We checked store windows and found “workers wanted” signs almost everywhere. We perused the classifieds and confirmed that the tale of worker-starved companies is not pie-in-the-sky economics. But we didn’t check with the on-line job services to see what’s going on with the job market.
Now, we will.
The stamp of significance, which caught our attention, came from Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Ltd. in New York. Searching for updated ways to measure job vacancies, its economic research department recently created a job-listing index that will gauge the nation’s on-line job market.
It relies on weekly figures from E.span, a privately held, 7-year-old on-line firm based in Indianapolis. (http://www.espan.com) It is one of five such firms in the U.S. that dominate the business of linking employers on-line with job-seekers. A competitor, Online Career Center, is also based in Indianapolis. (http://www.occ.com)
Taking 1996 as the base year for the survey and giving it a value of 100, the survey’s numbers began to take off this summer. It was down slightly in the last week and has inched lower over the last month. Overall, however, on-line job searching appears to have boomed in the last year, and the index stands at about 243.
Besides techies and our 14-year-old cousin, who would look for a job on the Internet?
“We are not talking about a small part of the population,” says Barb Ruess, marketing director for E.span. “The demographics show that we are more mainstream. The interest in the Internet is not as skewed as it used to be.”
The interest in job-hunting on the Internet will become even more interesting in coming months when E.span adds a service that will let job applicants take an on-line personality test. They will be able to review the results before submitting them.
How far are we from the day when we will not shake a hand or hear a human voice to get hired? Please deposit your prediction in our voice mail.
Take the bus: It is 7 a.m. You are nursing a tepid second cup of coffee, and nervously pondering how you are going to get through the day as you sit in an empty office.
Where are your workers?
If you are Rachel Hubka, president and CEO of Rachel’s Bus Co. in Chicago, you probably have a better idea than most employers. That’s because at least one-third of her company’s 140 workers ride back and forth from home to work on her school buses.
After dropping off their fellow employees at night, the home-to-work drivers park the buses at safe locations near their homes, and the next morning they pick up the workers on the way to the company’s transportation facility on Chicago’s Near West Side.
When her company began eight years ago, it had one bus route. Now, the company has routes spreading in nearly all directions, and Hubka, whose major client is the Chicago Public Schools, sees no end to the service.
It is a costly way, she admits, to make sure workers get to their jobs, but it works. If people have to make several connections, and go a long way to get to work, they are less likely to be timely, and time is critical when it comes to busing schoolchildren.
But her effort has another goal: It signals her company’s willingness, she adds, to help its workers. An innovative businesswoman praised for her social consciousness, she was recently named to the national board of the Welfare-To-Work Partnership, an organization that encourages businesses to put former welfare recipients to work.
Party time: While we recently noted the persistence of holiday parties, we have been advised that we omitted an issue that is increasingly significant in this era of the litigious, blame-ridden (or blame-free, you pick it) workplace.
Cheerful holiday gatherings can spur heightened feelings among workers of loyalty, optimism, community and shared visions. Please keep this in mind.
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Stephen Franklin resides electronically at [email protected]