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The high unemployment rate has created a false confidence among company hiring managers — from small business owners to Fortune 500 companies — because large pools of applicants are available. Rather than be fearful of making a hiring mistake, here are some ways to ensure you make a good, profitable hire the first time.

You might think Generation Y (GenY) professionals would be the least equipped to weather a recession, let alone be the solution to a company’s survival during a recession. But are you underestimating their potential?

As anxiety and uneasiness continue into the second quarter of 2009, companies are looking for ways to trim spending and improve their bottom line. Even though technology often encompasses a small percentage of a company’s cost expenditures, executives inevitably turn their attention to technology budgets. But cutting back on technology may not be the answer to today's economic woes.

Succession management has been bandied about as a topic of interest in companies and technology departments for years. Recently, succession management has enjoyed increased interest, as the need for skilled talent becomes more critical.

Businesses stand to lose a great deal when they don’t practice succession management — like management continuity and their best engineering pros.

When a person loses a job, he or she experiences shock, anger, disappointment, fear and the feeling of loss. We eventually dust ourselves off and begin to rebuild by searching for another job. Through networking, submitting résumés, interviewing and selling ourselves to perspective employers, we eventually land a new job.

Because recruiting is expensive and time-consuming, and the pool of available talent is shrinking instead of growing, employee retention is fast becoming the most cost-effective strategy for keeping up with business needs. Experts suggest that you can buy employee loyalty with salary, bonuses, perks, patting them on the back and even letting them bring their pets to work. Yet employees still leave. What is an employer to do?

In study after study, more and more engineers over age forty are reporting age bias in their job search, and engineers are increasingly wondering what they have to do to get a job in the second half of their careers.