I recently attended the International Retained Search Associates fall conference. As a board member for this organization, we try to attract members from around the globe to our semi-annual conferences. Our China delegation was in attendance and updated us on the trends in Asia. It appears that Asia has completely recovered and is back in strong growth mode. Our member from Shanghai is in the process of hiring an additional 23 recruiters for his large firm. China has invested trillions of dollars in infrastructure and construction is everywhere. His firm is busy across most industries, including manufacturing. He felt that China was about 6 months ahead of the US in recovery and felt the worst is well behind us. Of the entire organization, all but one attendee had experienced an upsurge in business in the past 3 months. Although recruiting may not be a pure bellwether of the overall economy, since we focus mostly on executive hiring, the overall attitude and confidence was up strongly from our Spring conference.

I recently read a survey of employees that reported that 78% of 'satisfied' and 39% of 'extremely satisfied' employees were open to looking for a new opportunity. The irony of this report is that just 30 days earlier, those same two groups of employees were 45% and 20% (respectively) open to looking at new opportunities. So what happened?

It appears that with signs of the economy recovering that employees have changed their career mentality from riding out the storm in a bunker and hoping that they wouldn’t get caught in the 5th RIF to seeing positive trends and beginning to assess where they'd like to be for the future; which apparently isn’t with their current employer.

This recession has been brutal. Companies have cut deeply into their employee ranks, including wholesale reductions in some of their most tenured employees. When employees see the loss of significant company tenured assets, it becomes clear that longevity and loyalty is no longer valued when times are hard. The definition of 'career path' becomes obscured when they see long-term employees struggling to come to grips with the possibility of moving from a community or accepting a significant reduction in responsibilities.

The current average tenure for a new employee in the US is less than 35 months, and that includes CEO's to non-exempt employees. Hiring has become transactional and an exercise in identifying a return on investment. The days of interviewing candidates for 'permanent hire' have been long gone, but this recession has solidified the image of how far a company will go to reduce labor costs; especially highly compensated labor with long tenure.

Most signs are pretty positive right now, even the growing trade deficit points to a rise in imported goods. The most negative economists have turned their ire towards concerns for how we address the long-term threats to sound fiscal policy; deficit control and health care cost restraint. But for the most part, the daily dirge of 'experts' predicting a financial meltdown has subsided, leading to expectations for growth beginning in 2009.

So, let's breathe. It's ok to peek out of your bunker. The worst has gone. Now it’s time to do damage control for the actions of the past year. How many of your remaining tenured and 'satisfied' employees are going to leave over the next year? Now would be the time to implement serious efforts for retention of key employees and improving overall company morale. Replacing employees will be a relative bargain for about 4-5 more months and then it'll turn very quickly into a candidate driven market as it happened in the last recession.

Get ready for a significant change in attracting and retaining talent.