Tough Times for Employee Recruiting

Friday, October 28, 2011

Times are tough – everywhere; individuals, governments, and organizations are all dealing with significantly less earnings, revenue, and income. Virtually every facet of our economy is affected; lowered consumer consumption, reduced governmental services, and even reduction or outright elimination of employee recruitment efforts.  Nevertheless, public and private employers are facing a significant brain drain as baby boomers have begun to retire. Even in the face of reduced pensions, 401(k) balances, and prolonged periods of unemployment; many workers are continuing to retire. Many organizations requiring highly skilled technical, professional, and scientific skills are facing a “war for talent”.

In addition, while it is true that some baby boomers are postponing retirement, organizations continue to struggle to fill critical roles in their technical areas of research and development, product development and production, and systems infrastructure.  The Pew Research Center estimates that beginning on January 1, 2011, 10,000 baby boomers are expected to retire every day for the next 19 years. That is a total 3.6 million employees potentially exiting the labor force ever year. Great news for the 9.1% of Americans currently out of work (provided if they have the required skills), even if only half that number actually retire.

So it begs the question that in the light of the loss highly skills technical, professional, and scientific talent, why would organizations reduce or eliminate recruiting efforts? Could it be a false sense of security or a sense of over confidence? Are organizational leaders overly optimistic about their ability to attract and retain the required workers? Have they been lulled into the delusion that high levels of unemployment translates into a ready and available labor force of highly trained and skilled workers? Corporate recruiters, like most of us are attempting to maximize their return on investment. In these lean times, it makes good sense to focus recruiting efforts on those schools which are most likely to produce the best candidates.  Increasingly, organizations are looking at the top state schools and not so much at the Ivy League.

Nor should we become tunnel-visioned into thinking that the talent war is restricted to engineers and computer scientists at Apple, Cisco, and Microsoft. Retail organizations the likes of Domino’s Pizza, Dunkin, Popeyes, KFC, Subway, Panera’s, and Chipotle Mexican Grill are struggling to find the talent to expand and manage their domestic and overseas operations. Securing that talent often means looking outside the organization and even outside the retail industry.

As pressing as the talent war is on existing and established companies, consider the impact on new and growth organizations. Large well established companies at least offer some degree of assurance that they may be around in two weeks. While past performance may be no guarantee of future performance, existing and established employers have a track record, good or bad, which can be analyzed. Start-up and organizations in the early stages of development offer very little more than unknown risk. Attempting to recruit highly skilled talent for such a company that has no track record, is not yet profitable, few secured customers, and an untied untested product is a challenging task.