Engineering, technical, scientific, IT, R&D and manufacturing recruitment remains strong. This is especially true for AI algorithm developers.
The Labor Department said this morning that U.S. employers continued a trend of robust hiring by adding 321,000 new hires last month. As a result, our economy is on track for the strongest year of job creation in 15 years!
Hiring was broad based in November including employers in:
a) The Professional and Business Services category adding 86,000 jobs
b) Retailing adding 50,000 jobs
c) The health-care sector adding 29,000 positions and
d) Manufacturing adding 28,000 jobs.
Additionally, over the last few months most of my recruiting colleagues have shared an increased war for talent for the Research & Development (R&D), engineering, scientific, Information Technology (IT), technical and manufacturing areas that we concentrate on as an executive recruitment firm. This has resulted in many R&D, engineering and scientific job positions going unfilled due to a lot more demand than supply! Particularly cutting edge fields like AI, VR and robotics.
Furthermore, revisions by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed employers added 44,000 more jobs in September and October than previously estimated. October’s payroll gain was revised up to 243,000 from 214,000 and September’s growth was revised up to 271,000 from 256,000.
Friday’s BLS report indicates that hiring remains strong in the final months of 2014, which is on track to post the strongest annual payroll growth since 1999. Sustained hiring and a sharp decline in the unemployment rate, which was 7% in November 2013, have complemented a pickup in economic growth since the spring.
Unfortunately, many companies lack the skills to successfully compete for this scarce technical talent. This has continued a trend noted by top economist Alan Blinder who recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that labor productivity has continued to fall over the last few years!
That is why we have recently launched our training division. The primary focus of our new practice is teaching hiring managers 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 their Cost Per Hire! One of the tools we use for this training is our 12 Commandments of Recruiting which are some of our best practices learned since opening our doors over 25 years ago on July 14, 1989.
During this process 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
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 technical recruiting abilities!
