The Labor Department reported this morning that U.S. companies started hiring again last month. This prompted the jobless rate to fall as the economy snapped back from a brutal winter. Nonfarm payrolls grew a seasonally adjusted 223,000 in April after a weak March in which only 85,000 jobs were added. As a result, the unemployment rate dropped .1% to 5.4% in April. The decline mirrored several positive events including: a) the labor force grew as more Americans entered the job search and b) the number of Americans finding work increased. As a result, the jobless rate is moving closer to the Federal Reserve’s expectation of “full” employment, which it pegs between 5% and 5.2%.
A more comprehensive measure of unemployment, which includes both Americans involuntarily working part-time jobs and those who have given up looking for work, fell from 10.9% to 10.8% in April.
Moreover, jobs creation was broad based across several industries. Professional and business services added 62,000 jobs. Health-care payrolls grew by 45,000. Construction also added 45,000. Manufacturing and retail jobs changed little. The mining sector, covering energy industries, fell by 15,000.
Many of our executive recruitment firm’s clients also believe that the first quarter downturn was only temporary and the economy will rebound this spring, as it did last year after a first-quarter contraction. Anecdotally, over the last few months, most of my technical recruiting colleagues have shared that top-notch technical talent is becoming more and more scarce. This is due to a lot more demand than supply among 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 for longer periods of time and in turn reducing the productivity of many departments!
As a result, we recommend that companies greatly improve their recruiting prowess. Unfortunately, most human resource departments have been cut back during the recession. Furthermore, those remaining personnel professionals have been required to handle a lot more tasks. This has brutally hampered many companies’ recruiting efforts. As a result, many R&D, engineering, scientific, technical, IT and manufacturing positions have gone unfilled for longer periods of time. In turn, this has severely reduced many firms’ productivity.
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 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 process we follow 4 steps:
a) Dividing hiring managers into small work groups of 7-8
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!
What are your findings?
