Since the market dip and round after round of layoffs, recruiters have served on the front lines of the jobless recovery.  We’ve born witness to the devastation that downsizing brings. We have sensed the desperation in our dealings with candidates who have been unemployed far too long. While recruiters do not make jobs, we fill them.  And so I wonder, with this Great Unfilling, is there a “there there”?  Where is the collective response from the very professionals who specialize in jobs, jobs, jobs?

A group of Americans have gathered to occupy Wall Street, in large part due too massively high unemployment — particularly for young people.  An article by Noreen Malone in New York Magazine entitled The Kids Are Actually Sort of Alright details the stark statistics.

14 percent of college graduates from the classes of 2006 through 2010 can’t find full time work.  Half of people ages 16 to 29 don’t have jobs —  55.3 percent.  That’s the lowest level since World War II (1945). College students are graduating with bone-crushing debt, which for the class of 2009 averages $24,000.  USA Today reports that at some point this year, student loan debt will exceed $1 trillion, surpassing even credit card debt. Total student loan debt is rising as other debts are tapering off. Delinquency has increased, too, since the height of the financial crisis.

Many recruiters do what we can ad hoc to introduce people to the career-saving opportunities they need. But the work is solitary. It lacks scale. It helps but a handful.  I would like to think that we, the recruiters who stand at the epicenter of the jobs crisis, would have something constructive to say and do, together, to fix what appears to be so very broken.  I look forward to your comments and suggestions.

A programming note:

We’ve have spun out an exciting new research division and have named it Intellerati. Intellerati offers recruiting research and candidate sourcing services to corporate executive search, talent acquisition, and diversity recruitment teams. For every engagement, Intellerati transforms research into actionable intelligence, giving employers the qualitative data they need to make the best hire, to diversify the executive suite, to inform workforce planning, and to deliver unprecedented ROI through the study of the talent ecosystem.  We have an Intellerati blog, which is where we’ll share some commentary, analysis, and practical tips on talent acquisition research best practices.

The Good Search is devoted exclusively our innovative approach to retained executive search. We’ve got a fancy new website, which also is home to our blog, The Investigative Recruiter, which is counted among the recruiting industry’s Top 20 blogs.

So come, visit, comment, subscribe.

Among companies that cultivate corporate diversity for competitive advantage, conventional wisdom holds that the more diverse a team, the better.  The more cultures, the more ethnicities, the more racial types, the more genders (male, female, and shades in-between), the more sexual orientations, the more diverse world views, the more innovative a company will be. Introducing alternative viewpoints informed by unique life experiences expands one awareness and sensitivity about the diverse customer populations that we serve.  However, now there is evidence the more women a team has, the better. So forget about stopping when women reach 50% of a team’s total as the perfect balance of Venus and Mars. Instead, if an organization really wants to drive results, said organization should push women into the plurality to 60, 70, 80 percent or more. This shocking bit of research has taken diversity science and stood it on its head.

Of course, the utter irony is that women are nowhere near approaching the 50% point of gender equity in the executive suite of most major corporations.  A 2009 study found that women held just 13.5% of executive officer level roles in the Fortune 500. A third of the companies had no women executive officers at all. Zero. Zilch. None.

I first read about the research in the Workforce Management blog called Fistful of Talent, penned by a courageous man Tim Sackett of HRU Technical Resources. His take away wasn’t that this called for downsizing men, or upsizing women in our ranks, but rather this was a lesson about how to work better in teams. His article pointed to a Harvard Business Review piece in which the researchers describe their findings, Defend Your Research: What Makes A Team Smarter? More Women. When professors Anita Woolley and Thomas Malone studied the factors that increased a group’s collective intelligence, they made some surprising discoveries. According to the article, researchers “gave subjects aged 18 to 60 standard intelligence tests and assigned them randomly to teams. Each team was asked to complete several tasks—including brainstorming, decision making, and visual puzzles—and to solve one complex problem. Teams were given intelligence scores based on their performance. Though the teams that had members with higher IQs didn’t earn much higher scores, those that had more women did.”

So forget about sprinkling in just a few women to ensure diversity as is so often the case.  To make teams smarter, instead of a soupcon of females, we’re talkin’ “beaucoup” –  a plurality that by definition is most decidedly not diverse from a gender perspective.  The only caveat is that the benefit may wane at the extreme end. Consequently, you don’t want a team to be completely devoid of men.

So how is it that women make groups more intelligent? It turns out we are great team players. Apparently, it’s written in our DNA.  We are masters of communication (listening) and constructive criticism. We are open to ideas and we’re not as autocratic as men.  Our natural ability to play nicely with others not only demonstrates how smart women are, but how we elevate the game for all involved.  The research makes a strong case that the best man for the job may, in fact, be a woman. Lots of them.

Technology startups are creating a staggering amount of jobs, but interestingly they’re more focused on sales and marketing and less on technology these days.

As NYC entrepreneur and investor Mark Birch pointed out in a recent blog post entitled “Don’t Look to Tech Startups to Fill the Jobs Gap“, fewer engineers are needed to build something really cool because our technology is oh so much smarter.  More intelligent computing lowers barrier to entry and increases the number of early stage companies battling it out for market share.

Consequently, the soldiers startups need to win are not so much engineers, but rather sales and marketing people, executives who are commanding increasingly higher salaries due to increasing competition in the labor market and record-high valuations in venture capital funding.  So, the irony is tech startups are not so much for tech jobs anymore .  .  .

If the unthinkable happens, if the “never has happened before” actually happens and the U.S. defaults on its debt,  640,000 jobs would vanish.  That’s just one of the really bad things that centrist think tank The Third Way suggests will take place if our nation hits the legal limits of its debt.

Of course, defaulting on our nation’s debt would be a black swan event.  Because the default would be a first, because it involves so many interlocking parts, and because the federal government touches so many of us economically in so many direct and indirect ways, the domino effect is extremely difficult to predict. And while we are stuck on the tracks and can see the train a-comin’ in August, it remains a strangely random event because it is so hard to predict what it is that Washington will do. It’s like trying to forecast the weather. Meteorologists frequently get it wrong because there is such a freakish amount of  variables. They get it wrong even with the help of monster computers that do in hours what it would have taken a whole lifetime for a weatherman to calculate.  Only, this isn’t a twister or a hurricane that, though devastating, is over in a few hours or days. This wouldn’t be over for a very long time.

So, as someone who advocates for career optimization, as someone who advocates for bringing great talent together with great companies, I am keenly aware the tearing apart that would occur would be tragic.

Please, let’s not go there.