With the unemployment rate dropping again last month to 5.8% and many sectors covered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) experiencing significant jobs growth, including:
a) Professional and Business Services (adding 37,000 jobs)
b) Healthcare (adding 25,000 jobs)
c) Retail (adding 27,000 jobs last month and 249,000 jobs over the past year)
d) Food Services (adding 42,000 jobs last month and an average of 26,000 jobs over the past 12 months)
e) Manufacturing (adding 15,000 jobs last month and 170,000 jobs over the past year)
f) Transportation and Warehousing (adding 12,000 jobs last month)
g) Construction (adding 12,000 jobs)
Countless companies are scrambling to fill their employment openings. This is especially true for the Research & Development (R&D), engineering, scientific, Information Technology (IT), technical and manufacturing areas that we concentrate on as a technical recruitment agency.
As a result, over the last few months most of my colleagues in engineering recruiting, R&D recruiting, scientific recruiting, IT recruiting, technical recruiting and manufacturing recruiting are experiencing an increasing war for talent with many technical job openings having a lot more demand than supply. This has resulted in some candidates being wooed by multiple technical recruitment agencies for the same technical job opening!
Additionally, many companies are also simultaneously trying to cut costs due to continued uncertain future economic conditions. This has resulted in many organizations eliminating executive recruitment agencies all together. Most have the goal of utilizing their own internal management recruiters to handle more of the executive recruiting and technical recruiting process. Unfortunately, few are prepared for this very daunting, difficult and challenging technical recruitment task.
That is why we have recently launched our training division. The primary focus of our practice is teaching key members of your organization the Best Worldwide Practices To Attract And Retain Talent. One aspect of this is training internal hiring managers to be better recruiters, which in turn lowers your Cost Per Hire! One of the tools we use for this training is our 12 Commandments of Recruiting outlined which are some of our best practices learned since opening our doors over 25 years ago on July 14, 1989.
During this training we follow 4 steps:
a) Dividing hiring managers into small work groups of 7-8 (Key: as I shared in my recent YouTube video smaller groups tend to be a lot more productive)
b) Sequentially discussing each of the 12 Commandments, including customizing them to the particular needs of the group and overseeing each group member as they attempt to actuate the commandment within the group setting
c) Progressing to the next commandment and following the same procedure and
d) Ending with a general question and answer session to ensure that each attendee has mastered all 12 Commandments.
At the end of the process most of our clients have exponentially increased their executive recruiting prowess in general and their technical recruiting abilities in specific!
As proof of my expertise in this area, I am a regular contributor to WGN Radio, First Business and CBS radio. Please go to https://strategicsearch.com/media.php for some of my recent appearances. Additionally, I will be one of the keynote speakers for a special jobs summit being sponsored by CBS radio affiliate WBBM News Radio 78 on December 2nd from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Please go to http://chicago.cbslocal.com/hiring-trends-and-career-advancement-seminar/ for more details and to sign up.
What are your organization’s recruiting needs?
