TV Shows Discussed At Work

This seemed like a good Friday topic from Working Wounded: List of the Week Look who’s talking €¦ What TV shows are most talked about at work. “American Idol,” 44 percent “Grey’s Anatomy,” 28 percent None, 21 percent “CSI,” 11 percent “House,” 9 percent From: Spherion I particularly enjoyed “None.”

Continue Reading

A High-Maintenance Generation

According to this quick blurb from the Pioneer Press – Talkin’ ’bout Y Generation (emphasis mine): Generation Y is coming of age, and “manage” – as in telling them what to do and how to do it – appears not to be in their vocabulary. Gen Y was born between 1977 and 1995, and Fortune (June 4) says the 20-somethings really are different. “This is the most high-maintenance work force in history. The good news is they’re also going to be the most high-performing,” the magazine reports. … Companies that want to attract the stars of this highly competitive generation must be creative. At JPMorgan, for instance, job candidates can play… Read More

Continue Reading

Sales Requires Mobility

What is your company doing to accommodate remote employees? That question is becoming more common in each subsequent interview I run with our customers. Sales has always been an “outside-the-walls” position, but now that truth is being taken to new levels. From Managesmarter.com’s Get Competitive, Get Mobile (added emphasis): The study polled more than 500 executives globally on whether or not their organizations had implemented mobility initiatives and how often those initiatives were being used. The results show that business mobility is now implemented in most companies and executives report that one fifth of their employees are mobile, spending at least one day a week working outside the office. Reasons… Read More

Continue Reading

Where The Tech Jobs Are

CNNMoney.com’s 10 great job markets for techies uses job listings from Dice.com to determine where the overall highest number of tech jobs (programmers, network administrators, etc.) are located.  Their findings: 1. New York/New Jersey – 11,044 postings 2. Washington, D.C. – 7,971 postings 3. Silicon Valley – 6,755 postings 4. Los Angeles – 4,546 postings 5. Chicago – 4,241 postings 6. Boston – 4,167 postings 7. Philadelphia – 3,156 postings 8. Dallas – 3,084 postings 9. Atlanta – 2,987 postings 10. Seattle – 2,309 postings I wouldn’t call it scientific, but it is certainly indicative of the tech boom that is underway.  We have done some work recently finding salespeople for… Read More

Continue Reading

The Boomers Will Not Retire…Sort Of

The Baby Boomers are huge in numbers and quickly heading towards retirement.  Generation X is a small generation in terms of numbers.  This disparity is the basis for the impending worker shortage.  Ah, but the market often has methods for correcting and adapting itself. The Herman Group’s latest newsletter (sorry, no link) offers a look at one adjustment that is underway: The good news is most Baby Boomers simply don€™t want to retire, at least not in the traditional sense. They are much more interested in re-careering. Here€™s why: *22 percent are bored with the mere thought of retirement. They don€™t want to sit on front porch in the rocking chair… Read More

Continue Reading

Online Job Posting Trends

Weddle’s offer’s a bi-weekly newsletter about Internet resources for recruiting & HR professionals. In a survey conducted between March 10 and May 10, 2007 they asked the following question: Of the openings you’ve posted online, what level were they at: Hourly positions? 7.7% Entry-level professional positions? 23% Mid-level professional positions? 46.2% Senior-level professional positions? 7.7% Managerial positions? 11.5% Executive positions? 3.9% It is interesting that Mid-level professional is the largest group followed second by entry-level. I believe we’ll continue to see these two categories grow in the coming years. It will be interesting to watch the growth of niche job boards and of the networking sites liked LinkedIn, Jigsaw and… Read More

Continue Reading

A Bigger Monster

We are awash in a sea of change in the sourcing options available to hiring companies.  Yahoo! news reports in Monster signs up more newspapers that Monster.com has moved into more locally-owned community newspapers. Community Newspaper Holdings has 93 daily newspapers and is based in Birmingham, Ala. Under the deal announced Monday, each of the 80 new sites cobranded sites with Monster will be tied to a daily newspaper from Community Newspaper Holdings. It appears that Monster, CareerBuilder (even though they are owned by 3 newspapers) and HotJobs are attempting to displace the long-standing newspaper employment classifieds.  Whether this will be sustainable in the long run is difficult to predict. I am… Read More

Continue Reading

That Giant Sucking Sound From The Newspaper

The Pioneer Press offers up an utterly worthless piece of agenda journalism regarding CEO pay.  At the risk of upsetting the Red Bird, I have pulled some quotes from You’re fired! Take these millions and go (all my emphasis): If 3M ever fires George Buckley, one of Minnesota’s highest-paid CEOs, there is one detail Buckley won’t have to sweat: health insurance. The Maplewood-based manufacturer will kindly pick up much of the tab for Buckley’s health care for two years as part of the $38 million goodbye he’ll get on the way out the door. (ed. – we learn later in the article that this “supersized pay” health care equals $28,430) Buckley’s… Read More

Continue Reading

A Quick Lesson On Millennials (Gen Y)

ABCnews.com offers a comprehensive article explaining some traits of the Millennial generation – Meet the New Millennials. The lengthy article provides many different insights into this generation. Here are some anecdotal highlights: “We recently had to tell a young woman employee that this was not an underwear optional workplace,” he told ABCNEWS.com. “This generation needs to be deeply coached about wardrobe, and a lot of them are used to getting up at 10 or 11 a.m. Forget about them showing up to work at 8 or 9 a.m.” “They grew up with an ‘everyone gets a trophy’ sense of entitlement,” he said. “They are members of a generation that thinks… Read More

Continue Reading

The Selling CEO

CareerJournal.com’s Company Leaders Are Spending More Quality Time With Customers covers a timely topic in today’s market – CEO’s directly involved in the selling process.  We have seen this change in our mid-sized customers for the past few years.  This article provides a good example – the CEO for Intel getting involved in a large deal with Apple: He heard grumblings that this change wasn’t possible — at least not anytime soon — but Mr. Otellini pushed ahead. “Instead of saying no, we can’t, let’s say yes and figure out how,” he recalls telling his senior team members. He won them over and soon had a new packaging design to… Read More

Continue Reading