Hiring Trends, Skills Gaps, and Where the Workers Are   After the great recession (2007 - 2009 - officially), the economy's recovery began in 2010, and has been gaining strength since then. Here are some key statistics that show were we are are now, and where critical skills gaps remain that could impact our economic growth.   KEY INSIGHTS   · Hiring strong and stable through April – In April, hiring across the U.S. was 19.8% higher than in April 2017. Seasonally-adjusted hiring, nationally, was 2.1% higher in April than in March 2018. The industries with the biggest year-over-year hiring increases in April were aerospace, automotive, and transportation...

Paid Family Leave - The Hot New Recruiting Tool?   Only three states — California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island — currently offer paid family and medical leave.RI will join them effective July. 1, 2018, after passing the Paid Family Leave Benefits Law during the 2016 session.    Ten others (CT, DC, HI, ME, MA, OR, VT, WA, WI) offer unpaid medical leave, while 11 other states offer school related parental leave.   A recent article by Lydia Dishman, with Fast Company, looks at the trend and what it means to families, companies, and recruiters.   "When her 17-year old son needed partial hospitalization for symptoms arising from his Asperger’s syndrome, Marcia Haugstad, a...

Employee Development is One of the Most Important Things You Can Do For Your Workforce Nikos Adriotis of efront, a management systems provider, recently wrote about the value of workforce development. Perhaps value isn't the proper way to look at it. In today's tight labor market, it would likely be more appropriate to look at workforce develop as critical to the success of your business. The numbers don't lie.   As many as 71% of Millennials expect to leave their jobs in the next two years because they’re unhappy with how their leadership skills are being developed. 59% of Millennials, 44% of Gen Xers and 41% of baby boomers say opportunities to...

PREPARE YOUR CANDIDATES FOR SUCCESS! Finding the right candidate for any job placement can be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. After all the effort, the last thing you want to happen is a bad interview performance.   All your work can go up in smoke if the candidate isn't properly prepared. Although you may not be able to accurately predict each and every question he or she may be asked, you certainly can prepare them for pretty-much any contingency.    One of the most highly recommended methods to give your candidate the edge is the STAR method. The STAR method is: S – Situation, background set the scene T – Task...

Are you about to make a BIG mistake?   Research Shows You May Have Already Done It ...  In a recent Quartz at Work article, Corinne Purtill discusses some interesting research that follows up the premises first promoted by Laurence J. Peter, in his 1969 business book parody The Peter Principle, (Why Things Always Go Wrong).   Peter took aim at an “ever-present, pestiferous nuisance” found in industries of all sorts: managerial incompetence. The explanation for it, Peter wrote, was his titular principle—that any employee in a hierarchy will rise to the level of his or her own incompetence. (“This Means You!” the book noted cheerily in a subhead.)   Organizations, Peter and...