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What’s Hot & What’s Not
May 2008 Edition
Compiled by Mark C. Healy
Recent reports and happenings that affect your world. Rocket-Hire keeps an ear to the ground to learn what’s really going on in recruitment and hiring.
Hot or Not?
As the job outlook gets increasingly complex, recruiters and HR leaders are facing a favorable hiring situation for some areas and intense competition for the most desirable candidates in tight, growing sectors. For example, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that unemployment increased most in the West and South, but reports from South Carolina suggest optimism and job growth. As usual, the most recent analyses of employment in Spring `08 share the opinion that hot fields like engineering, accounting, various sectors of IT and high tech, and health care are still characterized by long-term labor shortages and an overall tight market for qualified professional and leadership talent.
Hot
The latest round of consolidation in the HR and Recruiting vendor space has Taleo acquiring Vurv Software. The publicly held Taleo is thought of as one of the longtime players in the ATS and candidate management software market, and Vurv has gained ground in name recognition as a well-regarded provider of talent management products and expertise. As Rocket-Hire has been predicting for the last few years, consulting firms large and small are buying each other, and are more able to offer a complete sourcing, recruitment, selection and placement solution for their client organizations. The future will bring increased sophistication and cost savings via links to onboarding and development systems as well as simpler integration with other HR software tools.
Not
A recent report to the US Senate by the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) concluded that web-based hiring tools have not just failed to improve the recruitment and hiring process: They’ve caused more harm than good. In a scathing account of Office of Personnel Management (OPM) technology, the MSPB blames an over-reliance on technology and poorly designed systems. The worst failings appear to be poor communication with job applicants and months of delay in the selection and placement of candidates into key government roles.
For more depressing news about the failure of Federal hiring strategies, check out this link.
Hot
The trend toward greater acceptance of in-depth candidate prescreening and assessment is underscored by the findings of Rocket-Hire’s Fifth Annual Online Screening and Assessment Usage Survey. This latest incarnation of our ongoing tracking of the real-world implementation of prescreening and assessment reveals increased adoption of many types of assessments, including personality inventories and online collection of candidate histories and qualifications. Moreover, the continued tendency of companies to neglect a formal evaluation or ROI study of their recruitment and hiring processes continues unabated. For a summary of the survey data, check out the article on ERE.net. For a more complete discussion of the findings, check out the May 2008 Issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.
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