August 6, 2008
Fantasy for an August day: HR in the South Pole
Posted by Maureen Crawford Hentz at 2:34 PM
Ever have one of those bad days where you really think about chucking your company and packing it in? I saw a job today that really tickled my fancy: HR person at the South Pole. Listed on SHRM, the position is for Raytheon Polar Services and is a real true job.
Sitting here in August, I imagine running HR from a nice cold igloo. Ah! Nirvana. Then I remember that it's always cold there. At least here I can put on a sweater or go outside to warm up from our Antarctic air conditioning.
Then I think how nice it would be to just work with a small group of people, who are probably all sincere scientists with no complaints at all. But then I remember that I work with a nice group of sincere scientists who have limited complaints and who all go home, far away from the office, at 5pm. I imagine in Antarctica, they just snowshoe off to the next igloo and I see them at dinner, and then at breakfast, and then at the office.
Still, it's a good job for somebody and I think Boston.com readers should go for it. After all, we have been through enough frozen winters. Go to rayjobs.com and look for req number TSC110693. After you get hired, we'll want reports from your igloo.
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July 22, 2008
NYTimes admits that women don't just opt out for children
Posted by Diane Danielson at 10:08 AM
The NYTimes ran an article today, "Women Are Now Equal as Victims of Poor Economy". Despite the misleading title (women are usually affected worse than men in poor economies), the article discusses a new study that shows that women are leaving the workforce in a poor economy due to the same reasons the men do: jobs are eliminated; can't afford to do same job for half the wage; or can't find equivalent work.
The women, in sum, are for the first time withdrawing from work with the same uniformity as men in their prime working years. Ninety-six percent of the men held jobs in 1953, their peak year. That is down to 86.4 percent today. But while men are rarely thought of as dropping out to run the household, that is often the assumption when women pull out.
“A woman gets laid off and she stays home for six months with her kids,” Ms. Boushey said. “She doesn’t admit that she is staying home because she could not get another acceptable job.”
The biggest retreat has been in manufacturing, where more than one million women have disappeared from payrolls since 2001. Like men, many have not returned to jobs in other sectors.
Wage stagnation often discourages them from pursuing new jobs, says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. “While pay was rising solidly in the 1990s, you had women continuing to move into the work force,” Mr. Katz said.
Pay is no longer rising smartly for women in the key 25-to-54 age group. Just the opposite, the median pay — the point where half make more and half less — has fallen in recent years, to $14.84 an hour in 2007 from $15.04 in 2004, adjusted for inflation, according to the Economic Policy Institute. (The similar wage for men today is two dollars more.)
Not since the 1970s has that happened to women for so long a stretch — and because this is a new experience for them, “women may be even more reluctant than men to accept declining wages,” said Nancy Folbre, an economist at the University of Massachusetts.
Click here for full story.
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July 15, 2008
Best Diversity Candidates! Best Jobs Site!
Posted by Maureen Crawford Hentz at 11:08 AM
My phone's been ringing off the hook since 2002 with sales people trying to explain to me why their job site is the best, the biggest, the most worth the money. When I was a young, naive recruiter, hope always flickered in me that perhaps this site was the great one.
I've smartened up in the past few years, and started letting data affirmatively drive my decisions. I no longer try a site and then calculte ROI, unless the sales people are willing to give me a test job for free.
When sales people call and give me their pitch, I ask about their Alexa rankings. Strike one if they can't give me actual traffic data that supports their 'we're the best' claim. Strike two if their 'we are better than xyzsite' isn't supported by data. And woe to the sales person who calls me who doesn't know what Alexa is!
I've been evangelizing about Alexa.com for a while now, and all of my workshops to recruiters and job seekers feature at least a mention of the site and how it can best be used when adverstising or looking for jobs. I'm always worried about pinning all my data on one source (no matter how much I love it). A recent Ann Smarty blogpost on Searchenginejournal.com gives us a few other options when evaluating website traffic, including a new Google feature.
Each of these tools can help recruiters decide where to spend valuable dollars. Is it possible to miss the next hot site by waiting for site data? Absolutely. But if the site is really going to be hot, take a tip from Ben and Jerry's and give free samples. I'm all about try before you buy.
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June 10, 2008
Fraternities and Sororities --Know what to look for?
Posted by Maureen Crawford Hentz at 4:22 PM
In a career long ago and far away, I was a live-in fraternity house advisor. I went on to be a Greek Advisor on a large campus in Boston and one in Arizona. Having spent a lot of time among the Greek population (and being Greek myself), of course I came across occasional bad behavior, baffling rituals and strange group think, but more often than not, I found some of the best possible student leaders.
Think about this: when graduating from college with fraternity or sorority leadership experience, students may already have the skills they would have acquired working at your company in the first year. Too often, students who spent 40 hours a week for a year running a chapter or organizing an event list their experience under 'activities', so you may have to dig a little to find the experience. I spent lots of workshop hours talking to greek leaders about the importance of taking their leadership seriously and presenting it on their resume in a way that accurately showcases their skill development. It's actually still one of my favorite topics.
For example, on larger campuses, chapter treasurers may have been handling and managing significant amounts of money in multiple accounts: house accounts, philanthropy accounts, operating accounts. On resumes, look for treasurers of larger philanthropies. For example, Rutgers University's Dance Marathon took in over $300K. Looking for a financial analyst? Look for an accounting or finance major who has been active in a fraternity and sorority.
Need people for your management development program? Look at fraternity and sorority presidents and vice presidents. Hey, if you can run a 100+ person organization, and have responsibility for discipline, morale, scholarship and entertainment, you can do anything. Ever try mediating between two co-workers? Piece of cake if by the age of 21, you've already mediated over multiple in-house disagreements and possibly cross-chapter conflicts as well.
Want someone assertive for your sales team? How about the philanthropy chair who not only had to hustle up cash and in-kind donations, but who also had to convince the chapter members to volunteer and represent the school well. Need chutzpah? No need to prove your ability to fearlessly go where others won't if you have routinely motivated others to rise and shine early every Saturday in the fall for a walk-bike-swim-rock a thon.
On many campuses, students are running the major events, and governing themselves. While fraternity and sorority advisors work hard, their work is not (solely) about preventing Animal House 08. Rather, these are on-campus educational administrators who are teaching OUR next generation of employees how to lead, manage conflict, motivate, follow rules, make rules and manage change.
Remember, too, that recruiting through fraternities and sororities is a great way to actualize your commitment to diversity. Don't know what NPHC or NALFO is? You should. I do and I use it to recruit.
Yes, there are still keg parties and occasional bad behavior, but I'd wager the Chess Club gets in trouble from time to time as well. Don't let your stereotypes---either good or bad--- prevent you from really examining the resume of a fraternity and sorority leader. X-ray a fraternity or sorority resume and differentiate between 'attended charity events' and 'organized 500 person rally'. You'll be happy you did.
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May 14, 2008
Get a Google Internship and Fame Follows....
Posted by Maureen Crawford Hentz at 3:59 PM
Google, the category-killer-always-ranked-a-best-employer company is running a contest for the best doodle (art) for their logo and special days. One of the links from the contest page is about The Original Doodler, Dennis Hwang.
From the interview:
"How did you get such a cool job that meshes computers and art?
I had an internship with Google in college. I was given the task of helping with maintenance of the website and I soon became an assistant webmaster. Before I joined Google, the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were already thinking about holiday logos...and when I joined, they knew I was studying art and suggested I should give it a shot. I've been doing it since then...
What a great story of how an internship, some talent and a can-do attitude can change your life.
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May 5, 2008
Millennials, Work Life Balance and Technology
Posted by Maureen Crawford Hentz at 12:30 AM
One of the great things that came up at BU's Recruiting Roundtable is work-life balance. One of the points I made is in the difference between millennials and other generations in terms of work-life balance. For Xers and boomers, work-life balance is a 'sane' ratio of time spent at work versus not at work. Millennials, on the other hand, perceive work-life balance very differently--often by how much of their lives they can live at work.
To wit, this interesting information reported on the searchcio.com:
According to the survey, for example, 75% of millennials access Web-based personal email at work, compared with 54% of other workers; 66% regularly access Facebook or MySpace, compared with 13% of other workers; and 51 % of millennials access personal finance applications, compared with 27% of other workers.
The article then goes on to talk about how to cope with this:
How should the IT establishment respond? Not by yelling and telling, said Samir Kapuria, managing director, Symantec Advisory Consulting Services.
"This is a large volume of people who use these personal technologies," Kapuria said. "Businesses need to ask themselves, 'How do I harness the capabilities of this tech-savvy group while also making sure of eliminating the risks associated with the use of this technology?'" Kapuria said there needs to be a council of people who understand the mind-set of the millennials and can measure the business's risk level through this lens, then identify the hard and soft skills required to remediate the risk.
To read the whole article click here.
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May 2, 2008
Party like it's 1964
Posted by Diane Danielson at 1:00 PM
Ellen Goodman does a great job of capturing the pathetic treatment of Lilly Ledbetter and the rest of our gender when it comes to wage equality in today's Boston Globe:
The idea that the wage gap might be because of, um, sex discrimination seems soooo 20th century. In fact, the Supreme Court implied that Lilly Ledbetter's lower paycheck was her own fault because she didn't start investigating her employer for sex discrimination as soon as she started her job.
As for the conductor of the Straight Talk Express? McCain said he was all in favor of equal pay for equal work, but that women don't need lawsuits, they need "education and training." So let's begin with a couple of basics.
Lesson One: An unequal paycheck is a thief that keeps on taking. Even in retirement, Ledbetter is still, in her own words, "a second-class worker" with a pension and Social Security check that carry Goodyear's bite marks.
Lesson Two: In 2008, the Republicans are partying - "political partying" - like it's 1964.
Click here to read the full story.
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April 30, 2008
OPT : Are you up to speed?
Posted by Maureen Crawford Hentz at 11:20 AM
Unless you have been living on the moon for the past few weeks, you know that the rules for OPT have changed. What you may not know is how the rules impact your organization. There seems to be confusion about how these new rules will apply. NAFSA (which used to be called the National Association of Foreign Student Advisors) has published the NAFSA - SEVP Policy Guide. While this is a publication written and intended for International Student Advisors at colleges, it can be a great resource for recruiters as well.
The Department of Homeland Security also has the final rule posted here.
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April 16, 2008
Should you "friend" your boss on Facebook?
Posted by Diane Danielson at 9:52 AM
To friend or not to friend ... that is the question ... on Facebook. What happens when your boss wants to be your friend, or should you send a friend request to your boss? This is a question looked at in the Boston Globe today.
Ali Riaz has 126 friends on his facebook.com account. Ten of them are his employees.
Click here for the full story.
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April 7, 2008
Attracting & Retaining Generation Y
Posted by Maureen Crawford Hentz at 4:07 PM
Boston University's Feld Career Center is hosting an event for recruiters in the New England Area on April 24th. The 2008 Recruiters' Roundtable is called Attracting & Retaining Generation Y--- the Millennial Population and is open to recruiting professionals and talent development managers.
Too often, I find that even if companies acknowledge and understand that Gen Y is different, there are very few interventions planned. In other words, even the most enlightened companies know that the millennials are different, but they still haven't changed anything about their programs and services. This event promises to be a working conference where recruiters can once and for all move beyond "Millennials are Coming" to "and THIS is What We Should Do About It".
Chris Newell from Keane will be speaking about global issues and there will be an address by the Dean of the School of Management, Louis Lataif. In the interest of full disclosure, I should let you know that I will also be speaking briefly on this, my favorite topic. My remarks will be based on the millennials article I wrote for boston.com in June.
The event does require registration--call BU's Feld Career Center to reserve a place.
Can't attend? Check in here in a few weeks and I'll report back on all the best tips and tricks.
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