Happy Birthday to Jennifer

She may be absent from the blog for a while, but the reason this blog even exists is Jennifer and it's her birthday today. So join me in wishing her a very happy birthday! She puts a smile on all of our faces so hopefully today, she's all smiles as well. And she's a great boss. In her honor, we have 4 great links for you:

First, we head out of the United States for David Duarte's best Out of Office messages (H/T Wendy). Now by "best" I don't mean best for your employees to use at work...I mean best as in funniest. Let's hope that you've never e-mailed an employee and had any of these bounce back at you in your Outlook inbox.

FoundValue has 10 jobs that they promise are better than yours. Are they right in that assumption that these are dream jobs compared to the ones you currently hold?

Yahoo! hotjobs and Forbes have the worst words to say at work. I caught myself saying to someone "I'll try to get back to you sometime soon," and quickly reversed that course of action after reading that list.

Lastly, Yahoo! News has the story of how much people will pay...to work for free! On Monday, we'll look at an article from the New York Times which debates if that's legal or not (the working for free as part of a internship part...not the ridiculous auctioning)

Getting Rid of the Performance Review

I wrote earlier this week about changing the performance review scale, but the Wall Street Journal via Yahoo! Finance has an even better idea: eliminate performance reviews completely (H/T Sarah). The article's opening is a great call to arms:

It's time to finally put the performance review out of its misery.

This corporate sham is one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities. Everybody does it, and almost everyone who's evaluated hates it. It's a pretentious, bogus practice that produces absolutely nothing that any thinking executive should call a corporate plus.

And yet few people do anything to kill it. Well, it's time they did.

Just because everyone hates it, though, doesn't mean it should go. The ability to evaluate employees keeps everyone honest--including the reviewer, the reviewed, Human Resources, and upper management. Everyone hates it because it isn't fun to judge other people but like Valentine's Day reminds us once a year to say "I love you" when we should be doing it every day, performance reviews reminds us once a year that we should be giving constructive criticism, even though we should be doing that all the time as well. The key is to do it in a way that achieves a maximum comfort level for everyone involved and gets to a positive result.

Back From Vegas With Great Links

Just got back from a quick vacation in Las Vegas with a picture from the top of THEhotel at Mandalay Bay from my Blackberry (to the right) and some great links (below):

-Yahoo! HotJobs starts us out with some truth about resume lies and some advice to people looking for jobs about how to make the truth sound better (H/T Wendy). There is some good advice in here for Human Resources about how to treat resumes and how other people define "embellishment".

-This is not something for Texans to be proud of from WFAA:

In one of the largest civil rights investigations ever undertaken in Texas, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission declared that at least 100 African-Americans worked in a hostile environment and were subjected to racial graffiti, nooses, and symbols of hate while employed by Turner Industries in Paris, Texas.

-Harvard Business Review asks if all employees are knowledge workers? One bolded point from the article: "Perhaps the single greatest lesson from Japanese auto manufacturers is that all employees are ultimately knowledge workers and that the role of the firm is to both encourage and support problem-solving by all employees."

-Lastly, Simply Hired Blog has the winners of their Dream Job Contest. I like the most creative: "Rainbow Chaser and Pot of Gold Location Expert, also skilled in the identification of Silver Linings"

Unemployed...and Frustrated

On this Good Friday, we bring you some good links that are not so good if you're unemployed:

It's frustrating when you go through a few interviews and don't get a job offer. But one person went through 52 interviews at Goldman Sachs and got only one job offer according to Here Is The City (H/T Wendy). Wow

How many people are taking jobs right now they are overqualified for? But it doesn't mean they aren't really happy to be employed according to the New York Times (H/T Sarah and picture from the NYT article)

There is one time when "any work" is worse than "no work": unemployment benefits and the Christian Science Monitor via Yahoo! explains (H/T Wendy)

And Tom Delay, you have egg on your face after saying that people are unemployed because they want to be. Details of that non-PC and non-true statement from Huffington Post via Yahoo! (H/T Wendy)

Deception, Credit Checks and the Receptionist in the Job Search

A few older articles to get out of the way today, but that doesn't make them unrelevant!

From a mid-February New York Times report, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued seven job placement operators for deception. The victims were innocent people just looking for a job and part of an expanding array of fraudulent job placement and work-at-home schemes. This is sad news for the job market where cruel people are taking advantage of the desperation of people to get hired.

From earlier this week a Yahoo! News and AP report says that states may ban credit check on job applicants (H/T Wendy). As we said above, it's hard enough to get a job in this economy, but now job applicants are facing another hurdle in the form of bad credit histories. From the article:

Sixty percent of employers recently surveyed by the Society for Human Resources Management said they run credit checks on at least some job applicants, compared with 42 percent in a somewhat similar survey in 2006.

Employers say such checks give them valuable information about an applicant's honesty and sense of responsibility. But lawmakers in at least 16 states from South Carolina to Oregon have proposed outlawing most credit checks, saying the practice traps people in debt because their past financial problems prevent them from finding work.

And lastly, from the New York Times "Corner Office" is a C.E.O. that says that one of the things she looks for in a job candidate is how they treated the receptionist when they came in for the interview: "I’ll want to know if someone comes in and if they weren’t polite, if they didn’t say, “Hello,” or ask them how they were. It’s really important to me." Good advice!

Industries Hit Hardest by Job Losses and States With the Highest Taxes

Yesterday we talked about the hiring freeze thawing and the Wall Street bonuses growing, and today we have two more topics to discuss with you.

Investopedia via Yahoo! Finance has an interesting look at the three industries hardest hit by job losses and the job loss market as a whole (H/T Wendy). The amazing part is that since I started working in my current role in December of 2007, unemployment has almost doubled from 7.7 million Americans to 14.8 million. To make matters worse, the article says that the number of workers unemployed for 27 weeks or longer has soared to a record 6.3 million people. And 661,000 have just dropped out of the labor market entirely. These people don't count against the unemployment rate which means that even more people are not working than the unemployment percentage shows.

The three biggest industries hit by jobs losses are construction, transportation and warehousing, and manufacturing. There are only a few industries which have seen an increase in their employment. The temporary help services industry saw a bump as well as health care and the federal government (mostly due to the upcoming census). This proves that while jobs seem to continually be disappearing, looking in the right places shows that hiring is occurring.

Our second article, from The Guardian, looks at the actual tax rates of different US states (H/T Jay). It starts with the premise that many people are complaining at California taxes but California comes in 6th at an average of 10.5% on an average per capita income of $47,706 (2008). The real problem is in the Tri-State Area. New Jersey is #1 with 11.8% on $56,116, New York is #2 with 11.7% on $55,032. Connecticut is #3 with 11.1% on $63,160, with Maryland and Hawaii rounding out the top 5 (unfortunately I get taxed by both New York and Connecticut...eek!).

Massachusetts surprised the author of the post (and me) by coming in at 23rd. The South, while a lower tax rate in many states, also has a lower average per capita income. Wyoming seems to be the best bet to keep the most of your high salary with only 7% on $53,163. Some things to think about when relocating for a job!

Picture from Select Leaders

$25 an Hour Jobs

Great post from The New York Times Freakonomics Blog (and a true, but funny ending as well):

Yahoo! recently ran a story entitled “Surprising Jobs that Pay $25 an Hour.” The author writes,

But you don’t necessarily need a post-graduate degree to qualify for a job that pays several hundred dollars a day. While it may be true that helicopter pilots, high-tech administrators, and civil engineers earn $25 an hour or more, so do many other professionals in careers that require only an associate or bachelor’s degree to leap onto the playing field.

The jobs listed are electrical and electronic engineering technician, human resources recruiter, paralegal, respiratory therapist, police officer, advertising sales agent, and interior designer.

One profession that certainly qualifies, but was wrongfully omitted from the list: street prostitute.

One of the jobs on the list as Steven Levitt points out? Human resources recruiter! So there may be money in your job, yet.

Other great Freakonomics posts for HR to read:

• Italian workers who were able to trade overtime
• A look at what has happened to wages in the past 3,000 years.
• Levitt tries to determine the economic value of popularity
• If you give your employees a raise, will they start watching TV in the bathroom?
• Levitt reviews Michael Lewis' NFL book Blind Side and salaries in the NFL
  

Enjoy!

Filling The Gap, Job Descriptions, Obama's Healthcare Plan, etc.

We're reading all the articles so you don't have to...

-BizTimes talks about Human Resources filling the gap with interim executives

-Vault has job descriptions. They're not as good as the ones we do at Astron Solutions.

-WebProNews says that Yahoo! is putting a new spin on the recruiting process by launching pay-per-candidate for their Yahoo! HotJobs

-Workforce Management talks about how an economic crisis is creating an opportunity for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). "As companies slash payrolls and tighten their belts in other ways that squeeze employees, the association is trying to make itself indispensable to HR professionals."

-Lastly, the Chicago Sun-Times talks about President Barack Obama being pressed on healthcare during his ABC special by an Human Resources executive:

One questioner -- Marisa Milton, vice president of health care policy for the HR Policy Association, a public policy advocate for human resource executives -- said that "other industrialized nations provide coverage for all their residents" with "high quality care" without spending more money.

"A lot of those countries employ a different system than we do," the president said. "Almost all of them have what would be considered a single-payer system in which the government operates what is essentially a Medicare for all."

The president said he didn't think it wise to attempt to "completely change our system root and branch" since health care is one-sixth of the U.S. economy. It "would be hugely disruptive," he said, arguing that citizens would be forced to change their doctors and insurance plans "in a way I'm not prepared to go."

End-of-life issues were raised as well; right now it is estimated that nearly 30 percent of Medicare's annual $327 billion budget is spent on patients in their final year of life.

Jane Sturm told the story of her nearly 100-year-old mother, who was originally denied a pacemaker because of her age. She eventually got one, but only after seeking out another doctor.

"Outside the medical criteria," Sturm asked, "is there a consideration that can be given for a certain spirit & and quality of life?"

"I don't think that we can make judgments based on peoples' spirit," Obama said. "That would be a pretty subjective decision to be making. I think we have to have rules that say that we are going to provide good, quality care for all people.

"We're not going to solve every single one of these very difficult decisions at end of life," he said. "Ultimately that's going to be between physicians and patients."

The Financial World and the Job Market

It'll be interesting to see the fallout in the job market from the current financial crisis, but some effects are already seen...

The first article is from the New Jersey Law Journal and probably won't work for most of you...but the important part is just to read the title and then find a way to get your hands on the article: Pru Appeals in Suit Charging it Paid Off Plaintiffs' Lawyers: click here

Next, an interesting lesson from Yahoo! News via the AP on what can happen with mergers/takeovers and job layoffs as HP surprises Wall Street in this article: click here

(H/T to Wendy for those)

The Wall Street Journal (with a nice, new look) continues with an article sure to cause a little head scratching to most of America...the Executive job market is still healthy: click here and a video here

Next from the Journal is a very interesting article about trying to get Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's employees to stay as the mortgage giants go through some difficult times: click here

Going quickly to the Boston Globe's, Boston.com Monster.com HiringHub HR Center HR Blog, word that this isn't your father's job fairs--something new is in the air: click here

Lastly, in an article form the Journal, we learn that GMAT scores are being canceled...a lesson to employers that sometimes test scores aren't really all that reliable: click here

We've also added a great new feed from the WSJ on our right: click here

Girls Gone Wild

A title sure to get some people's attention...

But we start off with an article from Fistful of Talent which has the author's worst interviews of all time including a story about a girl who went a little wild...and told about it: click here

Also from Fistful of Talent, an interesting article about Brett Favre wrecking a succession plan in Green Bay: click here

Next, Employee Evolution asks if it's worth it to blog about Generation Y? click here

McArthur's Rant rants about how to deal with Negative Nancies as Managers: click here

And an interesting Yahoo! Hotjobs Q&A about whether it's OK to lie on a job resume: click here

(Credit to Jim Stroud and Industry Radar for some of these fine Humpday links)

How to Make 2008 Great---Employment Branding

First we link you to our Astronology for this week about Employment Branding: click here

If you're not already signed up for Astronology, make sure to click on that link and do it ASAP

Next, from Yahoo! Finance and US News and World Report, an article about what to do with a boss like Michael Scott from The Office: click here

And here's something that would eternally annoy all your co-workers: click here