Project

• Overview / Forward

Since World War II, headhunters and recruitment firms had worked (at least in part) to support individuals. After the strong economic gains and low unemployment of the 1960s however, recruiting firms shifted to working for employers instead of candidates as more and more companies began outsourcing their hiring efforts to fill roles that passive tools like newspapers failed to surface.

Desperate to find quality hires in these new talent wars led to the development of “cold calling” which, at the time, was still unacceptable for most Employers and so it became a common practice of 3rd party staffing firms.

While prospects were typically directed to inquire about jobs in person, by mail or by phone, equal opportunity mandates were complied with on paper but weren’t fully embraced as many employers (and career coaches) continued to bend the spirit of the civil rights legislation- encouraging candidates to include personal details such as gender, weight, height, family status, marital status, health conditions, whether you owned your own home, etc., etc.

The number of baby boomers entering the workforce skyrocketed.

1970’s Milestones:

• 1970 – Union power and membership continues to Fall.1
• 1970 – Occupational Health and Safety Act (OSHA).2
• 1970 – The Black Collegian magazine founded. 3
• 1970 –  The National Black MBA Association founded. 4
• 1971 – Electronic mail protocol invented.5
• 1971 – Kennedy Publications launches its ‘Red Book’ Directory of Executive Search Firms.6
• 1972 – Equal Rights Amendment passed.7
• 1975 – Earliest known book on Sourcing published.8
• 1975 – The term ‘Sexual Harassment’ is coined. 9
• 1975 – Altair 8800 is created.10
• 1976 – Apple is launched.11
• 1978 – Revenue Act creating the 401k passed.12
• 1978 – Mitre Corporation posts technical jobs on one of their their ‘company’ computers.13
• 1978 – Civil Service Reform Act passed.14
• 1978 – Pregnancy Discrimination Act.15
• 1979 – Compuserve establishes itself as one of the first Job [Bulletin] Boards.16
• 1979 – Usenet conceived.17

References

1. By 2021 Labor Unions comprised 11.1% of the workforce, a source of hire that is approximately 11.4 million workers. Unions were a major force in hiring but their biases and shady history prevented them from achieving fairness in hiring goals. The peak was achieved in the around 1955’s when 33.2% of the workforce were in unions. That percentage fell to 31.4% in 1960, and 27.3% in 1970. A missed opportunity that may be slowly reinventing itself in the 21st century.
   A Brief History of Unions
2. The Occupational Safety & Health Act (OSHA) was enacted by Congress in 1970 and was signed by President Nixon on December 29, 1970. Its main goal is to ensure that employers provide employees with an environment free from recognized hazards, such as exposure to toxic chemicals, excessive noise levels, mechanical dangers, heat or cold stress, or unsanitary conditions.
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_Safety_and_Health_Act_(United_States)
3. “The Black Collegian Magazine, founded by Preston Edwards Sr. in New Orleans from his garage based printing press,  is a career and self development magazine targeted to African-American college students and other students of color seeking information on careers, job opportunities, graduate/professional school, internships/co-ops, study abroad programs, etc. The magazine, at its peak, was distributed to over 800 campuses nationwide, primarily through the career services offices. The magazine today  is primarily online and connected to its sister job board, IMDiversity.”
   THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Online – IMDiversity
4. The National Black MBA Association “was conceived in 1970 to help Blacks coming into the corporate sector, largely for the first time, share experiences and insights to help make the journey easier.”
   Who We Are
5. Ray Tomlinson is credited as the inventor of networked email; in 1971, he developed the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts across the ARPANET, using the @ sign to link the user name with a destination server. By the mid-1970s, this was the form recognized as email.
   Email
6. The Red Book known officially as the Directory of Executive & Professional Recruiters was an annual publication of Kennedy Information that included the details of every Executive Search Firm. From 1971 to its bankruptcy in 2010 it listed at its peak more than 13,000 firms.
   Kennedy Information Is Part Of Bankruptcy Filing – ERE
7. The Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution to guarantee equal legal rights regardless of sex and end legal distinctions between men and women in matters of employment,etc., needed 38 states to ratify. First proposed in congress in 1923, it was approved by Congress in 1972 and finally ratified in 2020.
   proposed Equal Rights Amendment
8. Frank X. McCarthy, a pioneer in Sourcing, established Xavier Associates in 1973, an executive search firm serving diversity staffing needs of local companies and organizations in the Boston area which was sold in 2004. Frank had previously served as an Army Chaplain in Korea and field representative with the Office of Equal Opportunity. Frank (along with C. Gerard McGowan) authored Search Research: Mastering the Search Research Function in May 1975 which is arguably one of the seminal sourcing documents read by many of today’s most experienced Sourcers early in their careers.
   https://www.rowis.org/check-out-our-training-library/
9. Lin Forley, a journalist who had been teaching a course about women and work is credited with the phrase sexual harassment for the first time.
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Farley
10. The Altair 8800 literally sparked the personal computer revolution when it was featured in 1976 on the cover of Popular Electronics in a kit form for $439. It’s operating system, written by Bill Gates, became Microsoft’s first product.
    Altair 8800 – Wikipedia
11. Apple was launched by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Their first offering, the Apple I, “was sold as a motherboard with CPU, RAM, and basic textual-video chips—a base kit concept which would not yet be marketed as a complete personal computer.” It first debuted at the Homebrew Computer Club in July of 1976
    Apple Inc.
12. Signed by President Carter, The Revenue Act allowed Americans for the first time to contribute to a tax-deferred pension plan that eventually became ‘candidate’ mobile as additional legislation over the next 30 years by Presidents Reagan (1982,84,86), Clinton (1996) and Bush (2001, 2006) were added – candidates today would not be ‘leaving’ their pension behind. Prior to 1978 employees wanting to move had to wait (20 years before 1971) for their company pensions to be granted.
    America’s Path to Retirement | TSC
13. Mitre Corporation, headquartered in Boston, begins advertising its computer engineering and software openings in major newspapers (New York Times, Boston Globe, etc.) with directions on how to access the job description and post a resume within their VAX computer. Their thinking was if you could follow the directions, you were probably qualified. The problem was the candidate would have to use a 200k VAX from the company they were working with to connect to Mitre, an action that probably would violate their company’s policies.
    Source: From the notes of Gerry Crispin who was working at the time as as a TA leader at J&J
    
14. The Civil Sevice Reform Act strengthened the position of government workers and government as a place to work by increasing focus on merit for managers, creating fair processes for firing employees found to be incompetent, providing protection for “whistleblowers” and doubling down ob diversity in hiring in government.
    Civil Service Reform Act of 1978
15. The Pregancy Discrimination Act amended Title VII legislation to prohibit discrimination in hiring on the basis of pregnancy.
    The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 | US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
16. CompuServe (CIS) “was an American online service provider, the first major commercial one in the United States – described in 1994 as “the oldest of the Big Three information services (the others are Prodigy and America Online).It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major influence through the mid-1990s. At its peak in the early 1990s, CIS was known for its online chat system, message forums.“
    CompuServe
17. Usenet was conceived in 1979 and publicly established in 1980, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, over a decade before the World Wide Web went online (and thus before the general public received access to the Internet), making it one of the oldest computer network communications systems still in widespread use. By the early 1990s there were many USENET group forums posting job ads for professionals like librarians, students in technical colleges and academics.
    Usenet