2007 Workworld forecasts: looking into the crystal ball

As usual, January brings a slew of forecasts for changes during the coming year. Here are a few:

Employment Litigation

• Upswing in retaliation claims.
• Continued growth in class-action litigation, especially wage and hour issues, and age and race claims.

Compensation and working conditions

• Per CareerBuilder.com poll: over 80% of employers expect to increase salaries.
• Per same poll: half of employers were at least “fairly willing” to provide more flexible work arrangements, such as job sharing and alternate schedules.

Recruiting & Hiring

• Strong hiring, per CareerBuilder.com poll: 40% of surveyed employers expect to add full-time, permanent employees.
• Growth in recruitment process outsourcing, with more companies farming out everything from searching for candidates to hiring new employees.
• Employee referral programs will continue to be the best source for hires.
• The Internet and temp-to-hire also will continue to be hot sources of hires.
• More candidates will start using social networking tools aggressively in job search; many more potential candidates will have profiles available for recruiters.
• Growth of blogs within recruiting departments.
• Vertical search – a specialized job search that mines data from multiple sources for one specific type of jobs and present it in an easy-to-understand manner – becoming increasingly important part of recruiting industry.
• Rehiring of retirees. Mature “specialists” will begin to dominate temporary job market, teaching, mentoring, and transferring specialized knowledge to the next generations.
• More promotions and internal advancement opportunities.

Training

• Continued increases in spending.
• Added scrutiny and metrics.

Health care

• Trend towards better educating employees to help them make smarter decisions, including offering online financial modeling tools, in an effort to boost enrollment in consumer-directed health plans.
• Healthcare jobs will lead all other opportunities.

Retirement

• Resurgence of cash-balance pension plans, since legal uncertainty has been put to rest with the passage of the Pension Protection Act. Cash-balance plans are a cross between defined-benefit and defined-contribution plans, in which benefits are expressed in the form of an account that grows over time with interest and contributions from the employer.
• More companies are expected to offer automatic enrollment in their 401(k) plans.

Sources:

• 2006: A Year in Recruiting | Recruiting.com.
• Workforce Management: “An Ever-Changing Workforce Management Landscape”
• “7 Major Hiring Trends for 2007″
• “Poll Shows Strong Job Market In 2007″
• “2007 Predictions For and About the Mature Workforce”

Further Reading

I’ve set up a Trailfire trail on this topic, including the above sources and more. Here’s the annotated list version, or click here to access the first page, and then navigate through the trail by clicking the arrows at the top of the blue call-out windows.

Photo credit: Isobel T via flickr