Ringing in 2010 With Some Good Ol’ Optimism

If 2009 was the year of doom and gloom, it looks like 2010 might just be the year of cheer and sunshine. OK, maybe that’s a bit overboard - but some good news does seem to be on the horizon. Take this article from inc.com for example, which looked at the hiring and salary numbers for small businesses in December of 2009 and came back with some pretty encouraging news.

“According to the SurePayroll Small Business Scorecard, hiring is up 0.8 percent month over month -- that's the greatest month-over-month hiring increase we've seen since February '08. That brings us to a year-to-date increase of 3.4 percent...and more of the month-over-month hiring increase is made up of employees and not contractors.”

So what does this mean for 2010? Optimism. 

“In a late December survey, two-thirds of SurePayroll customers indicated that they predict their revenues will be up in 2010, and the same number feel good enough to say they believe the economy will get better in the New Year. Now that we're seeing more hiring, we should see more spending, and so an upward cycle can begin.” 

This is obviously great news. We rely on the vitality of small businesses.  As the United States Department of Labor points out, “The nation’s 17 million small, non-farm businesses constituted 99.7 percent of all employers, employed 52 percent of private workforce and accounted for 51 percent of the nation’s sales.”

So what are these small businesses doing to prepare for an uptick in hiring? Good question. Hopefully they have begun to consider talent acquisition systems – which would help in the sourcing and recruiting of new hires. And taking it a step further, hopefully some of these small businesses have begun to think of their talent management processes holistically, and so will look for a talent management system that can automate and streamline their processes from start to finish – managing candidates to managing employees. Viewing the entire talent management process in such a holistic sense would mean greater efficiencies and cost-savings, with such processes as applicant tracking, performance management and employee data management all housed within one, cohesive system. With any luck, that will equate into even more hiring and that much more success for said small businesses.

So what are we waiting for? Bring on the optimism!