Unhappy Campers

I was checking out a blog the other day called Recruiting.com and the post of the day entitled, "Easy Pickin's." It was essentially telling recruiters that if they were looking to recruit middle managers, the low hanging fruit was made up of thousands of middle managers who, according to a recent survey done by Accenture, were very unhappy campers.

One of the cute lines in the blog entry said it this way: "...you can't swing a cat in any large corporation without hitting an unhappy middle manager." It certainly went a long way to painting a very vivid word picture of the stats included in the survey such as: 58% of the respondents said they would consider changing jobs while 30% indicated they were actually actively looking for a new gig. This was up from 21% in the same survey last year.

While I was reading over the comments, it reminded me that it wasn't only middle managers who were "not feeling the love" as they are wont to say on Sports Center. I don't know how long Accenture has been running their survey, but at ExecuNet we have been running one for the past 13 years – 14 in January. What struck me was that a lot of this must, as they also say "flows downhill" because our membership is made up of senior-level executives who are also plenty interested in their careers, but the last time we asked, some 61% of our respondents said they were not happy in their current jobs, and a whopping 77% said they planned to do something about it in next six months.

Based on the number of "landings" that our members are reporting on a monthly basis, it would appear they are making good on the threat, and while the grass may or may not be greener, they care very much about finding that out for themselves.