By Beth Fitzgerald
Originally published in NJBIZ - February 23, 2009
Employers with jobs to fill during this recession are seizing a golden opportunity to hire talented people who are out on the street through no fault of their own.
"There is more and richer talent in the unemployed market than at any time in the 20 years I've been in this business," said Frank Wyckoff, president of Snelling Personnel/The Wyckoff Group, which has headquarters in Eatontown. "I've never seen so many jobs eliminated without any consideration of whether or not people are good at their work."
So employers are weeding out marginal workers and replacing them with top performers who otherwise would be unemployed.
"If you are running a business, you have to get more work out of fewer people - and if someone is not carrying their weight, employers have an opportunity to improve their staff, and they are doing it," Wyckoff said. "Managers who made $70,000 in their last job are taking $50,000, because in this uncertain environment, they can't afford to be out of work."
Steven Darien, chief executive of the Cabot Advisory Group, a human resources consultancy in Bedminster, said, "This is a great opportunity to clean out the ranks of mediocre performers and bring in people of high talent."
That may sound heartless, but employers can take a lesson from professional sports, Darien said. "Every year, the National Basketball Association drops two people off every team and brings in two new kids out of college. If they didn't do that every year, they would become a mediocre basketball team."
In a large organization, it's hard to see this process at work, because there are so many people, "but companies have to slough off the least-productive people and bring in better people," Darien said.
"These really are very tough times: a lot of people have lost their jobs through absolutely no fault of their own," said Patrick Sweeney, president of Caliper in Princeton, an international management consulting firm.
The economic downturn has forced companies "to look at their products, services and their marketplaces very differently, and much more competitively," Sweeney said. "What got them to where they are now won't take them to where they want to go."
The only viable option for businesses right now, according to Sweeney, "is to gain on their competitors. They are in a position to bring on people who are enormously talented, and it's really a matter of figuring out who can best fit into your culture."
Caliper has just launched a new product, Accelerator, which coaches new executives to fit into the company's culture and become effective employees more rapidly. These days, new hires need to hit the ground running; there just isn't time to be tentative and hesitant and slowly get acclimated to a new corporate culture, Sweeney said.
"Our advice to employers is that you can't just hire someone for the position that's open right now - you are looking for enormously talented people who can grow with the company," he said.
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