• Interview Exchange integrates with HigherEdJobs
• Interview Exchange integrates JobTarget OneClick "Job Posting Distribution Interface"
• Interview Exchange Launches Employee Referral Portal
• New solutions reduce recordkeeping expense, while finding better applicants
• "The CRM model for HR"
• Weddle's selects IE as one of the best employment-related resources available online

With each passing month, it's becoming clearer that the multiyear doldrums of the U.S. economy are finally behind us. Yet the jury is still out on how long it will remain a so-called jobless recovery.

According to a reader poll conducted recently by HR e-Lert, an online information service of BLR Business & Legal Reports, 22% of respondents expect hiring at their companies to pick up within a year. What’s more, over a third say hiring is already picking up.

Others aren't so sure. A recently released Federal Reserve study shows faster-than-expected economic growth is producing slower-than-expected hiring, partly because the U.S. is experiencing a new kind of economic recovery driven by productivity gains rather than job creation. Other reasons for the sluggish hiring may include companies' reaction to a period of over-expansion in the 1990s, and monetary and fiscal policy that has become more effective at limiting the severity of recessions.

Like so many other things in life, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Business being what it is, it's prudent for employers to delay hiring until absolutely necessary. Eventually, though, even if productivity remains high, as is expected, an accelerating expansion is likely to require recruiters to work overtime to meet the hiring needs of their companies.

At the same time, HR industry watchers agree the recovery will unleash a torrent of pent-up job turnover. Roger Herman, a strategic business futurist concentrating on workforce and workplace trends, estimates that 30-40% of today's workers find themselves in this state of "warm chair attrition." [ER Daily, 7-24-03]

Consequently, just when recruiters thought the resume landslide would start to recede with the improving economy, along comes a fresh avalanche of job seekers eager to explore what they consider to be greener pastures of an improving hiring climate.

This new supply of applicants presents recruiters with a widely divergent and largely unfamiliar applicant profile. Many will have successfully avoided layoffs over recent years but possess widely varying qualifications and motivations. Others will explore entirely different industries and lines of work. Can you say "ambiguous hiring environment"?

All of which is likely to alter the challenges facing recruiters both little and a lot, including:

• A continuing abundance of job seekers – many long unemployed and now the employed – competing for a slowly growing selection of job openings.
• Increasing competition for the best and brightest talent.
• Ongoing tight recruiting budgets.
• The need for low-cost tools that help identify the best qualified, most highly motivated applicants before competitors can.

At the Interview Exchange, we understand the volatile nature of today’s employment market and how recruiters and other staffing professionals are likely to be affected by it.

And we have the solutions and the expertise to help you anticipate and navigate the uncertain terrain ahead.

So you’re prepared when that brightening light at the end of the economic tunnel turns out to be an onrushing train full of job applicants.

Contact us at info@interviewexchange.com or 508-836-3800.

Contact Roger Herman at roger@hermangroup.com.