The Must-Read Articles for Talent Professionals This Week

“Hiring is getting harder,” writes industry leader Josh Bersin in a recent blog post. “Our newest benchmark study on time-to-hire clearly shows that almost every job role in every industry is getting harder to fill.”

So what’s a talent professional to do? Batten down the hatches and wait out the current labor crunch?

Not so fast, Josh warns, pointing to U.S. demographic changes, including a declining birthrate and earlier retirements. “Our research,” he writes, “clearly shows that we’ve entered a whole new economy, one that makes labor shortages a long-term trend.”

Before recruiters panic at the thought of a forever talent shortage, Josh points to two things that may help lessen the impact of smaller labor pools: embracing artificial intelligence and, perhaps more importantly, shifting leaders’ perceptions of their workers.

“We used to think of ‘labor’ as an expense,” Josh explains, “and we optimized jobs as ‘containers for people,’ with people as replaceable parts. No longer. Now we need to think about our entire companies differently, and consider people as our most trusted asset. I’ve always reminded leaders that people are the only appreciating asset on your balance sheet. When you train, develop, and invest in people they always return the investment many times over. This kind of thinking has to permeate the thinking of CEOs, CFOs, as well as CHROs.”

To learn more about Josh’s thoughts and research into a potential long-term labor shortage, be sure to check out his blog post at the top of our list below of must-read articles for talent professionals. And further down our list, you can learn why the so-called “September surge” in hiring may not be much of a surge after all; why a Taylor Swift–related job posting raised some eyebrows; and why many workers are heading home as soon as the clock strikes 5:01.