RECRUIT NEWS July 3, 2001 This Week's Recruit News: Altered Image. Another Oil Shortage. Diversity Rules. The H-1B Show. Lost Perks. If You Want Them, Target Them. Opportunities Fly in Chicago. ____________________________________________ Find the IT talent you need at a savings of almost $400! We're dice.com and we make your IT search more targeted and cost-effective. Take advantage of our Summer Special and become a dice.com member for only $995 for 2 months. End your IT search today. Offer expires July 31, 2001. Click here for more information, call 1-877-386-3323 ext. 2.RecruitNews ____________________________________________ ALTERED IMAGE Engineers are a hot commodity, and the employment forecast is only getting hotter. It is estimated the U.S. will need 1.75 million engineers over the next seven years, a number that is 20 percent higher than the total number of engineers we have now. That may seem like an achievable goal, but the number of students entering college and university engineering programs has dropped consistently since the mid 1980s. Industry experts say the problem lies not only in the education systems promotion and support of math and science programs, but also in the pervasive image of the engineer as a "geek." According to one survey, the general public respects the work of engineers, but they have no clue what it is that engineers really do. The National Society of Professional Engineers hopes to boost its image - especially among young, potential engineering students - with the American Engineering Campaign. Engineers are going into schools to explain the real-life aspects of being an engineer: having fun, making a good salary, and plenty of career opportunities. Seattle Times, 7/1/01 ___________________________ ANOTHER OIL SHORTAGE Oil is a boom-and-bust proposition, and the people who work in that industry know it. During the last bust, many skilled petroleum workers left the industry to find employment situations that were a little more even-keeled and dependable. Some even took pay cuts to attain stability. Now, thanks to skyrocketing natural gas and oil prices, the oil industry is booming again. Or trying to boom. The industry, as a whole, is putting expansions and new projects on hold because of a lack of talent. Companies are having a hard time recruiting and retaining the engineers, geologists, geophysicists and oil rig "roughnecks" needed to move new initiatives forward. "If we don't do anything about the labor trend over the next 36 months," said an industry expert, "things could get critical." In the next seven years, the industry stands to lose 40 to 60 percent of its workforce to retirement. To attract people into the field, oil companies have raised starting salaries for petroleum engineering graduates to $49,000. Companies are also offering hefty signing bonuses. The New York Times, 7/1/01 DIVERSITY RULES Where is the most fertile ground for cultivating highly talented skilled workers? In cities that attract a highly diverse population. According to a study by the Brookings Institute, cities that have high concentrations of gays, artists and foreign-born residents are also rich with high-tech talent. "People in technology businesses are drawn to places known for diversity of thought and open-mindedness," said the survey's authors. "These places possess what we refer to as low barriers to entry for human capital.Leading high-tech centers are places where people from virtually every background can settle and thrive." Here are the most divers cities, according to Brookings: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., New York, Seattle, Boston, San Diego and Austin, Texas. Business Week, 6/25/01 THE H-1B SHOW First there was "Startup," a documentary that chronicled the fast rise and faster fall of a New Economy company. Now comes"American Dream 2.0," which documents a foreign worker's struggle to fight The H-1B visa and American immigration systems. Murali Krishna Devarakonda, a software engineer from India, is one of the subjects of the film. The Documentary will capture Devarakonda and the Immigrants Support Network for six months as they lobby Congress to grant greater freedoms to H-1B workers. the film's producers set out to capture the rise and fall of San Francisco's tech boom as seen by three different individuals. Chronicled in the film are an entrepreneur who left a stable job to become an online retailer of environmentally-friendly products; a dancer and choreographer who was evicted from a Mission District studio and refused to leave; and Devarakonda, who is fighting to change the way H-1B workers are used as indentured servants by their employers. San Francisco Chronicle, 7/1/01 LOST PERKS Creative cost cutting is hitting employees on overseas assignments. Companies that have workers in international locations are reducing expenses by stripping away perks and benefits that would keep international workers and their families living abroad in a style to which they were accustomed at home. If overseas workers won't accept the new situations, they are quickly being brought home and being replaced. Replacements are typically "lo-pats," or localized expatriates, who look for assignments in specific locations and will sacrifice perks and benefits to get them. The positions can also go to foreign experts who wish to work for American companies, but remain in their home countries. Both options are cheaper than relocating a U.S. employee overseas, which can cost upwards of $1 million for a three-year assignment. Philadelphia Inquirer, 7/1/01 IF YOU WANT THEM, TARGET THEM Older workers may be the best things that ever happen to your company. Not only do they make up one of the fastest growing segments of the workforce, statistics and surveys agree that the over-50 set can bring managerial maturity, stability and experience to a workplace. However, only a small percentage of companies have taken steps to implement changes in benefits and work schedules that would help them recruit and retain seasoned candidates and employees. Most older workers want job flexibility, either to work fewer hours, on a part-time basis, or to take more time off for personal reasons. Training opportunities are also a powerful recruiting tool when it comes to attracting older candidates. They want to remain valuable members of the workforce for a longer period of time and need to keep up their skills in order to do so. Perhaps the biggest factor in attracting older workers is having other baby boomers on staff. Business Week, 6/28/01 OPPORTUNITIES FLY IN CHICAGO Boeing, which is moving its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago, recently held a three-day career fair in the Windy City. By 2 p.m. on the first day, Boeing recruiters had collected about 2,000 resumes for the 150 positions it was trying to fill. The new Boeing headquarters will employ 500 workers - 250 transfers from Washington and 250 new hires. According to a Boeing spokesman, Chicago was selected for the new headquarters because of the potential to hire a "skilled, talented, diverse workforce." In addition to the thousands of resumes collected at the career fair, hundreds more were submitted to the career center on the company's Web site.