There's an interesting article on recruitment for the renewable energy sector on New Energy Focus. As we try to find more sustainable ways to go about our work it's leading to a increase in demand for engineers but companies in this sector face the same skills shortage seen in the wider engineering sector. In Europe 15% of graduates study engineering compared to 6% of UK students but Sue Gill of Energy and UK Skills makes an interesting point - a large number of students graduating in engineering in the UK are foreign students who return overseas at the end of their course. Actual numbers of UK engineering graduates are decreasing.

With both Woolies and MFI going into administration there's the inevitable discussion of job losses with Woolies employing 30,000 and MFI around a 1,000. Woolies never really made it out of the 80's and it was inevitable that profits from pick'n'mix was never going to pay off debts of £385m. The supermarkets and online entertainment retailers stole it's entertainment sales while Wilkinsons stole it's position as king of cheap and cheerful. As for MFI I don't know anyone who's been there since IKEA landed on UK shores.

The media is focusing on the job losses which will no doubt happen to some extent despite any restructuring deals. There's also talk across the media of how many job losses are going to occur at suppliers to Woolies.

They miss one key point.

The market for light bulbs hasn't declined. We're not going to sit darkness this winter because there's no-where to buy lightbulbs. If I need a stapler I'll go to any of the numerous stationery retailers. If I want a cheesy bedside alarm clock then I'm sure Argos will oblige. If I want sweets then I'll head to a supermarket. If I want the X Factor CD then I'm sure I'll be able to pick it up in any of the high street entertainment stores, supermarkets or online stores.

The demand for these items hasn't changed. The reason that Woolies has suffered is because all of the other retailers found a more convenient way to get us the items we need at prices we liked. I haven't bought anything in Woolies for fifteen years but that doesn't mean I've been avoiding other shops. The few who still shop at Woolies will find other retailers ready to take their cash.

Yep, if you're Woolies supplier things might wobble in the short term. I'd hazard a guess that most suppliers are already supplying any number of retailers with the same products. If you're a Woolies employee then the next month looks uncertain. But some quarters talk about how many job losses will occur at suppliers. 

These are tough times. But if we're going to survive them we need factual and accurate information on the reality of UK employment. Not sensationalist journalism. 

Seth Godin, marketing genius, posts an interesting perspective about interviews where candidates take control of the interview.

Some bosses don't want to hire people who have a vision, a personality and a shtick. That's okay. You don't want to work for them anyway. 

There might be rising unemployment. But it many sectors and in specialisms there's a lack of talent. There's not enough experienced candidates. There's not enough people with that flair that makes them stand out.

Years ago people spent a lifetime at the same employer. The cost of changing was high. You had to check job ads. Write letters. Call them. There wasn't a website to see what they did. You couldn't Google a company to find the latest news. You couldn't go read reviews of what it was like to work somewhere. 

Now I can search 600,000 jobs in a second. I can read employee blogs. I can chat with friends on Facebook about where they work. I can apply for tens of jobs in my lunch hour.

What are you going to do to stand out? What are you going to do to be different to every other recruiter out there? How are you going to build a relationship with me?

Hint: It's not with an ad that starts 'My Client' 

With news that employment will hit 2m next year we can all be happy that employment minister Tony McNumpty is on the case. He's one of the most consistent Government ministers around in that he's achieved very little in any post he's held.

There are 1.8m unemployed. There's 600,000 vacancies. In certain regions the number of vacancies is higher than the number of unemployed. How come? Differences in skill sets. As we've moved away from industry, over to a service economy the skill sets of certain workers haven't kept up leading to long term unemployment especially in industrial areas.

Don't worry. Tony McNumpty is on to it. He recently made £27m million available to add to the £100m he's already offered for training. So that'd be about £70 a head to spend on courses then. Anyone up for wine tasting classes?

We've long faced a skills shortage in a number of industries including engineering and IT. Tried finding a good geophysical engineer lately? We need to address the problems in those areas where employers are reluctant to take on graduates wanting skilled staff. We need to spend a lot on equipping the long term unemployed with skills relevant for todays market. Not a basic course in Word or internet for beginners. And we need to have a serious look at entrepreneurship as an engine for job creation. It's not the FTSE 100's who are paying the wages of your average worker. It's small to medium size businesses who get no support. It's time to encourage them.

The news this week has been about how many thousands of people have been made redundant due to the ongoing downturn. The BBC leads today with the news of how 3,000 Royal Bank of Scotland staff are being laid off. The Times ran with news of how 4,000 people a day are losing their jobs.

Shocking?

Let's take a little look at the figures. The first announcment this week was from Virgin Media who said they're going to cut 2,200 jobs. But when you read the detail they're not cutting them until 2010. And even then it's part of a restructure. Virgin Media has billions in debt and has been struggling to carry it for some time. It's also still got some of the inefficiencies left over the merger of NTL and Telewest who in turn were formed from other cable operators.

Maybe BT as a national giant is more reflective of what's going on. They've said they're going to cut 10,000 positions by March next year. But the detail is that 4,000 have already gone and the majority will be made up of agency and contract staff. Not good but not as bad as it seems. And BT have made it clear that again this is a result of efficiency improvements and nothing to do with the downturn.

OK, so Yell, the Yellow Pages publisher might give us a more realistic understanding of what's going on. They're losing 1,300 staff as part of a £100m efficiency drive. Yell are blaming the downturn saying many advertisers are holding off placing ads. The reality is that Yell has £3.8bn, yes billion, in debt. How you run up that much debt printing telephone directories is beyond me. But after annoucing profits of £118m this week it should only 32 years to pay it off. Yell's problems are much bigger than anything that's happened as part of the downturn. At least chief exec John Coudron is on the case. He flew 100 staff out to Spain to celebrate and hired the Sugababes to perform but when they cancelled he handed them £1,000 each to make up for the disappointment.

RBS announced today that they're slashing 3,000 jobs to cut costs. RBS suffered a big shock earlier this year when it figured out that lending money to people who couldn't pay it back to buy overvalued houses wasn't a good business model. Luckily the Government is willing to pay £20bn to help RBS learn from it's mistakes. Delving into the detail a third of the job losses will be in the UK, so that'd be 1,000 then.

The BBC quotes 18,000 job losses this week. The reality is closer to 8,000.

Any job losses have a negative effect on the economy and the market we're in. But inaccurate journalism has a big effect too. The Times reporting 4,000 job losses a day is sensational journalism and nothing else.

We need to get through the downturn and get back to business as usual. We need those people to find work. We don't need to talk ourselves further into a recession.

Birmingham Mail journalist Adam Smith decided to follow this dreams and flew out to the US to support the Obama campaign. However he decided against the traditional resignation letter and decided to resign via Youtube. After having enjoyed the Obama celebrations...

See what he's got to say for himself below. (Does contain a little swearing)

Back in 2000 I was on the other side of the fence during the dotcom crash. I'll confess. I was an IT geek.

But it meant I had a ringside seat to watch the tech sector inflate itself to an incredible size then implode. Business plans back then were to spend as much possible and figure it out later. I argued against it but apparently I didn't understand. I argued against spending £500k on development of one service which in the end made £24 in subscriptions. Then in the fallout I was made redundant.

As a hirer I got to watch on as recruiters soared and then fell alongside the tech market. 

We're not heading into a slowdown across many sectors. We're already there. 

If you think you can contine to succeed as a general IT/finance/engineering/whatever recruiter then it's going to hurt.

If you think business development is calling an employer for a chat to source new business once a month/week/day/hour then it's going to hurt.

If you think this is going to last six months and then pick up again then it's going to hurt.

There's still a lot of demand out there for roles but it involves you knowing your market. Recruitment in IT is still busy for top-end roles. Database gurus, SAP consultants, software architects. You can survive for six months one person down on a helpdesk, you can't survive without the guy who keeps the database going every day. In engineering there's still massive demand for oil and gas workers as we want cheaper fuel and environmental engineers as we all go green. Construction still needs talented quantity surveyors especially on civil and infrastructure projects but don't count much else happening any time soon. And in finance there's more people needing insolvency practitioners than are looking for finance directors. This is where knowing how your sector and your clients' industries work. Who is going to be successful or at least not suffering as much? Who is still performing? What roles are moving? What contracts have people recently won? What are their busy times of year? 

During the tech crash there'd be a phone call from a recruiter at least once an hour trying to source jobs, all while I was thinking about losing mine. A week later there'd be another call from the same recruiter. There was no difference in the way any of the recruiters went about it. Every call was the same. Say we did have a role open. What makes you think we're going to call back you rather than any of the ten recruiters who placed identical calls before or after you?

You need to differentiate. You need to position yourself. What is going to set you apart? Why are there no blogs from UK recruiters such as Utah Tech Jobs or Recruiting Nevada? Robert at Utah Tech Jobs has done a lot to place himself in front of employers and candidates. He gets a daily chance to show off his expertise in front of targeted employers and candidates. Why are there no blogs dedicated to London IT or UK social care recruitment? Take some time each day to figure out what's going to make you stand out from every other recruiter out there. It's probably not fees.

This isn't going to go away. In fact for recruiters it's not going to go away for some time. Back when the tech crunch firms laid off workers fast. Now firms are holding off waiting to see what happens. This means on the far side when things pick up companies will still have a healthy headcount and won't jump back into recruiting so fast. 

There will be casualties. But there's opportunity here. Good recruiters can show their knowledge of their markets, win new clients and position themselves for when things pick up. But you need to do something.

You need to change your game. 

Over in the US, job search engine Indeed.com is beating the likes of Monster and CareerBuilder according to internet stats firm comScore. Back in October Cheezhead reported a similar trend between Indeed and Yahoo Jobs. Indeed.co.uk hit UK shores back on July 2007 and anecdotal data shows UK jobseekers starting to use Indeed in their search. Indeed competitor SimplyHired launched in the UK last month.

The job search engines will change the way that job hunters hunt and in turn the way recruiters recruit. Instead of running five or six similar searches on a handful of job boards, job hunters can run one search on just about all the job boards. It'll be interesting to see the effect this has on job boards, especially the niche boards who can charge higher fees because of their specialist audience. And there's room for savvy recruiters to list their jobs direct with the search engines and lower the cost of candidate acquisition.  

Continuing on the stat theme comScore showed an extra one million people UK web users visited careers sites in September than August. Is it just the usual end of the August holiday season or people become more worried about job security?

Business networking site LinkedIn announced today that it'll be laying off 10% of it's workforce. It's safe to say that it's a pre-emptive move - LinkedIn recently raised a further $27m in funding which valued the company at $1bn.

Recent research show LinkedIn users tend to have above average earnings and are more likely to hold executive or decision making positions. As the economy tightens and redundancies increase, LinkedIn reported an increase in users as those recently laid off see to network in the hunt for new roles. Nows as good a time as any for recruiters to talent source via LinkedIn.