Today's Labor Department Report was another in the recent string of CRIES for the HR organization to step up and manage and develop a plan for talent today and into the future. This is an impossibility without the help of technologies in the areas of:
Workforce Planning* Talent Acquisition* Performance Management - Not the appraisal only* Learning and Development Planning* Compensation and Incentives* Succession Planning* Mobilization of the Workforce
2007 the rest of this decade WILL be the time that HR differentiates the entire organization by either focusing on talent or ignoring it and letting the competition take over.
Many economists and labor market experts say that job growth and the economy overall would be significantly stronger if employers could find the skilled workers they really need.
"I'm hearing across the board, across industries, companies indicating they can't exploit market opportunity because they can't find people with the right skills," said Jeff Summer, an executive at Deloitte Consulting who leads the firm's management practice. He said that there's virtually no long-term unemployment for skilled workers.
"It's down to the nub already," he said. "Supply and demand is completely out of whack."
Anthony Chan, chief economist for JPMorgan Private Client Services, said employers are constantly citing the inability to find the workers they need as one of their top problems, if not their biggest worry.
Businesses "feel there's real (unmet) demand out there," he said, adding that "economic growth would be faster" if there wasn't this tight supply of workers.
Mark Vitner, chief economist for Wachovia, said another sign of the tight labor market is the growing number of job openings being reported by the Labor Department in a separate report, even as hiring posts modest gains.
The most recent report shows 4.2 million job openings in October, up 8.8 percent from a year earlier, while hirings rose just 1.5 percent. Meanwhile, the number of workers quitting, retiring, getting fired or laid-off grew only 0.6 percent.
"With this level of unemployment, the only way they can find the workers they need is to hire them away from someone else, hire them from someplace else, or hire someone without the necessary skills and grow them," said Vitner. "All these things cut into productivity growth."
When the economy hits some natural barriers, it slows it down, and one of those barriers is when the pool of workers begins to dry up," he said. "The lifeblood of the economy today is skilled workers."
Deloitte's Summer said that the current tightness will be a problem for business at least into the next decade, when demographic trends should start to help.
"We start to see some relief in 2012, but we'll probably be dealing with this through 2015, even 2020," he said. "Companies that are looking at this are saying, 'We have to re-invent what we're doing here.' Just paying people more won't be the answer. They really need to be treating the talent market as a customer market more than they ever have before."
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