Survey: M.B.A.s Are The Biggest Cheaters. Grad students are quite the cheaters according to this CareerJournal.com article. More than half (56%) of M.B.A. candidates say they cheated in the past year. For the study, cheating was defined as plagiarizing, copying other students’ work and bringing prohibited materials into exams. This borders on the absurd: However, what’s holding many professors back from taking action on cheaters is the fear of litigation. How pathetic is that? If these students are willing to risk their academic career by cheating, what will they be willing to state on their resume once they join the work world?
Continue ReadingWalking With Dinosaurs
Desperately Seeking Sales Stars is a long article from Sales & Marketing Management’s online edition. There is much in this article to dissect, but I will focus on some key points. First, don’t do this: “There are various [hiring and assessment] tools out there, but I still tend to be a seat-of-my-pants guy,” says Maher, now a speaker and sales consultant based in Helendale, Calif. “I’ve been hiring salespeople for over thirty-five years…and if they can sell me on their skills, that’s perhaps the most impressive thing.” And that is perhaps the only thing they can sell. These dinosaurs are still amongst us and still believe their intuition is more… Read More
Continue ReadingGet your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
Another embellished resume survey is out from CareerBuilder. I assumed educational background was the most common lie, but that is not so according to their survey. Stretched dates to cover up employment gaps is the most commonly-caught resume lie, with nearly one-in-five hiring managers saying they have found this on a candidates application. Other top resume lies include: Past employers (18%) Academic degrees and institutions (16%) Technical skills and certifications (15%) Accomplishments (8%) As naive as it sounds, it would be a pleasant surprise to see a downward trend in the percentage of resumes with distortions in them.
Continue ReadingThe Job-Hopping Path
CareerJournal.com has to be one of the best sources for hiring information on the web. Today is no exception as they release this article – Job-Hop to the Top Of the Corporate Ladder. To cut to the quick of the article: If you want to make it to the top of the corporate ladder, job-hopping may actually be the only way to get there… Yup, this is a common strategy amongst the younger generation. We wrote about it in this article from earlier this year. Our perspective focused on the manager’s viewpoint while the CareerJournal article focuses on the employee’s viewpoint. First, from the CareerJournal article: Identify what you want… Read More
Continue ReadingA Good Time To Be In Sales
This article – The Hottest Industries For Sales Jobs – comes from the daily SM&M Magazine enewsletter. The market demand for salespeople is strong right now (we can attest to that fact) and is going to remain high: The trend for hiring shows no signs of stopping, according to Cindy Hazen, the founder of Sales Executives, a recruiting firm based in Nashville, Tenn. “We have been booming for the last two years in sales and project to be booming for the next five,” she says. And now for the hottest topic in hiring: The aging U.S. workforce is also changing the sales profession. Companies soon will need to replace a… Read More
Continue ReadingBest Buy’s Results-Only Work Environment
There has been a lot written on Best Buy’s Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) in articles and in the blogs. Everyone seems to have an opinion about this type of work environment and if it could work outside of Best Buy. One article specifically addresses the point of the adaptability of Best Buy’s culture in other companies. I found a couple of points of interest that I would like to share with you. “Best Buy’s culture is very young,” says Washington, D.C.-based flexibility consultant Paul Rupert of Rupert & Co., who has worked with clients ranging from Wal-Mart to Xerox. “They have a lot of significant managers who are still in… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Select Metrix Survey Says…
Ok, there isn’t a Select Metrix survey and Richard Dawson isn’t screaming “survey says” anymore. Nonetheless, most of the major job boards have a quarterly report that details the hiring landscape. Now this morning I see that some of the smaller boards are starting to release their own survey results. TheLadders.com released their Quarterly Executive Employment Outlook. We have minimal experience with TheLadders.com but I have read many good things about it. Their focus is on $100K+ jobs which puts a management-level focus on their results. From the press release: The survey also revealed a growing trend among senior level executives to search for new employment in order to accomplish… Read More
Continue ReadingActivist Shareholders…
are two words you don’t want to hear if you are CEO of a publicly-traded company. From Inc.com: At public companies, this [turnover] is reflected in the rise of activist shareholders, Jacovitz said, seen most recently in the public ousting of top executives at Hewlett-Packard. I think there may be one other slightly significant item that had an impact on the HP ouster. The article focuses on C-level turnover, which is on the rise. But I found these graphs towards the end of the article to be more notable: Meanwhile at the lower rungs of the workforce, small employers are having trouble finding qualified workers, according to the National Federation… Read More
Continue ReadingRecruiting Challenges of 2006
As I have said before, I am a sucker for statistics so I was drawn in to this comparison of 2005 to 2006 recruiting challenges companies are facing in Workforce Management’s recent newsletter. It is a survey of 1,000 hiring managers conducted by Robert Half International/CareerBuilder.com. Here are the stats: Recruiting Challenges -Percentage of hiring managers reporting primary cause behind the challenge in finding qualified workers for their firm. 2005 2006 Shortage of qualified workers 47% 52% Low recruitment budget 6% 5% Inability to offer competitive compensation 20% 21% Inability to offer career advancement 10% 8% Ineffective recruitment tools 4% 4%
Continue ReadingFaith in the Workplace
CareerJournal offers another well written article covering a topic of interest to us – Managing by the (Good) Book Some Mix Business with Faith. As Christians, we have been in many discussions about faith in the workplace. We are strong supporters of it and do not believe that there needs to be this distinct difference between work life and spiritual life. In fact, it is impossible to separate faith from any aspect of life. I was not aware of this group: And C12 Group — a network of executives, like Mr. Dillon, who meet monthly to discuss management trends and the tricky intersections of religion and commerce — has grown… Read More
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