Oregon Energizes Portland Homes
Probably no one has ever cared more about clean energy than yesterday. Except for today. Or tomorrow. Although everyone has heard of the importance of transforming the way consumers receive energy, the jobs to make energy cleaner are often elusive. Currently, it seems that Oregon is making steps toward improving the way people use power, meanwhile generating new jobs to bolster the...
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Outsourced Human Resources Survey
In the United States, many conversations about the economy have been devoted to trying to figure out how to get more jobs to stay within the U.S. borders. But who is this benefiting? Do customers notice any detrimental changes when services, such as insurance, are shipped overseas? Among the top U.S. employers that choose to outsource its demanding HR jobs are the Federal Government and...
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Slow Growth Combats Unemployment in the Southeast
It can be difficult to picture all of the unemployment around the country, and it may be most helpful to look at the areas that you recruit for in terms of geographic region. In cities in the southeastern states, many areas face higher unemployment than the national average. There were some exceptions. For instance, Durham-Chapel Hill, North Carolina, notorious for its well-educated...
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Ask Jill: Flap Your Yap More, Type Less.
Dear Jill, I've recently started my own, small recruiting firm. It's just me and I've hung my shingle. It's been a lot of fun, but I want to really start growing my business and create a stronger working relationship with the clients I currently have. What's your advice for maintaining and creating more business in this crazy industry? Sincerely, Wonderin' in...
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From Clerk to CFO: How to Get Ahead in Your Corporate Accounting Career
As an accounting clerk, it may seem like you'll never be able to move up to a CFO position, you can do it if you work hard and dedicate yourself to furthering your career. Many CFOs started off as accounting clerks and worked their way up, and you can too. The major factors to keep in mind when furthering your corporate accountant career are education and internal promotions. Education in...
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Getting to Know Your Clients and Candidates
Those of us who have been in the industry longer than the internet has been in the average home probably remember the notebooks and colorful sticky notes we had all over our desks. These essential parts of our recruiting arsenal were chalk full of tidbits of personal information about everyone we talked to on the phone or met in person. Part of being an executive search recruiter was acting like...
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Needy Neighborhoods Make Big Plans
"Top ten" list of neighborhoods in America dominate the news on the computer. Often the stories entice readers with pictures and statistics about areas where things seem better. Fiscally better or environmentally better. Educationally better or geographically better. But what about everyone else? What about everyone who is trying to improve the problematic places that they...
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Core Competencies: Not Just for Students Anymore
Teachers can regularly be overheard lamenting the standardized tests that measure core competencies. It's so difficult to measure what a student knows and what he or she needs to know. Not everything can be measured. Now, teachers are not the only ones needing to figure out how to work with these hazy competencies. The U.S. Department of Labor is encouraging many industries to adapt...
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Opportunities to Expand Enterprise Engagement
At the end of the day, a lot of people's efforts go into making a company run. What would it look like if all these people could connect with one another? How would a company change if all of the integral people considered the collective experience when making decisions? Some businesses have come to call this interdependence "enterprise engagement." Enterprise engagement is based on the...
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Six Reasons to Take a Job Aptitude Test
If you are looking to find the right job for your unique skills, talents and interests, you need to take a job aptitude test. These kinds of career tests can be invaluable to job seekers and established professionals alike because they show you how your personality can affect how you interact with others in a work environment and what fields or careers would be best suited to your unique...
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Equal Treatment For Recruiters and Candidates?
There are lot of articles out there on the web like this one which tell candidates how do best deal with recruiters. The article is a checklist of do's and don'ts for job seekers when they are working with a professional recruiter. It was a breath of fresh air to see such a popular site basically instructing candidates to treat their recruiter with respect. With the exception of the bullet...
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Advice for Experienced Project Managers for Furthering Their Careers
If you already have a few years' experience under your belt as a project manager, you may think you know everything there is to know about getting ahead in your career. Especially if you're established in your career as a project manager, you can get complacent and your career advancement can plateau. In order to get ahead, you need to stay fresh and passionate about your career. Don't...
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Rising Costs of Everyday Living
Are the salaries that you've seen offered to newly hired workers adjusted for the increasing cost of living? Over the last 12 months, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 2.1 percent before seasonal adjustment. Certainly a large culprit for the increase in daily expenses is the 11.0-percent increase in the energy index. The 2.3-percent rise in the food index...
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High Traffic Managed by CareerBuilder
In fifty-five countries, CareerBuilder might be able to help someone find a new job or start a new career. Likewise, it's helping employers in the recruitment process. CareerBuilder has long been competitive in recruiting, but its number of users has really spiked this year. In January 2011, more than 25.7 million unique visitors came to the CareerBuilder Network. If you begin to imagine...
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YouthGO Website Launches
Think of all the jobs you wish you understood how the hiring process worked . . . Imagine what would help you get a handle on how the alien process works . . . Part of the work of the recruiter is demystifying the route to landing a job in the field of work that you represent. The Department of Interior is trying to demystify the process of getting a job working outdoors in places like...
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Recruiter Career Development Planning
Whether you are an independent recruiter working from a home office, or a seasoned professional working at one of the top firms, failing to have a recruiter career development plan in place will mean that eventually, you'll get left in the dust. In order to stay on top of your game and advance in position or earnings, you have to continually challenge yourself to do more, and do it better than...
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Get to Know the Career Center
When you need to decide on a career, the career center is the best place to start your search. Whether you are unemployed or just graduating from college, the career services center can help you to sort out which careers are best for you. You can find a career center affiliated with local colleges, your local chamber of commerce, or even your local unemployment office. The career information...
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Resume Tips for Marketing Managers
As a marketing manager, you know how to get your company noticed in their industry. When you're searching for a job, you need to apply these skills to your resume. The job market is just that — a market, and you're the marketing expert, so put your skills to use in marketing yourself. Think of yourself as a brand and make your resume the best advertisement for your skills and you can get...
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Six Tips for Being a Better Software Development Manager
If you're looking to make your career in the IT industry as a software development manager, you need to take your project managing skills to the next level. You can understand everything about coding and software, but you are first and foremost a manager of a team. In order to excel at your job and move up in your company, you need to keep your software development projects running smoothly....
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How Real Women Get Ahead
Forget what you heard about "being one of the boys," "having it all," and "going for the jugular." Here is how real women get ahead. Get In Line According to Catalyst's 2002 Census of Women Corporate Officers and Top Earners, women fill less than ten percent of line positions held by corporate officers and just 5.2% of top earners at Fortune 500 companies are women. Is there a...
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Type I, II Errors in Recruiting
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."—Thomas Jefferson Which kind of error is worse: accepting an applicant you should have rejected, or rejecting one you should have accepted? If you work for a usually super-cautious and lobbyist-resistant organization like the FDA (Food and Drug...
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A Recruiter's Scales and Tools of Justice
"So, you know I'm not the most politically correct person..."—UCLA student's now-viral YouTube preface to the self-destructive proof How do you, as a recruiter, respond when you discover an applicant has made a fool of herself—or worse—on YouTube? This week, the mega-popular video posting site was abuzz with viewings of and responses to an inflammatory video posted by a sadly...
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Doing the Real Math of Recruiter Networks
"For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination." –Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of "Sherlock Holmes" Do you have any idea of how many 2-person contacts among your recruiter network are possible? More importantly, do you know the professional, social and IT implications of that...
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Career Questionnaire: How This Test Can Help You Find A Career
A career test reveals aspects of your personality and helps you narrow down your career choices, and sometimes a career questionnaire will be called a career or job aptitude test. Luckily, this isn't the kind of test you can fail. By taking a career test, you can find out how you work with others, what kind of work activities best suit you, what sort of work environment is best for your...
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Import Costs Steadily Advance
Unless you follow the prices of imported goods, it's tricky to know if the gas station or the supermarket is just trying to make a profit, or if they are adjusting their prices due to the rising costs of imported goods. Although there does not seem to be too much surplus money in American coffers, the cost of buying foreign products has risen substantially this past year. Are most of the...
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Growth at 250 Miles Per Hour
What if you could leave town at 250 miles an hour? The vision is captivating mayors across the country. Maybe states are pushed into action when they watched people struggle to evacuate regions of Texas in a sea of unmoving cars. Maybe states shudder at the rising costs of foreign oil. Or maybe states just want to do their part in curbing global warming. Whatever the case, many states...
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Proposal to Strengthen U.S. Recruitment
Although the United States seems to be focused on how to create new jobs and keep manufacturing jobs at home, the U.S. Department of Labor also is trying to see how it can ensure that Americans get every opportunity to land U.S. jobs. Immigrant and migrant workers are responsible for a huge percentage of work in the United States that U.S. citizens don't know how to perform or are unwilling to...
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Why You Should Take a Job Assessment Test
A job assessment test can seem at first a little like someone asking a child what she wants to be when she grows up, but the truth is that these tests can tell you more than that. Many job tests include questions about your working preferences, but also questions that give you insight into your personality. Your personality type has a great deal of impact on which types of careers you are likely...
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Use a Career Finder Test to Locate the Best Career for You
A career finder test helps you to determine which career options best suit your particular personality type. These tests use psychological criteria to help determine thought and feeling patterns from your answers. Questions in career path tests can vary widely from your preferences between statements to colors and shapes or even how you feel about certain types of careers. More and more...
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Porn and Jobs: Unlikely Parallels
Last week, ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, formally approved the formation of a separate domain extension for porn sites: .XXX. Wired Magazine reported on it and the decision has of course sparked outrage from both sides of the argument. If you are interested in online recruiting, this story may instead spark Déjà vu. The agreement to formalize the XXX domain...
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Career Pay: What You Need to Know to Choose a Career
If you are trying to choose a career that will reward you both personally and financially, you should do some research about your chosen career pay, benefits, education and advancement. While it may not be the most important thing in choosing a career, your salary is an important aspect of any job, so it's worth investigating before you set yourself on a certain career path. If you're...
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Learning How to Find the Right Career
When you first set out to determine how to find the right career, you may realize that there are a lot of options and paths. Many people spend their working life moving from job to job in an effort to figure out how to find a suitable career and finally locate the right profession for their interests and personality. If you start off with a clear career plan, you can save yourself time and...
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Make the Most of Your Meetings
Typical managers spend nearly 40% of their work hours in business meetings, not to mention the time spent preparing (and recuperating). A survey of business leaders showed: • 33% of time spent in meetings is unproductive • 75% of the respondents said it is "almost essential" to have an agenda, yet they use them only 50% of the time • Only 64% of meetings achieve their intended...
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Finding the Right Career Choice Test for You
A career choice test is designed to help you learn about how your interests and skills relate to different types of careers for which you may have an aptitude. Career aptitude tests assess your answers to specific questions and offer direction as to which careers may suit you best. As you decide which career options to pursue, you have many different factors to consider. The right career test can...
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Why You Should Take a Career Path Test
Although there is a lot of junky career fit tests out there on the web, taken together, they really might offer some helpful perspective. A career path test is one of the fastest and most valuable tools you can use for helping to determine the most appropriate career path for you. By investing just a short period of time, you can get results that will help enlighten you as to specific...
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Resources Available at a Career Services Center
When you are trying to find the right job or career path for you, a career services center can be an invaluable resource. Many community colleges and universities will have a career center on campus, and you should take advantage if you are a student in search of the perfect career. If you are a job seeker who isn't in school, you can also find many career centers in your local community....
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Finding the Right Career for You
There are few decisions that you'll make in your life that could have as big of an impact as finding the right career. Ending up in a job that you are not happy with can have a negative effect on a number of areas of your life. You can minimize the potential negative effects of working in a job that you don't enjoy by doing the appropriate amount of research, consulting with qualified experts...
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How Career Degrees Can Help You Get Your Dream Job
Landing some dream jobs requires a different educational path than other jobs, which is why many job seekers are actively pursuing career degrees to ensure that they wind up in a career that is rewarding in every imaginable way. It can be tough to get any job without higher education, but getting and keeping your dream job may require a specialized course of education that you can only get from...
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How a Career Information Center Can Help You Find Your Career
Finding the right career is an absolutely enormous decision, but by taking the time to visit a career information center, you can make that decision in a much faster and much more informed manner. A career center will give you access to a tremendous amount of resources that will ultimately help to facilitate this very important life decision. The career counselors and professionals at a career...
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Marketing Management Research and Analytics
When was the last time you stopped and evaluated your marketing campaign? Did you evaluate the results against your own goals, or your client or employer's goals? It is very easy to fall into the trap of targeting the same keywords as your high-ranking competitors. We all get caught up in the race, jockeying for position so that we can come out a nose ahead in the final stretch. But before...
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Why Projects Fail
One of the project manager's responsibilities is project completion. However, poor project management practices often lead to project failure, and accountability lands squarely on the project manager's shoulders. Every project is different, however, there are generalities that exist with every project that a good project manager should know and can use to assess the project's success or...
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Of Mice and Men
—Running the maze of HR behavioral psychology "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."—Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, thesis 11 "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I...
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Veterans Face Likely Unemployment
Etched in our collective memory is the image of the Vietnam War veterans who returned to the U.S. with limited access to physical and mental health services and help finding work. Now, a combination of factors have culminated in a whopping unemployment for veterans of more recent wars and military operations. That said, veterans from all the wars in recent history still face high rates of...
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Citadel's McGuire Becomes Business Liaison
Even in this economy, plenty of people probably wouldn't want to be responsible for bridging the gap between public and private sectors. Also, the idea of getting businesses' perspective on government policies sounds like a delicate situation-- not for those of delicate constitution. The U.S. Commerce Department today announced that Matthew T. McGuire will be joining the agency as Assistant...
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Microsoft and Manpower Envision Future Entrepeneurs in Africa and the Middle East
Young people in the United States are among those suffering most from unemployment. Opportunity just doesn't seem to be knocking as audibly as it used to. But as the revolution in Egypt demonstrated, unemployment among the younger members of the workforce is not merely a national problem. Early opportunities for work in a growing business help create a lifetime of possibility. This week,...
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Evaluating and Purchasing Recruitment Technology – A Vendor's Perspective
I was lucky enough to attend this Tuesday's #TChat (which you should attend if you are on Twitter) and there was a great conversation on "Best Practices Evaluating, Purchasing Implementing HR/Recruiting Tech Software". Long title, but a pretty interesting conversation between HR / Recruiting professionals with a few vendor opinions mixed in. I encourage you to read the recap...
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The LinkedIn Free Ride is Over
Let's face it, most recruiters love LinkedIn. There isn't any better source for professional data. In particular, if you recruit for professionals in such fields as technology, marketing, accounting, and other internal business operation roles, there is an incredible wealth of contacts available. The Way It Was Recruiters (and everyone else) reach out to contacts that they are not connected...
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Natural (Initial) Selection: The Job Applicant as Gladiator
"Nos morituri te salutant! (We who are about to die salute you!)"—gladiator salutation to Caesar in the "games" arena of the Coliseum "As a game it is comic. The woman sets up the competition, and while the two men are fighting, she decamps with a third. The internal and external psychological advantages for her and her mate are derived from the position that honest competition is for...
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