Help!

It's a jungle out there. Orders are pouring in faster than your company can fill them. You're losing sales every day because you can't find new workers to step up output. You're not even sure you can hold on to your present employees; competitors are dangling offers in front of them. You need help--talented, experienced help, if possible--fast. So, boss, what do you do?

In the booming '90s, the answer is: everything you possibly can. Advertise in any way you know how, including skywriting. Don't forget the Internet; if your company doesn't have a home page, get one quick. Scout the "job fairs" popping up around the country, created for desperate people like you, or organize a fair of your own. And tell your campus recruiters to make their offers to top engineers, computer programmers and chemists more like the deals sports teams shower on athletes--including signing bonuses. Says Jim Bretl, director of the career-services center at Marquette University in Milwaukee: "It's much like the NBA."

Well, maybe not quite the way a National Basketball Association team would go after Michael Jordan. But if you're a manager in the American Hiring League, you are looking for employees in the hottest U.S. economy in 28 years, and you're going to have to wheel and deal, beg, borrow and steal--however and wherever you can--to find the help you need. Not since 1970, when the Vietnam War and a guns-and-butter economy created a huge demand for skilled manpower, has there been a tougher time to expand the corporate work force, especially in the high-tech industries of the "new economy."

Labor shortages have indisputably become a major drag on the continuing boom. In a survey of 441 "trendsetter" companies released in April by Coopers & Lybrand, a large accounting and consulting firm, almost 70% reported that they were having trouble finding skilled workers. More than a quarter were decreasing growth estimates, delaying or canceling expansion plans and overhiring--or trying to--in anticipation of a still tighter job market. Bear in mind that these companies were chosen for the survey because over the past five years they had been among the fastest-growing businesses in the country.

Nor is much relief in sight, even if the U.S. unemployment rate rises a bit from its 28-year low of 4.3%. In Austin, Texas, for example, the national rate is quite irrelevant. Unemployment there is officially 2.3%, and Steve Mays, director of a suburban grocery store, says only half-jokingly that it "is really minus 1.7%," given the "cannibalism" of employers' swiping workers from one another.

Anything involving computers is in great demand now--not just the arts of programming and software designing either. Almost anybody who works in an office must use a personal computer. A hotel clerk, for example, has to know not only how to click a mouse but also which hotel operations a computer can speed up and how. What is hot now, says Allan Kolber, chief enterprise architect at New Jersey-based technical-services provider Butler International, is people who know data warehousing and business-process re-engineering. Anyone who can deal with changes in the formatting of data, or "the domain change" as it is referred to in the high-tech world, says Kolber, "can write his or her own ticket."