SkyWater Blog

Learning, Understanding, and Driving Real Change

This year, as we recognize Juneteenth, we’re also reflecting on the fundamental human right to freedom itself. It’s not true freedom without truly equal access to education, rewarding work, and the opportunity to earn personal income and assets that can lead to generational wealth and security.

Yet right here, in spite of all the national attention on the Twin Cities’ woeful racial disparities in employment and income, those gaps still exist. According to the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED), unemployment rates are an impressively low 3.3%... until you look at the numbers by race.  As of April 2022, Black unemployment in Minnesota was 6.7%, more than twice the state’s average – and 2.4 times the rate for white Minnesotans.

Happy Father's Day!

SkyWater has had a bit of a baby boom in the last year and a half. We would be remiss if we didn't spend this weekend's blog post highlighting the fellas at SkyWater who are brand new to parenthood. We polled Alex Bowes, Adam Rosenthal, Corey Thonn, and Ben Lehmann with the goal of gaining some insight into what it is like to be a father on fathers day for the very first time.

Here's what they had to share...

What every CPA needs to know about today’s competitive market

“If you’re not happy where you are, start looking...”  Right?

That’s the old rule. But what if you still like your job? Let's imagine that the pay is fine, the benefits are good, the career path promising. If you’re in public accounting or a CPA with a public accounting background, there’s a new rule to consider following:  “No matter how happy you are in your current role, now is the best time to be looking at what’s out there.”  Here's why:

At the core of the SkyWater Search Partners promise is our commitment to the twin cities community. One way we celebrate that commitment is through our Employee of the Quarter award. Every quarter, we honor a top-performing team member with the gift of a substantial financial donation, in their name, to a nonprofit organization that is meaningful to them.

This quarter, we are delighted to say…

The concept of workplace flexibility is one that is front and center of nearly every client conversation we have at SkyWater. We hear employers describe their worries that dispersed teams will be less able to collaborate, engage, perform, and lead than teams who physically come to work every day. We empathize. At SkyWater, we knew we’d invested mightily in creating a shared work environment that facilitated closer connections and that hard-to-define but so important sense of belonging.

It's a tough mindset to rethink. But we have. And we continue to do so, paying careful attention to how our team members are doing, and what they’re telling us. The key has been our own willingness to be flexible, adaptable, and open. It’s also been about one additional, critical factor: the willingness of our own executive team to walk the talk. We hold ourselves to the same expectations that we establish for the whole team. Turns out, this may be even more important than we realized.

Permanent Placement and Contract recruiting both serve important functions. But beware of the firm that tells you they can do both.

Is it just me, or have you been sensing a little pessimism creeping into the “talent wars” conversation lately? For some hiring managers, the goal seems to be shifting away from building organizational bench strength, toward something that might appear more achievable: just fill the empty seat, asap.

It's a tempting pivot, particularly within the engineering, accounting and finance, and IT fields, where hiring battles run especially hot right now. I get the argument. If you give up on your hiring goal and engage a “contract recruiter” instead, you stand a good chance of having a temporary professional in that seat within a few weeks or even days.

But is switching to a contract approach a good idea? Sometimes. Before going there, though, consider the differences between a permanent recruiting firm and a contract one. Then ask yourself the 3 key questions I outline below.

Yes, greener employers do attract more talent!

To be honest, when I started writing this April’s SkyWater blog in honor of Earth Day, I wasn’t planning to talk about recruiting. Every April, we write an Earth Day blog, and this year, I’d been inspired by an MPR podcast hosted by Angela Davis, about the growing landfill crisis in the Twin Cities. Here in the metro area, we produce 3.3 tons of trash each year, roughly one ton per Twin Cities family – so much waste that our local landfills have become overwhelmed.

The role of self-awareness in making the career move that’s right for you.

A few weeks ago, my good friend and long-time colleague, Melissa Albers invited me to be a guest on The Self-Awareness Journey, the podcast she hosts with JJ Parker. She wanted to talk about The Great Resignation and how pandemic-inspired job decisions can affect our careers and, more importantly, our lives.

Regional Executive Search Firms Have an Undeniable Edge in  Executive Recruiting

Finding the right person for any executive role is a recruiting challenge every organization eventually needs to take. Historically, Fortune 500 companies have hired multi-national search firms to fill executive roles. The logic behind this seems to make sense: large positions can only be filled by large firms right? Think again. In the last few years, we have seen a trend emerge where companies are interested in a more intimate and focused search approach than what a large national recruiting firm can offer.