Yes, everybody is optimistic about 2010. We certainly are, staffing companies have probably seen the worst possible year, and that is past now. It is interesting to know what the businesses owners and staffing company leaders have to say about the economy and the way the coming year will be a change compared to last year. Let us start a new week with some quotes and let us unquote them over the next few days:

“Clearly, we believe that the worst is over,” says Yonas Prising, executive VP of Manpower and president of Manpower’s Americas operations. “The question now is: What does the comeback look like? There is nothing to tell us that we would see a roaring comeback, but [instead] moderate growth.”

“The goal is to eventually be at 60% professional staffing and 40% general staffing. We have plenty of room to expand. I hope we fill up every open seat we have over the next year. It would just be wonderful if that happened”—Krause, CEO of Spherion.

“We believe we can grow again in 2010 with focused execution even in a tough environment, in particular with our favorable business mix, which is about 70% physician-focused”—Mike Weinholtz, CEO of CHG Healthcare.

“We had never seen a recession of this magnitude before. We really had to change the way we looked at our business. –Same as above person.

“Some companies want to just receive staff augmentation services, and they have little process in place,” Yoh explains. “Others may prefer an enterprise solution with technology, service level agreements, etc. Our goal is to deliver the solution that best fits the culture and desires of the customer.”—Chairman of Philadelphia Yoh.

“Some companies want to just receive staff augmentation services, and they have little process in place,” Yoh explains. “Others may prefer an enterprise solution with technology, service level agreements, etc. Our goal is to deliver the solution that best fits the culture and desires of the customer.”— Amy Langer, partner in SALO LLC.

“Our company received GSA certification in October 2009 and plans to start providing staffing services to the federal government this year”– Amar Panchal, CEO of Akraya, a Sunnyvale CA-based information technology staffing firm.

Let us ponder upon the above quotes for a moment and discuss the challenges that may be faced when everybody is so optimistic about the things to come.

I  have said it before many times that RPO is slowly moving towards a phase where people have to start innovating to find means of spotting talent. We have seen how social media and other sources of hiring is gaining pace. But when it comes to recruiting “types” of employment, we are going to see an increased number of employment types that are being put to use by the organizations.  This is not something new, but it is moving at a rate where we can say that it is going to become a necessity rather than being a luxury.

I was reading the above comment on an article that speaks about non-traditional ways of employment over the last few years and somebody pointed out that that industry has already moved towards few of the solutions without even getting observed. The number of contingent workforce that is employed by the organizations have scaled up to high levels, and except in cases where employers are trying to protect some intellectual property, the trend will continue to be so.

2010 will see a continuous rise in Temp, contract, and consulting work. More and more factors are pointing towards the fact that such will be the case. More and more organizations are seeking employers with miscellaneous and multiple skill sets. I myself have experienced this situation for the company I work for, and it will continue to be so. Both the facts are connected—since such employees who have multiple skills and such people would like to use their experience to work for more people. On the other hand, companies would want to employ such people more, and hence they would even agree for a temporary assignment for such people.

This fact directly relates to the fact more and more young people are ready to downsize their life styles and ready to offer skills which do not put them under pressure. Employers and contingent labor companies who provide services to hire temp workers have to keep these things in mind when trying to source talent. We believe there will be at least 2x times temp hiring in 2010 then 2009.

What is happening to the economy? “It is improving all the time”—you would hear someone say. But one forgets to remind people of what exactly is up with the awareness. The year 2009 will be known for its notorious nature, even the Swine flu decided to flock its wings this year. But I noticed one thing: there was a tremendous awareness about the whole thing—People knew what it is and how to tackle that. Whether it be the TV, newspapers, blogs or the websites—everyone was educated about it, and hence there was no panic.

I am not here to say that there are not enough blogs and economic columns that deal with the topic (the recession), but it seems very few of them made the effort to COMMUNICATE the news to the general public. People have been found to be confused about the state of affairs; lots of them have even resigned to the fact that it can ever get any better. Worse, even the people in the industry who are working everyday don’t seem to be very savvy about the downturn, its causes, and their responsibilities to deal with the same. There was an interesting blog-post I came across, which talks about how employers should communicate with the employees and attain a higher level of awareness inside the organizations. But, the article was too employee-centric, and I would like to say that the communication levels we are talking about goes beyond just the employers and the employees. It has to pierce the general public, you and me, who are looking for jobs, people who are trying to get into the job scene—it is them who need to be communicated to more.

If you ask” “whose job is it?” I would day it is the job of the organizations, and it is surprising that organizations are consumed so much by their own businesses, that they forget that they have got to play better roles in the societies. The discussion can get us into “moral values in businesses”, but we would rather want to stay away from that. We already know one company who has done lots for the public, but it is never given the credit because it makes the most of the money too.

I want you to think about few things about the topic and tell us your views about how organizations can attain a better level of communication, by getting into the public and telling them about what’s up with the economy. The blog is open to commenting for the next 7 days, and the comments will be discussed in the further blogs.

Happy new years from the Sai Family, good luck.

With increase in staff-cuts (I’m literally tired of using this word throughout this year!!), the process that has taken the most hit is onboarding (I think I have heard of it before). It was just 2-3 weeks back when I had seen my friend being laid off from a leading telecommunications company (can’t really disclose the name), because he was underperforming (the guy had few years of relevant experience behind him). The candidate had been in the company for just 2 weeks!! It was startling, and it had me thinking, I was asking myself if the employers were giving some chance to the candidate to prove himself, or the entire affair was seen as extracting something out of the candidate with in minutes of hiring him.

It is not surprising that the way organizations have been behaving in this market has been leading to people being opinionated about the companies, directly affecting the brand in the process. The turnover rates have kept on increasing through out the year, people are surprised, yes—but they won’t be as soon as somebody points out these facts. Onboarding is something that has been practiced for decades in the organizations, yet, when it came to a bad situation, we all have panicked. My friend in case is a case in point, when we all know that on boarding reduces the turnover rate in the first 30-90 days, and increases the productivity, lessons are to be learnt!! (Over usage of exclamations was necessary to stress the point).

Onboarding is more of a “cultural” process that is handled differently by different organizations in different countries, it is way organizations welcome new people into their business, and try to realize the company goals at the same time. The concept of organization being a family has taken a blow in the recent times. One can retort saying that companies are here to run business and are not running non-profit organizations trying to help people. But that is my point, following processes which can benefit and hence profit in the long term is something we should stick to—success of an employee is success of organization, how can we relent on the basics?

The year has seen numerous examples where similar things have happened. Recruiting companies are oblivious to most of the situations I guess. Recruiting companies like us face similar problems when it comes to our own staff. Have recruiters asked the right questions? There are enough things for us to ponder upon, let’s hope we get them right in the coming year.

The lessons are there for taking, it seems companies have already taken few and are living by the lessons. The economy, although not in same magnitude, did take a hit in early 1990’s, and then again in 2001. The economy didn’t take much time to recover, but the trend then made managers hire lots of temp workers in the beginning of “opening-up”, and then the managers suddenly started hiring lots of permanent workers within the first few months. It is not the same case this time though.

As we have seen before, the hiring has stepped up, and has been rising for quite sometime now.  But the market is still relying on temp workers. The reluctance to do so marks the prudence of how the managers are approaching the hiring process as well as the pick-up points. Clearly, the aim of the companies is to fall back on smaller staff if things don’t smoothen out (just in case). The demand and supply graph has always been an indicator of how the companies and managers think about the situation, but the rise in demand is not necessarily sign of future demands, and hence the organizations are approaching the whole process in a different way this time around.

And that is not bad in the long term one would say. In the past, companies have employed people indiscriminately, and then fired them when the demand did not meet their expectations. Temp-workers are getting paid after all, and most of the temp-workers are highly skilled and get paid more then they would get paid normally. And formally speaking, they contribute to the figures of labor statistics.

The companies now seem to value employee relations more than ever now. Some of the top companies are employing the laid off employees again as temp workers. The conditions is uncertain though, as temp-workers are not free to spend that much, hence the demand is low than it would be if the permanent employment is more.

Given the nature of surge that has already taken place, one expects better things in the future, but the mixture of caution with aggression is not a bad thing at all. Only time can tell whether this mechanism would last, but the temp agencies are certainly busy and it keeps companies like us very busy.