|
something we would want."
West Coast recruiters and HR people started to notice the "people shortage" as early as 2005, she said, when the
unemployment rate began shrinking. "Historically, our employers put an ad in the newspaper and got lots of applicants.
Today, a company may not even get a response that way. We've had to get a lot more creative."
The best advice Figueiredo has for employers is to avoid the recruiting crisis as much as possible by not losing workers.
"Do whatever you can to retain them," she said. "Career issues workplace expert Beverly Kaye shares the scary statistic that
80 percent of people who are employed are looking at job opportunities elsewhere while they're at work. What this tells us
is that a lot of employers are assuming that loyalty is there, but it may not be there."
Lynette Rienbolt, director of the Center for Training Innovations at Southwestern Illinois College, says it's always a
wise idea to keep employees engaged in the operations of the company and in the decision-making whenever possible.
"If you want to keep the best workers working for you, give them a sense of ownership in their work," said Rienbolt.
"There are still some companies that haven't embraced this. Make sure your employees feel empowered enough to make
suggestions and contribute because it's essential to the retention effort. That front line worker - the person who actually
deals with your customers - you've got to get that person engaged."
Most workers leave a job not because of the job itself, but rather because of dissatisfaction with their immediate
supervisor, Rienbolt said, so employers, make sure you've got the right people in management. "A manager can't just learn
one style of coaching," she said. "If the workforce includes several generations of employees, the coaching needs to reflect
that."
Tom Monroe, director of the Center for Workforce Training at Lewis & Clark Community College, says the national
people-to-jobs shortage is expected to continue on for at least a decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
|
"And those numbers don't say a thing about the 154 million (existing) workers' skill abilities," said Monroe. "These are
just raw numbers. It understates the problem significantly. Anywhere from five to 10 percent of the U.S. population is only
marginally skilled to perform a job anyway. The U.S. Government has always considered unemployment that is in the 4 to 5
percent range to be a full-employment economy. And then, depending upon whose numbers you use, you've got another 5 percent
of the population whose skill level is so marginal that they're not beneficial to the workforce. So when you take that
number and add it to the raw number, it gets even scarier," he added. "We're really probably more like 20 million people
short."
Why is the U.S. producing more jobs than bodies to fill them?
Monroe says there are two primary reasons. First, as a nation, for many years the U.S. has been well below the
replacement rate on live births.
"With birth control and our national emphasis on reduction in families, we have somewhat of a 'bubble' demographic,
meaning that we have a lot of people in the middle age range," he said. "To some extent, the immigrant rate has mitigated
this. But at the crux of the issue is that our national birth rate is below our replacement rate."
Second, a record number of baby boomers - those born between 1945 and 1965 - are retiring. Monroe said many western
European countries are experiencing factor No. 1 but not factor No. 2.
"Most companies haven't even thought about this yet, or they've thought about it at a theoretical level," Monroe said.
"At some level, the better HR managers are thinking about it, but from a training standpoint, what are you going to do? You
just need to be a good company to work for so people don't leave you."
|
