Steven Rothberg over at CollegeRecruiter.com provides a money quote in his post Why Today’s College Students Need Not Fear Exploding Offers. Obviously, Steven’s market is geared towards college students, but this paragraph is applicable to all businesses when it comes to hiring (emphasis mine): The recession of 2001-03 was worse than the recession of 2008 and employers are looking backwards in order to better understand what to do as they move forwards. Although many and perhaps most employers have scaled back their college hiring plans for this spring, there’s little talk of exploding offers. More employers realize that recessions are tactical problems and college recruiting is strategic. You don’t solve… Read More
Continue ReadingHow NOT To Describe Your Education
This sentence is from a cover email regarding a sales position: I am educated up to an MBA. I still am not sure what that means.
Continue ReadingGen Y Retention Strategies That Work
Yesterday I posted on this “determine your own vacation time” approach to management. It is totally foreign to me. Today I come across another company with the same approach. This HRE Online article – In Their Own Words – contains comments provided by Gen Y workers on a recent survey. First the vacation comment (my empahsis): CarMax “Time away from work policy instead of vacation and sick days. There is not a set amount of time you can take, you just work it out with your manager. The office’s atmosphere is very bright and open. Management is very accessible and will answer any questions that you have. They encourage management… Read More
Continue ReadingFuturistic Jobs
I have a weakness for future predictions of jobs, markets, trends, etc. This particular one is from the Job Market Weekly email (sorry, no link). Technology will create new jobs as well. Out-of-work “top gun” pilots may find jobs captaining dirigibles, says Joel Barker, author of Five Regions of the Future. A relic from the 1920s and 1930s, these rigid blimps will revolutionize travel in the developing world, he adds. Hollywood’s woes may be solved by holography. Since consumers are perfectly happy watching DVDs at home on big flat-screen televisions, box-office receipts have slipped and movie moguls are scrambling. But eventually, Barker says, film companies will start producing three-dimensional holographic… Read More
Continue ReadingBright Spots In A Bleak Economy
The economy is slow, but this is a different economy than we have encountered before now. I suppose this is always true since the economy is completely dynamic so no two points in time are ever the same. Nonetheless, abcnews.com offers us this story – Job Winners and Losers in Hard Times – which has an excellent bit of information regarding this economy: In an environment of a sluggish economy and rising unemployment, analysts said there will be some safe harbors where job demand will keep growing. First and foremost in this group will be health care, where the demographics of an aging population mean the demands for medical care… Read More
Continue ReadingWho Needs Validated Assessments?
Especially when you can simply look at someone’s shoes. This Yahoo News story has to be an April Fool’s joke: Mindset Media, a media company that examines personality traits of different consumers, found that people who buy more than three pairs of sneakers a year are 61 percent more likely to have the qualities of a modern leader. These qualities were defined as having ideas and vision, and a style with others that is both inclusive and decisive. The survey of 7,500 people, using market research group Nielsen’s online panel, found multi-sneaker buyers were 50 percent more likely to be very assertive and 47 percent more likely to be spontaneous.… Read More
Continue ReadingReturn To Thoughtful Communication
Here is an interesting article from Selling Power regarding predicting trends of the future. Specifically, this one caught my eye: We’ll return to real, thoughtful communications. In this era of text messaging, blogging, and email, we’ve become lazy in our communications. We tend to dash off notes without proofreading them. We tend to use generic catch phrases like “seamless solution” and “superior service” that sound good but don’t really mean anything. Why do we do it? Because it’s easier and quicker than taking the time to think, write, edit, and edit again until our message is clear, compelling, and precise. There’s going to be a backlash against today’s generic, rushed… Read More
Continue ReadingRecareering Baby Boomers
The retiring Boomers and the lack of X’ers to replace them is a well-documented problem in the labor force. The Herman Trend Alert speaks to this problem, and more importantly to a solution, in their latest newsletter: Many Baby Boomers retirements are, in fact, often “recareering” instead. See our previous Herman Trend Alert http://www.hermangroup.com/alert/archive_5-23-2007.html. All of the major players: Adecco, Manpower, Kelly, and Spherion now offer their clients the options of rehiring their retired employees as “consultants”, thus protecting them from certain legal liabilities. Many recareering Boomers are looking for project-based work, giving their employers the advantage of not hiring them as full-time, permanent employees on the payroll. The bottom… Read More
Continue ReadingOnline Job Ads Decrease
No question the economy is slowing down so this article from Forbes.com is not surprising: The Conference Board found there was a total of 3,733,200 online-advertised job vacancies, a 0.6% decline from March 2007 and the first year-on-year fall in total numbers since the index began in 2005. The Board said the decline reflects a slowing in annual growth in 42 states, with 14 states showing negative growth. Yes, I know, the index is only a few years old, but there is enough data to show the present-day trend. Here is some anecdotal information from the survey: The online-ad volume in California dropped 118,000, or 19%, below its March 2007… Read More
Continue ReadingSimulation Training And Hiring
Lee and I recently attended certification training for one of the assessments we use and found the training to be quite good. The part that made it memorable is the fact that we were asked to use the assessments in real-life scenarios. That type of training sticks, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Simulation Shows What It’s Like to Be Boss: That realistic feeling is a big reason companies such as NetApp use simulations to help train managers in complex subjects such as strategic thinking. Experts say adults absorb information better when they use it, not just hear it. There is a quote from earlier in the article that is… Read More
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