RELO Roundtable…a gathering place

Interesting question!  How would you answer if you were a hiring manager?

Would you expect an extremely well-qualified candidate to respond differently – especially in this economy?

It's that time of year again when the folks at Atlas Van Lines invite business owners, human resource and employee development move managers, or relocation planning personal everywhere to participate in their annual Corporate Relocation Survey.

This makes the 43rd time that the company that specializes in corporate employee relocations both domestically and worldwide has conducted the comprehensive poll.

By the time they get done mining through the data, the pros at the Evansville, Indiana based moving and storage company usually uncover some useful nuggets of information concerning both domestic and international relocation trends.

To qualify for participation, a respondent must have relocation responsibility and work for a public or private company or government organization that has either moved employees within the past two years or else has plans to relocate employees sometime in 2010.

Enter here to participate in Atlas' Corporate Relocation Survey. The entire process takes approximately 15 minutes to complete.  Each party responding is notified after the results are tabulated, analyzed and published.

Last year, the majority of the respondents (65%) were human resource, recruiting or personnel departments for firms engaged in:

• service (36%)
• manufacturing/processing (33%)
• wholesale/retail (13%)
• financial (10%)
• government/military (3%)
• other (5%)

You can find other answers and more thorough explanations of the results of the entire 121 page summary at Atlas Van Lines Releases 2009 Corporate Relocation Survey.

The annual report is important because of the detail that it covers. Last year, for example, when responding to the question above, thirty-eight percent of the 320 respondents said “yes” – it does hinder an employee's career. Yet roughly two-thirds (65%) of the firms that responded indicated employees declined the opportunity to move in 2008.

Why? The devil's in the details.