Help Wanted: How to Find and Keep Talent in a Forever-Tight Labor Market

How employers can compete in a challenging labor market—by hiring differently, redesigning job quality, and rethinking their government relations strategies.

From two leaders in business and workforce development with a proven track record in innovative workforce strategies.

Over the past ten years, the U.S. labor market has been buffeted, with demand shifting dramatically. At the same time, demographic trends mean that U.S. labor supply will steadily tighten into the coming decade: Relatively fewer native-born workers are entering the workforce; a greater percentage are choosing not to work; and an aging baby boom generation is exiting the workforce. What’s worse, this systemic tightening of the US labor market has been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s decision to dramatically constrain immigration, the primary source of recent labor market growth.

Welcome to the “forever-tight” labor market. In Help Wanted, Jerry Rubin and Steven Dawson combine their 80 years of experience in management and workforce development to offer employers an “employee-focused competitive strategy.” This strategy includes a wide range of practical, well-researched tools and detailed case studies from a breadth of employers that will help readers compete for talent and retain a productive workforce.

Since the underlying cause of the tightening labor supply is structural, employers—whether for-profit, nonprofit, or governmental—must respond in kind. They too must undertake structural changes in finding, hiring, and retaining workers.

Now equal in importance to an organization’s customer-service strategy, an employee-focused strategy is no longer simply a competitive advantage—it is fast becoming a competitive necessity.

Jerry Rubin led and founded several highly impactful workforce and community development organizations and initiatives in the nonprofit and public sectors over the past four decades. He has written extensively on workforce and community development issues including monographs and book chapters. He is Senior Advisor at the Project on Workforce at Harvard and a Foundation Fellow at Eastern Bank.

Steven L. Dawson worked in the field of business/economic development for 45 years. He helped create and lead a range of for-profit and nonprofit economic development enterprises, and for decades he wrote for and consulted extensively with organizations on frontline workforce job quality issues.