Peter Drucker, the famed 20th century management guru who taught my Management Science course at Claremont in 1979, plundered the depths of the English language to describe the radical change taking place in business at the time and came up with the ‘Age of Turbulence’.
What term then could he come up with for today’s staffing market which makes that so-called turbulent era of the 1970s seem like a gentle breeze? Tumultuous? Upheaval? Agitation?
No simple words can describe how social networking and mobile have created a wind shear on human capital markets that from my seat here at Tempworks have repercussions throughout the staffing business.
Beyond the Desktop
The PC is no longer the hub of customer service. Microsoft’s share of internet-connected devices has nose-dived in the last five years, going from more than 90% to less than 50%. That means that staffing candidates and customers alike are expecting your staff to be available 24×7 by text, Facebook, Twitter or whatever way it is they want to reached.
Leading staffing companies are learning to connect whatever way it is that anyone wants to connect with them, and they’ve realized training is less a top-down process than it is a bottom-up where younger professionals get Facebook Connect and can talk on the phone even if they don’t realize ‘dial’ used to be a noun.
A Post-Search World
Although the Google search phenomenon continues to change the game from finding to being found, they’ve also become a victim of their own success. The big growth in search isn’t happening with search engines now. Instead it’s taking place at sites like eHarmony and more specialized job sites run by staffing firms that integrate their core database with their external-facing job board.
The Web and Beyond
Let’s not forget the really geeky stuff. The web is being transformed by a new standard called HTML5 that is to traditional HTML what the train-de-grande-vitesse is to the choo-choo-train. For staffing companies, HTML5 means both creating and satisfying demand right on the web. For a concrete explanation of what that means, check out what TempWorks will be unveiling at the upcoming Staffing World conference.
Staffing is indeed undergoing what ‘age of turbulence’ only begins to describe. I’m proud to be associated with several staffing firm clients who pushing the envelope with us to define this new era of staffing innovation.
