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April 2012
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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • "The market for professional and management jobs has flipped in the past year in Chattanooga from being an employer-driven market to now more of a candidate-driven market," said Al Clark, the local franchise owner and general manager of Management Recruiters of Chattanooga. "Many job candidates who were competing for an offer 18 months ago are now getting multiple offers."
Al Clark, Management Recruiters of Chattanooga
As quoted in the Chattanooga Times Free Press
March 30, 2012 | |
|  Featured Article | |
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Looking For a Short Cut Where None Exists
A consensus of economists surveyed by Blue Chip Economic Indicators last month projected the unemployment rate will be below 8 percent by the end of 2013. A recent report by a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, however, showed a series of scenarios in which unemployment could actually fall to 6 percent as soon as early next year. Either way, we are in a period of recovery, and unless outside factors such as instability in Asia or Europe slow the U.S. economy, the improvement is set to continue.
 Hiring activity continues to increase as the economy gains speed. However, employers are finding fewer qualified applicants for their top positions. Even when multiple qualified candidates materialize, selecting among them is feeling more like gambling than science. Hiring managers today are hungry for ways to confidently screen out candidates.
In fact, while most job seekers spend hours crafting a perfect resume, professional recruiters often don’t even look beyond the contact information. Instead, they opt to take a professional history through an interview.
“Resume and cover letter advice has become so ubiquitous that candidates are following the same unwritten rules. Rejecting resumes that fail to fit the mold exactly becomes an easy way for hiring managers to trim a stack of resumes,” says Rob Romaine, president of MRINetwork. “By the end, there is a small pool of candidates who simply put the right polish on their job search. But it’s a filtering process that doesn’t take into account the qualities that actually cause someone to positively contribute to an organization.”
The recent trend of interviewers requesting to see private social media profiles of candidates doesn’t stem from an interest in violating a candidate’s privacy. It’s the fallout of a talent market that has been coached and homogenized to a point where employers are desperate to find not just what makes one qualified candidate better than the other, but even just what makes them different.
“Today, a social media profile that is clear of content that gives an interviewer pause is as likely to mean the profile has been sanitized as anything else, which makes looking at them virtually meaningless,” says Romaine. “While even the most detailed profile is going to provide little insight into how a candidate solves problems, overcomes challenges, or would interact with a team. These are the qualities that make A-players and they are qualities that are infinitely harder to screen for.”
One important role outside recruiters can serve in the search process is their ability to interact with candidates outside the normal candidate-employer relationship. Agency recruiters will often interact with a candidate for months or sometimes years before sending them on an interview and will know many of their colleagues in a similar way. It gives the recruiter a much broader understanding of the candidate from which to evaluate how they will fit with an organization.
“Going online for 15 minutes can help to eliminate a candidate, but it does little to highlight the positive attributes a candidate might bring. Conversely, interview techniques, like having candidates participate in a long-form group meeting with several members of a team might be time intensive, but can help to highlight someone who would thrive in an organization,” notes Romaine. “While moving quickly once a top candidate has been identified is important, vetting a candidate using shortcuts that don’t actually connect to performance or cultural fit is counterproductive.”
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| Notable Global Events | |
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 Germany’s unemployment rate fell to a two-decade low in March, slipping to 6.7 percent, beating economist forecasts. Experts took the improvement as a positive sign for efforts to counter the European debt crisis.
A report by the Saudi American Bank Group projects UAE government investment in non-oil-related sectors would offset any slowdown in oil revenues and provide for robust growth for the country in the coming year.
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| Spotlight on the BRIC Economies | |
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Growth of the Next Decade
More than a decade later, Brazil, Russia, India, and China—the BRICs—have seen their influence in the world continue to grow. In 2001, the BRICs represented just 9 percent of the global economy. Today, they already represent nearly 18 percent.
So far, the biggest error in O’Neill’s thinking is the rate at which the BRICs would expand. In a follow-up paper in 2003, two of O’Neill’s colleagues projected the BRICs would surpass the G7 by 2037. By 2009, that figure was revised to 2027, and today economists are simply saying, “and maybe even sooner.”
The impetus for O’Neill’s projection a decade ago, though, wasn’t Brazil’s skyrocketing commodity prices, or China’s growing domestic markets, or Russia’s ballooning petroleum revenue. He saw the primary growth vehicle of these countries as their talent markets. Of the group, Russia is the lightweight with the world’s 8th largest population—143 million people. Collectively, BRIC countries comprise more than 40 percent of the world’s population.
More important than the sheer numbers, however, are the moves toward adding worker efficiency and upward mobility. China has gone from being a place to manufacture cheap, low-cost products to becoming one of the most efficient places in the world to not just manufacture, but also design high-tech electronics. Brazil has gone from having notorious income disparity to having a swelling middle class that is starting to bank, purchase luxuries, and plan vacations for the very first time.
What started off as an almost off-hand acronym in a research paper a decade ago has transformed into a term that defines the economic superpowers-in-waiting. In 2009, leaders of the four countries held the first of what has become an annual summit of BRIC leaders and, in 2010, South Africa became a member of the organization now referred to as BRICS.
As an organization of just five countries, though, BRICS is unique in that the members share neither geographical, cultural, political, or even economic heritage. By contrast, when the Group of 7 was formed in 1976, Japan was its only member from outside of Europe or North America.
As much of the West plans for modest growth over the coming years, BRICS represents economies of opportunity in which investment and development is happening to a large degree and where new sources—and demands—for talent are likely to emerge.
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| Spotlight on Oregon | |
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State Sees Slow but Steady Recovery
Last year, President Barack Obama put in an appearance at a groundbreaking ceremony for a $6 billion Intel manufacturing facility in Oregon. The world’s largest chipmaker is currently the largest private employer in the state, accounting for nearly 21 percent of all personal income and 20 percent of all employment in Washington County.
The new D1X fabrication facility is also the single largest construction project in the history of the state. “Right now the three largest building cranes in the world are right here in Portland,” says Peter Monsanto, managing partner at Management Recruiters of Portland.
That’s good news for a region that has been hit especially hard during the recent recession. Oregon’s economy has now begun to show encouraging signs, even though employment isn’t expected to pick up significantly until 2013. But, although Oregon probably won’t recover all the jobs it has lost since 2007 until 2014, the private sector gained 38,000 jobs last year, up 2.9 percent from 2010.
Over the past two-and-a-half years, the number of employed Oregonians has increased a little more than 60,000, while the number of unemployed has declined by nearly 53,000. The fact that the decline in unemployment has been matched by an even bigger increase in the number of employed workers is the biggest reason for the state’s declining unemployment rate.
“Virtually all of the economic indicators are pointing up,” says Monsanto. “The flow of positive economic news continues to gain traction and provide hope for a better 2012.” He notes, for example, that the number of building permits issued in February increased by 34 percent, and points to the construction of a new Walmart in southeast Portland, a further indicator of improvement in the building industry.
In addition to construction, sizeable gains are being seen in information technology, professional and business services, education, health care, and leisure and hospitality. Much of the growth is coming from small to midsize companies, where business owners and managers say the improved economic outlook affirms the increased activity they’re starting to see in their industries.
“The impact of Oregon’s wine industry on the economy has grown tremendously over the past five years,” says Monsanto. “A spurt of investment in the industry from 2005 to 2008 boosted acreage, the number of wineries and industry employment. Despite the severe recession, efforts to improve marketing and quality have paid off with increased revenues and a broadening of markets.”
In the manufacturing arena, A&K Development Co., a Eugene company that designs and manufactures equipment for processing crops, especially corn, also is seeing strength in exports, including a recent $2.5 million order from a single customer in Brazil. The company has annual revenue of more than $10 million and about 60 employees.
Royal Caribbean’s Springfield call center, which now has almost 600 employees, contributed to gains in employment. The cruise line hired 205 employees at the end of last year, more than the 180 hires the company had planned to make.
And as Oregon continues its steady recovery progress, it can also take pride in its recent designation as number one in the share of its workers – 5.8 percent – who regularly commute by bicycle to their jobs.
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