How tight is the labor market? One retailer is already taking applications for the holidays

You've seen the headlines, (or heard me talk about them on the HR Happy Hour Show), unemployment is really low, the number of posted job openings has never been higher, and companies of all kinds are reporting that finding and retaining talent continues to get tougher.

Just how tough is it out there?

Well here we are in late June and Kohl's, a major US retailer is already accepting applications for holiday (think Christmastime), seasonal workers for their stores. Here's the details from a piece on CNNMoney:

The department store announced Wednesday that it is already accepting applications for seasonal positions. Kohl's is staking an early claim in a tight job market that has made it hard for companies to find workers.

Kohl's is filling jobs at 300 of its 1,100 US stores for the back-to-school and holiday seasons. Additional jobs at stores and fulfillment centers will come open later in the year.

It's the earliest Kohl's has ever started hiring seasonal workers, said Ryan Festerling, the store's executive vice president of human resources.

Unemployment is 3.8%, the lowest since 2000. For the first time in at least 20 years, there are more job openings than people looking for work.

A couple of quick thoughts on this move by Kohl's to get a jump start on holiday seasonal hiring:

1. Kohl's is signaling, and I bet they have the internal data to back it up, that holiday hiring is going to be really, really tough this year for lots of reasons we've mentioned above. Starting as early as they can, they are hoping, will help them fill the roles they need by the dates they need them filled by.

2. For the talent pool for retail holiday season help, Kohl's has gotten ahead of the likely competition for these workers. This story has been in the news a fair bit, and people who are thinking about looking for these kinds of jobs this year might consider Kohl's before other retailers - especially since they can apply right now.

3. Despite all the talk about the end of retail and the inevitable domination of online shopping and Amazon, physical retail still matters. Lots of people work in these stores, and with a strong US economy, most of the large retailers will be looking to add staff for the holiday rush. Heck, maybe I will pick up a few hours this year over at the local mall.

That's it for me for a summer Friday - have a great weekend!

If not enough candidates fail your drug screening, maybe the problem is you not them

While catching up over the weekend on the latest from Willamette (Oregon), Week, (I mean, who doesn't spend at least part of their Sunday catching up on all things Willamette?), I hit this beauty of a headline - Oregon is Running Out of Workers Who Can Pass a Drug Test.

Since I think from the headline of the piece you probably have an idea where this is going, so I won't bother setting it up too much and just take you to the money quote from our friends in Willamette:

“One labor issue that continues to crop up is drug testing. At least anecdotally, more firms are reporting trouble finding workers who can pass a drug test,” the economists write.

Ok, so maybe I should have set up the quote a little. Oregon, like a lot of the rest of the country, is seeing unemployment levels at almost twenty year lows - about 4.0%. That, coupled with Oregon's decriminalization of marijuana for most uses in 2014, and many employer's slow reaction to changing existing and traditional screening practices has led to a bit of a conundrum in the Beaver State - plenty of open jobs, and also plenty of candidates who are 'failing' old-school employment drug screens.

As the trend/tendency for more and more states to adopt more permissive laws concerning recreational drug use - typically marijuana - I think organizations still conducting pre-employment drug screens and who are facing a shortage of 'acceptable' candidates in these states have three main options as to how to proceed:

(Note, all of the rest of this assumes jobs/roles that are not directly in public safety domains, i.e. I am not going to advocate that airline pilots for example are not screened for drug use)

1. Do nothing - What at least some employers in Oregon and elsewhere are doing. Maintain your strict policy of pre-employment drug screening, knowing that in places like Oregon you will effectively screen out more and more candidates as time/social mores evolve. The potential positive? Not everyone is so permissive about recreational drug use, and you might be able to score some points with that crowd - both candidates and customers. "We're the drug-free burger place" - that kind of thing.

2. Better segment their jobs and screening protocols - Ok in almost every organization there exists some jobs that are more, say, 'sensitive' than others. The payroll manager has access to lots more information (and can do more damage if she chooses), than say, the person who manages the cafeteria. The point is that not all jobs in the organization need to have the same strict pre-employment screening protocols. And chances are you know that, the CEO knows that, everyone knows that. If you are an employer facing 'clean pee' issues, maybe its time to think about how universal your policy needs to be?

3. Throw in the towel - Or, said differently, let a little bit more of the world in, realize you are recruiting (largely in Oregon), from a candidate pool who considers recreational pot use just fine, (and by the way is also legal). Sure, make or continue to enforce 'on the job' rules of conduct as you see fit, no one is arguing that, but let go of this kind of old-fashioned idea of having a 'drug-free' workforce. Because you know what? You don't have one of those anyway, despite whatever rules or policies you have. Said differently - a drug-free 'workplace' is your right (and the right thing to have), and drug-free 'workforce' is more or less none of your business and is out of your control.

Organizations usually often are slow in adapting to changes in the world around them. The great Grant McCracken wrote recently that "organizations are great at keeping things out, not so great at letting things in", (I might be paraphrasing a bit, but that is the gist.

The smart HR/talent leader not only know what is happening out there, they also know how their talent strategies have to adapt. Even in Oregon.

Have a great week!

The challenge of recruiting for a job we think is going away

If there is one job in the American labor force that presents an incredibly interesting, complex, and important case study on supply and demand, price economics, the impact of automation on work, and the current and future labor force it is the job of commercial truck driver.

A couple of important statistics to keep in mind before we wade into some of the details that make commercial trucking so darn interesting, (at least to labor market and automation geeks like me).

According to the American Trucking Association there are about 3.5 million commercial truck drivers in the US. And 71% of all the freight tonnage in the country is moved by truck. Finally, according to the BLS, truck drivers earn an average of about $24 an hour, and have an average age of about 55 years old.

There are a couple of other factors specific to commercial trucking that tend to make it a difficult job to perform and to recruit for - traditionally new entrants have had to fund their own, expensive training and certification, for new drivers, the hours and time away from home are significant, the job itself is stressful, hard, and tends to foster really unhealthy habits, (poor sleep, fast-food, little exercise), and finally, and perhaps most importantly, commercial truck driving has been increasingly seen as being a job that can and will soon be replaced and disrupted by automation. Estimates of the impact of automation on commercial truck driving vary, but one representative example from Goldman Sachs, estimates that as many as 300K trucking jobs will be lost annually, once self-driving trucks become more widely adopted.

Factor all of this in, the hard lifestyle, the relatively low pay, the looming threat of automation making many of these jobs redundant - oh, I didn't even mention the federal regulations making most of these jobs not available to workers under 21 and the strong market for alternative jobs in construction and energy luring many of the trucking industry's target candidates - and you would probably bet that the US economy is not producing as many new truck drivers as it has in the past.

And you would be right. But the problem of many US companies, (and consumers), is that while we wait for Elon Musk's fleet of autonomous semi-trucks to take over American highways, and in the age of increasing demand for shipments (driven by the strong economy and Amazon Prime), the industry is seeing an increasing shortage of commercial truck drivers.

Here's a chart from the American Trucking Association illustrating the problem facing the trucking industry shown as the estimate of unfilled truck driver jobs:

According to the ATA's estimates, there could be as many as 180,000 trucking jobs unfilled within 10 years. And that kind of a shortfall, should it indeed play out that way, will have a pretty significant ripple effect throughout large swaths of the economy.

Wages and benefits for truckers, which have been increasing steadily, will have to continue to rise. The transportation companies will have to pass these costs to their customers - manufacturers and retailers and commodity producers - who will past them on to their customers, who will pass them on to you and I. And the development timeline for the kinds of autonomous trucks that might stand in for the human truck drivers will have to accelerate.

But in the meantime, at least the next 5 or 10 years, if the current trends hold, the US economy and labor market is going to have to find a way to recruit and retain more truck drivers. And lately, it seems like the transportation and other companies have not really cracked the code on just how to do that.

A tough job, with lots of stress, with relatively poor to average pay, that we keep writing breathless stories about how it will soon be made obsolete by technology, with an aging cohort of workers currently in place, might represent the toughest recruiting challenge in recent memory.

Sure, everyone likes to think 'tech' recruiting is hard, and it probably is. But I would wager a good commercial trucking recruiter would be worth their weight in whatever it is their company needs to get from one side of the country to the other.

Anyone out there doing this kind of recruiting? Would love to hear how it is going on the front lines.

Have a great week!

Is every company soon to be an 'Artificial Intelligence' company?

A few years back the quote 'Every company is a technology company' made the rounds on social media and in presentations on the workplace, the future of work, and in probably too many TED talks to try and compile.

But while some work and workplace sayings, at least to me, don't necessarily become any more true just because they are repeated all the time, ('Culture eats strategy for breakfast', I am looking right at you), this notion of just about every kind of organization becoming much more reliant, dependent, and committed to more and more advanced technologies as a means to survive, compete, and thrive still seems valid to me.

Can you think of any business, small, medium, or large, that has not had its processes, products, services, communications, administration, customer service, and marketing significantly impacted by new technology in the last decade? Aside from perhaps a few of the very smallest, local service businesses, I can't really think of any. And even those kinds of places, say like a local barbershop or pizza joint, are likely to have a 'Follow us on Facebook' or a 'Find us on Yelp' sticker in the window.

I thought about this idea, of every company being a technology company, again recently when I saw this piece on Business Insider - 'Goldman Sachs made a big hire from Amazon to lead its Artificial Intelligence efforts'. While it isn't surprising or revealing at all to think of a giant financial institution like Goldman being transformed by technology like so many other firms in all industries, this specific focus on AI technology is I think worth noting.

Here's an excerpt from the piece:

Goldman Sachs has hired a senior employee from Amazon to run the bank's artificial-intelligence efforts.

Charles Elkan has joined Goldman Sachs as a managing director leading the firm's machine learning and AI strategies, according to an internal memo viewed by Business Insider.

Elkan comes from Amazon, where he was responsible for the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Amazon Web Services, according to the memo. He previously led the retailing giant's Seattle-based central machine-learning team.

"In this role, Charles will build and lead a center of excellence to drive machine learning and artificial intelligence strategy and automation, "Elisha Wiesel, Goldman Sachs' chief information officer, wrote in the memo. "Charles will work in partnership with teams across the firm looking to apply leading techniques in their businesses."

The key element I think to the announcement of Goldman's new AI hire is meant to work with groups across the entire business in order to find ways to apply AI and Machine Learning technologies. Almost as if Goldman is not looking to create the 'AI Department' akin to the classic 'IT Department' that exists in just about every company, but rather to find ways to infuse specific kinds of tech and tech approaches all over the company.

And thinking about AI in that way, much differently to how most companies have looked at most of the major technological advances in the past is what leads me back to the question and title of the post. If the Goldman, (and plenty of other companies too) example of looking for ways to embed AI technology and techniques all across their businesses, then it is not really a stretch to suggest at least in some ways they are seeking to become 'an AI company' at their core.

What's been the most significant single technology advance in the last 25 years or so that has done more to change how work and business get done?

Email?

The web?

Mobile phones?

Probably some combination of these three I would bet. And has any company you have known decided to 'brand' or consider themselves 'an email company?' Or a 'mobile phone' company? 

Not really, these were just tools to try and get better, more efficient, more profitable being whatever kind of company they really were.

So I think the answer to the 'AI question' for Goldman, or for anyone else going all in with AI at the moment is 'No', we aren't really trying become an Artificial Intelligence company. We probably should just consider AI and its potential as just another set of tools that can be leveraged in support of what it is we are really trying to do.

Even if it is tempting to try and create the latest management/workplace axiom.

Have a great week! 

Should workers have a 'Right to disconnect?'

Quick shot for a busy, 'It's almost Spring Break but not quite' Wednesday - another dispatch from the front lines of technology-driven employee burnout, (and potential governmental overreach).

First spotted from a piece on Fast Company with the headline 'New York workers may soon get the right to stop answering work email after hours' we find that there is some proposed legislation before the New York City Council titled "A Local Law to amend the New York city charter and the administrative code of the city of New York, in relation to private employees disconnecting from electronic communications during non-work hours".

First observation of this proposal? The name doesn't quite roll off the tongue like 'The Affordable Care Act' or 'Prohibition'. Maybe shorten up the name next time?

But leaving that aside, the details of this proposed regulation/law are what is more interesting. Patterned on successful and similar laws in France and Germany, this proposal would make it illegal for private employers in New York City to require employees to answer work-related electronic communications, (email, texts, work chat messages, etc.), outside of their 'normal' working hours.

Here's the relevant excerpt from the proposal (for those who appreciate government-speak):

Disconnecting from work. a. 1. It shall be unlawful for any employer to require an employee to access work-related electronic communications outside of such employee’s usual work hours, not including overtime, except in cases of emergency. 

There are some other exceptions from this policy named in the proposal - on-call workers and independent contractors are the two most common - but essentially if enacted, this 'Right to disconnect' would explicitly forbid private employers to require electronic message responses from workers outside of normal working hours. And the proposal also protects workers from retaliation and interference should they choose to exercise this 'Right to disconnect'.

A couple of quick thoughts on this, then I will let you ponder the wisdom and/or need for such a regulation while you take a few minutes away from your overflowing Inbox:

1. Note that the proposal isn't entirely clear on what 'in cases of emergency' really means - 'Where is the Penske file? EMERGENCY!!!!', which creates what seems to be a pretty big loophole for employers to walk through.

2. If you have to resort to making a rule, whether a piece of legislation, or just a company-wide 'No E-mail Thursday' policy, then it is pretty likely you have some kind of a problem with email and electronic communication overload. A law might not make sense, but it seems apparent that carrying on with things as they are, and with employees drowning in messages, texts, and emails isn't going to be sustainable forever.

3. It's at least worth pondering a few questions: What would our organization do if this law did apply to our employees? How would we communicate, organize, collaborate, and manage differently? Does our organization really rely on almost 24/7 electronic access and availability of our people? And if so, what does this do to them?

Do I think such a 'Euro-style' kind of proposal would actually pass into law anywhere in the US?

Not really.

But the way we tend to recoil or even mock these kinds of proposals that even if ill-considered have at their core the well-intentioned goal of giving workers more balance, time to re-charge, and time to not be thinking about work, also suggests that we are probably contributing to the problem too.

I once blogged, (it was so long ago, I can't find the link, but trust me I did), that you could learn everything you needed to know about an organization's work culture by examining six months worth of weekend email traffic.

Who is sending them (weekend email), who are they sent to, who is responding, and how quickly would reveal tons of information about the culture.

Have a few extra minutes soon? Ask your IT group to give you some stats on weekend email usage. I bet it would be interesting...

Have a great day!