Call us curmudgeons, but when accepted wisdom begins to dull the edge of a topic, we go looking for pins to stick in the balloon. Lately we’ve archived a slew of articles about the culture gap between Millennials (ages 18-29) and the rest of the universe.

This Millennial age group, the writers seem to concur, represents the vanguard of the human race and they are multi-tasking, social media-using, cell phone-addicted mutants whose peculiarities and special needs we will ignore at our peril. If we somehow fail to provide them with instant response, multimedia-enabled, nano-attention-span, group-validated inputs they will all crash and burn, taking our enterprises down with them.

Mastering Internet Recruiting - Job Seeker Attitudes and Behaviors

A good place to look for pins on this subject is the reports regularly published by the non-profit  Pew Research Center. The Center’s researchers have been studying Internet usage for years producing extensive and reliable data, with no commercial axe to grind.

Pin #1 Did you know that blogging has been declining in popularity among both teens and young adults since 2006, while by comparison, blogging within the overall adult Internet population has remained steady. Yes, the percentages are still different (15% vs. 11%) but it seems that the older Millennials get, the more they come to resemble...well, older adults. Go figure.

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For some companies the recession may have provided a respite from the issue of worker shortages, but those shortages remain real and persistent as we look to the future.
Demographics are immovable obstacles. We know the composition of the U.S. workforce for the next several decades and it suggests a prolonged and challenging period of increasing competition for diminished human capital resources.

2010 Corporate Recruiting Report

In the U.S. we will be dealing mainly with: a) the shortage of replacement workers for retiring baby boomers; b) a shortage of experienced, mid- and upper-level managers; c) the mismatch between worker skills and work requirements; and d) restrictive immigration policies. We are extremely fortunate in continuing to be a highly developed country that is also a growing labor market, with projected population growth over the next 40 years from roughly 300 million today to roughly 400 million by 2050. As such we are the exception, not the rule. Europe and Japan face similar problems, but theirs are tied to falling birthrates and declining populations. 

The developing countries on the other hand have a reverse problem, no place to absorb the labor surpluses among younger workers. Read more.

Almost any task can be outsourced and staffing is no exception. In today’s rapidly evolving business climate, corporate managers are continually asking whether cost centers are core to the business and whether third parties can provide additional efficiencies.

How much outsourcing is actually taking place? In our first survey addressing the matter (2007), responding groups were divided roughly in thirds: those who outsourced a little, a moderate amount, or a significant amount. Very few companies outsourced the majority of their work.

Recruiting Metrics and Performance Benchmark Report 2009

Our follow-up survey, taken 15 months later during the depths of the recession across a rebalanced sample of 760 companies, sought additional clarity on the low end where most activity takes place. What stands out immediately is the number of companies not outsourcing at all, perhaps, or probably, for economic reasons.

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The traditional sources of candidates are familiar and well understood. However, relatively new Internet sources continue to roil the waters of candidate sourcing, rising to the #2 and #3 places on our sourcing list in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. Employers are experiencing this as a mixed blessing: more viable candidates overall, but at the price of increased processing inefficiency. In other words, more wheat but also more chaff.

Source: 2010 Corporate Recruiting Report

Internet-based sourcing numbers are stunning.

Jobs Posted Online

• 1996 – 1.2 million
• 1998 – 28.7 million
   
• 2009 – 100 million plus? But no one really has a clue. The Conference Board measured 1,200 U.S. job boards (there are about 50,000 of them) in January 2009 and reported that 3.35 million jobs were posted in that month alone. Factor in jobs posted on private corporate sites, all the niche sites and foreign sites, then eliminate duplicate postings, out of date listings and phantom listings (designed purely to attract resumes) and it’s anybody’s guess.  Read more>