January 31, 2007

Super Bowl Flu this Monday?
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 2:37 PM

Well, the Pats may not be in the big game this year.

But, according to a survey conducted by Chelmsford-based workforce management firm Kronos Incorporated, you may be able to count on an even more predictable recurring event that hits your workplace at this time every year: Super Bowl Flu, which occurs like clockwork on the Monday after the Super Bowl.

Check out the audio segment here, which includes comments from Kronos VP Stuart Itkin. Running time: 1 minute.

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January 29, 2007

Sorting the posting wheat from the posting chaff
Posted by at 8:56 AM

I've been working a lot lately with new recruiters and talking about the tools of the trade. Like many of you out there, I am constantly bombarded with calls and emails from websites hipping me to the 'best' sites for finding candidates. I struggled to determine how to best determine the efficacy of these sites until I found Alexa.

One of the best tools out there is Alexa.com. This site's capabilities allow for recruiters to look at web site traffic ranking and related sites. These tools are invaluable in determining where to post jobs and look for resumes in that the site provides quantitative data. Being able to determine a site's traffic and compare it to competitor sites allows me to make better investments of our company's money.

Maureen Crawford Hentz

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January 28, 2007

To flex or not to flex
Posted by Diane Danielson at 10:27 PM

This week's BostonWorks section of the Globe looks at flextime that didn't break the bank or end anyone's career.

For a long time, having a flexible work schedule hasn't been much of a career booster. You did it to grapple with life needs, and then contended with the raised eyebrows, wage penalties, and other downsides as best you could. Full time, full tilt was the norm.

But little by little, that bleak picture is changing. Flexibility is becoming more workable, and can even be part of a model of long-term career success. That's the clear take-home message from a Simmons College study of 400 professional women released this month that you can read at simmons.edu/som/docs/centers/insights_25.pdf .

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January 25, 2007

US firms struggling to compete for oveseas talent
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 11:06 AM

Workforce Management's Fay Hansen reports on the difficulty many US firms are running into when trying to attract overseas talent, especially so-called "knowledge workers," due to immigration restrictions:

During the past 15 years, immigrants have launched 25 percent of all venture-backed U.S. public companies and 40 percent of venture-backed public companies in the high-tech sector, according to a study commissioned by the National Venture Capital Association. These immigrant-founded high-tech companies have generated half of the jobs in the sector.

Recruiters working to bring in the next generation of immigrant innovators face new obstacles in their attempt to attract both non-immigrant candidates who want to become permanent U.S. residents and immigrants who want to enter the U.S. with green cards in hand. The most talented employees worldwide are increasingly unwilling to tolerate the long waits and uncertainty entailed in immigrating to the United States. Instead, they are going to Europe, Canada, Australia and other countries where knowledge workers face fewer immigration difficulties.

A troubling trend. Read the whole piece here.

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January 22, 2007

Welcome, Aaron Green!
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 2:12 PM

We are pleased and proud to welcome Aaron Green as our newset BostonWorks columnist.

Green's column, "On Staffing," launched today on the Hiring Hub on BostonWorks.com. Every month Green, founder and President of Boston-based Professional Staffing Group, will pen a new column on topics relating to staffing, recruitment, retention, workforce development, loyalty programs, and more.

Green's columns can be found on the "Columns" page or at its own "On Staffing" page. We look forward to his continuing words of wisdom and advice. Welcome, Aaron.

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January 18, 2007

BostonWorks content now searchable
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 3:31 PM

A couple of weeks ago our parent site, Boston.com, launched a new search tool on the site. It searches all the content on Boston.com, including BostonWorks. It also searches a range of other local websites, if you so choose, in addition to the Globe.

Ths is the first time BostonWorks users, who have been searching for jobs in our database from Day 1, have been able to throw a search term - say, "resumes" or "interviewing" - against the site content to find what they are looking for. A couple of tips as you start playing with this new tool:

>> Access - you can get there either via the Boston.com home page, right at the top, or go directly to the Search page itself.

>> Filters - once you input your terms and get the search results, you will see a number of filters in the column on the left-hand side of the page. To view purely job and employment-related results for your search term(s), click either on "Jobs" under "By Subject," on "Job Information" under "By Type," or on "BostonWorks" under "By Globe Section."

>> Globe Content Only - for content only from the Boston Globe, remember to click the "Boston Globe" tab just above the search box.

>> Sort - you can also sort your search results by "Date" - most recent articles first - or "Best Match," which is the default order of the returned results (ie, the way they automatically appear first).

>> Beta - this is the software term for "we haven't really finished building it yet so please let us know what you think." That means we are interested in your feedback - how can we make it better? What works? What doesn't? Let us know your thoughts via the Feedback link on Boston.com.

I hope you find it a worthwhile experience and that it unlocks the archival power of all the great career, employment, and workplace-related content on BostonWorks. That's the idea, anyway. If it doesn't, this is your chance to help us make it so.

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January 15, 2007

Insert your company name here?
Posted by at 8:46 PM

NBC News reported last week on the first woman Thunderbird pilot , and I was struck by the fact that 'the first woman to...' is still a story in 2007. Many companies do not consider gender when looking at diversity and yet there are still many primarily male bastions in our corporate ranks.

Think of how many companies could substitute their names and particulars into this quote...

It is the most exclusive club in the Air Force. The Thunderbirds have had only 163 pilots since the team's creation in 1953 — each one accomplished, confident, the best of the best. And every one of them a man, until now.

Despite the fact that women now account for more than half of all college students, we have yet to see full gender equity bubble up. Until we do, we will continue to have 'the first woman to' stories. I can't wait until those future slower news days.

Maureen Crawford Hentz

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January 13, 2007

BlackBerry's in the bedroom
Posted by Diane Danielson at 11:15 PM

Forbes takes a look at how BlackBerry's may be ruining our sex lives.

Married couples are not the only ones being affected by the home invasion of wireless technology. Ask any upwardly mobile single and they’ll tell you that they’re often too busy getting ahead in the boardroom to get busy in the bedroom. “Unfortunately, technology is the modern-day equivalent to the spinster chaperone,” says Lisa Daily, author of Stop Getting Dumped! All You Need to Know to Make Men Fall Madly in Love with You and Marry “The One” in 3 Years Or Less.

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January 12, 2007

Diversity name of the game in Patrick administration
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 2:27 PM

It's a diverse team, all right: young, old, male, female, white, people of color - in other words, the 21st century workforce, on display in the top level appointments in the brand new Deval Patrick administration:

Patrick, the first African-American chief executive in Massachusetts history, promised to assemble a diverse team with fresh ideas to change the culture on Beacon Hill. Here is a look at who he has enlisted to help in the two months since his election.

The wizards of Boston.com have kindly formatted the names, faces, and mini-bios into an easy-to-view slide show. Start here.

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January 11, 2007

How does your firm stack up?
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 12:56 PM

Fortune magazine has just published its annual list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. Which raises some interesting issues for folks in HR - such as, how does your firm hold up in comparison with the best, as rated by their employees? (Over 100,000 of them were blind-surveyed to obtain these results.)

It's worth spending some time with the list, the articles, the maps, the videos, and other supporting material - Fortune gives it A-1 treatment at the CNN-Money site online - to see what these firms have that sets them apart. What makes Google #1 and Whole Foods #5, for instance? Or check out those right in your own backyard - a map and geographic listing are provided.

All designed to get you thinking a little bit about your firm's most valuable asset - its people - and what you're doing for them as we enter the New Year.

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January 10, 2007

The (New and Improved!) Big Help
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 3:44 PM

Since last Wednesday, January 3, we've been celebrating The Big Help here at BostonWorks. And this time around, it's been extra special as we've featured two major innovations.

First, the newly redesigned BostonWorks section in the Boston Sunday Globe was published for the first time, on January 7, in a handy pull-out tabloid format. There was no shortage of ads and the same great Globe coverage in the (fat!) 80-page section.

Second, we ventured into TV-land for the first time with a "Globe at Home" segment on NECN's New England Midday news show. The six-minute segment features Winter Wyman's Dave Sanford, author of the article "New Year’s resolution: Give your career a kick-start in 2007", which we published as a BostonWorks web exclusive as part of The Big Help. Appearing along with Sanford, in a purely supporting role, of course, is yours truly. Check out the compelling but, alas, non-Emmy winning action here.

While you're at it, don't forget to check out the live chat transcripts, fabulous photo galleries, and more, all available via The Big Help hub page.

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Whatever it takes
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 2:49 PM

We knew time was at a premium these days for most managers and business people, but is it this bad?

Nearly one in five small business managers read work-related e-mails and other documents while in the bathroom, and 49 percent say they work while driving, according to a new survey commissioned by Staples Inc., the office-supply retailer with headquarters in Framingham.

Ah, that explains all that boneheaded driving I keep running into all around town.

Read the entire piece from the Globe/Boston.com Daily Business Update.

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January 4, 2007

Millennials at Work
Posted by at 8:52 AM

One of my favorite Millennial gurus has launched a new blog called Generations at Work. This blog will explore and invite conversation about the upcoming clash of the generations in the workplace as millennials begin to permeate the bastions of GenX and the Boomers. A sample:

And now it seems that everyone in business and industry is talking about the “Generation Question.” ...I had trained as a sociologist and had a lot of experience with business economics but at the time I wasn’t sure what I was dealing with.

The idea of a generation was largely an artifact of pop culture in this country and it was hard at first to get some of my social science friends to take the idea of a “generation” seriously. But as I began talking about the “New American Work Force".... my research continued to point in the direction of generation as a new and important term in our lexicon of workplace issues.

Maureen Crawford Hentz

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January 3, 2007

Gender gap stalled at the top, closing at the bottom
Posted by Diane Danielson at 9:09 AM

I missed this one during the holiday, but the NYTimes wrote about the gender gap stalling for college-educated women.  Overall there is good news that the gap has closed from the 77 cents we were used to hearing to 80 cents. 

Largely without notice, however, one big group of women has stopped making progress: those with a four-year college degree. The gap between their pay and the pay of male college graduates has actually widened slightly since the mid-’90s.

Note that the article has been criticized as the author (a male - David Leonhardt) was accused of burying the good stuff at the end and focusing on the college-educated women gap; as well as writing in a manner that suggested there might still be discrimination against women.  Egad!  Imagine that.  I guess everyone has their own interpretation, because I thought he was quite fair in suggesting that women did often make choices that require them to limit their income.

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