The Execu|Search Group has released its 2017 Hiring Outlook: Strategies For Engaging With Today’s Talent And Improving The Candidate Experience. It bilaterally offers professionals information regarding deciding whether to apply for a job, join a company or leave what they’re doing now while giving employers suggestions for attracting and retaining top-notch candidates in a job seeker market.
The survey found that 50% of employees plan to stay at their current company for only two years or less, not surprising in this millennially mobile career era. Let me present the bigger picture: 80% of workers in their 20s want to want to change careers, 64% in their 30s and 54% in their 40s with only 14% of workers feeling that they have the perfect job, according to a Harris Survey for the University of Phoenix. A recent Gallup “State of the American Workplace” report produced the disconcerting statistic that 70% of Americans surveyed either hate their jobs or are completely disengaged from them. A report by the Conference Board, a New York-based nonprofit research group, revealed that 52.3% of Americans show up for work unhappy.
The crisis we are facing in the American workplace is less about the legitimate need for some companies to improve their hiring process and create a culture of engagement and opportunity and more about the need for individuals to find, free and follow their true passion for what it is they want to do and to create and adhere to a personal definition of success.
While the scope of the 2017 Hiring Outlook no doubt precludes diving deeper into the American career crisis, job dissatisfaction reasons like lack of advancement opportunities, lack of salary growth, negative work-life balance, and poor corporate culture may be masking the true reasons why 427,000 resumes are posted on Monster each week by workers looking for meaning in their work lives. Until we can get the journey-to-job match right, even the best recruiting efforts will retain short-term vision on guarantees and conversion periods at the cost of true employee engagement.
Read a FREE EXCERPT of DESIGN YOU by Garrison Leykam with illustrations by Christopher Leykam
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During World War II, a small population of indigenous Melanesian islanders was direct witness to the largest war effort ever mobilized. The vast amounts of military equipment and supplies airdropped by the Japanese and then the Allies introduced drastic changes to the lifestyle of the residents. Many had never even seen outsiders before, let alone the likeness of a massive Black Friday drone drop of goods and people.
With the end of the war, the military abandoned the airbases and stopped dropping cargo from the heavens. To encourage the deliveries of food, arms, Jeeps, etc. , cult members imitated the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors, and airmen do. They performed parade ground drills with wooden or salvaged rifles, carved headphones from wood, waved landing signals from fabricated control towers, lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses and actually built life-size replicas of airplanes out of straw parking them on new military-style landing strips hoping to attract more gift-giving airplanes. The cult members thought that the foreigners had some special connection to the deities and ancestors of the natives, who were the only beings powerful enough to produce such riches.
Garrison’s guest in this segment is classically trained dancer, choreographer, mentor and educator Ingrid Graham. Ingrid has performed and presented choreography at the Edinburgh Festival, Merce Cunningham, Dance Under The Stars Choreography Festival, California African American Museum and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She danced with the Pacific Northwest Ballet and as a guest artist at Stephen Sondheim’s Gala Benefit in NYC. Ingrid’s commercial dance clients include Victoria’s Secret, Pharrell Williams, Latin Grammy Awards, Nike and Saks Fifth Avenue among others. She produced and choreographed several dance films that have received honors and screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, ADF International Screendance Festival at Duke University and the Los Angeles Movie Awards. She is a former Hadar Foundation scholar and ballet award recipient from the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts. Ingrid has also appeared in Vogue, Glamour and Vibe Magazine.
Like a great classic book or symphony, Dorie Clark is one of those cornerstone branding experts who beckons you to keep going back to the wisdom well for a fresh drink. 
When Death Cab for Cutie wore blue ribbons to the Grammy Awards a few years back to protest Auto-Tune abuse in the music industry their courage to step out was exceeded only by their relevancy to a wider audience. 
American author, essayist, and literary critic William Deresiewicz coined the term “Excellent Sheep” to refer to those people who keep their nose to the grindstone and perform well at the tasks at hand but never question if what they’re doing is what truly matters to them. Perhaps we’d be well-advised to “take a day off” from the hamster wheel and heed the advice of Ferris Bueller: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”