American Staffing Association - Staffing Success Special Issue

Breaking Records
By Richard Wahlquist

In the world of sports, setting and breaking records is widely anticipated and highly celebrated. There are exceptions, of course. No one wants to hold the record for most strikeouts, most games lost, or most last-place finishes. It’s the same in the world of business.

The recession that began in December 2007 broke just about every unemploy-ment-related record set since the Great Depression. For American workers, it was particularly brutal—eight million people lost their jobs. Even now—more than two years after the recession’s official end in July 2009—14 million Americans are unemployed and an additional 10.9 million are underemployed, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. When BLS factors in the underemployed to create a measurement known as U- 6, the nation’s total unemployment rate in August of this year was a whopping 16.2%.

We can only hope that these are records that are never again broken in our lifetimes—but we also know there are no easy or short-term fixes, and so do the researchers. Recent studies and modeling by the Office of Management and Budget and the McKinsey Global Institute project that we won’t likely see a return to prerecession unemployment rates until about 2017 to 2020.

Although the staffing industry represents only about 1.7% of total U.S. employment, the impact that staffing and recruiting firms will have in helping put people back to work is exponentially greater than the industry’s size. It may not have much influence on gross domestic product as a whole, but the industry is playing a critical economic role.

At the macro level, the staffing industry effectively helps reduce structural unemployment by creating new jobs and helping workers obtain new skills. And, as Alan Krueger, incoming chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, determined in his 1999 research with Harvard economist Lawrence Katz, the staffing industry also plays an important role in reducing frictional unemployment by improving the efficiency of matching workers to jobs.

For businesses dealing with shorter and less predictable economic cycles, the staffing industry is providing work force solutions to more effectively source talent, increase productivity, and manage fluctuations in demand.

And while those contributions are critical to the companies and economies in which they operate, equally important are the benefits and opportunities staffing firms create and deliver for the nation’s work force.

As you will read in this special issue of Staffing Success, U.S. staffing firms led the way in new job creation as the economy was emerging from recession, adding 401,000 jobs on an average daily basis in 2010. ASA data indicate that the staffing industry employed 2.58 million people daily and 9.7 million over the course of the year. By any measure, that’s a lot of jobs.

The staffing industry is poised for growth and the outlook among staffing professionals is increasingly positive. Simply put, staffing firms can set their sights on breaking employment records in the months and years ahead, and continue playing an integral role in the economic health of the nation. n