From Foxnews.com’s How to Deal With the Salary-Expectations Question:

Don Sutaria, president and founder of CareerQuest, a staffing and training firm, advises job seekers to avoid offering a solid figure. “Don’t answer the question. Say, ‘I’ll expect the fair market value. Make me an offer and we can discuss it.’ Or, ‘Maybe you can tell me what your range is?'”

Sutaria adds that the best approach is to arm yourself with information. “It’s very easy to find now, based on the job title and industry, what your range is.”

This is a pet peeve of mine. I don’t think candidates get anywhere by being coy about their salary expectations. Candidates should know what the going range is for the position and it is wise for the hiring company to include compensation range in their ad.

We deal with salespeople so we have a bit of a myopic view, but the salary question is really a qualifying question. We look for salespeople who can qualify money, i.e. compensation, effectively. I would expect a strong salesperson to have qualified the compensation before going this far into the hiring process.

As a hiring company, it is wise to put the information out there. Watch how the salesperson handles it. See if they attempt to secure more compensation (nothing wrong with that approach). You should not bring in candidates without having a basic outline of their compensation expectations.

Basically, don’t let the money topic turn into a cat-and-mouse game between the candidate and the hiring manager.

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CNNMoney.com offers a fairly innocuous story: Survey: CEOs bullish on better economy. That is always good news and I am bullish along with them.

Small and mid-sized companies are optimistic about the U.S. economy’s prospects in 2007 on the back of brisk first-quarter sales and increased revenue, according to a survey released Tuesday.

But catch this little throw-away line from later in the article:

Twenty-one percent of all executives surveyed report having conducted Internet searches via News Corporation-owned MySpace, Facebook or Google when researching job candidates, the survey showed.

I found that number staggering – almost 1 in 4 executives are using social networking sites or search engines to research candidates. It is the right approach. Unfortunately, I would prefer to know how many executives used Google vs. the other sites. My hunch – of those 21%, the vast majority only used Google to research the candidate.

We’ve posted on this topic before– every candidate should complete their own online research regarding themselves. You never know what digital dirt is floating around in cyberspace.

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Monster Pairs With Tech Company to Increase Newspaper Ties:

Under the deal, newspapers using Adicio’s service will have several options to increase their ties with Monster, including having their own employment ads co-listed in Monster’s database and giving online advertisers an easy way to buy print ads in the paper.

A good move by the fading newspapers for sure. The traditional newspaper help-wanted ad is just about toast, as it should be. Surprisingly, we still encounter companies that only advertise in the local newspaper (at confiscatory rates). The trend is clearly towards a handful of major online job boards and a myriad of niche online job boards serving specific industries or positions.

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