What If All Your Senior Execs Left? from BusinessWeek addresses a topic we have been shouting from the mountaintop. First, a great point that I haven’t considered:

Organizations today are running with lean, highly productive staffs. While such streamlining is great for budgets, the fact that workplace productivity levels have continued their upward trajectory has created a dearth of available talent.Losing multiple key executives within a short time can tear a hole in the business plan and hurt both a company’s bottom line and stock price.

Companies are highly streamlined today which makes every position important to overall corporate success. Technology continues to drive productivity increases, but I believe the impending Baby Boomer exit will create too great a gap to overcome. Of course, necessity is the mother of invention so some technological breakthrough is probably on the near horizon. Or perhaps a dramatic rise in offshoring to countries with expansive labor forces.

The approach addressed in this article is the solution “workaround” we endorse – hiring the right talent from outside your industry. We even wrote an article on the topic. The author of the BusinessWeek article seems to agree:

Where should companies find this diverse group of talented people with appropriate knowledge and experience? Companies should be careful not to try to replicate the current senior team. Instead, they should consider creating a “new team” made up of internal promotions and a few hires from competitors, with the majority coming from outside the industry and outside the hiring company’s comfort zone.

Amen to that. The best return on your investment is to get ahead of your competition and start implementing this approach now. Stop recycling mediocrity by only hiring from within the narrow scope of your industry. Instead, follow the author’s advice:

The solution, then, is to act now. Evaluate your current team. Identify the holes and the available pool of qualified talent. Determine the core competencies you will need, and consider where you will find diverse talent. Build a leadership program to bring the talent on board, and fund the program for success. Then recruit the best talent in the market.

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Our friends over at Hidden Business Treasures have paid us a nice compliment by posting about The Hire Sense last week.

They allowed us to be a guest writer on their blog and we offered up this post – Searching for the Sale. The topic of our post is the importance of finding sales candidates who possess the web-searching skills needed to prospect today. We provide 3 techniques for determining a candidate’s information literacy.

If you are interested, please follow the link and leave a comment for them if you are so inclined. While there, take a look at their consistently thoughtful posts.

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3.7 months. According to this CNNMoney.com article, that was the median time it took to hire in the fourth quarter. As long as that may seem, it trended down from third quarter which is a good sign.

U.S. workers needed less time to land a new job in the fourth quarter of 2006 than they did in the prior quarter, according to a survey released Thursday.After hitting the highest level in more than three years in the third quarter, the median job search time fell 12 percent in the fourth quarter to 3.7 months, according to the survey by Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

While fourth-quarter job search times improved, they were still 19 percent higher than the 3.1 months recorded during the same time a year earlier, the Chicago-based employment placement and tracking firm said.

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Welcome to our new RSS feed. If you receive this post in your reader, you have successfully updated the new link.

If you haven’t considered an RSS reader…

What the Heck is RSS?

And why should I care?

Good questions. First, here’s why you should care.

Unlike getting website updates or ezines by email, RSS feeds give you absolute, 100% complete control over the situation.

You don’t have to reveal your email address. If you want to stop receiving content, you don’t have to request to be ‘taken off the list.’

One click, and poof the subscription is gone.

Plus, since there’s no email address involved, there’s no way a publisher can sell, rent or give away the means to contact you.

That’s right, no more spam, viruses, phishing, or identity theft. And best of all, no reason to put yourself at the mercy of the publisher’s intentions.

You won’t need to suffer through the legalese in the privacy policy (if there is one) looking for loopholes that will send you deeper into inbox hell. No more setting up dummy Hotmail accounts “just in case.”

Again, if you don’t like the content, you can make it disappear as fast as you can change a TV channel. With just one click.

Pretty cool, huh?

That is cool! Umm? What the heck is RSS?

Alright! Now we’re ready to get to that part.

RSS is a simply an Internet technology standard that allows busy people to receive updates to web-based content of interest.

You might have figured that much out by now. But basically, that’s the essence of an RSS feed – you subscribe and then receive new content automatically in your feed reader.

If you actually want to know how RSS works, click here.

What the heck is a feed reader?

You may already be using a form of feed reader, and not even realize it. If you use personalized home page services like My Yahoo or My MSN, you’ve got RSS capabilities built in. That’s how syndicated content like news, weather and stock quotes appears on your personal page. You can also add content from any blog or other site that uses RSS to provide updates.

Other web-based tools are primarily dedicated to feed reading only. One of the most popular web-based feed readers at this point is Bloglines, and it’s also free and easy to get started with.

If you use the Firefox browser, you can also receive RSS feeds from your tool bar by using the Live Bookmarks function. The latest version of Internet Explorer (IE7) has this feature as well.

Finally, there are desktop-based feed readers. These function somewhat like an email program for feeds. Examples include Newsgator and Feed Demon.

If it sounds complicated, it’s really not. And things will get even easier when the next version of Outlook integrates feed-reading capabilities. So, you’ll have the same convenience that email subscriptions offered in the old days, without any of the terrible consequences of giving out your email address to potentially unscrupulous characters.

Sounds good. So how do I subscribe to a Feed?

First of all, look for the subscription or feed options (some bloggers make this difficult for some odd reason). You might see a variety of buttons (amusingly called chicklets).

If the site you want to subscribe to uses FeedBurner to aid in the subscription process (like The Hire Sense and many other popular sites), you’ll likely see the standard RSS icon, which takes you to a page that will give you an array of the most popular feed readers so you can select yours, and you’ll go from there. This is the new standard RSS icon:

Sometimes there will be a chicklet for your particular reader right on the blog that will take you to the appropriate subscription page. You may see these (among others):

Finally, you may also see little orange buttons that say XML or RSS. Often these chicklets will take you to a page that looks like code gibberish. In this case, you simply cut and paste the page URL from your browser window and manually paste it into your feed reader subscription function.

Hopefully this last method will soon disappear, never to be seen again. (It will be removed from The Hire Sense shortly)

In summary: RSS solves BIG problems.

So there you have it – RSS is being adopted at a phenomenal rate, because it’s a good thing for everyone.

The benefit to readers is obvious. And it’s good for publishers too, because we want to make sure that people feel comfortable subscribing, and that our message is not nuked by an overzealous spam filter.

If there’s anything here that is confusing, or you have a question, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help!

(Thanks to Copyblogger for a helping hand with this tutorial)

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Last reminder – our new RSS feed will be up before 10:00am CST this morning. You will need to paste the new feed link into your RSS reader if you use RSS to subscribe to The Hire Sense.

The new feed link is http://feeds.feedburner.com/selectmetrix/gZUw

Please contact us directly – info@selectmetrix.com – if you have any difficulties.

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