are two words you don’t want to hear if you are CEO of a publicly-traded company. From Inc.com:
At public companies, this [turnover] is reflected in the rise of activist shareholders, Jacovitz said, seen most recently in the public ousting of top executives at Hewlett-Packard.
I think there may be one other slightly significant item that had an impact on the HP ouster.
The article focuses on C-level turnover, which is on the rise. But I found these graphs towards the end of the article to be more notable:
Meanwhile at the lower rungs of the workforce, small employers are having trouble finding qualified workers, according to the National Federation of Independent Business, a Washington-based lobby group with over 600,000 members.
Of more than 150,000 small businesses polled in September, more than 55 percent said they hired or tried to hire at least one new worker, the group reported on Monday. Of those, a full 80 percent said they found few or no qualified applicants, the group said.
“The availability of qualified applicants is on the rise again as the number one problem facing small-business owners,” William Dunkelberg, the group’s chief economist, said in a statement.
Ok, the economist’s quote is poorly constructed, but I believe he is saying that the supply of qualified applicants is moving up as the number one issue for small businesses. I note this in regards to my post from last week where attracting skilled staff was only number 10 on the list. That ranking certainly seemed low based on the small business owners with whom we work.