Archive for September, 2008

Archives for Social Media

One of the joys of social networking is reconnecting with people you barely knew 20 years ago but would like to know better now.

Like most people in my age bracket, I have held lots of positions. In my case, in publishing, I survived stints at CMP, Ziff-Davis, IDG and McGraw-Hill.

I’m occasionally invited to real-world reunions for one defunct magazine or another. These are strange gatherings because while there is often a friendly exchange of business cards, what happens down the road is usually nothing whatsoever.

Enter Web 2.0 and social networking. These days you can quickly form or join a social network made up of other former employees. Think of these cyber-gatherings as another form of an alumni network, even if your corporate exit may have been involuntary – without so much as a farewell lunch at T.G.I. Friday’s.

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Archives for Perfect Job

Here’s a profitable way to mine your static social networking connections. Morgan Stanley’s Rainmaker program takes mid-career professionals who travel in upscale social circles and trains them to become financial advisors.

Rainmaker’s stated “goal is to transform you into a successful financial advisor running your own profitable practice in just three years.”

On the other hand, in three years you could become a PhD, an MBA, go to med school or become a master chef at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. But being a stockbroker is kind of cool. If my stockbroker is reachable by phone past market close on the west coast it’s only because there’s an office party that day or he’s required to be there. Otherwise, one assumes, he has a regular 2 p.m. or 3 p.m. tee-time.

The payoff is appealing.

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Archives for Perfect Job

Have you ever wandered into an office staffed by 55 employees who are mostly 24-years-old and in their first job out of college? It might be kind of fun, right?

And in this particular office above Union Square in New York City, they throw the occasional staff party billed as the “Thursday Night Hang.” The workers in this firm called Connected Ventures run three pretty cool companies: a site called CollegeHumor.com; a t-shirt company called Busted Tees; and a video community site that predates YouTube called Vimeo.com.

One evening at a company party, they recorded the following video, for fun, on a single take. It wasn’t intended to be a recruitment video; it just turned out that way. Note, it takes about 40 seconds or more to get grooving and some of the words in a song you will hear are mature. Don’t worry, nothing else about the video is mature, it’s all in fun.

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Archives for Biggest Employers

When I get a warm and fuzzy feeling about a bank it’s usually because I’m watching a tearjerker TV commercial. Some bank has rebuilt a blighted neighborhood or loaned a struggling mom the dough to build a bakery.

Until recently, I never saw a commercial that made me want to work for a bank. Between the mortgage crisis, the falling dollar, bank consolidations, and layoffs, the financial services field seems just as appealing to me as military service.

Upon learning that Bank of America had acquired Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, for the bargain basement price of $4 billion most people would have called their stock broker or sussed out the situation on Yahoo! Finance. Not me, I checked out B-of-A’s careers site.

So why is this banking giant tugging at our heartstrings? Here’s something you might not have considered in view of its layoffs: the giant bank is talent constrained.

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Archives for Career Advice

It’s that time of year.  No, not the time to take off because you are so worried about the stock market.  There could be New Year planning, creation of new visions and missions and bonus distributions to name a few.  Just when you want to coast through Q1 is the time when you need to suck it up and ask yourself, “Should I be worried about my job?”

The answer is, yes.  We don’t need to turn the magic eight ball over and hope for “Answer hazy, try again”. The answer is unequivocally, yes.

If the heads of Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns and Citigroup can go, so can you.  Then think about the stock market craziness, talk of recession, the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, oil prices and your unemployed neighbor and well, that crazy thought about job security should enter your mind.

Should you be worried about your job?  The answer is yes.  If you are asking yourself the question, the answer is certainly, yes.  We are all on probation every day.  These days that probation just seems a little more real.  Wake up!  As we dive into this New Year, all of us should take stock and wonder if we should worry.

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Archives for Research

Lost in the heated rhetoric of the endless immigration debate is the basic fact that people want to go where there is work and governments want to regulate the matter.

In a tight labor market it’s not surprising to see workers relocate for the right opportunity. In a recent study Manpower reports that 78 percent of the workers it interviewed worldwide said they would be willing to relocate for a job. Nearly 37 percent said they would leave their home country. Of those willing to move, two in five said they would do so permanently.

But what happens to the countries and cities these migrating workers leave behind? Does brain drain cause economic pain? Apparently, yes, many employers around the globe are feeling that the global talent market is working against them, at least according to a new study.

Internationally, 31 percent of employers express concern about the global migration of talent, according to a Manpower study of 28,000 employers in 27 countries. The same study reports that only 15 percent of employers feel that government and business are “doing enough” to stem the flow of talent to other countries.

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