Wall Street Journal (05/30/12) Rachel Emma Silverman; Lauren Weber

Responding to research indicating that hiring outsiders can lead to costly missteps, firms are ramping up internal hiring efforts and investing in new career sites to boost intra-office movement. Companies say those efforts are helping to cut recruiting costs and retain high performers. A recent study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School found that external hires were paid some 18% more than internal employees in equivalent roles, but fared worse in performance reviews during their first two years on the job. Hiring managers often “underestimate how hard it is to integrate new people,” says Matthew Bidwell, a Wharton assistant professor whose study examined six years of employee data at a financial services company’s U.S. investment banking unit.

Cisco Systems Inc. has developed an internal career program, called Talent Connection, that seeks to identify “passive candidates,” qualified employees who aren’t necessarily looking for a job. The system is designed to help recruiters approach internal candidates the way they do external ones, says Mark Hamberlin, a Cisco vice-president of global staffing. Talent Connection has saved the company “several million dollars” in search-firm fees and other recruiting costs, according to Hamberlin, while employee surveys show workers’ satisfaction with career development has risen by nearly 20 percentage points.

Forbes (05/29/12) Jacquelyn Smith

The seventh annual talent shortage survey of more than 1,300 employers in the first quarter by ManpowerGroup indicates that even as the U.S. unemployment rate remains above 8%, 49% of employers are having a hard time filling vacant positions. The 10 hardest jobs to fill are skilled trades, engineers, information technology, sales representatives, accounting and finance, drivers, mechanics, nurses, machinists and machine operators, and teachers.

Melanie Holmes, a vice president at ManpowerGroup, attributes the trend to a talent mismatch, noting, “They are looking for people who have multiple skill sets and varied backgrounds, and those individuals are hard to find, especially among individuals who have been out of the job market for an extended period of time.” Among the employers having a difficult time filling jobs, 55% cite a lack of applicants, 54% cite applicants seeking higher pay, and others cite a lack of experienced applicants. Holmes says employers need to “leverage flexible work force models that integrate a dynamic mix of workers; advance contemporary people practices that redefine how talent is hired, rewarded, engaged, and developed; and improve talent pipelines by tapping different resources of talent and re-skilling current employees.”

MarketWatch (05/30/12)

A survey of more than 1,000 hiring professionals by Dice Holdings Inc., which provides specialized career Web sites for professional communities, indicates that 51% of respondents plan to hire more workers during the second half of the year, up from 47% anticipating additional hiring in the first half of 2012. The number of hiring managers and recruiters planning to pull back on hiring dropped from 30% six months ago to 23%. As of May, only 36% have seen a jump in voluntary departures, which is less than the 41% of respondents who predicted such an increase six months ago. According to the survey, 47% of respondents report a rise in salaries for newly filled positions, and 45% say salaries for existing workers have increased. Scot Melland, chairman, president, and chief executive of Dice Holdings, says, “When confidence in available career opportunities is high and mobility restored, the retention race will heat up.”

Wall Street Journal Online (05/29/12) Sue Shellenbarger

Co-workers stopping by your desk to chat is the leading on-the-job distraction, cited by 27% of 500 executives in a recent survey by Creative Group, a Menlo Park, CA-based staffing company specializing in creative, advertising, and marketing professionals. While many employers are using open-plan offices, with low or no walls between co-workers to aid collaboration, the trend also can fuel distractions. Walling oneself off by wearing earbuds or headsets is an increasingly popular solution, but supervisors complain that too many are using the devices to retreat into a private world.