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#JobSearch : Why White-Collar Workers Are Losing Out In The Job Market. Recent Job Market Survey: 66% of Executives Most Worried. MUst REad!

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White-collar, college-educated professionals are having a harder time finding a new job and are facing greater job insecurity than blue-collar workers. Unlike during the Great Resignation, white-collar professionals are enduring long rounds of interviews, not receiving feedback, and finding it harder to secure a new opportunity, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In a recent job market survey by Professional Résumé Writers, nearly half of the workers self-reported that they were concerned about losing their employment, with executives being the most worried (66%).

 

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Article continued …

Causes For Concern

According to Layoffs.fyi, nearly 198,000 workers have been laid off this year in the tech sector alone. There are fewer opportunities for professionals in the United States, as data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that job postings have fallen by nearly 500,000 since the end of 2022. Hiring for knowledge workers or the “laptop class” has slowed, while jobs for lower-wage workers remain abundant, especially in leisure and hospitality.

As if that is not enough to instill fear into white-collar workers, in March, Goldman Sachs released an alarming research report about the ascendency of artificial intelligence. The investment bank concluded in the analysis that 300 million jobs could be lost or diminished due to this fast-growing technology.

Office administrative support, legal, architecture and engineering, business and financial operations, management, sales, healthcare and art and design are some sectors that automation will impact. In 2023, IBM and Chegg laid off workers or paused hiring, as management felt AI could handle many of their tasks.

Companies are also accelerating their efforts to send jobs to lower-cost countries. A recent Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta survey found that 7.3% of leadership in the U.S. plans to move more jobs offshore as the next step from remote work within America.

Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University and an expert in workplace matters, told the Wall Street Journal, “About 10% to 20% of U.S. service support jobs, like software developers, human-resources professionals and payroll administrators, could move overseas in the next decade.”

The Job Search Process

Michelle Reisdorf, an Illinois-based district director at recruiting firm Robert Half, told the Wall Street Journal that employers are being “extra cautious” when it comes to hiring. Unlike the Great Resignation, when companies urgently needed to increase headcount, hiring managers are now slow-walking the interview process to vet out candidates properly. Businesses are also raising their standards for hiring, whereas, during the talent shortage, companies were less stringent in their criteria. Understandably, employers will be more discerning when hiring white-collar workers, as these professionals cost more money.

According to data from Robert Half, the average time it takes companies to fill white-collar roles is 11 weeks. In 2021, the hiring process was averaging seven weeks.

In her over 20 years at the recruiting firm, Reisdorf said she has never seen employers exercise this much caution throughout the hiring process.

People Will Move For Less Money

Facing labor market headwinds, employees are willing to accept less money, despite economic uncertainty. In a recent survey by Blind, 56% of tech workers said they’d be willing to accept the same or less pay in a new role. Thirty-three percent of respondents attributed this to the current state of the job market.

The survey also found that tech employees are more likely to accept a lower salary in a job switch if they are already well-compensated. For example, 62% of respondents earning over $100,000 per year said they would accept a lower salary in a job switch.

This is a significant shift from the past, when tech employees were more focused on maximizing their salaries.

What You Can Do About It

Despite the challenges, there are a number of things that white-collar workers can do to safeguard their employment status. One important thing is to stay up-to-date on the latest trends in their field. This will help them to remain relevant and marketable in the job market.

Another important factor is to develop strong skills in areas such as problem-solving, critical thinking and communication. These skills are becoming increasingly important in the workplace and can help professionals stand out.

Sometimes, workers must compromise on pay and work preferences to get hired. That could mean accepting less compensation than you were earning and going into the office every day.

For those people who are still holding onto their jobs, they must make themselves indispensable in the workplace. This will help you avoid being on the chopping block when it comes to layoffs at your company.

Finally, white-collar workers should be prepared to adapt to change. The job market is constantly changing, and knowledge workers need to be able to change with it to stay successful and keep earning a livelihood.

 

Forbes.com | May 22, 2023

#YourCareer : The Disappearing White-Collar Job. Peak of the Need for Knowledge Workers. Your Thoughts?

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For generations of Americans, a corporate job was a path to stable prosperity. No more. 

The jobs lost in a monthslong cascade of white-collar layoffs triggered by overhiring and rising interest rates might never return, corporate executives and economists say. Companies are rethinking the value of many white-collar roles, in what some experts anticipate will be a permanent shift in labor demand that will disrupt the work life of millions of Americans whose jobs will be lost, diminished or revamped partly through the use of artificial intelligence.

“We may be at the peak of the need for knowledge workers,” said Atif Rafiq, a former chief digital officer at McDonald’s and Volvo. “We just need fewer people to do the same thing.”

Long after robots began taking manufacturing jobs, artificial intelligence is now coming for the higher-ups—accountants, software programmers, human-resources specialists and lawyers—and converging with unyielding pressure on companies to operate more efficiently.

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees after the Facebook parent’s latest round of layoffs that many jobs aren’t coming back because new technologies will allow the company to operate more efficiently. International Business Machines CEO Arvind Krishna recently said the company could pause some hiring to see what kind of back-office work can be done with AI. Leaders in many industries say they expect the new technology will augment some existing roles, changing what people do on the job. AI could allow employees to better contribute to their companies by doing more meaningful work, said Mr. Rafiq, author of a new book on management.

For the year ended in March, the number of unemployed white-collar workers rose by roughly 150,000, according to an analysis from Employ America, a nonpartisan research group. That included workers in professional services, management, computer occupations, engineering, and scientists.

“I can’t think of any job where it’s like AI by itself,” said Rodney McMullen, chief executive of grocery chain Kroger, which has about 430,000 employees. “I can think of a lot of jobs that are being affected by AI.”

That underlying dynamic has been accelerated by the binge hiring of recent years. Company leaders say they have become saddled with bloated managerial layers that slow decision making. The retailer Gap said in April that its new round of corporate job cuts would trim what has become an inefficient corporate bureaucracy.

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Article continued …

Lyft’s new CEO, David Risher, told investors this month that the ride-sharing company had cut the number of management layers from eight to five. Lyft said in April it would eliminate roughly 1,000 white-collar jobs in its latest round of layoffs. The flattened corporate structure means that Lyft “can innovate faster,” Mr. Risher said.

Jobs go through boom-and-bust cycles. In previous downturns, executives pledged to make streamlining efforts stick, only to replenish or grow their corporate ranks when business conditions improved. Many executives say the forces now at play suggest this time is different.

During past periods when higher interest rates pitched the U.S. economy into recession, job losses were often led by industries most sensitive to rate changes, such as manufacturing and construction. “It seems like we’re not seeing that right now. It could be the structure of the economy has changed,” said Preston Mui, an economist at Employ America, who has been studying white-collar job losses.

“A real question is: The Fed raises rates and softens the economy, where is that going to show up?”he said. The evidence is pointing to white-collar jobs, he said.

After 14 months of interest-rate increases by the Federal Reserve, job openings dropped to their lowest level in nearly two years in March, the most recent month of Labor Department data. Layoffs in the information sector were up 88% in March from a year earlier and up 55% in finance and insurance, the data show. For manufacturing, they were up 25% over the same period.

Companies are for the moment focused on keeping blue-collar employees—restaurant servers, warehouse workers, drivers and the like—who remain in short supply, according to economists and human-resources specialists. For C-suite executives under pressure from investors, that exposes middle managers and other white-collar workers to layoffs.

Whole Foods and Walt Disney announced layoffs in recent weeks that largely hit corporate staff while sparing such customer-service jobs as grocery clerk and hourly theme-park attendant. Retail workers, including salespeople and cashiers, were among the most in-demand roles in the first quarter of the year, according to the jobs site LinkedIn, along with nurses and drivers.

“Companies realize they over-hired in the middle,” said Nick Bunker, an economist at jobs site Indeed. “They’re paring things back.”

The number of employees working and the number of hours they worked in white-collar sectors such as professional services and medical and veterinary roles contracted in late April compared with January, according to data from Homebase, which provides software services to small businesses for scheduling hourly workers.

Sudden fall

Colton Pace, chief executive of Ownwell, a property-tax analysis company based in Austin, Texas, said he was filling more open roles with temporary contractors to give the startup flexibility in an uncertain economy. He also sees technology soon doing more company tasks.

“I want to be a little more cautious in how we hire,” Mr. Pace said. “In addition to that, it makes more sense because we’re not sure. Some of these roles will be automated away.” 

A year ago, roughly 15% of the company was made up of contractors or seasonal workers. Those workers now make up a quarter of Ownwell’s roughly 85-person workforce. Mr. Pace said he could see AI and other tools eventually shouldering a greater share of the work in customer support, operations and sales.

There is no firm definition of white-collar employee in government data. The term broadly applies to people who work in offices and have higher education, such as a bachelor’s degree or some college. In recent decades, hiring in management and professional jobs rapidly outpaced other categories. The number of employees in management and professional occupations increased nearly 150% in the past 40 years, and nearly 36% since the end of the 2007-09 recession, according to Labor Department data. By comparison, service occupations such as barbers, child care workers and casino employees have risen 72% since 1983, the earliest available data, and 3.5% since June 2009.

Over the years, higher demand for skilled workers and higher pay for college-educated workers widened the economic gap with blue-collar workers. Yet following the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, wages rose fastest among low-earners, reducing the college wage premium and reversing about a quarter of the rise in wage inequality since 1980, according to a study by economists including David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Payroll data from more than 300,000 small- and medium-size businesses showed that wages for new hires had generally declined in April from a year ago but fell most rapidly in white-collar professions, such as finance and insurance, according to Gusto, a payroll, benefits and human-resource management software maker. They rose most quickly in such services and blue-collar industries as tourism, construction and recreation, Gusto found.

Digital smarts

As companies look to cut costs, some employers have said middle managers will have to give up their teams and return to being just another worker. Others, including McDonald’s, have asked staffers to accept reduced compensation if they want to stay at the company.

Artificial intelligence also is expected to eliminate some positions entirely. Mr. Krishna, of IBM, has said in recent weeks that he could see 30% of IBM’s roughly 26,000 non-customer-facing roles being replaced by automation or AI over a five-year period.

An IBM spokesman said the company was still hiring for thousands of positions. “There is no blanket hiring ‘pause’ in place,” he said. “IBM is being deliberate and thoughtful in our hiring.”

The Labor Department projects that of the 20 occupations that will create the most jobs through 2031, about two-thirds will be blue-collar jobs that pay around $32,000 a year, including home-health and personal-care aides, restaurant cooks, fast-food workers, wait staff and freight movers.

The professions with the best prospects for growth that require a college degree include software developers, operations managers and registered nurses. Those jobs pay around $100,000 a year and are forecast to be better protected than other white-collar work from AI displacement.

Some employers are already figuring out exactly how many fewer white-collar workers they will need in the future. The business- and government-consulting firm Guidehouse in McLean, Va., which employs about 16,500 people, had expected to triple its head count in the coming years to reach its goal of roughly tripling its revenue to $10 billion, said CEO Scott McIntyre. Not anymore, he said.
 
Mr. McIntyre expects that with the help of AI and increased automation, Guidehouse may need to hire 40,000 people instead of 50,000 to reach its growth target. “The smarter you are with enabling technology and technology that creates productivity, the smarter you can be about hiring,” he said.

WSJ Authors:  Chip Cutter at chip.cutter@wsj.com and Harriet Torry at harriet.torry@wsj.com

WSJ.com | May 15, 2023

#JobSearch : Here’s How To Succeed In Salary Negotiations. Prepare for a Tougher Salary Negotiation in ‘Todays’ White-Collar Recession.

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It is more challenging to negotiate a salary and total compensation during an economic downturn. When the economy and job market are hot, employees have the upper hand. During the Great Resignation, companies struggled to find top talent and were willing to offer lush compensation packages to recruit, onboard and retain workers.

With that in mind, be prepared for a tougher salary negotiation during a white-collar recession. Workers in tech, Wall Street, real estate and other sectors were hit hard by inflation, high interest rates and subsequent layoffs. With more than 125,000 tech workers laid off, according to Layoffs.fyi, it’s reasonable to expect that there will be intense competition to get a job offer. If you push too hard in the negotiation process, it is easy for the company to move on to the next applicant who is more flexible regarding their pay package.

 

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We here at FSC want to thank each of our corporate partners for the opportunity in serving & moving each of their transitioning employee(s) rapidly toward employment!

 

Article continued …

To prepare for the pressure of haggling over compensation, do a lot of homework about what’s happening in your field. Ask questions about the corporate title, vacation days, health benefits and work styles. Prioritize what’s important, and don’t take anything personally.

Do A Lot Of Research

If you haven’t searched for a new job and gone through the interview process in a while, take time to find out what’s going on. If some of your colleagues recently switched jobs, ask them about the process and what salary ranges were discussed.

In addition to pay, you want to learn about the health benefit packages, the appropriate corporate title, projected bonus, 401(k) plans and stock options. As there is a push by many companies to return to the office, check to see what their predominant work style is. Look at sites that offer compensation for various roles; however, be skeptical. In my experience as a recruiter, the numbers are not always accurate. People who self-report tend to exaggerate how much they earn, and some pay packages are guesstimates.

It’s Going To Be Awkward

If you use the services of a recruiter, they can help make the process much easier. Headhunters specializing in a few select sectors tend to know the companies, human resources personnel and hiring managers. They also have long-standing relationships with the hiring managers. The recruiters with insider knowledge have a solid understanding of the title breakdown and pay structures. Instead of having to haggle your own salary negotiations, your recruiter can do it for you—making your life easier and less stressful.

If you are going it alone, it can be awkward and uncomfortable. You’ll be negotiating against the people with whom you will be working with. The challenge is that you’ll be worried about pushing too hard and turning them off. On the other hand, if you don’t assert yourself, you’ll leave money on the table.

 

Both Sides Win

In a difficult market, taking a strong-arm position may backfire. Family, friends and co-workers will tell you to push for everything. It’s easy for them to say, as it’s not their livelihood. In brokering thousands of placements, I’ve learned that you have to make both sides feel somewhat happy.

Most people think they must beat the other side and get everything they want. That generally doesn’t happen. Usually, the result is that you get around 70% to 80% of what you want. The same holds true for the company. The best negotiations are when everyone walks away feeling satisfied.

Here’s A Negotiating Hack

Not all companies handle salary negotiations the same way. Some companies will bypass the bargaining and say, “Here’s our best offer.” Other firms may make a lowball offer to test you. It is sad to say that these companies prey on your vulnerability and try to get you aboard with less than you deserve. With the new pay transparency laws, many job descriptions share the salary bands, making it a little easier to know if you’re getting cheated.

Don’t immediately ask for a number that is wildly out of range, as it will backfire. A more effective method is asking for about 20% more than you really want, so there is room for negotiations.

You need to have evidence to support your demands. Additionally, you should continue to sell yourself by reminding the company why you are the best candidate, including your standout attributes, skills, education and relevant experience. It’s acceptable practice to negotiate and make a counteroffer. If you can’t get the compensation you desire, you can ask for more vacation time, remote work, stock options or a lofty corporate title. Avoid taking anything personally, which is easier said than done. You should put aside your emotions and focus on getting what you deserve.

Todd Dybas, an editor at LinkedIn, warns job seekers about over-negotiating. Dybas wrote in a LinkedIn post, “The line between negotiating for a better package and overdoing it is thin.” He added, “Job seekers want to maximize offers while not stoking irritation in their prospective employer.”

Dybas pointed to Salary Negotiator founder Brandon Bramley’s advice on the three negotiation tactics that “may backfire,” which include “starting too high with your request, being too forceful with a take-it-or-leave-it approach and shifting out of a friendly tone.”

What To Do After Accepting The Offer

After negotiations are over, there are a couple of things left to do. Carefully review the offer letter. You want to ensure that everything you’ve discussed is in writing. Double-check the salary, bonuses and stock options, personal time off, vacation days, corporate titles and the hybrid, in-office or remote work schedule. Look for any potential deal-breakers, such as a non-compete clause, garden leave or requirement to pay back upfront bonuses.

It will be unpleasant, but you must tell your current boss that you’re resigning. To cushion the blow, leave on a positive note. Tell them, “I greatly appreciate everything you’ve done for me. I have learned so much under your tutelage and regard you as a mentor and friend.” Be polite by offering to help pitch in with the extra work during your notice period. Also, let your supervisor and team know that you’ll be available to answer any questions and help even though you’ve moved on.

 

Forbes.com Author:  Jack Kelly Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website or some of my other work here.

Forbes.com | March 7, 2023