Here is an interesting prediction for 2008 from The Economist (my editing):

PEERING into Tech.view’s crystal ball, the one thing we can predict with at least some certainty is that 2008 will be the year we stop taking access to the internet for granted. The internet is not about to grind to a halt, but as more and more users clamber aboard to download music, video clips and games while communicating incessantly by e-mail, chat and instant messaging, the information superhighway sometimes crawls with bumper-to-bumper traffic.

The biggest road-hog remains spam (unsolicited e-mail), which accounts for 90% of traffic on the internet. Phone companies and other large ISPs (internet service providers) have tolerated it for years because it would cost too much to fix. Besides, eliminating spam would only benefit their customers, not themselves.

How so? Because the big fat pipes used by ISPs operate symmetrically, with equal bandwidth for upstream and downstream traffic. But end-users have traditionally downloaded megabytes of information from the web, while uploading only kilobytes of key strokes and mouse clicks. So, when spammers dump billions of pieces of e-mail onto the internet, it travels over the phone companies’ relatively empty upstream segments.

Meanwhile, users are changing the way they use the internet: they are now uploading, as well as downloading, gigabytes galore—thanks to the popularity of social networks like Facebook, YouTube and MySpace.

While major internet service providers like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast all plan to upgrade their backbones, it will be a year or two before improvements begin to show. By then, internet television will be in full bloom, spammers will have multiplied ten-fold, WiFi will be embedded in every moving object, and users will be screaming for yet more capacity.

(h/t Online Media Daily)

I certainly hope this prediction does not come true, but the entire article makes a compelling argument.

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I’m willing to guess that a majority of New Year Resolutions involve weight loss and career/job changes.  If so, then January is the apex of retention within a company.  In sales recruiting, we typically see January as one of the premium months for finding sales talent.  Salespeople have completed the previous year’s commission plan and are staring at an empty commission plan.

In other words, this is an excellent time to upgrade your sales team.

The time to hire is still extended right now in spite of the dire economic predictions of the media.  This week’s Herman Trend Alert email speaks to this point:

The activity of job boards is a predictor of the future of the economy. The number of jobs posted is a forward leading indicator of near-term economic growth. “Our level of job postings is at an all-time high,” said Ted Daywalt President and CEO of VetJobs.com, the leading job board for veterans and their families in the United States.

Job boards are involved with organizations just after the decision to add employees. They are the main medium by which employers now advertise for new and replacement workers.

Daywalt details that in 2002, VetJobs barely had 2,000 jobs posted per day. Now the average is 24,000 active jobs per day and he sees his numbers rising. He expects the number of daily active postings to grow to 30,000 later in 2008.

VetJobs’ increase mirrors the marketplace as a whole; recently, the Conference Board reported that the number of jobs advertised online in 2007 grew by 9.7 percent over 2006.

Though there are no statistics to separate new from replacement postings, VetJobs’ level of increase indicates expansion. Since the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics states that voluntary employee turnover has remained constant over the last quarter, we can safely assume that most of the increases are attributable to new job creation.

The increase in job postings reflects the level of corporate confidence. That’s why we at The Herman Group feel comfortable in forecasting a slowdown, rather than a recession in the U.S. economy for 2008.

For the last five years, the time between Christmas and New Years for job boards was “totally dead”. This year, VetJobs signed on a number of major corporations and their mid-size clients called because they need to hire people “right away”.

A few of the hottest job categories: information technology, engineering, water management, computer numerically controlled (CNC) machining, healthcare, and service industries.

“Many companies would like to expand, but are holding off because they can’t find the skilled people they need”, reports Daywalt.

If you are looking to hire, now is the time to start the process.  And we can help.

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