Recruitment That Works®

What's Wrong With Kids Today?!

2010-03-05T16:02:00.000-06:00

medialifemagazine.com

Rachel speaks!

Rachel, what's wrong with kids today?

By Rachel Mar 5, 2010 - 1:03:28 AM

Dear Rachel,

Maybe I’m over-reacting because I haven’t done this for a while, but what is wrong with today’s kids? Over the past couple of months I’ve been called to talk to young people applying for jobs in media at our agency because the person who usually does this is out on maternity leave. Some of the young people I meet are impressive but too many are on the moon. They don’t come prepared for the interview, and they don’t really seem to care what sort of impression they make. It’s as if they are doing me a favor by showing up. Some are downright arrogant. I wouldn’t hire any of them. What gives? Sign me, Beaned in Boston

Dear Beaned,

I will jump to their defense, if briefly.

These days I don’t think young people have the work experience behind them that kids of earlier generations had, like summer jobs and part-time work in college. So I think when they go looking for that first job they suffer from a lot of misconceptions about how they should present themselves.

They think they must come across as self-assured, and too often the result is to appear arrogant.

But I think another problem is that many have come out of college media programs where they think they learned everything there is to know about media. When they get to the interview they want you to know just what they know. So they chatter on, and you have to listen.

In their defense, I think they’re probably pretty good kids beneath the bluster.

How do you handle them in the interview?

I think you should be polite but very firm about what the agency expects of people it hires. See if they’re listening. If they are, it’s a good sign.

I also think you need to take control of the conversation. Don’t let them talk on.

Ultimately, your goal is to filter out the ringers to get to those who would make good hires for your agency. As soon as you realize the person you are talking to is not going to make the cut, move to end the interview with a few polite comments along the lines of we’ll call if we have something that’s right for you.

You may go through dozens of such interviews before you find your person, which might seem like a lot of time better spent doing more worthwhile things. But it’s a good investment of time if the person you settle on is a good hire.

If you don’t find that person after dozens of interviews, you may want to widen your net.
The one mistake you do not want to make it is to hire that person who’s the best of a bad lot, the least annoying of a not very promising set of candidates. If you have doubts about that person in your first meeting, you need to trust your gut and take a pass.

You can’t hire weak candidates and shape them into good workers. It doesn’t happen. Trust me. I know.

© 2010 Media Life

How To Become A SUCCESSFUL Corporate Recruiter!

2010-03-05T12:35:00.001-06:00

How do you go from being a corporate recruiter to a SUCCESSFUL corporate recruiter?

You have to break the rules! Lou Adler says you have to break the rules because the old rules don’t work anymore.

Some of Lou’s thoughts:

1. Stop using traditional job descriptions when taking an assignment from a hiring manager. Instead find out what the person needs to do to ace the performance review. These are the same performance objectives provided to new hires during the onboarding process, so it makes sense to use the same approach when defining the new job. Also, by clarifying job objectives up- front you get buy-in from the hiring manager, the interviewing team, and the candidates before the person is hired. This list of performance objectives is called a performance profile.

2. Don't allow candidates to decide if they’re interested in the job. Instead you determine if you're interested in them. To pull this off, you need to be a bit vague about the job, move a bit slower, and get the candidate to describe his or her background first. If you determine the job represents a real career move, you can then reel the person in. If not, you can get some great referrals by asking the person about some of their LinkedIn connections.

3. Dump traditional behavioral event interviewing since, according to Lou, it doesn't help hire better people or more accurately assess the candidate’s ability to ace the performance review. To replace it, try these two foolproof questions that will enable you to defend your candidates from managers who are superficial interviewers, including those who still use behavioral event interviewing.

Lou says, "One of the questions involves getting a very detailed example for each of the performance objectives listed on the performance profile. This generally takes 15-20 minutes each and we assign each interviewer a few to dig into. We then share this evidence in a formal debriefing session when evaluating the candidate. This process naturally eliminates the superficial thumbs-up or down voting process, by going narrow and deep rather than broad and shallow when conducting the interview."

4. Don't use KSAs (knowledge, skills, and abilities) and competency models when screening candidates. Part of the problem here is hiring the supposedly “well-qualified” person who doesn’t want to do the work required, or doesn’t fit too well with the hiring manager, team or company culture. The other problem is eliminating great people with a slightly different mix of KSAs who are demonstrated top performers. Many of these are vets and diverse candidates who have non-traditional backgrounds, so this opens up a new pool of top performers for us.

For an example of how this works, just consider all of your best employees who get promoted internally or transferred to bigger jobs. They all have less of the K and S, and more of the A, M (motivation to do the work listed on the performance profile) and T (ability to work with and influence comparable team members). During the phone screen have the candidates describe their most significant accomplishment. I then look at what KSAs, behaviors, and competencies they used to accomplish these results. Surprisingly, some of the best people have far less experience than would have been expected given their performance. These are the high performers you present to your clients.

5. Don't sell candidates on the job; have them sell you. During the screening and interviewing process, look for career gaps and voids between the candidate’s major accomplishments and the performance objectives listed on the performance profile (e.g., scope, span of control, budget, impact). Ask candidates to tell you about comparable accomplishments they’ve handled that required them to stretch themselves. You learn a great deal about a candidate this way, and in the process of convincing you that their qualified, they’re also convincing themselves that this job offers a real career move. This not only makes the compensation less important, but it also allows the candidate to convince his or her friends and family that your position offers the most upside potential among other competing opportunities.

So there you have it. Be prepared to break the rules and, in the process, you'll hire more great people than ever before. If you want more ideas from a fresh perspective send us an email at info@mittonmedia.com.

Obama Regulates Away Jobs

2010-01-21T12:05:00.000-06:00

To read the article, just click on the title.

Then share your thoughts, opinions and comments.

It's Time To Elevate Entrepreneurs

2010-01-21T12:01:00.001-06:00

Given recent shock waves heard around the nation, thanks to a Special Election in the Northeast, we are sharing a few articles with opinions about creating jobs and reducing unemployment.

To read the article, simply click on the title. Your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Top 10 Phone Sourcing Rules

2010-01-13T11:08:00.000-06:00

By Maureen Sharib, January 13, 2010

People would rather focus on phone sourcing’s sister cousin, Internet sourcing, than telephone sourcing. Phone sourcing still seems scary to most; after all, a keyboard and computer screen don’t talk back to you and stymie you in your efforts at seeking information. This reluctance is becoming today a not-so-subtle avoidance issue and hiring managers are noticing and demanding more.

With that in mind, I’m in the process of finishing a Telephone Names Sourcing Rule Book. So far I have 46 rules. The following that are the 10 rules that, so far, I see as the “top.” Feel free to add yours!

Rule #1: Say hello and state your name.

When the Receptionist Gatekeeper answers, she usually says her name. Make that your cue to say your own.
“Hello, Anne, this is Maureen Sharib. Can you…”

Rule #2: Repeat her name back to her.

“Hello, Anne, this is Maureen Sharib. Can you please transfer me…?”
It’s said that a person’s name is the most beautiful sound (to that person) in a person’s language. It’s also the beginning of the knowledge exchange and capture.

Rule #3: Ask for one thing at a time.

Do not overwhelm her. Keep it simple.
“Hello, Anne, this is Maureen Sharib. Can you please transfer me to the Director of Risk Management?” asks one question and is easy to cope with. Think of her as a child and give her one instruction at a time.
Asking several questions/giving her too much information in one hurried onslaught will turn her off, sending up her defenses and more than likely cause her to turn you away.

Rule #4: Don’t lie.

“Hello, Anne, this is Maureen Sharib. My boss is on a deadline and he talked to your Director of Risk Management last week about a possible project but I’ve lost his name and I need to address correspondence today or I’m going to lose my job and I don’t want to lose my job! “Who is your Director of Risk Management?” does little more than open you up to something cold from Anne like this:
“We don’t have a Director of Risk Management and haven’t for a long time.”

You want to go there? This takes us to the next rule:

Rule #5: Listen and hear what’s in the Gatekeeper’s voice.

You have a few seconds to decide your tack when she answers. A Gatekeeper’s voice will tell you many things if you’re listening. Many times it will reveal if she’s young, middle-aged, or older. This information can speak to her level of maturity and experience on the phone. You can hear frustration, resentment, and hastiness in a person’s voice as well as happiness, patience and serenity. Having her speak first when she answers is a monumental advantage in phone sourcing that gives you a superior couple-second position to choose your approach.

“ABC Corporation. It’s cold, icy, and snowy here in Minneapolis today, Anne speaking — may I help you?” exclaimed chirpily might tell you Anne is a young and energetic Gatekeeper who doesn’t mind repeating all that yadda-yadda each and every time she answers the phone, but at some point, you have to think it gets old. It could be presenting an “ice-breaking” opportunity though:

“Hi Anne, this is Maureen. Wow, that’s a mouthful. I hope you’re staying warm!”
Anne: “Oh I am! It was really cold though when I came in this morning — they turned the heat down over the weekend — can you imagine?”
Maureen: “I had a boss that did that once. Nobody wanted to be first in the office in the morning. Consequently nobody came in before 10. He got the message.”
Anne: “I guess there’s more than one way to skin a cat!”

That above is pretty close to an actual conversation I had in the past, and afforded an opportunity to move to the next phase of my call as if we were old girlfriends with no secrets between us. I forget what was obtained out of her on that call, but rest assured it was probably pretty powerful and fruitful information!

It can go the other way though:
“ABC Corporation. It’s cold, icy, and snowy here in Minneapolis today, Anne speaking — may I help you?” said listlessly might say Anne is older and weary of repeating that mantra each and every time she answers the phone. That too, can be worked to an advantage:

“Hi Anne, this is Maureen. Wow, that’s a mouthful. You have to say all that each and every time you answer?”
Anne: “Yeah, can you believe it? It gets old but they insist…”
Maureen: “Anne, I’m trying to reach the Director of Risk Management — can you direct me?”
Anne: “Yeah! He’s onea’ the ones who insists I say all that! Don’t tell him I said anything!”
Maureen: “You’d think he’d know better! Don’t worry, Anne, I won’t say a word!”

That too comes close to a conversation (or two/change the locale/weather conditions) that I’ve had with Gatekeepers. Once again the manner in which I interacted with her set the tone for the level of cooperation she gave me. Remember, a Gatekeeper’s reality may not be what you think it is or anywhere aligned at all to your own.

There’s another not-so-pleasing way it can go as well:

“ABC Corporation. It’s cold, icy, and snowy here in Minneapolis today, Anne speaking — may I help you?” repeated tonelessly can indicate hostility and an uncooperative Gatekeeper. It’s usually best to just get down to business:
“Hello, Anne, this is Maureen Sharib. Can you please transfer me to the Director of Risk Management?”
Anne: “No.”
Maureen: “No?”
Anne: “We have a no-names policy here. I don’t have titles here at the front desk — you need a name to be transferred. Do you have a name?”
Maureen: “Well, yes, Anne, I do have a name. Can you please transfer me to Jim Maloney?”
Anne: “He’s not the Director of Risk Management.”
(And she said she only had names at the front desk? Be aware that most Gatekeepers lie as one of their job functions. It’s a shame really. Most of them don’t like it and as a result resent having to do it.)
Maureen: “I know, but I thought maybe he could help me. Can you transfer me please?”
Anne: “What is it you need?”

Now at this point handling Anne gets tricky. I know I probably have an angry/resistant/hostile/burned-out Gatekeeper on my hands and I have a few choices here. I can either strong-arm her by insisting she send me on to Jim without stating my business, but that’s probably not going to work.

I can also excuse myself from the conversation and say something akin to: “Maybe I have the wrong information — let me check my notes and get back to you,” and quickly hang up the phone before she has a chance to say anything and this isn’t a bad tack to take with hostile or resistant Gatekeepers because if she is like this, chances are you’re not going to get a lot further anyway.

This high-risk/low-return scenario doesn’t appeal to me (usually) but if I got up on the wrong side of the bed that day I might pressingly say: “Anne, are you going to transfer me or not?” which is probably going to be met with the “not” ultimatum and is the main reason I rarely challenge Gatekeepers. Sometimes harsh, gruff words precede surrender in life but it takes a lot of emotional stamina to play that psychological guilt game with her.

I look for low-risk/high-return situations, so in most of these unpleasant situations I just get off the phone as quickly and painlessly as possible. When I first started names sourcing I was told the following and startling truth:
“It’s just a phone. If you freak out, Maureen, just hang up!”

And it’s usually what I do, though I try to do it with some grace. Some phone sourcers just hang up. That’s not very nice and might close off further chances of communication with her on a day she may be feeling better. I try not to burn bridges. I prefer to save my strength for opportunities when they present themselves. They always do if I’m patient and persevere.

This rule is so long because it’s very important. It leads us into the next rule, which is:

Rule #6: Never, ever, ever argue with the Gatekeeper.

It’s almost a 100% bet you’re not going to change her mind, so allow her to have her way with you. After she’s done this a couple times and you’ve obediently followed her “suggestions” she’ll feel an investment (of her time) in your progress. Because she is investing her time she is likely to become more, if not very, helpful at some point allowing you to begin directing her actions. This is when you gain the upper hand.

Rule #7: Understand that phone sourcing may not, and very well might not, be your cup of tea.

Phone sourcing, in general, calls for a personality type that:
• Is in tune with their senses — uses internal feelings to deal with the outside world
• Is likely to be quiet and reserved — difficult to know well but may appear warm and sensitive — an enigma
• Has an interest in contributing to other’s sense of well-being and happiness — are service-oriented
• Grasps intuitively information that belongs or doesn’t belong
• Are attuned to underlying meanings
• Is not easily led or controlled
• Requires personal space — are independent and original
• Can work with subtle differences in the personalities of others
• Are usually penetratingly accurate in assessments of other’s personalities
• Are action-oriented “doers” easily bored with theory unless it holds practical application
• Make value judgments based on strong, subjective beliefs
• May be harsh, self-judging perfectionists
• Is spontaneous/impulsive and can lose selves in action — acting soberly and intensely in the here and now sometimes with little to no planning or preparation appearing to be caught in a whirlwind driven by some inner compass
• Is gentle toward others, showing consideration through action rather than words
• Do not often express themselves verbally, allowing their body of work to speak for them; this seems odd in light of the work but when you observe a good phone sourcer in action you are impressed with how little he says
• Are competitive
• Learn through enjoyable experiences
• Is optimistic

Rule #8: Lose the stinkin’ thinkin’.

Anticipate reactions and prepare your own but don’t expect defeat. Be decisive. Be bold. If you can’t lose the negativity, seek professional help. There’s medicine available.

Rule #9: Be humble.

It’s one of the main lessons in life for being successful. I learned this one the hard way! Embrace your foibles. They’re what make you human. Laugh at yourself often and at others never.

Rule #10: Give back.

Take the time to help others who want to learn. You’ll come across them and they will teach you far more than what you can ever teach them. Believe me.

________________________________________

7 Things You Should Communicate

2009-12-31T11:35:00.000-06:00

One of the biggest elephants in the room is that once hiring starts to pick up again, experts predict there is going to be massive turnover. There are several factors contributing to the turnover including employees who, despite holding on to their jobs during the recession, feeling that they were/are overworked, under paid and under appreciated.

From personal observation, what is striking to me is that many hiring managers, HR Directors and even presidents of companies do not yet seem to feel the urgency to deal with the pending turnover crisis NOW. To believe that your current employees will remain loyal because they kept their jobs is, well it's crazy to think that way because it's not true. You need to be taking immediate steps to put a retention plan in place that will help you hang on to your best employees as well as attract good employees from other companies once the "jumping" begins.

How do you take the first step in putting a solid retention plan in place? Call MITTONMedia at 281-242-4473. Or send me an email at jmitton@mittonmedia.com. We'll do the work. You'll get the credit.

Here is a great "thought-starter" article posted today by Stephen Balzac:

"It’s not enough to say that if you want to keep the best people when the economy improves, you just need to communicate more. It matters what you say and how and when you say it. Communication occurs in the context that you’ve created over time, and how your communications will be received will depend a great deal on that context. If you want to keep your best people, then you need to do your homework. (Or, conversely, if you want to recruit someone else’s key people, find companies that did not do the homework suggested in this article.)

Fortunately, it isn’t terribly difficult to communicate better. It does, however, require recognizing that emotion, not logic, is the driving force, and it requires starting now — not next week, next month, or next year. If you wait until people are leaving, it’s too late.

So how do you highlight someone’s contributions? I offer more, detailed suggestions in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, but for now, I suggest the following in brief.

Take the opportunity to praise them in public. Note that this does not mean comparing them to others on the team; that only creates resentment and embarrassment for all concerned. Talk about the importance of the effort they’ve put in, and find small ways of demonstrating your appreciation. It doesn’t have to be fancy, especially in a time of tight budgets. Honest appreciation goes a long way.

The next step in keeping people is to make sure that their contributions are not just recognized, but are also important. Visible contributions that are not valued by the company are not going to be very compelling. Likewise, contributions that someone does not perceive as important will not serve to keep them at the company.

A cousin of mine worked for NASA in the early 1970s. He was part of the team designing the space shuttle. Due to security issues, he and his team had no idea what part of the shuttle they were working on; it was the quintessential “clean room” project, where they would be given instructions and specifications, but no context. When the day of the grand unveiling arrived, he found out that he had been designing the door lock. He walked out of the unveiling and out of NASA.

If you want to keep someone, make sure you frequently highlight how their work fits into the long-term vision of the company. Help them see that their work matters to the team and the company. Build a sense of partnership and status. They’re not a hired mercenary; they’re a trained professional providing valuable services. Again, demonstrate appreciation whenever possible. Find ways to reward people for their efforts, but don’t make the rewards the point of the work.

Make people feel competent and appreciated. No one likes being reminded of embarrassing incidents, of failures, of things that didn’t work out well. On the flip side, practically everyone loves to be reminded of successes. As the old saying goes: nothing succeeds like success. As the lesser-known corollary goes, nothing keeps people at your company from leaving like the feeling that they’re in an environment where they’ll be successful.

Although the corollary lacks the pithy ring of the original saying, it is nonetheless valid. Create an environment where people can see their own competence and measure their own success toward creating something larger than themselves, and you’ve gone a long way toward keeping them at your company. And, of course, providing opportunities for growth also helps build that feeling of competence and further increases the attractiveness of staying. An additional side effect is that the more competent people feel, the more secure they feel. The more secure they feel, the harder it is for someone else to pry them away.

So yes, in the end it really is all about communications, provided that you are communicating the right things.

Think about how you are communicating the following things:
• Your recognition of the contributions of your employees
• Your appreciation for their contributions and the personal sacrifices they are making
• Your own enthusiasm, excitement, and positive vision of the company and its future
• The goals of the company and how each employee fits into bringing those goals to life
• The common ground and ideals that will unify your team
• The information your employees need to work and grow most effectively
• The feedback that will make your employees feel successful

If you can address those seven points, odds are you’ll keep your top people as the economy improves."
________________________________________
Source: December 30, 2009 http://www.ere.net

Federal Employees Make 30% More Than Private Sector

2009-12-11T11:10:00.002-06:00

Just for Fun: A Test of Your "Morals"

2009-12-07T10:09:00.000-06:00

You are driving down the road in your 2-seater sports car on a wild,
stormy night, when you pass by a bus stop and see three people waiting for the bus:

1. An old lady who looks as if she is about to die.

2. An old friend who once saved your life.

3. The perfect partner you have been dreaming about.

Which one would you choose to offer a ride to knowing that there could
only be one passenger in your car?

Think before you continue reading...

This is a moral/ethical dilemma that was once actually used as part of a
job application.

You could pick up the old lady, because she is going to die, and thus you
should save her first.

Or you could take the old friend because he once saved your life, and
this would be the perfect chance to pay him back.

However, you may never be able to find your perfect mate again.

YOU WON'T BELIEVE THIS....................

The candidate who was hired (out of 200 applicants) had no trouble coming
up with his answer.

He simply answered: 'I would give the car keys to my old friend and let him take the lady to the hospital. I would stay behind and wait for the bus with the partner of my dreams.'

Sometimes, we gain more if we are able to give up our stubborn thought
limitations.

Never forget to, "Think Outside of the Box."

Who Creates Jobs?

2009-12-03T16:58:00.000-06:00

Who Creates Jobs?
By John Stossel, December 3, 2009

Today, the White House holds its “Jobs Summit” stunt. It’s typical Washington-think: Assemble interest groups and concoct special tax credits and handouts to the politically connected. What conceit. The political class think that economies revolve around them, that Washington makes things happen, that politicians are the most important players.

Today’s Washington Post [1] suggests that the way to create jobs is public spending by the federal government:

Obama's options are limited, as the administration already has signaled that it is unwilling to make any investments that would add significantly to the nation's ballooning deficit.

At least the Administration talks about the private sector:

"We want to make sure it is not just the public sector doing this in a vacuum," said Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama. "It's important we engage the private sector as well." Administration officials, however, have excluded major trade associations from the summit... .

Some of those groups privately complain that their job creation ideas, including enactment of stalled free trade deals that they say would boost exports, are opposed by labor unions, which will be heavily represented at the forum.

The White House, which has clashed with some of the business groups over their opposition to health-care reform and other initiatives, says it has met repeatedly with those organizations and wants to hear fresh ideas.

Yes. I am sure those "fresh ideas" will come from the trade unions whom the White House just hasn't heard from much over the past year. At the summit they will also hear from environmental groups “Green for All” and “Coalition for the Green Bank.” I’m sure they’ll have great ideas for job creation.

Will at least some free-market economists get to speak? No. The White House will hear from Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz, and Jeffrey Sachs. "Fresh ideas" won’t be heard from these folks.

They and the political class can’t imagine a decentralized world where good things happen…without them. But in the real world, that’s exactly how good things happen, and how jobs are created.

When government sets simple rules that everyone understands and then gets out of the way, free people create jobs.

Hong Kong demonstrates this. Last century, Hong Kong was third world poor. 50 years ago, its citizens’ average income was under $700 [2] (in today’s dollars) per year. Today, it’s $43,800 [3]. Hong Kong got rich because Hong Kong’s rulers, stuffy British bureaucrats, practiced what I’ll call “benign neglect”: they enforced rule of law—kept people from stealing from each other, or killing each other--- but then sat around and drank tea. They left people alone, and free people, left alone, created prosperity.

America’s founders did the same thing. The Constitution announced that American would be a country of limited government. That provided the simple and understandable rules that allowed America to grow into the richest country ever.

Today’s political class thinks that they can improve on that, but they can’t. Their micromanagement kills jobs. When Washington threatens to drastically change the rules of the game with health care mandates, cap and trade, financial regulation, a second stimulus, and (of course) a "jobs bill", the private sector can't make investments with any confidence. At least the Post quoted one businessman who said Washington should stop fiddling:

Peter Y. Solmssen, interim U.S. chief executive of Siemens Corp., a German conglomerate, said fixed policies would help businesses, large and small. "We both need a certain amount of certainty, which gives us the opportunity and capability to plan."

(Editor's Note: What do you think? Who should create the jobs and how should they be created?)

WH Job Summit

2009-12-03T14:23:00.001-06:00

How do you feel about a Job Summit with 130 CEOs, local politicians, and academics? Not one Small Business person in the group, yet Small Businesses create most of the jobs in this country.

What do you think?

What Job Seekers Can Expect in 2010

2009-11-24T11:28:00.000-06:00

By LIZ WOLGEMUTH (U.S. News & World Report)
Posted: November 11, 2009

President Obama summed up the precarious nature of today's economy and job market in a recent interview with ABC's Jake Tapper. "Now that we've rescued the economy and the economy is growing," Obama said, "businesses aren't yet hiring." Indeed, it's strange to see a "rescued" economy in which nearly 16 million unemployed face a paltry 2.5 million openings each month. Employers have not stopped cutting jobs, and the unemployment rate soared to 10.2 percent last month.

With 2010 just around the corner, everyone is crossing their fingers for a better year. Here are a few things you can expect:

Washington will keep trying to create jobs:

The gross domestic product climbed 3.5 percent in the third quarter, while payrolls continued to fall. This is no doubt proof of the rule that employment is a lagging indicator. But some economists see it as particularly lagging at this point. The Conference Board's employment trends index, which takes into account eight labor market indicators, rose in October. It was the second consecutive month of growth. (September's rise had been the first since January 2008.) The index numbers suggest job losses would end by early next year, and "that's a very optimistic statement compared to the consensus at this point," says Gad Levanon, senior economist at the Conference Board.

When the private sector isn't creating jobs, government tends to step in by lowering taxes, creating incentives, or spending to spur hiring. President Obama signed a bill providing another federally funded unemployment extension Friday and said he would likely do more: "My economic team is looking at ideas such as additional investments in our aging roads and bridges, incentives to encourage families and businesses to make buildings more energy-efficient, additional tax cuts for businesses to create jobs, additional steps to increase the flow of credit to small businesses, and an aggressive agenda to promote exports and help American manufacturers sell their products around the world." The White House has stopped short of calling these tools "stimulus." On Capitol Hill, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told colleagues Tuesday that Senate Democrats would take up a bill aimed at job creation, but did not elaborate on its details, according to the Hill.

The deficit will begin to weigh on Washington's efforts to create jobs:

While the president laid out a lengthy menu of possible job-creation tools, he is receiving no small amount of pressure to begin tackling the deficit. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is the most powerful voice among many pushing Obama in that direction. The president says that he is beginning to look at the fiscal 2011 budget and that he understands the nation's long-term debt is a problem. While unemployment is clearly a nearer-term problem, deficit concerns will weigh on each decision. Countries that buy American debt could begin to demand higher returns. To pay higher yields on debt, the government would be forced to raise interest rates, a situation that could endanger the fledgling recovery.

Unemployment will peak next year:

By and large, economists do not believe the unemployment rate will tick downward in November or December. Instead, they expect a peak sometime next year. Even the Congressional Budget Office is anticipating an average unemployment rate of 10.2 percent in 2010 and about a percentage point lower in 2011.

Unemployment will likely fall by the end of next year—or even toward the middle of next year—but even the most bullish economists do not anticipate major drops in the unemployment rate. Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein of First Trust Advisors are expecting a drop of a full percentage point. The Conference Board's Levanon says he expects the unemployment rate to remain elevated over the next several years.

Productivity will, eventually, help boost employment:

Productivity grew at a 9.5 percent annual rate last quarter. Americans were working hard. Labor productivity is measured by dividing output by hours worked. In the third quarter, output rose by 4 percent while the number of hours worked fell by 5 percent. This can make people nervous, because employers are doing more with less and would seem to have no incentive to increase their payrolls. But productivity numbers during downturns "do all sorts of strange things," says Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. And they can look very good after employers cut payrolls.

A longer purview shows productivity to be a very positive thing for employment. Productivity allows more to be produced with less capital. "The increased productivity of capital raises the supply of other kinds of capital that contributes to a growth in the earnings of workers," says Gary Becker, an economist at the University of Chicago. "In the very short run, productivity improvements are associated with rising unemployment and reduced employment, but in the somewhat longer run it will raise the demand for workers and earnings."

(Editor's Note: Let us hear your opinion. Should we be dependent on the government creating jobs for people or should steps be taken that will allow the private sector to create the jobs?)

California Was Among States With Record Unemployment

2009-11-21T08:49:00.000-06:00

By Courtney Schlisserman, Nov. 20 (Bloomberg) --

California, Delaware, South Carolina and Florida registered record rates of unemployment in October as weakness in the labor market stretches from coast to coast and limits the economic recovery.

Joblessness rose in 29 U.S. states last month compared with 22 in September, the Labor Department said today in Washington. Michigan had the highest jobless rate at 15.1 percent, followed by Nevada at 13 percent and Rhode Island at 12.9 percent.

The national rate last month reached a 26-year high of 10.2 percent, weighing on consumer spending that accounts for about 70 percent of the economy. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said Nov. 17 that joblessness “likely will decline only slowly,” a reason policy makers will keep interest rates near zero to ensure growth is sustained.

“We’ve had a surprisingly sharp jump in the jobless rate,” said Richard DeKaser, president of Woodley Park Research in Washington. “Businesses have truly been doing an extraordinary job of wringing out productivity from the labor force.”

Stocks fell for a third day, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index declining 0.3 percent to 1,091.38 at 4:03 p.m. in New York. Dell Inc., the third-largest maker of personal computers, dropped 10 percent after reporting a 54 percent drop in profit.
Declines in 13 States

The unemployment rate fell in 13 states, including Massachusetts, where it declined to 8.9 percent from 9.3 percent; New Hampshire, with a drop to 6.8 percent from 7.2 percent; and West Virginia, which fell to 8.5 percent from 8.9 percent.

The number of states with at least 10 percent unemployment held at 14 last month, the Labor Department’s report showed. The states reporting a record jobless rate were California at 12.5 percent, South Carolina at 12.1 percent, Florida at 11.2 percent and Delaware at 8.7 percent. The District of Columbia also set a high with an 11.9 percent rate.

“Virtually every sector aside from the health-care sector is losing jobs,” said Sean Snaith, University of Central Florida economist in Orlando. “Housing has been central to Florida’s economic story throughout the entire cycle. Unfortunately, it has spread well beyond the sectors directly involved in the housing market.”

President Barack Obama on Nov. 6 signed into law a plan to extend jobless benefits, expand a tax credit for first-time homebuyers and provide tax refunds to money-losing companies. The measure gives jobless people as many as 20 additional weeks of unemployment assistance.

The president has also announced plans to convene a jobs summit at the White House next month.

State Payrolls

Payrolls declined last month in 21 states, today’s report showed. New York showed the biggest drop, with a loss of 15,300. Florida had 8,500 job losses, followed by Georgia with 7,500 and Virginia with 7,100.

“When you apply for a job, because there are so many other people looking for jobs, you have to be the absolute perfect candidate and lucky, or be someone’s brother-in-law, to get a job,” said Mary Kough of Tellico Plains, Tennessee. “In this economy there are very few jobs for which to even apply.”

Kough has been looking for work for four months, applying for as many as 25 positions. She’s been interviewed once. The 47-year-old said she has about 20 years of experience, including jobs as a customer service manager, supervisor and purchasing agent. Tennessee’s unemployment rate held at 10.5 percent in October, the Labor Department’s report showed.

Taking Comfort

“I try not to get discouraged,” Kough said. “I know that you will get a certain percentage of what you apply for, and since there are less jobs to apply for, I know it will just take a little longer. I take comfort in knowing that. I have faith.”

Applied Materials Inc. is among companies still planning to cut jobs. The world’s biggest maker of chip equipment, based in Santa Clara, California, said Nov. 11 it plans to eliminate as many as 1,500 positions within 18 months.

Over the last year, California showed the biggest loss of jobs, with payrolls falling by 687,700 workers, today’s report showed.

Nationally, payrolls fell by 190,000 in October, the Labor Department said Nov. 6. The U.S. has lost 7.3 million jobs since the start of the recession in December 2007, the most of any downturn since the Great Depression.

Other measures corroborate that while firms are firing fewer workers, it is harder for the unemployed to find work. The number of people getting extended payments jumped in the week ended Oct. 31 even as the number of Americans filing first-time claims for unemployment benefits held at a 10-month low last week, according to government data released yesterday.

8 Lessons from Real-Life Career Switchers

2009-11-15T16:29:00.000-06:00

by Kerry Hannon | Nov 11, 2009 |

When Lisa Eaves decided to make a mid-career switch from working as a tech specialist for Fannie Mae to opening her own acupuncture practice five years ago, it was a risky move, but not a rash one.

During treatment for melanoma several years earlier, Eaves, 51, had become fascinated with Chinese medicine. And she also began realizing that technology work, while financially rewarding, was not something she was passionate about. “I felt it was time to explore other lines of work, and my health scare gave me that push,” Eaves says. So she enrolled in night and weekend classes while she worked and eventually got a Master's degree in acupuncture before starting her practice part-time.

Eaves had time on her side, and ideally, so will you. But if a layoff or a shrinking industry has left you little choice but to find another line of work, there’s still plenty you can do to prepare and make that transition as smooth and successful as possible. According to a recent CareerBuilder.com survey, one-third of American workers are interested in changing careers right now. Here are eight rules for doing it right.

1. Dig Inside for an Honest Appraisal

While it’s obviously crucial to match your next job or career to your interests,that can be easier said than done. You may have been working in the same field for years — or even decades — making it hard to get a good idea of what else you’re suited for.

To help you get started, check out free self-assessment quizzes at Careerpath.com and Monster.com. You can find more detailed personality tests — such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Strong Interest Inventory, and the Work-Personality Index — for a fee at What’s Next.

Beverly Jones, a 53-year-old corporate lawyer and vice president of external affairs and policy at Consolidated Natural Gas, accepted a modest early-retirement package. Her second-act plan was to get involved in landscape design, since gardening was one of her passions.

But she soon found that it didn’t make sense as a career choice. As a hobby, gardening was the perfect antidote to a busy career, but the solitary nature of the work made it a lousy full-time gig. She thrived on social contact. The good news: Jones had another skill — mentoring — that met all her requirements for a rewarding second career.

While remaining loosely associated with a law firm and lobbying for a nonprofit, she studied and obtained a Leadership Coaching Certificate from Georgetown University. She also attended career workshops, hired her own career coach, and read extensively about the field. Roughly six months later, she launched her own coaching/consulting practice in Washington. “In time, I began to find my own voice as a coach and felt confident I was doing what I was meant to do,” Jones says.

2. Get the Skills You Need Before You Leave Your Job

If at all possible, keep your current job while you add the education you need for your new pursuit so that you can reduce your financial burden. Under federal law, employers can offer up to $5,250 a year in tax-free education-assistance benefits for undergraduate or graduate courses. You don’t even need to be working toward a degree. Your employer, however, may require you to receive a minimum grade or to complete a program to be eligible for reimbursement. You may also need to stay employed by your company for a period of time after completing the course of study. And some employers even offer these benefits to laid-off former employees.

When mortgage banker Cliff Stevenson, 55, decided to become a high-school social-studies teacher a few years ago, he took night courses for two years to get a master’s degree in education before he resigned from his firm. Since he had an undergraduate degree in history, all he needed were seven additional courses in education to be certified as a social-studies teacher in Pennsylvania. “I started planning years before I switched careers,” Stevenson says. “My wife and I thought carefully about the financial aspects, and I set a target date that I would leave the mortgage-banking business, which allowed me to go to school and stuff away as much money as I could.” Unplanned bonus: He got out of mortgage banking just before the industry fell off a cliff.

3. Take Advantage of Education Tax Breaks

If you need to ramp up your skills with a degree or additional classwork, the tuition tab can be onerous. Stevenson’s total cost for a master’s degree in education, for instance, was $35,000. Depending on your income, though, you might qualify for various tax credits, such as the lifetime learning credit, worth up to $2,000 each year for an unlimited number of years that can be used for tuition and fees. The credit has an income phaseout for 2009 incomes from $50,000 to $60,000 (single filer) or $100,000 to $120,000 (married filing jointly). These phaseouts are indexed for inflation.

4. Apply for Student Aid

Financial aid isn’t just for undergrads — anyone can get low-cost student loans from the government, even if you’re only attending part-time. Acupuncturist Eaves was able to borrow $10,500 to help with her $26,000 tuition using low-interest Stafford loans, the main federal loan for students. Graduate Stafford loans currently charge a fixed rate of 6.8 percent, compared with about 8 percent for a home-equity loan.

The good news is that the federal aid formulas that determine how much you can borrow don’t take into account your home-equity or retirement accounts. Also, a certain amount of your savings — about $20,000 to over $60,000, depending on your age and marital status — are not calculated into your aid formula. And your student-loan interest may even be tax deductible, depending on your income level. You can get more information on what’s deductible from IRS Publication 970, as well as from the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators’ Tax Benefits Guide.

In addition, there are a number of research scholarships and grants available specifically for older students that are offered by different associations and foundations. Check out sites such as FastWeb and FinAid to find what’s available.

5. Consider Moving to Reduce Costs

The reality is that you will probably have to take a salary cut when you move into a new career, so it might make sense to look for work in an area where the cost of living is lower.

Tim Sheerer, 48, moved from an expensive northern New Jersey suburb, where he had commuted to work on Wall Street as an investment banker, to Pittsburgh, when he decided to enter the restaurant business and open an Italian bistro. The cost of living there — about one-third lower — allowed him the cushion to get his restaurant up and running without undue financial pressure.

Of course, that sort of uprooting is a little more complicated if you have a family to consider. For Sheerer, he couldn’t have done it without getting the green light from his wife, Colleen, and four children, who all pitch in at the restaurant.

6. Train While You Work

When Seattle human resources pro Arlene Carter lost her job, a friend told her about an executive fundraising job at a local assisted-living community. The job duties combined fundraising, public relations, and marketing. Carter figured she didn’t have quite the right skills for the job, but she went for the interview anyway. As it turned out, the hiring manager for the nonprofit foundation liked her and offered to shell out a few grand to help her to earn a certificate in fundraising from Indiana University-Purdue University.

It may be hard to believe, but there are some fields, particularly in the health care sector, where there’s a shortage of workers, so employers are willing to help train employees who have the overall skill set and personality to do a job but need to bone up on the nuts and bolts. “The kind of work I did in human resources and what you do in public relations is actually pretty close,” says Carter. “And because it was a hybrid job, it was a little easier to make the stretch.”

Fields such as nursing, eldercare, and home health services are particularly amenable to on-the-job training, says Ellen Freudenheim, author of The Boomers’ Guide to Good Work.

7. Downsize Your Lifestyle

When you’re new to a profession, you usually can’t expect to pull in the big bucks until you ramp up your skills and gain experience. So get a clear handle on your finances, and start to look for places to cut spending. Ask what luxuries you can do without, from dining out to dry cleaning. And set aside a cushion of up to six months of living expenses to ease transition costs, as well as for unexpected emergencies. Before she left Fannie Mae, Eaves, for instance, refinanced her condo to lower her monthly mortgage payment and paid off her car loan.

Arlene Carter had to take a 15 percent pay cut for her new position, but she’s taken it in stride. For starters, she now commutes just one mile to work as opposed to 30 minutes to her ex-employer’s office, which helps her save on gas and wear and tear on her car. She and her husband also found ways to trim monthly expenses by cutting channel options for their cable-TV service and reducing the number of minutes available on their cell phones. They make a habit of opting for home-cooked meals, and her new work environment’s casual dress policy means lower wardrobe bills. “I don’t even notice the pay cut,” Carter says.

8. Get Your Foot in the Door

It’s critical to soak up as much as you can about the businesses that appeal to you before you make the plunge. So do informational interviews with people who work in those fields, apply for internships or fellowships, and consider volunteering or moonlighting to get a sense of what the job entails. A potential employer can get a chance to see what you have to offer, and you get a peek inside to see if the job suits you.

Before Steve Brooks, a veteran TV producer based in Atlanta, opened his boutique winery in Walla Walla, Wash., he worked as an apprentice to top-drawer winemakers in the region, in addition to taking classes. “I made a lot of contacts in the business and connected with winemakers who were willing to mentor me,” Brooks says. “I was a cellar rat for three years, and it was the best education I could imagine.”

(Kerry Hannon is the author of the upcoming book, What’s Next: How to Follow Your Passions to a Fantastic and Fulfilling New Career (Chronicle Books).)

2009-11-14T13:19:00.000-06:00

Informal Survey: Do you think we need to have a Job Summit at the White House in December to get the ball rolling? Or are there other things that could be done now to get jobs created in the Private Sector? Anxious to hear your opinions...

Are Fellow Employees Getting Ready To "Jump Ship" When Economy Recovers?

2009-11-12T18:11:00.000-06:00

Are fellow employees in your company getting ready to jump ship as soon as the economy turns around? How about leaving before the economy turns around?

I had the chance yesterday to speak at a local HR "Lunch & Learn" session. Talked about the coming "Fruitbasket Upset" of employees leaving current employer to go someplace else. Bosses think just because certain employees have kept their jobs during the economic crisis, these same employees will be loyal and stay with the company when things get better.

According to a recent survey by Monster and HCI, those bosses need to do a quick reality check:

57% of workers believe employers are exploiting the recession to drive longer hours and lower pay from their workforces;
Only 26% excuse their employers for conducting layoffs and forcing longer hours .
74% believe their employer is using recession for employer’s benefit
58% believe employers are less concerned about employee retention, if they were ever even concerned at all
50% of workers are more concerned now about top performers leaving than before the recession;
53% have a decreased company loyalty
79% are more likely to be seeking jobs elsewhere

Some studies indicate that as many as two-thirds of employees are ready to go. Unfortunately, few corporations are preparing today to handle the dramatic increase in voluntary terminations that will come tomorrow.

“Today’s employers feel that employees are loyal due to the economic times, but the reality is they are not,” said Katherine Jones, HCI Research Fellow. “Because of this, there is a strong likelihood that when the economy turns for the better, employers could find themselves with valued employees jumping ship. This places pressure on them to put retention measures in place now.”

How about you? Is your employer doing any kind of effective workplace retention? How long will you stay?

Post a comment or send an email to jmitton@mittonmedia.com.

"Going Postal": Increased Threat of Workplace Violence

2009-11-07T12:44:00.000-06:00

On Friday morning, it was announced that America’s unemployment had unexpectedly climbed to 10.2 percent, the highest it’s been in a quarter-century. The jobless report was released right around the time that a bankrupt, desperate, and unemployed 40-year-old man, Jason Rodriguez, attacked his former employer’s office in Orlando, Florida—one of the worst-hit states in the country.

The Orlando office shooting, which left one dead and five wounded, came close on the heels of the massacre at Fort Hood the day before. The Fort Hood shooting was unusual because rarely has a Muslim “gone postal” in the America workplace. But Judeo-Christian Americans, including Latinos like Jason Rodriguez, have been massacring their co-workers and fellow students in “going postal” shootings for well over two decades now.

In fact, America invented these “going postal” murders, starting with the first post-office massacre in Edmonds, Oklahoma in 1986, which left 14 dead and six wounded. Over the next few years, shootings, rampages and suicides were rampant in the U.S. Postal Service, giving rise to a whole new term for these crimes.

At first, they were dismissed as a Postal Service problem, as if loonies had suddenly been recruited to work there. But the murders and complaints piled up, and by 1989, the co-worker-on-co-worker office massacre had jumped like a virus to the private sector—beginning with the rampage shooting at a printing plant in Louisville, Kentucky, which left nine dead and 12 injured.

Soon, workplace massacres of this sort spread all across the country; the term “disgruntled employee” also entered the lexicon, signifying something akin to “terrorist.” By the mid-1990s, even middle-class all-American schools were experiencing mass killings.

Today, 10 years after Columbine, these episodes come and go with such frequency that most Americans hardly notice; they’ve become cable news wallpaper.

Why did these killing sprees begin cropping up in the mid-1980s? When I studied these murders for my book, Going Postal, I traced the roots to Reagan-era economic policies that changed the postwar relationship between employees and companies, and between the middle class and the super-rich.

Government regulation of business was reduced, unions were decimated, and a radical new brand of capitalism became a kind of state religion. The trouble began in the U.S. Postal Service, a major government entity suddenly subjected to market forces under President Richard Nixon. He signed a law banning strikes, opening up the USPS to private-sector competition, and mandating that it become profitable by 1983. Not coincidentally, 1983 was the year of the first postal employee-on-employee shooting in South Carolina. A once-comfy government job had transformed into the sort of stressful workplace that the rest of America would soon experience, too.

Back in 2005, when the book was first published, it wasn’t easy getting Americans to accept this thesis. Now that the entire Reagan model has crashed and most Americans have woken up to the fact that they’ve been taken for a ride, it seems almost self-evident. Average American wages haven’t grown since 1979, while the super-wealthy have seen their share of income soar to the point where the wealth gap in the U.S. is on a par with Mexico and Turkey. Americans today work more hours with less security, fewer health and pension benefits, and even shorter lunch breaks and sick-day leaves, than they had before the Reagan Revolution stripped those protections away. CEOs earned on average 30 times the wages of their workers in 1978; by this decade, they were earning more than 500 times their workers’ average salaries. They did it, in the words of GE’s “Neutron Jack” Welch, by squeezing “unlimited juice” from their employees (Welch famously downsized more than 100,000 GE employees during his reign, while making himself a billionaire).

As the disparities mounted, so, too, did the frustrations in the work force. And Florida has been the site of some particularly horrific outbursts. In 1993, a fired employee of Fireman’s Fund Insurance burst into the Tampa office building, killing three and wounded two; three years earlier, in the largest mass shooting in state history, a 42-year-old man whose Pontiac was repossessed by GMAC entered their Jacksonville office and killed nine employees, wounded six more, then turned the gun on himself.

And those incidents took place during Florida’s boom years. Today, the state is suffering record unemployment, record foreclosures, and one of the hardest-hit real-estate markets in the nation. To make matters worse, a U.S. attorney labeled Florida “ground zero for mortgage fraud;” recently, 105 people involved in a massive mortgage scam were arrested.

This week, the annual “Happiness Index” was released, and Florida, its citizens plagued by high debt, unemployment above the national average, and the third-highest foreclosure rate in the country, came in dead last among all 50 states.

We don’t yet know the full story of what happened with 40-year-old Jason Rodriguez. But against that backdrop, his tale of financial and personal ruin is depressingly familiar.

When he was arrested at his mother’s a few hours after the shooting, he told reporters why he attacked his ex-employer, Reynolds, Smith & Hills: “They left me to rot.” When reporters asked Rodriguez if “they” meant his former employer, he answered: “No. No. I’m angry.”

RS&H fired Rodriguez in 2007. Two months ago, he filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. He listed his income as $812.67, with $90,000 in debts, and just $4,675 in assets—$4,000 of which came from his Nissan Xterra SUV, the vehicle he fled in after the shooting (and which is described in the filing as in “poor condition”). He owed about $40,000 to Sallie Mae and Wachovia for loans he took out to earn a master’s degree in business administration from a university in Puerto Rico, which he signed up for right around the time when his wife moved there after divorcing him.

Rodriguez does not appear to have had a violent history or a criminal record. In that regard, he’s like most of the others who have “gone postal.” Instead, he seems to be a man ground down by the kind of dreary, familiar pain that more and more Americans experience as jobs disappear and despair takes hold. Until there is a radical rethinking of the way America treats its workers, there are tragically going to be many more like Jason Rodriguez to come.
.
(Source: Mark Ames, November 7, 2009, TheDailyBeast.com)

From CNN: Landing a job like getting into Harvard

2009-11-06T17:21:00.000-06:00

By Samuel Sherraden, Special to CNN

Editor's note: Samuel Sherraden is a policy analyst for the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think tank that promotes innovative thought across the ideological spectrum.

Washington, D.C. (CNN) -- The 650,000 jobs created or saved by the stimulus package so far make up only a small step toward correcting the gap between the tens of millions of unemployed people and the few openings that those people are fighting over.

Even the administration's goal of creating 3.5 million jobs is far below what the economy really needs. With an official unemployment rate of 10.2 percent, the gap between the number of full-time job openings and the number of people who are unemployed has widened.

Since the beginning of the recession in December 2007, job openings declined from 4.4 million to 2.4 million and the number of officially unemployed persons grew from 7.5 million to 15.7 million, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

If the 15.7 million officially unemployed workers were to apply for those 2.4 million jobs, the chance of any one of them finding a job are about 15 percent, or roughly the same odds as being accepted to the University of Pennsylvania.

The official figure only counts workers as unemployed if they have searched for a job within the past four weeks. But, does it make sense to exclude people who have not looked for work in the past month? Probably not, given that statistics show workers are trying harder than ever to find a job and only give up looking after prolonged periods of unemployment.

The average duration of official unemployment -- which, by definition, requires that people be actively searching for a job -- has increased to 26.9 weeks, or just over a half a year.

But after many months of unsuccessful job hunting, some people do give up hope. And after four weeks of not looking for a job, they are dropped from official unemployment. It is primarily for this reason that since May, the official labor force has shrunk by 1.1 million people.

The exclusion of these so-called "discouraged" workers from statistics means that the official number of unemployed severely understates the weakness in the labor market. If you include these workers, the unemployment rate would rise to 13 percent, or 21.3 million.

If these workers were to apply for the 2.4 million jobs available, the odds of securing a job would be 11.2 percent, or roughly the same as getting into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It gets worse. Another group excluded from the official unemployment report is the growing number of part-time workers who would prefer to have a full-time job. These workers are forced into part-time jobs or are forced to take part-time hours because no full-time work is available.
During the current recession, workers who are "part time for economic reasons" have grown from 4.6 million to 9.3million.

Adding part-time workers to the number of officially unemployed and the discouraged workers, as labor market expert Leo Hindery, Jr., has observed, results in a rise in the real unemployment rate to 19.2 percent, or 30.6 million people.

The odds of any one of these 30 million securing one of the 2.4 million full-time jobs available is 8 percent, the same as the admissions rate of the Ivy League gold standard, Harvard University.

The 3.5 million jobs the stimulus package aims to provide are insufficient. To get the job growth the country needs, the White House should push for sustained infrastructure investment, cutting corporate taxes, and increasing access to credit for small businesses.

We still have thirty million workers in the United States who are unemployed, underemployed or discouraged and they face the same odds of finding a job as a high school senior applying to the world's most elite university.

Watch Your Back Elmo: Layoffs Hit Sesame Street

2009-11-06T17:12:00.000-06:00

OK, you know it's time for the politicians to move jobs and the economy to the top of the priority list when things like this start to happen:

"Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit producer of "Sesame Street" and other kids' programs, is cutting about one-fifth of its work force because of the economic downturn.

The crisis on Wall Street is plaguing Sesame Street.

Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit producer of "Sesame Street" and other kids' programs, is cutting about one-fifth of its work force because of the economic downturn.

The New York-based company said Wednesday that it's eliminating 67 of 355 staff positions.
Declaring it is "not immune to the unprecedented challenges of today's economic environment," the company pronounced a need "to operate with fewer resources in order to achieve our strategic priorities."

The statement reiterated the organization's mission "of helping children reach their highest potential here and around the globe."

Best known as the home of such Muppet characters as Big Bird and Elmo, Sesame Workshop was founded in 1968 as Children's Television Workshop, then unveiled the groundbreaking "Sesame Street" as a literacy-building initiative a year later. That show, which remains a worldwide hit, was the first step toward a media empire that encompasses television, books, toys and online programming.

Among the company's early TV efforts is "The Electric Company," which aired during the 1970s and was revived with new episodes on PBS in January.

Sesame Workshop gets revenue from product licensing and the sale of its programs to PBS and syndication. The company is also funded by government agencies, foundations and corporations.

Total revenue was $145 million in 2008, with operating expenses totaling $141 million, according to the company's Web site."

(Source: AP, New York)

Unemployment Tops 10 Percent

2009-11-06T09:07:00.002-06:00

By: Victoria McGrane November 6, 2009 08:40 AM EST

Democrats – headed into an historic health care vote this weekend — got smacked in the face with a 10.2 percent unemployment rate in October, the government reported Friday.

The jobless rate is well above the 9.9 percent that economists expected and breaks the psychological barrier of 10 percent, topping double digits for the first time in 26 years. It's the last headline the Obama administration wanted to see going into the House healthcare vote, and White House officials were already heading to the airwaves Friday morning to talk up the economy.

In all, employers shed 190,000 non-farm jobs last month.

The tough numbers arm House Republicans with fresh political ammo against the trillion-dollar House health care bill, which could come to a vote as early as Saturday. The GOP has been relentlessly pushing the narrative that Democrats are obsessed with creating ever-bigger government at the expense of the economy, and Democratic response to the bad employment news was thin on Friday morning while Republicans pounced.

“Democrats Job-Killing Agenda Must Cease,” declared a press release from Republican Study Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.).

"As unemployment tops 10 percent this holiday season, Republicans have put jobs and the economy first, and are focused on developing real solutions that will put Americans back to work," House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said. "Increasing taxes on small business, as Democrats will do to pay for government run health care, is the wrong approach."

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele slammed the Obama for pushing a “phony” message on economic recovery that GOP election wins Tuesday prove voters aren’t buying anyway.

“With so many families looking for work, it is time the Obama administration stop spreading their phony ‘saved or created' talking points and start creating the dependable jobs America needs,” Steele said in a statement. “President Obama promised jobs during his campaign for president, and the elections in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday were a clear referendum on his failure to deliver on this promise.”

Democrats are in a defensive crouch on the unemployment figures, and still blame Republicans for blocking critical economic measures.

“These are crocodile tears from politicians who had to be dragged kicking and screaming just to extend unemployment benefits to the long-term unemployed,” Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, told POLITICO, referring to Senate Republicans’ repeated objections to passing legislation extending jobless benefits. “Only Washington Republicans would argue that the way to create jobs is to allow insurance companies to fix prices and deny insurance to sick people.”

Even though it was higher than expected, the upward trend in unemployment comes as no surprise to economists and administration officials alike. Nonetheless, the increase is an uncomfortable reminder for the Obama administration that they’re facing a long string of bad headlines on the economy, despite other evidence that the economy is shaking off the recession.

Anticipating the numbers heading upward, the White House had scheduled Obama to sign legislation extending jobless benefits Friday – a bill Congress cleared just under the wire Thursday and which would also expand and extend the $8,000 homebuyer tax credit.

The signing ceremony was to be closed to the press, but the president is now expected to appear on camera in late morning.

Obama aides nevertheless were dismayed by the worse-than-expected figure. The White House activated a plan calling for the president’s economic advisers to hit the cable channels at 9:30 a.m. A written presidential statement is also planned.

Congressional Democrats also seemed caught flat-footed, lagging well behind their Republican critics in responding to the exceptionally bad jobs numbers. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), chairwoman of the joint economic committee, beat out leadership in both chambers, sending out a statement at 9:14 a.m.

“Today’s unemployment report puts a harsh number on the suffering felt by Americans nationwide. While the economy has shown signs of life in recent weeks – durable goods orders are rising and initial unemployment claims are at their lowest point in nearly a year – the problem of joblessness is still pervasive; and it will not be solved overnight,” she said.

There’s wide consensus that the jobless rate hovers above10 percent before it starts to head back down, and it could remain above that figure well into 2010. Hiring typically lags behind other signs of economic recovery in a recession, and this recession has seen deeper job cuts than previous recessions.

The unemployment figures are also sure to up the pressure on Democrats to take steps to boost job creation – all while being careful not to do anything large enough to earn the label of “stimulus,” which would suggest that the first one they did this year didn’t work.

Mike Allen contributed to this story.

© 2009 Capitol News Company, LLC

140 Google Interview Questions

2009-11-05T16:54:00.003-06:00

Lewis Lin, an Interview Coach in the Seattle area, recently posted these 140 Google Interview Questions on his blog at http://blog.seattleinterviewcoach.com/2009/02/140-google-interview-questions.html.

20 More Weeks of Unemployment Aid

2009-11-05T10:00:00.000-06:00

The Senate unanimously passed a bill Wednesday that would extend unemployment benefits for up to 20 weeks in states with rates of joblessness above 8.5 percent, which means the jobless in those areas could get up to 99 weeks of benefits. (States with lower rates would get 14 weeks.) This is the "second stimulus" some have buzzed about (though Democratic leadership has avoided the term); it contains other measures to boost the economy as well, all of which were in the original $787 billion stimulus package but were set to expire. This includes an extension of a first-time homebuyer tax credits, credits for homeowners who lived in the same place for at least five years, and would allow businesses who suffered operating losses in 2008-2009 to seek refunds on taxes paid over the past five years. The legislation will likely pass the House Thursday and be quickly signed by President Obama.

(Source: The Daily Beast, November 5, 2009)

Moms Increasingly Going Back to Work in Recession

2009-10-29T09:28:00.000-05:00

Thursday , October 29, 2009
By Julie Banderas/Fox News

With men accounting for 72 percent of the nation's job losses since the beginning of the recession, many American families are looking to mom to bring home the bacon. Recent studies found that 40 percent of American women are now the primary earners for their families, and that means more and more moms are going back to work — or at least trying to.

"If you had told me five years ago I would be doing what I'm doing now, I might have said no way," said Liz Morgan, a full-time mom who hopes to return to the workforce.
Morgan, 44, worked for 13 years as a legal publisher before taking on the role of a stay-at-home mom. She left her job four years ago to spend more time with her kids, as her husband's small business provided for their family of five.

But being a stay-at-home mom is a luxury the Morgans can no longer afford.
"I thought, well, it shouldn't be too hard to find a part-time job, and that proved to be more difficult too. I'm not only competing with people my own age — there are a lot of younger people who have more flexible hours," she said. "I basically want to work between 8 and 3."
"They face a motherhood penalty which will make it harder for them," said Pam Stone, a professor of sociology at Hunter College in New York. "It would be hard enough because they have interrupted their careers and their skills are getting rusty."

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that an increasing number of married women with a college education between the ages of 25 and 44 are working. Some see the predominantly "male'" recession as an opportunity for women to make a new start.

"The sectors that men have traditionally found good jobs in — finance and technology — aren't going to be doing well going forward," said Sylvia Hewlett, founder of the Center for Work Life Policy.

"So I think a lot of couples are understanding that over the long haul it's the wife and the mother that has the better prospects in the job market."

Times have definitely changed, but not completely: despite women making up nearly half of the U.S. workforce, women continue to be paid 23 cents less than men for every dollar earned, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Is Your Career Site Making A Good Impression?

2009-10-29T08:00:00.003-05:00

A career site can be an effective part of an overall Talent Management System. Or, it could be one of the main reasons why that Talent Management System isn’t doing what you need it to do on a consistent basis. We sat down with interactive design expert Maarten-Jan Waasdorp, COO at Six Foot LLC, and asked him questions that non-interactive experts might want to ask about their own career sites:

1. What are some most common mistakes you see employers making with their career sites?

Companies tend to stick to their current look and branding and make recruitment a part of the corporate site. This often leads to the Career Area on the site being overlooked. If it doesn’t stand out and engage potential candidates, then the candidates will not be motivated to apply for a position with the employer.

2. What are some general suggestions you might have for employers to help them make their career sites more effective?

Some of the suggestions I would make are:
· Start to think like your potential applicants think. Ask “How can I “entertain” the candidate while they are on my site? Are they tech savvy? Are they into Social Media?
· With the current available technology it is very important to be leading-edge so you will get the best people for your jobs.
· Make your recruitment site interactive, attract with visuals like video’s or animations. Engage the potential hire in a game or quiz.
· Make optimal use of all available media; on-line, print, TV and radio and be combined into one powerful recruitment tool.
· Also think of separating recruitment from your main site and set up a separate (mini) site. You can be more efficient and use more SEO/SEM (Search Engine Optimization/Marketing) tools aimed at recruitment.

3. What is the best way to measure traffic coming to your site?

First you have to make sure that anyone looking for a job in your industry/geographic area will find your career site/mini-site. I can’t stress enough the importance of making the search process fast and easy. It all starts with the way your site is initially set up. Once set up, it’s a good idea to ask the company that built your site to also track the traffic coming to the site. There are free options available, but for a small fee it’s worth the peace of mind you get by having experts handle the process on a monthly basis. And it’s quite possible they will notice “Red Flag” indicators you might miss and be able to trouble-shoot on the spot so that your site continues to enjoy a robust flow of traffic.

4. What are a few of these “Red Flags?”

One of the biggest issues is always the question of are you using the right key words to reach your target audience? You may think you know what is driving people to your site, but sometimes perception is not the reality. That’s why traffic metrics are so important. Most employers realize that SEO is not a miracle tool. You have to do intelligent research to ensure your SEO strategy is targeted and will reach the audience that possesses your desired levels of skill-sets and experience. Wrong input will result in wrong output.

5. What steps can an employer take if they need to build or improve their site but don’t have an in-house web department?

The obvious answer is to look for a partner like Six Foot! Aside from that, even if you have an in-house web department, it’s worthwhile to look outside the company and find a vendor who can help you realize the goals you’re trying to accomplish. Take Six Foot for example. We have a large team that does nothing but design and develop solutions exactly like this, using the latest technologies. An experienced design team will come up with ideas you haven’t even thought about yet simply because you were unaware of all the possibilities available at your fingertips.

In Six Foot’s case, we combine these skills with more than 20 years of experience in the Talent Acquisition & Retention business to help you come up with the customized strategies for your specific situation. We also use our vast network of industry partners to combine (web) technology solutions with a wide variety of related consulting services.

6. How do you prevent getting "ripped off" by an outside vendor?

There are a lot of suppliers out there who will provide a lot of different solutions with a lot of different price tags. The outcomes, of course, will be different, too. In most instances you will find that you can’t expect the same result from a smaller “start-up shop” versus a well seasoned, very experienced, award winning company.

In today’s economy it’s tempting to underestimate the importance of quality and focus rather on the cheapest price. Well, a quality product doesn’t always have the highest price. Hopefully you are developing your website so that it becomes an important, strategic and cost-efficient part of your Talent Management process.

For example by attracting higher quality candidates, an effective career site can often help reduce the amount of fees you find yourself having to pay staffing agencies. A good site will also increase your brand identity and value. Paying more does not automatically guarantee good service so I do advise you shop around before making any decisions. Ask friends and colleagues if they are happy with their website provider. Be sure to sit down with the potential design team and engage them in a comprehensive “discovery phase” before you kick-off the project. The discovery will give you an exact scope and plan of the project and will confirm whether or not you are dealing with the right supplier.

SIX FOOT: Six Foot is an interactive agency and consultancy that specializes in ORGINEERING (process mapping, usability and information architecture), INTERACTIVE (websites, portals, animations and applications), ONLINE MARKETING (brand marketing, SEO/SEM, social media and metrics), and EXPERIENTIAL DESIGN (touch screen, digital / interactive retail experiences, kiosks and trade show support). Six Foot has emerged as a leader, specializing in the development and execution of combined online and in-store brand experiences, e-marketing programs, creative design, 2D and 3D animation, and database and back-end infrastructure development.

Maarten-Jan Waasdorp: COO at Six Foot LLC; Maarten-Jan (M-J for short and definitely easy) has over 20 years of global experience in finance, operations, company strategies and general management for Fortune 100 companies. M-J combines all his skills and experience to develop and execute plans for any kind of challenge. M-J was born in the Netherlands and moved to the US in 2007. He is a member of the national COO Forum and the World Affairs Council of Houston.

US in need of Tech reboot

2009-10-28T07:54:00.002-05:00

From John Mitton:

Much has been made about the shortage of workers, in the USA, who have the skill-sets needed for jobs of the future, including jobs which haven't been invented yet. I have recently given a series of keynote speeches to a variety of professional groups in different industries which all share the same dilemma: How do we starting producing tomorrow's workforce today? During the keynote sessions we explore answers to questions like: What changes need to be made in what and how we teach our children?; How do we strengthen our childrens "soft skills?"; With only 28% of 9th graders headed to a four-year university, how do we prepare the other 72% to survive in today's workplace?; What happens if we don't act now?

The article by Kendra Marr, "US In Need of Tech Reboot," illustrates that many in corporate America have begun to put realistic training programs and mandates for innovation back on the front-burner. It will be a process involving parents, teachers, Board of Educations, state legislatures, institutions of higher learning at the 2-year and 4-year levels, and finally the workplace itself.

Enjoy the article:

(Source: Politico.com; By: Kendra Marr October 28, 2009 05:01 AM EST)

For years, the U.S. was a pioneer, the renowned home of Yankee ingenuity. The United States put the first man on the moon and invented the light bulb. The country gave the world the daring Wright brothers, billionaire computer genius Bill Gates, Google and the iPod.

But lately, experts say, the U.S.’s creative streak has sputtered. Today, it has gone from being the No. 1 innovative country in the world to No. 6 and has made less progress in international competiveness and innovation than 40 other nations and regions measured in the past decade.

Concerned about the failure to innovate — and convinced that it is the key to a vibrant economy — officials at Intel, the world’s largest maker of semiconductor chips, are convening a high-level conference in Washington next month. There, Obama administration officials, high-tech gurus, NGOs, corporate titans and academics will share ideas on how to spur economic recovery through innovation.

“You need to create circumstances that encourage risk-taking and entrepreneurship,” said Peter Cleveland, Intel’s vice president of government relations. He said the conference will explore what skills U.S. workers need to compete in industries of the future, including green technologies, and will tackle how to foster creativity, make scientific investments a priority and encourage cooperation between the public and private sectors.

Industry’s focus on innovation as a key to the future dovetails with White House thinking, and several senior administration officials will participate in the conference, including top economic adviser Larry Summers, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Austan Goolsbee, staff director and chief economist on the president’s economic recovery board. Other scheduled participants include America Online founder Steve Case; Jeff Immelt, the chairman and CEO of General Electric; D.C. Public Schools chief Michelle Rhee; and Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education.

In February, when consultants at McKinsey & Co. asked executives how the government should spend federal stimulus funds, 59 percent answered, “fostering innovation and potential new industries.” Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg echoed that sentiment last week when he proclaimed “investment and innovation has never been more important than it is right now.” “In the face of a global recession, economies all over the world are looking for ways to become smarter, more productive and more competitive,” he said at a broadband industry conference in Chicago. “The key to a smart economy is smart technology that can change business models and change society.”

President Barack Obama embraced the same message last month when he outlined the “groundwork and the ground rules to best tap our innovative potential.” Building on more than $100 billion in stimulus funding, he promised to invest more in research, promote policies that foster entrepreneurship and provide federal backing for clean energy, advanced vehicles and health care technology. “By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world,” Obama said. “We used to be No. 1. We should be No. 1 again.”

That, however, is a formidable challenge. Tight credit markets have driven companies to stash away cash, cut wages and lay off workers. Companies in Standard & Poor’s 500 index chopped 5 percent of their research and development costs and 25 percent of capital expenditures between the end of the third quarter last year and the second quarter of this year, according to the index.

To match Finland’s investment in technology programs on a per capita basis, the U.S. would need to invest $33 billion each year, said Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Today, the U.S. spends about $2 billion. “In reality, innovation is not manna from heaven,” he said. “It’s human made and influenced by policy.”

Many experts believe that policy imperative begins with investing more in education. Over the past decade, numerous studies show, the United States has failed to raise math and science test scores, and students in several Asian countries consistently score higher in both subjects.

Economic turmoil often breeds technological breakthroughs. During the Depression, DuPont invented nylon, which paved the way for parachutes and toothbrushes. The dot-com bubble burst in 2001, but that same year, Apple introduced the iPod. The hope is that history will repeat itself. Intel Chairman Craig Barrett has been repeating the company’s mantra: “You can’t save your way out of a recession.”

In February, Intel CEO Paul Otellini announced plans to spend $7 billion to build advanced manufacturing plants in Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico. The company funded mini-documentaries produced by PBS’s “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” that examined the role of innovation in the economy.

Intel and the Aspen Institute also hosted dinner discussions featuring Summers, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra. The Aspen Institute, the journal “Democracy” and PBS are co-hosting the Nov. 30-Dec. 1 Intel Conference. Lehrer and PBS correspondents Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff will be among the moderators.

“It was definitely not hard to get people to participate in the conversation, because it’s on everyone’s mind,” said Jamie Miller, Aspen’s vice president for public programs. “You look at the auto industry and places like Detroit, and there’s a fear that if America’s not at the cusp of innovation, we will not be able to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off,” she said. Said Atkinson: “We were ahead so long — really since the ’50s — that we were kind of blind to the threat going on.”

Understanding Available Retention Strategies: Are You Prepared for Turnover Rates to Double?

2009-09-28T12:36:00.002-05:00

(Part 1 of a 2-Part Series) by Dr. John Sullivan on ERE.net, September 28th, 2009:

As the economic turnaround picks up steam, turnover rates in many organizations are likely to skyrocket and recruiting replacement workers of the same caliber will be extremely challenging.

Study after study has confirmed the notion that many employees would have left their employers months/years ago had the option to do so been viable. The economic downturn, combined with the mortgage crisis, has forced many frustrated, disappointed, and unmotivated employees to stay put. The trend is not a new one and is consistent with past downturns.

While turnover rates are at an all-time low, they most certainly cannot be taken as an indication of a firm’s status as a desirable place to work.

Just as in years past, when job opportunities become more prevalent, employees will exercise their right to demonstrate just how much they appreciated the treatment they received throughout reductions in force, furloughs, clumsy mergers, travel freezes, and budget cuts. The level of animosity among many will render most traditional retention [1] approaches ineffective.
Some studies indicate that as many as two-thirds of employees are ready to go. Unfortunately, few corporations are preparing today to handle the dramatic increase in voluntary terminations that will come tomorrow.

While few organizations completely decimated their staffing functions, the majority have cut back to the point where capability has been negatively impacted. Strategic programs that deliver retention have been cut, and in most cases, no one is held accountable for retention solutions. It might seem outrageous, but unless you consider the phrase “let’s keep them all” to be a retention strategy, it’s a fact that most HR and recruiting executives can not even list common retention strategies, let along devise their own.

Retention Is One of the Most Poorly Managed Goals in HR

It’s hard to argue that retaining key employees isn’t a high-value activity, and I can’t say that I have ever visited an organization that would argue otherwise. In fact, most HR leaders and recruiters talk a lot about the importance of retaining the very best employees that the organization has invested so much time, money, and development resources in. Unfortunately, talk is where most HR organizations end when it comes to formalizing retention efforts.

Among organizations that force-rank satisfaction with HR deliverables, retention often ranks high in importance but extremely low in execution. In fact, it’s often lower than compensation and benefits, if you can imagine that!

Its perennial position at the bottom of the list qualifies it as the most poorly managed staffing activity. However, its position at the bottom should come as no surprise, since few organizations can identify who’s in charge of it, what is the strategy, and how retention efforts are measured and evaluated.

These three factors are the reason behind most organizations’ poor retention performance:

Reason #1 — Who is in charge of retention?

In many organizations the answer to this very basic question is no one! Rarely does the organization’s design for the HR function include a role(s) charged with designing, developing, and executing retention programs. When such a role does exist, rarely is it positioned at level with enough resources and power to make a difference (i.e., Senior Director or VP).

When it comes to organizational design, nothing says “low importance” more than lack of budget or executive-level leadership at the helm. Some might argue that all are responsible for retention, but merely listing it as one among many responsibilities essentially guarantees a mediocre enterprise-scale effort.

While great managers may assume ownership of retention activities in their group, because there is no clear support organization, their approaches will largely be ad hoc in nature and inconsistently leveraged, opening the door for anyone disgruntled to scream discrimination!

Reason #2 — The real costs of key employee turnover are not reported.

Retention metrics in most organizations begin and end with overall turnover by period. Absent are metrics that measure the business impact of turnover and specific goals to mitigate predicted impact. If your retention function doesn’t measure and report these five key metrics, chances are your efforts are under-managed:

The cost of turnover. Reporting a percentage turnover rate seldom excites executives, but converting that turnover rate to a dollar impact on business performance can establish the visibility on talent issues needed to transform a good recruiting function into a great one.

Top performer/key employee turnover. Often called regrettable turnover, this measure prioritizes the jobs and individuals based on the degree to which their leaving hurts the firm.

Competitor win/loss ratio. This metric is simply the ratio of the number of top performers you have successfully recruited away from a competitor compared to the number of top performers who voluntarily terminated to join a competitor. If a top performer quitting goes directly to a competing firm (vs. retiring), it raises the costs because it hurts the firm while aiding a competitor.

Preventable turnover. If turnover is occurring for silly or preventable reasons, the percentage of cases where that is true needs to be reported and fixed.

Percentage of “at risk” employees. The best firms proactively identify high-priority individuals who present a high risk of leaving during the next one or two years. Reporting the percentage of target individuals at risk alerts managers helping them put into place proactive programs attacking retention issues before they get out of hand.

Reason #3 — What is the name of your retention strategy?

The economic impact of losing 10% of the workforce each year in a major corporation amounts to tens of millions of dollars. With that amount of money and disruption involved, retention is clearly a strategic issue. To develop a competitive advantage around a strategic issue requires a strategy that is measurably superior to that of your competitors.

Unfortunately, it’s rare for organizations to develop a formal retention strategy. To make matters worse, most HR executives don’t even know the common retention strategies in use that they could adopt.

Before launching into a comprehensive list of common retention strategies, note that all retention strategies fall into one of three categories and usually contain five common elements.

The Five Common Elements of a Retention Strategy

Goals of the strategy. This element identifies the goals and specific results the strategy should produce.
Prioritization process. This element specifies the methodology that will be employed to determine which (if any) employees should receive priority treatment.
Identifying turnover causes. This element specifies the methodology that will be employed to identify the primary factors that “cause” employees to leave.
Retention solutions. This element contains a catalog of proven counter measures or solutions that can be employed by managers to halt or reverse a trend of turnover categorized by common cause.
Success measures. This last element covers the process for selecting retention metrics and reporting the results.

The Three Categories of Common Recruiting Strategies

Retention strategies usually fall into one of three categories, but world-class organizations often employ a hybrid approach that uses different strategies for different groups within the organization based on their role in achieving wildly important organizational goals. The three common categories include:

Laissez-faire approaches. This group contains decentralized retention strategies that rely almost exclusively on operating managers to solve the retention problem.
Comprehensive approaches. These approaches attempt to retain all employees by improving the treatment, pay, or benefits of all employees. These approaches are also called “peanut butter” strategies because they attempt to spread the improved treatment evenly across all employees.
Targeted or personalized approaches. This category concentrates retention efforts on high-priority individuals and jobs and then customizes the treatment as much as possible in order to fit the individual needs of the targeted employee.

My Boss Sent "Friend Request!"

2009-09-18T10:23:00.002-05:00

(Source: medialifemagazine.com. Sep 18, 2009 - 1:02:58 AM)

Dear Rachel, I have a problem. My boss has sent me a friend request on Facebook. I know she's already friends with a few people in the office. The thing is, I don't know if I should friend her. We get along fine, but I don't particularly want her to see my status updates, some of which are inappropriate for work, or know the fact that I stay logged on to the site all day, even during work. At the same time, I don't want to offend her by rejecting her request. So far I've just been pretending I haven't seen it, but it's already been a few weeks, and I'm starting to feel uncomfortable. What should I do?-- Facebook Addict

Dear Addict, I think you should be truthful with her and explain that as much as you respect her as a boss and like her as a person, you believe it's important to keep your personal life separate from your office life and that friending her would cross that line. You won't feel particularly comfortable about doing it, but if you handle it well, you can maintain good relations and get the matter behind you.

You don't have much choice, really.If you don't address the issue, she might let it drop but more likely she would persist, and at some point you could find yourself in a far more uncomfortable situation.She’ll be offended on two fronts. You’ve not friended her and you’ve been rude in not even acknowledging her request. I think the other issue you raise is what you are putting up on your page.Sites like Facebook invite users to open themselves up to their friends, and they are a wonderful way to stay in touch with people without having to pick up the telephone. But we all know the downsides. What you post can find its way into the wrong places, leading to all sorts of embarrassment. The best advice--and I am hardly original in saying this--is to never post anything you wouldn't want your mother to see. So leave off all references to your steamy dates, and leave off all snide comments about people you work with, or know socially.

As for your Facebook addiction, I can offer little help there. I have the same addiction, and I rationalize it this way: There are worse things to get hooked on.In time there may be a 12-step program for us, but until then I'll just have to learn to control my addictive behavior.

Best Buy calls Twitter a job qualification

2009-07-16T16:23:00.001-05:00

Employment ad asks for "250 plus followers" on social networking site
By Paul McNamara on Mon, 07/13/09 - 10:46am on Buzzblog.

Twitter skeptics -- and they remain legion -- will find the idea silly … but it's not, particularly not in this case.

Of course Best Buy should be seeking Twitter experience in a candidate for a senior manager's position in "emerging media." Who would dream of landing such a job without first-hand knowledge of the most-hyped emerging medium in recent memory?

But that's not to say the company is going about measuring Twitter savvy in the right manner; its not.

Nor does it answer the more difficult question of who among us needs to be on Twitter for the sake of our employers and our careers. (It's a question we're grappling with right now at Network World.)

From a Computerworld Canada story:

A recent job posting on Best Buy Co Inc.’s Web site for a Senior Manager – Emerging Media Marketing position based out of the company’s corporate headquarters in Richfield, Minn. listed two preferred job qualifications: a graduate degree and 250+ followers on Twitter.

Basic qualifications for the position include a Bachelor’s degree, “two plus years of mobile or social media marketing experience” at the director or strategist level, “four plus years people or resource leadership experience” and “one plus years of active blogging experience."

Again, I'd want any candidate for such a job to be an active blogger and have a hand in Twitter. However, an arbitrary number of Twitter followers will not separate the dabblers from the more meaningfully experienced, as was noted by employment experts quoted in the story.

Anyone can accumulate followers on Twitter. The real questions are whether you're actively participating and realizing any tangible benefits from that participation.

Although I'm not interested in working for Best Buy, I do meet the company's Twitter threshold, having attracted 1,653 followers since taking the plunge eight months ago. Over that span, I have sent 2,552 Twitter messages -- roughly 10 Tweets a day, seven days a week. While not by any stretch a Twitter heavyweight, that does put me in the top 1 percent of 2.7 million accounts tracked by TwitterGrader.com.

Yet I remain wholly unconvinced that everyone needs to be on Twitter.

Yes for would-be senior managers of emerging media. Yes for technology trade-press editors. No for CEOs. (A recent survey showed only two Fortune 100 CEOs are on Twitter, and it seems to me they have more to explain than the non-Tweeting 98.) Maybe for most everyone else.

As for you, your job and your future aspirations? The best way to find out is to give Twitter a shot. It's free, it can't hurt, you might find you like it … and you never know when you might need a job at Best Buy.

(Update: Just stumbled across this item noting that Best Buy in general is big on Twitter and that company CEO Brian Dunn has an account, albeit one that just barely would qualify him for employment in his marketing department.)

Tough job market for teens

2009-07-07T15:14:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, July 7, 2009, 10:08am EDT

Atlanta Business Chronicle

Companies are hiring more teens this summer, compared to a year ago, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.

But at the current pace, it would still be the second-worst job market for teens since the late 1950s, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Companies hired 111,000 teens in May, followed by 698,000 in June — or a total of 809,000 jobs this summer. That’s about 10,000 more than the first two months of summer 2008.
Last year, companies hired 1.17 million 16- to 19-year-olds, the lowest since 976,000 teens in 1954.

“While summer hiring among teens is by no means robust, it has been stronger than expected, particularly in light of this recession’s impact on retailers, restaurants, tourist destinations and other businesses that are typically the biggest recruiters of teenagers during the summer months,” said John Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
The company estimates more than 1 million teens will find work this summer.

“For those who are still wanting a summer job, it is not too late to find one,” he said. “Some retailers may add more workers for back-to-school sales. Other employers may need to replace workers who didn’t work out.”

U.S. college grads shun Wall Street for Washington

2009-06-11T08:24:00.000-05:00

U.S. college grads shun Wall Street for Washington
11 Jun 2009 12:03:20 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Wendell Marsh

WASHINGTON, June 11 (Reuters) - Wall Street may be losing its luster for new U.S. college graduates who are increasingly looking to the government for jobs that enrich their social conscience, if not their wallet.

In the boom years, New York's financial center lured many of the brightest young stars with the promise of high salaries and bonuses. But the financial crisis has tainted the image of big banks, and with fewer financial jobs available, Uncle Sam may be reaping the benefit.

"Some grads might have seen two of their older siblings go through the dot-com crash and the emptiness of that, and now the Wall Street crash, just chasing after the big bucks," said John Challenger, chief executive of job placement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Some of the appeal of Washington simply reflects the grim reality of graduating in the midst of the worst recession in decades. The U.S. unemployment rate jumped to 9.4 percent in May, which means new graduates are competing with a large pool of older unemployed workers for a limited supply of jobs.

A report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers projected a 21.6 percent decrease in new hires among college graduates. Almost every sector was hit, with banking taking the biggest blow, dropping 70.9 percent.

"Students don't see the private sector as being as viable this year," said Edwin Koc, director of strategic and foundation research for the Pennsylvania-based NACE.

Of the roughly 1.6 million students who recently graduated from college, only 19.7 percent had secured jobs upon graduation in May, according to NACE's 2009 student survey.

But Labor Department data shows employment in the Washington area has increased since early 2008, even as other regions have lost jobs.

"D.C. is the only place where we can point to that is actually adding jobs right now, and we also know that the government is hiring thousands of people to oversee both the (economic) stimulus package and all the associated projects," said Marisa Di Natale, Senior Economist for Moody's Economy.com.

GIVE BACK

Challenger said the excitement surrounding the election of President Barack Obama, who enjoyed huge support on college campuses, was also attracting young graduates to government and government-service contractors.

Britini Wilcher is one of them. Wilcher, a recent graduate from Spelman College in Atlanta, spent two summers as an intern for Merrill Lynch, which was hard hit by the financial crisis and taken over by Bank of America Corp last year.

When it came time to look for full-time employment, Wilcher wanted to do something with a bigger social impact.

The California native will be working in Washington for a government consulting firm where she will specialize in economic development.

"It's becoming trendy to take your community into your hands and give back, which is a good thing," Wilcher said. "People are empowered by the current political climate."

The shift in attitudes is also apparent in graduate school enrollment. At Morehouse College, more graduates are opting to study public policy, said Douglas Cooper, director of career services at the college's division of business and economics.

That is a big change for Morehouse, which has a long history of sending its students on to Wall Street, thanks in part to a relationship solidified by former college president and current Bank of America Chairman Walter Massey.

"Clearly, students who have historically planned on making a beeline to Wall Street have rethought that or are rethinking that," Cooper said.

The share of Morehouse business students going into finance has decreased to 37.5 percent this year from 44 percent a year earlier, while the number of students going on to graduate school has almost doubled.

Most students who continue to graduate school this year are planning to go into government-related fields, Cooper said.

Some think the shift will have longer-term consequences in employment trends as the baby boomer generation approaches retirement, opening up career paths in government and service.
"You may see a whole generation of some of the very best students that decide to do public service rather than business," Challenger said.

(Reporting by Wendell Marsh; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

Houston Community College Launches Job Partnership Program

2009-06-10T13:10:00.005-05:00

Houston Community College's "Partners for Jobs" is a collaboration of interested organizations helping Houstonians get an education or training and identify job opportunities. Members of the corporate community assisting HCC in this effort include: MITTONMedia; Employment Expert Rick Gillis; Jobs Ministry Southwest; Waste Management; HR Houston; Greater Houston Business Partnership; HoustonJobs.com; Workforce Solutions, Houston Chronicle and Comcast.

Learn more about the program by going to http://www.hccpartnersforjobs.org/. To watch part of the press conference launch with Houston Mayor Bill White, click on this link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AkxKkS04tk

And remember, "A great job is only an education away."

The Media Fall for Phony 'Jobs' Claims: The Obama Numbers Are Pure Fiction.

2009-06-09T15:55:00.000-05:00

There are many sides in today's debate about job gains or losses in this economy. Wanting to present all sides, here is an article from today's WSJ:

By WILLIAM MCGURN/WSJ/June 9, 2009

Tony Fratto is envious.

Mr. Fratto was a colleague of mine in the Bush administration, and as a senior member of the White House communications shop, he knows just how difficult it can be to deal with a press corps skeptical about presidential economic claims. It now appears, however, that Mr. Fratto's problem was that he simply lacked the magic words -- jobs "saved or created."

"Saved or created" has become the signature phrase for Barack Obama as he describes what his stimulus is doing for American jobs. His latest invocation came yesterday, when the president declared that the stimulus had already saved or created at least 150,000 American jobs -- and announced he was ramping up some of the stimulus spending so he could "save or create" an additional 600,000 jobs this summer. These numbers come in the context of an earlier Obama promise that his recovery plan will "save or create three to four million jobs over the next two years."

The president should 'save or create' more jobs in Cleveland.

Mr. Fratto sees a double standard at play. "We would never have used a formula like 'save or create,'" he tells me. "To begin with, the number is pure fiction -- the administration has no way to measure how many jobs are actually being 'saved.' And if we had tried to use something this flimsy, the press would never have let us get away with it."

Of course, the inability to measure Mr. Obama's jobs formula is part of its attraction. Never mind that no one -- not the Labor Department, not the Treasury, not the Bureau of Labor Statistics -- actually measures "jobs saved." As the New York Times delicately reports, Mr. Obama's jobs claims are "based on macroeconomic estimates, not an actual counting of jobs." Nice work if you can get away with it.

And get away with it he has. However dubious it may be as an economic measure, as a political formula "save or create" allows the president to invoke numbers that convey an illusion of precision. Harvard economist and former Bush economic adviser Greg Mankiw calls it a "non-measurable metric." And on his blog, he acknowledges the political attraction.

"The expression 'create or save,' which has been used regularly by the President and his economic team, is an act of political genius," writes Mr. Mankiw. "You can measure how many jobs are created between two points in time. But there is no way to measure how many jobs are saved. Even if things get much, much worse, the President can say that there would have been 4 million fewer jobs without the stimulus."

Mr. Obama's comments yesterday are a perfect illustration of just such a claim. In the months since Congress approved the stimulus, our economy has lost nearly 1.6 million jobs and unemployment has hit 9.4%. Invoke the magic words, however, and -- presto! -- you have the president claiming he has "saved or created" 150,000 jobs. It all makes for a much nicer spin, and helps you forget this is the same team that only a few months ago promised us that passing the stimulus would prevent unemployment from rising over 8%.

It's not only former Bush staffers such as Messrs. Fratto and Mankiw who have noted the political convenience here. During a March hearing of the Senate Finance Committee, Chairman Max Baucus challenged Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on the formula.

"You created a situation where you cannot be wrong," said the Montana Democrat. "If the economy loses two million jobs over the next few years, you can say yes, but it would've lost 5.5 million jobs. If we create a million jobs, you can say, well, it would have lost 2.5 million jobs. You've given yourself complete leverage where you cannot be wrong, because you can take any scenario and make yourself look correct."

Now, something's wrong when the president invokes a formula that makes it impossible for him to be wrong and it goes largely unchallenged. It's true that almost any government spending will create some jobs and save others. But as Milton Friedman once pointed out, that doesn't tell you much: The government, after all, can create jobs by hiring people to dig holes and fill them in.
If the "saved or created" formula looks brilliant, it's only because Mr. Obama and his team are not being called on their claims. And don't expect much to change. So long as the news continues to repeat the administration's line that the stimulus has already "saved or created" 150,000 jobs over a time period when the U.S. economy suffered an overall job loss 10 times that number, the White House would be insane to give up a formula that allows them to spin job losses into jobs saved.

"You would think that any self-respecting White House press corps would show some of the same skepticism toward President Obama's jobs claims that they did toward President Bush's tax cuts," says Mr. Fratto. "But I'm still waiting."

Microsoft to move jobs overseas if Obama tax plan goes through

2009-06-04T13:57:00.000-05:00

This recent article by Ryan J. Donmoyer, of Bloomberg, addresses interesting dilemma: how do you grow companies and create jobs if corporate tax structure drives companies abroad?

"By Ryan J. Donmoyer, June 3 (Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer said the world’s largest software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Barack Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits.

“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said in an interview. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”
Obama on May 4 proposed outlawing or restricting about $190 billion in tax breaks for offshore companies over the next decade. Such business groups as the National Foreign Trade Council, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable have denounced the proposed overhaul.

U.S. tax rules let companies defer paying corporate rates as high as 35 percent on most types of foreign profits as long as that money remains invested overseas. Obama says he wants to end such incentives to keep foreign profits tax-deferred so that companies would invest them in the U.S.

Microsoft reported an overall effective tax rate of 26 percent for 2008 in its last annual report. “Our effective tax rates are less than the statutory tax rate due to foreign earnings taxed at lower rates,” the report said.

Barry Bosworth, an economist in Washington at the Brookings Institution research center, said many software companies such as Microsoft have exploited tax and trade rules in the U.S. and other countries to achieve a low overall tax rate.

Ireland Subsidiary

Typically, he said, a company like Microsoft develops a product like Windows in the United States and deducts those costs against U.S. income. It then transfers the technology to a subsidiary in Ireland, where corporate tax rates are lower, without charging licensing fees. The company then assigns its foreign sales to the Irish subsidiary so it doesn’t have to claim the income in the United States.

“What Microsoft wants to do is deduct the cost at a high tax rate and report the profits at a low tax rate,” Bosworth said. “Relative to where they are now, the administration’s proposals are less favorable, so there will be some rebalancing on their part.”

Ballmer is one of 10 U.S. software company executives pushing back against the tax proposals in meetings today with White House officials including Jason Furman, deputy director of the National Economic Council, and the heads of congressional committees such as House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, a New York Democrat.

Expense Deductions

Among other things, Obama proposed limiting expense deductions such as those for employee compensation when companies defer U.S. tax on foreign profits.

In a roundtable discussion today, Ballmer, Symantec Corp. Chairman John Thompson and the heads of smaller companies such as privately held Bentley Systems, an Exton, Pennsylvania-based maker of engineering software, said such policies would hurt domestic investment, reduce shareholder value and increase the cost of employing U.S. workers.

Ballmer said that, while the Obama proposals would preserve expense deductions related to research and experimentation costs, the overall deduction limits for companies that defer tax on foreign profits would raise the cost of employing U.S. workers. Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders would require Microsoft to cut costs, he said, meaning many jobs would be moved out of the country.

Worldwide Employees

Microsoft employed 95,029 people worldwide as of April 21, of whom 56,552 were based in the United States, according to the company’s Web site. The company announced it was firing up to 5,000 people in January while hiring some new workers; the company has shed about 1,000 jobs since then, spokesman Lou Gellos said.

Ballmer estimated that higher taxes under the proposal would reduce profits for companies that comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average by between 10 and 15 percentage points.
“It’s just a question of how much will the Dow come down,” Ballmer said. “It’s not about companies anyway; we’re talking about shareholders.”

In addition to limiting current deductions for companies that defer U.S. tax on their foreign profits, Obama proposed altering a set of rules known as “check the box” that allow companies to shelter foreign profits in offshore subsidiaries that can be disregarded for U.S. tax purposes.
Duck Liabilities

While the rules were designed in 1997 to protect U.S. companies from paying excessive tax to other governments, Obama administration officials say it has evolved into a way to duck U.S. liabilities. Altering the rule, which Obama dubbed a “loophole,” would generate $86.5 billion in new revenue by 2019, the administration says.

The third international tax proposal would change rules governing how companies can claim tax credits for levies paid to foreign governments. Officials say some companies abuse the rule to accelerate tax credits before they could otherwise be claimed.

Obama has said his proposals would protect or create jobs in the United States.
Thompson of Symantec, the Cupertino, California-based maker of Norton anti-virus software and similar tools, said software companies are frustrated by being called tax cheats and compared with companies that moved their headquarters to low-tax countries such as Bermuda.
‘Counterintuitive’

Thompson called the Obama proposals “counterintuitive” to the administration’s other stated goals of fostering an innovation-oriented economy.

“It is a little bit ironic that most of our most significant trading partners and partners globally have taken the tack that they’ll reduce corporate tax rates to stimulate economic growth and not raise corporate tax rates,” Thompson said."

The Disappearance of the Traditional Career Path

2009-05-28T10:49:00.000-05:00

Dr. Michael Kannisto on ERE.net.

In the July/August print publication Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, I’m spelling out my “10 predictions for the coming year.”

We’re already seeing signs that many long-held assumptions about what success looks like are now open to interpretation. Forced to get creative, companies are now reviewing the long-term effects of traditional staffing models. Buying talent from competitors fills jobs quickly, but those people don’t always stay. Fighting for a top MBA grad at the best school may give your company bragging rights, but does the expense associated with managing them (and their expectations) yield a good return on the investment?

While some managers used to be convinced that there was no talent within their own companies, many are now taking a closer look at internal candidates when filling key jobs. Career paths are now often about moving sideways, not always up. As each and every hiring decision is placed under greater scrutiny, hiring managers will become more flexible in finding ways to get work done.

What would once have been an open job that would have involved an in-person pitch from a retained search firm, a parade of candidates, a consensus-driven decision, a nasty attempt to address a counteroffer, and an expensive relocation, might now simply involve a qualified long-term employee working remotely.

Faced with the reality that their jobs might be eliminated despite good performance, employees will be more open to lateral moves and developmental assignments. And companies, desperate to fill key roles, will be willing to give them those opportunities.

Social Media Is Not A Magic Bullet

2009-05-26T13:03:00.000-05:00

Last week I had a chance to present part of our recruitment workshop at the 18th Annual Gulf Coast HR Symposium. The workshop, "Beyond Post & Pray: Effective Recruitment Strategies and Techniques for Today's Workplace," addresses the dangers of Group Think and illustrates why a blended basic approach is usually the most successful strategy in finding and hiring higher quality candidates.

Social media was a hot topic of discussion. What was surprising were the number of attendees in the audience who were already moving away from "social media" platforms as an effective tool for better recruitment results. It was a matter of "grief-to-dollar" ratio or, in this case, "grief-to-time spent" ratio.

Social media is a tool. One of many traditional and non-traditional tools at the disposal of recruiters and Hiring Managers. Many in the session voiced the opinion that while it was the new hot topic of the day, social media involved so many different platforms that they did not have the time necessary to be consistent and effective. To paraphrase a quote from a recent article about social media, "All the buzz around social media is similar to that surrounding a weight loss product. Losts of hype but you have to put out the effort, be consistent, and individual results will vary."

What's been your experience?

Some Employers See Hiring Opportunity

2009-05-26T11:48:00.000-05:00

(Source: Wall Street Journal)

By CARI TUNA
Cancer Treatment Centers of America Inc. received 19,000 applicants for 100 jobs at a new hospital near Phoenix, opened in December -- six times as many as when it last opened a facility, in 2006.

Applicants included administrators, physicians and nutritionists -- both unemployed and employed. Chief Executive Steve Bonner was so overwhelmed that he is considering hiring additional employees long before he needs them, likely in 2011. "I'm asking myself: where are my weak spots, and is this an opportunity to plug one?"

Jobing.com

Jobing.com's Phoenix career fair drew record attendance.
Like Mr. Bonner, some employers are seizing the recession as an opportunity to strengthen their talent pool, poach stars from rivals or rebuild after layoffs. Every opening attracts dozens of qualified, and overqualified, applicants. Unemployment is 8.1% (since raised to 8.5% as of the Friday, April 3, unemployment report), the highest since 1983, and 12.5 million Americans are out of work. Yet the Labor Department says there were fewer than three million job openings in January, the fewest since it began tracking the data in 2000.

Strategically hiring skilled, productive employees can help employers boost efficiency and save money, says DeLynn Senna, executive director of permanent placement services for North America for Robert Half International Inc., a professional staffing firm. Good hiring decisions now may allow companies to best competitors when the economy rebounds, she says.

Many of the employers that are hiring are in sectors such as healthcare, government or utilities, which are still adding jobs. The U.S. Census Bureau is staffing ahead of next year's population count. The Los Angeles regional office has received more than 80,000 applicants for an initial 10,000 jobs, from field workers to office staff. Applicants include PhD and MBA holders "who would not typically apply for temporary positions with the Census Bureau," says Celeste Jimenez, an assistant regional manager.

For the Palm Beach County, Fla. School District, the recession means savings on recruiting and training bus drivers. Two years ago, the district was so desperate for drivers that officials parked a bus outside a local mall and handed applications to shoppers. This school year, the district has received more than 1,000 applications for fewer than 100 driver positions, paying around $12 an hour plus benefits. Many applicants have commercial driver's licenses, which were rare in the past; that cuts training costs, says transportation director Yevola Falana.

Other employers still hiring are gaining at the expense of rivals. Revenue at Family Dollar Stores Inc. grew 8.7% to about $2 billion in its fiscal second quarter, ending Feb. 28, as overall retail sales for the same period fell 9.4%. The Charlotte, N.C., discount retailer, which employs about 45,000 people, plans to open around 200 new stores and add more than 1,350 workers in 2009.
Each opening attracts a surge of applicants, helping Family Dollar trim recruiting costs and fill jobs faster with stronger candidates. "We're seeing a level of applicant we haven't ever seen before," says Bryan Venberg, senior vice president of human resources.

A recent posting for a New York City store manager drew 700 applications in two days. A listing for a human-resources manager drew more than 100 applications in 24 hours. Two years ago the company would have tapped a recruiter to fill the HR position, Mr. Venberg says.
To bolster its information-technology department, Family Dollar contacted managers at Circuit City Stores Inc., which recently liquidated. Family Dollar ultimately hired four IT specialists from the defunct electronics retailer, Mr. Venberg says.

Danish drug maker Novo Nordisk A/S, boosted by sales of new diabetes treatments, is hiring salespeople and researchers in the U.S., as many pharmaceutical companies shed jobs. Novo Nordisk employs 27,000 people worldwide, including more than 3,000 in the U.S. Novo Nordisk drew more than 4,000 applicants for 80 positions at a new research facility in Seattle, opened in October, including research directors laid off elsewhere. "Highly qualified people are trying to get lower-level jobs," says human-resources manager Rebecca Capuano.

Ms. Senna, of Robert Half, says small and mid-sized employers are benefiting too, as some large companies lay off workers and cut wages and benefits.

Consider Model N Inc., a closely held Silicon Valley software maker. Kamal Ahluwalia, vice president of corporate marketing, says Model N traditionally faced tough competition for employees from software giants such as Oracle Corp. and SAP AG, as well as smaller startups.
"Now, all the big guys are on hiring freeze, and most of the startups are dying," he says. "In this downturn, we really do have an opportunity to hire the best talent."

Buoyed by rising sales of its revenue-management software, Model N plans to add 30 to 40 employees to its 275-person staff in 2009. In February, Model N tapped Jim Gavin, an SAP salesman in Palo Alto, Calif., to lead sales to big technology companies.
In January, SAP had said it would cut 3,000 jobs, or 6% of its workforce. The layoffs "put the whole organization on edge," says Mr. Gavin, who had worked for SAP for three years. He started looking elsewhere.

Model N tapped Mr. Gavin through a recruiter he had used to hire employees for SAP. Mr. Gavin's total potential compensation – between $260,000 and $300,000 – is similar to his target pay at SAP. But his fixed salary is higher and sales targets more achievable, he says. "Here you have a little bit more control," he says.

Mr. Ahluwalia says Mr. Gavin is better-qualified than his predecessors, who typically arrived from mid-sized technology companies with fewer contacts and less experience selling to big companies.

But hiring in a downturn can be tricky. Job seekers are not only more numerous but more desperate, hiring managers say. Weeding through hundreds of resumes is time consuming, and mistakes can be costly. Some employers are trying to screen out applicants who are merely seeking a paycheck until the economy recovers.

Defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. expects to receive a record 1.5 million applications for around 20,000 positions in 2009, up from 1 million for between 12,000 and 13,000 openings in 2007, says Ken Disken, senior vice president of human resources.

He says interviewers have been instructed to pay closer attention to candidates' career goals than in the past. "We want to make sure they want to come to Lockheed Martin to pursue a career, not a job," Mr. Disken says.

Airline mechanics who can't read English!

2009-05-19T09:21:00.000-05:00

10:03 AM CDT on Saturday, May 16, 2009
By BYRON HARRIS / WFAA-TV

News 8 has recently revealed serious flaws in the way the FAA licenses mechanics who fix planes.

There is evidence of years of problems in testing these mechanics. There is also evidence that hundreds of mechanics with questionable licenses are working on aircraft in Texas.

Now there is evidence of repair facilities hiring low-wage mechanics who can't read English.
Twenty-one people were killed when U.S. Airways Express Flight 5481 crashed in Charlotte, North Carolina in 2003. The plane went wildly out of control on takeoff.

One reason for the crash, investigators found, was that mechanics incorrectly connected the cables to some of the plane's control surfaces in the repair shop. The FAA was cited for improper oversight of the repair process.

Repairing airplanes is a complicated business. Airplanes have many manuals. Typically, when mechanics repair a part, they open the manual, consult the book, and make the repair step-by-step, as if it were a recipe book.

They make a list of every action they take, so the next person to fix the plane (as well as the people who fly it) will know exactly what has been done.

If mechanics don't speak English, the international language of aviation, they can't read the manual and they can't record their activities.

There are more than 236 FAA-certified aircraft repair stations in Texas, according to the FAA's Web site. News 8 has learned that hundreds of the mechanics working in those shops do not speak English and are unable to read repair manuals for today's sophisticated aircraft.

Former FAA inspector Bill McNease told News 8 he regularly encountered applicants for pilots’ licenses who tried to pretend they could speak English — but could not.

"When I was based in Dallas, I had that happen every week," McNease said. "It was not uncommon at all to have foreign flight students. We had mechanics, but I handled the pilot end of it.... and I turned down people every week because they couldn't speak English."

"There are people [where I work] who do not know how to read a maintenance manual as they are spelled out, because they don't have a clue," said one certified aircraft mechanic who works at a Texas aircraft repair station. He wished to remain anonymous to protect his employment.
To certify a part for flight or repair an engine, a mechanic must be licensed by the FAA as an Airframe and Powerplant mechanic, known in the business as an "A&P."

News 8 discovered that mechanics at one licensing center in San Antonio were being tested in Spanish as late as last fall. The FAA ultimately shut the facility down.

Supervisors in Texas repair stations say they are supposed to oversee the repairs of dozens of untrained mechanics who can't read the manuals and can't write down the work they've done.
But the FAA does not require every person working at a repair station to be a certified A&P. One certified A&P can sign off on the work of dozens of uncertified mechanics.

That creates a huge problem, another certified mechanic told News 8. "I need an interpreter to talk to these people," he said. "They can't read the manuals, they can't write, and I have so many working for me I can't be sure of the work they've done."

To be sure of proper quality, the supervisor has to either re-do the work himself or take the chance that no mistakes have been made. There is a push to get work out the door and planes back in the air. But when he signs his name to certify the repair for flight, he is legally responsible for it.

The root of the problem is money, mechanics say. A certified mechanic can earn upwards of $25 an hour in Texas. Technicians who can't speak English are often hired for less than $10, according to mechanics interviewed by News 8.

"I've been wanting to leave this company since the day I got there," said one certified A&P. "But with the economy the way it is, I've got kids to feed and I have to stay there. I don't want to be anywhere near one of those planes when it kills somebody."

The FAA is supposed to police repair stations, but insiders say the agency is more focused on looking at paperwork than inspecting the facilities. Insiders also say inspectors warn repair stations when they're coming.

"In Dallas, most of them would map it out and tell them what day they were going to be there," said Gene Bland, a former FAA inspector.

Safety, mechanics say, is at risk. "In my opinion," said one, "company owners should all be locked up because someone's going to die eventually, if it hasn't already happened."
Texas' two biggest airlines, American and Southwest, both require mechanics and the technicians who work under them to speak, read and write English.

But mechanics who work elsewhere — whose repairs often end up on commercial airliners — say their shops are filled with non-English speakers.

The FAA declined to be interviewed for this report.

Tripling Traffic to Your Careers Site With a Facebook Account?

2009-05-18T15:56:00.000-05:00

by Jim Durbin, Apr 21, 2009

Curious as to the impact of social media on your search-engine profile? Try this experiment: Go to a search engine and type in “(your company) careers” into the search field.

If you’re most companies, you may get one or more entries that may or may not point a job-seeker to the correct website. If you’re a few companies I won’t mention, you sadly go to the archives of well-known recruiter blogs begging you to upgrade your site. For the company Sodexo, the first result is its blog, and the second is the careers site, and the rest of the page is profiles in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Flickr.

Sodexo is one of the largest employers in the world, and yet it flies under the radar when it comes to staffing. Sodexo staffs food and facilities management services around the world, and employs over 120,000 people in North America. Imagine that req load.

Sodexo didn’t have to imagine. To add to the confusion, it recently changed its name, which means new branding, new marketing, and new search terms. So in December of 2007, curious about the blogosphere and the impact of social media on staffing, it launched its first blog. Sodexo Careers is written on Blogger, and covers issues of staffing and HR, but also corporate citizenship, technology, and culture. It’s the number one search result on Google for “Sodexo Careers,” beating out the careers site on Sodexo.com.

The blog started out private, but after a month of internal monitoring, got the green light to go public. The Staffing team didn’t have much marketing help in the beginning, so the task fell to Kerry Noone, a marketing associate with a background in branding to manage the social media duties. The blog success led Kerry to create a Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter presence, complete with hiring groups, touchpoints, and most important, live recruiters managing the action. For each site, the goal was to establish a presence, understand candidate expectations, and meet them.

Each site built on the success of the other profiles, and as Sodexo as a company got more comfortable with a site, individual recruiters begin linking to each other, supporting each other, and using personal profiles to create a lively and engaged hub for all of their hiring needs. What started as a single person writing turned into an organizational change that allowed each recruiter to use the company’s social media presence for their immediate and long-term hiring needs.

The focus was always on metrics. Traffic and hires were tracked as best as they were able (recognizing that hires often come from multiple sources). The result? A near tripling of traffic to the careers site by mid-summer, prior to the massive influx of resumes from the weakening economy.

In February of 2008, traffic to the site averaged about 50,000 uniques per month. Three months later, that traffic was at 120,000 a month, and by August 2008, the three-month rolling average was at 135,000, with peak numbers reaching 150,000 uniques.

These numbers only represent unique visitors to the careers site, and don’t count individual recruiter pages, fan pages, company profiles, or any traffic to the blog and other social media sites. YouTube alone saw over 60,000 video views in the first eight months of use.

Hires can’t be tracked accurately all the way from the first contact to the eventual hire, but recruiters do report regularly on the importance of social media in the initial connection, through the employment process, and after the offer. Candidates are better informed, and anecdotally more engaged and more excited about Sodexo the company.

The effects of integrating social media into the Sodexo employment process are undeniable, but the startling part of their success came from understanding the effects of social media on the internal workings of the corporation. Having a successful social media program that is highly visible has led to a high degree of cooperation between the Talent Acquisition team and other divisions. Other sections of Human Resources, as well as Marketing, Sales, Diversity, and Corporate Communications, use the Sodexo social media presence to better launch initiatives and connect with clients. Internal resources look to the Talent Acquisition team for its obvious social media expertise, and the executives have a firm grasp on the value of the effort, measured against other costs like advertising, job boards, and recruiting fees.

Anthony Scarpino manages the division for Sodexo, and with the firm support of the overall head of Talent Acquisition, he has seen results that far outweigh the costs of implementation. The campaign, made up of individual efforts (and light management oversight), has made Sodexo better at hiring the staff it needs. They are better recruiters because they actually carry on conversations with potential job-seekers in the medium the job-seekers wish to use. This conversation has helped teach Scarpino what job-seekers expect, and through that Sodexo has been better able to empathize and tweak the process for an improved overall experience. The result has been a steady increase in hires in the short time they have had the program working.
Most important, the success of the program has brought increased participation from the hiring staff. Recruiters aren’t forced into social media, but as they see results, they engage more and more, using the tools that best suit their hiring niche.

What Lessons Can Be Learned?

First, social media in recruiting may best be used at the individual level. Programs designed to give a company a presence online don’t work if they aren’t generating results for the recruiters in the trenches.

Second, supportive management is a key factor. The right amount of oversight and guidance is necessary to manage a system without dampening creativity and enthusiasm. In opening up to social media, Sodexo gave future employees avenues to speak with past and present employees. That’s a scary proposition for any company, especially one with so many employees, but the result has been a long-term positive reaction.

Finally, we see that it is possible to track the ROI of social media in staffing. Sodexo uses a mixture of branding and marketing metrics tied into standard hiring benchmarks.

The result in this case is an astounding increase in targeted traffic that once again shows that when social media is integrated into a company’s hiring DNA, good things happen. There are no silver bullets, but the earnest application of social networking can help your company put people to work.

Oops!: Unintended Consequences of Lay Offs.

2009-05-12T16:16:00.000-05:00

One of the reasons we stress Workforce Planning is so that our clients do not lay off the wrong people, the people they are going to need to do the jobs that will generate revenues.

A story in today's Washington Post illustrates the problem.

"...Scott Pattison, executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers, noted that some cuts may be justified. 'You never want to see an individual be removed, but sometimes lost in the discussions is whether some of these positions should be eliminated,' he said.

...For instance, Florida's court system has cut 200 employees in the past 18 months. Judges lack staff members to prepare materials for trials at a time when property crimes and foreclosures are up significantly. The state cut so many hearing officers for traffic infractions that drivers started to realize that there was no one to hear cases and contested more tickets. This meant a big drop in revenue -- leading the state to rehire some of the officers.

(Source: Despite Stimulus Funds, States to Cut More Jobs, Alec MacGillis, Washington Post, May 12, 2009)

It's A Good Time To Work For Uncle Sam!

2009-05-12T13:02:00.000-05:00

Posted by Declan McCullagh

President Obama's call last year for "shared sacrifice" doesn't extend to federal employees, at least based on the details of his administration's 2010 budget released this week.

At a time when the official unemployment rate is nearing double digits, and 6.35 million people are receiving unemployment benefits, the U.S. government is on a hiring binge.

Executive branch employment — 1.98 million in 2009, excluding the Postal Service and the Defense Department — is set to increase by 15.6 percent for the 2010 fiscal year. Most of that is thanks to the Census Bureau hiring 102,000 temporary workers, but not counting them still yields a net increase of 2 percent in one year.

There's little belt-tightening in evidence in Washington, D.C.: Counting benefits, the average pay per federal worker will leap from $72,800 in 2008 to $75,419 next year.

Meanwhile, according to Forbes' layoff tracker, there have been 558,087 layoffs since November 2008 at large public companies; even local school districts aren't immune. That's just a sliver of the total unemployed, which government data estimate to be 8.6 percent of the workforce, or an alternate method of reckoning that counts discouraged workers puts at 20 percent.

Some of the Feds' hiring increases have been stunning. If you look at the four-year period from 2006 to 2010, the number of Homeland Security employees has grown by 22 percent, the Justice Department has increased by 15 percent, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission can claim 25 percent more employees. (These figures assume that Congress adopts Mr. Obama's 2010 budget without significant changes.)

A 39-page "dimensions" document accompanying the White House's 1,380-page appendix offers justifications for each new hire. Homeland Security says its new employees will "increase border security." The Agency for International Development wants to improve "the management and stewardship of foreign assistance programs." The Smithsonian Institution wants "additional security guards." And so on.

The final evidence that it's a good time to have a .gov e-mail address? Civilian government employees are set to enjoy a 2 percent raise. Not only are private sector workers are struggling to keep their jobs, but their earnings are stagnating and pay cuts are no longer uncommon.

The Curse of the Class of 2009

2009-05-11T16:50:00.000-05:00

(Source: The Wall Street Journal)

The Curse of the Class of 2009

For College Grads Lucky Enough to Get Work This Year, Low Wages are Likely to Haunt Them for a Decade or More

By SARA MURRAY
The bad news for this spring's college graduates is that they're entering the toughest labor market in at least 25 years.
The worse news: Even those who land jobs will likely suffer lower wages for a decade or more compared to those lucky enough to graduate in better times, studies show.
Andrew Friedson graduated last year from the University of Maryland with a degree in government and politics and a stint as student-body president on his résumé. After working on Barack Obama's presidential campaign for a few months, Mr. Friedson hoped to get a position in the new administration. When that didn't pan out he looked for jobs on Capitol Hill. No luck there, either.
So now, instead of learning about policymaking and legislation, he's earning about $1,250 a month as a high-school tutor and a part-time fundraiser for Hillel, a Jewish campus organization. To save money, he's living with his parents.

Low Wages Linger

For those who graduate during a recession, the effects on their earnings last years.
If asked a year ago whether he'd be tutoring now, Mr. Friedson says, "I would have laughed in your face."
Trading down to a lower-skilled job isn't just a hit to Mr. Friedson's ego. It could also hurt his bank account for years to come. Economic research shows that the consequences of graduating in a downturn are long-lasting. They include lower earnings, a slower climb up the occupational ladder and a widening gap between the least- and most-successful grads.

In short, luck matters. The damage can linger up to 15 years, says Lisa Kahn, a Yale School of Management economist. She used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a government data base, to track wages of white men who graduated before, during and after the deep 1980s recession.
Ms. Kahn found that for each percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate, those with the misfortune to graduate during the recession earned 7% to 8% less in their first year out than comparable workers who graduated in better times. The effect persisted over many years, with recession-era grads earning 4% to 5% less by their 12th year out of college, and 2% less by their 18th year out.
For example, a man who graduated in December 1982 when unemployment was at 10.8% made, on average, 23% less his first year out of college and 6.6% less 18 years out than one who graduated in May 1981 when the unemployment rate was 7.5%. For a typical worker, that would mean earning $100,000 less over the 18-year period.
The impact on wages could be just as severe this time around, says Ms. Kahn. That's because of the depth of this recession and the possibility that the unemployment rate may approach the 10.8% level not seen since the early 1980s. The rate hit 8.9% in April, the Labor Department reported Friday.

One reason behind declining wage potential, economists say: The caliber of jobs available in a recession, and their accompanying wages, tend to suffer. High-end firms hire fewer people and drive down salaries because jobs are in such demand.
That means many graduates end up with lower-wage, lower-skill jobs at less-prestigious firms or in firms outside their field of interest. Once the economy picks up and they try for better jobs, these workers have to learn skills they should have been developing immediately out of college. In the meantime, colleagues who graduated in a better economy have already developed these skills and progressed much further.

For Brad Dechter, a 24-year-old who majored in graphic design, this could mean starting at the bottom when and if he gets a job at an advertising agency. He studied at the Art Institute of Colorado partly because the Denver school advertises that 86% of alumni get a job within six months of graduation. So far, no dice.
Two recent college graduates are scraping by in the toughest job market in years. They're stuck between trying to find jobs that advance their careers and landing jobs that pay the bills. Eight months after graduation, Mr. Dechter is making just $500 a month freelancing for bands, designing flyers and album covers. When he runs short of cash, he borrows from his friends. He spends his days on Craigslist searching for job openings instead of learning the marketing and design skills he would have picked up in his first year at an agency.
"I've pretty much given up on trying to find my dream job," says Mr. Dechter.
Christine Pacheco, director of career services at the Art Institute, acknowledges that graduates face a struggle now. "They may need to take two part-time jobs and do some freelance rather than get a full-time job," she says.
College graduates remain better off than those with only high-school diplomas, in good times and bad. The unemployment rate in April among four-year college graduates between 20 and 24 years old was 6.1%; among those the same age with only high-school diplomas, it was 19.6%.
But a college degree isn't an automatic ticket to upward mobility, either. Even before the recession began, graduates were seeing their wages shrink. Between 2002 and 2007, according to government data, the inflation-adjusted hourly wage for men ages 25 to 35 with bachelor's degrees (and no graduate degrees) fell 4.5%. For the typical woman, inflation-adjusted wages fell 4.8%.
This year, employers say they'll hire 22% fewer college graduates than last year, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, an organization of career counselors. At the same time, colleges are expected to see the highest number of graduates in a decade. The average starting salary for graduates who do get jobs, meanwhile, dropped to $48,515 this spring, down 2.2% from the same time last year, according to NACE.
Plenty of recent graduates are making far less than the average. Between her business marketing degree and numerous New York City contacts, Nicole Buckley, 21, figured she would find a marketing job after graduating in December from Siena College, a small Catholic liberal arts college near Albany, N.Y. She didn't expect to be working the jobs she has now, five months after graduation: As a full-time receptionist with a part-time gig as a model, promoting Bacardi rum and Grey Goose vodka to patrons at bars. But after doing two interviews a day and applying to more than 50 jobs, she had to do something to pay the bills.
"I don't think anyone went to college and said, 'I want to graduate and make $25,000 a year,' " says Ms. Buckley. She estimates her earnings at a little less than $30,000 between the two jobs.
Sarah Veilleux, 22, one of Ms. Buckley's two roommates in a $1,125-a-month Brooklyn apartment, graduated in May 2008 from the University of New Hampshire with a communications degree. For a few months, she worked selling band merchandise at a music venue. Then she found her ideal job: doing promotions for Sirius Satellite Radio. But they need her only 20 hours a week.
"As soon as I saw the offer for Sirius," she says, "it didn't matter how many hours a week." She spends the other half of her week doing administrative tasks for a staffing company, earning $1,500 a month -- $18,000 a year -- between the two jobs.
Still, Ms. Veilleux probably will be better off than those who take low-wage jobs outside their fields, says Till Marco von Wachter, a Columbia University economist. Mr. von Wachter, with a couple of colleagues, has looked at wage data covering 70% of all Canadians who graduated from college between 1976 and 1995, a span encompassing two recessions. His work indicates that graduates who get jobs in their fields -- even low-paying jobs -- are able to learn the right skills, and thus have an edge when the economy rebounds.
Mr. von Wachter also found that what recession-era graduates studied, and where they went to school, made a big difference in how quickly they caught up to workers who graduated in boom times. People who majored in fields that lead to high-paying jobs, such as chemistry, biology, physics and engineering, tended to catch up to other graduates more quickly, primarily by switching jobs during the economic recovery and landing at better firms. In contrast, says Mr. von Wachter, the wages of humanities majors at less prestigious schools were less likely to catch up to the wages of their peers who graduated in healthier times.

For some graduates, the recession has had an unintended upside: a career path they never thought they wanted.

Diane Hempe, 24, planned to be a teacher. But after graduating from the University of Maryland last year with an elementary education degree, she failed to find a job at a school. So she settled for working at a day-care center, where the $12 an hour she brought in felt like an affront.
In December, Ms. Hempe went in an entirely new direction. She took a job in the customer-service department at a Wells Fargo call center in Frederick, Md. "I definitely know I can move up," she says. "I can be in customer service; I can be in collections; I can be in so many different departments."
And in the meantime she's shifting her long-term goals. Instead of getting a master's degree in education like she once thought she would, Ms. Hempe says eventually she plans to get her master's in business.

Other are opting to ride out the slump doing public service. At AmeriCorps, a nationwide community-service network, applications more than tripled to about 48,500 between November 2008 and March compared to the same time period a year earlier. Teach for America received 35,000 applications this year -- 42% more than last year. About 70% of those were recent college graduates. Among the most common reasons people cited for applying, according to Teach for America, were poor job conditions and President Barack Obama's call to public service.

Another alternative to unemployment or a low-paying job: Stay in school.

Graduate applications for 2007-2008 were up 8% nationwide compared to the year before, according to the most recent numbers from the Council of Graduate Schools. Schools such as Northwestern University and Harvard are already tracking double-digit increases this year.
College grads who went to graduate school instead of the job market during the early '80s recession didn't suffer the same wage losses, says Ms. Kahn, the Yale economist.
That's the approach John Bence is taking. A 2008 graduate of Kenyon College in Ohio, the history major worked with a temp agency and did a six-month stint at an international consulting company. After repeatedly losing out on jobs -- at museums, universities, consulting firms -- to more-qualified candidates with master's degrees, he'll head to New York University to get a master's degree in history, specializing in archival management.
"I wasn't surprised I didn't get those jobs in, like, museums," Mr. Bence says. "But I was surprised that no one was willing to hire me to do anything."

Thought provoking quote about "sons."

2009-05-08T10:02:00.000-05:00

"Your son is at five your master, at ten your servant, at fifteen your double, and after that, your friend or foe, depending on his bringing up."

--- Rabbi Chasdai ibn-Crescas

Citigroup eyes new ways to pay employees

2009-05-05T11:24:00.000-05:00

Mon May 4, 2009
*Citi looking at commissions, other measures to keep staff
*New possibilities could be difficult to execute
*US banks losing staff to hedge funds, foreign banks
By Dan Wilchins
NEW YORK, May 4 (Reuters) - Citigroup may put more employees on commission or offer them larger base salaries as it tries to retain key staffers without running afoul of laws limiting executive pay at banks that receive government funds.
Three people familiar with the matter said the bank has examined a series of possible moves, including special stock-based bonuses, or offering employees a percentage of their group's revenue.
Banks across Wall Street are struggling to reward top performers without violating an amendment to the 2009 stimulus package limiting executive pay. That amendment calls for the Treasury Secretary to review compensation of top employees at any major recipient of funds from the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Bonuses are expected to face particular scrutiny after Wall Street firms paid $18.4 billion of bonuses in 2008, a year in which the U.S. financial sector required more than $1 trillion of government support.
Some banks, most notably Goldman Sachs Group Inc, (GS.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) hope to repay their TARP funds as soon as possible, in part to avoid having to comply with pay limits.
Citigroup, which has received $45 billion of TARP capital and is not believed to have much hope of paying the government back anytime soon, is having discussions with the government about measures that might be appropriate for retaining revenue producing employees.
A number of possibilities are under discussion, and generally are geared toward ensuring that employees are motivated to perform well. The No. 3 U.S. bank will have a better sense of how to proceed once the Treasury Department crafts more specific guidelines on pay, one person said.
Of particular concern is the Phibro business, which has been extraordinarily profitable. If Citigroup cannot find ways to compensate people there, the energy trading business may be spun off, sold, or opened to outside investors, a person familiar with the matter said. News of this possibility was first reported in the Wall Street Journal.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that Citigroup had asked the Treasury Department for permission to pay special bonuses to key employees. One scenario discussed internally would be a one-time bonus paid to employees mainly in stock that would vest over at least three years.
Citigroup spokesman Stephen Cohen said in an emailed statement that the bank has not presented Treasury with any specific plan for staff retention or special cash payouts.
"Citi continues to examine ways to ensure its employee compensation practices are competitive in this very challenging market environment," Cohen said in the statement.
The alternatives that Citigroup is considering to standard discretionary bonuses still have flaws with them, experts said.
Commissions, for example, only work well for professionals in sales positions, and even then can lead to conflicts over which sales person was responsible for a deal. Giving percentages of revenue could result in outsized paydays if a business outperforms, which could lead to public outcry.
"There's no perfect answer to this issue," said Michael Holland, founder of Holland & Co, which oversees more than $4 billion.
STEMMING THE EXODUS
But banks have every incentive to figure out how to retain their top staff. On Monday, a source said two equity traders and a salesman from Bank of America Corp (BAC.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) moved to hedge fund giant Citadel Investment Group. Foreign banks such as Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) have also been able to hire employees from U.S. competitors.
In fact, banks that are not profitable will likely have trouble from a political standpoint paying employees anything but stock in bonuses, while banks that are profitable will likely look to repay TARP as quickly as possible to eliminate restrictions they face.
"I just don't think all this planning for other ways to pay people will amount to anything," said Paul Sorbera, a recruiter at Alliance Consulting in New York.
But for now, banks are concerned about retaining staff, and ensuring they are properly motivated.
"If we can't pay people competitively, we can't expect them to stay here," said one bank executive.
(Reporting by Dan Wilchins; Editing Bernard Orr)

Small businesses still interested in hiring, survey says

2009-04-03T15:07:00.000-05:00

Friday, April 3, 2009

Small businesses still interested in hiring, survey says
Atlanta Business Chronicle

Small businesses are still planning to put out the help-wanted signs, just not as frequently and with fewer spots to fill, according to a survey by TriNet Group Inc.
The TriNet HR Trends Survey found that 55 percent of small businesses intend to hire someone during the year, down from 80 percent in the survey conducted in November and December of last year.
Two-thirds, or 65 percent, of respondents who were looking to fill jobs said the current talent pool was better than normal.
If faced with reducing personnel costs, 31 percent of respondents said they would reorganize staffing, such as making sure they have the right people in the right places. Twenty-five percent would choose to lay off rather than reduce salaries and benefits, and 20 percent of those surveyed said they would reduce salaries and benefits for all or some employees to avoid layoffs.
The San Leandro, Calif. human resources outsourcing company surveyed more than 300 small businesses in the technology, financial services and professional services sectors for its quarterly report.

More Houston CFOs plan to hire than fire

2009-03-03T14:08:00.000-06:00

(Source: Houston Business Journal, March 3, 2009)

For accounting and finance staff in the Houston area, jobs may not be too hard to find in the next few months, according to a new study.

According to the Robert Half Financial Hiring Index a net 4 percent of CFOs in the area expect to add staff in the second quarter.

The survey found that 11 percent of CFOs surveyed plan to add staff during the quarter, compared with 7 percent who plan to cut staff.

While the net 4 percent represents a 1 percent drop compared with the first-quarter 2009 forecast for the area, it’s still 6 percent above the national average, according to the study, which was based on interviews with 200 CFOs from companies in the Houston area with 20 or more employees.

Workforce Planning Is Hot; Are You Lagging Behind?

2009-02-25T10:10:00.000-06:00

(Source: ERE.net - http://www.ere.net)

Workforce Planning Is Hot; Are You Lagging Behind?

By Dr. John Sullivan On February 23, 2009 @ 4:15 am In News and Features

What’s hot in talent management changes quite often. Right now, there’s no hotter topic within the talent management community than workforce planning.

The reasons are simple: with the current economy driving revenues down dramatically, many senior executives are examining how to plan ahead in order to increase their firms’ capabilities, reduce costs, and survive the economic chaos likely to continue for some time.

Organizations need an effective talent management plan that will allow them to “explode out of the box” at the first sight of economic recovery, yet one that doesn’t threaten economic sustainability in the short term.

While most in talent management are continuing to react with stale cost containment approaches developed decades ago, strategic talent managers are stepping forward with robust workforce planning solutions and new work models that account for the significant changes in both how people work and live that have occurred in the last 20 years.

If you are interested in doing more than talking about being strategic, here are some recommended action steps to help improve your organization’s workforce planning.

What the Heck is Workforce Planning?

It might seem like a simple question, but there is little to no agreement among HR and talent management professionals as to what constitutes workforce planning. To some, it’s mostly an administrative activity that reports on historical changes to headcount and forecasts likely changes based on historical trends (i.e., headcount planning).

To others, it is a more strategic effort designed to forecast talent needs, talent supply, and the ability of existing HR programs and activities to align the two.

The more strategic variant looks at both internal and external trends and predicts what will be needed to recruit, develop and redeploy “just the right amount” of talent to meet specified business needs. The definition of workforce planning I prefer is:

“Workforce planning is an integrated and forward looking process that is designed to predict (what, when, how much) will likely happen in talent management and then to provide action plans that will cause managers to act in the prescribed way. As a result of the planning process, managers will be able to avoid or mitigate people problems, take advantage of talent opportunities and to improve the “talent pipeline,” so that your organization will have the needed “people capabilities” required to meet your business goals and to build a competitive advantage over other firms.”

Goals of Workforce Planning

Once again, not everyone agrees on what workforce planning is, but generally speaking, there are eight major goals for workforce planning that everyone should agree make sense. These goals relate to an organizational capability to:
1. Reduce labor costs rapidly without negatively impacting productivity.
2. Identify and prepare leaders and managers for future openings.
3. Fill “sudden vacancies” in key roles immediately with capable talent.
4. Maintain a flexible contingent workforce.
5. Proactively move talent internally to maximize the return on talent.
6. Target retention activities on key talent.
7. Identify mechanisms to rapidly hire needed talent.
8. Increase the overall productivity of the workforce.

Key Programs within Workforce Planning

There is no standard array of programs that define every organizations’ workforce planning effort. No matter what you end up doing, your programs will largely fall into one of two areas.

The first area focuses on increasing organizational capability through talent, and common programs in each area include:

Forecasting the future needs, talent availability, and potential talent problems.
Succession planning and leadership development.
Forecasted recruiting plans.
Workforce innovation management.
Retention planning.
Immediate “backfill” planning (To fill sudden openings in key positions).
Internal re-deployment and “right job” placement planning.
Merger and acquisition integration plans.

The second area focuses on decreasing labor costs, and common programs in each area include:

Contingency/contract labor workforce planning.
Workforce outsource planning.
Reduction in force planning.
Benchmark Firms

In my experience, these are the firms to study:

Microsoft
KLA Tencor
Valero
WellPoint
U.S. Marines
Google
Eli Lilly
Qualcomm
Intel
GE
P&G
Booz Allen
Toyota
NASA
Starbucks

Workforce Actions That ‘Fit’ the Current Environment

The most effective workforce plans are not developed over a long period and then implemented all at once. Instead, while some plans are being developed, talent management leaders simultaneously take action to resolve immediate needs.

If your company is struggling in the current economic environment, five of the key action steps that you should consider immediately are listed below.

Action Step I – Labor cost containment/headcount reduction

I am not alone in forecasting the fact that the decrease in revenues that businesses are facing will continue for at least another year. Whether that actually happens or not, it’s always a good idea to prepare for the “worst-case scenario” and hope that your plan is not needed.

Start with position prioritization, a process that identifies which key positions, key individuals, and key skill sets will have the most business impact during the next two years. Once you prioritize, you can then focus on retention, redeployment, and development efforts on the most impactful positions.

A related step is to develop a process to effectively identify and “control” all forms of labor costs throughout the organization (that includes full-time employees, part-timers, contractors, consultants, strategic partner labor, and outsourced labor).

The next step involves developing the capability of reducing “labor costs” and headcount in the lower priority positions. That might include “mock layoffs” and designating lower priority positions as “contingent labor” positions. Other options to consider include labor wage arbitrage (moving labor to lower-cost areas) or outsourcing with contracts that allow you to rapidly reduce outsourcing costs as your needs decrease.

Action Step II - Increase the internal movement of key employees

As business needs change, it’s important to develop processes that don’t leave the internal movement of talent into the “right job” to chance (as most internal job posting system’s do). I recommend that you develop a proactive redeployment process and plan to move your top performers and highly skilled individuals out of less essential business units and into units and jobs where they can have a greater impact.

The goal is to make sure that you don’t have a “Michael Jordan” playing “baseball” within your organization, when his impact would be significantly greater if he was proactively moved into “basketball.”

The right job can be defined as having your top performers and highly skilled individuals:

Doing what they do best;
With the right skill set for the job and business unit;
With the right tools, resources, and motivators;
With the right manager; and
With the right teammates.

Action Step III - Increase the retention of key employees

Most organizations literally “forget” about retention during tough economic times because they assume that their employees will put security over external opportunity.

Unfortunately, that would be a mistake because the seeds for foundation of top performer turnover begin long before they decide to leave the firm. “How you treat your current employees now,” will directly impact their willingness to stay later on when the economy turns around. If your firm has been using hiring freezes, pay cuts, furloughs and layoffs recently, your key employees are likely to be frustrated and overworked. It’s also true that some firms have learned to continue hiring while simultaneously releasing employees.

This “churn” means that recruiters in some industries, firms and regions are still targeting your very best.

The best retention plans first identify the things that excite and frustrate your key workers and then provide a plan for increasing their level of excitement, challenge, learning, and opportunity within the firm.

The last but most important action step is to develop a “bad manager identification program” because bad managers are the number one cause of employee turnover.

Action Step IV - Reinvigorate your succession plan

If your firm has undergone layoffs, hiring freezes, and reductions in college hiring, you are likely setting up your organization for a future “talent pool gap.” What this means is that by failing to hire and develop talent over a period of even a few years, there simply won’t be enough available talent to fill future management leadership positions when growth begins. This will slow promotions because there just isn’t anyone internally to replace them. This will make the predicted “leadership gap” even worse.

The best course of action is adopt your own “churn” approach to maintain some minimal level of hiring and development to minimize the possibility of any future internal talent pool gap. A related option is to implement a talent SWAP approach, where you continually “troll” for top talent and then replace bottom and average performers only when you find an exceptional replacement.

Action Step V - Prepare to “explode out of the box”

The final action step is to develop a plan that enables your firm to have sufficient talent to enable it to “explode out of the box” the minute that your firm’s revenues begin to turn around. That means retaining your very best recruiters on staff and having them focus on developing Web 2.0 recruiting tools. It’s equally important to maintain the two most-impactful recruiting programs, employee referrals, and employment branding.

Develop a “boomerang” program that tracks and maintains a relationship with the very best employees you must release. The goal is to be able to almost immediately rehire some of the proven talent that you lost.

Final Thoughts

The basic premise of workforce planning is that it’s better to be prepared than surprised. It might seem counter-intuitive to try to plan during times where uncertainty is so high, but that would be a mistake.

During times of turmoil, almost any forecasting and planning will produce higher business impacts than reacting to unforeseen events without a plan. Fortunately, if you’re personally interested in workforce planning, you’re likely to find that no one actually has the formal authority to “own it” at the present time, so you can seize the opportunity and become known as the person who can see around corners. During turbulent times, you will find that no one will be considered more valuable than someone who is not “surprised” by the future!

Free Workforce Planning Handbook: If you are interested in reading in-depth about workforce planning, I have compiled a number of articles into “The Workforce Planning Handbook,” a 240+ page electronic book which is available at no cost for evaluation purposes at www.drjohnssullivan.com. .

Make Sure Your Facebook Profile Doesn't Lose You A Job

2009-02-25T09:16:00.000-06:00

Make Sure Your Facebook Profile Doesn't Lose You A Job

(Written on 2/24/2009 by Ali Hale. Ali runs Alpha Student, a blog packed with academic, financial and practical tips to help students get the most out of their time at university.)

Do you use Facebook? I do too -- and so do a heck of a lot of other people. Including my mom, and my former boss.

Employers are increasingly using Facebook (and other social networking sites) to check up on potential and current employees. People have been disciplined at work, have missed out on job positions, or have even been dismissed due to comments they've left on Facebook and similar sites.

In the credit crunch times, you can't afford to have anything working against you. Here's how to make sure your Facebook profile isn't visible to your boss - and how to clean it up if necessary...

Step 1: Check Your Privacy Settings

Do you know who might be reading your Facebook profile? Are you really certain that it's only limited to those people who you've accepted a Friend request from?

Log into your account, click the "Settings" button on the top left: then look at the "Networks" tab:Like me, you might well be in two or more networks - probably a school one(mine's Cambridge University) and a regional one (mine's London - so pretty huge). Have a quick glance at the numbers of people in those networks: 44 thousand at Cambridge and three MILLION in London.

Now click on the "Settings" tab, and on the "manage" link next to "Privacy Controls"Then click "Profile".

I've got three hundred or so friends on Facebook -- but my networks cover three and a half million people: all of whom are either graduates of the same university (so high on my list of potential networking contacts), or people who live in London (where, if I was looking for another full-time job, I'd be seeking employment).

As you can imagine, giving potential bosses (and your past professors - people who might write you a reference) access to your entire profile could be a no-no. I don't actually use Facebook a lot and the few obligatory drunken photos of me aren't particularly risque, so I'm not too bothered who can see my information. But if you pack your profile with rude quotes, if your status update regularly includes how drunk/stoned/lazy you are, and if the photos of you are ones you'd never want to be posted on the office noticeboard ... you might want to limit all of the information in your profile to friends only.

Why Should I Bother?

When an employer decides to check you out on Facebook prior to interviewing you, they won't be able to see your profile, photos of you, and so on. The first impression they get of you will be a professional one from the interview. Leaving your Facebook profile open to them is a bit like inviting them to come and nose around your home (when it's at its most untidy, with your stack of dodgy magazines left lying around...)

And if you doubt that employers do make these checks, here's food for thought from an article on "Facebook Can Ruin Your Life" from the Independent (a UK newspaper) - emphasis mine:

At Cambridge, at least one don has admitted "discreetly" scanning applicants' pages – a practice now widespread in job recruitment. A survey released by Viadeo said that 62 per cent of British employers now check the Facebook, MySpace or Bebo pages of some applicants, and that a quarter had rejected candidates as a result. Reasons given by employers included concerns about "excess alcohol abuse", ethics and job "disrespect.".

Do you want to risk missing out on your dream job because of your Facebook profile?

Step 2: Cleaning Up Your Profile

You might not want to limit access to your profile to only your friends, if you use Facebook for a lot of networking. Or, you might have a lot of "friends" who've added you because they read your blog, or because they knew you in kindergarten: you never know when one of these friends might be a useful ally, a potential employer or mentor.

And although your profile might not contain anything too dreadful (such as admissions of just how you ended up leaving your previous job), things which seem perfectly innocuous could still cause employers to decide to pass on you. The recruitment site www.onrec.com offers ten top turn-offs for employers who are performing discreet background checks using Facebook and similar sites:

Top ten turn-offs for employers on social networking sites:
1. References to drug abuse
2. Extremist / intolerant views, including racism, sexism
3. Criminal activity
4. Evidence of excessive alcohol consumption
5. Inappropriate pictures, including nudity
6. Foul language
7. Links to unsuitable websites
8. Lewd jokes
9. Silly email addresses
10. Membership of pointless / silly groups

And from the New Zealand Herald:
Interestingly, employers were not just concerned about alcohol or drug use, or inappropriate photos. They also used the information posted to identify those with poor communication skills, and inaccurately stated qualifications. Bad mouthing of former employers and colleagues was also identified as a concern in a large number of cases.

So it's worth cleaning up your profile to get rid of anything that's not contributing to the impression you want to give to employers, business colleagues and other contacts - anything which undermines or contradicts your personal brand.

I'm going to focus on two key areas that could be letting you down: "Your Info" and "Your Photos".

Your Info

Click on "Profile" in the top bar, then on "Info":Have a good read through what's listed there. You might want to update old information (I'm awful at doing this...) You may need to self-censor some of your "favorite music" or "favorite movies", if you have somewhat extreme tastes in either. Think about who might read your profile here: if you're going for a job with a right-wing political or charity body, a long list of slasher/horror movies and death metal music might not go down too well, but it could be just the thing if you're trying to land a job with a design agency that prides itself on "alternative" styles and creating shocking, engaging concepts.

Some quick tips that might help you are:

Get rid of any silly, profane or potentially bigoted (racist/sexist/etc) group memberships
Try to list some favorite books, not just films and music. Employers will be impressed if you look well-read.
Make your Quotations ones which are funny/profound, not all lewd jokes that your friends made after a few drinks.
Check for typos and spelling mistakes: these might seem unimportant to you, but they could be sending a negative impression to potential employers

Your Photos

Click onto the "Photos" tab. This will show everything which someone's tagged with your name. It's worth going through every single one, and untagging it if it's not something you want to be associated with! Again, use your own judgement here: an unflattering shot might be a disaster if you're trying to become a supermodel, but could be an actual asset if you're aiming for a career in stand-up comedy...

Click on the thumbnail to view a photo full-size, and click the "Remove tag" link next to your name (at the bottom, under the photo) to remove the tag - meaning snoopers can't find that photo of you:

For most of us, photos to look out for are:

Photos where you look drunk/stoned/comatose (even if you were "just caught at a bad angle, honest")
Photos containing a number of "unsuitable" looking friends
Photos where someone's put a really dodgy caption about you (sadly, employers may decide against you based not only on your profile, but on what your friends seem to be like).
Any photos containing evidence of illegal or semi-illegal activity - especially if your employer or school could penalise you for it

Why Should I Bother?

Current employers (or your university/school) may check up on your Facebook profile. The Independent article mentioned the unfortunate case of: Kevin Colvin, an intern at Anglo Irish Bank, who told his employers he had a family emergency, but whose Facebook page revealed he had, in reality, been cavorting in drag at a Halloween party.

Photographic evidence can also be used to catch student culprits:

Oxford University proctors disciplined students after pictures of them dousing each other in shaving foam, flour and silly string in post-exam revelry were found on their Facebook pages.

Step 3: Keeping Your Profile Clean

Once you've limited access to your profile and cleaned it up, you need to keep it safe for work. In my last full time job, my boss was "friends" with a number of my co-workers: this calls for considerable caution! If you have parents who are paying your tuition fees, you might want to make sure your Facebook account gives the impression that you're making the most of their money (rather than partying constantly...)

Some good points to pause for thought are:

When setting your status. Do you really want to declare that "John thinks work SUCKS" or that "Jane is thinking of throwing a sickie?" Even something a bit less obvious, like moaning about a difficult client, could rebound badly on you.

When uploading photos. Is it really something you want your office colleagues to see? Or your mum?

When commenting on other people's photos, wall, etc. Think about what your words might convey to someone who wasn't in on the joke or the conversation. Would you look bigoted, illiterate or plain nasty?

It's also unwise to use Facebook while at work - your actions are time-stamped, so if your boss sees that you've been updating your account at 11am when you should've been hard at work, he's unlikely to be impressed.

Why Should I Bother?

Thoughtless use of Facebook has led to people losing their jobs in the past (though this is usually due to admission of some serious wrong-doing, such as theft from the company). Even if you don't get sacked, you might have to face up to consequences.

I'll leave you with the cautionary tale of Kyle Doyle, a call center worker who pulled a sickie ... and bragged about it on Facebook:

Kyle Doyle, a 21-year-old resolutions expert for telecommunications firm AAPT, bragged about his day off on the social networking site while telling his employer he was away for "medical reasons".But he was found out when his boss spotted this Facebook profile update on the day in question, August 21: "Kyle Doyle is not going to work, f*** it I'm still trashed. SICKIE WOO!"

So ... head on over to Facebook, and check out the employer-friendliness of your profile. Let us know what you decide to change (or whether you look squeaky-clean already) -- but don't say anything too incriminating in the comments. Remember, bosses read Dumb Little Man too...

Google Ends Program To Sell Radio Ads: Exiting The Radio Biz

2009-02-13T10:08:00.000-06:00

As reported on the AllAccess website, February 12, 2009, "in the second major setback for GOOGLE’s ambitions to expand its advertising business beyond the Internet, the company said THURSDAY that it was ending its program to sell radio ads. THE NEW YORK TIMES reports the program, called GOOGLE AUDIO ADS, which it began in 2006, did not live up to the company’s expectations, and the decision to kill it may result in the layoffs of approximately 40 people, GOOGLE said in a blog post.The announcement highlights GOOGLE’s continuing efforts to cut costs and focus on fewer projects as its core search advertising business has slowed dramatically in the face of the recession. AUDIO ADS is the second offline advertising initiative that GOOGLE has shut down in as many months. In JANUARY, GOOGLE pulled the plug on its PRINT ADS program, which sold advertisements in newspapers."

While the demise of GOOGLE AUDIO ADS is certainly a disappointment for GOOGLE it is important to note that radio, if used correctly, is a wonderful tool to reach highly qualified Passive Job Seekers. As MITTONMedia has demonstrated to employers for the past 20 years and in several different countries and languages, radio provides a way to engage potential applicants and share effective hiring messages. One hiccup to be aware of, however, are the "special recruitment packages" sold directly by local radio stations. Most of these packages are designed to move unsold inventory in difficult to sell dayparts. Subsequently the packages, while appearing to be inexpensive, lack the Reach & Frequency required to deliver expected outcomes. Buyer beware.

Fearless Recruiting In Today's Economy

2009-02-12T09:02:00.000-06:00

The writer and historian, Michael Ignatieff, once wrote, "Living fearlessly is not the same thing as never being afraid. It’s good to be afraid occasionally. Fear is a great teacher. What’s not good is living in fear, allowing fear to define who you are. Living fearlessly means standing up to fear, taking its measure, refusing to let it shape and define your life."

I think we can all agree that there are high levels of fear in today's workplace. Employees worried about their jobs and what will happen if they get laid off. HR professionals in fear for their own positions. New graduates afraid they won't be able to find a job. Ordinary people afraid that the politicians will not be able to figure out an effective way to pull the country out of it's current economic nose dive.

So what are we to do? Ignatieff provides a hint when he says, "Fear is a great teacher...Living fearlessly means standing up to fear, taking its measure, refusing to let it shape and define your life." In other words, it is time to develop coping skills which will allow us to tackle our problems head-on and improve the chances for favorable outcomes.

Kevin Wheeler, President and Founder of Global Learning Resources, Inc., recently wrote an article entitled, Frame the Future You Want: 4 Things to Do Right Now. In it, Wheeler provided some of his suggestions as to how to cope and prepare for the future. Here are excerpts from the article:

Be Strategically Bold; Tactically Careful
The first step in dealing with the current situation is to sit down and plan out a 3-5 year strategic plan for the future of your recruiting function. Envision a new tomorrow where you can use the technology, processes, and learnings that have emerged over the past decade. Some of the technologies and tools include such things as social networks, blogs, wikis, and candidate relationship management tools. At the same time, you need to act right now with fiscal caution and show your management that you are a responsible manager. Your job is to balance today with several possible recruiting situations in the future.

Envision a New Workforce
The really best recruiting and talent leaders will sit down with management and have some open discussions about the desired workforce of the future. Every recession is an opportunity to recalibrate, learn and decide on what skills and competencies are most likely to be needed as we emerge from this recession. By anticipating needs, recruiters will have had an edge on any competition. Once you have even a blurry picture of the skills and competencies you may need, you can begin sourcing for these kinds of candidates and begin to populate a talent community with people whom you are getting to know and who are getting to know you.

Collaborate and Learn
Collaborate and learn from your peers and from experts in the field. This is a golden opportunity to attend webinars, which are mostly free, catch up on the blogs you have wanted to read but didn’t have time to, and make a few phone calls to friends, colleagues, and others you may have heard of.

Focus on Candidate Engagement
Carefully, authentically, and regularly communicate with all the best candidates you have. Experiment with tools like blogs, email, newsletters, Twitter updates – anything that might engage and stimulate the many potential candidates you should already have in your talent pools. If you neglect them or just tell them that there are no openings now, you lose a resource that you have spent lots of time and money finding and developing. Better to be honest with them, let them know exactly what your situation is, and keep them updated regularly.

Wheeler concludes his article by reminding us that economies will recover and the emerging world will be different and more challenging than ever. He urges us to use this precious resource of extra time wisely and well to frame the future we want.

Which is exactly what we are doing in our offices at MITTONMedia. On the surface, this would not appear to be the ideal time to be running a recruitment advertising firm! However, we believe in the classic axiom, "In chaos there is opportunity." By developing and refining our own coping skills, we are discovering all kinds of possibilities with employers. Some of our coping skills include:

Creating this blog, Recruitment That Works. Hopefully we will all learn new things along the way which will add to our knowledge base and improve skill levels in many areas.
Enhancing our Social Networking skills. To be completely honest, I should say improving MY social networking skills. I try to live by the rule of "always hire people who are smarter than you are." Which means I am surrounded by a wonderful staff of skilled "mentors" who enjoy opening my eyes to new possibilities. And and it has been an enjoyable experience to get "LinkedIn" and reconnected with former classmates and colleagues as well as being introduced to new business opportunities.
Developing new products and services designed to meet the needs of employers in the current economic client. For some employers we continue to plan and execute robust recruitment advertising programs both domestically and globally. For others it has been time to re-tool their Employer Branding and Employee Retention programs. We have also developed an anonymous online survey system to help employers gather the data they need to prepare for immediate and long-range strategic planning. There have also been numerous requests for the re-design of corporate career websites to better engage prospective applicants and the creation of customized Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) which do a better job of providing understandable data that allows for better tracking and more effective results.
Aligning ourselves with sister companies who do not provide the specialized services we offer and vice verse. By working together we find new opportunities and produce more complete customized solutions.
Collaborating with the academic community. For example, members of our staff met this week with 13 doctoral students and their professor in the University of Houston's Industrial/Organizational division of the Psychology Department. Historically there has often been a disconnect in the communication process between academics and those in the business world. In many cases instead of problem-solving together, each group continues work in isolation surrounded by their own filtration system of what is important and what is not. We hope to SHATTER that barrier in our corner of the world by collaborating with these fresh young minds and try to develop a few new strategies and tools that will help employers embrace what is waiting for them in the future workplace.

How about you? What kind coping skills are you developing and implementing in your office?