnover.

These assumptions are pretty realistic. The question is, are you ready for this scenario? If you are, here are some of the things you’ve probably been doing over the past six months:

keep reading…

Not a lot of surprises in the latest career trends report from Beyond.com. Healthcare and medical jobs are the largest segment represented on the 15,000 site Beyond network. They represent almost a quarter of the jobs posted to the network during the first quarter of the year. Beyond says it’s a top spot the industry sector has held for the last three quarters.

IT jobs accounted for the next largest group, but their 11 percent of the total showed the continued weakness in the sector. The job count was off on a year-over-year basis, decreasing almost 3 points from the 14 percent of jobs in the first quarter of 2008. Even so, they were up slightly from the last quarter.

By far, the largest number of jobs on the Beyond network are essentially entry-level. The report says 59.5 percent of the jobs during the quarter specified less than one year of experience. Another 22.5 percent sought 3-5 years of experience.

That’s bad news for the 68% of network candidates whose resumes show five or more years of experience. The largest increase in candidates was the 2.1 percent jump in older candidates — those with 21 or more years experience. The biggest drop was among candidates with less than a year of experience (1.62 percent).

While the percentages suggest that companies, when they hire, are looking for cheap labor, which typically means entry-level or close to it, the survey results are specific to the Beyond.com network. Big though it is (traffic is among the top 25 employment sites), Beyond.com itself is the only all-purpose site; most of the company’s job boards are regional or industry.

Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.

–Yogi Berra

You read it here first, folks: Twitter — at least as it is structured today — is going down. Oh sure, it’s easy to be a contrarian: simply watch where everyone is going and then head in the opposite direction. But the media attention on Twitter means we need to monitor its impact on social interaction — especially recruiting. That said, there are real reasons why the social media phenom Twitter is poised to become a victim of its own success. keep reading…

It has been an amazing year in recruiting and talent management. Despite severe economic hardships, budget cuts, and hiring freezes, recruiting functions have continued to innovate and stretch the limits of “standard recruiting.”

After evaluating hundreds of applications, here is part two of the list of best practices in recruiting that I recommend you emulate.

(This article was updated May 4, 2009; it originally said that GE Healthcare “abandoned its outsourcing model,” but this was incorrect. It did not.)

keep reading…

It may be the worst recession in decades, but that didn’t stop Bayard Advertising Agency from launching a new recruitment consulting and RPO business.

“Maybe it is a crazy time,” laughs Mark DeChant. “But our clients were asking us for this. There might even be a bigger need now, with HR departments handling so many other things.”

DeChant is managing director of Worklight, LLC, Bayard’s new RPO subsidiary. He comes to the company from CareerBuilder, where he was an area sales manager. His background includes a stint as business development manager at staffing firm Ranstad.

Although Bayard is only the second large recruitment ad agency to branch into RPO (the other is Bernard Hodes) DeChant says it’s a natural extension of the business. “The deliverable at Bayard, without an RPO, is an electronic version of a person,” he explains. Adding the recruiter between the sourcing and delivery to the client simplifies the process for an employer.

It also gives Bayard another service to offer its 1,100 clients. DeChant says Bayard reps are routinely asked to recommend screeners, sourcing firms, RPOs and the like. “This allows us to keep the revenue in house and makes it easier for the client since we already know them and helped them plan their recruiting strategy,” he adds.

Worklight is offering a complete RPO menu from screening of resumes to the complete sourcing and vetting of candidates. Worklight also provides HCM consulting and training. “Sourcing, interview techniques, OFCCP compliance,” are part of the training curriculum DeChant notes.

“Now,” he adds, “with this set of services, when a client asks, we can say, ‘Yes, we can help with that’.”

It has been an amazing year in recruiting and talent management, despite severe economic hardships, budget cuts, and widespread hiring freezes.

Unlike the economic turmoil following 9/11 and the dot-com bubble burst, many recruiting functions have continued to innovate and stretch the limits of what can be defined as “standard recruiting.”

If you work in an organization that has given up on innovation and instead has adopted a survival strategy, it’s important to realize that many of your competitors are not standing still. If your organization chooses to wait for an economic recovery to begin modernizing their recruiting practices, you may find it nearly impossible to catch up.

One of the challenges in the fast-moving profession of recruiting is how to keep up with the latest evolutions in best practice. In my experience, there’s no better place to learn about practical tools and applications in recruiting and talent management than ERE.net.

Fortunately, ERE Media holds a yearly global competition aimed at identifying the very best “next practices” in recruiting. Each year, ERE receives hundreds of applications in eight recruiting program categories from well-known organizations like Microsoft, IBM, Ernst & Young, Intuit, Accenture, GE, Yahoo!, and from less well-known but equally innovative organizations like DaVita, the American Cancer Society, and Tata.

Fortunately, as a judge for the Recruiting Excellence Awards, I’m given the opportunity to highlight some of these amazing practices that your organization should consider adopting.

keep reading…

I am always looking for trends, new ways of doing things, or emerging practices that are changing, or at least influencing, the way we attract, source, assess, and recruit talent.

Some of them will most likely slip into history with little impact, but others will become the new way we do things.

Twitter is a recent example of an application that seemed of little practical use to recruiting until hundreds of people began to apply their creativity and developed interesting and useful ways to use Twitter for recruiting. It is being used by many organizations to announce new jobs to those potential candidates who follow them. It is used to help the recently unemployed stay connected and aware of open positions. It is used to communicate with a select group of prospective candidates or to students on a campus.

Here are three trends that I see as potentially significant. Please leave a comment letting us know what you are seeing, and what other tools, applications, or practices you think are emerging. keep reading…