Employment Digest

Keep up to date on articles and news and subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

New ideas for older workers

Year by year, the percentage of “retirement age” workers in the labor force is inching higher.

About one in seven persons over age 65 now is employed full or part time, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This is at a time when many companies — usually for cost-cutting reasons — are encouraging early retirements.

If you attend job transition support groups or meet with displaced workers at outplacement seminars, you’ll see a lot of over-50 workers.

Many of them want to return to work. They are financially and emotionally unable to accept long-term unemployment.
Read the rest of this entry »

Talent Shortage At The Helm

Information technology leaders will be among the most sought-after executives this year, and nearly one in five recruiters expects a shortage of CIOs, CTOs, and other top tech execs, a new survey says.

“The IT market has come back with a vengeance this year,” says Allison Cheston, chief marketing officer at the Association of Executive Search Consultants, which conducted the survey of 221 recruiters. “Two years ago, these jobs were very hard to come by,” she says.

Hiring has been fueled by some of the big tech vendors, most notably Google. “There’s a lot of competition for top talent, and as this kind of hiring goes up, there’s an overall shrinking of available talent,” she says.
Read the rest of this entry »

Employers Favor Internet Recruitment

According to a new study by Booz Allen Hamilton, 51% of new hires in 2005 came about through the Internet, and only 5% through newspapers.

The study was commissioned by the DirectEmployers Association, a nonprofit consortium of US employers focuses on Internet recruiting solutions, and included data from 73 leading US employers.

Employers’ own Web sites were the top source of new hires, followed closely by referrals from current staff, each accounting for about one-fifths of new hires in 2005. A host of other channels, including job boards, search firms and campus recruiting, accounted for remaining newly hired employees. Referrals were the top source, in terms of volume of candidates, by a large margin.
Read the rest of this entry »

Volunteering can help you find jobs

One of the most difficult aspects of being unemployed is the time spent cooling your heels. If you’re used to working, sitting around the house waiting for someone to call you about a job can drive you nuts.

But what if there were a way to keep busy, make valuable contacts and even help your fellow man? There is, and it’s called volunteering.

Volunteering can give you those important contacts you need in a world where it’s often not what you know, but who you know that helps you get a job.

When you’re considering volunteer work, think about what skills you have that would be valuable and what abilities you might like to acquire.
Read the rest of this entry »

Hints to help ease your 21st century job search
Q. I’m in a good job now. But, at 37, I see a new generation of competitors over my shoulder – clinging to their iPods and IM-ing each other all day – and I’m wondering about a new generation of technology in the job market. In job hunting, what must I know to upgrade as the world moves on? — W.V.P.

A. Think back to when, a dozen years or so ago, some of your co-workers were amazed – or disbelieving – that people like me were insisting the Internet had made it possible to put one’s resume in the hands of employers all over the country … instantly! From those first stirrings of job-search revolution in the early 1990s, astonishing wonders have come along that once again are reshaping the way people and jobs find each other – especially over the past couple of years in a time frame some call “Web 2.0.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Clients Claim They Didn’t Get Job Help They Paid For

Finding a job is hard enough on your own. Some people go to others for help. Clients of two companies that claim to help job seekers say they didn’t get the help they paid $6,000 for.

The NBC 10 Investigators recently went into the Edison, N.J., office with a former client of Michael Pozd, a principal player in a company called Career Developers Consulting Group, and an undercover camera and things became pretty hot, pretty fast.
Read the rest of this entry »

Internet job hunt may have just gotten harder

Do you know what the OFCCP is? It is the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, and that little taste of bureaucratic alphabet soup is a part of the Department of Labor’s Employment Standards Administration. The OFCCP’s job is to ensure “that employers doing business with the Federal government comply with the laws and regulations requiring nondiscrimination.” In essence, that makes the OFCCP one of the many departments that exist within the government to monitor activities and make sure things are done properly and fairly. A noble goal, to be sure, but the OFCCP has distinguished itself with a new rule going into effect this week regarding the tracking of those who apply for jobs on the Internet, and it may have repercussions for anyone using electronic means to search for a new career.

[OFCCP] regulations require covered federal contractors and subcontractors to collect information about the gender, race and ethnicity of each “applicant” for employment. The final rule published today modifies OFCCP applicant recordkeeping requirements to address challenges presented by the use of the Internet and electronic data technologies in contractors’ recruiting and hiring processes. The final rule is intended to address recordkeeping requirements regarding “Internet Applicants” under all OFCCP recordkeeping and data collection requirements.
Read the rest of this entry »

Face it: E-mail can’t land the job

“We never talk anymore.”

No, that’s not your significant other talking; it’s corporate America.

According to a survey developed by OfficeTeam, a staffing agency that specializes in placing administrative professionals, executives today spend less and less time conversing with colleagues by phone or in person, and much more time online.

Only 13 percent of managers polled use the telephone as their primary means of communication — down from 48 percent five years ago.

Just 14 percent rely on face-to-face meetings, compared with 24 percent five years ago.

Instead, e-mail has become the most common form of dialogue at work — 71 percent, up from 27 percent five years ago.

So what does this have to do with job-searching? Glad you asked.
Read the rest of this entry »

Job networking works, when you work it correctly:

Matthew Bernius hit many low points on his way to snagging that coveted job.

It began when Bernius returned to Rochester last summer after graduate school at the University of Chicago. He had just finished a yearlong educational leave from Eastman Kodak Co., and his one-time employer wasn’t taking him back.

So he applied for coffee shop jobs, hoping to make some money while he hunted for full-time work.

“I was told I didn’t have the right skills to make coffee,” recalled Bernius, 31. “I didn’t quite know how to react to that, especially after spending the amount of time I did in graduate school.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Cold calls can bring hot jobs

Phoning strangers out of the blue to make an employment connection is a tactic job seekers can’t hang up on, Marjo Johne finds. When Maria Kim returned to Toronto after a two-year stay in England, she had no job and no prospects.

But rather than fire off a bunch of résumés and wait for employers to call her, she picked up the phone and began calling companies she wanted to work for.

“I’d introduce myself to the head of whatever division I was interested in and ask if they would be available for an information session, where I could learn more about them and their company,” recalls Ms. Kim, who worked in London for a marketing firm. “About 60 per cent of the time, people said ‘yes.’ ”
Read the rest of this entry »