The Wall Street Journal provides an article that does a nice job of laying out the upcoming shortage of workers.  The focus is upon the different generations and the general drive behind each.  The article is rather rudimentary, but it provides a clean view of the problem.

First:

Americans of childbearing age simply are not producing enough kids to meet the economy’s future need for workers, notably in fast-growing fields such as medicine and engineering. The shortfall is coming largely because the fabled baby boom generation was so huge—75 million Americans born in the 18 years from 1946 to 1964—that no other generation can be expected to match it any time soon.

Ok, that point leads to this:

They are being replaced by two younger generations, each with its own desires regarding the opportunities and rewards available at work. The challenge for hiring managers is to figure out what these workers’ needs are, so that employers will be able to find them, hire them, and keep them on the job.

Retention is going to be a top business initiative over the next couple of decades which is a simply outcome of supply and demand.

The baby boomers: They place a heavy emphasis on work and successfully climbing the corporate ladder. Work is an anchor in their lives.

The Gen Xers, born between 1965 and 1980: They enjoy work but are more concerned about the work-life balance.

Generation Y, also known as Millennials, born after 1980 and now age 28 or younger: They often have different priorities than their Gen X and baby boomer counterparts, Smith says.

“Because of their reliance on technology, [Millennials] think they can work at any time and any place and believe they should be evaluated on the basis of work produced—not on how, when or where they got it done. Curiously, most Millennials want long-term relationships with employers, but on their own terms,” Smith says.

And finally, here is the rub we have seen between Baby Boomer managers and Gen Y employees:

The Millennials respond poorly to those who act in an authoritarian manner and those who expect to be respected due to higher rank alone. They believe they can learn quickly, take on significant responsibility and make major contributions far sooner than baby boomers think they can.

Exactly.  There has to be a balance between the boomer manager allowing the Gen Y worker to grow quickly in the role and the Gen Y worker not expecting too much, too fast.  There is distinct tension between these two goals.

As they see, read the entire thing.

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The online job posting statistics provide a look at general hiring trends…I think.  My question is always in regards to which online boards are being tracked.  We are seeing a marked migration away from the big boards to the still-developing niche boards.

That migration may be skewing the data from this Inc.com article - I’m not certain.  Nonetheless, the year-over-year tracking of the big boards is still noteworthy (emphasis mine):

The number of online job postings last month declined 16.4 percent from a year ago, the Conference Board reported Friday.

In total, there were 2,591,500 new jobs posted online in April, with healthcare and management accounting for more than 450,000.

Alaska continued to lead the online job market last month, followed by Nevada and Massachusetts, while the sharpest declines were reported in Maryland, Vermont, and Connecticut.

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I haven’t heard this term before, but I absolutely love it.  From the Wall Street Journal’s How Stay-at-Home Moms Are Filling an Executive Niche:

The decision among some highly educated women to stay home with children is sparking a countertrend: The rise of the mommy “SWAT team.” The acronym, for “smart women with available time,” is one mother’s label for all-mom teams assembled quickly through networking and staffing firms to handle crash projects. Employers get lots of voltage, cheap, while the women get a skills update and a taste of the professional challenges they miss.

What a fantastic idea.  The differentiation:

Skilled workers taking temp projects isn’t new, of course. What’s different about these teams is that they’re available on short notice because the women are usually at home; they tend to work cheap because their main motive is to keep their skills fresh; and they’re often extraordinarily well-qualified, having left the work force voluntarily when their careers were on the ascent.

The work world becomes more flexible every day.

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From RecruitingTrends.com (my emphasis):

Manpower Inc. releases the results of its third annual talent shortage survey, revealing that 31% of employers globally are finding it increasingly more difficult to fill jobs. The top three candidates most in-demand are skilled manual trades, sales representatives and technicians (technical workers in the areas of production/operations, engineering and maintenance).

What would it be if they put a qualifier on finding the right salesperson?  I keep saying this - a strong salesperson is always in demand no matter what the economy is doing.

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From the Herman Trend Alert newsletter (sorry, no link):

The economic slowdown here in the United States is not having the expected effect on the demand for qualified executive talent. ExecuNet’s “2008 Executive Job Market Intelligence Report” finds that increasing demand, along with a shortage of qualified talent and sustained economic growth overseas, are driving better than expected job growth at the executive level.(http://www.execunet.com/marketreport)

The sectors with the highest demand are High Tech, Healthcare, Business Services, Pharmaceuticals/Biotech, and Energy/Utilities. The factors credited with the continuing demand for executive talent are an aging workforce and global economic growth, despite the looming threat of recession.

The report also finds, in spite of the evidence that the economy could continue to shed temporary and entry-level jobs, recruiting and retaining of executive-level talent will remain “a challenging priority” in 2008. More than 70 percent of search firms and corporate human resource professionals believe there is a shortage of executive talent, and two-thirds (67 percent) say the war for executive talent has intensified over the last year, amid increasing economic uncertainty. No longer is the United States economy the sole determinant of executive demand.

The global economy certain provides a bit more insulation to a slowdown in the U.S. economy.

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The modern workplace is shifting towards a more ad hoc approach vs. a scheduled interaction according this The Economist’s excellent article Labour movement.  This article defines nomadism in the current work world:

Today’s work nomadism descends from, but otherwise bears little resemblance to, the older model of “telecommuting”, says Mr Ware. That earlier concept became popular in the 1990s thanks to cheap but stationary telecommunications technologies—the landline phone, the fax and dial-up internet. Because it still tied workers to a place—the home office—telecommuting implicitly had people “cocooning at home five days a week”, he says. But people do not want that: instead, they want to mingle with others and to collaborate, though not necessarily under fluorescent lights in a cubicle farm an hour’s drive from their homes. The crucial difference between telecommuting and nomadism, he says, is that nomadism combines the autonomy of telecommuting with the mobility that allows a gregarious and flexible work style.

That is an excellent explanation, isn’t it?  This trend is already in place and growing.  Mobility has become the emancipating factor in the equation.  Large companies are jumping into the nomadic ways too:

At Sun Microsystems, a company that makes hardware and software for corporate datacentres, more than half of the workforce is now officially nomadic, as part of a programme called “open work” in which employees have no dedicated desk but work from any that is available (called “hotdesking”), or do not come into the office at all.

And one good outcome of this?

Mr Schwartz, like Messrs Boyd and Coburn, has also noticed that he is having fewer “flesh meetings”.

…With more than 100,000 customers, he finds that he communicates far more efficiently through his blog, which is translated into ten languages and “on a good day reaches 50,000 people.”

…But in general he finds that “face-to-face is overrated; I care more about the frequency and fidelity of the communication.”

The article is long, but well worth the read.

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The doom-and-gloom economic reporting continues and as a sales manager it is important to keep a pulse on your team.  More articles are being released on the topic of employees getting skittish about their future with the company.  Bob Rosner offers some good advice for these employees in his Working Wounded blog:

Be careful to not drink the Kool-Aid with coworkers by being hyper-critical about your company’s future. Get an outside opinion. If you work for a public company, talk to a stock broker. A search in our city listed 391 brokers who offer a free consultation. If you work for a smaller company, check with vendors to see if they’re getting paid on time. Don’t stop there — also get a read on your department. Is your budget increasing? Do you work with vital customers? These are great check-ups to see if a layoff could be in your future.

…

Do you like, love or just plain hate your job? If you’re really unhappy, try information interviews with people on a career path that interests you. Passionate people enjoy sharing career tips with others. You could also obtain a skills and personality evaluation to determine your vital signs. Your work decision-making shouldn’t just revolve around your company or region’s vitality — it should reflect your passions too.

There will be plenty of salespeople jumping ship if they find a more secure opportunity.  Now is the time when sales managers have to secure their top talent before they drink the Kool-Aid.  Take the extra time to interact with your team and get a read of their present mindset.

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This Wall Street Journal quick-hit article is shocking:

Companies are rolling out software that allows them to mine their employees’ emails and electronic address books for contact information, in a bid to make it easier to establish relationships with potential clients and others. But the tools also raise privacy concerns, and have been met with resistance at some firms.

“Raises privacy concerns”…that is an understatement.  There has to be more to this story, but I can’t imagine companies using these tools.  If they do, I suspect the natural reaction will be for employees to carry around their contact info on their cell phone and not place it on their company computer.

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Yahoo HotJobs offers up a fairly simple article titled 6 Signs Your Job May Be in Jeopardy.  I don’t think there is any revelation within the article.  I also find this revealing:

More than 2 of 3 respondents to a recent Yahoo! poll believe their job is in jeopardy due to the current economic slowdown.

You would think this country has never seen a slowdown before.  Anyway, one of the 6 signs jumps off the page:

Where Have All the Clients Gone?

If the new business team seems to be spinning its wheels, as major clients jump ship and they are not replaced, your job could be on the hit list.

“There is only so long that your boss can be giving you busy work,” says Roberta Chinsky Matuson, president of Northampton, Massachusetts-based Human Resource Solutions. “Eventually, his boss will catch on, and it will be time to go.”

Sales is the lifeblood of any company, isn’t it?  An economic slowdown is a good time to upgrade your sales team since there will be strong salespeople on the street.  Many companies cut their salesforce during economic slowdowns.  Each company’s situation is different, but we always see talented salespeople looking for opportunities during these times.

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Selling has always been about relationships, but it is becoming more significant in today’s world.  According to a recent study referenced in this Selling Power.com article - The Relationship Imperative - product superiority is not as big a driver in customers’ decision-making process.

“Product superiority used to be a big advantage for companies,” says Jim Dickie, partner at CSO Insights. “But collapsing product lifecycles is changing that. If a competitor doesn’t have a feature or function today, they can catch up a lot faster than they could in the past.” The result: product superiority has dropped down to the number three reason companies win deals with just 35 percent of companies citing it versus 56 percent who say relationships drive their wins.

Isn’t that notable?  “Collapsing product lifecycles” is really behind this shift.  I just read an article about 5 new cell phones coming out to compete with the iPhone.  They are all touchscreen phones with many similar features.  Maybe we are trading imitation for innovation?  Whatever the reason, relationships drive sales.

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