Today, new technology and process improvements can sharply truncate the length of time it takes for employers to hire employees. Through their online hiring systems, leading employers are compiling databases organized by candidates’ skills. This allows for automated matching of talent supply and demand. Once an employer identifies the skills and competencies it needs, it can tap ready pools of talent. Hiring in some cases can even proceed without posting the position, saving time and costs.
By understanding these new employer staffing-management processes, professionals can position themselves better in the job market. The first step is to visit the Web sites of employers that interest you and then submit your profile to these companies’ talent-pool databases.
Profile-based systems help companies identify talent quickly, so you’ll improve your chances of being matched to an employer’s requirements if you provide complete and pertinent information about your skills and interests. In the electronic job market, a personal e-mail address that you frequently monitor is the preferred means of communicating with employers.
Just-in-Time Staffing
New staffing technology also is affecting other job-market dynamics. For instance, with streamlined processes and skills-based candidate-relationship databases, companies that have just-in-time-staffing needs can hire permanent employees as quickly as they once hired temporary employees. For this reason, temporary hiring may no longer be as reliable an indicator of an economic recovery in the future.
Eliminating the need to hire temporary employees will benefit companies in several ways. Temporary employees are expensive; their training and ramp-up time don’t create long-term value. Of course, they offer value by providing elasticity to a company’s labor force, which, for instance, is appropriate for seasonal labor demand. Yet that does not necessarily translate into a sign of forthcoming economic growth.
With effective staffing management, corporations can more finely tune work-force management. As a result, the employment of temps can be made more strategically, rather than reactively. Although hiring of any kind is a positive signal, the rate of temp staffing will be a more tangential, rather than key, indicator of economic growth.
Regardless of the direction of the economy, professionals need to be proactive about managing their careers. Job seekers should take into account these new candidate-relationship-management practices and adapt their career strategies to current job-market dynamics.
By lice nell