Archive for the 'Employment' Category

Archives for Employment

Check out this funny, possibly prescient look at the latest Internet bubble. It’s amazing how many people - especially here in the San Francisco Bay Area - aspire to live the dream of building a social app and getting it funded.

Let’s hope the Web 2.0 bubble doesn’t burst too soon!   

 

Archives for Employment

You show up for a job interview at a company you care about. But the interviewer is ill-prepared, ill-mannered or clueless.

Do you take the job anyway if it is offered to you?

I would take a job if I liked the position, the upside and the company. That is, assuming that the interviewer I disliked isn’t going to be my boss or his boss.  But that puts me in the minority. Two-thirds of respondents to a survey of 6,000 staffing directors, hiring managers and job seekers, conducted by Development Dimensions International, a consulting firm, and Monster Worldwide, say they wouldn’t take the job. They would sooner walk away.

Would you say that these job seekers sound a bit brittle? If you’re called in for four or five or six interviews, aren’t you bound to dislike one or two of them? Unless you’re interviewing for a senior position, expect that one or two interviewers will go through the motions or be distracted by a pressing appointment.

Archives for Employment

Startups are finding it harder to launch with world-class talent and that is putting qualified job candidates in the catbird seat.

“Startups aren’t the destination employers for top talent anymore, and it’s a candidate’s market right now,” writes Dave Lefkow, CEO of talentspark, a Seattle-based talent management consultant. I followed up with Lefkow to find out why startups have lost their Mojo. Things have changed, he assured me: “It used to be the opposite - startups could take their pick of top talent.”

While I could find little consensus about what’s causing some startups to struggle for talent, the experts I interviewed agree that the fundamentals aren’t getting much better for startups despite several recent high profile acquisitions (You Tube and MySpace in a class by themselves) and the recent influx of venture capital and private equity investment. Salary surveys indicate that startups pay lower wages than established firms and big riches are mostly elusive.

Archives for Employment

Gap Inc.’s disclosure that it lost a laptop containing the personal information of 800,000 job applicants leaves me wondering what on earth they were thinking.

• Why were these applicant records stored on a laptop rather than accessible over a virtual private network (VPN)? Is convenience more important than privacy?

• The data was lost by an unnamed third-party provider. What service were they performing with the laptop?

• The data was unencrypted, apparently against Gap policy. Why?

• Some percentage of the applicants reportedly provided social security numbers. If you were going to analyze the applicant data, why would you also need the social security numbers?

• Do they know who stole it or why? Was it a former employee of the third-party provider? An investigation is underway, but it’s unclear whether law enforcement is involved.

Archives for Employment

Though the Bush administration touts a low unemployment rate, these are subpar years for job creation in America. The August jobs report, the worst in four years, marked a rare net decrease in the number of employed workers.

For an economy that creates about 50,000 to 100,000 more jobs each month than it loses, the announcement that the net number of employed decreased by 4,000 jobs in August clearly riled investor - and worker - confidence too. Wall Street didn’t see this coming; which, as we know, only makes matters worse.

The Economist magazine this week finds the American economy guilty of all charges: “Whatever your opinion of the health of America’s economy was a couple of days ago, it should now be a lot gloomier.” Should it?

Archives for Employment

The exodus of job listings from print to online highlights an inexorable trend that bodes well for job seekers and employers but is moving newspapers to the endangered species list. Searching for jobs, rather than browsing them, is the way of things in 2007.

Within a few years, however, job seekers will mostly become the hunted rather than the hunters.

Archives for Employment

There’s a pretty good package of articles in Inc. magazine on the topic of small businesses “going global.” The article I find most insightful is an American businessman’s view of Vikas Goel, CEO of eSys Technologies of Singapore.

Setting aside the fact that Goel never really struggled and became an overnight, global business sensation, the well-educated, Indian born leader has shown in eight years that he is one of the world’s most innovative businessmen. In 2000, his first year of operations, Goel’s component and hard-disk drive distribution firm became a profitable US$130 million business. Flash forward to present day: eSys is a $2 billion company operating in 33 countries.

Goel, the go-getter, is 36. His company has introduced a US$264.00 PC that is considerably less expensive than many other hardware vendors are able to produce.

What’s most impressive about Goel’s eSys company is the way it operates in the black with exceptionally low profit margins buoyed by high volumes. Not many $2 billion companies can boast having only 1,100 employees.  And, yes, there are job openings at eSys.

The one part of Goel’s near-legendary business success story that is somewhat in dispute is whether he arrived in Singapore “with no capital and no contacts,” as told by Jack Stack, CEO of SRC Holdings, who co-authored the Inc. article. Goel, who has received several awards for his entrepreneurial acumen, may actually have been wealthy and well connected according to at least one of his award sponsors in Singapore.

Goel’s next goal? Outsourcing. Watch out IBM!