ERE.net - Recruiting news, information and community

A discussion forum for corporate recruiting issues, and an opportunity to network with other recruiters in Miami/Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties.

ERE.net - Recruiting news, information and community.

Florida high-tech exports grow by nearly $1 billion

What does this mean for the demand of IT professionals, technical recruiters and all? From the South Florida Business Journal:

Florida’s technology exports grew by almost $1 billion last year, according to the Trade in the Cyberstates 2008 report, released Tuesday by AeA, a national technology trade association.

Florida was the third-largest tech exporter in the nation, with a $13.4 billion share of the U.S.’s $214 billion total.

Florida trailed only California, which led the country with $48.2 billion, and Texas, the nation’s second leading high-tech exporter, with $35.9 million. New York ($8.9 billion) and Massachusetts ($8.7 billion) rounded out the top five.

Read the rest here: Florida high-tech exports grow by nearly $1 billion

State unemployment rate highest in 13 years

Reporting one of the higest unemployment rates in the country:

Florida’s unemployment rate was up slightly in August – to 6.5 percent – with 606,000 people out of work. That’s the highest it’s been since January 1995, when the rate also was 6.5 percent. It is higher than the national average of 6.1 percent, according to the latest figures from Florida’s labor department

read the rest here: State unemployment rate highest in 13 years - South Florida Business Journal:

For South Florida to draw vibrant work force, lifestyle issues need fixing

In Florida, its always sunny, even when the sky is falling:

South Florida, according to recent news articles, is losing population, and its work force. Enrollment in our public schools is also down, and while that may ease school crowding, it too reflects a loss of potential employees.

These trends are troubling. Businesses looking to relocate here, expand their businesses and create more jobs want to know there is a ready and willing work force. It is frequently one of their first questions. So what is behind this exodus? It is part of a growing phenomenon wherein people make lifestyle decisions first and employment decisions second. In the age of industrialization, people moved to the job and lived where they could. In the creative and innovation economy, which is global in nature, work can be done virtually anywhere. This allows the person to move where they want to live and the work follows them.

Read the rest here:For South Florida to draw vibrant work force, lifestyle issues need fixing — South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com

Jason Gorham Chums the Waters

Member Jason Gorham who is the Founder and CEO of Lake Worth-based CareerMetaSearch.com and Sharkstrike.com is getting ready to launch a hybrid service in September:

CareerMetaSearch & Sharkstrike have evolved into the world’s first and largest job keyword engine. Our patented job keyword technology has been in development since 2003, including search engine marketing for various jobs around the world, and now we are bringing our results to you…

Our job keyword engine contains over 30,000 job keywords that are relevant to passive and active job seekers looking for work in technology, entry level, executive, and accounting and finance jobs. Our job posting keyword extraction software captures targeted keywords from your jobs to be displayed to passive candidates throughout the Google network reaching over 80% of internet users. Our database is a collection of CareerMetaSearch.com historical keywords, crawled job keywords, and shared keywords from users of our system.

Sounds nifty, don’t it? Stay posted…

Aerotek expands its South Florida operations

As reported in the South Florida Business Journal:

Technical and professional staffing agency Aerotek has opened in an office in West Palm Beach, the Business Development Board of Palm Beach County said.

The company, which already has offices in Fort Lauderdale, Miramar and Miami, has been looking for a West Palm Beach office since early this year. Aerotek said the additional office will create 10 internal positions and hundreds of contract and contract-to-hire positions over the next year. As of February, it had 76 internal employees and 675 contract employees in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties.

Read the rest here…

Give me your B-players and I’ll give you mine

Allison Ross reports in the Palm Beach Post that FPL and a few other area employers have decided to cast their lot with recruiting solution de jour AllianceQ. Oh, my.

Buying into the old “more cost-efficient way to recruit people for jobs” codswallop it seems the employers you’d expect to be the most savvy can still leave one scratching their head wondering, “What the hell are they thinking?” Of course, I could be missing something but the AllianceQ sales-gotcha that drawing from a pool of other employers’ rejects somehow delivers better quality candidates is hard to understand.

AllianceQ rationalize it like this:

Say Company A spends $2 million a year to advertise, and that brings in 500,000 job applicants. They can only hire about 2 percent of those people…Then they take the rest and put them in a pool. Now the companies can leverage each others advertising spends.”

I would have thought that if a company can only hire 2% of the people it attracts something is fundamentally wrong. It could be profiling, employer branding, sourcing strategy, screening, assessment and/or selection but whatever it is, I cannot imagine why anyone would want to compound the problem be adding more B-player fuel to the fire.

The Human Capitalist has an interesting follow-up post with some alternative points of view. As for me, I think someone in procurement needs a follow-up of their own, don’t you?

Creating a life science cluster in Florida

In the same week that I have had two unrelated calls from people moving to the area asking about jobs in the biotech space, this from Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News:

For the last several years, Florida has been named by various industry pundits as one of the top biotech regions. The criteria used to determine this ranking are a bit nebulous, but if the ranking has anything to do with money spent luring life science institutions to the state and an unwavering determination to create a healthcare juggernaut, then the laurels are well deserved.

After 10 years of seeking to become a life science hotspot, things do seem to be finally coming together in Florida. A triumvirate of critical factors have coalesced in the last five years, including cooperation among three southern Florida counties (Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach), significant financial input from state coffers, and an abundance of committed individuals.

You can read the article here…

South Florida Metro Recruiters - An important announcement [or two]

Here is an email that went out to the first 42 members of the South Florida Metro Recruiters group on RecruitingBlogs.com…

[Read more]

Scholarships and bling-bling

Elgin Jones reports in the South Florida Times that Lauderhill Mayor Richard Kaplan and other city officials have implemented a program to use funds seized from criminal activities to provide $1,000 scholarships to students in the city. They presently have four scholarships available.

Um, four grand, eh? Crime must be way down in Lauderhill. Or maybe they’ve stopped auctioning off seized houses, cars and boats and have taken to donating them to other ‘good causes,’ more deserving than tomorrow’s workforce.

[Read more]

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