Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its most recent report on U.S. employment. At the end of December, the unemployment rate reached 7.2 percent. While far from the double-digit rates of the 1980s, the increase in unemployment reflects a staggering one-month loss of 524,000 jobs and the disappearance of 1.9 million jobs in the final third of 2008. These sobering highlights are widely reported in the news media, but most of the BLS report gets little coverage. Readers willing to dig deep enough can find some interesting -- and possibly helpful -- information.

Consider these statistics:

Only 3.7 percent of civilians with a bachelor's degree or higher are unemployed, nearly half the overall unemployment rate. (The unemployment rate for those with some college or an associate degree is 5.6 percent.)

Unemployment in management, professional, or related occupations is 3.3 percent. Service occupations have the lowest unemployment rate (2.9 percent), and the category called farming, fishing, and forestry has the highest (18.3 percent).

Healthcare employment actually rose in 2008. The industry added 372,000 jobs during the year.

In December, two age groups showed gains in the number of people employed: eighteen-to-nineteen year old women and workers age fifty-five and older. (According to a separate BLS report, in the ten-year period ending 2007, the number of workers age sixty-five and over increased by 101 percent. The number of people age seventy-five and over jumped 172 percent during the same period.)

The BLS also tracks the number of job openings in the country. As of October 31, the latest available information, there were 3.1 million unfilled jobs. For the year, the government sector had the smallest decrease in the number of open positions.

Can you use this information in your role as a leader? I think so. For starters, make sure you're not taking your most highly educated workers for granted; they're still very much in demand in the workforce and vulnerable to pilfering by your competitors. And if you're having trouble finding qualified employees, look no further than the growing abundance of workers eager to work past the traditional retirement age. Most importantly, read beyond the headlines to find the data that truly impacts your business.

Labels: hiring

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As I wrote a few months ago, "People join an organization, but they leave a manager." In follow-up surveys of departing employees, companies are discovering that the main reason workers quit is because of a bad boss. Yet, surprisingly, most organizations fail to recognize the connection between poor leadership and employee turnover.

Matt Langdon referred me to this great post by Allan Webb, a management consultant who has worked with small-to-medium sized companies for thirty years. As Webb points out, today's workers are not looking to make lifetime commitments to employers. Most stay with a company for just a few years. Employers who figure out that good leadership and employee retention are inseparable will be more likely to convince workers to stay awhile longer.

Labels: employees, hiring

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Griffin Hospital is obsessed with patient care. The Derby, Connecticut facility's mission statement declares, "Griffin Hospital is committed to providing personalized, humanistic, consumer-driven health care in a healing environment." To make sure it fulfills that commitment, the hospital measures patient satisfaction incessantly by surveying 100 of its discharged patients every month. For three years in a row, its former inpatients gave Griffin a 97 percent satisfaction rating.

But its patients are not the only people satisfied with the hospital. As it has every year since 1999, Griffin made it onto Fortune's list of the "100 Best Places to Work for in America" in 2008. Factored into the rankings is how workers grade their organizations for credibility, respect, fairness, pride, and camaraderie, and Griffin's staff members give their employer high marks indeed. But more revealing than the Fortune honor is Griffin's impressive applicant pool. Last year, the hospital received 6,691 applications for only 180 open positions. Let that sink in a moment: that's an average of thirty-seven applicants for every job opening. What's more, Griffin's pay scales are 5-7 percent lower than other area hospitals. Why would people be so eager to work for Griffin when they could earn more elsewhere? Clearly, the hospital's focus on providing extraordinary patient care attracts healthcare workers who share that obsession. In other words, Griffin's core values align with its applicants' individual core values.

Griffin Hospital is proof that, when selecting employers, job candidates are focusing less on financial rewards and more on values. How obsessive are you about your organization's mission statement.

Labels: employees, hiring, leadership

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Here's sobering news for hiring managers: four out of ten teenagers believe that cheating, plagiarizing, lying, or behaving violently is sometimes necessary for their success. The fifth annual Junior Achievement/Deloitte Teen Ethics Survey polled U.S. teenagers ranging in ages from thirteen to eighteen about their ethical standards. Although 71 percent of respondents said they have what it takes to make ethical decisions once they enter the workforce, 38 percent said dishonesty and violence are acceptable as long as those behaviors help them succeed.

Consider these findings: More than half of the 24 percent of teenagers who said it's okay to cheat on a test listed a personal desire to succeed as suitable rationalization. Twenty-three percent said violence toward others can be justifiable when settling arguments or seeking revenge. And while 95 percent said stealing something from a store is dishonest, 47 percent found nothing wrong with downloading music from an online retailer without paying for it.

"As the teens of today become the workforce of tomorrow, it is more important than ever that they learn how to make appropriate, ethical decisions," says Gerald Czarnecki, president and chief executive officer of JA Worldwide. Indeed. Leaders I speak with are increasingly frustrated to discover that many young people entering the fulltime workforce lack the ability to recognize right from wrong. They find themselves having to teach workplace behaviors they think young adults should already know; that it's proper to call their supervisors when staying home sick, for instance, or that it's improper to text message their friends during staff meetings. But who's going to teach this stuff to our youth?

As it turns out, Junior Achievement and Deloitte will. The two organizations have collaborated to launch JA Business Ethics, a new program developed to help prepare high school students for making ethical decisions at work. The program's hands-on classroom activities and real-life applications allow students to compare their personal beliefs with accepted ethics theories. Additionally, Junior Achievement updated Excellence through Ethics, its free online program that provides ethical lessons for students in grades four through twelve. "Our society relies on its members having a clear understanding that integrity and trust are the foundation of all human relationships," explains Czarnecki. Thankfully, JA and Deloitte are helping to build that foundation.

Labels: employees, hiring, integrity, values

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As I've stressed before, the key to effective hiring lies in making sure an applicant's personal values align with the culture of your organization. To be sure, finding workers with the skills or experience needed to perform a job is important. But misjudging how a candidate will fit into your company's culture will likely lead to dissatisfaction for both you and the newly hired employee. If you find spotting that connection challenging, you're not alone.

In a recent poll, 59 percent of human resource managers admitted to hiring a candidate who proved to be a poor fit for their company's culture. The survey, conducted by staffing specialists OfficeTeam, revealed a major pitfall of hiring people ill-suited for an organization's culture: 85 percent of HR managers acknowledged losing a staff member who did not fit the company's work environment.

Diane Domeyer, OfficeTeam's executive director, says the interview is a good opportunity to assess the employer-employee fit -- for both parties. "The interview is a two-way street," says Domeyer. "Employers are looking for clues to an applicant's work ethic and personality, and job seekers want to learn more about the company culture." To help hiring managers find good matches, she suggests asking potential candidates the following type of interview questions:

- What type of work environment brings out your best performance?
- In what type of work environment are you least likely to thrive?
- What did you like best/least about your last job and why?
- Considering your greatest accomplishments in previous roles, what were the factors that allowed you to be successful?

As it turns out, recognizing a good work-culture fit is difficult for job applicants, too. Nearly half of the respondents in the OfficeTeam survey said they have misjudged an eventual employer's work environment in the past.

Labels: employees, hiring, values

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