How you see the world and how it affects the hiring process

As our country gets nearer and nearer to some financial black hole that no one is even daring to name ( we name storms and cars, why can’t we name financial crises?) I am noticing a pattern in friends and family. Since I work in a financial firm, there is no lack of professionals whose minds I can pick around in, trying to discover root causes, kicking therories about the future about and generally trying to decide what the heck to DO.

People (and employers) are faling into three camps:

We’ll be all right. These folks have generally never known anything but moderate prosperity and cannot actually comprehend the idea of depression-like times in these modern eras. They understand that “we’re in a bit of a slump” but figure now is the time to spend less, pay down debt and hunker down. If this person is an employer, they will keep the employees they have, attempt to freeze hiring and make the company do more with less.

It’s a big buffet. These folks understand that in times of fear make people do odd things. They might be more well versed on how SOME people made quite a lot of money during the Depression and see our current situation as more of an opportunity than anything else. Employers like this will hire the best for less, use this time to switch from legacy tech over to something more versatile and generally handle tasks like employer branding and long-term workforce planning with their current talent acquisition team (since they likely will not be doing any mass hiring either).

AAAAGGGHHH! These folks are channeling the REM song “It’s the end of the world as we know it” and cannot help but spread the word of panic everywhere they go. They worried, scared, not sure if they should pay down debt, save money, sell their house or stockpile canned goods. As employers, they are freezing hiring, firing as they can, slashing budgets and doing all they can to stay afloat. All new spending (with the exception of sales, if they’re smart) is trounced.

The scary part is, few know the right answers for employers in today’s market. Recruiters who went through the dot com bust swear that now is the time to rally your candidate base, others say getting the wrong folks out and the right folks in should be the focus, still more insist that the talent war (if it ever existed) is for sure gone now as employers have their choice of top notch candidates.

What is YOUR employer doing? What are you doing if you are an employer?