Top 30 Job Boards

Weddles.com has published their annual user choice awards. Here are their top 30 online job boards. Unfortunately their newsletter does not have a link but does have some interesting points worth noting: Nine of the sites are making their first appearance. Two-thirds are niche or specialty sites providing recruiting support in a specific career, field, industry, location or group. One-third are general purpose sites.

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What If All Your Senior Execs Left?

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… Read More

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The Informed Sales Candidate

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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Median Hiring Time Shortens Slightly

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… Read More

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Presenteeism and Flexible Hours

I had never heard of “presenteeism” up until a couple of months ago as I mentioned in this post. Now I encountered this SM&M article – Working While Sick. Top reasons for schlepping in when sick: I feel guilty for calling in; my workload is too heavy; I save my sick time for personal reasons like family emergencies, sick children, parent care issues and other unexpected events; and I try to have perfect attendance. “Schlepping in…?” Another new phrase for me. No real surprises in the reasons for coming to work sick. I did find this paragraph insightful: The study suggests bosses could do more to stem the trend. “Employees… Read More

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Is There An Editor In The House?

Full disclosure – I’m no economist. You wouldn’t have to know me long to realize that fact. However, our local Pioneer Press offers a quick read business article with a potpourri of short articles – Labor could reap rewards of political shifts. From the 1st story: Political shifts in the U.S., Europe and Asia increase the chances that 2007 will bring labor higher pay and stronger job protection after five years in which its share of economic gains fell….Wages in the dozen nations sharing the euro barely shifted last year even as the region, which expanded last week to include Slovenia, enjoyed its strongest growth in six years. “Economic data… Read More

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A Culture of Fun

From abcnews.com – How to Have More Fun at Work. This topic is going to become more common as Gen X ascends and Gen Y populates the workforce. Already we are seeing numerous articles on work/life balance enter the article sphere. I’ve worked for many Boomer managers who were suit-and-tie, get your work done leaders with no time for, well, fun at the office. At one technology employer, we had a dartboard and ping pong table in the lunchroom that was a huge hit. In the sales department, we would take a 15 minute afternoon break to go trash-talk each other while competing like we were in the Olympics. To… Read More

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Think Sourcing – Part 2

CNNMoney.com takes the today’s job report even further – Skilled worker shortage hurts U.S. The article’s opening sentence: The biggest problem with job growth right now isn’t too few new jobs. It’s too few skilled workers. And later: “It’s down to the nub already,” he said. “Supply and demand is completely out of whack.”Some experts say part of the blame for the slowdown in the economy in last year’s second half can be laid on labor constraints – companies couldn’t expand as fast as they wanted due to a lack of workers with the right skills. Notice that the comment is not a lack of skills, it is a lack… Read More

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Think Sourcing

From Foxnews.com – Economy Shrugs Off Weak Housing and Automotive Sectors As Employers Add 167,000 Jobs in December. We are encountering extended sourcing cycles right now due in no small part to compensation increases. Employers stepped up hiring last month, boosting payrolls by a brisk 167,000 and keeping the unemployment rate steady at a still historically low 4.5 percent. Workers’ wages grew briskly. The latest snapshot of the nation’s employment climate, released Friday by the Labor Department, showed that the jobs market ended 2006 on a strong note and provided fresh evidence that the troubled housing and automotive sectors aren’t dragging down employment across the country. We have implemented numerous… Read More

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Another Survey, Similar Results

Now HotJobs.com offers up their survey about job seekers in 2007 – Many workers to consider new jobs in 2007. No surprises in that headline. Their stats: The survey — in which nearly two-thirds of respondents (66 percent) said they would consider new job opportunities in 2007 — suggests the U.S. workforce is full of “passive job seekers” looking to improve their prospects.Optimism about new jobs in 2007 was also common among survey-takers, as approximately 70 percent believe opportunities for job seekers are better or the same as one year ago. These numbers are similar to SHRM’s results. There is a stark contradiction later in the article. Salary ranked as… Read More

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