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A Flexible Connection
In the most recent Monster Work/Life Balance Survey, 89 percent of employees polled said work/life balance programs such as flextime are important when evaluating a new job, yet only about half of HR professionals polled consider such balance to be an important initiative for their companies. So it may not come as a surprise that newly created niche Web sites are stepping in to fill the void for workers seeking a professional job with flexible hours to complement their own work/life scenarios. Kathleen Wiant, along with fellow working mom Carol Clark, is co-founder of Needlestackjobs.com, a specialized job-board site based in Dublin, Ohio. Like many of the job seekers who are now using Needlestackjobs.com, they were both looking for alternative working arrangements, says Wiant. "[Clark] still wanted to work, she just didn't want to work full-time, didn't want to work the Monday-through-Friday, 8 a.m.-to-5 p.m. thing." So the duo decided to start their own job board to connect flextime job seekers to employers offering the option. Wiant says the name they settled on refers to the difficulty she had in finding a suitable, flexibly scheduled job. The site was launched last August. Jobs posted there are all professional-level, require a college degree and include pharmaceutical sales, accounting and attorney positions. "A lot of family-friendly and small companies are really getting into this," says Wiant. "We are targeting a group that they couldn't access before." While acknowledging that a majority of job seekers on the site are currently working moms, Wiant says the company will begin to market to baby boomers as well. "For different reasons, [both working moms and baby boomers] need flexibility," she says. "[Boomers] have worked for 30 years, but they may not be financially ready to retire yet." Also poised to join the search for flextime are Gen Xers, according to Reesa Staten, senior vice president of communications and director of employment research for Robert Half International, the Menlo Park, Calif.-based consultancy. "In a recent survey of professionals ages 21 to 28, we found 73 percent said they were concerned about achieving work/life balance," she says. "Flexible hours also provided a highly coveted benefit, more important than profit-sharing plans and on-site childcare. . . . Many of these professionals may have seen their parents struggle to achieve balance while raising a family and want assurance that their companies will help them juggle multiple obligations."
Michael Felton-O'Brien can be e-mailed at mobrien@lrp.com.
January 1, 2008 Copyright 2008© LRP Publications |
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