• The official blog of Abacus Group — a place to share our knowledge and thoughts on trends in recruiting •

Hiring surged in December with employers adding 312,000 jobs. This figure was well above the expectation of economists and only confirms that the U.S. economy continues to go from strength to strength.

The month of May saw 223,000 jobs added to the U.S. employment market, seeing the unemployment rate drop from 3.9 in April, to 3.8 percent. Unemployment, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has not been this low since April 2000.

The falling unemployment rate in recent months has strengthened the economy and provided great hope for the year ahead.

Regardless of market conditions and unemployment levels, Temporary Staffing will always be in demand, explains Ray Carroll, Senior Business Development Manager at Abacus Group. While the economy has little bearing on the necessity of contingent labor, the market certainly impacts the caliber of the temporary candidate pool. Ray sheds light on this effect.

At just over four-and-a-half years, median employee tenure in the U.S. is longer now than it’s been in the recent past. Even so, the job you currently hold won’t be yours forever; so-called “permanent” jobs are, in reality, always temporary. As such, we strongly recommend that professionals remain prepared for a job change at all times by formulating a comprehensive Career Resilience Plan.

A recent article from The New York Times by Mr. Nelson D. Schwartz discusses the prevalence of referral hiring in major corporations.  An increasingly popular hiring strategy among employers, referral sourcing circumvents candidates who carry the “stigma” of reliance on Internet job boards and career fairs. As one HR consultant explains, the most capable professionals are those who are endorsed by internal employees, while the rest are less likely to be “top performers.”

​A recent article from a North Carolina paper, The Herald Weekly, discusses the advantages of temporary employment in a distressed economy. Citing the number of professionals seeking temporary jobs as 7.8 percent higher in 2011 than in 2010, the article correctly explains that these types of roles are most appealing to the unemployed, who often seek a “starting point” when getting back into the workforce. Contract work does, in fact, function quite well as a sort of springboard for people who have been unemployed. Now increasingly popular within companies that cannot always afford to provide employee benefits, temporary work serves as an effective way for professionals to “bounce back” after what is commonly an emotionally and financially defeating occurrence.

There are many valid reasons for wanting to quit your job: lack of growth, a long commute, the feeling of being undervalued, uninteresting work, a bad relationship with one’s supervisor. The mistake that many professionals make, however, is failing to obtain another job prior to resigning. Quitting your current job without the security of a new one will likely pose serious consequences to your professional, financial and personal well-being.

​It’s common knowledge that the current economic conditions have been less than friendly to many Americans, including Finance professionals. What are the best courses of action for a recently laid-off Finance professional in terms of pursuing a new career? How can he or she expect to recover after becoming comfortable in familiar work environment and attaining reasonable success after say, eight or ten years with a firm?