IT employers, take note: The federal government’s tight time frame for computerization, along with a steep implementation curve, will require more IT workers for health care organizations—soon. Job projections range from at least 41,000 positions to more than 200,000.
Information technology leaders shouldn’t be lulled by today’s sluggish hiring market into thinking IT employees won’t be on the move anytime soon. With the race to computerize the nation’s medical records poised to take off, that’s going to change, industry watchers say.
The federal government’s tight time frame for computerization, along with a steep implementation curve, will require more bodies—soon, and in the thousands at least, they say. The federal stimulus bill, which earmarked $19 billion for incentives related to computerization at hospitals and physician practices, also included financial penalties beginning in 2015. Just 9 percent of hospitals use electronic records on even a limited basis, according to a recent study.
Based in recent discussions with IT experts, the debate seems to be less about the likelihood of a hiring surge and more about how many jobs it will fuel and how soon that surge will happen.
Job projections range widely, from at least 41,000 positions to more than 200,000, depending upon the analysis cited. The 41,000 figure is likely on the low end, says Dr. William Hersh, one of the researchers involved. “That data is probably an understatement—it looked mainly at hospitals,” says Hersh, who chairs the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology at Oregon Health & Science University.
At the moment, though, many health care leaders are in a holding pattern, waiting for the outcome of health care reform, as well as the finalization of key health IT regulations and related grant funds, industry watchers say. In late August, Vice President Joe Biden announced the distribution of nearly $1.2 billion in grants to assist hospitals. The funds won’t start being distributed until October. “Everybody is hunkered down right now,” says John Stevenson, a Dallas-based IT executive consultant and a past president of the Society for Information Management, an IT professional organization.
But once hiring starts, likely by early 2010, watch out, says Walt Zywiak, a principal researcher for Computer Sciences Corp.’s Healthcare Group, based in Falls Church, Virginia. Zywiak was among those who predicted that talented IT employees, including systems administrators, database engineers and security architects, will be recruited from other industries.
“When it [the hiring] does happen, I think there is going to be a tremendous shortage of people,” Zywiak says. “There will be a tremendous competition to get staff out there to install systems.”
Projecting a squeeze
A hiring frenzy may seem more like a mirage now, given that many IT employees have been sidelined by the recession. IT unemployment can be difficult to track, given that positions fall across a number of job categories as characterized by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But a recent analysis of second-quarter data by Information Security Media Group, a publisher, found that unemployment across a range of IT professional jobs had reached an annualized rate of 4.1 percent. That may sound low, compared with unemployment overall, but for IT, it’s the highest figure in at least five years.
And IT leaders don’t yet appear to be in much of a hiring mood. Just 8 percent reported plans to add staff and 85 percent reported maintaining current levels, according to a spring survey of more than 1,400 chief information officers by Menlo Park, California-based staffing firm Robert Half Technology.
Nor are health care jobs immune to layoffs. In mid-August, officials at Kaiser Permanente announced that roughly 1,850 jobs in California (out of 135,000 employees) would be eliminated.
But the long-term IT staffing forecast has been bullish, even prior to the $19 billion commitment under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. In the spring, officials at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted that the demand for network systems and data communications analysts would increase by 53 percent from 2006 to 2016 and other technology jobs, including information-research scientists and database administrators, by at least 20 percent.
Initiatives by the Obama administration are projected to boost IT-related federal spending—with a particular focus on health care, energy and green building projects— from $76 billion in 2009 to $90 billion by 2014, according to Input, a Reston, Virginia-based research firm.
Meanwhile, the federal stimulus bill includes both carrots and sticks. Hospitals and physician practices that achieve meaningful use of their electronic health records can reap financial incentives starting in 2011. The term “meaningful use” is still being defined, but for those who don’t make the grade, reductions in Medicare reimbursements begin in 2015.
Just 1.5 percent of hospitals have a comprehensive electronic records system, and an additional 7.6 percent have implemented a system in at least one unit, according to a New England Journal of Medicine study published this year. “To this point, the health industry is basically the backwater of IT technology,” says Tom Pettibone, founder and managing partner at Transition Partners, an IT management consulting firm.
Still, Pettibone senses some reluctance from hospital leaders, who already are financially stretched by the economic downturn. He says they tend to say, “ ‘Look, if I get a few dollars, I need it for beds. I don’t need it for electronic health records.’ ’’
Hiring and poaching
In the Denver area, physician practices and other health care organizations started computerizing medical records several years ago, and so Denver may serve as one harbinger of the staffing challenges organizations will face, says Shannon Salter, a Denver-based information technology practice manager for Hudson IT, a recruiting and consulting firm.
There’s definitely been poaching, she says: “We’ve seen a lot of health care clients recently taking top talent in the IT field out here from other industries.”
Nationally, Zywiak predicts that two primary tech groups will be in high demand: people who can install systems and those who can troubleshoot, forming a bridge between clinicians and tech experts in resolving workflow problems and other implementation challenges.
Security architects and other related specialists also will be hot commodities, given the inherent privacy concerns involved with storing and sharing personal medical data across large hospital systems or even regional networks, says Kurt Roemer, chief security strategist at Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based Citrix Systems. For similar reasons, technologists who specialize in cloud computing—storing vast quantities of information over the Internet rather than on individual servers—will likely find numerous health-related employment opportunities, he says.
Employers in non-health industries typically hold one advantage, say Zywiak and several others interviewed. Health IT salaries, particularly at hospitals, tend to be on the lower end compared with other industries, such as financial services. Salter says the difference is not substantial—roughly 5 percent lower than other types of IT jobs— and can be offset by non-salary perks, such as good health insurance and generous time off.
But any pay discrepancies likely will fade away once hiring heats up, says Marty Witrak, who chairs the workforce subgroup of the National Rural HIT Coalition, a cross section of rural health professionals and other interested parties.
“If hospitals are in jeopardy of losing their Medicare and Medicaid payments, they will find ways to pay people a competitive wage to get them to come and work for them,” she says. “They will have to.”
At Hudson’s Denver office, Salter can attest to that ripple effect. In the last six months, Hudson has been approached by several human resources specialists outside health care, she says. They wanted more information about local salary scales to keep their IT specialists from straying.
Workforce.com Article 10/2009
By Charlotte Huff
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Workforce.com: Special Report on Talent Acquisition Technology—Logging Off of Job Boards
Special Report on Talent Acquisition Technology—Logging Off of Job Boards
Many organizations are eschewing general-purpose job boards and turning instead to social networking sites, search engine marketing and niche job sites to get the specific worker skills they need. The online giants are trying to change with the times, however.
By Ed Frauenheim
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Whitney has about had it with job boards. Whitney, vice president of human resources at data networking equipment company Infinera, has stopped buying job ads on online job boards, with the exception of limited postings at Monster.com for positions like entry-level accountants.
Sunnyvale, California-based Infinera needs highly technical talent, such as optical engineering specialists. In the past two years, Whitney found job boards were filling just 5 percent of his openings despite the fact that trolling through résumés from major job boards took up about 25 percent of his recruiters’ time.
Infinera now concentrates on finding passive candidates—those not actively seeking a new job—through a combination of employee referrals and social networking tools such as LinkedIn. The firm’s annual spending on job boards has dropped from tens of thousands of dollars annually to a few thousand dollars. Job boards “are just too generic to be useful for specific skill sets,” Whitney says.
Whitney’s plight is one reason job boards face challenging times, and Infinera’s new focus reflects a shifting landscape in online recruiting. Organizations that once relied on general-purpose job boards are turning to alternative strategies, including social networking sites, search engine marketing and niche job sites. In a May study by research firm AIM Group, nearly 45 percent of recruiters surveyed said they used networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook with mixed or great results.
Such experimentation owes partly to the recession, which is prompting firms to look for less-expensive recruiting methods. The economic downturn also means fewer jobs to advertise, and therefore skimpier revenues at traditional sites like Monster and CareerBuilder. Both vendors reported sharply lower results for the first quarter of this year.
Still, the job board giants aren’t likely to disappear overnight. They say they’re changing with the times, with improvements such as social networking features, enhanced search tools and greater career development content. Bolstering professional development services is a smart strategy for job boards, because it can woo the passive candidates whom employers typically crave, says recruiting industry analyst Peter Weddle. And given the limited dollars currently flowing into recruiting, the pressure is on job boards to stand out, Weddle says.
“We’re separating the boys from the men in today’s marketplace,” he says.
Evolving model
Job boards have evolved a great deal from the first ones that appeared in the mid-1990s. Initially, they were little more than the Internet equivalent of classified ads. Just as classifieds were confined to newspapers, the job board universe for years has been centered at the so-called “big three” sites: Monster, CareerBuilder and Yahoo HotJobs.
Yet specialty sites have proliferated. Weddle estimates there are now roughly 100,000 job sites worldwide.
Job boards contribute to a small but significant chunk of hiring. Recruitment advisory firm CareerXroads estimates that job boards are the source for about 12 percent of external hires. About six in 10 open positions at large corporations are filled with external hires, according to CareerXroads’ annual study on sources of hires published in February. The share of external hires attributed to job boards has stayed roughly the same the past four years.
That share is unlikely to increase, says Gerry Crispin, principal with CareerXroads. Companies are looking more to alternatives such as social networks and search engine marketing, which involves bidding to place job ads next to search results on sites like Google.
“By and large, corporations have maxed out on the proportion of candidates they’re going to get from job boards,” Crispin says.
Together, Monster and CareerBuilder account for half of all job board hires, according to CareerXroads. And, for the first time in the 8-year-old study, CareerBuilder this year overtook Monster in terms of hires attributed to the respective job boards.
CareerBuilder has developed a wider set of services in the past several years, says Brent Rasmussen, the company’s president for the North America region. On the employer side, CareerBuilder now offers consulting on talent acquisition, advertising agency services and outplacement services.
Such services accounted for less than 5 percent of CareerBuilder’s business three years ago but now make up more than 15 percent, Rasmussen says.
Organizations may not be hiring as much during the recession, but “they’re looking at their employment brand,” he says.
For job seekers, CareerBuilder offers to help people chart their career path, get skills training and connect through its professional network, BrightFuse.com.
“We’re more than just a job board,” Rasmussen says. “We’re the global leader in human capital solutions.”
Monster’s makeover
Other job boards, such as Monster, are making similar claims. A site redesign launched in January features a career mapping service that mines Monster’s millions of résumés to see how people have progressed in their work. Through its acquisition of Affinity Labs last year, Monster also has a stable of sites focused on different professions, such as teaching and nursing.
“To a degree, we’re a job board,” says Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi. “To a degree, we’re really not.” Broadening Monster to become a career and lifestyle hub has been a priority for Iannuzzi since taking over two years ago.
Still, Monster has sought to improve some job board basics. The company has reduced the number of steps required to post résumés from about 20 to four. Another Monster focus is uneven job search results—an issue that still vexes the industry. Last year, Monster paid $72.5 million for résumé-matching technology specialist Trovix, whose software is designed to take into account the relevancy of skills and job experience and how recently a candidate worked in a particular field—much like a real recruiter.
Monster plans to release a version of the Trovix tool later this year, and Iannuzzi expects big results. “We’re coming very close to mimicking that human capability,” he says.
Yahoo HotJobs has had a more relevant matching technology in place for about a year, says Chris Merritt, general manager of the HotJobs division. Merritt says that helps explain why HotJobs ranks second in traffic to CareerBuilder in the career resources category, according to research firm comScore.
In April, CareerBuilder had 23.5 million unique visitors, followed by 17.5 million at Yahoo HotJobs and 11.6 million at Monster.
In recent weeks there has been speculation Yahoo will sell HotJobs. Merritt, who took over as the site’s general manager this year, declined to comment except to confirm that the company is reviewing its entire product portfolio under Yahoo’s new chief executive, Carol Bartz.
He is also optimistic about HotJobs’ business, in part because of a sales effort launched last summer. The Smart Ads campaign turns job listings into Internet display ads and “narrowcasts” them to Yahoo’s 500 million users worldwide based on their behaviors.
For example, someone who spends time on the Yahoo Finance page and reads Yahoo news articles with a financial bent might get an ad for a stockbroker opening. Smart Ads are shown both on Yahoo sites and on partner sites including Walmart .com.
The program is “growing like a weed,” Merritt says.
While Monster and CareerBuilder offer automated career development tools, HotJobs relies largely on articles by experts, including the advice of HotJobs senior managing editor Tom Musbach. “It’s very difficult to have a tool give you good career advice,” Merritt says.
Keeping current
Neither the human touch nor the high-tech approach is a panacea at the moment. Yahoo’s Career Assessment page recently featured this stale headline: “2006’s Career Dos and Don’ts.” When asked to suggest a path from “reporter” to “analyst,” Monster’s Career Mapping software kept suggesting a career as a “telecom analyst”—a limited result.
Still, efforts to boost career development resources are on the right track, says consultant Weddle, who later this year is publishing a book with his picks for the 100 best job boards. Weddle says smart companies are using the recession to build a repository of relationships rather than résumés. And the job boards that can best serve that goal, he says, are ones with the feel of a professional organization, attracting both active job seekers and passive candidates not looking for work.
“The best job boards are transforming themselves into virtual associations without the dues,” he says.
Dice Holdings, the parent of technology-focused job board Dice.com, is shooting for this goal. Both Dice.com and sister site JobsintheMoney.com, which concentrates on finance positions, feature career news and advice. Posts on Dice.com discussion forums have doubled in the past year to about 9,000 per month, says Dice CEO Scot Melland.
“The expectations of job seekers are going up,” Melland says. “We are becoming much more of a career management or a career development tool than we were five years ago.”
The career content helps explain Dice’s attraction to passive candidates: About two-thirds of Dice.com users are employed.
There’s a cost for ‘free’
Another challenge to the traditional job boards comes from free or near-free listing services. Google Base is a free service from the Internet search giant that allows people and organizations to publish all sorts of information on the Web, including job openings. Online bulletin board Craigslist charges $25 per job ad in cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, but is free in other locations. Major job boards, by comparison, charge hundreds of dollars.
The recent report from the AIM Group, though, indicates “free” comes with a cost. “The free sites, like Craigslist and Gumtree in the U.K., aren’t getting very high marks from recruiters,” Peter Zollman, founding principal of the AIM Group, said in a statement. “While they’re ‘free,’ the effort associated with posting ads there and the work required to screen candidates make them not-very-valued alternatives—at least for now.”
Then there are the vertical search engines devoted to jobs. SimplyHired and Indeed, also known as aggregator sites, aim to provide comprehensive job searches by gathering job openings from around the Web.
Dan Finnigan, CEO of recruiting software firm Jobvite, likens the general job boards to America Online. AOL’s “walled garden” approach gave way to Google’s ability to organize the entire Web easily, Finnigan says. In a similar way, he says, recruiting is moving away from the “closed” systems of job boards and their limited information about applicants and jobs to approaches that target potential candidates based on their overall profiles online—including their relationships in social and professional networks.
“People’s profiles are increasingly everywhere,” says Finnigan, who headed Yahoo HotJobs earlier this decade.
Jobvite’s software allows employees to send job listings to people in their LinkedIn and Facebook networks. It also makes it easy for visitors to corporate career pages to pass along job openings to people in their networks.
Too little, too late?
It’s inaccurate to say the major job boards are missing the social networking trend altogether. CareerBuilder recently launched a service designed to help companies gather information about applicants from sources such as blogs, social networking sites and Web forum postings.
But it may be too little, too late to convince Infinera’s Paul Whitney. Whitney, whose firm uses Jobvite, says traditional methods of recruiting, including job boards, “have failed us. They failed us badly.” Jobvite’s system helps encourage employee referrals, which typically is the best source of hiring, he says. And Infinera uses the technology to boost its visibility on tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
“Employers must respect the boundaries between the personal and the professional in reaching out to these areas,” Whitney says. “But this is where the talent of the future will be.”
Ed Frauenheim is a Workforce Management senior staff writer based in San Francisco. E-mail editors@workforce.com to comment.
Special Report on Talent Acquisition Technology—Logging Off of Job Boards
Many organizations are eschewing general-purpose job boards and turning instead to social networking sites, search engine marketing and niche job sites to get the specific worker skills they need. The online giants are trying to change with the times, however.
By Ed Frauenheim
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Whitney has about had it with job boards. Whitney, vice president of human resources at data networking equipment company Infinera, has stopped buying job ads on online job boards, with the exception of limited postings at Monster.com for positions like entry-level accountants.
Sunnyvale, California-based Infinera needs highly technical talent, such as optical engineering specialists. In the past two years, Whitney found job boards were filling just 5 percent of his openings despite the fact that trolling through résumés from major job boards took up about 25 percent of his recruiters’ time.
Infinera now concentrates on finding passive candidates—those not actively seeking a new job—through a combination of employee referrals and social networking tools such as LinkedIn. The firm’s annual spending on job boards has dropped from tens of thousands of dollars annually to a few thousand dollars. Job boards “are just too generic to be useful for specific skill sets,” Whitney says.
Whitney’s plight is one reason job boards face challenging times, and Infinera’s new focus reflects a shifting landscape in online recruiting. Organizations that once relied on general-purpose job boards are turning to alternative strategies, including social networking sites, search engine marketing and niche job sites. In a May study by research firm AIM Group, nearly 45 percent of recruiters surveyed said they used networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook with mixed or great results.
Such experimentation owes partly to the recession, which is prompting firms to look for less-expensive recruiting methods. The economic downturn also means fewer jobs to advertise, and therefore skimpier revenues at traditional sites like Monster and CareerBuilder. Both vendors reported sharply lower results for the first quarter of this year.
Still, the job board giants aren’t likely to disappear overnight. They say they’re changing with the times, with improvements such as social networking features, enhanced search tools and greater career development content. Bolstering professional development services is a smart strategy for job boards, because it can woo the passive candidates whom employers typically crave, says recruiting industry analyst Peter Weddle. And given the limited dollars currently flowing into recruiting, the pressure is on job boards to stand out, Weddle says.
“We’re separating the boys from the men in today’s marketplace,” he says.
Evolving model
Job boards have evolved a great deal from the first ones that appeared in the mid-1990s. Initially, they were little more than the Internet equivalent of classified ads. Just as classifieds were confined to newspapers, the job board universe for years has been centered at the so-called “big three” sites: Monster, CareerBuilder and Yahoo HotJobs.
Yet specialty sites have proliferated. Weddle estimates there are now roughly 100,000 job sites worldwide.
Job boards contribute to a small but significant chunk of hiring. Recruitment advisory firm CareerXroads estimates that job boards are the source for about 12 percent of external hires. About six in 10 open positions at large corporations are filled with external hires, according to CareerXroads’ annual study on sources of hires published in February. The share of external hires attributed to job boards has stayed roughly the same the past four years.
That share is unlikely to increase, says Gerry Crispin, principal with CareerXroads. Companies are looking more to alternatives such as social networks and search engine marketing, which involves bidding to place job ads next to search results on sites like Google.
“By and large, corporations have maxed out on the proportion of candidates they’re going to get from job boards,” Crispin says.
Together, Monster and CareerBuilder account for half of all job board hires, according to CareerXroads. And, for the first time in the 8-year-old study, CareerBuilder this year overtook Monster in terms of hires attributed to the respective job boards.
CareerBuilder has developed a wider set of services in the past several years, says Brent Rasmussen, the company’s president for the North America region. On the employer side, CareerBuilder now offers consulting on talent acquisition, advertising agency services and outplacement services.
Such services accounted for less than 5 percent of CareerBuilder’s business three years ago but now make up more than 15 percent, Rasmussen says.
Organizations may not be hiring as much during the recession, but “they’re looking at their employment brand,” he says.
For job seekers, CareerBuilder offers to help people chart their career path, get skills training and connect through its professional network, BrightFuse.com.
“We’re more than just a job board,” Rasmussen says. “We’re the global leader in human capital solutions.”
Monster’s makeover
Other job boards, such as Monster, are making similar claims. A site redesign launched in January features a career mapping service that mines Monster’s millions of résumés to see how people have progressed in their work. Through its acquisition of Affinity Labs last year, Monster also has a stable of sites focused on different professions, such as teaching and nursing.
“To a degree, we’re a job board,” says Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi. “To a degree, we’re really not.” Broadening Monster to become a career and lifestyle hub has been a priority for Iannuzzi since taking over two years ago.
Still, Monster has sought to improve some job board basics. The company has reduced the number of steps required to post résumés from about 20 to four. Another Monster focus is uneven job search results—an issue that still vexes the industry. Last year, Monster paid $72.5 million for résumé-matching technology specialist Trovix, whose software is designed to take into account the relevancy of skills and job experience and how recently a candidate worked in a particular field—much like a real recruiter.
Monster plans to release a version of the Trovix tool later this year, and Iannuzzi expects big results. “We’re coming very close to mimicking that human capability,” he says.
Yahoo HotJobs has had a more relevant matching technology in place for about a year, says Chris Merritt, general manager of the HotJobs division. Merritt says that helps explain why HotJobs ranks second in traffic to CareerBuilder in the career resources category, according to research firm comScore.
In April, CareerBuilder had 23.5 million unique visitors, followed by 17.5 million at Yahoo HotJobs and 11.6 million at Monster.
In recent weeks there has been speculation Yahoo will sell HotJobs. Merritt, who took over as the site’s general manager this year, declined to comment except to confirm that the company is reviewing its entire product portfolio under Yahoo’s new chief executive, Carol Bartz.
He is also optimistic about HotJobs’ business, in part because of a sales effort launched last summer. The Smart Ads campaign turns job listings into Internet display ads and “narrowcasts” them to Yahoo’s 500 million users worldwide based on their behaviors.
For example, someone who spends time on the Yahoo Finance page and reads Yahoo news articles with a financial bent might get an ad for a stockbroker opening. Smart Ads are shown both on Yahoo sites and on partner sites including Walmart .com.
The program is “growing like a weed,” Merritt says.
While Monster and CareerBuilder offer automated career development tools, HotJobs relies largely on articles by experts, including the advice of HotJobs senior managing editor Tom Musbach. “It’s very difficult to have a tool give you good career advice,” Merritt says.
Keeping current
Neither the human touch nor the high-tech approach is a panacea at the moment. Yahoo’s Career Assessment page recently featured this stale headline: “2006’s Career Dos and Don’ts.” When asked to suggest a path from “reporter” to “analyst,” Monster’s Career Mapping software kept suggesting a career as a “telecom analyst”—a limited result.
Still, efforts to boost career development resources are on the right track, says consultant Weddle, who later this year is publishing a book with his picks for the 100 best job boards. Weddle says smart companies are using the recession to build a repository of relationships rather than résumés. And the job boards that can best serve that goal, he says, are ones with the feel of a professional organization, attracting both active job seekers and passive candidates not looking for work.
“The best job boards are transforming themselves into virtual associations without the dues,” he says.
Dice Holdings, the parent of technology-focused job board Dice.com, is shooting for this goal. Both Dice.com and sister site JobsintheMoney.com, which concentrates on finance positions, feature career news and advice. Posts on Dice.com discussion forums have doubled in the past year to about 9,000 per month, says Dice CEO Scot Melland.
“The expectations of job seekers are going up,” Melland says. “We are becoming much more of a career management or a career development tool than we were five years ago.”
The career content helps explain Dice’s attraction to passive candidates: About two-thirds of Dice.com users are employed.
There’s a cost for ‘free’
Another challenge to the traditional job boards comes from free or near-free listing services. Google Base is a free service from the Internet search giant that allows people and organizations to publish all sorts of information on the Web, including job openings. Online bulletin board Craigslist charges $25 per job ad in cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, but is free in other locations. Major job boards, by comparison, charge hundreds of dollars.
The recent report from the AIM Group, though, indicates “free” comes with a cost. “The free sites, like Craigslist and Gumtree in the U.K., aren’t getting very high marks from recruiters,” Peter Zollman, founding principal of the AIM Group, said in a statement. “While they’re ‘free,’ the effort associated with posting ads there and the work required to screen candidates make them not-very-valued alternatives—at least for now.”
Then there are the vertical search engines devoted to jobs. SimplyHired and Indeed, also known as aggregator sites, aim to provide comprehensive job searches by gathering job openings from around the Web.
Dan Finnigan, CEO of recruiting software firm Jobvite, likens the general job boards to America Online. AOL’s “walled garden” approach gave way to Google’s ability to organize the entire Web easily, Finnigan says. In a similar way, he says, recruiting is moving away from the “closed” systems of job boards and their limited information about applicants and jobs to approaches that target potential candidates based on their overall profiles online—including their relationships in social and professional networks.
“People’s profiles are increasingly everywhere,” says Finnigan, who headed Yahoo HotJobs earlier this decade.
Jobvite’s software allows employees to send job listings to people in their LinkedIn and Facebook networks. It also makes it easy for visitors to corporate career pages to pass along job openings to people in their networks.
Too little, too late?
It’s inaccurate to say the major job boards are missing the social networking trend altogether. CareerBuilder recently launched a service designed to help companies gather information about applicants from sources such as blogs, social networking sites and Web forum postings.
But it may be too little, too late to convince Infinera’s Paul Whitney. Whitney, whose firm uses Jobvite, says traditional methods of recruiting, including job boards, “have failed us. They failed us badly.” Jobvite’s system helps encourage employee referrals, which typically is the best source of hiring, he says. And Infinera uses the technology to boost its visibility on tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
“Employers must respect the boundaries between the personal and the professional in reaching out to these areas,” Whitney says. “But this is where the talent of the future will be.”
Ed Frauenheim is a Workforce Management senior staff writer based in San Francisco. E-mail editors@workforce.com to comment.
Monday, October 5, 2009
No Labor Shortage – Just a Shortage of Imagination
September 16th, 2009 By Kevin Wheeler
In many cases the shortage of skilled labor may be caused more by very narrowly defined job descriptions and a lack of imagination than by any real shortage.
We set up expectations and define jobs based more on what we want (or think we want) than on what is realistically available.
Many of us say that we cannot find qualified C# programmers, for example, when we all know that there are very few people with good skills in this area. We are left with two choices: wait to find a disgruntled one that we can steal from some other employer or decide to do something to change the supply by developing training programs or taking on apprentices.
Many emerging jobs require a new perspective, rather than an entirely new skill set. An interior designer could easily do the new job of home stager – someone who decorates your house prior to selling it — but for a much lower price. Many skills for jobs in the health care arena can be learned quickly, but are all based on a common set of skills around patient care, communication, and appreciation for and understanding of technology. The real challenge is perpective, atttiude and sometimes the willingness to work for less.
Developing People is a Requirement for Success
I spent many years working in the semiconductor industry when it faced a labor shortage of skilled process engineers and equipment operators. We eventually devised training programs that took basic electrical engineers and developed them into capable process engineers quickly. IBM trained thousands of programmers throughout the 1960s and 1970s to meet its own huge needs. At the same time, IBM and other companies quietly worked with academic institutions to develop today’s academic computer curricula.
This training and development does not have to be of the same type that a person would receive at an ordinary academic institution. In a most every case, corporate training can concentrate on skills that are needed right now and forego the theoretical, the basics, and the nice to have but not critical things. Whether or not a person goes back at some point to get those basics remains a question, but I believe that efficient training can address the labor shortage issue quickly.
In both world wars, the U.S. Armed Forces have reverted to intensive training programs to fill critical positions. They have learned that this can be as efficient a process as having a huge standing army. The trick is in accepting that there is a responsibility on the part of employers to develop the people they need. Employers should be willing to provide the training and development for the jobs they have a need to get done. Waiting for the school system or the government to do your job for you has never been a very good strategy.
We Need To Expand the Labor Pool
Many available people are older or retired and have skills that have become obsolete or are not needed right now. However, these people could be retrained for some of the open positions if we took a different attitude. Unfortunately most of us, or most of our employers anyway, would rather spend money on search fees, agency fees, administrative overhead, and advertising rather than on intensively training people with decent basic skills. Granted we cannot train people for every job because many of them do require experience, or time in the saddle, as they say, in order to be successful. However, I think we could significantly lessen the labor shortage if we were willing to be a bit wider in our job expectations and definitions.
This is why I constantly argue for integrated staffing and development because I believe their functions are inextricably intertwined. It is very difficult to do one without doing the other. If we are to look at recruiting has a process, we are going to have to incorporate development into our staffing thinking and staffing into our training thinking.
Whether this is done through merging departments, or whether it is done simply through good collaboration doesn’t really matter. What is critical is that there is a dialogue between the two functions. . If you work in a small company where there are no separate training and recruiting functions, then this becomes even easier for you to do.
You need to always think whether an open position is better trained for or hired for. Is it a job that would be impossible to train someone for in a reasonable period of time, or is it a job that someone could be trained to do fairly quickly?
When management and recruiters both develop a broader understanding of the issues and step up to the fact that in many cases skilled people are just not available at a reasonable cost, then developing people becomes sensible and cost effective.
There are no labor shortages or surpluses – there are just shortages of imagination and an unwillingness to accept responsibility for filling our own needs.
In many cases the shortage of skilled labor may be caused more by very narrowly defined job descriptions and a lack of imagination than by any real shortage.
We set up expectations and define jobs based more on what we want (or think we want) than on what is realistically available.
Many of us say that we cannot find qualified C# programmers, for example, when we all know that there are very few people with good skills in this area. We are left with two choices: wait to find a disgruntled one that we can steal from some other employer or decide to do something to change the supply by developing training programs or taking on apprentices.
Many emerging jobs require a new perspective, rather than an entirely new skill set. An interior designer could easily do the new job of home stager – someone who decorates your house prior to selling it — but for a much lower price. Many skills for jobs in the health care arena can be learned quickly, but are all based on a common set of skills around patient care, communication, and appreciation for and understanding of technology. The real challenge is perpective, atttiude and sometimes the willingness to work for less.
Developing People is a Requirement for Success
I spent many years working in the semiconductor industry when it faced a labor shortage of skilled process engineers and equipment operators. We eventually devised training programs that took basic electrical engineers and developed them into capable process engineers quickly. IBM trained thousands of programmers throughout the 1960s and 1970s to meet its own huge needs. At the same time, IBM and other companies quietly worked with academic institutions to develop today’s academic computer curricula.
This training and development does not have to be of the same type that a person would receive at an ordinary academic institution. In a most every case, corporate training can concentrate on skills that are needed right now and forego the theoretical, the basics, and the nice to have but not critical things. Whether or not a person goes back at some point to get those basics remains a question, but I believe that efficient training can address the labor shortage issue quickly.
In both world wars, the U.S. Armed Forces have reverted to intensive training programs to fill critical positions. They have learned that this can be as efficient a process as having a huge standing army. The trick is in accepting that there is a responsibility on the part of employers to develop the people they need. Employers should be willing to provide the training and development for the jobs they have a need to get done. Waiting for the school system or the government to do your job for you has never been a very good strategy.
We Need To Expand the Labor Pool
Many available people are older or retired and have skills that have become obsolete or are not needed right now. However, these people could be retrained for some of the open positions if we took a different attitude. Unfortunately most of us, or most of our employers anyway, would rather spend money on search fees, agency fees, administrative overhead, and advertising rather than on intensively training people with decent basic skills. Granted we cannot train people for every job because many of them do require experience, or time in the saddle, as they say, in order to be successful. However, I think we could significantly lessen the labor shortage if we were willing to be a bit wider in our job expectations and definitions.
This is why I constantly argue for integrated staffing and development because I believe their functions are inextricably intertwined. It is very difficult to do one without doing the other. If we are to look at recruiting has a process, we are going to have to incorporate development into our staffing thinking and staffing into our training thinking.
Whether this is done through merging departments, or whether it is done simply through good collaboration doesn’t really matter. What is critical is that there is a dialogue between the two functions. . If you work in a small company where there are no separate training and recruiting functions, then this becomes even easier for you to do.
You need to always think whether an open position is better trained for or hired for. Is it a job that would be impossible to train someone for in a reasonable period of time, or is it a job that someone could be trained to do fairly quickly?
When management and recruiters both develop a broader understanding of the issues and step up to the fact that in many cases skilled people are just not available at a reasonable cost, then developing people becomes sensible and cost effective.
There are no labor shortages or surpluses – there are just shortages of imagination and an unwillingness to accept responsibility for filling our own needs.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Hiring Is Hard Work
By Jack Welch
What's the biggest hiring mistake you've ever made?
Would you believe that with about 60 years of combined experience, we've made too many hiring mistakes to name just one? It's true. Now, many occurred when we were newer at this game, but picking the right people never gets easy. Indeed, we almost blew it twice recently, saved only by last-minute epiphanies in both cases.
Incidentally, even as we were in the midst of making these almost-mistakes, we were cringing a bit, concerned we were offtrack. And yet we forged ahead, feeling simultaneously hopeful and helpless. Our candidates (whose descriptions have been altered to protect their privacy) seemed bright and shiny enough. And we were just so tired of interviewing when there was real work to be done.
Hiring is real work, of course. In fact, given the central importance of your people, it's as important as work gets. And yet, too often we rush headlong into painfully common pitfalls.
Take, for instance, our first near-miss, when we almost gave in to the impulse to hire a person who was too good to be true: Ivy League degree, several impressive technology jobs, and exactly the skills we needed. Well-dressed, well-spoken, charming, eager—the works. Even her target salary was in the low range. The only problem? She couldn't explain why she hadn't held a job for the last six months.
"She's perfect," we actually said to each other, and, "Maybe the job market is tighter than we thought." Finally, we came to our senses when her references simply would not return our numerous calls, forcing us to remember that people who look too good to be true usually have a knack for covering up blemishes on their track records.
A related hiring mistake is rushing to hire a person because he possesses your missing pieces—the Wharton MBA, a way with words, the "prestige" experience. Back when one of us (Jack) was a new graduate of the University of Illinois trying to build a plastics business, he leaped at every candidate whose résumé listed DuPont. Some of those hires turned out fine; others were duds. In the end, pedigree was less important than the entrepreneurial nerve and sales savvy they needed to succeed.
Flip the coin, and you'll find another common hiring slipup: going for the familiar. Same college, social background, favorite baseball team, whatever. This dynamic crops up especially in global hiring, where managers seem irresistibly drawn to the candidate who literally speaks their language. Again, familiarity hiring can work. But too often, once your new hire settles in, you begin to discover shortcomings you should have dug for earlier but didn't because you "knew" the candidate. You only knew what he seemed like—you.
Then there's the mistake of hiring a candidate who has too much experience, or more aptly, too little runway. Yes, it can feel reassuring to bring aboard a person who has seen it all. But eventually these individuals can grow bored of seeing it all again, and without upward options, they become a managerial problem without an easy solution. You've hired someone into a dead end.
Finally, a misstep we've both taken is hiring a candidate who's smart and capable but just too lacking in emotional intelligence, or EQ, the term coined by researcher Daniel Goleman to describe the combination of self-awareness, authenticity, compassion, and resilience that helps make people great teammates and leaders. Luckily, most people develop EQ as they mature, through work and life experiences, good and bad. And many others can be coached to develop latent EQ within. But occasionally you bump into a talented and competent candidate, as we did not long ago, who's so lacking in the EQ components of humility and realness that you can't take a chance. Again, this young man had a lot of the right stuff, but when he started telling us he had never made a mistake in his life and didn't expect to, we knew we'd heard enough.
The happy ending to this story is that we eventually ended up with great people, but we'd have to predict that our hiring travails will never end. As long as "real work" beckons, time is tight, and hope springs eternal, the science of hiring will be imperfect. Just like all the people doing it.
This question and answer originally appeared in Business Week magazine on June 27, 2008.
What's the biggest hiring mistake you've ever made?
Would you believe that with about 60 years of combined experience, we've made too many hiring mistakes to name just one? It's true. Now, many occurred when we were newer at this game, but picking the right people never gets easy. Indeed, we almost blew it twice recently, saved only by last-minute epiphanies in both cases.
Incidentally, even as we were in the midst of making these almost-mistakes, we were cringing a bit, concerned we were offtrack. And yet we forged ahead, feeling simultaneously hopeful and helpless. Our candidates (whose descriptions have been altered to protect their privacy) seemed bright and shiny enough. And we were just so tired of interviewing when there was real work to be done.
Hiring is real work, of course. In fact, given the central importance of your people, it's as important as work gets. And yet, too often we rush headlong into painfully common pitfalls.
Take, for instance, our first near-miss, when we almost gave in to the impulse to hire a person who was too good to be true: Ivy League degree, several impressive technology jobs, and exactly the skills we needed. Well-dressed, well-spoken, charming, eager—the works. Even her target salary was in the low range. The only problem? She couldn't explain why she hadn't held a job for the last six months.
"She's perfect," we actually said to each other, and, "Maybe the job market is tighter than we thought." Finally, we came to our senses when her references simply would not return our numerous calls, forcing us to remember that people who look too good to be true usually have a knack for covering up blemishes on their track records.
A related hiring mistake is rushing to hire a person because he possesses your missing pieces—the Wharton MBA, a way with words, the "prestige" experience. Back when one of us (Jack) was a new graduate of the University of Illinois trying to build a plastics business, he leaped at every candidate whose résumé listed DuPont. Some of those hires turned out fine; others were duds. In the end, pedigree was less important than the entrepreneurial nerve and sales savvy they needed to succeed.
Flip the coin, and you'll find another common hiring slipup: going for the familiar. Same college, social background, favorite baseball team, whatever. This dynamic crops up especially in global hiring, where managers seem irresistibly drawn to the candidate who literally speaks their language. Again, familiarity hiring can work. But too often, once your new hire settles in, you begin to discover shortcomings you should have dug for earlier but didn't because you "knew" the candidate. You only knew what he seemed like—you.
Then there's the mistake of hiring a candidate who has too much experience, or more aptly, too little runway. Yes, it can feel reassuring to bring aboard a person who has seen it all. But eventually these individuals can grow bored of seeing it all again, and without upward options, they become a managerial problem without an easy solution. You've hired someone into a dead end.
Finally, a misstep we've both taken is hiring a candidate who's smart and capable but just too lacking in emotional intelligence, or EQ, the term coined by researcher Daniel Goleman to describe the combination of self-awareness, authenticity, compassion, and resilience that helps make people great teammates and leaders. Luckily, most people develop EQ as they mature, through work and life experiences, good and bad. And many others can be coached to develop latent EQ within. But occasionally you bump into a talented and competent candidate, as we did not long ago, who's so lacking in the EQ components of humility and realness that you can't take a chance. Again, this young man had a lot of the right stuff, but when he started telling us he had never made a mistake in his life and didn't expect to, we knew we'd heard enough.
The happy ending to this story is that we eventually ended up with great people, but we'd have to predict that our hiring travails will never end. As long as "real work" beckons, time is tight, and hope springs eternal, the science of hiring will be imperfect. Just like all the people doing it.
This question and answer originally appeared in Business Week magazine on June 27, 2008.
Why Employee Retention Matters More Today Than Yesterday
Why Employee Retention Matters More Today Than Yesterday
By Roberta Matuson July 6, 2009
We all know that it's an employer's market. Unemployment is the highest it has been in 26 years. So why are you having a difficult time filling positions? And why should you even think about employee retention when you have candidates lining up outside your door?
According to BusinessWeek, "In the midst of the worst recession in a generation or more, with 13 million people unemployed, there are approximately 3 million jobs that employers are actively recruiting for but so far have been unable to fill. That's more job openings than the entire population of Mississippi." So why do so many employers still believe they are in the driver's seat?
Some people mistakenly believe these openings are mostly lower level positions. You know the kind of jobs that most Americans are not interested in doing. This is simply not the case.
I was speaking last week to one of my clients, who is the CEO of a publicly traded company. He was expressing concern over the inability of his VP of Sales and Marketing to fill several key sales positions that have been open for months. I can't tell you exactly why he is having a difficult time since I have not been actively involved in the search. However, I suspect that it is a combination of things. This is an international company. He needs people with very specific experience in a market where talent is treated like talent. By that I mean, these employees are treated as valuable employees. Their employers know how difficult it is to replace producers. That means there is quite a limited pool of candidates for my client and others to pull from.
There are some lessons we can all learn from this. Eventually the pendulum will swing and it will become an employee's market. I don't have a crystal ball so I can't tell you if that will happen next year or within the next five years. But I can say for sure that it will happen again. Here are some things you can do today to retain the talent you have.
Treat your employees like fine antiques - In some organizations, I've seem managers treat their furniture better than they treat their employees. Think of your employees as irreplaceable. This shouldn't be difficult to do if you've done a great job of hiring.
Promote your talent - Give credit where credit is due. Try this the next time you are in a meeting with a customer. Instead of telling the customer that the department fixed their problem, give them the name of the employee who made this happen. Try doing this in front of the employee. Don't be surprised if the room lights up.
Talk less and listen more - It is difficult to hear what people are saying if you are doing most of the talking. If you ask a question, wait until you receive an answer. Allow your employees to be heard. Then respond accordingly.
Only ask if you really want to know something and are prepared to take action - I can't tell you how many times I am approached by companies who tell me they've done a number of employee surveys over the years and that lately their response rate has been dismal. That's usually because they keep asking the same questions and continue to ignore the answers they are receiving. I can tell you from experience that you are better off doing things your own way than asking for input you have no intention of using.
Retention is actually one of the few things you can control, particularly in this economy. Don't believe me? Just give it a try.
Enjoy the ride!
By Roberta Matuson July 6, 2009
We all know that it's an employer's market. Unemployment is the highest it has been in 26 years. So why are you having a difficult time filling positions? And why should you even think about employee retention when you have candidates lining up outside your door?
According to BusinessWeek, "In the midst of the worst recession in a generation or more, with 13 million people unemployed, there are approximately 3 million jobs that employers are actively recruiting for but so far have been unable to fill. That's more job openings than the entire population of Mississippi." So why do so many employers still believe they are in the driver's seat?
Some people mistakenly believe these openings are mostly lower level positions. You know the kind of jobs that most Americans are not interested in doing. This is simply not the case.
I was speaking last week to one of my clients, who is the CEO of a publicly traded company. He was expressing concern over the inability of his VP of Sales and Marketing to fill several key sales positions that have been open for months. I can't tell you exactly why he is having a difficult time since I have not been actively involved in the search. However, I suspect that it is a combination of things. This is an international company. He needs people with very specific experience in a market where talent is treated like talent. By that I mean, these employees are treated as valuable employees. Their employers know how difficult it is to replace producers. That means there is quite a limited pool of candidates for my client and others to pull from.
There are some lessons we can all learn from this. Eventually the pendulum will swing and it will become an employee's market. I don't have a crystal ball so I can't tell you if that will happen next year or within the next five years. But I can say for sure that it will happen again. Here are some things you can do today to retain the talent you have.
Treat your employees like fine antiques - In some organizations, I've seem managers treat their furniture better than they treat their employees. Think of your employees as irreplaceable. This shouldn't be difficult to do if you've done a great job of hiring.
Promote your talent - Give credit where credit is due. Try this the next time you are in a meeting with a customer. Instead of telling the customer that the department fixed their problem, give them the name of the employee who made this happen. Try doing this in front of the employee. Don't be surprised if the room lights up.
Talk less and listen more - It is difficult to hear what people are saying if you are doing most of the talking. If you ask a question, wait until you receive an answer. Allow your employees to be heard. Then respond accordingly.
Only ask if you really want to know something and are prepared to take action - I can't tell you how many times I am approached by companies who tell me they've done a number of employee surveys over the years and that lately their response rate has been dismal. That's usually because they keep asking the same questions and continue to ignore the answers they are receiving. I can tell you from experience that you are better off doing things your own way than asking for input you have no intention of using.
Retention is actually one of the few things you can control, particularly in this economy. Don't believe me? Just give it a try.
Enjoy the ride!
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