Archive for March, 2009

Archives for Salary

The economy is destroying jobs and retirement plans, but if you stretch the concept of good news, employers are coming to the rescue with talk of small pay raises this year.

On the whole, I wouldn’t spend that expected 3.5 percent pay hike in Bermuda or Hawaii. Suffice to say, that merit pay increase isn’t keeping up with price of milk and sugar, much less gas.

Watson Wyatt Worldwide, a global HR consulting firm, surveyed 1,389 employers globally, including 276 in the U.S., said that employees who exceed expectations may expect to receive between 4.2 percent to 6 percent merit pay increases, so maybe that’s an incentive for you to work harder.

Laura Sejen, global director of strategic rewards consulting at Watson Wyatt, claims that “Employees will view holding merit increase budgets steady as a positive sign that will help them offset inflation and higher energy and food costs.” I beg to differ.

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Archives for Recruiters

If you pulled a B or C average in college, good luck getting an interview with Google or other intellectually rigorous global employers. But according to Alan C. Guarino, an author and recruiter, companies that overemphasize academic performance systematically overlook valuable talent.

“Success, defined as business achievement, comes to a wide range of people. For some, it has little correlation to their classroom successes,” writes Guarino in his new book, Smart is Not Enough!

Of course, the prevailing wisdom is that academic performance is a proxy for the ability to learn new skills, even though it’s no guarantee of future success. Are there a lot of underachieving former valedictorians in our midst? (A brief look at some of the research in this area shows mixed results with regard to linking academic performance, academic testing and future success.)

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