John Sumser nails it in Tuesday's Elecrontic Recruiting News. The following emphasis is mine.

For employees, the first decade of the 21st century will be a time of unparalleled opportunity. On average, there will be 2.6 new jobs created for each new person, who enters the American labor market. The competition to acquire new employees and retain existing personnel will reach dimensions that are unthinkable in today’s environment. By the end of this decade, the overall labor shortage, measured in unfilled jobs, will be 21.3 percent, according to the Federal Government. Their statistics on the subject are usually very conservative (lower than the reality).

Driven by declining birthrates, the aging of the population, baby-boom retirements, and increasingly, a squeeze in the supply of foreign workers, the United States is hardly alone. Most of the top 50 industrialized countries face the same demographic issues. German population, for instance, will decrease nearly 20 percent by 2010. The good news for American companies is that domestic population growth has slowed, not stopped. The bad news is that there is enough demographic pressure to destroy opportunities for corporate growth. Within 3 years, the pressure will be strong enough to raise the risks associated with new strategic initiatives for most companies.

Surprisingly, white collar, college educated workers will not be the category with the greatest shortages (although 1.5 out of 10 of those desks will be empty). Lower level service and production jobs that require little formal education, but a degree of On-The-Job-Training (OJT) will be harder to fill, sooner. This implies that the first wave of impact will involve watching professional and managerial employees cleaning their own offices and doing the landscaping after they have finished helping load the trucks.

The shortages will manifest themselves differently by region. Areas with currently low unemployment like College Station, Texas, (1.9%) will find themselves in difficult circumstances sooner rather than later.

Approximately 20 percent of the country lives in Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) with unemployment below 4 percent. The tiniest bits of growth will create hypercompetitive local labor markets in these areas.

Bureau of Labor Statistics; Civilian labor force and unemployment by state and metropolitan area; http://www.bls.gov/news.release/metro.t01.htm.

What does this mean?

1. Temp agencies will do well. Working class staffing companies are in the best position to exploit exploding demand for low skill service workers. Adecco, Manpower, Kelly, Randstad, Vedior.
    
2. Local matters more. Retail office networks, the most successful recruiting platform for these workers, will expand. Adecco's brands have more than 1000 locations in the US; there is roo. So will ecruiting tools that leverage staffing teams in the field [ call me].
    
3. Prioritize National Efforts by Region. John spells out above how to pick which towns will shift first.
    
4. ROR. Staffing firms averaged as much as 10 weeks of placement per temp/contractor in the 1990s. Watch them try to boost Return-On-Recruiting by using the same workers more and longer. 
    
5. Workers Grow Into Their Power. If your donut shop will close if the manager leaves, you may consider sharing more wealth with her. The last time there was this much pressure, stock options became wide spread. The time before, employers created health benefits. What do workers want now? Start asking. 
     
6. IC to the fore. Desparate managers with a clue will glom on to knowledge management and other practices to keep intellectual capital from retiring or leaving for greener pastures. How will CIOs handle 30-40% retirement of the IT experts now running legacy systems? Klogs, learning organizations, [ call me]
    
7. SEC Scrutiny. As markets change with the demographic shift, company plans and strategies will go awry. The ability to staff appropriately and respond to these changes, even to sustain current business capabilities, will be threatened. Human capital plans will become a factor in SEC disclosure by 2005. [ call me] 
      
8. HR to the Chiefs table. maybe. IT earned their way ten years' ago. They did it by becoming indispensable to line operations, creating new business opportunities, and by showing how their toolbox shapes strategy.  
    
9. Resumequity. With the power, every worker will want more control over what is in their profile and who sees which parts of it. Think of this as:
• an extension of personal identity management.
• asserting intellectual property rights over your metadata, as in the European Union. 
• thoughtful exploitation of your celebrity.
• minding the fences between parts of your life.

This labor shortage is high drama. As big as the Internet. As disruptive as war. As insidious as HIV.