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The March 16, 1998 issue of Fortune showed a picture of one Roberto Ziche, a software engineer, and his bird, Reika, a little lime-green and red parrot. Demand for tech talent so outpaced the supply then that his employer had agreed to his demand to let Reika hop about Ziche’s office all day, jumping from his keyboard, across the top of his monitor, and stopping for a rest sometimes on Ziche’s head. “She’s a pleasant diversion,” says Ziche. But there are drawbacks. “When I am on the phone she gets jealous and starts screaming and biting and messing up everything on my desk.” And of course, unlike a dog, the bird was not house trained, so messing up on the desk meant more than mixing up the papers.

Nerds in Paradise

Well, if that story seems quaint, your next tech hire may be demanding she bring her pet to work too. Think that’s unlikely? Well think again. keep reading…

U.S. consumer confidence in August dropped to the lowest point in two years, the result, analysts say, of the protracted debate over the debt issue and the continuing employment situation.

The 14.7 point drop in The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index is the largest since October 2008, at the very beginning of the recession when banks and investment houses were failing. The Index now stands at 44.5, its lowest level since April 2009.

Among the components that make up the Consumer Confidence Index is the jobs picture. There, 49.1 percent of consumers said jobs are “hard to get,” an increase from July’s 44.8 percent. The percent saying jobs are plentiful declined to 4.7 percent from 5.1 percent.

Asked about job growth, consumers were even more pessimistic. Almost a third of consumers (31.5 percent) expect there to be fewer jobs available in the next few months. Just last month, 22.2 percent expected fewer jobs. Employment optimists — those expecting more jobs in the months ahead — declined to 11.4 from 16.9 percent. keep reading…

With 25 million Americans out of work or underemployed, you’d think it wouldn’t be too hard to find a teacher, an admin assistant, or an accountant. But you would be wrong, according to Manpower.

Those jobs are among the 10 toughest jobs to fill in the U.S., says Manpower’s annual Talent Shortage Survey, which also reports that 52 percent of the employers in the survey are having trouble filling jobs.  Only in Japan and India do more companies report talent hard to find.

Globally, a third of all employers say they have difficulty filling jobs.  Lack of experienced workers is the most frequently cited reason,  globally, as well as in every region in the survey. In the Americas, lack of experience was followed by a lack of skills.

Particularly surprising was the the rise in U.S. companies reporting hiring difficulty. In the 2010 survey, only 14 percent of companies reported problems filling jobs. Now the percentage has nearly quadrupled.

If it seems unlikely the hiring situation could have worsened so much so fast, part of the disconnect may have to do with when the survey was conducted – months ago, long before the current round of gloomy economic reports started coming out. keep reading…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 skill — 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 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. keep reading…

There’s nothing that different about Millennials that age doesn’t explain. So concludes an interesting study by the Kenexa High Performance Institute on the work attitudes of Millennials.

“Millennials are, in fact, much like their older counterparts,” says the study authors, who compared the results of current surveys and historic surveys of Boomers and Gen Xers.

What they found is that contrary to the stereotype of being a malcontented, coddled, naive lot, Millennials, the Gen Y generation, are in many ways more satisfied than their older counterparts.

“The data refutes the ‘millennial malcontent’ stereotype,”  write authors Brenda Kowske and Rena Rasch. As part of Kenexa’s WorkTrends survey of some 30,000 workers in 28 countries, they asked a series of attitude questions, finding that 60 percent of Millennials are “extremely satisfied” with where they work. That’s well above the 54 percent of Boomers and Gen Xers who said that.

Millennials were also more satisfied with the recognition they receive, more satisfied with their opportunities for growth and development, and as excited about their work and their pay as Boomers and Gen Yers. keep reading…

4.0?

We’re only just digesting 3.0. But what direction are we heading in? Is it a coherent journey? Is there a clear destination/end goal?

4.0. What on earth could that include? How’s this?

• Recruitment transitions from being a “cost center” into a “profit center”’!
• The collapse and insolvency of many recruitment agencies.
• Job boards stuttering and collapsing … and repurposing themselves
• Companies hiring “through the sky” through external referrals and crowdsourcing
• Exclusive/VIP/premium paid in-community content and paid mobile apps
• Gamification shapes recruiting strategies and generates stickiness and virality
• Companies rated globally by crowd opinions

Before anyone screams “unrealistic” or “utter fantasy” or cries B.S., let’s be clear that Recruitment 4.0 moves into the territory of vision. This is some years off. But by calculated hypotheses it is clear there will be a 4.0 and that it is a natural progression of 3.0 and builds sensibly on its foundations.

Let’s recap the different versions of recruiting.

Recruitment 1.0 encompasses traditional recruiting over a huge timeline, including good old-fashioned fax machines, print advertising, (post, spray ,and pray), and Rolodexes moving into traditional ATSs. Recruiters more focused on processes than end results. The basic any-bum-on-any-seat philosophy.

Recruitment 2.0 saw the move onto online and using technology for recruitment purposes, including the advent of online job boards & online CV searches. While the technology moved forward, the traditional methodology of 1.0 was prevalent, including online post, spray, and pray candidate attraction (aka the recruitment lottery of let’s hope the right-ish person looks at the online advertisement, at the right time and feels willing to go to the effort to apply).

Both Recruitment 1.0 and 2.0 were/are fundamentally focused on the active job seekers, (applying to vacancies, on agency books, and those watching job boards like a possessed predator).

Recruitment 3.0 is a huge leap as it moves recruitment out of its comfort zone. The beating heart of 3.0 is the non-active/passive individual and a focus on “best talent” and building predictable talent pipelines. In addition, the philosophy of “everyone is a potential candidate so engage them” is central. 3.0 takes us into building engaged, two-way, free-conversation based, transparent communities. This is anchored by things like employment branding, marketing, and PR. 3.0 is not only concerned with building communities but mapping key competitors and seducing cream-of-the-crop talent with your brand and in-house opportunities.

What is Recruitment 4.0?

Recruitment 3.0 is all consumed and focused on building communities. 4.0 is all about the value of those communities, both real and perceived. keep reading…

A declining Employment Trends Index is signaling job growth stagnation lasting through the end of the year, says The Conference Board. The Index, released today, was down in July, its third drop in four months.

The 100.6 the Index registered in July is off from June’s revised 100.9, so the drop isn’t substantial. It’s also up 4 percent over July of 2010. However, says  Conference Board economist and associate director of research, Gad Levanon:

The Employment Trends Index declined in three of the past four months, and is signaling employment growth of less than 100,000 per month through the end of 2011. Despite weak employment growth in recent months, GDP has been growing even slower in the first half of 2011. There is simply not enough growth in production to warrant stronger hiring.

While there’s been plenty of bad economic news in the last two weeks to support his conclusion, there a few glimmers to suggest job growth might be just a bit better. keep reading…

Some points to make before you read this article:

1. 

   It’s somewhat controversial, but by the end you’ll agree (if you get that far).

2. If you’re a corporate recruiter or HR leader, put your confirmation bias in the parking lot before reading this article.
3. You might want to listen to this YouTube video of a webcast (Future of Recruiting Circa 2020) we recently held. It will give you a sense what’s happening now and what will happen soon.

No surprise here, but the answer to the headline’s question is an unequivocal yes. Here’s why the current version of the corporate recruiting department is heading toward extinction: keep reading…

Following the release of the June unemployment figures, House Speaker John Boehner released a statement that began with: “The American people are still asking the question: where are the jobs?”

Boehner is not alone. A lot of people of all political, economic, and social persuasions seem to be asking the same question. But because many of us have been exhorting for years that such a scenario was inevitable, the current job crisis should be no surprise. More importantly, it should be more than obvious that strategies that worked in the past would not work in the future. As Peter Drucker once said, “the greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”

A new report released by McKinsey Global Institute seems to confirm that political rhetoric and populist driven strategies won’t be enough to see the United States return to full employment before 2020.

The report includes quite a few compelling statistics that I hadn’t seen before, at least not in these terms: keep reading…

Back in the day, online career events were exciting only for their novelty.

To tell the truth, as recently as a few years ago, online job fairs were barely a step above what employers would get for buying a posting contract on a job board: a place to list open jobs, a corporate profile, access to resumes, maybe live text chat, a bulletin board discussion area, and some off-site advance promotion. These events would typically run for days or weeks.

Once the excitement of the Internet’s bursts of innovation began to wane, so did enthusiasm for the online job fairs. Relegated to the sidelines, they chugged along sponsored by colleges, the occasional job board,  tech companies, and some newspapers.

But now, with interactivity commonplace and budgets tight, new life is being breathed into online recruiting events.

Next week, two ambitious events will take place on successive days. One is a bonafide career fair. The other a Twitter-based jobs conference.

Tuesday, TweetMyJOBS will bring together, virtually, a raft of top-flight job search and recruiting professionals, to participate in panels and workshops on subjects from branding to networking to career changing.

Tweetnoting (as the press release describes it) the American Jobs Conference is presidential candidate and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. This is worth watching if for no other reason than to see how he manages to deliver his address — Getting Americans Back to Work — in 140 characters.

It starts at 9 a.m. PDT and runs until 3:15. The general hashtag is #jobs4US, and it’s already getting a workout. Hashtags will be assigned for each of the sessions once the agenda is completed.

TweetMyJobs was acquired a few months ago by the CareerArc Group, which also owns a few other career and recruiting focused sites.

On Wednesday, some of the largest newspapers in the country will participate in a virtual career fair as far from the old-school events as YouTube is from Hampster Dance.

To anyone who has ever played an online game or wandered around a virtual world, the environment of the Tribune Digital-organized job fair will be entirely familiar. Job seekers navigate by moving through a conference center to visit the various employer recruiting booths. keep reading…

Tech hiring is tough and it’s only going to get tougher, says a new report from Dice.com.

The IT specialty job board said its survey of IT employers found 65 percent expect to do more hiring of tech professionals in the second half of the year. That kind of robust hiring is already bumping up against the low unemployment rate for computer professionals. The U.S.  Bureau of Labor Statistics put the unemployment rate for computer and math occupations (a category that includes actuaries and some other small groups) at 3.8 percent. Last year the rate for May was 5.5 percent.

Postings for information technology jobs increased by 41 percent over may of 2010, according to Indeed.com. The government’s count of job openings for the information industry (a classification that includes more than just IT) was 110,000 in April. During that month, there 69,000 hires.

While the various data points aren’t directly comparable, they help explain why half the 900 IT recruiters and hiring managers Dice surveyed reported that time to hire is getting longer; 64 percent of the respondents say the problem is finding qualified candidates for the jobs. keep reading…

You want proof positive that the U.S. economy is picking up? The percentage of HR jobs being advertised is growing by double digits.

In March, says new data from Indeed.com, HR jobs were up 34 percent over March of 2010, and the number of human resource job postings grew faster than those in half a dozen other industry categories. In the last quarter alone, HR beat out the growth in most of the categories that Indeed tracks. Now that says something about the confidence of American employers.

Indeed, today, began listing human resources as the 13th category in its employment trends. The jobs site counts the number of HR and HR-related jobs during a month, scrubs the list to eliminate duplicates, and posts the results. It does the same for clicks into the HR listings on Indeed. (Because Indeed sends those clicks directly to the site where the job post originated, it can’t say how many turned into applications.) keep reading…

I just finished my 10th year of ERE Spring Expos (March 23-25, 2011) and I left with a great deal of optimism about the prospects for our industry over the next one to two years. However, with that general positive underlying feeling about economic prospects, I also have major concerns that not much has changed since the modern-day recruiting jungle came to be, circa 1995. I hope I’m wrong on this Groundhog Day-like feeling (i.e., reliving history). First, let me describe my misgivings.

photo by Todd Raphael

The first biggie for me, is we — as an industry — including practitioners, vendors, and HR/recruiting leaders, hiring managers, and company executives, aren’t seeing the forest for the trees. This ERE Expo, as great as it was, was not a recruiting Expo; it was mostly a SOURCING expo! About 75% of the vendors were offering some type of new sourcing solution, with the one big exception, Starr-Tincup Advertising, offering beer, wine, and hard drinks.

Second, about the same percentage of the presentations were focused on sourcing, with the majority of these on how to better use social media. It’s as if solving the sourcing problem will solve everything else. This is exactly the same message I heard at the first recruiting expo I attended in 1998: the advent of job boards will be how we’ll win the talent wars. History is repeating itself. Somehow we’ve lost sight of the real problem we as recruiters face, and based on last week’s Expo, I suspect that’s we’ll be no closer to solving it by the time the 2021 ERE Expo rolls around. If so, I’ll be on some island in retirement.

As I see it, sourcing top people is not the problem; hiring them is. keep reading…

Thinking of changing jobs? It seems almost everyone is.

CareerBuilder says 15 percent of workers are actively looking, but 76 percent of the rest would jump ship if the right opportunity comes along. Given the acceleration in hiring, that right opportunity may come along sooner rather than later.

Manpower said this week that 16 percent of employers expect to add jobs in the second quarter, which begins tomorrow. When seasonally adjusted, Manpower says its Net Employment Outlook is a plus 8 percent.

CEOs are even more optimistic, a good thing since they are the ones to give the thumbs-up to hiring. The Business Roundtable’s CEO survey found 52 percent of them expect to increase hiring over the next six months.

So if you happen to be one of those active job seekers, or you’re just waiting for the right job to come along, you should know that HR jobs generally and recruiting positions in particular are trending up.

Next week, Indeed adds HR as the 13th category to its employment trends report. We won’t know until Tuesday what the March numbers show, but last week Indeed’s Jason Whitman gave us a preview at ERE’s Expo in San Diego. keep reading…

Job boards are far from dead. For the second consecutive year, internal transfers and promotions were the primary source of hire. A quarter of the companies that have a contingent workforce have no idea how big it is. More than half the companies use social media exclusively or as a significant part of their direct sourcing programs.

And finally, and least surprising of all, referrals continue to be the leading source of external hires.

These are among the highlights of the 10th annual Source of Hire study by CareerXroads. Released today, the study reports the results of a survey of 36 large, “well-branded” but anonymous U.S. companies who cumulatively employ 1.32 million workers and hired not quite 133,000 employees in 2010.

This is the 10th year that Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler have conducted the survey to see where companies source their hires. As has been the case from the beginning in 2001, referrals from employees, vendors, alumni, customers, and other sources was the leading source of external hires. Last year, the surveyed companies reported 27.5 percent of their external hires came from referrals. The percentage has fluctuated only modestly over the years. keep reading…

We are in interesting times with regards to corporate recruiting. This is a Big Inflection Point in the business cycle (arguably the largest one many of us will experience in our lifetimes) and recruiting departments are really stretched.

Part of the challenge corporate recruiting departments face today are a result of not recognizing “False Economies.” A False Economy is when something seems like a great deal or a good idea, but the economics are not what they seem when viewed more holistically or from a different vantage point. This is usually a result of tension between short-term objectives and long-term objectives: value is typically traded between the two. Jack Welch famously remarked about two years ago that “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world …”

That is an interesting insight to reflect upon in light of managing a corporate recruiting operation.

There are a host of potential False Economies in corporate recruiting departments — things that seem like they save money or create value, but in reality the true net economic value is substantially less. Identifying and understanding these False Economies will be imperative for staffing leaders to navigate the rough waters ahead.

One timely example is recruiting team capacity … many organizations currently have an insufficient capacity model for the current demand plan. This typically results in overspending that is far greater than the cost of deploying a more sustainable resource model. At the center of the dilemma is the substantial difference between maximum capacity and optimal capacity. Many corporate recruiting departments have been cut so much that they would need to operate at maximum capacity to meet the needs of the business. This is unsustainable, like running your car at redline all the time: sure you can do it, but how long is it going to last? keep reading…

We need jobs, and lots of them: unemployment is dropping but it’s a long road back to the days of 5% unemployment, and we’re not going to get there for a very long time. So where will the jobs come from? The old standbys of healthcare, IT, and education, will continue to add jobs, but there are more interesting and less obvious areas that will spur job creation. keep reading…

I’ve been thinking a lot about speed.

Things are starting to loosen up in the talent marketplace. Candidates are now comfortable changing jobs. Jobless claims are dropping, as is the unemployment rate, but there are not a huge amount of new jobs being created (yet). So The Great Churn of 2011 has begun, as employees (including recruiters) start to change companies after having hunkered down for the last three years. And this is putting increased pressure on corporate recruiting departments, most of which have been cut in ways we haven’t before seen. My prediction is that 2011 will be a tough year for most corporate recruiting departments.

Which brings us back to speed. keep reading…