patti wilson's blog

On E-Groups, Networks and the Competition

I have recently joined several Linkedin email interest groups. One is for people who have big lists of contacts. There I am starting to discover how puny my couple thousand numbers are. Another list is international which is interesting because I was expecting different and got same.

This has paused me to look back at what I was doing with Linkedin two years ago. Seems that over time since 2003, I just relaxed my zealotry about connecting to only known trusted resources and not to the competition. In retrospect, I see how my views have changed about networking, Linkedin and competition.

What are the lessons learned?

• Connect to anybody and everybody if it gains you increased access to the 6.5M user base and you can manage the requests load. This gives me and all my connections visibility to the multitudes beyond the high-paying recruiter and sales-folks. I can be found by the rest of the list who just use the free basic degrees of separation approach.
• There is no competition. It just doesn't matter who is linked to you as it is just a connection on a networking site. The person may have a similar or the same profession as mine but, really no two of anything is the same unless you are twins. Everyone has their own style, skill-set and unique gifts that they bring to the table.
• I met somebody recently who was mad at me for not linking to them over two years ago. It takes a lot of psychic energy to carry grudges and resentments. If you have a lot of them, you end up with a lot of baggage you're dragging around, which eventually will drag you down and only you down.
• Never rely on one on line source for networking, connections and business. I realized that I gradually renewed connections on different email groups that I had dropped for the social networking sites.

Job Growth in the Western States

I have been following the quarterly job growth reports on the FDIC's website. They publish growth or decline in available jobs by state and then rank the states and regions.

No, California, at 22nd, is not at the top.The Rocky Mountain region leads the growth in employment with the top 4 states: Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, and Utah. The South with the exception of Louisiana is also showing solid employment while the heartland and northeast are fairly weak.

This information is consistent with the long predicted demographic movement of population from North to South and East to West. The real estate boom of the last decade has been fueled by the Baby Boomers reaching retirement age and seeking optional lifestyles in milder climates and low interest rates enabling investors to buy income property with refinance money.

The areas that appear to continue to flourish have either a compelling climatic, business, and/or economic story. Las Vegas continues to show strong growth due to the hospitality/entertainment industry draw, while Phoenix has climate, high tech and tourism. Arizona has a strong initiative with both UofA and Arizona State for bio-tech and bio-medical research. 

Idaho and Utah both have low cost of living compared to the other growth states in the West, together with natural resources (mining, hydro) and tourism. Oregon's economy has been a slump for years due to the downsizing of the timber/wood products industry but has slowly evolved into another small mecca for technology companies seeking an educated works force, inexpensive power resources and lower cost of living compared to California.

Is this a good reason to relocate? Sure, if you have no compelling Bay Area ties and can find equivalent employment there? As one client of mine said, as he put his Palo Alto, California million dollar bungalow up for sale, you can "live larger" elsewhere.

0.5 Hiring Process in a net 2.0 Economy

I just resumed coaching a long-time client. We have been through the dot.com wars together. I coached him through multiple promotions and positions at start-up companies. He left for business school when the bubble burst and weathered out the recession obtaining a solid ivy league education.

When he called shortly after joining an old-dog non-tech company, I wondered what he was thinking in making that career move. It appeared to be to him a very cool opportunity to make change happen by moving the product's delivery into digital distribution.

Unfortunately, my client is going crazy with way more work than he can handle. He got a fast-track promotion and is doing his old job plus the new one until he can hire his replacement. That happened last December.  Seems like the company has had a 50 year policy of not using any kind of recruiters, neither internally nor externally.  It's up to each manager to source, identify, attract, screen, interview and hire their direct reports. 

The catch 22 is that my client is spending every spare minute trying to make the revenue forecast and has no time to hire and bring on board the team that could help him make the numbers. Does sound familiar?

We planning strategy on how to change a "it's always worked this way" mindset to "OK, let's pay the 20%, engage a recruiter and get good people on-board yesterday".

How much are we talking in serious money here? Not much really, it's about 20 to 40K. I could do a treatise on the internal cost of lost revenues, blown morale, burned out employees and lowered productivity because of an unwillingness to hire a recruiter. I am sure they are figuring that this is a slippery slope and can add up astronomically with multiple hires. But this is not a black/white yes/no choice for any organization.

Using a search person selectively for a specific hiring intervention makes for a good ROI. It is difficult to get a 0.5 company to become a 2.0 company when they can't get past outmoded rules and procedures.

Return of the Recruiter

In Silicon Valley, the determination of its economic health has always depended on who is doing the measuring and from what perspective. 

One measure of that is how much hiring is done using recruiters to identify and capture talent. Coming out of the last recession in 2003 when there was no hiring, the first dribble of job openings went to friends and colleagues looking for work.

In 2004, the job openings went to friends of friends and word of mouth through the grapevine. People in companies started sending me job openings, asking me to refer people. Of course, they assumed in wanting to help my unemployed clients, I would not request a finders fee. They thought right.

The Valley's economic evolution has been like the Sinatra song,  It Was a Very Good Year. Yes, 2005 was a very good year compared to the previous 4 years. It was a year that saw the proliferation of job postings on Linkedin, and the use of niche job sites by employers like the The Ladders . It fired up the popularity of Simply Hired, billed as the largest job search engine on the planet. Hey, now there was something to search for.

2006 has been the best year yet, for recruiters. They have come back on the scene after a 5 year hiatus. It's been a long dry spell. Many of them resorted to becoming expert career coaches, like me, helping the unemployed to write resumes for non-existant jobs. Some morphed into expert management consultants to help all those troubled dot.coms make a turn-around.

In 2006, the unforeseeable by most of the Valley, has happened. Companies have been having trouble finding and hiring talent through their own devices. Yes, not all the jobs were shipped off-shore. The long predicted "talent shortage" is finally bubbling up like a fine champagne in 2006.

Up to now, companies looking for talent would do anything but use a recruiter. That's understandable because they charge a hefty percentage of the candidate's 1st year salary. It's not exactly the salad days of the late 90's  when it comes to their fees but it's a living again.

I'd say that the Valley is getting back to good economic health again because recruiters are making money finding people, the right people though.