On Babies, Bathwater, AI Recruiting, and HR
AI recruiting has been around longer than most realize. But smart leaders are wise about how they use it.
Why Engagement Matters Now More Than Ever
In an especially good 12/27/25 Wall Street Journal piece (“Companies Are Outlining Plans for 2026. Hiring Isn’t One of Them”), Chip Cutter notes that US business hiring has predictably slowed to a crawl on the cusp of full-blown AI launch, and anticipated corollary job reductions. As a result, many who might otherwise have entertained a […]
All Cows Will Please Report to the Barn
Recently, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy gave notice that all AMZN corporate staff were to be back in the barn working in January 2025. (Before anyone sends any inflammatory emails, we’ve used the Cows metaphor for better than 25 years and have gone to great lengths to be clear that we are NOT comparing people to […]
Can We Resume the Beatings Yet?
The war for talent is far from over. Employers who relax measures to attract and retain the best talent will fall behind their competitors for talent.
RTO Mandates: How to Make Recruiting and Retention Even Harder
Let’s get right to the point. Consider two groups, A and B. Group A: Knowledge workers who want the option to work remotely, or hybrid. Group B: Managers who want them to come back to the office, issuing Return to Office Mandates. In today’s labor market, Group A outweighs Group B by a staggering margin. […]
Where did all the workers go? The last four reasons there don’t seem to be enough workers
In the first three installments of this series (July 12, Sept 12, and Oct 25), we tried to shine some light on the headscratcher of the year, “Where did everyone go?”, as the labor market certainly feels tighter than ever before, both to employers and consumers. And numbers don’t lie. We still have too many […]
Where Did All the Workers Go? A Lot Retired.
Where did all the workers go? Answer #3 in the series: People retired in droves. Way more than anyone expected. More than half the people who voluntarily withdrew themselves from the labor force between March of 2020 and July of 2021 did so through retirement.
Where Did All the Workers Go?
The severe labor shortage of 2022 has most of us vexed. The question I keep hearing is “Where did everyone go?” If you look deep enough (and I have), the answers present themselves. And it’s not just one thing. Or even two or three. It takes a lot of converging factors to tighten the labor […]
Part Two – Twenty-Seven Things You Can Do Right Now to Win the War for Talent – Onboarding
By Richard Hadden and Bill Catlette Onboarding new talent- when done well – is probably the smartest thing you can do to preserve your investment in recruiting (which was the topic of our post on November 26, 2021). In fact, we see onboarding as such a central part of the whole recruiting process, that for […]
Twenty-seven Things You Can Do Right Now to Win the War for Talent – Part One
How about if I don’t start this out by recounting how hard it is to find and keep workers right now? That would be only slightly less useful than an OB/GYN standing over the bed of a woman in the travails of labor, saying, “Let me tell you how bad you hurt.” I’ll also save […]