The Employer/Employee Disconnect

The Employer/Employee Disconnect

David Earle

Why do we feel this is important when the U.S. economy appears to be returning to an even keel and unemployment has begun to fall? Because the disconnect we refer to has little to do with unemployment.

It’s about something far more pervasive and consequential – the way employers today go about finding the talent they need versus the way job seekers go about finding the companies they might like to work for.

Education's Impact on mobility

This disconnect affects all job candidates at all levels in all types of job markets, whether they are anxiously looking for work on a daily basis or happily employed and not looking at all.

We have been researching candidate behavior since 2007. At first we accepted the common categorization of workers as either active or passive, with each group having distinctive attitudes and behaviors that required specific and familiar job marketing approaches. But the more data we saw, the less those categories made sense. They seemed to be artifacts from another time when most employment was long-term and most people changed jobs infrequently. But they made no sense at all in a fragmented, turbulent job market where employers increasing sought highly flexible, worldwide workforces and job seekers increasingly held a dozen or more jobs between school and retirement.

Our clients are well aware of the internal changes they have had to make over the past decade to remain competitive in the job market. In the years ahead, those changes will not stop; in fact we see them accelerating. The drivers of marketplace change – globalization, demographics and technology – will continue to rapidly alter the dynamics of the job marketplace. One of the places we see this most clearly is in the attitudes and behaviors of job seekers.

Complexity and Change

Globalization, demographics and technology are interacting in complex ways. For example, demographics create labor imbalances that over time influence mobility. Companies move work to where the most profitable labor pools are located while workers move themselves to where the best opportunities are. Technology has accelerated this trend by exponentially increasing job visibility. From a communications standpoint, the potential labor supply for many jobs is now worldwide, available from any city, town or village with an Internet connection.

But now these interactions are producing secondary effects. For example, in the past most mobility was physical; the worker relocated or the employer set up shop in a new location. Now, increasingly robust communication tools can connect work and workers regardless of where they happen to be physically. Leaving home to go to work is no longer necessary, even if the commute is only half an hour.

But while technology is reducing travel as a condition of work, it is increasing it as an elective option. Mobile phones, text messaging, Skype, email, Flicker, Facebook and Twitter allow friends and family to access one another even when they are half way around the world. And the comfort of maintaining home ties, coupled with the career benefits of a diverse, worldwide CV, and the personal benefits of exposure to different cultures and lifestyles, are all contributing to more mobility rather than less.

Rates of Adaptation

The demand side (employers) and the supply side (job seekers) of the job market have both been powerfully affected by the interactions of globalization, demographics and technology. Many disconnects that we explore in these two reports are caused by the different rates at which the two sides have been able to adapt. Social media is a good example. Having only personal technical systems to modify, job seekers are adapting to new communication technologies very rapidly. Employers, on the other hand, working within the constraints of large, complex systems, cannot. So job seekers are racing ahead to develop new information habits and channels while employers are trying to reach them through messages and channels that have lost relevance.

A second key issue involves transparency. The Internet has made it very hard for corporations to keep secrets, while making job seekers avid and discerning consumers of information. Our research shows that companies that don’t understand or respect this are recruiting at a severe disadvantage to those that do.

A third issue involves process. The increasing mechanization at the top of the corporate recruiting funnel has, if anything, made the application process worse from the candidates’ perspective. The infamous “black hole” is blacker than ever and candidates uniformly hate it. Companies that haven’t used technology to make the internal recruiting process more transparent and user-friendly are slowly committing a form of job branding suicide one mitigated only by the fact that most competitors are guilty of the same anti-consumer behavior.

Source : Staffing.org