Tory Johnson at abcnews.com provides all the background you will ever want on National Boss’ Day. In case you were wondering, here is the explanation the definitive authority on this holiday:

The goal? To express “appreciation for the ways bosses manage people, respect for their handling tough workloads, and gratitude for the coaching they provide.”

That “definitive authority” was Hallmark Greeting Cards.

I haven’t received a card yet.

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Ok, there isn’t a Select Metrix survey and Richard Dawson isn’t screaming “survey says” anymore. Nonetheless, most of the major job boards have a quarterly report that details the hiring landscape. Now this morning I see that some of the smaller boards are starting to release their own survey results.

TheLadders.com released their Quarterly Executive Employment Outlook. We have minimal experience with TheLadders.com but I have read many good things about it. Their focus is on $100K+ jobs which puts a management-level focus on their results.

From the press release:

The survey also revealed a growing trend among senior level executives to search for new employment in order to accomplish their career goals. Sixty-three percent of job seekers said they are not likely to achieve their career goals with their current employers. And 75% report that they are more likely to attain career satisfaction at a different company.

If you have read our blog for any amount of time, you know that these numbers are fairly consistent no matter what the source. It seems that 66 to 75% of employees are looking at other opportunities, whether it be a casual awareness or a full-fledged search. This ear-to-the-tracks approach to furthering one’s career is the modus operandi for the current Information Age.

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Ok, I thought I would offer an anecdote from earlier this week. One of our customers has an unrefined sales rep who works hard but lacks many skills. He had a customer make a design change to a part that was going to cause an 18% increase in the price of the salesperson’s service.

His call to the customer to announce this news:

“Hello customer, how are you today? Wait, I shouldn’t ask you that until I tell you that our price is going to increase 18%. I am sure our competitor will be able to be well under that price if you have them quote it. Now how are you doing?”

I kid you not – he still got the order from the customer which is more of a testament to the company than it is to the salesperson.

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are two words you don’t want to hear if you are CEO of a publicly-traded company. From Inc.com:

At public companies, this [turnover] is reflected in the rise of activist shareholders, Jacovitz said, seen most recently in the public ousting of top executives at Hewlett-Packard.

I think there may be one other slightly significant item that had an impact on the HP ouster.

The article focuses on C-level turnover, which is on the rise. But I found these graphs towards the end of the article to be more notable:

Meanwhile at the lower rungs of the workforce, small employers are having trouble finding qualified workers, according to the National Federation of Independent Business, a Washington-based lobby group with over 600,000 members.

Of more than 150,000 small businesses polled in September, more than 55 percent said they hired or tried to hire at least one new worker, the group reported on Monday. Of those, a full 80 percent said they found few or no qualified applicants, the group said.

“The availability of qualified applicants is on the rise again as the number one problem facing small-business owners,” William Dunkelberg, the group’s chief economist, said in a statement.

Ok, the economist’s quote is poorly constructed, but I believe he is saying that the supply of qualified applicants is moving up as the number one issue for small businesses. I note this in regards to my post from last week where attracting skilled staff was only number 10 on the list. That ranking certainly seemed low based on the small business owners with whom we work.

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According to Inc.com, if you live in Baltimore, you spend more time in line than any other major metropolitan city.

With an average wait time of 5 minutes, 13 seconds, Baltimore ranked last in the comparison of customer service speed in the 25 most-populous U.S. cities.

I suppose what really matters is what you are waiting for. Personally, I would wait 10 times that long for crab cakes in that town. Now for the coup d’gras:

Phoenix had the shortest average wait for service at 3 minutes, 5 seconds. Residents of Portland, Ore., finished second, with an average wait time of 3 minutes, 30 seconds, and Minneapolis came in at third place, with 3 minutes, 41 seconds.

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The month of October is Clergy Appreciation Month and dates back to 1992. Hallmark has a page giving details of this celebration. Here is some background from their site:

The mission of Clergy Appreciation Month is to uplift and encourage pastors, missionaries and religious workers by providing physical, emotional and spiritual support. There are more than 1 million full-time Christian ministry workers in the United States, including 350,000 senior pastors.

So make sure to thank your pastor, reverand, preacher and priest for all they do.

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There may be no more popular buzzword in employment articles today than “self starter.” The majority of ads list this trait as required for the position. We can objectively measure it.

Self-Starting Ability
A measure of a person’s ability to initiate tasks in order to fulfill responsibilities and commitments along with the degree to which a person will maintain that ability in the face of adversity.

A salesperson with strength in this capacity is adept at synchronizing their internal drivers (e.g., level of initiative, persistence, goal focus, etc.) and directing these combined abilities toward a common goal or task. They are also capable of marshalling these strengths on their own without external supervision or motivation.

A salesperson with weakness tends to require greater external influence to accomplish their goals or become distracted from the target more easily than someone with a strong aptitude.

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As I have said before, I am a sucker for statistics so I was drawn in to this comparison of 2005 to 2006 recruiting challenges companies are facing in Workforce Management’s recent newsletter. It is a survey of 1,000 hiring managers conducted by Robert Half International/CareerBuilder.com. Here are the stats:

Recruiting Challenges -Percentage of hiring managers reporting primary cause behind the challenge in finding qualified workers for their firm.
2005 2006
Shortage of qualified workers 47% 52%
Low recruitment budget 6% 5%
Inability to offer competitive compensation 20% 21%
Inability to offer career advancement 10% 8%
Ineffective recruitment tools 4% 4%

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We have kicked around a pricing model in jest but it conveys a point. One part of our business is assessing candidates for many different positions but sales is our specialty. We have clients that do their own sourcing and interviewing and then use our online assessments to measure the candidate’s sales skills, aptitudes, motivations and style.

That being said, here is what the Rock Star and I were discussing:

• If a company locates a sales candidate they feel is strong, we assess them and confirm that they are strong, the fee is $500.
• If a company locates a sales candidate they feel is strong, we assess them and reveal that they are weak, the fee is $1,000.

Now, I don’t believe for a minute that this pricing model would fly in the marketplace, but you see the logic behind it. We posted many times about a salesperson’s ability for building rapport during an inperson interview. Many salespeople have that bonding ability and nothing more. Yet they have learned to use it to land a new job and then “schmooze” their way through 1 to 2 years before moving on to another opportunity.

Imagine if a hiring manager becomes smitten with a schmoozer candidate. Isn’t it worth more to a company to keep that sales candidate off the payroll?

As I’ve said before, the best time to get rid of a bad salesperson is before you hire them.

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CareerJournal offers another well written article covering a topic of interest to us – Managing by the (Good) Book Some Mix Business with Faith. As Christians, we have been in many discussions about faith in the workplace. We are strong supporters of it and do not believe that there needs to be this distinct difference between work life and spiritual life. In fact, it is impossible to separate faith from any aspect of life.

I was not aware of this group:

And C12 Group — a network of executives, like Mr. Dillon, who meet monthly to discuss management trends and the tricky intersections of religion and commerce — has grown from three sets of 12 Christian business executives in 1992 to nearly 550 members today.

Judeo-Christian principles provide a bountiful resource for directing sound business doctrine. An example that I have personally used was articulated in the article:

Mr. Dillon became uncomfortable with the company’s habit of paying its bills a few weeks late, even as it pushed customers to pay on time.

I have worked for companies in the past that have completely subscribed to this hypocrisy. One of the small companies that I worked for required that the salespeople collect on past-due invoices. However, the company purposely delayed paying its bills per the owner’s directive.

One part of the article I found amusing was this sentence:

And lawyers say it’s generally not a problem to run a public company on faith-based principles, as long as the executives make those principles clear to shareholders, and make sure they don’t follow faith to the exclusion of investor interests.

Apparently lawyers have the final say about matters of faith in the work world. Some people would find irony in that statement (I put that in here for some of my lawyer friends). Nonetheless, it is a fair article that discusses a topic that all-too-often is viewed as taboo in business.

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