Perfect Labor Storm 2.0

Is Your Email Address Sabotaging Your Career?

When it comes to hiring, employers and candidates insist that first impressions still matter.  But apparently the brain hasn’t gotten the message when the lips are moving and fingers are typing.  Quite a few candidates are doing some pretty stupid things these days regarding finding a job.

Let’s start with what is the possibly the very first point of contact between a candidate and a company – the email address. The just released HR Magazine (May 2011) included an interesting article about how a cutesy, clever, or freaky email address might create a bad first impression with the employer.  For example, a few of my favorite inappropriate email addresses submitted by candidates applying for jobs at my clients included “[email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] ... and that’s just scratching the surface.  With high unemployment and employers practicing very selective hiring practices, turning an employer off with a provocative email address might not be the best way to get the hiring manager’s attention.

A recent study took this one step further.  Researchers rated the email addresses of30,000  job seekers applying for entry-level, non management jobs in the U.S. What they found was a potential link between crazy sounding email addresses and low scores on pre-employment tests.

For example:

• Cutesy and inspirational addresses and those with a money them scored slightly lower on pre employments assessment tests.
• Candidates whose addresses were rated inappropriate  scored lower.
• Candidates with appropriate email addresses scored higher in conscientiousness, professionalism, and work-rated experience.

I’m not suggesting – nor did the article – that employers should use email addresses as a screening tool.  But when combined with a pre-employment test assessing a candidate’s honesty, integrity, and work attitudes, the email might trigger greater scrutiny during the interview and subsequent background checks.

The study should prompt candidates to think twice about the email address they attach to the resume  they attach to the job application.

Is Poor Job Retraining Responsible for High Unemployment?

It's a difficult concept to grasp -- that at a time of massive unemployment, good paying jobs remain unfilled.

And yet despite unemployment in nearly 30 states running 8 percent or higher, nearly 2 million jobs remain vacant because employers can't find enough qualified workers.

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece of the Business2Business Magazine about the growing gap between the skills of the unemployed and the skill requirements of the jobs. These issues were also discussed in a recent article in theNew York Times on job retraining and another article in USA Today.

What’s the basic problem?  A Washington Post article suggests that maybe it’s job retraining that needs to be retooled.

Some high unemployment America faces today is cyclical, meaning that hard times wiped out jobs that will be restored when conditions improve. But many of the job losses this time were structural – we just don’t need them anymore or other countries can do them better or cheaper or both.  So the difference between this economic recovery and those in the past is that this time there is a dramatic mismatch between the kinds of jobs that millions of Americans have historically held and the kinds of jobs that we will generate moving forward.

Traditionally we addressed this problem by advocating worker retraining. No unexpectedly t is a cornerstone of the Obama administration's jobs policy. In 2009, the Department of Labor spent a little more than $4 billion on adult workplace training; about one-fifth of that came from the stimulus package. Millions of Americans are undergoing such training every year in an effort for them to go back to work.

And what are workers being retrained to do? It seems that a significant portion of the money is focused on "green jobs" and health-care industry jobs. But the Times article makes clear that current job retraining is inadequate, and hints that it may never really work.

So why doesn't the training produce its intended results? The Times grabbed the easy answer: "Because there are no jobs." That might, indeed, be the major reason, but before endorsing it, the Washington Post article offers several other theories:

The shortages aren't real. When medical organizations speak of shortages, they are measuring current workforce levels against a theoretical number per capita. Just because health professionals say they need more employees doesn't mean that the market has the capacity to support them.

There’s a personality gap. The unemployed generally have overbearing and unpleasant personalities.  That’s at least a reason offered by actor-comedian-economist Ben Stein, “The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities.” Stein suggests, “that high schools and colleges should have a course on "how to get along" and "how to do a day’s work." (That might help with future Gen Y joblessness but what about the 7 million unemployed workers 35 years and over.)

There's a geography gap. Economists have noted that while capital and physical goods are easily moved from stagnant to productive places, people are much less so. In the short term, it's not easy for unemployed people to move to where jobs might be, especially when many of their mortgages and home values are upside down.

There's a gender gap. Rationally, any well-paying job should be attractive to any needy worker. But the nation has suffered from a shortage of nurses for decades. Today more young men are willing to enter nursing as a career. But what about out-of-work males in their 40s and 50s who worked in male-dominated industries like manufacturing, construction, IT, and engineering?

Our training is really lousy. Governments and business leaders want unemployment to go down; community colleges want federal grants to provide workplace training; companies want skilled employees; and unemployed workers want jobs that pay well. So what’s the problem?  Maybe – just maybe – we need to stop training skills that businesses past their prime and out-of-work adults want and start training the skills that will produce the growth the economy needs.

And maybe we need to take a serious look at retooling job retraining before we can re-equip unemployed workers with the skills they need to get good paying, stable jobs.

Advice for CEOs: Work Your Strengths, Know Your Weakness

Working your strengths might be a good strategy for finding the right career, but ignoring your executive skill weakness can humble and tumble giants.  As many leaders have come to learn recently, a single weakness blown off as irrelevant can negate the strengths of even the mightiest of top performer CEOs.

 

Tony Hayward's fate as CEO of troubled BP was likely sealed weeks before the Deep Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico stopped gushing millions of gallons of oil. His story serves as a cautionary tale to CEOs everywhere of how a single mishandled crisis can eclipse an entire career. In three short months, Hayward learned what it meant to become the face of disaster. What he didn’t learn was how to keep his mouth shut.

 

Chief executives must placate a wider variety of constituencies than ever before, making the job's symbolism nearly as important as its substance. Mr. Hayward's various gaffes—saying he wanted his "life back"—and sour appearance before legislators showed a degree of tone deafness that is no longer acceptable for corporate leaders, management experts say.  Hayward also initially described the spill as "oil [only] on the surface. There aren’t any plumes," a gaffe he never lived down.

 

This incident should also serve as a warning to hiring managers and boards of directors who focus too much on executive strengths and pay too little attention to executive weaknesses.

 

Executive skills have little to do with the job position as much as they describe innate cognitive functions that all people, not just corporate executives, “execute” in a work environment.  Chuck Martin, author of “Work Your Strengths” and CEO of NFI Research, identified 12 executive skills.  Certain ones are prevalent in high performing individuals.  Specifically, Martin’s group found three executive skills shared by nearly all high performing CEOs:  Goal-Directed Persistence, Planning/Priortization, and Working Memory.  Goal-Directed Persistence was the most dominant skill in 43 percent of the CEOs surveyed.  As significant, only 6 percent of top performing CEOs had Goal-Directed Persistence as a weakness.

 

The executive skill that helps an individual think before you act (and talk) is called Response Inhibition. It is the ability to resist the urge to say or do something to allow time to evaluate the situation and how a behavior might affect it (Source: Work Your Strengths). If you tend to say the first thing that pops into your head and later regret it, you’re likely weak in Response Inhibition.

 

Hayward’s repeated gaffes over the past three months demonstrate clearly how a single weakness can turn a respected leader into everyone’s favorite punching bag. Even under normal conditions, the data deluge is beginning to stretch people beyond their information capacity. During a crisis, all bets are off. That’s when stress and fatigue degrades executive skills and the weakest skills fail first.  In the case of Hayward – not to mention Vice President Biden, Former President George W. Bush, and Britney Spears to name a few – a lack of Response Inhibition likely led to his demise. 

 

Maybe a better title for Martin’s book would be “Work Your Strengths, Know Your Weakness.”

 

Listen to my interview with Chuck Martin on Workforce Trends Blog Talk Radio.

 

What CEO or other famous people gaffes stick in your mind that eventually brought the speaker down?

Only 20 Percent of Workers Qualify for High Demand Jobs

Despite prolonged high unemployment, employers are struggling to find qualified skilled workers? How is this possible?

 

“Everyone has been caught flatfooted,” according to author/human capital expert Edward Gordon.  During a recent interview on my radio show Workforce Trends, Gordon said, “we only have 20% to 25% of the current workforce that fits into jobs that are in high demand right now….where we are creating jobs, not where we are abandoning and consolidating jobs.”

 

Gordon has been warning about this talent meltdown since 1991, when he authored the

first of 17 books.  "Across the United States refineries are breaking down with unusual frequency. Though BP and other refiners are making major safety changes, the breakdowns frequently stem from technician errors due to increasing shortages of trained workers,” wrote Gordon in the introduction if his newest book "Winning the Global Talent Showdown." He wrote that statement nearly a year before the Deep Horizon well accident in the Gulf of Mexico this year.

 

The Wall Street Journal reported a story in mid-July that Congress was investigating if the accident was related to a lack of properly trained technicians on the rig.  Then just a few days later, the Journal reported that a critical alarm system had been disabled which would have warned workers of dangers.  The story line unraveling at the scene of the accident seems to confirm Gordon’s forecast - a shortage in the quantity and quality of personnel and decision making ability is imminent.  Gordon warns that if we don’t do something quickly about re-training and educating people differently, “the world will not end in a big bang but in a slow grinding halt.”

 

It’s not that mankind hasn’t seen shortages like these in the past.  When we entered the Industrial Age beginning somewhere around 1850, we needed people to design, manufacture, and repair things.  That need created a lot of blue collar, semi- skilled, and low- skilled jobs that paid enough money to workers so that that they could live a middle class lifestyle. While 84% of those workers graduated from high school by the 1950s, many of them were only reading at the 6th or 8th grade level. But that didn’t matter - there were still jobs for them.  They could make a good living and raise a family in comfortable surroundings.

 

But then technology began to change everything.  In the 1970s, the Industrial Era became history and the Computer Age began to change the nature of work. Jobs now required different skills at a higher education level.  We still needed people to design, manufacture, and repair things but the complexity of the work required better skills. We started shutting down and shedding many of those low- skill and semi- skill jobs. They started going elsewhere - to Japan and South Korea. At the time they were the skilled low-wage countries.  Now, it is India and China who are low-wage and Japan and South Korea are high- wage countries.  But that too is changing according to Gordon who says, “wage inflation is beginning to change the nature of work in India and China, too.”

 

Unfortunately the U.S. work mindset remained the same while the world changed.  Many leaders in business and government believed that only a certain proportion of our people needed to be really well- educated and the rest could get along pretty well with a mediocre education or no education at all. As a result, we now have more than 90 million US workers who lack the reading, writing, and math skills to do the jobs properly. Our education system is just so far behind resulting in 95 million adults are reading at or below the 8^th grade reading level. That is just a staggering number. It is almost the third of our population.

 

Now we find ourselves exiting the Computer Era and entering the Cyber-Mental Age, where advanced technologies are embedded in everything.  “We need the people who have the necessary higher levels of literacy in math and reading, and special technical training in virtually every business sector you can think of from A to Z,” says Gordon. “Things are changing so fast in every industry that unless something is done, a lot of current workers, incumbent workers, will find themselves with skills that are out of date.

“The warning signs,” says Gordon, “started a long time ago.” He wrote a book on this called "Closing the Literacy Gap in American Business" nearly 20 years ago. Yet here we are living in a country with 30 states experiencing unemployment rates over 8% and 20 states with rates at or above 9%. And still many employers are complaining they can’t find enough skilled workers.

 

Today's long-term jobs crisis is not about the current financial meltdown. It is about an accelerating talent showdown. The basic cause is that unprecedented technological advances are ever more rapidly transforming the world of work. This will continue to raise the U.S. talent ante for people seeking employment or for businesses that need to fill high-skill jobs. The U.S. Department of Labor finds that 62 percent of all U.S. jobs now require two-year or four-year degrees and higher, or special postsecondary occupation certificates or apprenticeships. By 2020 we can expect that these talent requirements will increase to include 75 percent of U.S. jobs.

The World Future Society predicts that over the next decade the amount of new technology introduced into the U.S. economy will equal that of the last 50 years! While it took 120 years for the nature of work to change from the beginning to the end of the Industrial Era, it only took 40 years for the Computer Age to change work. We are already witnessing a major talent shift from low-skill jobs to more complex knowledge jobs across major world economies as we enter what Gordon calls the "Cyber-Mental Age" of ultra-high technology.

 

And that’s why today we are living in a world of high unemployment and skilled worker shortages, or as Gordon calls it: a world of “abundance and poverty.”

 

Listen to the full interview on Workforce Trends or request a transcript of the show.

What’s the “Next Big Thing” in the Job Market?

In 1999, 70% of workers considered it a good time to be looking for a quality job. Only 12% believed that in 2009.

Similarly, 64% were confident in 1999 that they could find a new job as good as or better than their previous job, while only 20% believe that today.

Adding to the stress of a painful recession, it also turns out that forecasting the fastest growing occupations over 10 years has proven to be an inexact science.  Many job seekers who took the advice of career planners have found  themselves stuck in jobs that have been stagnant if not significantly reduced in demand.  Unlike just a decade ago, job seekers are taking such projections with a grain of salt.

That’s because the projections released from 1998 through 2008 were mostly wrong. The data shows how difficult it is to predict which occupations will “boom” over the coming decade. For example, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics forecast in 1998 that 439,000 new jobs would be created for computer support specialist. In reality, only 10,000 jobs were created. While health care jobs were certainly that little engine that could during the first decade of the 21^st century, personal care and home health aides didn’t fare so well.  While 433,000 new jobs were predicted, only 71,000 jobs were created. Being a systems analyst was possibly the worst place to be at least in the technology sector.  While the system analyst was projected to be the hot job of the 21^st century, 85,000 jobs were cut instead of the 577,000 that were supposed to be created.

Those forecasts pale to the train-wreck in job creation for general manager and top executives jobs.  The BLS had projected an increase of 551,000 jobs between 1998 and 2008 when the actual economy had reduced the number of these positions by nearly 1.2 million.

The wrong projections aren’t necessarily always bad news. The BLS projected 323,000 new computer engineering jobs but missed the forecast by nearly 50% - over 611,000 new jobs were created. Medical assistants also experienced unanticipated growth when new jobs exceeded the projected number by 86,000 new jobs.

Predicting which occupations will experience the largest growth is very difficult. Job growth depends largely on macroeconomic trends and industry growth, which are difficult to forecast and can be derailed by an economic downturn.

For what it’s worth, the BLS did offer this job forecast in December 2009 for the years 2008-2018.  The following jobs are most likely to comprise a major source of employment and job growth over the next few years:

Registered nurses

• Home health aides
• Customer service representatives
• Food preparation and serving workers
• Personal and home care aides
• Retail salespersons
• Office clerks
• Accountants and auditors
• Nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants
• Postsecondary teachers

Most of the occupations predicted to experience the largest job growth are ones that cannot be outsourced to other countries.

High Energy Employees: Prey for Poaching?

The recession led to a rather interesting differentiation between employees who change jobs voluntarily and those employees who are poached. It’s the poaching of employees that employers need to fear the most.

These workers are the high energy individuals, who helped their organizations during the recession, are very visible to peers due to their 'catchy' energy and successes and today are not being rewarded adequately. In fact, they are likely being counted on to take on more and more work due to the amount of work they do.

A recent study has called these at-risk employees the "neglected warriors." A recent article in the Automotive News offered an example what is happening: "GM poaches hot, high energy marketing whiz."  The people at most risk of being poached away are these neglected warriors who may be in line to become "heroes" in their next new company.

Going from warrior to hero status takes just one thing - recognition. Heroes are recognized for their deeds. They are not necessarily the best employees, but they are the people who courageously entered into the battle for their organizations’ wealth during the recession. The neglected warriors harnessed their internal energy to drive many initiatives forward; however, with all these good deeds came very little recognition from their current employer.

Neglected warriors have a high sense of urgency, are compelled to move forward, have supported their companies through the rocky changes of the recession, and who today find themselves unrecognized and unappreciated for their efforts. These neglected warriors are not at high risk of voluntary turnover, but they are at risk of being poached away by the companies who know how to find them and who appreciate the type of talent they possess.

The research conducted by Leadership Pulse™ found that employees fell into four groups with the percentage of employees in each group noted below:

Fully engaged	55%
Entitled	6%
High Opportunity	22%
Disengaged	17%

Most employers are tempted to focus most on the “disengaged” employee.   According to Leadership Pulse, this might be a mistake.  While these employees are at risk of voluntary turnover, they are often burned out.  They are less likely to be poached because of their disengaged state.

The neglected warriors are the employees who will be poached because they have no good reason to stay with their current organization. They are visible to others because they have a high sense of urgency; they have been on the front lines fighting to keep the organization moving forward in tough times. Heroes on the other hand  are the most important employees to keep.  But they are less at risk of being successfully poached because they feel valued. These individuals have a high sense of ownership in their job and company, and they say they are fairly rewarded. Smart recruiters will not go after these people, and their friends and co-workers will not recommend them to their headhunter colleagues.

The highest risk that employers face when it comes to their heroes is that these individuals, based on something that happens in the firm, no longer feel valued and move to the neglected warrior state. At that point, they too are at risk to be poached away.

Today, organizations have a choice. Leaders can sit by and watch as neglected warriors get poached away. Or they can be proactive. They can identify the Heroes and Neglected Warriors and give them their well-deserved recognition. Or they can take a wait-and-see attitude and wage the old war for talent, simply trying to find enough people or adequate supply to survive.

Unemployment to Remain High: Abundance of Labor, Poverty of Talent

For the unemployed, the road back to employment seems to be getting longer and longer. Worse it seems to be filled with bumps that will never end.

 

The number of unemployed in March was unchanged at 15 million, but those now counted among the long-term unemployed, those working part time because they can’t find full time jobs, and those considered officially “discouraged” continues to grow. When you add together the unemployed, the discouraged workers, those working part time but want full time jobs and the group the BLS calls “marginally attached” the total is 26.4 million.

 

Even more indicative about the state of our economy is that the number of workers who have been without a job for 27 weeks or more increased by 414,000 over the month to 6.5 million. That’s 44 percent of the unemployed.

 

On a brighter note, the economy did add 162,000 jobs last month, the largest one-month increase in three years.  But that was partially fueled by 48,000 people hired by the U.S. Census Bureau.  Private sector job growth of 123,000 however  was better than expected, offering evidence and relief that government hiring was not the only cylinder firing in the sputtering  engine of growth.  Even the construction industry added 15,000 jobs, compared to the 142,000 jobs lost just 12 months ago. As recently as January and February, construction was throwing off jobs at the rate of 60,000 a month.

 

Welcome to the new economy - one where high unemployment and job creation co-exists. The cover story in this month's Business2Business Magazine addresses the workforce filled with an “abundance of labor and a poverty of talent.” Read the full article What Jobs Won’t Return at or download the pdf. 

 

It's also the topic of my Workforce Trends Radio Show this week.  My guest will be the editor/economist at Business2Business Magazine, Ted Byrne.

 

(Source: Workforce Trends)

Gray Ceiling Casts Shadow on Millennials

The unemployment rate for young adults has skyrocketed to over 16 percent.  For teens (ages 16 to 19) the rate exceeds 25 percent. Slow job growth and delayed Baby Boomer retirement is erecting what I’ve called the “gray ceiling,” the inability of the next generation of employees (Generation X) to move up and the inability of the youngest generation to enter into their first career jobs.  In addition, many Baby Boomers who retire from one job don’t stop working.  They “pick up” entry level jobs formerly reserved for young adults to keep busy or supplement their income.  This gray ceiling has huge implications for business, society, and long-term earning potential for our next generation of workers.  Watch my 3-minute video interview about the “gray ceiling” on Behind the Lines with host Diane Dayton.

Jobs Are Scarce, But Candidates' Expectations Aren't

There’s an assumption pervading board rooms and inner circles of management that high unemployment is tempering the demands of candidates. I’ve got a simple response: Stop drinking the Kool-Aid!

While Baby Boomers still make up the largest single generation and control corporate America's purse strings, their grip on the future is weakening. Baby Boomers no longer constitute the majority of workers, although many managers continue to act like they do. Here’s the new reality: the combined population of working age Generation Xers and Yers swamps the Baby Boomer population by more 24 million people — 104 million compared to 78 million.

Underlying these numbers are four significant trends that will trump the old recruiting rules during times of unemployment. My favorite trend (for obvious reasons), cited by Kevin Wheeler in "Why Recruiting Good People Will Get Harder and Harder," is “Generational Mindset.”

Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) are the most traditional workers these days. Most Baby Boomers are still more comfortable “going to work.” Many find it difficult to build a relationship without pressing the flesh. Their lives and personal identities are also often defined by their work.

Generation X (born 1965-1979) also tends to associate work with a physical place of business. They are, however, more open to working from home or on virtual teams (virtual work is a second trend mentioned by Wheeler). A career choice, whether it is a new job or promotion, often comes down to which one offers the most flexibility for them and their family.

Generation Y (born 1982-1995), as most employers are discovering, do not really want to work for any organization, especially those mired in hierarchy, bureaucracy and policies. Work is something you do, not a place you go. They want flexible, virtual work and are more likely to have multiple jobs. According to Wheeler, “they are the hardest to recruit and the hardest to retain. Yet, they are the future of most organizations as Baby Boomers age and move out.”

A third trend, according to Wheeler, is flexible work arrangements. The “normal” working day has been shattered. The time clock has become almost irrelevant. Getting paid for hours worked is slowly but surely being replaced by outcome and output. What does it matter if an employee works early in the morning and late at night if the work gets done correctly and on time?The lines have blurred between work, home and play. Young parents demand time for their children. Women have become primary breadwinners — when the kids are sick, dads stay home.  “9 to 5” work hours and 18-hour days just don’t cut it anymore.

The fourth trend that creates a significant hurdle for old school recruiting is the stigma of an employee holding multiple jobs. “Organizations still expect and seek loyalty,” says Wheeler, “even though they have shown their employees little of that when times get tough.” For many reasons, workers young and old are often working two or more jobs.  Most often it is because they need the money. But others are holding down one full-time job while starting a new business before-and-after hours.  And still others are working while going to school to prepare for a career not related to their current job. Unfortunately, rejecting candidates in this day and age will significantly reduce both the quantity and quality of your talent pool.

There is very little you can do to stop these trends, especially as the demographic tide continues to shift. It will be difficult to convince the talented candidate to work for an organization that does not allow flexible work. The alternative is obviously to recruit Baby Boomers who have grown up in a business world without flexibility. But that’s a strategy with a slippery slope as more and more Baby Boomers are demanding flexibility too. It’s also a short-lived strategy as Boomers will eventually leave the workforce, one way or the other.

The solution lies not in resisting the change but embracing new and creative ways to recruit and manage employees.

Also posted on my blog Workforce Trends at Bizmore.com

The Pros and Cons of Rehiring Employees Who Quit

Just a few years ago, using the axiom “time heals all wounds” and boomerang worker in the same sentence would seem so…contradictory. Today, many employees who have left a company to pursue opportunity elsewhere have shed the label “traitor” and have been ordained corporate “alumni.”

This shift in attitude has thrown a wrench into the recruiting mindset of many older managers.  For Veterans (born before 1946) and Baby Boomers (1946–1964) the very notion of re-hiring an employee who quit their job for greener pastures was at best considered disloyal. Voluntarily leaving a good-paying steady job placed a permanent blemish on a resume and tattooed the employee as a job-hopper, a fate worse than death in the minds of a hiring manager. Even women who left the workforce to give birth to or raise a child were deemed unfit to rehire. “What would stop them from doing it again?” asked managers.

But that was then and this is now. It is way past the time when the Machiavellian temptation to prove a point is a rational approach to hiring and managing talent. The world has changed. The number of employees who remain loyal to a single organization throughout their lifetimes and vice verse is shrinking. Job hopping has been transformed from a character flaw to a career plan. Life-long employment died with Generation X. The free-agent generation changed everything. Building a portable career became more important than getting a gold watch at retirement. And Generation Y took job hopping one step further. If job hopping became a norm for Gen X, then career hopping will be the vehicle for Generation Y to build what they are defining as parallel careers.

But hiring a boomerang worker isn’t only about managing a multi-generation workforce. Hiring a boomerang employee has one of the highest returns on recruiting investment an employer can ask for. The cost to re-hire a boomerang employee has been reported to be one-third to two-third the cost of hiring a “virgin” employee. Little time or effort must be invested in getting to know the candidate. Boomerangs can be valuable to an organization because they understand the culture. They have a history with the business, but bring a fresh perspective from the outside. During their absence, there is a good chance that boomerangs have learned new skills and strategies, achieving success in a different setting. (If they haven’t been successful, why bring them back?) They likely have made new connections and expanded their network.

But hiring boomerang employees shouldn’t be the strategy of choice because it’s cheap and easy. The decision to re-hire an employee should be based on good job fit — that the employee has the right skills for the right job. Not every employee who voluntarily quit or was “dislocated” is a good candidate for re-hire. If anyone was fired or forced out, they should not be on the priority list, unless of course the person or persons who forced them out turned out to be the cause of the problem and not the solution.

For some employees, you should just count your blessings they’re gone. In addition, managers should not assume that just because someone doesn’t leave an organization that they are loyal. It could simply mean they don’t have any place to go!

It is illogical to assume in an era where specific skills are increasingly scarce that separation from an organization has anything to do with loyalty. Individuals with the most valuable skills are constantly offered opportunities, and should a valued employee accept one, it is as much the manager’s fault for failing to retain the employee as it is the employee’s fault for taking advantage of market conditions. Besides, the shift from long-term employment to project work fits the lifestyle of highly skilled Generation X and Generation Y who demand flexible work arrangements and growth opportunities.

The successful re-hiring of a boomerang employee also doesn’t stop with the extension and acceptance of a job offer. Hiring boomerangs can be a bit political. The re-integration of a boomerang is a path fraught with landmines. The players might have changed between the time that the employee left and returned.  Interpersonal relationships might have changed too.  And dynamics might be tense if the boomerang leapfrogged over an incumbent employee, who might have felt he or she deserved a crack at the job.

Without question, managers need to get over their heartbreak and pride when it comes to re-hiring employees. Rehiring former employees who have the skills you need is not only the right thing to do, it’s good for business.