Here is a bullet point from a sales employment ad: Home based office experience a major plus! Can you imagine reading that point just 5 years ago?
Continue ReadingGenerations 101
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… Read More
Continue ReadingOnline Job Movement
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.… Read More
Continue ReadingSWAT Teams
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.… Read More
Continue ReadingTop 3 In-Demand Positions
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.
Continue ReadingExecutive Hiring A Challenging Priority
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… Read More
Continue ReadingTelecommuting Is Old School, Nomadism Is New School
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… Read More
Continue ReadingDon’t Drink The Kool-Aid
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… Read More
Continue ReadingBig Brother Scanning Your Contacts
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… Read More
Continue ReadingYour Job In Jeopardy
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… Read More
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