I had the good fortune of attending the OnRec / Kennedy Information recruiting conference in Chicago this week. I was both a panelist on a session about how employers can use mobile marketing for recruiting and CollegeRecruiter.com had a booth in the exhibit room.
The session was well attended and seemed to be well received by the attendees. Most had little to no experience with cell phone text messaging, keyword advertising, mobile web sites, or any other components of mobile marketing. Virtually all, however, seemed to realize that the future of on-line recruiting will be on web-enabled mobile phones.
It is probably of no surprise to anyone involved in college recruiting that new college graduates who had internships prior to or even after graduation fared far better in their efforts to find permanent employment after graduation than did their counterparts who didn't intern.
The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) just released its 2009 Student Survey. The report shows that just 19.7 percent of the Class of 2009 who had applied for jobs had one by the end of April. As dismal as that one in five percent may be, it was even worse for those who had not completed an internship. Just 14 percent of those landed jobs as of April as compared to 23 percent of their classmates who had interned. In other words, completing an internship prior to graduation made members of this year's class 64 percent more likely to land a permanent job by graduation.
My wife and I have three kids, one of which attends an elementary school and the other two attend a middle school. Both schools recently notified the Minnesota Department of Health and the parents that at least five percent of students were out sick the same day with "flu-like symptoms." In other words, at least one in twenty kids probably has the H1N1 virus as the seasonal flu has yet to make its appearance here. And note that I wrote "at least," because it is likely that many parents are reporting their kids absent due to illness and not providing the information about fever, cough, etc. required to include the kids in the "flu-like symptoms" bucket. How many more than one in twenty is anyone's guess, but based on what my kids are telling me it seems that it is more like 10 percent.
If 10 percent of your employees were to call in sick at the same time and for a week, what impact would that have on your productivity? What if 10 percent of your key employees were out sick for a week and then another 10 percent the next week and then another 10 percent the next week?
Continue reading "Lack of Preparation for H1N1 and Other Disasters" »
In a sign that companies are preparing now to meet post-recession talent needs, nearly one-third of professionals in recruiting and human resources roles say that hiring is already underway, according to a new survey. Eighty percent of these professionals on the frontlines of hiring activity expect that recovery recruiting will begin by the second quarter of 2010.
The survey - conducted by talentRISE, a Chicago-based talent acquisition and talent management consulting company - also found that 85 percent of respondents believe that improving processes for identifying great talent is a top priority in the near future. This indicates that companies are now looking beyond just filling empty seats to ensure that they are hiring the best people, with the best skills, in the most effective manner possible, said Carl Kutsmode, Senior Partner at talentRISE. "As the economy recovers, companies know that they need to hire top talent ahead of their competition," Kutsmode said. "But many, having downsized their human resources function dramatically during these past two years, today lack the process, technology and people to attract and recruit top talent. Unwilling to re-build internal capabilities, they are looking for solutions that require few investments and little commitment."
Continue reading "Hiring for the Rebound Has Already Begun: New Survey" »
Economic indicators are always tricky as some are seemingly inconsistent. My favorite example in the recruiting space are the payroll and unemployment numbers. They often seem to move in opposite directions and therefore, to some, seem to be inconsistent. Yet they measure very different aspects so they can move in opposite directions and be consistent. Payroll numbers measure the number of people who are working while unemployment numbers measure not the number of people who are unemployed but the number of people who are actively searching for employment. During economic recoveries, people who weren't actively searching often re-start their searches so the unemployment numbers tend to increase before declining due to many finding work and it is during that decline that payroll numbers tend to increase.
The numbers that we're seeing at CollegeRecruiter.com are something like that. We just ended one of the best Septembers that we've ever seen, at least as far as revenues go. Yet we just posted a rather gloomy looking press release that indicates that the number of job posting ads on our site declined in almost every state in the country. How can both be true? Well, one reason is that the bulk of our revenues come from targeted email and cell phone text messaging campaigns and those don't show up in the job posting counts. Employers who purchase targeted email or cell phone text messaging campaigns tend to be hiring dozens, hundreds, or thousands of candidates or at least are planning to do so in the near future. Employers who rely exclusively on job posting ads tend to be recruiting one or two people right away. Postings simply don't generate the quantity or quality of response that targeted email and cell phone text messaging campaigns generate.
So, if you're a glass half empty kind of person then pour some whiskey into your morning coffee and tell yourself that there are potentially some very dark days ahead. On the other hand, if you're a glass half full kind of person, then this is some pretty good news at the start of this week and near the start of the new month.
They graduated into one of the toughest job markets in years, so what types of jobs were graduates of the college Class of 2009 most likely to be offered? Teaching positions topped the list, according to a new report published by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).
NACE's Fall 2009 Salary Survey report lists teaching, management trainee, financial/treasury analysis, consulting, and sales positions as the top five jobs offered to 2009 graduates. "The types of positions offered to new grads has remained fairly stable over the past five years," says Marilyn Mackes, NACE executive director. "In general, employers value graduates who have these the skills required for these types of positions, regardless of the economy."
Continue reading "Top Jobs for College Graduating Class of 2009" »
The economy took a hit: So too did starting salary offers to new college graduates, according to a new report published by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).
NACE's Fall 2009 Salary Survey report shows that Class of 2009 bachelor's degree graduates earned an average starting salary offer of $48,633--1.2 percent below the average $49,224 their Class of 2008 counterparts received.
Continue reading "Class of 2009 Paid Less Than Class of 2008" »
Dr. Phil Gardner of Michigan State University asked if CollegeRecruiter.com could help him (and the college recruiting community) collect some information from employers of college students and recent graduates for his annual survey. I strongly encourage all employers, whether they're clients or CollegeRecruiter.com or not yet client of CollegeRecruiter.com (wink, wink), to complete this survey. If you do, he'll be happy to send a copy of the compiled results to you.
Here is the message from Dr. Gardner:
Continue reading "Employers: Tell Candidates What You Think in This Survey" »
Paul Bell, our manager of e-learning, and I just returned from a three day trip to south Florida to meet with a vendor, attend the annual member meeting for the International Association of Employment Web Sites, and walk through the exhibitors room at the ERE fall 2009 recruiting conference.
Shortly after we walked into the exhibitor's room at ERE, Paul and I bumped into a few old friends: Chris Russell of AllCountyJobs.com, Ethan Bloomfield of JobTarget, and Mark Ezra of Honesty Online. They graciously accepted our request to be interviewed. Interestingly, all five of us agreed that the job market, job board industry, and recruiting industry have stabilized and that we're all seeing slow and steady improvements in the health of each.
Continue reading "Optimism About Job Market at ERE Fall 2009 Recruiting Conference" »
Anyone who has ever been unemployed or even under employed can appreciate the frustration that builds and needs to be vented. One of the places where that frustration is now being vented is against the job board industry. Many, although I don't think most, pundits believe that job boards are dead. According to Peter Weddle of the International Association of Employment Web Sites, "a recent Google search of the phrase "job boards are dead" identified 31,900,000 documents. Allowing for the search engine's mistakes (for example, including the Knock 'em Dead Job Search Guide), that's still a lot of fatal references to an industry that just five years ago was considered the state-of-the-art in employment."
Peter and I agree that the drastic change of opinion about our industry is in large part due to the repeated publication of bogus statistics. For example, the CareerXroads Source of Hire Survey found that job boards only account for 10 to 15 percent of hires made by employers yet those employers spend a far larger share of their sourcing budget on job boards.
The rules of back-to-school shopping have officially changed: buy only what you need, check for coupons and sales before hitting the stores, and, if you can find the perfect computer at the right price, grab it! According to the National Retail Federation's 2009 Back to School Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey, conducted by BIGresearch, the average family with students in grades Kindergarten through 12 is expected to spend $548.72 on school merchandise, a decline of 7.7 percent from $594.24 in 2008. Although total spending on back-to-college and back-to-school is down, it is still anticipated to total $47.50 billion.
According to the survey, the economy is having a major impact on back-to-school spending as four out of five Americans (85%) have made some changes to back-to-school plans this year as a result. Some of those changes impact spending, with 56.2 percent of back-to-school shoppers hunting for sales more often, 49.6 percent planning to spend less overall, 41.7 percent purchasing more store brand/generic products and 40.0 percent are planning to increase their use of coupons. Others say the economy has impacted lifestyle decisions, with 11.4 percent saying children will cut back on extracurricular activities or sports and 5.7 percent saying that the economy is impacting whether their children will attend a private or public school.
Continue reading "Back-to-College Spending Down Due to Recession" »
We've been involved in college recruiting since 1995 so we've seen a lot of fads and trends. One of the more interesting trends -- I don't see this as a fad -- is the growth in the number of students who pay for internships. That's right. Students are paying for internships rather than being paid to work as interns.
The New York Times recently ran an interesting article about this trend. The article, entitled, "Unpaid Work, But They Pay for the Privilege," did a nice job of laying out both sides of the issue with a number of quotes from college career service office professionals criticizing the practice and a number of quotes from people like Eric Normington, the chief marketing officer of University of Dreams. They're a leader in the industry and advertise "a guaranteed internship placement, eight weeks of summer housing, five meals a week, seminars and tours around New York City for $7,999. It has a full-time staff of 45, and says it placed 1,600 student interns in 13 cities around the world this year, charging up to $9,450 for a program in London and as little as $5,499 in Costa Rica."
Continue reading "Paid Internships Are Booming...But Students Are Paying Rather Than Being Paid" »
Now I've heard just about everything.Trina Thompson, who may win the award for making the stupidest career move ever, has sued her alma mater, Monroe College, for $70,000. Her claim? She's been unable to find a job since she graduated with an information technology degree in April and she blames the school's Office of Career Advancement (a/k/a career service office) for not trying hard enough to find her a job.
Trina's mother -- surprise, surprise -- is pretty vocal in all of this and completely backs up her precious daughter and completely slams the college. Pathetic.
Continue reading "Jobless Grad Sues College for $70k - Claims Career Office Didn't Help Enough" »
Which new college graduates are faring best when it comes to salary in the current economy? According to a new report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, engineers are pulling down the highest starting salaries.
NACE's Summer 2009 Salary Survey report shows that engineering disciplines account for four of the five disciplines getting the highest starting salary offers. The average starting salary offers by engineering discipline are:
Continue reading "Highest Paying College Major is Engineering" »
The legend of the fountain of youth occurs in many cultures going back centuries. One aspect often associated with youthfulness is a sense of optimism about the future. The Kenexa Research Institute (KRI) asked, "Is there any evidence to support the notion that being young brings with it a sense of optimism about the future or is the notion of youthful optimism just another one of those myths with little substance?"
A recent study conducted by KRI measured Employee Confidence in the workplace by contrasting younger (18-29 year olds) and older workers' (50+ year olds) levels of confidence. The study was conducted between June 2008 and June 2009.
Continue reading "Gen Y Workers More Optimistic Than Gen X'ers and Baby Boomers" »
Returning from the eduWEB 2009 Conference in Chicago, I recorded on my Flip Video some thoughts about what college hiring looks like for the fall.
Many clients of CollegeRecruiter.com are planning to ramp up their hiring of students for internships and recent graduates for entry-level jobs but the healthcare reform being pushed by Barack Obama's administration and Congress could kill those hiring plans.
Continue reading "How Healthcare Reform May Kill Fall 2009 College Hiring" »
Despite the poor job market, the the college Class of 2009 hasn't seen a drop-off in starting salaries. The average starting salary offer for new college graduates now stands at $49,307. That's off less than one percent from the average $49,693 that 2008 graduates posted last year at this time.
The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) Summer 2009 Salary Survey report also shows that, as a group, graduates with bachelor's degrees in the business disciplines saw their average offer nudge up less than one percent to $47,239. Accounting majors did better than the average, and posted a 1.9 percent increase for an average offer of $48,993.
Continue reading "College Grads of 2009 Making Same Money As Grads of 2008" »
One of my saddest days at work over the past year occurred early last fall when one of my favorite client contacts was let go by her employer not because of poor performance or anything of the sort but instead because her employer was hard hit by the recession and needed to quickly reduce the number of people it employed or it would likely go out-of-business and then everyone there would be out-of-work. There's never a good time to lose a job but it is particularly hard in a recession. Unfortunately, that scenario repeated itself many times over the fall and into 2009 with many organizations terminating the employment of many recruiters and other human resource professionals. One of the saddest days occurred when one of our sales people called me and told me that she had to cancel one of her sales calls for the day because she was supposed to speak with the three people in the employer's college relations team but two of them were let go earlier that day.
Some of these people who have been laid-off have approached me for help in finding a new position and I've been able to help some but not most as there simply aren't all that many recruiting and other human resource positions available. But earlier today I spotted a position that looks great. One of our clients, Black & Veatch Corporation, is hiring a College Relations Leader for their Overland Park (suburban Kansas City) head office.
Continue reading "Job Opening for College Relations Leader" »
Recessions have a lot of similarities to coal mines. How? Well, think of college recruiting like the canaries that miners used to bring down into the mines with them. When there was trouble, the canaries were the first to know it. And when there's trouble in the labor market, those of us in college recruiting know it first as the trend that has emerged over the years has been that the last hired is typically the first fired but entry-level candidates are also the first hired back because they tend to be cheaper than those with years of experience.
I just read an interesting study from SurveyU and youth marketing agency Campus Media Group. According to their study, "college students remain optimistic about their career prospects. In fact, nearly two out of three (64%) are confident that they will be able to start their careers in whatever area they choose. In contrast, only one in four (25%) believe that the economy is in such bad shape that it doesn't make sense to start their careers now." The data was collected in February 2008 by from 1,000 college students ages 17-26.
Continue reading "2/3 College Students Confident About Career Prospects" »
College students and their parents see higher education as a critical investment in the future, but according to a national study of college-going families, many overlook the cost of college as they select their school and do not consider post-graduation income as they decide whether and how much to borrow to pay for college.
The study of 1,400 undergraduate students and parents, "How America Pays for College," reveals that:
Continue reading "Cost Not a Factor When Choosing College" »
I've been hearing rumblings from a number of college career service office professionals, employer representatives, and vendors that this week's National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) 2009 annual conference should be a great learning experience for all but there will be far fewer in attendance than in previous years. The reason? The economy has crushed the travel budgets for many organizations.
One career service office director told me that she lost her entire travel budget for the 2009-10 school year and expects to have nothing in her travel budget for 2010-11 either. Nevertheless, I will see her on Wednesday as she is flying in for the day and attending at her own expense. That's the kind of dedication to your craft that you don't see often enough in any profession.
The lowly mobile phone (remember when we all called them cellular phones?) is on the verge of transforming our society. Think back, way back, to 1994. Few had heard of the Internet and those who used it were almost all government or university employees and a sprinkling of early adopters using services such as Prodigy. But then along came Netscape, Yahoo, Google, and billions of web sites and the world was changed. Porn sites and on-line gambling are changes that many would be happy to do without, but the vast majority agree that the Internet has made the world a better informed, more tolerant, and smaller place.
But holding us back is the need to use a computer in order to properly access the Internet. I love the iPhone but let's not confuse the ability to see a web page properly on your mobile device with the ability to properly access the Internet. Few would trade their laptop or desktop computers for an iPhone if that was the only way they could get their work done. So what happens next? What happens when devices like the iPhone and the networks to which they connect actually become good enough that we prefer to access the Internet on our mobile devices? What happens when we can access virtually all of the information ever created by anyone with a device that slips into our pocket and is always with us?
Continue reading "Mobile Devices Are Our Future. Is That Good or Bad?" »
The class of 2009 is graduating into one of the worst job markets in history. Although the class of 2008 had it rough as we were in the early days of a recession, their experiences were not nearly as difficult as their 2009 counterparts.
The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) just completed its 2009 Student Survey. It shows that just 19.7 percent of 2009 graduates who applied for a job actually have one. In comparison, 51 percent of those graduating in 2007 and 26 percent of those graduating in 2008 who had applied for a job had one in hand by the time of graduation.
Continue reading "27 Percent of 2009 Grads Plan to Go to Grad School" »
Starting salary offers to the college Class of 2009 have fallen slightly compared to offers received by the Class of 2008, according to new report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).
According to the Spring 2009 issue of NACE's Salary Survey report, the overall average offer to a 2009 bachelor's degree graduate stands at $48,515--down 2.2 percent from the average of $49,624 posted in Spring 2008.
Continue reading "College Class of 2009 Sees Lower Starting Salary Offers" »
In response to recent reports that job seekers are struggling to find jobs, CollegeRecruiter.com compiled lists of the five best and worst states for finding internships and entry level jobs. The data was gathered through a state-by-state search on the site; the lists will be updated every month to help students and entry level job candidates know how many opportunities are available to them and in which states. The results? Very encouraging.
We were very pleased to see that almost every state, large and small, recorded significant increases in the number of internships and entry-level job openings. There has certainly been a lot of doom-and-gloom related to the economy over the past year but an increase in the number of advertised job openings means that more employers are finding it difficult to attract the talent they need to fill the openings they have. Historically, increased entry-level hiring is one of the earliest signs that an economy in recession is recovering.
For more details, see the press release that we just posted.
Employers expect to increase the pay they offer college students for internships, according to a new study conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
Overall, employers taking part in NACE's 2009 Experiential Education Survey say they will offer bachelor's-degree-level interns an average hourly wage of $17.13--up 4.9 percent from the average they offered last year's interns.
Continue reading "Employers Hiring Fewer Interns But Paying Them More" »
Employers are cutting the number of college students they will offer internship opportunities to by nearly 21 percent. Employers taking part in the National Association of Colleges and Employer's 2009 Experiential Education Survey cited budget cuts, decreased workloads, and company downsizing and restructuring as among the top reasons for bringing in 20.7 percent fewer interns this year than last year.
"The drop-off in internship opportunities mirrors what we're seeing in terms of full-time hiring for new college graduates," says Marilyn Mackes, NACE executive director.
In February, NACE released a report showing employers expected to cut new college graduate hires by nearly 22 percent compared to last year.
Continue reading "It Isn't Just Stocks Which Are Dropping: Internships Down 21 Percent" »
It appears from some conversations occurring on a college recruiting discussion list to which I subscribe that about 40 percent of college seniors have not yet begun to search for a job to go to upon graduation. That's a very similar percentage to what we saw last year, but the world has clearly changed since last year.
Why is the Class of 2009 choosing to behave like the Class of 2008? I haven't seen any surveys explaining the motivations for the late start by those who graduated this year versus the motivations for those graduating this year, but I suspect their motivations are quite different. Last year's job market was pretty strong, so many students graduating then knew they could wait and did. This year's job market is terribly weak, so many students graduating this year are paralyzed or so pessimistic about their employment opportunities that they've given up before they've even started.
Jeff Horwich of Minnesota Public Radio led a roundtable discussion with a group of 10 college seniors to better understand their thoughts on what it is like to graduate into the worst job market since the Great Depression. I was fortunate enough to be a part of the discussion when the show was recorded yesterday evening.
Almost all of the students were pessimistic about their job opportunities but apparently their views were not representative of the views of many other students at campuses from around the state. Want to learn more? You'll need to listen to the show.
The edited version will be broadcast tomorrow at noon Central on Midday with Gary Eichten. For those outside of the MPR listening area, listen on-line.
Employers expect to hire 22 percent fewer new grads from the college Class of 2009 than they actually hired from the Class of 2008. The new projections in the National Association of Colleges and Employer's Job Outlook 2009 Spring Update override those employers made back in the fall, when hiring projections looked flat.
"Earlier, employers indicated that they expected to keep their new college graduate hiring levels even with last year," says Marilyn Mackes, NACE executive director. "Our current survey shows that college hiring is as affected by the economy as other types of hiring."
Continue reading "College Hiring Down 22 Percent for Class of 2009" »
Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads provides some excellent advice for organizations which are considering rescinding job offers or deferring start dates for the class of 2009 a/k/a Members of the Facebook Generation:
Continue reading "Thinking About Rescinding Job Offers? Be Very, Very Careful." »
There's little movement in starting salary offers to the college Class of 2009 compared to offers received by the Class of 2008, according to a new report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).
The overall average salary offer made to 2009 bachelor's degree graduates is $49,353--nearly identical to the 2008 average of $49,300. The Winter 2009 issue of NACE's Salary Survey shows that the stagnation is even evident when looking at individual majors in the disciplines.
Continue reading "Salary Offers for Class of 2009 Are Flat: The News Could be Worse" »
A new study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) shows that, for new college graduates in this tight economy, becoming the perfect job candidate is a tall order.
"Today's employers have an extensive list of attributes, skills, and qualities they look for in their job candidates," says Marilyn Mackes, NACE executive director. "And that's assuming that the candidate meets the employer's basic criteria--including having the requisite major, course work, and GPA."
Continue reading "What makes for the "perfect" job candidate in a tight employment market?" »
Internships, co-ops, apprenticeships and other such systems have existed for hundreds of years. They help young adults get the experience they need in order to be hired to do interesting, meaningful work by a quality employer that pays fairly. Students are no different from those of us who have been in the workforce for years or even decades. We all want to do work for which we are competent, which we value, and which is of interest to us.
The problem right now, however, for students is that the economy is in shambles. Far fewer employers are hiring interns this year than in years past and those who are hiring are being deluged by applications. With fewer positions and more applicants, more and more employers have re-thought their internship programs. So what adjustments should be made? The Intern Queen recently posted a great list:
Continue reading "How the Weak Economy Has Impacted Internships" »
One of the interesting developments to come out of the convergence of rapidly increasing costs of education and the tanking job market is that more and more high school seniors are going to be more pragmatic in their choice of which college to attend. Friends of ours are proud that their bright son chose to go to a well regarded two-year community college so that he could accumulate fully transferable college credits at a relatively low cost while he figures out what he wants to do with his life...or at least the first few years after graduating from college. At the age of 18, the kid is showing wisdom. Why throw $15,000 per year at a good four-year college when you'll end up in the same place as someone who spends $3,000 per year at the two-year school, transfers, and graduates with the same diploma?
Will more and more high school seniors have the same epiphany. I sure hope so. The cost of a four-year degree revolts me. I've said it before and I'll say it again: when I graduated from college 20 years ago, the most that any of my friends had to trade-off in order to take a low paid but incredibly rewarding job was an inability to live a fancy lifestyle. No awesome apartment. No cool new car. But regardless of their student loan balance they could afford to take any job they wanted. No more.
Continue reading "Will Job Hunting With a Two-Year Degree Become Advantageous?" »
Given the terrible job market and the worse news that seems to come out almost every day, we all need to find a way to have a few laughs now and then. This should do the trick for just about anyone:
I just received an email from an employer who is going through some layoffs. A manager wants to hire some interns but is considering hiring them on an unpaid rather than paid basis. They wanted to know if I felt that there will be more unpaid internships due to the weak economy.
I definitely foresee a higher percentage of internships being unpaid both employers will want to save some money, students won't have as many options, and employers will know the students don't have as many options.
As the economy strengthens, employers will understand that they're being penny wise and pound foolish by trying to save a few thousand dollars by not paying their interns as it is productivity that drives organizations, not labor savings. The better the caliber of your workforce, the better your profitability.
Virtually everyone who has anything to do with today's college students and recent graduates knows that the vast majority of them use Facebook. A recent study by eROI provides proof of that:
A number of recent studies have reported that the use of email to reach college students is a dying marketing channel because the students are primarily using email to sign up for email alerts from sites such as CollegeRecruiter.com and to sign up with social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn.
Our targeted email product is our biggest product by revenue so this is an area that we know a lot about. We've long questioned the validity of these studies as we've seen no drop-off in the response rate to the employment-related emails that we deliver to candidates who opt-in to receive the emails. A new study by eROI supports our experience and refutes the theory that students only use email for alerts and to register with social networking sites.
Continue reading "Students Use Email for More Than Just Social Networking" »
During past recessions, many high school seniors elected to go to college and many college seniors elected to go to graduate school rather than face almost certain unemployment. This recession appears to be different.
Maureen Sharib, Telephone Names Sourcer/Trainer, drew my attention to a recent survey of 371 private institutions by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. According to the survey, two-thirds of the schools said they were greatly concerned about preventing a decline in enrollment. There are several reasons for the drop-off:
Continue reading "College Not the Refuge from Recession It Used to Be" »
I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Minnesota Public Radio's Jeff Horwich for his In The Loop show about the job market this year for college seniors. It is, without a doubt, the most difficult job market for college seniors in decades.
My portion of the show starts 7 minutes and 14 seconds in, but listen to it all of the way through. As is always the case, Jeff's show manages to be both informative and entertaining at the same time.
Continue reading "College senior? At least the feds are hiring." »
We keep close tabs on how college students and recent graduates use email because our biggest product by revenue is our targeted email campaign product. The trends are interesting and not well understood by many of the employers with whom we speak.
A common misconception by the employers is that the best email address for students is the address provided to them by their schools. Wrong. That is probably the worst address to use when trying to deliver emails. In addition to many of the schools having anti-spam filters that are lousy because they incorrectly identify a lot of legitimate email as spam, the systems are often archaic and sometimes even require the students to login in the on-campus computer labs. Today's students have a mobile lifestyle and are used to much more advanced email systems which are web-based. They simply don't tolerate archaic technology, nor should they. Boston College understands this and just became one of the first colleges in the nation to abandon its email system and is now helping its students shift over to Gmail.
Continue reading "College Students Not Using School Email Accounts" »
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recently announced what many involved in college recruiting have suspected for months: Americans between 20 and 29 years old have the highest unemployment rate of any age group. The national unemployment rate is 6.7 per cent. For those aged 25 to 29, the unemployment rate rose from five percent in November 2007 to a whopping 7.3 per cent in November 2008. Even worse was the unemployment rate for those between 20 and 24 years of age. In November 2007 it was 7.7 percent but in November 2008 it had climbed to 10.4 percent.
So what are we hearing? Most employers are telling us that they've scaled back their plans to hire more college students and recent graduates this year and instead the overall hiring plans seem to be roughly flat. In other words, an employer that a year ago hired 500 people may have planned as recently as a few months ago to hire 600 this year but they've likely since scaled that back to the same 500 as they hired last year. In addition, those same employers are deferring their offers so they can be more certain about what the economy will be like next spring and beyond and when they do extend those offers they're extending fewer of them. That's partially due to the scaled back hiring but also because candidates are far more likely this year to accept the first offer they receive so employers are getting a higher percentage of acceptances.
It is no secrets that career fairs have seen better days. With more and more employers directing candidates to apply on-line, more and more candidates are avoiding the hassles and stress of attending in-person job fairs because they're largely unproductive. You wait forever to get in and speak with a recruiter but get only a few minutes and perhaps just seconds of their time. They listen, nod, and tell you to apply at their web site. So why even bother going?
Perhaps the failures of this sourcing tool explain why Monster.com and its partner National Career Fairs seem to have greatly pumped up their volume of unsolicited, bulk, commercial emails. I've gone from rarely receiving emails about career fairs just weeks ago to multiple emails a day. Have a look at my spam folder for today.
One email every once in a while I get. But 16 in a day and still seven hours to go before this day is officially over? Ridiculous.
Is it just me or are these guys spamming the heck out of everyone who moves? I don't have a resume on Monster.com and have never opted in for their mailings. Same with National Career Fairs. I pity those who actually did give permission to these organizations. If I'm getting 16 without having provided my opt-in, I can't even imagine how many emails must be going to those who did provide their opt-in.
There are a lot of employers out there today who are faced with a difficult predicament: they're receiving enough qualified applicants for their current openings or they're not hiring or they're laying off staff. In that kind of environment, who would advice them to continue to spend money on recruitment advertising? Well, I would.
Employers who slashed their college recruitment spending in the 2000-03 recession lived to regret it. Actually, some didn't live to regret it in part because they were penny wise and pound foolish.
Continue reading "Don't Change Your Strategy When Faced With a Tactical Problem" »
I just returned from the Kennedy Information 2008 annual conference in sunny Orlando. Perhaps it was the very pleasant weather or something in the water, but all of the doom-and-gloom in the economy didn't seem to have much of an impact on the vendors who exhibited at this year's conference.
We had our first booth there ever and plan to return next year. We weren't overwhelmed by the business that we generated but were quite pleased. We were able to get some valuable face time with some clients, have a private dinner with a large client that should become much larger, and meet with 15 to 20 potential clients. We also had the pleasure of speaking with dozens of representatives from other organizations whose hiring needs are not a good fit for our college job board and that's fine as you never know when the people that we met on Monday or Tuesday may change places of employment and then be in a position where we can help them with their staffing needs. Or they may stay with their current organizations and those organizations may change and start to hire college students for internships or recent graduates for entry level jobs.
Continue reading "Kennedy Information Surprisingly Successful for Exhibitors" »
The National Association of Colleges and Employers periodically surveys its employer members, most of which are large organizations, about their plans to hire college students for internships and recent graduates for entry-level jobs. A year ago, those employers planned to increase their hiring by 16 percent. That number later dropped to about five percent and is now at just 1.6 percent.
"Overall, hiring looks flat for now and some employers are indicating some movement to cut back," says Marilyn Mackes, NACE executive director. "In August, approximately one-third of employers said they were going to trim their college hiring; in our current poll, however, 52 percent said they were going to adjust their college hiring downward."
As we enter the final days before the Tuesday, November 4th elections, I am flabbergasted at how brainwashed the voting public has become. Case in point: Joe the Plumber. Now I realize that stories about real people or situations make arguments more persuasive. That's why I try to work in as many real-life examples into my recruiting webinars and other presentations as possible. But the stories should make sense, shouldn't they? And if they don't make sense, then shouldn't the story teller suffer for failing to respect their audience?
The latest example is the use by the McCain campaign of Joe (the Plumber) Wurzelbacher, the plumber who reportedly isn't licensed as a plumber, has unpaid back taxes, and thinks that it is un-American to "spread the wealth." Give me a break. Spreading the wealth has always been part of the American way, as it is in every other nation and community. Humans and many animals "spread the wealth" in every society because doing so makes us all better off. We "spread the wealth" when we pay taxes to fund schools, roads, police, fire, military, and every other function of government. We "spread the wealth" when we use governmental services. We "spread the wealth" in our places of work as some days we are more productive than those around us and other days they are more productive than are we. We "spread the wealth" in our families, as seen in families where one spouse is the primary moneymaker while the other primarily takes care of raising the kids.
The yo-yo economy that we're suffering through has everyone running scared right from the highest levels of largest organizations the lowest levels of small organizations. Everyone either is or should be concerned with what is happening to the economy as a whole and how those happenings impact their own families.
Our organization is no different and I wouldn't expect it to be any different. Some of our employees are actually optimistic and have increased their 401k purchases. Other employees have paused those investments. Some employees look at our sales and profits to-date for 2008 and see that we're in the same ballpark for both as we were in 2007. Sales are a little down yet the number of large, pending proposals is higher than it was a year ago and gross profits are up.
Today one of my employees suggested that I better communicate to all of our employees how we're doing. The suggestion was a great one and I did so right away. Our culture is to be open, transparent, and honest. If we're struggling, I want our employees to know. If we're kickin' butt, I want our employees to know. But to only tell them when we're struggling or only tell them when we're kickin' butt isn't open enough, isn't transparent enough, and isn't honest enough for us. Is it for your organization?
There aren't too many heroes in the financial crisis currently gripping Wall Street and, as the politicians are too fond of saying, Main Street. But one of the few is Wells Fargo & Co. Why? Because they've proven time and time again that they're one of the best managed banks in the country.
I was interviewed by a journalist a few days ago and she asked me for examples of industries where college students should look for internships and recent graduates should look for entry level jobs. It was a difficult question to answer given the severity of the crisis and the lack of hiring by most organizations right now -- even healthcare is seeing layoffs. My answer was that the federal government looks like a safe harbor right now for those who want to maximize their chance of being hired while minimizing their chance of being laid off. But I should have pushed back on the question a bit and reminded her that job seekers don't apply to work for an industry. They apply to work for an organization and that there are many very good organizations which are hiring.
I had the opportunity to sit down prior to the International Association of Employment Web Sites (IAEWS) conference with Jonathan Goodman, Vice President of Business & Membership Development, and Mark Willaman, President and Founder, of FISHER VISTA, LLC / HRmarketer.com.
For part of the meeting, Jonathan recorded his interview with me during which we discussed the economy, the future of the job board industry, the conference, and some assorted other odds and ends. HRMarketer did a really nice job cleaning up the audio. If only they could have made some of my answers a little more intelligible.
There's no question that most college students prefer paid internships to unpaid internships. After all, not many people would prefer to do the same work for nothing than receive compensation for it. But what if you're a student and are weighing competing offers for an okay internship that is paid and a great internship which is unpaid. Which do you accept?
Students whose finances allow them to find a way -- any way -- to accept the unpaid internship should do so. The little compensation that they will likely receive from the paid internship will almost surely pale in comparison to the increased compensation they will receive upon graduation when they're able to convert that great internship into a great entry level job.
Despite the generally negative economy and decline in overall employment in the United States during the first quarter of 2008, job-seeking seniors found a relatively robust job market, according to results of NACE's 2008 Graduating Student Survey.
The survey, which was conducted February - April 2008, found:
The findings from NACE are consistent with what we at CollegeRecruiter.com have been hearing from the candidates using our site and our employer clients. There are many firms who are no longer hiring and some which are laying off but for every one of those there seems to be another organization that has started or increased their hiring of college students and recent graduates. The result is a flat job market as compared to 2007. Not up and not down but flat.
Fewer grads are reporting receiving multiple offers but they're also telling us that they're more inclined to accept the first offer they receive quickly so fewer grads are in a position to receive multiple offers. If the economy were stronger, they'd likely be more confident about holding out for the best match and therefore more likely to receive multiple offers.
At the end of the day, there seems to be equilibrium. There seems to be about the right number and quality of positions available for the students and grads who are properly seeking them. Note the use of the word "properly." When I hear from students who are really discouraged in their job hunt, I almost always learn that they are doing little to no networking and what networking they may be doing isn't really networking at all. They're hiding behind their computers and applying to advertised jobs day after day. When they do, ahem, network it is only to ask others to help them find a job. That isn't networking. Networking is about asking what you can do for others knowing that at some point some of them will do the same for you. But don't start off asking them to do you a favor.
The ten cities with the best combination of high starting salaries, low costs of living, and strong employment markets are:
One of the beautifies of being a blogger and being an owner of the web site on which the blog is published is that you have a lot more flexibility about what you write than you would if you worked for a major daily newspaper and had editors looking over your shoulder every minute of the day. Of course, the content those publications put out is slightly better than what I generate.
I just got off of a phone meeting where we were discussing sales strategies and one of the clients that came up was a large energy company. For those who have been holed up in a cave for the past couple of years, energy prices are, ahem, somewhat higher than they were. And the profits and hiring by those same energy companies are also higher. Yet the energy company that we discussed was only interested in using our killer cell phone text messaging (SMS) product to help them hire college students and recent graduates if the price was $100 or less. Ain't going to happen.
Job applications from college students to federal community service programs such as Teach for America are way, way up. The explanations vary, but it is clear that far more of today's college students are applying for positions with AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, Teach for America, and other such organizations than in years past.
According to the Star Tribune, "Teach For America, a two-year program that places college graduates in low-performing schools around the country, the number of applicants fell in 2007 but this year jumped 36 percent to nearly 25,000 would-be teachers. Only 3,700 are placed. When the program began in 1990, 2,500 students applied."
Continue reading "Community Service Applications Way, Way Up" »
Late June and July are great seasons for college job boards to connect with their largest employer clients and help them plan and budget for the upcoming college hiring year. One of the big changes that I've noticed this year is that, finally, only a minority of the employers with which we've been talking regard job postings as being cutting edge.
The bulk of the larger employers with which we've been speaking correctly believe that job postings are efficient and effective but if they need to hire dozens, hundreds, or even thousands then a handful of job postings will help but not nearly enough. To get the people they need, these employers are embracing our two biggest products by revenue: targeted email campaigns and cell phone text messaging. I've also been watching with pleasure as many of these same employers embrace products offered by other organizations such as recruitment videos, podcasts, video interviewing, and more.
We're moving into a brave new world here, folks. Some employers will make great use of these new opportunities and thrive. Others will stumble and get hurt. Those who stick to their old ways will fail.
It is amazing and most gratifying to hear employer after employer and client after client telling us that their organizations recognize the strategic value of a strong internship program and how they're taking steps to build or enhance their programs.
When we went live in 1996, about a quarter of the Fortune 500 employers had web sites, about as many had email, a small minority had formalized college recruiting programs, and virtually none had formalized internship programs. Now, all Fortune 500 employers have web sites and email and many have formalized college recruiting programs that include an internship program. Thank goodness.
College recruiting and internship programs are strategic and most leading employers today recognize that fact. They understand that their management and leadership ranks will be decimated by the retirement of their Baby Boomer employees unless those soon-to-be retirees are replaced now by Gen Y students and recent graduates. It will take years for today's hires to gain the experience that the departing Baby Boomers have accumulated so to expect today's hires to immediately be as productive is foolish. But to replace those retirees with lateral hires will be incredibly costly in terms of recruiting dollars and, perhaps even more significantly, the ability of the organization to control its own culture.
I attended the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) annual conference last year in Las Vegas and again this year in Chicago. Even though the Vegas metro is much smaller than the Chicago metro, the Vegas conference was much bigger than the Chicago conference.
I didn't go to the sessions and I don't know how many attendees SHRM had for the two conferences. I spent all of my time in the exhibition area so that I could get some great face time with clients, vendors, and partners. As wonderful as email and the phone are, nothing beats looking someone in the eye and figuring out how to better help each other.
So what was bigger about Vegas? The number of exhibitors. It took me 1.5 days last year to walk through the exhibit hall. This year it took about half that time. I'm in much better physical shape this year than I was last year but that's not it. I bet there were 30 to 40 percent fewer booths this year and some of the booths had nothing to do with human resources, such as one for Sleep Number beds and another for Mercedes cars.
Is SHRM hurting because of the economy? Or did the exhibitors expect Chicago to draw fewer attendees than Vegas? Or something else?
Less than a week ago I wrote that there have been exploding offers this year and will be more but there won't be as many as there were in the 2001-03 recession. An exploding offer is a job offer which an employer makes to a candidate, which the candidate accepts, and which the employer later rescinds usually because of changing economic conditions.
Today's Wall Street Journal includes an article about how a year ago law firms were falling all over each other to recruit and retain entry level lawyers for their summer associate programs (sort of like internship programs) and as first year associates (entry level lawyers). Now some of those same law firms are cutting back:
A job offer which is extended by an employer, accepted by a candidate, and then rescinded by the employer is often referred to as an exploding offer. Here today yet gone tomorrow.
There were a lot of exploding offers in the recession earlier this decade. College students who turned down great offers during the fall recruiting season in favor of even better offers were understandably devastated when spring rolled around and they received word that their employer had deferred their start date by months or sometimes even rescinded their job offer. Career service office professionals were livid and many banned the offending employers from conducting on-campus recruiting for a year or more. The lack of talent entering the management ranks of the employers seriously impaired and sometimes even crippled the employers five years later when the classes of 2001-03 would have been entering the ranks of middle and upper management.
Continue reading "Why Today's College Students Need Not Fear Exploding Offers" »
We recently surveyed job seekers and found that 64.1 percent of college students and recent graduates believing that it will take them three or fewer months to find a job if they were to start looking for a new job today. That level of pessimism is significantly stronger than it was in March when 73.5 percent expected to find a new job within three months or even February when 65 percent expected to find a new job within three months.
Anyone living outside of a cave or the Washington, D.C. beltway understands that there is a recession in the U.S. and that it is hurting those who are searching for a new job.
College students searching for internships and recent graduates hunting for entry level jobs are no exception. Although a healthy 59 percent of employers plan to hire college grads this spring and summer, that's 17 percent points down from a whopping 76 percent last year. In addition to the 59 percent, 29 percent aren't sure of their college hiring plans through the summer and that's nearly twice as many fence sitters as there were a year ago.
So is there any good news? Absolutely. Of the 59 percent who plan to hire, 73 percent plan to hire at least as many people as they did last year. That optimism is being met by the students as most members of the class of 2008 expect to receive at least two job offers upon graduation. The economy can't be all that bad if candidates are receiving multiple job offers.
Sources: Monster and RetiredBrains.com
Economists will tell you that a recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, but most people on the street will tell you that the economy is in recession when they and their neighbors fear losing their jobs and their ability to pay their bills so they spend less on just about everything other than essentials and defer those purchases as long as possible. So are we in a recession? I suppose it depends on the definition but I've felt for months that the U.S. is in a recession.
There is no question that we are in an economic slowdown and let's assume for sake of discussion that we are in a recession. What does that mean for college students seeking internships and recent college graduates hunting for entry level jobs and other career opportunities? The answer is that it doesn't mean as much as you might expect. According to Penelope Trunk, author of The Brazen Careerist,
The health of today's job market is not so much a function of economic indicators as it is a function of demographic trends. There is a huge shortage of employees. Baby Boomers are retiring and Generation X and Y are less able to replace the Baby Boomers than had been anticipated; employers receive fewer hours of work per person from post-Boomers because of their focus on family (Generation X) and entrepreneurship (Generation Y). Due to these factors, the employee shortage is increasing, and only a knock-down-drag-out recession will change this sunshine outlook for employees.
In other words, as the current trickle of Baby Boomers exiting the employment market and entering the world of retirement turns first into a flow and then into a flood, demand by employers for replacement workers will increase. There simply aren't nearly enough Gen X'ers to replace those Boomers so employers will need to further accelerate their hiring of Gen Y'ers. So today's college students and recent graduates should be able to look this recession in the eye and understand that it will inconvenience many of them but do serious harm to few of them. For unlike past recessions, the changing demographics of the workplace should ensure that this recession does far more damage to the psyche of the consumer than the wallet of the job seeker.
Last week's rumors of an acquisition by onTargetJobs of the RegionalHelpWanted.com network of job boards and Cupid.com dating site proved to be true. It seems that niche job boards are consolidated almost as fast as they can be added. I have a lot of respect for the people behind both onTargetJobs and RegionalHelpWanted so this was a deal that really caught my attention. I am very confident that together they will deliver even greater value to their clients.
The parties did not disclose an acquisition price, but reports indicate that RegionalHelpWanted had revenues of about $35 million and that onTargetJobs paid about $100 million.
We recently conducted a survey and found that job seekers are increasingly pessimistic about how many more months it will take them to find a new job. Unfortunately, I'm starting to see more support for their pessimism including a report that people who are unemployed are unemployed for longer periods of time now than they have been in the past.
I really hope that we're not heading into a long or deep recession. The economic indicators are really mixed right now. The housing market is down yet exports are up. The labor market is softening yet we're still adding more new jobs each month than we're losing. Consumer optimism is down yet spending is up. What does this all mean? Those with crystal balls step to the front but I suspect we're teetering on the edge of heading further into recession or coming out of a short, mild recessionary period.
A recession can be defined as "a significant decline in general economic activity extending over a period of time." Are we in one? Yes, I believe that we are. But because economists must look backwards in order to measure economic activity, we won't know whether we're in a recession, how severe it is, or when we've come out of it until after the fact.
Why do I feel we're in a recession? Before I answer that directly let me tell you a little joke about how you know when you're in a recession. You know that we're in a recession when your neighbor loses his job. You know that we're in a depression when you lose your job. And you know when we're in a recovery when the president loses his job.
Well, that's what I hear from too many hiring managers and recruiters when I speak with them by phone, trade emails, and at recruiting conferences. The hiring managers tend to fall into two groups:
Nice to see that a poll that we ran showed that college students who are hunting for internships and recent graduates who are looking for entry level jobs and other career opportunities are more optimistic in December than they were in November. Perhaps all of the doom and gloom in the mainstream media is overblown.
One of the skills that is critical to the success of any entrepreneur or intrapreneur is the ability to see around corners. That is, to be better able to predict the relevant future than your competitors. Those who have the skill are at a huge advantage as they are able to better position themselves and their organizations than are their competitors. Corporate recruiters who want to peer around the corner to see what practices will soon be popular need only look at what the various branches of the U.S. military do, including the U.S. Army.
For decades, the Army has used the promise of money for college as a recruiting tool. But starting this January, their message will change. Rather than promising tens of thousands of dollars in money for college, the Army will instead promise up to $40,000 towards the purchase of a home or the creation of a business. And rather than directing the messages at the potential enlistees, the Army will direct a significant portion of the messages at the parents and other adult "influencers" of the enlistees. "If you want to get a soldier, you have to go through mom, and moms want to know what kind of future their children will have when they leave the Army," Lt. Col. Jeff Sterling, the program's architect, told the Wall Street Journal.
Continue reading "Army Targets Influencers: Why Don't All Employers?" »
I recently read a note posted to a recruiting discussion list saying, in part, that candidates who have time to be active on social networking sites aren't working and aren't of interest to him. I couldn't disagree with the author more on this point.
I suspect that the author was thinking about the typical Baby Boomer or Gen X candidate when he was writing his post. But 95 percent (that's the actual number) of college students and recent graduates are active users of Facebook. As these candidates progress through their careers, they will continue to be active users of social networking sites because those sites are as much a part of their lives as is TV for Gen X'ers. Even the busiest of Gen X'ers watches TV and the same holds true for Gen Y'ers: even the busiest of them uses social networking sites.
Continue reading "Why Employers Need to Embrace Social Networking" »
One in four high school students in the United States drops out or otherwise fails to graduate, a percentage which is considerably higher than many people think. That discrepancy is due in large part to contradictory but less reliable statistics issued by many governmental and non-governmental agencies.
The less reliable statistics are based upon the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS) and the National Center for Education Statistics' Common Core of Data (CCD) surveys. The CPS shows recent drop-out rates at about 10 percent, down some 40 percent for this Gen Y versus the previous Gen X drop-out rates. The CCD shows that high school completion rates, which are the flip side of the drop-out rates, have stayed steady at about 75 percent for decades.
Continue reading "One Quarter of High School Students Drop-out" »
I'm pleased to announce the launch of a new monthly service, the CollegeRecruiter.com Job Seeker Confidence Index. Each month we'll poll hundreds of candidates to better understand their level of optimism about the job market. We'll use the same question and offer the same answer options each month so that we'll be able to understand, over time, whether candidates are becoming more or less optimistic about their prospects of finding a new internship, entry level job, or other career opportunity.
We just posted the results for November and they look quite good. Almost 75 percent of respondents believe that it will take them three or fewer months to find a new job.
Employers which are concerned about retention know that retention and job satisfaction go hand-in-hand. So a recent study about the job satisfaction reported by Millennials should give all employers some pause.
According to the Emerging Workforce Study conducted by staffing firm Spherion, only 34 percent of 18 to 24 year olds rate their current level of job satisfaction as very good or better. That's the lowest job satisfaction rate in among all age groups in the American workforce.
The low job satisfaction rates are very troubling as they lead to job hopping and that leads to lower productivity for employers, higher prices for consumers, and perhaps even less solid open ice checks in the NHL. Well, perhaps not that last issue, but that still should be a concern to us all.
Forty-eight percent of these Millennials indicated that they were likely to leave their employers within the next 12 months. And they don't see this job hopping as a negative. Some 61 percent said that they have increased their career potential by periodically changing jobs. Even though they're at the beginning of their careers, already 56 percent are employed in a field different from that in which they were employed when they first entered the workforce.
Open source software, including web sites, allow customers, vendors, partners, and other third parties to add onto or customize the software that your firm offers. Think Facebook. Until this past spring, Facebook was closed source so any modifications or enhancements to their web site needed to be done by their developers. Then they moved to open source and within weeks doubled their traffic. Why? Because their millions of users became even more engaged with Facebook because Facebook became even more relevant to the needs and wants of its individual users. Call it mass customization.
Now Google and some partner sites are getting in on the act in an apparent attempt to fight back against the massive traffic moving to Facebook. As amazing as it is, Facebook, which didn't exist just a few years ago, is now the sixth most popular web site in the world. Google and its partners are opening some of their source code to encourage third party developers to create applications that will be able to run on any web site anywhere in the world. So unlike Facebook's strategy, which allows third parties to develop software to run on Facebook, Google's strategy seems to be in line with the adage of a rising tide lifts all ships. The more sites that use these new apps, the more engaged we'll all be with those sites. And because so many commercial web sites, including CollegeRecruiter.com, use Google to sell at least some of their banner advertising inventory, those rising ships will generate more traffic which will generate more ad impressions for Google to sell.
So why do I feel that Gen Y is largely responsible for this? Because they're powerful advocates of transparency. You can see it in how they approach their careers. They're going to post their nasties to their Facebook and MySpace pages and if you as the employer don't like knowing that they get drunk on the weekends, too bad. That just means that you weren't a good fit for them anyway. If Gen Y doesn't like your site or some aspects of your site, they're going to modify it through your open source program or they're going to abandon you. Anyone remember Friendster? While it continues to be popular overseas, it was replaced by MySpace and now Facebook as the social networking site of choice by Gen Y. And that move was due in large part to Gen Y being able to customize their presence on MySpace and Facebook more than they could on Friendster.
Transparency. Scary but exciting. Embrace it or perish.
On-line social networking utility Facebook just received a $240 million investment from Microsoft for 1.6 percent of Facebook's stock. That values Facebook at some $15 billion. Wow. Keep in mind that this site didn't exist four years ago and was started by a few college kids in a dorm room at Harvard. Heck, they didn't even have their own web server initially as they stole space and bandwidth from Harvard.
So what does this mean for candidates? More of the same. Facebook and sites like it provide tremendous opportunities and threats to college students searching for internships and recent graduates hunting for entry level jobs and other opportunities. But any financial rationing that Facebook was experiencing will now disappear so it will now be more free than ever to market itself, enhance its infrastructure, hire more staff, enter into more partnerships. The investment will, in short, accelerate Facebook's already tremendously accelerated growth. Students, recent graduates, and other candidates will find Facebook even easier and more enjoyable to use.
Because Facebook has virtually 100 percent penetration on-campus and is expanding its reach into people who graduated a few years ago or even many years ago, look for the average age of its user to increase from the current 25 years of age. The risque photographs and other content that caused Gen X'ers and Baby Boomers to tut tut their Gen Y children and grandchildren will now creep into the profiles of those same Gen X'ers and Baby Boomers, although probably not to the same degree. Employers who winced at seeing content that they traditionally have self-shielded themselves from will see more and from a broader cross section of candidates. The days of not seeing the face of your candidate until the interview are long past, so employers who are still clinging to that quaint tool to fight racial, gender, and other forms of discrimination better find other arrows in their quivers because like it or not, they'll be seeing more and more of those photos from an increasingly broad range of candidates.
One of my biggest concerns for Gen Y has been the rapidly escalating cost of attending college and the resulting huge student loan burden that they have. As a Gen X'er, when I graduated from college, my friends and I had some financial pressures too but ours were quite different. When we graduated, we knew that if we took jobs in low paying fields such as public service that we would have to live in apartments, probably have roommates, and drive old, inexpensive cars. Flash forward a generation. Gen Y's loans are often twice and sometimes four or even more times as large. I hear stories of students with loan balances so high that their take home pay from public service jobs would be less than their student loan payments. Students with loans that large can't afford to take those jobs, and that's a significant problem for society.
Thankfully, the recently enacted College Cost Reduction and Access Act provides an important incentive for students to enter public service. The law contains a section called the Public Service Loan Foregiveness program, which will forgive what could be tens of thousands of dollars of school debt per student. Under the law, public service is defined to include a wide range of fields such as public health, public education, working for a non-profit organization, serving in law enforcement, or working as a public-interest lawyer. The Department of Education needs to issue regulations to properly define exactly what fields qualify.
Continue reading "Student Loan Laws Now Encourage Public Service" »
We can probably file this blog entry in the "this isn't quite news but it is still interesting" category. A few weeks ago, private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson announced a majority investment in on-line job board, Vault.com. My congratulations to both parties. I've long been a fan of Vault for the quality and quantity of employment-related content that they produce. We've also been around for about the same period of time. We went live 12 years ago. They followed a year later.
Just two short years ago, Vault laid off one third of its staff (25 people) in an effort to become profitable. I did some research on-line but wasn't surprised when I wasn't able to turn up any type of reliable profitability measurements for Vault. Is it profitable today? Probably. But it is certain that today, with its revenues reported to be $9.6 million, it is valued at $60 to $85 million. If so, that's a pretty rich revenue multiplier of 6.25 to 8.9 times as compared to some other niche job boards. For example, Dice Holdings, Inc., the owner of information technology niche job board Dice.com, is trading at 6.59 its annual revenues. All things being equal, a public traded company usually trades at a premium over privately held companies because investors prefer to be liquid.
Continue reading "Vault.com Acquired by Veronis Suhler Stevenson Private Equity Firm" »
Conventional wisdom holds that the more years of education that you have, the better off that you are. Now before we really get started, let me be absolutely clear. You would be hard pressed to find a bigger proponent of education than I am...even if that education does not translate into higher paychecks, more job satisfaction, or other benefits. Education is always a good thing. Always. Well, maybe not if you're only looking at the ability of a person in today's labor market to find and retain quality employment. Let me explain.
There seems to be three different job markets evolving in our country:
Talk with an economist and they'll recommend more and better education. Encourage all workers to improve their interpersonal and abstract thinking skills so that they'll move from the third to the first bucket. Discourage students from entering occupations where their work is largely routine even if completely intellectual like lower end computer programming. It has always been important for individuals to get a college or graduate school degree, but apparently it is now becoming just as important for them to get the right type of degree.
Perhaps it has something to do with the crisis we face over the rapidly escalating cost of higher education and the resulting crushing amounts of student loan debt that Gen Y is bearing, but it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone that the average college student expects to earn an above average level of compensation upon graduation.
As a long-time Minnesota resident, I've become very familiar with Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion and his mythical Lake Wobegon skit. According to Keillor, in the town of Lake Wobegon, all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average. While that may be true in some towns, hopefully the children are of above average intelligence rather than have above average student loan balances.
Retailers often state that their location is a more important determinant of their likely success than any other factor. Now it appears that the same may be true for employers.
A recent survey of 1,000 Gen Y recent graduates by the Segmentation Company indicates that 65 percent prefer to "look for a job in the place that I would like to live" rather than "look for the best job I can find, the place where it is located [being] secondary." For those of us who are Gen X'ers and Baby Boomers, that may come as quite a surprise as our generations were far more likely to look for the best possible job and then use factors such as location as tie breakers.
For employers, this means that to successfully recruit college students searching for internships or recent graduates hunting for entry level jobs and other career opportunities, you need to target those who are most interested in working in your geographic area and then target within that group those who have the skills needed for your opportunity. In other words, it is becoming even more important than ever to really understand the needs and wants of your candidates. They have more choices than previous generations and employers can either wish that wasn't the case and perhaps even act as if it wasn't or they can modify their recruiting practices and actually succeed in recruiting and retaining their next generation of star employees.
I'm flying to Dallas tomorrow to tape a show for Corporate TeleLink Network (CTN), a premier business television network for the energy industry and a leading provider of natural gas and energy-related distance learning events since 1992. CTN delivers programming via:
Peter Clayton of Total Picture Radio just added a podcast with Mark Penn, CEO of the PR firm Burson-Marsteller. You might want to listen in if you care about what is happening to today's college students.
Some may know Mark as a top presidential campaign strategist to Senator Hillary Clinton while others may know him as a numbers wonk. Mark has been a key adviser to Bill Gates and Microsoft for the last six years and just wrote a new book entitled Microtrends - The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes. In the book, Mark states that the number of undergraduate math majors is 77 at Harvard and 38 at Yale. As scary as that is, that isn't what scares Mark the most about today's college students. His biggest fear is the rapidly increase number of drop-outs.
The U.S. Census Bureau just reported that more than three times as many blacks live in prison cells as in college dorms. The ratio is healthier for Hispanics, but only barely as 2.7 times as many Hispanics live in prison cells as in college dorms. The magnitude of those problems are evident when you compare those ratios to the ratio for non-Hispanic whites: twice as many live in college dorms as in prison cells.
Although the data is startling and very troubling, it isn't quite as bad as it seems. The data does not include those who go to college but live off-campus. While there are likely some discrepancies in percentages of whites versus blacks and Hispanics who live off- rather than on-campus, I suspect that this doesn't come close to explaining the differences in the ratios. Another factor is that the data is not broken down by age. The reality is that most prison inmates are 25 years of age or older while 96 percent of people in college housing are 18 to 24 years old.
No matter how you look at it, there has been a failure when anyone is forced to live in a prison cell rather than going to college. And it appears certain given the huge differences in the ratios that young black and Hispanic adults are far more likely to end up in a prison cell than in a dorm room. Those who end up in prison are far less likely to benefit their families or society than those who go to college so it behooves us all to work towards reducing and coming as close as we can to eliminating the number of people in prison, regardless of their race.
The Federal Bureau of Investigations released its annual crime report yesterday and violent crime nationwide increased for the second consecutive year. Murders reached their highest level in decades. Gen Y is responsible. Why? Read on.
Few would debate that the main perpetrators of violent crime are teenagers and other young adults and most of those reside within our urban communities. Much of their criminal activities victimize their peers and those who reside within their communities. In Minneapolis, for example, a 12 year old girl was shot in the head last week. Her only mistake was that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time: she was walking home from a party when someone fired a gun a block away at someone else but missed their intended target. In most cases the bullet would have lodged in the wall of a house, a vehicle, or a tree. But in this case it hit a girl. A 12 year old girl.
So why do I blame Gen Y? I don't. I don't blame the entire generation. But I do recognize that violent crimes such as the Minneapolis incidents are largely carried out by teenagers and other young adults and those members of our society are all members of Gen Y. Each generation before Gen Y has been responsible for these types of crimes so it isn't a surprise that it is now Gen Y's turn. But what scares me is that the largest high school graduating class in our nation's history is the class of 2009. So these kids are now about 16 years old. They're just entering the age when they will be most likely to commit violent crimes. I hate to look at it this way, but the reality is that we're heading towards a surge in violent crime that likely won't subside for another six to 10 years.
The economic news out of the college career service offices is beginning to sound like a broken record, but few mind as the news is again good news for students searching for internships, recent graduates hunting for entry level jobs, and those who view a strong job market as being a good sign for the economy and therefore for all of us.
A recent poll by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) of its thousands of college career service offices reveals that nearly 78 percent report that their 2006-07 graduates had more and better job opportunities available to them than did 2005-06 graduates. Only eight percent believed that the prospects facing 2006-07 graduates were bleaker than those facing 2005-06 graduates.
Continue reading "Job Offers and Salaries Up for 2006-07 College Grads" »
I believe that it is incredibly important for all of us to give back to our communities. Not only does giving back improve the health of the communities in which we live, but it also improves our own mental health. Nothing feels better than making a positive difference in the life of someone who needs a helping hand.
Today's college students understand the importance of community service. Thousands compete for positions with organizations such as the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, and Teach for America. But a significant difference between Gen Y / Millennials and Gen X'ers, Baby Boomers, and other generations is that Gen Y'ers are much more interested in not only working for service organizations for a while after graduation but they're also interested in creating their own service organizations.
Continue reading "Students Making Community Service a Career" »
Think your for-profit organization faces a crisis with the number and quality of your Baby Boomer leaders who are on the verge of retiring? Feel fortunate that you're not in the non-profit world.
According to Bridgespan Group, a management consulting group for non-profits, about 640,000 new senior leaders will be needed over the next decade by non-profits. That's about 250 percent the current number. Why the huge increase? Burnout and the above mentioned retirements.
Continue reading "Non-profits Face Dire Shortage of Future Leaders" »
The State of Maine recently passed legislation that should greatly increase the number of college students who choose to remain there upon graduation. One of the biggest burdens upon this generation is the enormous student loan debt that they have. It is many times that of their parents and much larger than even the debt incurred by their older siblings.
But now, "if you live, work and pay taxes in Maine, you're not going to have this student debt hanging around your neck." Nice? Yes, but also very smart for the State of Maine and its future prosperity. That giant sucking sound that you hear is the sound of college graduates refusing to leave Maine for its neighboring states.
Ever spent a few minutes with one of today's college students? If so, you'll know that they're experts at multitasking. Many see nothing wrong with carrying on a conversation with you while at the same texting one or more friends about something completely different. As annoying as that may be to a Gen X'er or Baby Boomer in a social setting, it is even more annoying to those same people in a work setting. While I'm not condoning that type of multitasking, I'm also a realist and I know that it is here to stay so I can either grumble about it or I can get used to it and perhaps even in some ways learn to embrace it.
Thankfully, a lot of the multitasking is occurring during their non-work hours. According to a recent study from William Blair, 93 percent of college students conduct at least one additional activity while also watching television. Overall, 41.6 percent of television time is spent multitasking. So what are the most popular distractions from television watching?
Textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin recently released a study conducted in July 2007 that illustrates that today's college students study hard and multitask just as hard.
Nearly two-thirds reported studying diligently and 59 percent said they used online study tools such as online quizzing, course outlines, video tutorials, tutoring and study groups. "We're finding that students are increasingly using online study tools in tandem with their textbooks," Katie Rose, head of research and marketing for Houghton Mifflin College Division, said in a statement.
Good news? Perhaps for some students. While most students seem to use their computer primarily as an education tool, 44 percent said that the same computer was also their distraction of choice. Not so good.
Since 2003, the unemployment rate amongst new college graduates has decreased from about three to a little over two percent. Why?
Continue reading "What a Shock! New Grads are Finding Jobs." »
The Big Four accounting firms of Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte & Touche, and KPMG have all nearly tripled their recruiting staffs and budgets over the last three years. They're using a large chunk of those funds to recruit college students for internship programs and recent graduates for entry level career opportunities by sponsoring campus leadership programs, developing a presence on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, throwing beach parties, giving away spring break trips, and more.
Continue reading "Big Accounting Firms Have Tripled Their Recruiting Budgets" »
"College graduates are in some of their peak [hiring] years," said John Challenger, CEO of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. "It's not just the A students and the engineering or technology grads who are doing well. The benefits of the strong market are reaching out into the B and C students and liberal arts grads. It's a job seekers' market."
So why are Challenger and employers so optimistic? Today's employers emphasize soft skills like oral and written communication, critical thinking, and responding to constructive feedback. Those are the same skills possessed by many liberal arts graduates. Employers are also generally optimistic about their long-term financial prospects and recognize that their Baby Boomer employees and candidates are starting to retire. As those retirements accelerate, the need for college grads will as well as more and more employers are seeing that they must hire college grads today in order to have them properly groomed to become the next generation of their leaders prior to the departure of their seasoned Baby Boomer managers.
Source: Campus Career Counselor
Studying abroad has long been viewed as a fun experience for students, but did you know that a large percentage of employers place a significant value on it too? About 200,000 American college students study abroad each year and they're not all studying foreign languages or hoping to cash in on favorable currency exchanges. Study abroad programs are available in almost every discipline to students at almost every school.
As fantastic as these programs are, I'm a bit fearful. You see, Congress is getting into the act. (Pun intended.) The Commission on the Abraham Lincoln Study Abroad Fellowship Program is urgent that half of all American college students participate in study abroad programs within the decade. "What nations don't know can hurt them," the group wrote in a report. "For their own future and for that of the nation, college graduates today must be internationally competitive."
That is a laudable goal and I hope that it happens but I also hope that Congress lets the inherent attractiveness of these programs drive their success rather than forcing their "success" through legislation.
The competition for top performers is heating up as 96.1 percent of organizations are actively recruiting, according to the preliminary results from the Compensation Data 2007 survey. Also up from 2006, voluntary turnover is at 12.3 percent for all industries, while total turnover is 18.3 percent.
Perhaps it was inevitable and perhaps it is a sign of improving work conditions for women, but it appears that the recent domination of college campuses by women is spilling over into the workplace as young, college educated, female adults are now earning more than their male counterparts in many of the largest metro areas in the country.
I've written before that a significant majority of college students and an even larger majority of college graduates are women, but a study by Queens College demographer Andy Beveridge shows that all women from ages 21 to 30 living in New York City and working full-time made 117 percent of men's wages, or a median wage of $35,653, and even more in Dallas, where the women made 120 percent of what the men made. Some of the other cities where young women earn more than men are Minneapolis, Chicago, and Boston.
What a shock. College students spend a lot of time on the Internet. No surprise there, but some of the details from a recent study by Burst Research is very interesting because it provides a fair amount of detail about what college students are doing and not doing while they're on-line and it also details what they're doing and not doing in other areas of their lives as a result of their Internet surfing:
Continue reading "College Students Surf a Lot, But for What?" »
As the world gets flatter and more and more business people do more and more business globally, it seems to me that a premium will be paid to those who speak multiple languages. But an even greater premium will likely be paid to those who have successfully completed business language courses. There's a big difference, of course, between conversational questions like asking for directions to the nearest restaurant like most language courses teach and business questions like asking for pricing information on a custom built product.
I've run across one organization that offers such business language courses but there must be many. The one that I've run across is a U.K. firm that offers Spanish and English courses in London, Bristol, Brighton, Liverpool, etc. If there aren't many yet, hopefully there will be more in the future as there is a big need for services such as this.
As the owner and an employee of CollegeRecruiter.com, I see the increasing costs of healthcare insurance from both sides of the desk. But many employees only see the increasing the bite that is coming out of their paychecks and assume that they are bearing the majority and perhaps all of the increased costs of healthcare. Some even believe that employers are paying less both in percentage and absolute dollars than they used to. The reality is that both employers and employees are paying more than they used to and often getting less.
Continue reading "Think Your Share of Healthcare is Rising? Think Again." »
The good news for the Class of 2007 continues to roll in: employers project hiring 19.2 more recent college graduates this year than they did last year. Not surprisingly, compensation for those hires is also increasing with nine out of 10 employers reporting that they're having to compete more for those hires than they did in previous years. Employers also are projecting that the competition will only get worse for them, and better for the graduates, in coming years.
While many employers are scratching their heads over what to do about these economic indicators, over half are planning to change at least some of their recruitment strategies this year. These changes include increasing the focus in their efforts to recruit Gen Y candidates. But employers are also changing tactics such as increasing their average starting salary offers. The result is an almost across the board increase in starting compensation for 2007 college seniors:
Continue reading "Class of 2007 College Hiring Up 19.2 Percent" »
When it comes to career development, many companies have an "it takes a village" mindset. According to a just-released study conducted by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), 60% of the 382 polled companies have a career development program in place and 41% of those use in-house coaches and/or mentors to drive development. The study also suggests that people who want coaching and mentoring are better off working in the rich and diverse “villages” of large corporations.
Continue reading "No Surprise: Big Organizations Provide Better Training and Mentoring" »
If you think that today’s two- and four-year college students lack solid writing and leadership abilities, you’re not alone. According to a recent study of 431 human resource professionals across the United States, recent college graduates are not ready for the workplace.
Although 71 percent of the human resource professionals said written communication was very important for graduates of community, technical, and other two-year colleges, 47 percent said that these graduates are deficient in their written communication skills. Similarly, 83 percent said that skill was very important for graduates of four-year schools yet 28 percent said graduates of four-year colleges are deficient in that area.
Continue reading "I’ve Gots Me a College Degree But None Leadership Skills" »
As the weather heats up, many employees are packing their bags for a summer vacation. According to the newly-released Compensation Data 2007 preliminary results, exempt employees with five to nine years of experience have 14.4 vacation days on average. Non-exempt employees with the same years of service have 13.8 days.
The number of vacation days offered to exempt employees has changed little since 2005. Those in their first year average eight days and then, are given 10.5 days after their first year. Workers with 15-19 years of service typically average 19.5 days. A recent study by Expedia.com revealed 35 percent of U.S. employees won't utilize all of their vacation time, and on average, each will leave three days unused.
Continue reading "U.S. Employees Pack Their Bags for a Summer Vacation" »
The revenues and profits that we generated in 2006 were our best ever. But yesterday we surpassed both and the year isn't quite half over yet. Interestingly and perhaps a sign of things to come, the sale that put us over the top was the largest cell phone text messaging campaign that we've ever sold and perhaps the largest ever sold by a job board.
The trend has been there for decades. More and more women have been enrolling to attend college and more and more of them were graduating. Within the past decade, women comprised the majority of incoming freshmen at most schools. There is little doubt that the vast majority of these women and the schools they attended did not regard this trend as a zero sum game. In other words, the gains being made by the women did not need to come at the expense of the men. But could it be that is exactly what is happening?
Peter Gardner of Michigan State conducts some of the best research in this area and his recent findings are startling. Although women comprise about 55 percent of college freshmen, they are now comprising about 75 percent of the graduates. So where are all of the men going? Are they being forced out by the women? Are the colleges forcing out the men through the application of hostile policies which used to be directed against women but are now directed against men? While those are possible explanations, Peter has a far more logical explanation: the men are leaving to start their own businesses.
Continue reading "Women Are Finally Taking Over College Campuses" »
There is no doubt that parents of every generation have been concerned about their children and have wanted their children to succeed. But what happens when you take probably the most career-focused generation in history – Baby Boomers – and turn them into parents? You get parents who hover over their children so continually that sociologists have begun to refer to these Boomers as helicopter parents.
As a Gen X’er, I understand but don’t condone this type of behavior. I understand that these parents have raised highly programmed, multi-tasking kids. I get that these parents are used to running their kids from one after school activity to another to another. And I even get that some of these parents have a hard time letting go when little Johnny or Jenny move away to attend a great college. But after four or five years of living away from home and hopefully entering the workforce, John and Jennifer are no longer kids. They’re adults. So you’d think that by the time John and Jennifer have chosen to go back to school for an MBA that their parents will also have grown up and realized how destructive their hovering can be. Well, you’d have figured wrong.
Continue reading "Helicopter Parents Invading the MBA Schools Now Too" »
One of the popular features on CollegeRecruiter.com is our School Finder program as it allows the candidates who use our job board to find on-line schools and traditional schools should they be interested in completing a degree, transferring, getting an MBA, etc. Candidates use the service for free and we are compensated by the schools for referring the candidates. But it is a very competitive business.
There are a lot of players in this industry, including EarnMyDegree.com. They offer on-line college degrees and university courses so do pretty much the same thing as our School Finder program. Two of the great things about EarnMyDegree.com are:
“How often do you bring work home?” When asked that question in a poll taken across the 15,000 niche career sites in our network, only 34.71 percent of job seekers said, “I never bring work home.” A majority responded that they bring work home either once or twice a week (23.09 percent), everyday (29.82 percent), or only on the weekend (12.38 percent).
“To remain competitive, companies need to continue to evolve their technology and service offerings,” said Rich Milgram, CEO of Beyond.com, Inc. “This effort often requires employees to be proactive and work longer hours inside and outside the office. However, professionals can still achieve a healthy work-life balance by working smarter and setting priorities and boundaries to help effectively manage their time.”
I had the good fortune of listening to a presentation by Phil Gardner of Michigan State University earlier this week about the current trends in the college students and recent graduate labor market. Although I've been keeping a close eye on the biggest employers of college students and recent graduates, it hasn't been as easy to keep up-to-date on the types of jobs being offered to students and recent graduates. But Phil does. Oh boy, does he ever.
One of the most interesting pieces of information that he delivered was that 18 percent of the job offers made to recent college graduates in 2006 were for sales and marketing positions. So far in 2007, the percent of job offers made to recent college graduates for sales and marketing positions has jumped to 50 percent. If there was any doubt that the job market for recent college graduates is hotter this year than it has been since 2000, there should be no doubt any longer. Phil's presentation also showed the increases in salary expectations amongst undergraduates and graduate school students alike and the increases in expectations are dramatic.
Another fascinating part of Phil's presentation was the takeover of college campuses by women. The majority of enrollees are women. That's no secret and has been well reported by the media. But how many knew that even though about 45 percent of the enrollees are male that only about 25 percent of the graduates are male? Why are so many males dropping out? Phil believes that it is because this Gen Y / Millennial generation and particularly males of this generation are choosing to start their own businesses so they can have more work-life balance and the students see no significant benefit to completing a degree if they're going to work for themselves so they're dropping out rather than burden themselves with huge student loan debt and delaying their entrance into the marketplace.
Millennials are likely to be “different.” They have a view that is more in tune with the globe, and they also have a tendency to want a better balance between their work and life. I’m going to contradict myself here and note that with all the “soccer moms” taking their over achieving kids to soccer, violin, debate team, and chess club, all the while running a 4.5 GPA and scoring 2400 on the SAT, this seems to be one of the most ambitious generations we’ve ever had. It would seem that they want the opportunities, they want to learn, and make lots of money. But if you’re perfect, and still can’t get into Harvard, Columbia or Yale, what do you do?
Amen, brother.
Source: systematicHR
I recently wrote about the best paying jobs for recent college graduates and listed the percentage increases to the starting salaries that these college grads should expect to receive. The highest paying job for recent college graduates were economics (business / managerial) and finance grads with average offers at $53,449 and $47,877, respectively. But the grads who saw the biggest increases in compensation were marketing graduates with an average 10.3 percent increase from 2006 to 2007 to $41,285.
So what is it that marketing grads do? There are a variety of jobs, but many become marketing managers. To see what they do, watch this short career video, which is just one of 350 career videos available courtesy of CollegeRecruiter.com:
Continue reading "Marketing Grads Make the Biggest Salary Gains, But What Do They Do?" »
Retiring baby boomers are already creating a significant challenge for U.S. employers in certain industries, according to survey findings released today. The survey was jointly conducted by Buck Consultants, an ACS company, WorldatWork, and Corporate Voices for Working Families. The survey, "The Real Talent Debate: Will Aging Boomers Deplete the Workforce?" assessed responses from more than 480 organizations in a broad cross-section of industries.
Forty-two percent of all respondents indicated the aging workforce issue is significant. Of this group, 50% have a majority of mature workers eligible to retire in five to ten years. One-half of respondents in this group also see a current shortage of skilled workers.
Continue reading "Retiring Baby Boomers Creating Workforce Talent Shortage" »
U.S. employers plan to maintain a cautious approach toward hiring during the third quarter of 2007, according to the seasonally adjusted results of the latest Manpower Employment Outlook Survey conducted quarterly by Manpower Inc.
"The survey suggests that it will be a cool summer when it comes to hiring in the U.S.," said Jeffrey A. Joerres, Chairman & CEO of Manpower Inc. "Employers are holding steady with their employment projections for the third quarter and taking a wait-and-see approach as they begin to look toward year-end."
Continue reading "Employers Express Caution About Summer 2007 Hiring" »
Chief Financial Officers and other financial executives expect to continue hiring accounting and finance professionals in the third quarter although at a more moderate rate than during the second quarter. Six percent of chief financial officers (CFOs) surveyed anticipate adding employees and 3 percent forecast personnel cutbacks. Ninety percent of those polled foresee no change in staff levels. Respondents cited rising workloads as the primary driver of hiring.
Continue reading "Accounting and Finance Hiring Cooling Off" »
The graduating college seniors of 2007 face one of the best job markets in history and certainly the best since 2000. Employers and students both talk about greatly increased efforts by employers to land the candidates they most desire and the multiple job offers being received by many and perhaps most of the grads. Yet few employers are complaining like they did in 1999 and into 2000 that they are unable to hire the people they need to hire. They are complaining that it is difficult to hire those people, but generally they are able to hire them with the proper effort. And part of that effort is paying a salary which is competitive.
According to a recent survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), 90 percent of college career service offices believe that the class of 2006-07 is graduating into a strong job market with 11 percent rating the market as being "excellent." In comparison, only three percent rated the market as being excellent in last year's survey. In addition, two-thirds of the schools reported that more employers recruited on their campuses, 82 percent reported increases in on-line job postings and the number of employers attending career / job fairs, and 87 percent reported that at least as many employers signed up for spring 2007 recruiting than did last year.
Continue reading "Expected Salaries for 2007 College Graduates" »
I'll be a guest on tomorrow's Minnesota Public Radio "Midmorning" show at 9:06am CT. The show runs for almost an hour. During that time, we'll discuss the improving job market for recent college graduates. I'll be sharing the microphone with Lindsey Pollack, author of "Getting from College to Career: 90 Things to Do Before You Join the Real World."
Want to listen in but outside of the range of MPR? No problem. Go to http://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/services/nis/streams.shtml.
I've always been a proponent of more trade between nations because it raises the standard of living for all and forces nations which might have opposing views on some subjects to engage in constructive dialogue. So it was great to see that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said the United States benefits on balance from expanded trade, warned against barriers to imports as a response to jobs lost to international competition, and that it does not have a harmful effect on U.S. employment.
To anyone who has ever had discussions with friends or family about how much they like or dislike their work, it should come as no surprise that the Conference Board found in a survey of 5,000 U.S. households that many Americans dislike their work. The group that disliked their work the most? Gen Y, with more than 60 percent indicating that they are dissatisfied with their current jobs. That low level of satisfaction was the lowest level ever recorded in the nearly 20-year history of the survey.
The U.S. Department of Labor just reported that employers added 180,000 jobs to payrolls last month, up from 113,000 in February. Economists had predicted a gain of 120,000 to 135,000 so the 180,000 kind of knocked the cover off the ball.
The national unemployment rate dropped 0.1 percent to 4.4 percent -- the lowest since October 2006. The consensus of the economists was an unemployment rate of 4.6 percent. The last time the unemployment rate was this low was May 2001, which was just before the labor market tanked. If you're thinking that 4.4 percent is therefore pretty great news for job seekers, and it is, then consider this: the unemployment rate for college graduates is down to 1.8 percent.
In addition to the incredible student loan debt and other financial burdens being imposed upon older members of Gen Y by the rapidly escalating costs to attend college, now word is coming out that the younger members are struggling just to get into their colleges they most desire.
Continue reading "Gen Y Struggling to Accepted by Colleges" »
This year's college seniors may have far too much student loan debt, but at least they're making more money so they're better able to make the payments on that debt. Employers are planning to hire 17.4 percent more college graduates for entry level jobs and other career opportunities and almost 80 percent are planning to increase the salaries they pay to those new hires. The average expected increase is 4.6 percent, up substantially from the 3.9 percent increase received by 2005-06 graduating seniors. So who are the big winners and losers?
Continue reading "Starting Salaries for 2006-07 College Grads" »
Today's college students and recent graduates are generally referred to as Gen Y, Millenials, or Echo Boomers. Regardless of what we call them, who are they? Are they the community focused, environmentally conscious, work to live rather than live to work people of which surveys seem to repeatedly paint a picture? Or are they money hungry, free agent job hoppers that drive retention oriented employers nuts? Well, they're both and to understand why, it is critical to understand the Rule of 7-11.
Continue reading "Gen Y: Community Focused or Money Hungry?" »
I'm more of a feminist than many females that I know and thank goodness as I am the father of a bright and strong seven year old daughter and husband to a bright and strong wife. I joke that my sons, both of whom are older than my daughter, need to learn to be overly protective of her, but I have no doubt that she's able and will continue to be able to take care of herself along with those around her. So it was nice for me to see the Satisfying Career - Happier Life Career Blog entry by Shweta Khare that Millenial (also known as Gen Y) females are stronger and more confident than the Generation X (my generation) working females.
Although the current conventional wisdom is that the healthy labor market should result in a strong job market for spring 2007 college graduates, some are cautioning that the job market for this year's grads may be tighter than in past years.
Yesterday's announcements by Jobster may have been characterized as disruptive to the industry, but we won't know that for months at the earliest and likely years. In a nutshell, Jobster is moving to the HotJobs / Indeed / SimplyHired / GoogleBase model of giving away job posting ads in the hopes that the additional traffic from employers and job seekers will generate additional profits.
Continue reading "Will Facebook and Free Postings Make Jobster Profitable?" »
The U.S. Labor Department estimated that employers added 111,000 jobs to payrolls in January 2007. So what's bad about that? Nothing, unless you had previously relied upon the estimate of the economists who had forecast some 260,000 additional jobs.
Since we emerged from the labor slump of mid-2001 through mid-2003, the number of employers who hire college students for internships and recent graduates for entry level jobs and other career opportunities has grown tremendously and so have the average number of hires per employer. This year's graduating class, the Class of 2007, is optimistic and has every right to be so. Entry level employers are expected to increase their hiring by 7.3 percent this year over last year.
Below is a list of the top / biggest 50 employers of college students and recent graduates. An astounding 60 percent of the full list of 543 are planning to hire more students and recent college graduates in 2007 than last year while another 20 percent expect to hire the same number this year as last year. Only 20 percent expect to hire fewer students and recent graduates, and I suspect that a good portion of those would hire more if they could find enough highly qualified candidates. The competition is getting tighter and tighter for the students and recent graduates who are the best fits.
So which employer sits atop the rankings? For the fifth year in a row, that employer is CollegeRecruiter.com client Enterprise Rent-A-Car. They expect to hire 8,000 students and recent graduates this year, which is up 14 percent from last year. "Our experience in hiring for Enterprise's Management Training program has revealed the importance of showing candidates a true picture of our overall company and their potential career with us," said Marie Artim, Assistant Vice President of Recruiting at Enterprise Rent-A-Car. "While the basics like pay, hours and benefits are still important and must be addressed, a candidate's decisions are often made based on the bigger picture--so we take care to highlight the values of our company, opportunity for advancement and more."
But as much as you respect the success demonstrated by Enterprise and many of these other organization, you're not reading this article for the quotes. You're reading this article to see the list. Is your organization included? If it isn't, post a comment and tell us about your expected number of hires and what works well and doesn't work well for your organization in its efforts to hire the best college students for internships and recent graduates for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.
Continue reading "Top / Biggest Employers of College Students and Recent Graduates" »
Facebook just passed MySpace as the most popular site amongst 17-25 year olds. Employers who are looking for new and better ways to recruit students and recent graduates take note: MySpace is becoming your father's Oldsmobile.
Employers spent more money in 2006 on on-line recruitment advertising than in newspaper job ads. That has never happened before but will likely happen every year from here on. Job boards and other on-line media took in $5.9 billion in recruitment advertising revenue in 2006. Newspapers took in $5.4 billion.
The study by Borrell Associates Inc. also looks forward and I like what they see. They project that the shift to on-line advertising will continue over the next five years as Internet job listings hit $10 billion in 2011. That will represent some 13.7 percent of overall recruitment advertising dollars. Newspapers? Borrell predicts they'll earn only 6.5 percent of those dollars.
"Our projections through 2011 do not bode well for traditional recipients of recruitment spending," stated the report. "Of all forms, the only ones we see growing share over the next five years are online media and recruitment agencies." With only about one-third of U.S. job-seekers saying they planned to search the Internet for work in 2006, the report projects plenty of upside remaining for recruitment spending online.
The results that Borrell is seeing line up perfectly what we're seeing at CollegeRecruiter.com. We went on-line in 1996, so we're a decade old now. Our best year ever financially was 2004 until 2005 came along. The revenues and profits for 2005 easily eclipsed those of 2004. Then 2006 came along and its revenues and profits easily eclipsed those of 2005.
What do I see in my crystal ball? In the short-term, I'm quite optimistic. The industry is healthy, the labor market is strong but not red hot like it was in 1999 and 2000 when some employers stopped spending money on recruitment advertising because it wasn't generating any responses, and our site and products are very well positioned within the college job board niche. Long-term? Who knows. One of the great and terrible things about running a dot com is that your world changes every day. To try to make accurate predictions about what we're going to see in 2011 is to ask for a major butt kicking five years from now.
Much has been written about the professional and personal goals of Generation Y, but Hal Fischer just brought some very interesting research to my attention that definitely is worth sharing.
Yikes. A recent study indicates that 48 percent of 2006 college graduates plan to move home after graduating and 44 percent of 2005 grads still love at home.
My thanks to Hal Fischer of MilitaryStars.com for bringing this disturbing trend to my attention.
With Nancy Pelosi's recent ascension to arguably the third most powerful governmental position in the country, I thought that it would be interesting to look at who are the most powerful businesswomen in the country:
Much has been written recently about how Monster.com's traffic is slipping, but it isn't just their main job board that has been suffering. Take a look at how their college job board has seen its traffic plummet over the past five years. Apparently, college students who are looking for internships and recent graduates who are searching for entry level jobs are not finding Monster to be the best source of information anymore.
One of our blue chip financial services clients is in a pickle. They recently organized an on-campus information event at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which virtually all would agree is one of the premier schools in the country. As they have done in past years, they flew in a team of hiring managers and recruiters and invited faculty and staff from the school to attend. They catered the event so there was plenty of wine, cheese, and perhaps even a few pickles. Unfortunately, only five students showed up. That's right. Five. There were more hiring managers and recruiters at the career information event than candidates.
Continue reading "Five Candidates Show Up to MIT Job Fair" »
I was talking with a new acquaintance over the New Year's holiday and she was amazed at how many stories she's hearing about recent college graduates who are negotiating their starting salaries. Given the tightening labor market, I'm actually amazed that more aren't. When I'm hiring people, I want them to negotiate. If they don't, I question if they're going to be pushovers for the clients or vendors they're going to be dealing with.
What's been your experience?
Gen Y is big into entrepreneurship. The federal Bureau of Labor 2005 statistics indicate that 370,000 young people ages 16-24 were self-employed. That occupational category includes entrepreneurs. Let's compare that to 30 years ago. In 1975, 351,000 young people were in the same self-employed category, but those young people were Baby Boomers and that generation was much larger. So there has been a noticeable increase in the number of young enterpreneurs in absolute numbers and even more so in percentage terms and they foretell what is just around the corner: the Bureau of Labor projects that the number of young people in the self-employed category will grow five percent per year from 2004 to 2014, which is a huge increase over the two percent per year growth from 1994 through 2003.
If you're one of those who are primarily motivated by money, pay close attention. The 10 highest paying jobs in the country are as follows:
College students who are searching for great internships and recent graduates who are looking for the highest paying entry level jobs often search job boards such as CollegeRecruiter.com for the highest paying employment opportunities. There is little doubt that the highest paying internships are great for students who want to make as much money as possible. Similarly, the highest paying jobs for college graduates are great matches for recent graduates who want to make the most money.
So what is an example of an entry level career opportunity that is one of the highest paying jobs? Securities Commodities and Financial Services Sales Agents.
Continue reading "High Paying Internship and Entry Level Job" »
Want another indicator that Gen Y'ers has different priorities than Gen X'ers or Baby Boomers? An increasing number of college students are choosing to study abroad in countries for which the U.S. State Department has issued travel warnings. Although almost two-thirds of American college students still choose to study abroad in the more traditional locations of Western Europe and Australia, more than 7,000 students studied in Africa during the 2004-05 year. That's a 25 percent increase from the year before. Even more startling is that the number of students who chose to study abroad in the Middle East more than doubled in that one year period.
Continue reading "Students Choose to Study Abroad in War Zones" »
If the thought of getting on another airplane and having to endure more delays gets under your skin, consider for a minute the people who are on airplanes all day long, every workday. That's right, the flight attendants. If you think that traveling is rough on the passengers, think about it from their perspective. Or, better yet, watch this CollegeRecruiter.com video, one of 350 career videos that we offer on our site and which any site can run for free:
Continue reading "Hate Flying? How About Having to Fly Every Day?" »
About a week ago I noticed that the Coca-Cola Company had begun to run pay-per-click recruitment advertising on CollegeRecruiter.com through Google AdWords. They purchased the text ad from Google. When visitors to CollegeRecruiter.com clicked on the ad, Coke paid Google some amount of money that only Coke and Google know and then Google shared some of that revenue with CollegeRecruiter.com. By running that pay-for-performance recruitment advertising campaign, the Coca-Cola Company became the latest organization to understand that they could shift the risk of a campaign not performing to CollegeRecruiter.com and any other sites running it through Google. Presumably, CollegeRecruiter.com and the publishers of the receive a bit more for the Coke advertising over the long run in return for assuming that risk.
Lest anyone think that pay-per-click and other types of pay-for-performance recruitment advertising is only for organizations with the deep pockets of the Coca-Cola Company, I just noticed a similar pay-per-click advertising campaign by the Peace Corps:
I had the pleasure of speaking in Seattle yesterday to a packed room at the Mountain-Pacific Association of Colleges and Employers (MPACE) annual conference about social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. The participation and enthusiasm exhibited by the attendees was great and that made the presentation a lot of fun and probably a lot more interesting for the attendees. Most of the attendees were college career service office professionals, but a sizeable minority were employers who are actively engaged in college hiring.
One of the feedback forms suggested that I add a slide to my presentation that defines what a Gen Y'er is as I often referred to that generational group during the presentation but never defined it. If I had been speaking to a general audience, I definitely would have done so but I figured that people who are engaged in college recruiting wouldn't need to see that information. Perhaps the suggestion came from someone who is new to the field.
In any case, as I was reading through my favorite blogs I came upon a recent entry by Chris Russell at the Recruiting Fly Blog about the Millenial Generation, also known as Gen Y. Not only is Chris a great guy who provides great value for his AllCountyJobs.com clients, but he's also a great blogger. To summarize the blog entry by Chris, Millenials are:
Q - How do you know when the economy is in a recession?
A - When your neighbor loses his job.
Q - How do you know when the economy is in a depression?
A - When you lose your job.
Q - How do you know when the economy is in a recovery?
A - When [insert your least favorite politician's name here] loses his job.
Q - How do you know when human resource search engine optimization experts are happy for those of their clients which are job boards?
In my conversations with employers of Gen Y students, many complain that their high school and college aged employees have unrealistic expectations about the type of work that they are qualified to do and how hard they need to work in order to succeed. While I've often chalked that type of talk up to the perennial tendency of older generations to look with disdain upon younger generations, there is some empirical support for the concerns being expressed about Gen Y.
Continue reading "High School Students Have Unrealistic Career Expectations" »
"Location, location, location," is not only a relevant phrase when shopping for a prime piece of real estate but it is also a key determinant when conducting a job search.
Continue reading "Your Daily Commute Means More Than You Think" »
For the past few years, one of the media's favorite buzz words has been "outsourcing," which they tend to misuse when they are referring to organizations which terminate domestic employees and move their work to foreign countries where it typically can be done at a lower cost. Outsourcing is not the same as offshoring, which is the word that the media should actually use to refer to what those organizations are doing as one American organization can chose to outsource part of its work to another American organization and that's hardly the type of activity that politicians or the media can or should get worked up about.
Employers continue to increase starting salaries to new college grads, according to the Fall 2006 issue of Salary Survey, a quarterly report published by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). The Fall issue is NACE's final salary report for the college Class of 2006.
Continue reading "Best Job Market in Four Years for College Graduates" »
We recently surveyed more than 2,200 business professional members across our network of 15,000 niche career sites. We asked them “When you are on vacation, do you check-in with your office?” The purpose of this survey was to gather and share valuable information about the habits and interests of those who are using CollegeRecruiter.com and the rest of the sites in our network to search for internships, entry level job opportunities and other career information.The results were:
Continue reading "How Often Do You Check-in While on Vacation?" »
We recently surveyed more than 4,400 business professional members across our network of 15,000 niche career sites. We asked them “How long is/was your commute to work for your most recent job?” The purpose of this survey was to gather and share valuable information about the habits and interests of those who are using CollegeRecruiter.com and the rest of the sites in our network to search for internships, entry level job opportunities and other career information. The results were:
During the fourth quarter of 2005, the category with the most job postings across our network of 15,000 niche career sites was Information Technology. In the first and second quarters of 2006, Sales & Sales Management took over. During the third quarter, the leading category was Healthcare & Medical with 15.39 of the job postings across the entire network.
Continue reading "Healthcare Takes Over From Sales for Most Job and Resume Postings" »
More news that Republicans didn''t want to see heading into next Tuesday's mid-term elections. The U.S. Department of Labor just reported that the number of unemployment claims jumped by 18,000 last week, a number that exceeded the expectations of most analysts. To put that number into context, the total number of U.S. workers who last week applied for jobless benefits was 327,000, the highest since the week of July 8th when they were 334,000.
Continue reading "Jobless Claims Jump: Bad News for Republicans?" »
If anyone had any doubt that on-line education has truly come of age, those doubts should quickly vanish. Harvard University, the oldest and one of the most prestigious post-secondary schools in the United States, has officially joined the world of on-line education.
The second largest school district in the country, and therefore one of the pacesetters, is the Los Angeles Unified School District. This is the nest from which our future workforce emerges. It is on its underpinnings that we rely on getting the best of the best. But LAUSD has long suffered from the black eye of not producing sufficiently trained and educated people from whom recruiters and employers may select their skilled talent.
However this past Friday, in a controversial move, the LAUSD announced its selection for the person to succeed retiring Superintendent Roy Romer. Retired Navy Admiral David Brewer. Brewer, in his acceptance speech, spoke of transforming the school district and the education one can expect from it into a world-class district where the fruits of its effort will be able to think and compete on a global basis.
The LAUSD has in recent years begun to pull itself out of nearly last position as far as academic performance testing, quite the opposite of its position in the late 1950s and 1960s of one of the top-scoring districts in the country.
There are many issues that confront the school district and its administrators in delivering quality education that produces the types of workers and leaders businesses need and demand in today's and tomorrow's business environment. With Brewer's acceptance remarks, it appears he plans to take on these issues and bring his constituency (which he sees as not just the students but the businesses and people within the school district) to winning the war for skilled talent.
One of the big topics at the recent International Association of Employment Web Sites (IAEWS) conference in Chicago was whether and how employment web sites (job boards) such as CollegeRecruiter.com could work with applicant tracking system (ATS) companies so that our joint clients would better understand the source for their applicant leads. When viewed at a micro level, the problem isn't difficult. The job boards could pass a tracking code to the ATS systems that would allow the ATS systems to automatically credit the lead to that job board and not have to rely on the inherently flawed self-identification by the candidate approach that virtually all employers use. The problem is that there are about 40,000 job boards and thousands of ATS vendors. If each ATS vendor needs to set up a separate tracking system for each job board, well, that's simply asking for too much. But some very recent and significant consolidation in the ATS space should help remedy the problem.
Continue reading "Consolidation in the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) Space" »
In yesterday’s CollegeRecruiter.com Blog entry, I provided statistics to demonstrate how much stronger the job market is for 2006 college graduates than it has been in the past four years. Employers are hiring more recent graduates and are increasingly active in their college hiring activities when doing so. As a result, the starting salaries being offered to students and recent graduates who are searching for entry level jobs and internships are up across all fields.
Continue reading "2005-06 Best Job Market in Four Years (Continued)" »
The indicators from all directions point to the fact that this is an excellent time for recent college graduates. Although many may not see it, employers are avidly seeking skilled labor (meaning people with communication skills, computer savvy, analytical and problem solving) and knowledge workers for their business initiatives. According to Jesus Chavarria, Editor and Publisher of Hispanic Business magazine (HB), the HB500 companies are definitely in this mode. However, the highly-sought new talent is difficult to find. That in turn is creating a talent war that according to Pasadena executive recruiter and CEO of Fluhrer & Davis, Alan Fluhrer, began around the middle of this year.
Continue reading "HB500 Strive to Survive the Talent War with Recent College Grads" »
The class of 2006 had the good fortune to graduate into the best entry level job market for college graduates in four years. Quite simply, employers are hiring more recent graduates and are increasingly active in their college hiring activities when doing so. In a recent survey, 87 percent of college career service offices reported that their 2006 graduates had more job opportunities available to them than did their 2005 counterparts. In addition, 98.3 percent of schools reported that employers interviewed on-campus for full-time hires, 95.7 percent reported that employers participated in on-campus career fairs targeted to college students and recent graduates, 92.2 percent reported that employers participated in on-campus information sessions targeted to students and recent graduates, and 91.3 percent reported that employers visited their campuses to recruit students who were searching for internships and co-op positions.
There's little doubt that today's graduates face a lot of pressure to succeed. But is that pressure so great that they are starting to believe that cheating is acceptable? While some would argue yes, I have too much faith in this generation to believe that is the case.
Continue reading "Are We Creating a Generation of Cheaters?" »
College students and recent graduates are notorious for being frustrated by their inability to land a great job with great pay. The question they often ask out of frustration is how can they find a job if no employer will give them a chance?
 When I speak with students, I remind them that it is their responsibility to get that experience, not the employers to which they are applying. But I don't stop there. I give them concrete advice for where they can get that experience. I normally tell them to accept an unpaid internship or volunteer for a few months in a position that is related to their chosen career path. They can then use that experience to land a paid internship or entry level job upon graduation. Yet some students still express frustration and wonder why employers simply can't hire them for a paid position in the first place. The answer is that most employers would find that to be too costly, yet just how costly is it? |
Continue reading "Why Employers Can't Afford to Just Give Candidates a Chance" »
Accounting graduates are certainly well qualified to count dozens of dimes, but they definitely cannot be regarded as being worth a dime a dozen. The recent Sarbanes-Oxley securities laws have contributed to an imbalance in the supply and demand of new accounting graduates. There simply are far more entry level accounting jobs than their are entry level accountants. But if you think that the situation is tight in your hometown, take it easy and be thankful that you're not in The Big Easy.
Continue reading "Entry Level Accounting Jobs Plentiful in New Orleans" »
The job market for 2006 MBA graduates is excellent, according to two surveys conducted by the Graduate Management Admission Council. "Bottom line is, every way you look at it, the boom is back on the MBA," said David Wilson, President and CEO of the Council.
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Salaries for MBA grads are averaging $92,360, which is a 4.2 percent increase since 2005. In addition, two thirds of this year's graduates are receiving signing bonuses. Those bonuses are averaging $17,603, which is also a slight increase over 2004. The salary and bonus increases can be traced to increased demand for MBA graduates as employers expect to hire 18 percent more new MBA grads in 2006 than they did in 2005. The graduates who are the most highly sought after are those with expertise in finance or marketing. |
Source: Campus Career Counselor
Female college students academically outperform their male counterparts on many and perhaps most college campuses. At the University of Rhode Island, for example, women captured 70 percent of the honors degrees handed out this year and at Brown University, 30 percent of this year's female seniors graduated with honors while only 24 percent of the males did so.
Employers that do business with the federal government are stressed out about the so-called new OFCCP regulations. Most employers with formalized college recruiting programs do business with the federal government, so these regulations are impacting most of our biggest clients. Some would argue that these regulations have little impact other than some additional paperwork or perhaps a slightly different candidate application process. Those people are wrong and I can prove it. First, a little background.
Continue reading "Tangible Proof That OFCCP "Internet Applicant" Rule Is Impacting Employers" »
The class of 2002 is still in the lead, but the class of 2007 is closing in. Preliminary results from NACE's Job Outlook 2007 Fall Preview survey show that employers plan to hire 17.1 percent more college graduates in 2006-07 than they did in 2005-06.
The preliminary results show that service employers plan the largest increase at 20.5 percent, but the other two sectors, manufacturing (9.5 percent) and government/nonprofit (8.0 percent), are also planning increases. In addition, all four geographical regions—South (23.2 percent), West (23 percent), Northeast (20.7 percent), and Midwest (10 percent)—will see increases in hiring.
Students who are seeking entry level jobs or internships are almost always going to prefer the opportunity that offers the greatest paying should everything else be equal. While virtually no student is going to be willing to accept an entry level job that is unpaid, many and perhaps most accept internships that are unpaid because they recognize that it is far more important to get great experience during an internship than a great paycheck. Better experience as an intern leads directly to far better pay when you're seeking an entry level job, so the investment is quite wise.
But what about employers who want to charge students for the opportunity to intern with them? When I first heard about the idea, I assumed that the internships were most likely scams. Well, some may be but some definitely are not. As reported by Campus Career Counselor, students are paying $2,000 to $5,000 for the right to intern with firms such as Morgan Stanley, NBC, Miramax, WebMD, and Electronic Arts. To be clear, these firms have excellent reputations on-campus and deservedly so and they are not profiting from the sale of these internships. What they are doing is donating the right to intern with them to charities such as elite private high schools and those charities are in turn auctioning or otherwise selling the internships to the students.
Who is buying these internships? Well, that's a little unclear but it appears that parents of students who attend the elite private high schools are purchasing the internships to help their children impress college admissions personnel. To me, this is another example of crazy behavior by helicopter parents (the term is a reference to the mostly Baby Boomer-aged parents habit of always hovering over their kids). I've heard many stories of helicopter parents networking for their kids. I've heard some stories about helicopter parents accompanying their kids to interviews. I've heard one or two stories about helicopter parents even walking into the interview room with their kids. But I had not heard of helicopter or any other parents purchasing entry level jobs or internships for their kids.
Does anyone else think that this is as crazy as I do?
Workers in human resources are marginally more bored than accountants, but administrative and secretarial staff are the most fed up. According to the Workforce Boredom Index, also bored with their jobs are manufacturing and sales employees, ranked second and third on the index. Teachers and healthcare workers were the least bored at work.
The survey of more than 2,000 graduates aged 21 to 45 found more than half were regularly bored at work.
When asked why they found their job interesting, 81 percent of teachers questioned said it was the challenge of the role and the same proportion said it was because "no two days were the same."
Employees surveyed said they were mainly bored because of the lack of challenge in their jobs (61 percent). Half of those employees who said they were bored had considered changing profession in the past year.
Source: Training and Development Agency for Schools
Calgary, Alberta has one of the hottest economies in North America, primarily because of the high oil prices. Alberta has huge oil reserves, often estimated as exceeding those of Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately for those in Calgary and other cities in Alberta, the oil in Alberta is far more difficult and costly to extract than the oil in Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, as the price of oil rises, the extraction of that oil becomes more economical.
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So what does the price of oil have to do with the entry level job market category in the City of Calgary? Everything. While many of the oil industry jobs are highly skilled, many are not. Yet virtually all are paying extremely well right now in and around Calgary and that wage inflation has driven many entry level job holders to leave their positions in fast food restaurants, retailers, and other employers to try their luck working in the nearby oil fields. Supply and demand is driving those restaurants, retailers, and other employers to increase what they're paying to entry level job seekers. Paying a fast food worker $6 per hour just doesn't cut it anymore in Calgary. Restaurants and retailers are closing their doors or restricting their hours because they're not able to hire enough entry level workers.
In fact, according to the 2005 Alberta Wage and Salary Survey, the average hourly wage in Alberta increased to $21.39 in 2005 — an 8 percent increase over the hourly wage in 2003. According to the survey, welders and machine operators earned on average more than $25 an hour last year, while heavy equipment operators earned an average of about $24 per hour. Just two years before, the averages for those jobs were $22.42 and $19.53 per hour, respectively. |
There has been plenty of anecdotal evidence indicating that the tightening labor market has led to an increase in demand for and therefore compensation being paid to recent college graduates. But anecdotal evidence can be misleading at best and fundamentally flawed at worst. But in June 2006, Compensation Resources, Inc. obtained compensation data and information on recruiting and hiring trends for recent and new college graduates. The data was collected was compiled from survey questions that were developed by CRI and distributed to companies in over 12 industrial classifications, representing publicly-traded, privately-held, and not-for-profit organizations. The following table provides a summary of compensation results:
| Year | # of Incumbents | Avg. Weighted Base Salary | Prevelance of Orgs Providing Bonus | Avg. Weighted Annual Bonus/ Incentive | Prevelence of Orgs Providing Signing Bonus | Avg. Weighted Signing Bonus/ Incentive |
| 2005 | 1434 | $40,748 | 27.7% | $4,930 | 12.9% | $3,087 |
| 2006 | 1526 | $44,894 | 45.5% | $4,963 | 14.9% | $3,581 |
Results indicated that in 2006, the average base salary is 10 percent higher than it was in 2005. Although annual bonus amounts are relatively the same, the number of companies that provided a bonus increased from 28 to 46 percent. Other survey highlights:
College graduates are sobering up to the realities of the work world while employers scramble to capture the best of the freshly minted workforce. With the economy humming along, some firms are finding the market for brand new professionals more competitive than in recent years. Should internships be part of the sourcing solution?
Some 3,055 undergrads and MBA's at top-tier schools were recently surveyed to learn which companies actively recruited them, how they view prospective employers, how they determine which to include on their short list, and which recruiting tactics were most effective. In the survey by Wetfeet, the students identiifed more than 1,100 employers and, of those, rated the following 10 as being the most effective recruiters:
1. McKinsey & Co.
2. The Boston Consulting Group
3. Bain & Co.
4. Deloitte & Touche
5. Lehman Brothers
6. Goldman Sachs
7. Target
8. Microsoft
9. JP Morgan Chase
10. Booz Allen Hamilton
Target, Microsoft and Deloitte & Touche joined the list. The dropping out were Citigroup, Johnson & Johnson and Kraft.
What was the difference between the best recruiters and the worst? According to the students, the best had great campus information sessions, sent a large number of impressive representatives to campus, treated candidates with respect, and had a strong word-of-mouth reputation. Note that job offers, salaries and employer prestige did not make that list. While important, even more important were the personal interactions the candidates had during the recruiting experience.
Other interesting tidbits were:
Today's CollegeRecruiter.com Blog posting is courtesy of Toby Dayton of JobDig as part of the Recruiting.com Blog Swap.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune ran a great story yesterday on the deal that TCF Financial Corp. has struck with the University of Minnesota. As part of the company’s $35 million naming rights deal for football stadium, TCF also received a wide range of additional branding, marketing, and advertising perks including access to 236,300 alumni and season ticket holder names and addresses, the right to put the TCF logo everywhere you could imagine around the stadium, and the right to become the dominant bank on campus, pushing competitors off campus.
Leaving aside the ramifications surrounding the TCF/University of Minnesota stadium deal, and there are many, what if a similar type of arrangement was struck with employers who were trying to reach college students with employment opportunities? Or companies like Monster who wanted to establish themselves as the sole provider of recruitment advertising around the university? It is not inconceivable that some day 3M or General Mills might pay the university some amount of money to be the only company who could recruit on campus, or maybe paid a smaller fee to be the first company every year to host their own job fair, giving them first crack at the top students. How about Monster paying a fee to be the only company that was allowed to host a career fair on campus?
Continue reading "Employers Paying Colleges for Exclusive Recruiting Rights" »
The average student loan debt for a U.S. college graduate is now $19,200, according to a study published by the State Public Interest Research Group, a Washington-based independent research organization. That's 58 percent higher than 10 years ago after adjustments for inflation. Other than energy and healthcare, I can't think of too many consumer products that have increased at nearly that rate. Remember, that's adjusted for inflation.
What does this mean to college graduates? A lot. It effects their choice of schools, majors, classes, and perhaps most significantly, career paths. Want to be a social worker? Sorry. They don't make enough money. Go into law. Want to be an entrepreneur and help create jobs? Sorry. Too risky because should you fail your student loans won't be discharged when you file for bankruptcy. Want to work for a non-profit? Sorry, unless you're considering enlisting in the military because they will help pay for your college education.
College education has never been cheap. But it has never been this expensive and it is getting more and more expensive every day. Some spend an enormous amount of energy criticizing our youth for mortgaging their futures by taking on too much debt. While I agree that too much debt is a bad thing for everyone, I hope that more people start to spend more energy on finding ways of bringing down the costs of a college education.
Candidates (and employers) should look at the cost of living when deciding where to relocate. Just to stay even, candidates who choose to reside in an expensive city will need to earn far more money than those who choose to live in an inexpensive city. So everything else being equal, it makes the most sense to live in cities with low costs of living. Where does your city rank?
Beauty, as the cliche goes, is in the eyes of the beholder. And to an extent so is the best city in which to reside, to build a career, or to build a business. Yet many factors that people consider when looking at which city is best for building a career or a business are similar, so it is helpful to periodically step back and evaluate factors such as business and living costs, job and income growth, migration trends, crime and culture-and-leisure data, and education trends.
Forbes recently released its list of the best metro areas in which to build a career or business. The top 10 are:
Answer: not enough. I've never heard, and doubt that I ever will, that any society produces enough engineers. These are the folks that design and build just about everything. While some may take their work and talents for granted, I do not. So I was disturbed to read in Jim Stroud's blog that the U.S. will graduate more sports therapists this year than engineers.
I have nothing against sports therapists. I've been to a few to help with rehabilitation from sports-related injuries (if you can call sledding a sport). But I doubt that any rational sports therapist would argue that the U.S. or any other society needs more sports therapists than engineers.
I had the pleasure of listening to Dave Lefkow of Jobster yesterday at the National Association of Colleges and Employers 2006 annual conference in Anaheim. Dave's presentation was about the impending labor shortage or, more accurately, the impending skills shortage. While Dave correctly pointed out that no one can accurately predict the future, he set out a convincing case that the forces of supply and demand will eliminate the skills shortage, although perhaps with some sacrifices.
Dave foresees the possibility of pay increases, which will result in the decline of both economic growth due to higher costs of production and standards of living because the pay increases will lead to an increase in the cost of goods and services due to inflation. These forces will put downward pressure on demand for labor while at the same time other forces will put upward pressure on the supply of labor. These upward pressures include the desire by most Baby Boomers to continue to work past the traditional age of retirement (although on their terms), increased immigration, increased productivity, increased outsourcing/offshoring, increased labor force participation by those who traditionally are under represented in the market, and acts of divinity or man.
Dave sees the economy as shifting from knowledge to innovation. Winning organizations will develop brilliant ideas, bring them to market faster than their competitors, and hire better than their competitors. Organizations that want to be winners must hire stars by analyzing their needs and looking for visionaries, rewarding recruiters for high impact hires, and fostering environments where new ideas can be generated and take flight.
A truly enlightened presentation. Awesome, Dave.
Yet another sign has emerged that the labor market has rebounded from the recession of 2001-03. Today’s college seniors are very confident that they will find jobs upon graduation and that those jobs will pay well. In a nationwide survey by Yahoo! HotJobs, 69 percent of college seniors indicate that they expect to have a full-time job within three months of graduation, up a remarkable 17 percent from just a year ago. In addition, more than two thirds of those seniors expect that their job will be within their desired field of interest and that they will make more than $50,000 in their first year.
So what’s important to college graduates when choosing between competing offers? Work-life balance is often mentioned as the most important factor for this Millenial generation. While that is a factor, far more are concerned about the reputation of the employer. The percentage breakdowns are:
The good folks over at CNNMoney.com have been at it again. This time they've come out with a list of the 50 best jobs in America. While some such as college professor were of no surprise to me, others were. For example, I know that the job market has bounced back for information technology workers, but how many people would have expected software engineers to rank first? Or computer analysts to rank as high as seventh? And just where on the list is owner of a college job board? Hmmm.
The list, with no further editorializing:
1. Software engineer
2. College professor
3. Financial advisor
4. Human resources manager
5. Physician assistant
6. Market research analyst
7. Computer/IT analyst
8. Real estate appraiser
9. Pharmacist
10. Psychologist
The Washington Post is reporting that adult education is thriving nationwide with more than 92 million adults taking college classes. While that's great news for most, it isn't news to those of us at CollegeRecruiter.com. Three years ago, we significantly upgraded the continuing education section on our site so that it became a fully integrated and integral part of our career site. Our free School Finder product matches candidates up with one more schools of their choice. We work with hundreds of traditional and on-line schools and help students find the schools that offer the right combination of location, degree type, majors, etc.
Our School Finder product has been incredibly successful for the students and therefore the schools and CollegeRecruiter.com. It works well and is convenient and the convenience is critical. As reported in the same story, "Unlike high school students, who factor in everything from a university's academic reputation to its football team's national ranking when searching for a college, adult students look for one thing above all else: convenience."
On April 12, 2006, a day that will live in infamy (I turned 39 plus a year that day), the Economist released an interesting study showing that women may soon begin to out earn men:
Girls get better grades at school than boys, and in most developed countries more women than men go to university. Women will thus be better equipped for the new jobs of the 21st century, in which brains count a lot more than brawn. In Britain far more women than men are now training to become doctors. And women are more likely to provide sound advice on investing their parents' nest egg: surveys show that women consistently achieve higher financial returns than men do.
Continue reading "If Girls Go to College to Get More Knowledge, Why Do Boys Go to Jupiter?" »
I've been saying for months that the job market for 2006 graduates is the best in years. My statements were based upon anecdotal evidence: conversations with employers and students. I've been hearing from them that a sizeable minority of students are receiving multiple job offers in their chosen career fields, a landmark that hasn't been seen since 2001.
While I'm grateful to Reuters for empirically confirming what I've been seeing, I found to be much more interesting a post at the The Only Republican in San Francisco blog. The post contrasted the excellent job market for college graduates in the U.S. this year with the riots occurring in France over the job prospects their graduates are facing. While our graduates understand that they will likely change careers half a dozen to 10 times during their careers and change employers even more, students in France are going ballistic over proposals that would allow employers to terminate them should they fail to do their jobs. Imagine. Being fired for not producing adequate value for your employer. No wonder France hasn't been a world power in almost 100 years.
In the March 27, 2006 issue of Forbes magazine, publisher Rich Karlgaard argues that the price of a four-year, private college degree is money poorly invested. Mr. Karlgaard is insightful, prevocative, and almost always right. But in this case, he's just wrong because he only looks at the monetary return of a college degree and his assumptions to get to that return just don't stand up.
Mr. Karlgaard starts by correctly pointing out that asset classes such as stocks, bonds, real estate, and collectibles compete with each other for investment. Those that produce the greatest expected rate of return at the lowest risk will attract the most investment. That investment will drive up their price and therefore reduce their yield or return. Assets that fail to attract investment will become cheaper which will therefore increase their yield or return.
Continue reading "Is a College Education a Terrible Investment?" »
Many and perhaps most college students strive to work for large organizations. There are many reasons, including the prestige such positions carry (you don't have to explain to people what type of work you do if they recognize the name of your employer), the perception that offer better job security, better benefits, and because larger firms tend to recruit more heavily on college campuses than do smaller firms. But if you're struggling to find the right opportunity, perhaps you're thinking too large. As in too large of an organization.
In December, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released data showing that over the past 12 years, small businesses have created 65 percent of the net new jobs in our economy. From September 1992 through March 2005, firms with fewer than 500 employees accounted, on average, for 65 percent of quarterly net employment growth. That represents an astounding 13.5 million out of 20.6 million net new jobs created by the entire private sector.
So if you're searching for a great new job, perhaps the best approach is to think small.
The average starting salary for college graduates with non-technical degrees is substantially lower than those with technical degrees. According to the Winter 2006 salary survey of organizations which are members of the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the average grad with a non-technical degree employed by a non-profit was paid $28,793. Grad with technical degrees were paid an average of $36,295.
The breakouts for non-technical degree graduates by employer type was:
Continue reading "Non-Profits Pay Techies More Than Non-Techies" »
Students often ask which is the "best" major or "hottest" career field. The correct answer is that it depends upon the student's competencies, interests, and values. What are they good at? What do they like to do? What is important to them? If making the most money is important to them, then they should strongly consider majoring in engineering.
According to a report issued by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), engineering majors receive the highest offers, on average, of all majors. Indeed, the four highest paying majors are all for engineering disciplines. There was also plenty of good news for students in other majors. According to Marilyn Mackes, executive director of NACE, "seven of the top-10 majors with the highest starting salary offers saw increases in their offers over last year. Engineering remains strong, and another high point comes for economics/finance graduates, who saw a spectacular 11-percent increase to their average starting salary offers."
Continue reading "Engineers Receive the Highest Paying Job Offers" »
Employers, already faced with the prospect of Boomers starting to retire in droves, are now also faced with the prospect that today's college students and recent graduates, often referred to as Gen Y, are turning away from a life in the corporate world and toward entrepreneurship. As reported by the Boston Globe, 30 to 40 percent of those who graduate from colleges such as Harvard and Carnegie Mellon are choosing to start their own businesses.
My paternal grandfather was an entrepreneur. My father is an entreprenuer. I'm an entrepreneur. And I hope that my kids are too if it will make them and their families happy. I love the feeling of creating something out of nothing and continually making decisions that haven't been made before. Yet running a small business can also be difficult as that business sometimes lacks the size or resources to be competitive against larger organizations which are in the same space. Fortunately, I was able to learn value of strategic partnerships pretty early on. Too many entrepreneurs don't. They're entrepreneurs first and foremost because they can't or won't work with others. Rather than collaborating, they internalize. Rather than looking for solutions beyond their own walls, they look for reasons why they can't help a client with a particular need. Rather than assuming success, they assure failure.
The U.S. Department of Labor recently released its long-term projections for employment within different industries. It should come as no surprise to those who follow the statistics that the Department is projecting that virtually all of the new jobs to be in service industries. Indeed, during the 2004 through 2014 period, the Department is projecting that approximately 18.7 million of the 18.9 million new wage and salary jobs will be in the service industry.
Service IndustriesEducation and health services. This industry supersector is projected to grow faster, 30.6 percent, and add more jobs than any other industry supersector. About 3 out of every 10 new jobs created in the U.S. economy will be in either the healthcare and social assistance or private educational services sectors.
Healthcare and social assistance—including private hospitals, nursing and residential care facilities, and individual and family services—will grow by 30.3 percent and add 4.3 million new jobs. Employment growth will be driven by increasing demand for healthcare and social assistance because of an aging population and longer life expectancies. Also, as more women enter the labor force, demand for childcare services is expected to grow. Private educational services will grow by 32.5 percent and add 898,000 new jobs through 2014. Rising student enrollments at all levels of education will create demand for educational services.
Professional and business services. This industry supersector, which includes some of the fastest growing industries in the U.S. economy, will grow by 27.8 percent and add more than 4.5 million new jobs.
Employment in administrative and support and waste management and remediation services will grow by 31 percent and add 2.5 million new jobs to the economy by 2014. The fastest growing industry in this sector will be employment services, which will grow by 45.5 percent and will contribute almost two-thirds of all new jobs in administrative and support and waste management and remediation services. Employment services ranks among the fastest growing industries in the Nation and is expected to be among those that provide the most new jobs.
Employment in professional, scientific, and technical services will grow by 28.4 percent and add 1.9 million new jobs by 2014. Employment in computer systems design and related services will grow by 39.5 percent and add almost one-fourth of all new jobs in professional, scientific, and technical services. Employment growth will be driven by the increasing reliance of businesses on information technology and the continuing importance of maintaining system and network security. Management, scientific, and technical consulting services also will grow very rapidly, by 60.5 percent, spurred by the increased use of new technology and computer software and the growing complexity of business.
Management of companies and enterprises will grow by 10.6 percent and add 182,000 new jobs.
Information. Employment in the information supersector is expected to increase by 11.6 percent, adding 364,000 jobs by 2014. Information contains some of the fast-growing computer-related industries such as software publishers; Internet publishing and broadcasting; and Internet service providers, Web search portals, and data processing services. Employment in these industries is expected to grow by 67.6 percent, 43.5 percent, and 27.8 percent, respectively. The information supersector also includes telecommunications, broadcasting, and newspaper, periodical, book, and directory publishers. Increased demand for residential and business land-line and wireless services, cable service, high-speed Internet connections, and software will fuel job growth among these industries.
Leisure and hospitality. Overall employment will grow by 17.7 percent. Arts, entertainment, and recreation will grow by 25 percent and add 460,000 new jobs by 2014. Most of these new job openings will come from the amusement, gambling, and recreation sector. Job growth will stem from public participation in arts, entertainment, and recreation activities—reflecting increasing incomes, leisure time, and awareness of the health benefits of physical fitness.
Accommodation and food services is expected to grow by 16.5 percent and add 1.8 million new jobs through 2014. Job growth will be concentrated in food services and drinking places, reflecting increases in population, dual-income families, and dining sophistication
Trade, transportation, and utilities. Overall employment in this industry supersector will grow by 10.3 percent between 2004 and 2014. Transportation and warehousing is expected to increase by 506,000 jobs, or by 11.9 percent through 2014. Truck transportation will grow by 9.6 percent, adding 129,000 new jobs, while rail transportation is projected to decline. The warehousing and storage sector is projected to grow rapidly at 24.8 percent, adding 138,000 jobs. Demand for truck transportation and warehousing services will expand as many manufacturers concentrate on their core competencies and contract out their product transportation and storage functions.
Employment in retail trade is expected to increase by 11 percent, from 15 million to 16.7 million. Increases in population, personal income, and leisure time will contribute to employment growth in this industry, as consumers demand more goods. Wholesale trade is expected to increase by 8.4 percent, growing from 5.7 million to 6.1 million jobs.
Employment in utilities is projected to decrease by 1.3 percent through 2014. Despite increased output, employment in electric power generation, transmission, and distribution and natural gas distribution is expected to decline through 2014 due to improved technology that increases worker productivity. However, employment in water, sewage, and other systems is expected to increase 21 percent by 2014. Jobs are not easily eliminated by technological gains in this industry because water treatment and waste disposal are very labor-intensive activities.
Financial activities. Employment is projected to grow 10.5 percent over the 2004-14 period. Real estate and rental and leasing is expected to grow by 16,9 percent and add 353,000 jobs by 2014. Growth will be due, in part, to increased demand for housing as the population grows. The fastest growing industry in the financial activities supersector will be activities related to real estate, which will grow by 32.1 percent, reflecting the housing boom that persists throughout most of the Nation.
Finance and insurance is expected to increase by 496,000 jobs, or 8.3 percent, by 2014. Employment in securities, commodity contracts, and other financial investments and related activities is expected to grow 15.8 percent by 2014, reflecting the increased number of baby boomers in their peak savings years, the growth of tax-favorable retirement plans, and the globalization of the securities markets. Employment in credit intermediation and related services, including banks, will grow by 5.4 percent and add about one-third of all new jobs within finance and insurance. Insurance carriers and related activities is expected to grow by 9.5 percent and add 215,000 new jobs by 2014. The number of jobs within agencies, brokerages, and other insurance related activities is expected to grow about 19.4 percent, as many insurance carriers downsize their sales staffs and as agents set up their own businesses.
Government. Between 2004 and 2014, government employment, including that in public education and hospitals, is expected to increase by 10 percent, from 21.6 million to 23.8 million jobs. Growth in government employment will be fueled by growth in State and local educational services and the shift of responsibilities from the Federal Government to the State and local governments. Local government educational services is projected to increase 10 percent, adding 783,000 jobs. State government educational services is projected to grow by 19.6 percent, adding 442,000 jobs. Federal Government employment, including the Postal Service, is expected to increase by only 1.6 percent as the Federal Government continues to contract out many government jobs to private companies.
Other services (except government). Employment will grow by 14 percent. More than 1 out of every 4 new jobs in this supersector will be in religious organizations, which is expected to grow by 11.9 percent. Other automotive repair and maintenance will be the fastest growing industry at 30.7 percent. Also included among other services is personal care services, which is expected to increase by 19.5 percent.
Goods-producing Industries
Employment in the goods-producing industries has been relatively stagnant since the early 1980s. Overall, this sector is expected to decline 0.4 percent over the 2004-14 period. Although employment is expected to decline or increase more slowly than in the service-providing industries, projected growth among goods-producing industries varies considerably.
Construction. Employment in construction is expected to increase by 11.4 percent, from 7 million to 7.8 million. Demand for new housing and an increase in road, bridge, and tunnel construction will account for the bulk of job growth in this supersector.
Manufacturing. Employment change in manufacturing will vary by individual industry, but overall employment in this supersector will decline by 5.4 percent or 777,000 jobs. For example, employment in transportation equipment manufacturing is expected to grow by 95,000 jobs. Due to an aging population and increasing life expectancies, pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing is expected to grow by 26.1 percent and add 76,000 jobs through 2014. However, productivity gains, job automation, and international competition will adversely affect employment in many other manufacturing industries. Employment in textile mills and apparel manufacturing will decline by 119,000 and 170,000 jobs, respectively. Employment in computer and electronic product manufacturing also will decline by 94,000 jobs through 2014.
Agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting. Overall employment in agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting is expected to decrease by 5.2 percent. Employment is expected to continue to decline due to advancements in technology. The only industry within this supersector expected to grow is support activities for agriculture and forestry, which includes farm labor contractors and farm management services. This industry is expected to grow by 18.2 percent and add 19,000 new jobs.
Mining. Employment in mining is expected to decrease 8.8 percent, or by some 46,000 jobs, by 2014. Employment in coal mining and metal ore mining is expected to decline by 23.3 percent and 29.3 percent, respectively. Employment in oil and gas extraction also is projected to decline by 13.1 percent through 2014. Employment decreases in these industries are attributable mainly to technology gains that boost worker productivity, growing international competition, restricted access to Federal lands, and strict environmental regulations that require cleaning of burning fuels.
One of the features on CollegeRecruiter.com of which I never tire is the graph on each of our career channel pages that allows you to instantly see the trend in the number of jobs and resumes which are being posted to the 6,800 niche career sites in our network. If you're following the Accounting and Finance sector, then click to our career channel home page, click on the link to Accounting & Finance, and scroll about halfway down the page. You'll see the following graph:
The two graphs use the same data. One is a line graphic and the other is a bar graph. Some people find one easier to interpret than the other, so we display both. The graphic above depicts the change in volume of Accounting & Finance job and resume postings within the last several months. As you can see, the number of jobs being posted is far more variable but overall is trending upwards with a slight recent decline. The number of resumes being posted is less variable but also overall is trending upwards with a slight recent decline.
So how do you turn that data into information? Well, employers may want to use it to determine what types of incentives they need to offer to land new hires. If the number of postings is trending upwards and the number of resumes is trending downwards, then it is reasonable to infer that there is a labor shortage and the incentives will need to be increased. On the other hand, if the number of postings is trending downwards and the number of resumes is trending upwards, the candidates should understand that there likely is a labor glut and they shouldn't expect rich incentives.
I recently wrote about Maryland's misguided social engineering efforts in their quest to force Wal-Mart to pay a higher percentage of its payroll towards healthcare costs for its employees. Although many would argue that employers should pay more, I fail to see any rationale for only forcing this upon Wal-Mart rather than all employers or perhaps all employers with more than perhaps 50 employees. Others would argue that if providing healthcare benefits to Maryland citizens is so important to the Maryland legislature, then the legislature should fund their social engineering project and follow the lead of Oregon in implementing a universal healthcare program.
Today, let's address another misguided effort by Maryland to ostensibly shift wealth from employers to employees. Maryland's legislature recently overrode the veto of Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) and voted to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.15 per hour. While few would argue that more people making more money is a bad thing, the problem with increasing the minimum wage is that doing so increases the costs to employ those people. Given our increasingly interstate and even global economy, when we increase our costs of production we increase the incentive to employers to export those jobs to other states or to other countries. And even if the jobs are such that they will not be exported, the increased cost to the employer will end up being paid by consumers or the employer's shareholders or both. If by consumers, then the standard of living in Maryland just dropped. If by shareholders, then the employer's shareholders will see a lower rate of return on their investment, which will increase the cost of capital to that employer which will make it more difficult for that employer to hold the line on price increases, add new facilities, employ more people, etc.
Years ago, states could increase the minimum wage without having to worry about the negative consequences because those consequences were few and insignificant. Today, those consequences are very real and very serious. While those employees who see their pay increase by $1 per hour will no doubt rejoice, the rest of those in Maryland should be concerned. In fact, they should be very concerned about the lack of wisdom being exhibited by their elected officials.
Maryland recently passed a law requiring employers with more than 10,000 employees in the state to spend 8 percent of their payrolls on health care. Ostensibly, the goal is to reduce the number of workers in Maryland from needing to rely on Medicaid. So how many employers does this effect? You guessed it. Only one. Wal-Mart.
Although some might view Wal-Mart as the evil empire and some might suspect that my residency in Target's home state of Minnesota would pretty much require me to be one of those who view Wal-Mart as the evil empire, I do not. Like any corporation, Wal-Mart is in business to legally earn as large a profit as it can. Is forcing Wal-Mart to pay a higher percentage of its payroll on healthcare a good idea? Read on and I'm hoping that you'll agree that isn't really the point.
The U.S. Department of Labor just reported that 108,000 net new jobs were created in December, which was significantly less than analysts had predicted. While most would celebrate the news of 108,000 jobs being created, the analysts were actually disappointed. Yet they were quite pleased by a related report from the Department. Although December's numbers were less than anticipated, the Department reported that it has revised upwards November's job growth from 215,000 to 305,000 new jobs.
The gains in November and December allowed the Administration to trumpet the fact that the economy added two million jobs from 1/1/05 through 12/31/05. "As we begin 2006, we have every reason to be optimistic," said Treasury Secretary John Snow. "Making the President's tax cuts permanent is the most important thing that we can do in the coming months to make sure the economic environment in 2006 is as healthy and as good for job-seekers as it was in 2005."
