Getting ready for the next hiring wave

Everybody knows there’s a job drought in the United States, but what few people realize is that it won’t last forever.

By Marshall Loeb
CBS MarketWatch

At some point, when almost all the excesses are wrung out of the economy, when business people start buying and building again, when factories start producing at more than merely 74 percent of their capacity, there will be a burst of new hiring, and it will last quite some time.

Many of the same employers who announced huge cuts in jobs not so long ago will be right back hiring again.

Smart workers are preparing themselves now for the hiring boom that may well start in two or three years, perhaps sooner.

"With the aging and retirement of the baby-boom generation, the demographics suggest that we may see a significant increase in available career positions," said John Boudreau, director of the Center for Advanced Human Resources Studies at Cornell University.

Here are six things to do today to position yourself to land one of those career positions tomorrow:

• Try to move into a field that will offer the largest opportunities for hiring and promotion.

The workers most in demand will be those who have "hard" skills, such as in technology, finance and accounting, where your productivity and contribution to the bottom line are clearly visible and can be more easily measured.

Those least in demand — and most vulnerable to layoffs — are people in the "soft" fields, such as advertising, public relations, management consulting and executive recruiting.

All of them are nice for a company to have but not absolutely necessary.

• Get into a field that pays well.

When it comes to differing levels of pay, some firms offer outsized rewards to top managers and partners, but not so much for the front-line service workers who back them up.

That is often true in law, investment banking, entertainment, communications and stock brokerage.

• Don’t undersell yourself.

Even in sluggish times, such as now, it is unwise to take a job paying less than you think you deserve.

In bureaucratic corporations with ossified pay systems, employees who start out cheap might never catch up.

• Sharpen your skills to step off the career plateau.

Some people stuck on a career plateau might never move up unless they add to their skill set, such as by taking some hard-edged courses at a community college or enrolling in an executive MBA program at a local university.

The new economy forces everyone to work at a higher level, to bring up their game.

Said Susan Gebelein, executive vice president of Personnel Decisions International: "Employees who think they can just stay where they are, are just wrong, and they are going to regret it. Expectations (on the part of management) for every single job in every company I know of are increasing."

• Step forward with your ideas.

Now is a time when top managers are looking for ways to save money or earn more of it. It has never been a better time to speak up with your ideas for sparing cash or adding to earnings.

Don’t be afraid to request a specific and challenging assignment.

Said Gebelein: "Most leaders are excited about someone wanting to take on more responsibility."

• Try to get an interview even if there are no jobs available.

If you are looking for a job and come across a company you really want to join, push hard to have that firm’s managers or human-resource people interview you even if there are no job openings.

There almost certainly will be jobs there at some point in the future.

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company

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