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The recession may be on the wane, but the scars it has left on the global economy will remain for a very long time to come. As a result, the former "tried-and-true" methods of doing things have fallen by the wayside. A small example - teleconferencing has begun to replace air travel for long-distance business meets, thus reducing time as well as travel expense. One of the hardest hit areas has been recruitment. When layoffs are taking place en masse and companies can hardly maintain their existing staff, what is a recruitment agency to do? Through the recession, recruitment agencies worked by curtailing job-seekers' expectations, and being more and more selective about clients they chose to take on. Only the most competent and willing of clients got jobs, and even they often had to settle for a much lower fixed salary than they would have had a few years ago. For job seekers, this means that a much more spruced-up profile will be needed to obtain a job than was needed even three years ago. Companies - and therefore agencies - are wary of making false investments, or of repeating the expense incurred to stage advertisements and interview. In order to avoid getting tangled in lawsuits or being stuck with inefficient workers, many companies have opted to increase contractual staff and decrease the number of permanent staff. This means that employees will get paid lower, and - even worse - may not get health insurance or such auxiliary benefits. In fact, freelancing becomes a more and more tempting option in the aftermath of the recession. For engineers, work experience will be crucial if you want to get a good job. Apply for internships - whether paid or unpaid - to build up that portfolio before applying to full-time jobs. Like the business commuters, recruitment agencies have also eschewed physical travel in favor of telecommunications. Today, recruitment agencies gather a lot of their information from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Monster and such networking sites. This allows them to jump on a piece of news as soon as the would-be employer puts up a one-line message. This development has been a boon in disguise, as it has speeded up operations to an unforeseen degree. On the other side of the coin, multinational companies are choosing the recession as the best time to make big investments, and snap up and up-and-coming talents. As the recession shows signs of letting up, slightly smaller companies will find the courage to invest in quality staff to help them ride the wave of a slowly but surely growing economy. Skills in innovation and resource management are becoming more prizes, as engineers keep trying to find ways to do things cheaply, easily and efficiently. To sum things up, all that the recession has done is to make things tougher. Now, the bar for "good enough" has been raised, which means that candidates have to work extra hard to get a satisfactory job. This holds equally true in all sectors, especially engineering - where the "tech bubble" has motivated many youths to sign up for courses, without thinking that the field may be saturated one day.
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