Category Archives: Office / HR / Employment

By Rene A. Walrath

As we move into 2025, the job market has experienced a significant transformation, evolving into what many are calling an “employer’s market.” This shift is characterized by increased leverage for employers during hiring, a wider pool of candidates, and heightened competition among job seekers. It is essential for both employers and employees to understand the factors driving this change and its implications in the current landscape.

Global economic challenges, including inflation, rising interest rates, and geopolitical tensions, have led many companies to adopt more cautious hiring practices. Layoffs in certain sectors, particularly in tech, have created a surplus of skilled professionals competing for fewer job openings. Although the pandemic initially expanded opportunities for workers through remote work, companies are now recalibrating their operations by consolidating roles, enforcing stricter return-to-office policies, and reevaluating workforce needs, which has resulted in fewer available positions.

With more individuals re-entering the workforce post-pandemic—including retirees, part-time workers seeking full-time positions, and international talent—employers now have access to a larger and more diverse talent pool.

By Rose Miller

Many managers are finding it difficult to manage today’s multigenerational workforce.  It is becoming clear that younger employees express themselves differently from older employees. As a person in the Boomer category, I struggle too.  I’ve had to learn to adapt management strategies to fit the various generations, who work, think, train, and communicate differently.

The workplace is more multigenerational than ever before. It’s not unusual to find employees over 60 working alongside 20-year-olds, and it’s possible to find recent college graduates supervising employees old enough to be their parents.

The primary generations in workplaces today are Baby Boomers (born between 1946-1964), Generation Xers (born between 1965-1980), and Millennials (born between 1981-2000), with members of Generation Z (born from 1997-on) quickly filling a larger share of job vacancies. 

The competitiveness of Boomers and the ego-centric approach of Gen Xers are causing friction with the younger generations. Layer on a company’s need to preserve institutional knowledge, and it’s critical that older managers begin to transfer knowledge to the younger generations.  

Although we should be mindful to avoid stereotypes or try to paint with too broad a brush, there are certain tendencies that a group will commonly identify with. As a group, each generation has different values, attitudes, expectations, needs and motivators. Managers are dealing with employees with shifting views towards job satisfaction, which is tethered to employee retention. 

By Susan Elise Campbell

John Harvey, the founder and owner of the one-man search firm, High Peaks Executive Search, LLC, hunts for the world’s top scientists and executive talent in the pharmaceutical, medical device and biotech industries like a miner digs for gems. And just as striking a vein in the rock can lead to a valuable find, Harvey’s disciplined networking approach leads to a cache of candidates who are the most accomplished in their fields.

“These are doctors and scientists who are finding cures and saving lives,” said Harvey. “Most recruiting is in research and development, and the manufacturing of drugs and medical devices for pre-clinic and clinical research and for commercial products.”

Harvey started the company in 2017 after having been a recruiter for two large pharmaceutical search firms. His career prior was as director of human resources for Native Textiles when it was in Glens Falls, which remains home to a number of companies serving the three growing industries for which Harvey recruits.

“I came up through the HR field, so I have recruited for sales and human resources positions as well as for scientists throughout my career,” he said.

Success as a recruiter in this niche depends on identifying candidates with a narrow skill set, and that requires “a lot of hard work and networking,” said Harvey. 

“When you narrow down the candidates you may find there are only 20 or 30 people in the world for the job,” he said. “Then I might have to convince them to relocate.”

By Susan Elise Campbell

If executive recruiter Renee Walrath has one mission for her business and her clients, it may be “helping people and their families.” As top-level and mid-level executives and managers move from position to position, Walrath said she and her staff of nine at Walrath Recruiting, Inc. are “dedicated to the perfect fit” as they connect companies and candidates.

The pandemic touched the executive search industry like every other. Employees quickly moved to their homes in great numbers and then slowly have been called back. Now an individual may want to work remote, but the positions are no longer out there, according to Walrath.

“I have no one-hundred-percent remote job openings in the Capital District,” she said. 

Last year, in 2023, a “big chunk of organizations made the move back to their offices,” said Walrath. “Now our firm gets calls that ‘my company is calling me back in, but they are out of California or in Boston.’”

“They say, ‘we moved here to New York, like it here, and want to stay here,’” she said.

Only one of her client companies offers working at home full time, but the individual “has to live near headquarters in New Hampshire just in case,” she said.

Hybrid situations may allow some to work at home and at the office for portions of the week. 

“But certain positions need to be in the office, and it seems people always want what they can’t have,” said Walrath. “Where an individual may work is now an important factor in our recruiting.”

By Paul Post

Gerald Davis wants to open a second location for his successful heating and cooling business, and document its growth with a long-range goal of having employees partner up with him as franchise owners.

JoAnna Schwartz felt the need for more structure and better processes at Name Bubbles, an e-commerce company that makes personalized waterproof name labels and decals, to ensure the firm’s future prosperity.

These are just two of many area business leaders that have turned to Wendy Waldron to teach, facilitate, coach, lead and direct them through critical phases of their respective operations. 

She owns Glens Falls-based WaldronWorks, and is a Professional EOS Implementer for the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), whose principles have helped clients around the world overcome business problems as well as identify and take advantage of new opportunities.

By Susan Elise Campbell

Around the time Lynn A. Wadleigh, CPA was thinking of leaving the corporate world and into a career where she could be her own boss, her father, E. Peter Marshall, had decided to sell the CPA practice he had built over the past 40 years.

“I enjoyed doing financial statements for a senior management team,” said Wadleigh, whose accounting career spans more than 30 years. “But as my father was preparing to retire, I was thinking it was time to do my own business.”

Buying his firm, Marshall Associates CPAs, kept the business in the family and  serving the community Wadleigh grew up in.

This was 2018 and Marshall was in his late 70s. His practice had grown along with his family and Wadleigh, her  siblings, and their mother all worked there at different times over the decades. 

“We all remember how busy the five of us were during tax season,” she said. “Raised in the CPA world,” Wadleigh graduated from Queensbury High School and SUNY Albany and got an accounting internship at Ernst & Young in Albany. She earned her CPA designation, started a career in public accounting, and planned to stay in it.

“I had an opportunity to take a position with KADANT, part of Albany International, the paper manufacturer,” she said. “By the time my father had his CPA and his own business.”