I was reading an interesting article in workforce.com about the 7th Annual Sources of Hire Whitepaper produced by CareerXroads. Needless to say, I had to find that white-paper and see for myself. It shows some interesting data but it gave me so much food for thought I got a headache. (just kidding). The truth is that I began thinking about the “War for Talent” that everyone is so hot and bothered about. I do not want to harp on a subject that so many others are carrying on about but I keep thinking about the implication of this discussion on sourcing strategies and efforts.  To quote an American icon “Thewe’s something scwewy going on around hewe . . .”(Elmer Fudd).

We keep hearing from many experts about a talent shortage but Mr. Crispin and Mr. Mehler tell us that “For the first time in seven years of conducting this survey, more firms are predicting that they will make fewer hires in 2008 than 2007″. According to the white-paper more firms (34%) predicted they would have fewer hires in 2008 while 44% said they would hire the same number and only 22% predicted a greater number of hires. Then one of those random thoughts hit me. It may be just me experiencing a brain fart, you know the electronic pulses skipped a few neutrons, causing it to not compute correctly. Anyway sorry about the parenthesis there, listen to this, If companies are hiring less how could there be a war for talent?  

Now don’t get me wrong here, that is not my expertise, I’m only trying to interpret the data to better understand the marketplace, especially as we are putting out conflicting messages and I’m getting confused. To see what I mean check these to articles out first read this one by The War for Talent by FastCompanyand compare it to this article by Karen M. I don’t know enough to form an opinion on this I will leave that opinion to those who can substantiate there posture, the point that I am trying to make here is that how can we come up with strong sourcing strategies when we don’t agree on the basic direction of the marketplace.

The beliefs we form from this discussion will affect the strategy we chose for sourcing the candidates we hire. If we believe there is a labor shortage, we will improve our brand, and give bigger and better offerings to prospective candidates, we will beef up our budgets to pipeline candidates.  On the other hand if we have a surplus of candidates, there would be no signing bonuses, no perks and even salaries would go down because there would be more people than positions to fill. What is happening in your company? Are you offering more to prospective candidates or are salaries going down? or are positions being eliminated? Once you identify where you company is you can develop strategies.

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