October 2008

Employment Trends:

In September, the U.S. unemployment rate jumped from 5.7% to 6.1%. The professional and managerial sector rose from 2.3% to 3.3%, although nearly 1.2 million positions were added. Individuals who have earned a college degree (or higher) are at a 2.7% unemployment rate.

Construction remains off by about 3.8 percent from the prior year, and will only be hurt more as companies trim back in the winter months. Manufacturing is down by roughly the same amount in all sectors.

With the large and highly educated baby boom generation approaching retirement, the shortage of college educated workers is only going to grow so take advantage of a slowing economy by going back to school.

-BLS Report: http://image.exct.net/lib/fef417747c670c/d/1/BLSSept.pdf

On the Upside: Growth in Renewable Energy

Jessica Meissner
Renewable Power Generation, Engineering and Operations

With the Renewable Energy Tax Credit bill finally through the Senate by a huge majority (93-2), we’re one step closer to a big boost for a sector that’s already growing incredibly quickly. According to the UN Environment Programme’s report on September 24th of this year:

-http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=545&ArticleID=5929&l=en

Commodity Pricing Impact on Job Market

Lisa Carpenter
Supply Chain Team Leader

What happens to the job market when commodity pricing rises? From the beginning of 2008 to August, steel has increased 100 percent, aluminum by 22 percent, platinum by 32 percent and copper by 23 percent. Crude oil prices have jumped by more than 40 percent. This is causing some industrial manufacturers, primarily heavy truck and construction equipment manufacturers, to raise prices, and others to put holds on new hiring. Many candidates are impacted by tightened hiring because they are looking for jobs closer to home to cut commuting costs, but finding few new roles are open. This will impact people in some hourly and support positions, but will increase demand for certain professions like Commodity Management. For instance, most Global Commodity Managers dealing with the metals commodities are so busy dealing with pricing issues and exchange rate woes that they don't have time to pick up the phone, let alone schedule an interview. They are hard to recruit for this reason, and are often not willing to make a change due to the last-in-first-out perception that comes to play in waning economies. For these reasons, there are fewer voluntary job changes these days, and the recruiter’s role in the hiring ecosystem is becoming more critical in some ways.

The Elusive Executive for the new Globally Integrated Enterprise (GIE)

Robert C. Meissner, Jr.
C-Level and International Search Specialist

One partial consequence of the rise of the emerging economic power houses of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) this decade, has been the evolution of the multinational corporation from one home-based in a developed country, to one more and more frequently found in either an emerging market or with virtual bases. The 9/20/08 issue of The Economist details the broader subject of Globalization in their special 26 page report (following page 62) but there are implications for the development of management talent worth noting.

The GIE has much going for it starting with nothing less than a mentality of making more and newer, often less complex products with lower labor inputs AND increased resource productivity. The result is a lower all-in delivered cost in fundamentally different ways: GIEs recognize the challenge and rewards of making products and services attractive to the emerging, much less wealthy middle classes of the BRIC and other developing markets. To be successful the GIE must do this while being on their ‘best corporate’ behavior - because they must adhere to the highest standards where they sell and, at the same time, operate with true cultural sensitivity.

What GIEs may lack, at times, is depth of management experience. What is rare, but exists, and required is experience of a truly multinational, multicultural, multilingual nature from the bottom of the pyramid. This English speaking (a must) executive probably has a nomadic history of culturally sensitive team building, where he is constantly benchmarking himself against the best executives in the developed business world. We believe that increasingly this executive will have been educated in the developed countries but born elsewhere.

He or she isn’t shackled with an old multinational corporate mindset but begins by thinking out of that box. They are, ironically, actually benefiting from these challenging times and bad economic policies in both emerging and developed economies. Why? Because they are forced to concentrate on ‘Blue Ocean Markets’, longer, leaner supply chain lines, inter-continental costing and a constant search for productivity (lean) gains. This executive must be agile enough to shift from one supply or production country to another in short order and all the while ensuring a strong, steady cash flow. We find these individuals to be some of the most interesting people on earth. They will have a powerful role to play in the economic well-being of the world in the decades to come.

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