Duane Roberts asked

"Which way is the staffing market going? What does your crystal ball foresee?

There are two parts to this: cyclical recovery and structural shift.

You're catching the cyclical recovery.

The pain hit in the Bay Area first and hardest. Assuming nothing else changes, expect recovery to come here first and stronger. The queue of IT work comes from pent-up pressure on internal project queues, new business starts.

Then there's structural change:

Has anything fundamental changed over the last 12-24 months in terms of how hiring/buying decisions are made? What kinds of talent to fill first? What to outsource vs. fill in-house? Are there effective substitutes for local talent? Let me fumble with these a little bit.

Consumer behavior:

DICE.com, which had 500 thousand contractor listings in its hey-dey is down to 31 thousand. In the last two years, Monster and HotJobs/Yahoo have become more contractor-friendly while thousands of niche job boards popped up, dominating the left-handed BeOS sysadmin labor pool. TMP Monster knows the recovery is at hand, and they want contract ad dollars as much as perm dollars. One of their strategies is going direct to the cost-conscious hiring manager, substituting their putatively cheap advertising for a staffing firm's services.

Are the same people doing the hiring?

I don't know: you'll know before I will. My sense is that HR and procurement are trying to get their people out of the hiring conversation, pushing the work of selection to line managers.

Who's first to be hired?

That's hard. What serious work has been put off for too long? Plumbing and infrastructure (Security? Sysadmins? Telecom? Desktop OS upgrades?). How about those customer requests that wound up in the IT in basket, and that can hurt or help pending sales? I'm betting on ordinary priorities.

Perm vs. temp vs. outsource?

Budgets are iffy. You know the drill: until you are confident in your headcount, you fill IT projects with contractors or outsource the work. Look for foreign outsourcing when cost tops urgency or novelty.

Substitutes?

What tools or methods improve productivity so much, you don't need as many people to do the job? Not many jumped out in the last two years. Many web projects that were 2-3 person years a few years' ago are now turn-key. You can get a content management system for a thousand bucks from UserLand; it competes against systems costing 50-100 times as much including staff, and have it up and running in one day. How about a smart portal for your intranet or for each of your customers? Fast, cheap, and good from iCommunity.com. Complex apps like these are becoming commodities as they mature.

You can develop sales strategies for non-cyclical trends too.

The retirement of the baby boom (over the next ten years) can lead to contracting retirees back to their employers and new knowledge management efforts. California's budget shortfall (the next three years) will result in some stupid headcount cuts without removing the work; see some of this outsourced. The resurgence of defense and intelligence spending (the next ten years) will bid up demand for IT and other engineering supporting those efforts.

How will staffing firms respond to the upswing?

One wild guess.

Headhunters and staffing companies will behave more like talent agents.

• Drivers:
  • Bigger share of business from high payrate workers
  • Cost of recruiting high payrate workers driven down if you can place them more than once
• Notes:
  • At the biggest and best staffing companies, a temp works for 10 weeks, about 1 percent of their career. Wouldn't it be nice if you could represent them for 10 percent? Other strategies try to boost the average bill rate, cut operational costs, or reach new markets. This strategy says: serve the worker better and create returns on relationship.

How have job seekers changed? The burnt and shellshocked are still tender. Watch them pick security over ambition in their next job. It will be different for others...  

Many workers will reclaim power they thought lost in the 2001-2003 recession.

Watch who reads "Get a Raise in 7 Days" instead of "The Perfect Interview." We don't have one labor market, we have thousands. Some have structural shortages. We are short of nurses, policemen, soldiers, molecular engineers, and others in industries where long term demand is growing while (maybe because) baby boomers are retiring. These folks will assert power in the hiring relationship, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups.  

I am so completely and totally full of it, your vicious critique is both welcome and anticipated.

[aka staffing] 

You went to the conference/seminar/workshop/class? Post your trip report.

• It reinforces what you observed, learned
• It spreads the wealth, even second hand.
• It gives event-quality feedback for next time

Take a look at Phil Windley's trip reports from his first day at OSCON,  second day at OSCON, and third day at OSCON. His  first day and second day at the Western CIO Summit sponsored by Western Information Technology Council.

Need skills? Read about technography, the art of real time note taking in support of meetings.

[aka klogs]

Jon Udell writes about the dozens of configuration tweaks he made to Radio.

A few weeks ago, I spent some time showing an InfoWorld colleague, Mark Jones, how I use Radio. As always in this kind of situation, I was reminded of:

• how much non-default configuration I depend on
• how little I remembered having done that configuration
• how hard it was to articulate, then transfer, that configuration

Another InfoWorld colleague, Steve Gillmor, was watching this, and he said: "You need a deployment descriptor." Exactly right.

How do you move newbies up the tweak learning curve? How do you standardize an intranet or community Radio weblog rollout? How do you assure everyone starts with the same tools, the same extra macros, the same ftp configuration?

Jon:

Given some configuration that varies from the default, enable the user to:

• ask for a description of the tweaks, in some standard XML grammar
• transfer that description (or a subset of it) to another user (or to another instance of the app owned by the same user)

While I'm dreaming, why not use peer-to-peer web services for this kind of thing? If I have Radio or Outlook behavior that you want, I ought to be able to grant you temporary access to my app so you can reach across using SOAP and grab the behavior that you need.  The mechanism  wouldn't be CTRL-; then QuickScript then Run in Radio, and something equally arcane in every other app. There would be a system-wide standard way to describe, share, and acquire application behaviors.

So, five things:

1. Publish this preference.
• Exclude passwords, IDs.
• Let me add notes by preference: why did I choose this? who suggested it? problems and lessons relating to this? prior setting?
2. Package all of my shared preferences.
• Make available in a published colophon page. 
3. One-click import.
• Something like the Radio coffee mug (espresso machine?) to select (old setting, new setting) and import a potential preference
4. Grab everything.
• My tools, macros, templates, preferences.
5. Follow my coach.
• Someone else keeps up on all this nerdy stuff more than I do. Let me subscribe to almost all of his changes, adopting them automatically or at least putting them in a queue for approval. This way I focus on my content and let my coach pick/tweak tools, macros, templates, style sheets, news feed subscriptions, etc.
• I can unsubscribe bit-by-bit (perhaps tweaking my own templates) as I learn more and follow my own path.
• This may be the default for a company, department, community, hosting service.
• Affiliate one or more coach URLs with a "Radio Community Server".

Advantages:

1. Lower learning curve
2. Lower IT support costs
3. Faster distribution of new/fixed components
4. Faster and wider dispersion of knowledge throughout the Radio community