New Workforce - The Weblog of New Equities

Keeping the lines open to talent

itzBig Blog comments on an age-old conundrum in the relationship between candidates and recruiters: "Why don't you call me anymore?"

Most of us have been there before. You know you’re right for the job, you’ve done the prep work, you’ve communicated with the recruiter every step of the way, and you even hit it off with the hiring manager. Then, as though you’ve become contagious, no one wants anything to do with you anymore.

Understandably, this leaves many candidates feeling baffled. It also goes a long way in furthering the “Us vs. Them” attitude that many candidates take on their searches. They accept the belief that recruiters and hiring managers are simply out to get them.

What happens? The post goes on to explain that it can be due to changes in the hiring company; or that they're just not ready to hire; or, more likely, another candidate walked through the door who was a better fit; or hey, maybe they're just not that into you.

But these explanations all beg the obvious question: what about basic professional courtesy? In our conversations with working consultants who deal with staffing firms, we hear the complaint all too often: "They were really hot on me, then suddenly I heard nothing from them." Recruiters and headhunters often remind candidates that the recruiter is working for the client, not the candidate and attention therefore goes to the client's priorities. If a particular client is hot on a candidate to fill an open requirement, then so is the recruiter. If the client decides to go in a different direction, or wants to pursue a different candidate the recruiter moves on. After all, time is money and who has time to handhold everyone? Nothing personal, just business, right?

It may be business, but it's a dysfunctional way of doing business that assumes the candidate (aka the "talent") has no intrinsinc worth outside of the immediate context of this particular requirement, and can be discarded like an old shoe if things don't work out. Aside from being just bad manners, it's also bad business, as the post in itzBig underscores:

We believe that this situation can be rectified. Instead of taking on the “silent treatment,” it would be effective for both recruiter and candidate to look into the resons why the company went a different way. This enables a candidate to see where they might have been lacking in experience or skills and it gives them the chance to focus on those areas. It also keeps recruiters in touch with candidates that have at least garnered the interest of employers. One missed opportunity shouldn’t bring the candidate/recruiter relationship to a close.

New Equities developed its consultant-centric staffing model precisely because of our philosophical belief that the value we bring to our clients is our relationship with the best talent. Even outstanding candidates are not going to be a fit for every requirement or project, and people who may be rejected in one context may be ideal in another. Why end that relationship prematurely? And why treat a fellow professional like a disposable component that no longer fits and has therefore outlived its usefulmess, when it takes only a few minutes to give some feedback?

As we move from a buyer's market in talent during the first half of this decade into a seller's market for what may well be the next few decades, that talent will simply refuse to do business with companies who treat them as commodities. Their first loyalty will be to themselves and their own professional development, but that loyalty will extend to the people in their network who help them further their careers.  Successful staffing firms will need to start according candidates the same priority and courtesy as they would hiring managers. True, the hiring manager may be the paying customer, but it is the consultant who is actually the "product" that is being paid for and thus cannot be taken for granted. As the Baby Boom retires and the pool of available talent shrinks, organizations who deal in providing access to talent, whether permanent or contract, will find that they ignore that reality at their own peril.

New Equities has organized itself around the concept of  "Talent Communities", targeting the specific skill sets (e.g. project managers, Java developers, business analysts) and industry expertise (banking/insurance, manufactuing, retail) important to our clients in specific geographies. Each Talent Community has a dedicated manager called a "Consultant Agent" who builds and maintain relationships with the consultants in the community and the client managers who hire that talent.

Conducting business within the New Equities framework and philsophy means taking a proactive approach to finding good people, rather than the typically reactive approach of filling a req and moving on. It means keeping community members in the loop through phone calls, emails, newsletters, events, and blogs and online discussions. It means understanding what consultants want -- what kinds of projects they prefer, what skills they want to develop, what kind of work experience they are looking for -- and finding ways to help them advance their career goals. It means working hard on behalf of consultants already on projects, getting ahead of the curve to find the next assignment before the current one winds down.

In short, it means looking at the staffing business as a network of relationships rather than a series of transactions. It is definitely more time-consuming than the traditional approach, but it results in a better fit between each consultant's capabilities and work style and the needs of a particular client or project. Viewed in conventional business terms, this equation is a no-brainer: taking the time to get the product right yields greater customer satisfaction. Ironic that so many in the "people business" seem reluctant to invest the time in getting to know the people who make or break that business. 

Google's quest for the elusive talent algorithm

The folks at Google are working to craft an algorithm that helps them predict which prospective employees will thrive in the company's often-chaotic corporate culture:

Google has always wanted to hire people with straight-A report cards and double 800s on their SATs. Now, like an Ivy League school, it is starting to look for more well-rounded candidates, like those who have published books or started their own clubs.

Desperate to hire more engineers and sales representatives to staff its rapidly growing search and advertising business, Google — in typical eccentric fashion — has created an automated way to search for talent among the more than 100,000 job applications it receives each month. It is starting to ask job applicants to fill out an elaborate online survey that explores their attitudes, behavior, personality and biographical details going back to high school.

The questions range from the age when applicants first got excited about computers to whether they have ever tutored or ever established a nonprofit organization.

The answers are fed into a series of formulas created by Google’s mathematicians that calculate a score — from zero to 100 — meant to predict how well a person will fit into its chaotic and competitive culture.

Google is very serious about cracking the code as to what prefigures a successful employee. And it's finding there is more than one answer. For example, the company has traditionally looked for candidates with high academic achievement, but is now finding there are other factors:

“Sometimes too much schooling will be a detriment to you in your job,” Dr. Carlisle said, adding that not all of the more than 600 people with doctorates at Google are equally well suited to their current assignments.

Indeed, there was no single factor that seemed to find the top workers for every single job title. (And pet ownership did not seem to be a useful predictor of anything.) But Dr. Carlisle was able to create several surveys that he believed would help find candidates in several areas — engineering, sales, finance, and human resources. Currently about 15 percent of applicants take the survey; it will be used for all applicants starting this month.

It will be interesting to see whether Google can completely automate the selection process to the point where the candidate interview becomes a mere formality. That might be efficient, especially given volume of applicants Google must weed through (a nice problem to have!), but it seems rather impersonal for a company that prides itself on its corporate culture and values.

At New Equities, our philosophy is to build a strong relationship with the consultants in our talent communties, on the basis that we expect to work with them long-term over multiple assignments. To that end, we spend a lot of time up front in the qualification process so that we are sure we understand each person's unique abilities, career goals and work preferences. After all, if someone prefers 3-month assignments, it makes no sense to pressure that individual to accept a yearlong engagement. Or, if someone has been a successful Business Analyst but is now looking to work as a Project Manager, we will bring those kinds of opportunities to their attention, or look for hybrid BA/PM roles that are in line with that individual's stated career goals.

Obviously, technology plays a role in finding the right talent for a particular need, but there is no subsitute for knowing what people are good at and what they want to do professionally. Metrics and algorithms are useful predictors, but in the long run, relationships may matter more.

(Hat tip: Pajamas Media)

Great expectations

Information Week looks ahead to the 2007 IT job market.

Survey: IT pros are "job flirts"

A recent UK survey found that a large percentage of IT professionals are constantly on the lookout for the next opportunity:

The "Work in Progress: Jobseekers survey", carried out by polling firm Loudhouse Research, surveyed over 1,000 UK workers across the UK and found that nearly half (48 per cent) of workers in IT have applied for a job or registered with a recruitment agency in the past 12 months. Despite this, over two-thirds (68 per cent) reckon they will still be in the same job 12 months from now.

According to the study, IT employees are knowledgeable about what they look for in a new job and are intent on finding companies that can offer the best deal. However, money was not necessarily the main priority for job seekers.

Top factors that attract job seekers to a new company or role are interesting or challenging work (89 per cent) and friendly environment (84 per cent).

This is consistent with our own findings at New Equities, based on surveys and roundtable discussions with consultants (both those who work for us and those who don't). Getting the "best deal" is important, but the intangibles such as job satisfaction and cultural fit are also key. And - being listened to was something consultants highly valued and sought in their work environment. Not surprising, but apparently a much rarer occurrence than most of us would think.

All of this points to the looming challenges of 21st century workforce management: how to find the best talent, and how to retain that talent (and the knowledge of those workers). These are actually age-old questions, but they take on a new urgency in the IT industry, as the qualified pool of talent ages and the next generation of potential IT workers, spooked by fresh memories of the recent tech recesssion, opts for other career paths.

Company loyalty is not entirely a thing of the past, but it has to be constantly earned and the bar is set much higher than it was a decade ago. For firms that hire consultants on an ongoing basis, it means adopting a more "consultant-centric" outlook that works from a starting point of trying to understand what consultants want out of their careers and making an honest effort to deliver value in those areas.

India's IT skills gap

Think offshoring jobs to India will address the coming IT labor shortage? Think again:

Business leaders have warned that India's information technology (IT) industry is heading towards a severe shortage of highly-skilled manpower.

They say India will not be able to achieve its targeted growth rates if the issue is not tackled immediately.

Young engineers and college graduates lack necessary skills, a conference in the city of Hyderabad was told.

Software industry body Nasscom has warned that India faces a shortfall of half a million skilled workers by 2010.

More evidence pointing to the development of a strong and persistent job market for career IT professionals.

Hot summer, hot IT job market

Information Week reports that the job market is heating up for tech pros: "Tech Worker Survey Shows Happy Days are Here Again".

"It's hot out there right now for tech pros," says Kevin Knaul a Hudson VP. Fueling the confidence of tech pros is heavy demand by employers. "There is definitely more demand than supply right now," he says. "It's a struggle to keep up," he says.

Especially hot are those with skills in Web services, .Net, Java and ERP. "All the major ERP vendors are updating their products this year," driving the need for those pros, says Knaul.

Recall that only a short time ago, the IT industry was singing the blues. Now a new dynamic has taken over:

Boosting tech worker confidence was optimism about personal finances—despite rising summer fuel costs—as well as a high level of job satisfaction. The number of employees who rated their finances as excellent or good rose 4 points in July to 56%. There was also a 7 point increase to 49% in the number of workers who indicated their financial situation was improving. Seventy four percent of tech workers said they were happy with their jobs in July, up from 71% in June.

Of course, from the perspective of a hiring manager, this is yet another confirmation of the coming IT labor shortage that has been predicted since 2003, and that will only deepen as workforce undergoes major demographic shifts.

The hourglass workforce

FastCompany has seen the Future, and it looks like an hourglass:

To get a sense of what lies ahead, consider a simple demographic tool: the "population pyramid." Imagine that we took all of the people in a given population and stacked them up by age, putting all the infants at the bottom and all the centenarians up top. For most stable, peacetime societies, the resulting figure would look like a pyramid, with the youngest people at the base and the oldest people up at the tip. And indeed, that is exactly what you see today in a place like India--a perfectly sloped pyramid with lots and lots of babies at the bottom and a handful of the ancient. By contrast, in what passes for a demographic joke (given our fondness for Fritos and Cinnabon), the current U.S. pyramid looks like an overweight contestant on The Biggest Loser, with the giant baby boom billowing out from its midsection.

Starting in the next decade, however, our flabby pyramid is quickly going to slim down. It will assume the form of an hourglass, with the largest number of older people in our society's history, the quasi-retired baby boomers, up top, and the largest generation of young people since the boomers--the millennials, or echo boomers--at the bottom. The beleaguered generation-Xers will form the "pinched waist" in the middle.

This hourglass demographic has major implications for the workforce. In fact, the impending retirement of the Baby Boom generation looms large in the consciousness of workforce planners, as it gives rise to two major challenges for employers:

1. Finding quality workers - With the Boomers exiting the scene, there will be many more jobs in the economy than people to fill them. This projection holds even accounting for the jobs that go offshore. This holds true even assuming that many Boomers will continue to work due to an unwillingness or inability to retire. Workforce experts are predicting a "War for Talent". Some say it's already upon us.
2. Reducing knowledge loss - Job mobility is already an established phenomenon in the workforce. The old model of working for a single employer until you got your gold watch went out decades ago. As the Boomers cycle out, organizations will leak knowledge like a sieve.

What to do about it? At New Equities, our view is that a new workforce model is needed, one that dwells less on meaningless distinctions between "permanent" and "contract" employees, and focuses instead on an organization's relationship with mission-critical talent, regardless of its current location or status. We'll be returning to this topic again and again, as we expect it to be front and center for any organization concerned about attracting and retaining qualified workers.

(Hat tip: Praba)

Outsourcing gets outsourced

In the comments section of an earlier post, New Equities consultant Rajah Chacko calls our attention to an amusing series of Dilbert comics that ran last week:

Asok, the intern, has his job outsourced to India. The irony of Asok coming from India is not lost. Today's (6/1/06) comic comes full circle.

The comic punchline Rajah references above can be found here.

And once again, life imitates Dilbert, but with an ironic twist. This week, Information Week's Patricia Keefe points out that outsourcing has indeed come full circle, as even India goes offshore to meet the market demand for talent. The outsourcers are now themselves outsourcing. (What do we call this phenomenon -- "off-offshoring"?)

Dubbed "reverse outsourcing," the effort involves both opening offices in other countries and hiring foreigners to work in India (see Marianne McGee's recent blog asking whether IT pros would consider moving to India to move up the career ladder, for a range of perspective from InformationWeek readers on that idea).

Now much of this hiring supposedly won't be done in the U.S. That's not surprising - Indian firms are under the same cost pressures as are U.S. and other western companies, and they are looking at rising salaries for local workers given the fierce competition for their services. But they will hire some Americans, and that trend is expected to grow. It will be interesting to see whether that sparks a mini price war or helps to ratchet up salaries a bit - at least in some jobs - on both sides of the ocean.

In the same post, Keefe links to an item on a recent study by American Sentinel University that suggests the impact of offshoring on the US job market may be overhyped, especially as regards jobs requiring a combination of technical skills and business knowledge. This is in line with an earlier study done by the McKinsey Global Institute on the impact of offshoring service sector jobs.

In fact, according to another linked article, half of the IT workforce is confident enough to be looking to the next job:

"Tech employment is on a steady uptick," says Kevin Knaul, VP at staffing firm Hudson, another firm that also today released its own new survey data showing that job confidence among IT workers was up significantly in May compared with last May.

Demand for talent in "niche pockets," like business analysis and project management, has been up for a while, he says. But in the second quarter, "there's been enough pockets seeing an increase that there's an overall improvement" in the general IT employment market, says Knaul. This makes IT pros feeling confident about looking for different and better opportunities, he says.

Being in the business of putting IT consultants to work, we agree with the above analysis. Far from a loss of IT jobs, we see a coming boom in the IT job market, which will present both opportunities and challenges for employers and staffing firms alike. The traditional reactive approach to finding and hiring  talent is inherently inefficient, and neither consultants nor the companies who benefit from their expertise are well served by it. The process, roles and  people involved are changing, and the realization is setting in that staying ahead of the curve will require new models for workforce management that provide greater flexibility and better serve the goals of the people who do the work.

New Equities gets it, and we're on it. In fact, it's what we do.

Survey: IT "still a good way to make a buck"

Information Week has released its Annual Salary Survey for the IT industry:

Information technology is still a good way to make a buck, with the average manager making $99,000 and the average staffer $73,000, according to InformationWeek Research's National IT Salary Survey.

Top-paying gigs include data mining and data warehouse, human resources IT, Web infrastructure, ERP, and enterprise application integration. But it's not just about the money:

Job stability, challenge and responsibility, and flexible work schedules all are cited by more than half of respondents as factors that matter most to them about their jobs; base pay is cited by 48%.

Some of those factors have the potential to conflict with others. Consultants frequently have more earning potential than full-time employees, but may be more or less concerned about stability, depending on their comfort level with finding the next project. On the other hand, IT consultants consistently tell us they like the flexibility, variety and challenge inherent in working contract assignments. At New Equities, our goal is for our consultants to have it all -- the stability of full-time employment with the flexibility of working as a consultant. Oh, and the money as well.

UPDATE: Speaking of money, find out what you're worth in various markets using Information Week's Salary calculator. (Sorry, it doesn't have an option for hourly consulting rates).

Follow the IT money in 2006

The Top 10 IT projects of 2006, according to Baseline Magazine, include CRM, Collaboration, Supply Chain Management, and Business Analytics, among others. Plan accordingly.