For my blog post this week I wanted to include an infographic (what did we ever do before them?) on the state of recruiting that was done by Talent Technology. The good news is that economic and job growth is expected as well as an expectation for increased competition for the best talent. To see the complete study and survey results, go to www.talenttech.com/

A really, really smart guy named Salman Khan (three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard) wanted to help his niece in another city bring up her math grade. So, he started tutoring her remotely. Her grades went up and more nieces and nephews were added to his roster. With their schedules to consider, it just became easier for him to make brief YouTube videos simply explaining the math they had to learn. Pretty soon, other people started watching his videos. And their numbers grew. The result is Khan Academy. And I think it is the best thing on the Internet. At this amazing site, you can now watch more than 2,800 videos where geniuses explain things to you simply – often while making simple drawings to illustrate their point.

Math is still this site’s strong suit, but topics now range from Biology to Art History to Calculus to Chemistry and beyond. Their mission is nothing short of changing the way the world learns – while democratizing access to knowledge.

Check out the TED Talk that Mr. Khan gave about his amazing site:

One other thing about the site – it makes learning fun. Really. You can start at any point and earn badges for successfully completing exercises that accompany the lessons. You can use it to help your kids with complex concepts that you either don’t remember or never learned. Or, you can simply dip in at any point and learn more about topics that excite you.

I love a good video of a kitten falling asleep as much as the next person. But, if you’re ready to use the Internet to its full advantage, Khan Academy should be your next stop.

“During Twitter‘s official 2012 Hack Week, one project was to make the “best/worst recruiting video of all time.” Consider that challenge successfully completed.”

Hack Week is an event at Twitter where Twitter employees create teams of their own and come up with creative ideas for the company minus the input of upper management. After Hack Week is finished they send their ideas off. The ideas are either immediately implemented, or put on the back burner for later.  This is a great idea to get employees excited to come up with new programs, software, communication tools and more. The opportunity is endless.

The video has since gone viral with over 450,000 views on You Tube since it was posted on Friday. The phrase, “It’s so bad that it’s good.” definitely fits this video well. See for yourself below…

This is their real recruitment video and if you are actually interested in a job with Twitter feel free to check them out online or visit @jointhflock

What are your thoughts on the video? Would a recruitment strategy like this work for other companies just as well?

InformationWeek.com has presented us with an unusual study that proves that utilizing social media is actually better for gaining control over your privacy than not. But how is this possible, you ask? Is your company of the mindset that using social media completely obliterates the concept of privacy at its very definition? Check out the results of this Google study and learn how sharing can actually aid in privacy instead of eliminate it.

As the article highlights, “sharing can shape your reputation, thereby building trust and privacy, Google research says. ‘Clean coal,’ meet ‘privacy-aware sharing.’ Let the oxymoron wars begin.” The article clarifies by explaining the study in more detail. “In the wake of Google’s decisions to condense its privacy policies and correlate user information across its services, as well as to automatically establish Google+ accounts for people who sign up for Google Accounts, a Google research scientist has chosen what appears to be an opportune time to argue that social networks enhance privacy.

In a paper titled ‘Vanity or Privacy? Social Media as a Facilitator of Privacy and Trust,’ to be presented next month at the 2012 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, or (2012 CSCW), Google researcher Jessica Staddon contends that social media facilitates trust and engagement by promoting self-representation and by reflecting community views. ‘[W]e present survey evidence that ‘vanity’ searches are associated with an important privacy need,’ Staddon writes. ‘We also present evidence compatible with the conjecture that social annotations in search support privacy by enabling better self-representation and thus more privacy-aware sharing.’”

So what exactly does this mean and how can you determine whether or not this really protects your privacy? Start by defining it first: “In order to not reject Staddon’s argument outright, let’s define privacy in the way Google search defines it:

1. The state or condition of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people.

2. The state of being free from public attention.

Using this definition of privacy offered by Google search, social media just doesn’t work. You can have sharing or you can have privacy. You can’t have both. But of course you can’t run a social network or social search engine under this regime. That’s why the privacy policies of leading Internet companies describe not efforts to safeguard information, but the conditions under which information is shared. Were privacy policies renamed ‘virginity policies,’ they’d describe the conditions under which children are begotten rather than practices that preserve chastity. One company has recognized the absurdity of titling documents that describe information usage ‘privacy policies.’ Facebook no longer has a privacy policy. It now has a data use policy, a name that actually reflects the purpose of the policy.”

Still, Staddon’s theory is shaky based on the fact that “privacy” can be defined in a few different ways. How does she combat this? “Staddon did not immediately respond to an email seeking a definition of the term ‘privacy’ as the word applies to her study. But let it suffice to say that ‘privacy’ is a tricky word to define. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, ‘The term ‘privacy’ is used frequently in ordinary language as well as in philosophical, political, and legal discussions, yet there is no single definition or analysis or meaning of the term.’ (As long as you don’t type ‘define:privacy’ into Google.) Staddon’s paper concedes that social media can pose privacy problems. ‘The abundance of communication that social media enables clearly can lead to privacy problems, often with severe personal consequences,’ the paper says. ‘Jobs have been lost, marriages ended, and court cases won all because of unintended sharing of online social communication.’ Yet, Staddon counters that social media ‘also leads to huge privacy advantages by facilitating perception, both in terms of understanding of one’s online self, particularly as driven by the inputs of others, and self-representation.’”

Okay, so perhaps the study presents a little bit of a stretch. Social media doesn’t exactly protect your company’s privacy, but there is a little bit of a loophole here on how social media can save your privacy based on the idea that it can serve as a form of public relations for your reputation. Depending on how your company represents itself online can in a way shield and enhance your company’s brand.

Does your company believe that social media can “protect” privacy? Does your company use it to shield and enhance your company’s brand?

If you really want to see a VP of HR get nervous, ask him or her about the candidate experience at their organization. Like profanity-laced tirades and red faces? Ask a job seeker what happened the last time they applied for a position through an ATS. Of course, there are some wonderful exceptions out there, and I am so proud that many of our clients have made the candidate experience a goal in 2012, but I think we all know that for the most part the CE is still pretty lousy. From my vantage point, it’s one of the biggest topics facing HR, and now that the job market is beginning to improve I expect a harsh spotlight to be shining on this issue.

In most circles outside of our industry, the popular thing to do is to bash HR and recruiters as nasty, unfeeling cretins who purposely design byzantine application processes and cackle malevolently each time a candidate leaves a voice mail about a job they interviewed for two months ago. I’ve written about the candidate experience a lot over the last few years, and my opinion really hasn’t changed: it’s a simple numbers game that HR is on the wrong side of. In an interview I did with recruiting guru Peter Weddle, he put it all into perspective:

You cannot recruit more talent with less recruiting resources. It defies the laws of human nature. If you want to hire talent, you have to use the talent of the recruiting team, and that means giving them the time and support they need to do their best work. Frankly, I don’t get it. Companies spend hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars on their ATS and then let the vendor off the hook. Not only are the vast majority of these systems abusive to candidates, they’re abusive to recruiters, as well. In addition, they’re costing employers a fortune by giving them inaccurate data on the source of candidates (causing them to misspend both their recruitment advertising dollars and the time of their recruiters).

Me? I’ve been waiting for top management to see the cost of a bad candidate experience and—well, I think they need help. If you’re a recruiter, show them the revenue potential you lost when that great salesperson walked out the door because no one called her after the interview. Tell them about the time, resources and impact on care and morale that will result from fumbling the Respiratory Care Manager you wanted so badly.

Fortunately, there are some great resources out there to help. Experts on both www.ere.net and www.shrm.org are telling their success stories and showing blueprints and examples of the steps they are taking to fix the candidate experience. It’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s going to be a process filled with setbacks, but I believe those that truly want to fix it—and the CEO’s who have their backs–will prevail, and win the battle of not only common courtesy, but the war for the best talent.

I have not one memory of a high school guidance counselor or college advisor using the phrase “flexible schedule” when purporting to help me figure out — between the ages of 17 and 21 —  plans for the next 40 years of my life as a wage earner. They used phrases like, “salary range,” “benefits package,” “room to advance,” and “stability.”

Though those were are all very historically important factors to mull over, the thing that I failed to take into consideration at the time was that the counselors and advisors I talked to were men.

Sure, I wanted the same advice they would give a guy. I wanted the same opportunities for success. I wanted a career that would give me security and a steadily rising paycheck. But a little real-world advice from a woman — especially one who was also a mother — may have changed my outlook on professional deal-breakers and deal-makers.

My mom and dad gave me advice, too. While my mom pushed the “do what you enjoy” mindset — one I wholeheartedly agree with, even if my daughter decides she wants to be a professional face painter (they do make a killing at kids’ birthday parties you know…), my dad extolled the virtues of those career planning guides that predicted what the need for a certain job might be in 10 or 20 years. Personal fulfillment and future growth are both are excellent considerations for deciding what you will do with your life. For many, choosing to stay at home, raise children, and run a household can be a dream job or a financial necessity. For others, working full time is what they must do to support a family and/or reach their professional goals.

But the thing no one ever told me was this:

Flexible schedules rock.

Ask any nurse, physical, occupational or speech therapist the reason they chose healthcare. I’m sure personal fulfillment and job security had a lot to do with it. But I also bet many saw the rates for weekend, night and per diem schedules (part time in most people’s minds), and thought, “THAT’S what I’m talkin’ about!” Today, the flexible schedule isn’t limited to hourly healthcare professionals. Any pediatrician, lawyer or accountant who’s had a half dozen years of professional success can opt to go “part time” or have an “abbreviated workweek” and still make a very comfortable living.

And here’s the most important part: they’re LIVING. As in, finding time for other things in life besides going to work. They’re the people who have the freedom to really spend time with their families and friends, to coach and volunteer, to attend concerts and meetings, pick up a hobby, and to get away now and then without being attached to an electronic device. They don’t do it all — because often, part time roles mean doing even more in less time both at home and at work — but they have more opportunities to enjoy it all.

At Alstin Communications, selling what job seekers want to hear is part of our job. Making employers and work environments look as appealing as possible is our specialty. As a copywriter, when I work on a posting or ad recruiting candidates for a full time, high-pressure, huge responsibility, head-honcho kind of role, I do it. But when a description comes across my desk talking about flexibility, choosing your own schedule, and the now overused but so crucial “work/life balance” — I perk up and think, “Now this is a job someone is going to be glad they went after.”

The successful candidate may never be honored by business magazines. May never have his or her own office. There probably won’t be huge dollar signs in his or her stock portfolio.

But even if they’re not bringing home the biggest piece of the proverbial financial pie, they may have something else — something that’s tough to measure but worth its weight in gold: peace of mind.

Want to take a look at how Alstin markets jobs with flexible schedules?

So you’re in the middle of your professional career and you want to sharpen your skills, or maybe, you’re a job seeker and you happen to find yourself with some free time. You’ve heard before that embracing social media, learning the ins and outs of popular sites such as LinkedIn, and blogging can help your career, but you’re still not convinced? The Get Busy Living Blog posted a piece on the “10 Reasons To Start a Blog Today.” From networking opportunities to brushing up on your writing proficiency, blogging offers many rewards that are sometimes overlooked.

Here are just a few of the benefits of blogging, straight from a fellow blogger:

“1. You will meet a variety of great people.

Since I’ve started this blog, I’ve gotten to know some awesome people online. Not only do I love what they write and what they’re doing, but I love getting to know them.

When I went to Las Vegas to get married, a blogger I’ve gotten to know, Steve Roy from Ending the Grind was out there at the same time. We set up a time to meet and we literally just walked around the Wynn/Encore casino and talked.

Just last week in Taipei, I met Matthew Hooper, who I met through Twitter one day when I first started and got to know him throughout the year. We just happen to be back visiting Taipei at the same time. Matt, a Canadian, actually lived in Taipei for eight years and met his wife here. Plus he worked with Eleanor at a language school many years ago. Small world!!

I know I’ll meet more in person in the near future.

I’ve read stories of people who’ve attended Blog World or World Domination Summit and finally met long time blogging friends, and made new ones.

You know what I’ve found too? Bloggers are some of the nicest people out there.

If you want to know how to reach out to bloggers, read Adrienne Smith’s post about how to do it.

3. It can lead to publishing a book

It does seem like some bloggers would love to publish a book. With a blog, if you’ve built up a huge audience you, that could help in your book proposal. Even if you don’t go the traditional route, you could self publish on the Kindle, which many are doing today.

Pamela Slim has a book called Escape From Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur (great book), which started out as a blog by the same name. She didn’t start the blog with the intention of writing a book, but later was approached to write a book on her expertise.

Another blog to book is 1000 Awesome Things, by Neil Patel.

Neil started posting awesome things every weekday, got a book deal, and it turned into a New York Times #1 bestseller.

There is a blog called Stuff White People Like by Christian Lander. He says it’s about “a scientific approach to highlight and explain stuff white people like. They are pretty predictable.”

He got a book deal after three months (wow) and it turned into a New York Times bestseller, aptly called Stuff White People Like and now Whiter Shades of Pale.

Jenny Blake, another blog to book blogger (say that five times fast), wrote a guest post on the pros and cons of it. Great for those interested in publishing.

If you’re looking to publish your first book this year, Chris Guillibeau has a guide to teaches you how to write, sell, and publish your book (aff link).

5. You can make a difference

The first thing that comes to mind is using your blog as a way to raise money for a charity.

Tim Ferris does it often on his blog.

Last year after the Japan earthquake and tsunami, I saw tweets about a fundraiser organized by Lavonne Ellis. A donation gave you a bunch of products donated by bloggers to help your blog and business grow. Plus you were entered in a drawing for some premium products and services.

I just read they raised $5,385 plus got a matching grant to double the amount! It’s really cool that a bunch of bloggers did that.

It doesn’t just have to be amount money. You can bring attention about issues in your community, nation, or the world. You can make a difference in many ways through your blog.

6. It can give you a voice

A blog lets you be heard. The blog is your platform. You can share whatever you want with your readers. You can share your opinion. You can teach. You can inspire. You can inform.

The important thing is it’s coming from you. You have a voice.”

If you’re still not sure if blogging is right for you, click on the link to view all 10 reasons why you should start a blog today. Hesitant about what to write? Here’s the key- the most important thing is the start on something. It doesn’t necessarily have to be entirely professional or technical. Choose a topic that you are interested in and go at it. Learn new things, teach others through your blog and really focus on writing about what you’re passionate about. Just the fact that you are writing can be seen as valuable in and out of the workplace.

Are you a die-hard blogger? What do you write about and how has blogging helped your career? 

So many things happen throughout the day. Emails get lost, servers go down, printers break, phones ring off the hook… sometimes we are left in a head-spin and it’s really tough to stay positive.

I came across this video today (word on the street is that it has gone viral) about this awesome guy. He is blowing minds while playing his violin when a rude audience members ringtone destroys the classical mood with the common Nokia ringtone.

Doe the violinist flip out? Curse at everywhere? Break his instrument and walks off stage? Let’s take a look.

Well played. Well played.

How do you keep your cool in tough situations?

With the very notable exception of working with a great group of talented people, I think my favorite part about working at Alstin is the presentations we do. Perhaps I was denied attention as a child, or I’m just a ham, but I love getting in front of people and telling them about Alstin. As someone who’s always out and about, meeting people and learning about our industry, I also attend a lot of presentations. Most are great, but some…

I think this video is funny because so much of it rings true. My personal favorite is the forgotten fourth bullet and the appearance of the smug IT guy. Enjoy.

Like anyone with a favorite pair of sneakers or some worn-in flannel pajamas, I enjoy being comfortable, but comfort has a way of letting the mind and body get sleepy. One doesn’t want to get complacent…

As an ever-changing hobbiest, I step into new adventures every couple of years, not just because I’m restless, but because there’s something wonderful about turning ignorance into a talent. My past is littered with adventures in beer making, rock climbing, animation, sushi rolling, etc. These were all things that I dove into because of some underlying desire or love. They seemed like they were within reach of my skill sets. Sure, they were new, but they all seemed learnable and they generally came pretty easily to me.

Enter ballroom dancing.

Mind you, this is not a typical choice for me, but a wonderful woman I had just started dating had mentioned being into dancing, so I offered up that we take lessons together. Aside from netting myself 1,000+ “great guy” points, I suddenly found myself spending evenings moving awkwardly across a dance floor with instructions that made my last experience (Virginia Reel, 1974) seem completely irrelevant. Hello Rhumba, Waltz, Eastern Swing, Cha-cha and Foxtrot! For those of you who’ve seen “Dancing with the Stars” (I have not), following a routine like they do is completely different than making it up on the fly and being able to convey the next move to your partner (that’s called “leading” I now know).

And you know what? I’m having a fun time, but I’ve finally found something I’m completely awful at! Now, my girlfriend and dance instructor both assure me that I’m in fact progressing quite well, but as someone who has always considered himself a quick study, I’m just not seeing it! Perhaps I can blame it on age, infrequency of lessons, or two left feet (there’s got to be a reason in there somewhere!), but it doesn’t matter. I’ve always been of the mindset that you learn more from failures than successes, so I’m learning more than I have in years. It’s a good thing!

Resolve in the upcoming year to step out of your comfort zone. Risk being awful. Looking like a fool.

You’ll thank me in 2013!   - j

Move over Jersey Shore. See ya later Mob Wives… If the girls from Tiara and Toddlers see this we might have a temper tantrum. Say hello to a recruiters dream (or nightmare). Are you a top recruiter? If so, check out the teaser trailer below for one of the newest reality TV show…

“This upscale/sophisticated Reality Show will take place in the Miami Beach. This show’s mission is to take the American dream from regressive to progressive. We have selected this nations best of the best recruiters to educate America!

Top Recruiter, The Competition, is a reality show that will feature 5 of the best Human Resources, Talent Acquisition, RPO, Recruitment & Staffing Professionals in America. These personalities will be chosen to live in a house together and engage in many tasks which showcase their approach, expertise, and raw talent as a recruitment expert. We have many surprises for our stars and you can expect to be blown away with what we have in store for them. We are most excited about who America will choose to be the Next Top Recruiter.”

The show was inspired by another reality tv show, when creator, Chris Lavoie decided to uncover the gray area that recruiters can’t seem to get away from.

What are your thoughts on recruitment gone reality TV?

Last night I went to a Mexican restaurant that very recently opened in town. While the food was fantastic, the service was a little off and it made the experience less than perfect. Maybe it’s because the restaurant just opened and they’re still finding their footing. Maybe our waiter was overwhelmed and just couldn’t seem to keep up with everything going on around him. Regardless of the reason, my company and I had walked in with higher expectations and when they weren’t met, we found ourselves wondering how the other tables had fared. Thinking back on it, maybe we should have read some online reviews before choosing which restaurant to go to. After all, there are so many people who take advantage of this technology and they exercise it liberally. Not sure where to go? Try Yelp.com, Yahoo or other sites that offer reviews. But what happens when someone writes up a bad review about your company online for millions to see? Fortunately for you, and for that restaurant, Smartblog has written up a way to help deflect these issues, and think of it not just for the food service industry, but for any industry.

As the article explains, “It’s human nature to want to defend yourself when online reviews take swipes at the restaurant you’ve spent years of time, toil and cash to build, but it’s almost always better to set your emotions aside and let the practical side of your mind take over before putting fingers to keyboard.” Again, think of this for any kind of company. The internet is readily available to all kinds of people seeking all kinds of service. The article gives an example of a bad situation for a small business owner:

“Example: Atlanta barbecue-joint owner Andrew Capron found that out the hard way, when he used Facebook to publicize an emotional and expletive-studded response to a negative Yelp review by a patron who was less than thrilled with her meal at Boners BBQ, according to media outlets including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fox. The exchange prompted a firestorm of criticism from bloggers, and Capron later apologized for what he acknowledged was bad judgment. Worse, the response could end up being a costly mistake for his business.

 

Reviews, back in the day: A decade or so ago, the old system of restaurant reviews written by professional critics and published in mainstream and alternative press allowed eateries to frame and post the positive stories on their walls, and perhaps find some constructive tips in negative press while waiting a few weeks for the story to become a distant memory. Not so today, when every one of your guests has an online voice and the ability to write critiques that may conceivably show up every time another consumer searches the Web to find someplace to eat.”

So if bloggers have the freedom to take complaints and critiques to the internet (that are usually justified, but sometimes unfounded) what can you do to help prevent the spoiling of your company’s name?

 “The plus side of online reviews: Good reviews on Yelp can boost business for independent eateries. A Harvard University study released in the fall found that the emergence of online review sites such as Yelp have leveled the playing field for independent restaurants that compete with bigger chains, and a one-star increase in Yelp ratings can boost sales as much as 9%. The findings give mom-and-pop restaurants that earn online praise a reason to cheer, while the right response for eateries whose customers report on less-than-stellar experiences may not be as clear.

How to respond: Yelp offers restaurant owners tips on responding to negative and positive reviews, advising proprietors first and foremost to remember that their reviewers also are their paying customers. When it comes to bad reviews, Yelp cautions owners about the very type of venting Capron engaged in, urging restaurateurs to  ‘just keep your message simple: thank you for the business and the feedback. If you can be specific about the customer’s experience and any changes you may have made as a result, this could go very far in earning trust.’”

Don’t forget, this could happen to any business- small or large- offering any service in any industry. Yelp.com also offers reviews on dentists, salons, doctors, etc. You name it, they review it. While Yelp offers some tips on how to deal with poor reviews, the biggest and most important is probably, do not ignore a bad review. Use a simple response, or be more specific if you feel inclined, but address the issue just as you would if someone called your office to complain. You wouldn’t hang up on them without hearing them out first, would you?

As the owner or manager of a business, have you experienced a poor online review about your company and, if so, how did you handle it?

As our blog readers know, I prefer to keep my reading in the land of fiction (to see my top fiction picks of 2011, click here). However, every once in awhile a non-fiction book comes along that changes the way we think about our world. For me, I always find Malcolm Gladwell’s books thought-provoking (read my blog on Outliers here), and a few years ago Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle changed the way we think about our food supply.

At the end of last year, I began hearing good things about a new book on self-control and willpower. While I’m always wary of books that get fawning praise (I especially bristle when I read things like “A Revelation,” “This Changes Everything We Know About [insert subject here],” “Masterful”), sometimes a book lives up to the hype, and I really found a lot of great information in Willpower: Rediscovering the World’s Greatest Human Strength by researcher Roy F. Baumeister and New York Times science writer John Tierney.

I’d hate to give too much away because I think this is a book everyone should read, but the crux of their findings is that willpower acts like a muscle: it can be depleted and fatigued, but also strengthened with practice. You’ll also learn that, as unsexy as it sounds, what fuels willpower is not determination, your grandfather’s pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps philosophy or the harsh Minnesota winters of your youth. Nope, it’s just glucose, and it can be bolstered simply by replenishing the brain’s store of fuel. That’s why eating and sleeping have such a profound impact on our self-control, and why it’s almost impossible for traditional dieters to resist temptations.

You’ll also learn that:

• People around the world rank a lack of self-control as their biggest weakness.
• We typically spend four hours every day resisting temptations.
• We have “one” willpower; in other words, our willpower to eat healthier, our willpower not to yell at our kids, to exercise, to be a better husband, to keep a clean kitchen, etc.–all tap the same source. That’s why trying to change too many habits at once (stop smoking, lose weight, go to church more) is almost impossible.
• How even a super-motivated, hyper-successful person like Oprah Winfrey–who built and runs an empire–can still struggle with her weight.
• How to really make a New Year’s resolution (John Tierney, one of the authors of Willpower, had a nice piece on this in Sunday’s New York Times
• How with the Internet age, we face a whole new level of temptations to overcome.
• Why almost every diet is doomed to fail.

Willpower showcases a lot of studies, but in an informative, entertaining way, and the authors do a good job of summarizing their findings, including being honest about results they have difficulty explaining.

Perhaps the best news in the book is that once you learn to master these techniques and establish better habits, willpower gets easier and requires less mental energy to gain self-control.

For example, the authors studied people who seemed very disciplined, whether it be in their eating habits, exercise, career, home life, etc. When they looked closer to see what made them tick, they found that these go-getters weren’t necessarily more motivated or possessed more willpower than the average person. So how did they do it? By consistently placing themselves in situations where they had to use that willpower less often. That’s why good habits like having only healthy snacks in the kitchen, packing a gym bag before you go to bed, scheduling a set hour each day to read to your children, etc. can make a real difference.

To learn more about Willpower, check out this review here.

Yesterday, news outlets around the world reported on a worker protest happening at a Chinese factory called Foxconn. On January 2, managers moved 600 workers to a new production line. In describing the conditions of the new line, one worker noted: ”We were put to work without any training, and paid piecemeal. The assembly line ran very fast and after just one morning we all had blisters and the skin on our hand was black. The factory was also really choked with dust and no one could bear it.” They were making computer cases for Acer.

What made this story big news was that the worker protest was quite unlike those we’re used to. About 150 workers gathered on the roof of the company’s building and threatened suicide. They were coaxed down after two days.

If you Google Foxconn, you’ll likely come across this wiki  on the “Foxconn Suicides” which paints a grim picture of the company’s history:

The Foxconn suicides occurred between January and November, 2010, when eighteen Foxconn employees attempted suicide with fourteen deaths. The suicides drew media attention, and employment practices at Foxconn, a large contract manufacturer, were investigated by several of its customers including Apple, Dell and HP, fearing bad press of their own. Foxconn is a major manufacturer catering to famous-name brands including Apple, Dell, HP, Motorola, Nintendo, Sony and Nokia.

Holy cow. Did you know about this? About Foxconn, I mean. Not that Chinese factories are notoriously bad for workers. I didn’t know the Foxconn story until a coworker sent me a link and then I did some quick research. It gives me pause. So many of our American brands are connected to manufacturing operations in China. Not so sure how good I would feel knowing the company I work for is connected to a place like this.  OK, I am sure. I probably wouldn’t want to work there anymore.

Microsoft also uses Foxconn as a contract manufacturer. They investigated the most recent protest and according to PC Word, “Microsoft maintained that it monitors working conditions closely at Foxconn, and works to ensure the workers there are treated fairly.”

Knowing what happened in 2010, I take that with a grain of salt. I know, I know this isn’t a very happy or funny blog on happenings in HR, but this was truly a protest like no other and I think it is worth talking about.

Although I still have some mixed feelings about Google+, Google’s social component, I think I may just be starting to like it.

They just announced a function that allows you to see “personal results” and “profiles in search”. This allows you to search the way you normally do with the ability to find and view relevant Google+ posts that are related to trips away, events or major news stories that have brought people together.

“With Google’s new features, users will now be able to start typing a friend’s name and the form will auto-populate the field. This will then bring up the profile, delivering information delivered on their Google+ account and web results that are connected to them.”

So… what do you think? I’m pretty excited to see Google+ growing into it’s own.

According to an article titled “Want better employees? Ask better questions in job interviews” posted to TheGlobeandMail.com, hiring manager should take more time asking questions that not only measure a candidate’s skill level, but also gauge how well the individual will do in your company’s workplace environment based on their attitude and personality type. For example, you wouldn’t want to hire an incredibly passive or shy individual for a sales position that might require meeting new people, giving presentations or making cold calls, if they are uncomfortable speaking in front of people.

The article explains, “Tell me about … your biggest weakness … your favourite colour … the superhero you most admire. At least 70 per cent of employers still ask lame, predictable questions such as these in job interviews. That’s why they often miss clues that a candidate is destined to be a flop as an employee, leadership coach Mark Murphy found in a study his company did, which became the basis for his new book, Hiring for Attitude. The study tracked 20,000 newly hired employees in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia, and found that 46 per cent of them had either been dismissed or received poor performance reviews or written reprimands over the course of the past three years. ‘Most new hires don’t fail for lack of skill. Rather, their underlying personalities and attitudes aren’t a good match for the job and the organization,’ Mr. Murphy concluded.”

But how can you tell based on a single interview if this candidate has the right attitude for your workplace? Don’t worry- Murphy’s got that covered too:

“Five main issues that led to failure:

Coachability: In 26 per cent of failures, the employees were unable to accept and use feedback from bosses, colleagues or customers.

Emotional intelligence: In 23 per cent, the issue was inability to manage their emotions and accurately assess others’ reactions or expectations.

Motivation: For 17 per cent, the issue was lack of sufficient drive to reach their potential and excel in the job.

Temperament: In 15 per cent of the cases, their personality didn’t suit their job or their team.

Technical competence: In only 11 per cent of cases, the person’s functional skills weren’t up to the job.”

Still not sure how to gauge a potential employee’s attitude? Murphy explains what changes a company to their interview process and how they found success. “A good example, he said, is the Toronto-based Four Seasons Hotels chain. ‘In their interviews, they treat candidates like they treat their guests, and they expect that candidates will reciprocate,’ he said. For example, ‘even when candidates are waiting for the interview, do they greet each other? Are they polite and make eye contact? And their interview questions are designed to reveal underlying personality and attitudes.’ Interviewing for attitude will become increasingly important as organizations realize they can’t hire as many people as they did in the past and they want to ensure they get people with the right fit, Mr. Murphy said. ‘When you only have 60 minutes or so in an interview, it makes no sense to ask questions that people can prepare for in advance and don’t tell much about underlying attitudes.’”

Murphy actually encourages hiring managers to “Avoid questions that lead toward hypothetical situations. You want to know how people actually responded in historic moments rather than wax philosophical.”

Have you, as a hiring manager, found a successful method of gauging attitude and personality during your interviews that wasn’t mentioned here? If so, what have you done and how has it worked?

So, we’re almost a week in 2012 already. How are those resolutions holding up? Hopefully, you’re staying the course and will be meeting the personal goals you’ve set for yourself. I often feel like we get a very unique perspective here at Alstin, because we work with so many recruiters in so many different industries. With that in mind, I wanted to list five resolutions for recruiters to consider taking on in 2012.

• Go Big Picture

Take a deep breath, step back and take a big-picture look at your recruiting function. Think about the people on your recruiting team and how they spend their time; the hiring managers you work with; business conditions in your industry; and even the leadership at your organization.  What impact do they all have on your ability to recruit the best talent? What are you doing well and what needs to be improved upon? Chances are, your answers haven’t changed much in the last few years. If that’s the case, go directly to #2.

• Challenge Existing Processes

So much has changed in technology, business and communications in the last 5 years. Has your recruiting function kept up? Are you still spending your day running through a maze of outdated methodologies and old processes just because “that’s how we’ve always done it here?” What time-consuming tasks or those with little value to recruiting can be eliminated or automated? Better yet, what are some new workflow patterns that you can put in place that will make a real difference? How will you measure it?

• Use Social Media (already!) and Get Mobile

Social media for recruiting has some definite pitfalls and downsides, but those that keep ignoring it will continue to miss out (more and more) on a great recruiting tool that your competitors are tapping into. Get a social media policy in place and get moving. Consider trying a Facebook pay-per-click campaign as a start (you don’t even need a Facebook careers page to do a PPC campaign). Again, measure the “before” and “after” for both candidate volume and quality.

I’ve read more than one recruiting website proclaim that 2012 will be the year of mobile. Is your career site mobile ready? Do you know the best tools to leverage mobile recruiting? If not, I know a pretty good recruitment ad agency that can help.

• Work on the Candidate Experience.

I don’t think I attended one meeting in 2011 where the topic of the candidate experience didn’t come up (and it wasn’t to discuss how great it was). This is probably the most difficult, pressing topic in recruiting, and one that nearly every organization struggles with (I’m very proud that we have many clients that are making a real effort to tackle it in 2012–they will be the ones capturing the best talent). You’re not expected to solve the entire dilemma for the recruiting industry, but what changes, no matter how small, can be made at your organization to be more personable, responsive, engaging and polite to candidates?

•  Take Care of Yourself.

Many of us resolve each year to be more productive and grow in our jobs. I believe that to really reach that goal, we need to take better care of ourselves. Put away the smart phone and laptop for a little bit now and then, eat better, exercise, spend more time with family or friends, and do whatever else it is that lets you unwind and gives you happiness. Also, resolve to learn something new in 2012, as our brains need to be challenged and stretched to stay strong.

On behalf of all of us at Alstin, a happy and healthy 2012!

Have you noticed an increase in the number of blogs, ads and commercials addressing the growing desire of many people who are currently employed, to seek that career change to the job of their dreams? Hordes of professionals are feeling unfulfilled in their jobs today and are eager to shed the stress and monotony of their daily grind. Their longing to bring more happiness and a better sense of accomplishment to their lives urges them to pursue a more personally and professionally satisfying career doing something they enjoy. With the start of the New Year, this state of mind is at an all time high.

The consistent development of new technologies, and countless designs to rapidly deliver news of the progression of such tools, ideas and updates have provided a platform for those who feel stuck in a rut to discover opportunities to create the careers they crave by formulating a new livelihood based on their passion. In addition, the increased variety of job search functions, including social media and apps for every need, contribute to the success of those who take the risk.

Is it worth it to try? Yes. People are still finding their dream jobs. Users’ pages are peppered with daily blog posts prompting the transition with steps to achieve the proper mindset (like this article), Infographics mapping out your plan of action, and success stories of those who’ve obtained freedom in a career that allows them to spend their time on things that matter to them – “and loving it”.

It’s important that both employed and unemployed job seekers identify the skills they most enjoy using to help them to define their dream. Those who are following their vision will be able to approach their job hunt with more fervor and the stamina it takes to surmount a lengthy search process. Studies report that it now takes an average of 37 weeks to find something. Employees who have achieved a job that reflects their dream in some way, demonstrate more energy and drive in their role, and in the advancement of their company.

Advertisers/recruiters should consider this and appeal to these sensitivities in the right areas when reaching out to candidates, while keeping in mind the value and stability of securing passionate employees for your positions.  The ROI is paramount.

I am what some may call an “over-sharer”. I even have the Foursquare badge to prove it.

So when an application that allows you to share images, along with applying fun filters, with tagging and sharing capabilities comes along. It’s mine… especially if it’s free.

If you’ve been hearing a lot about Instagram you are not alone. It has become a huge marketing tool for companies from all different types of industries.

“According to some research, it seems that the short list is National Geographic, NPR, NBC News, Playboy, Pepsi, CNN, Starbucks, Grammys, and David Blaine. After a series of posts on TechCrunch, Mashable, et al, that list will surely grow. It seems like a natural for any business or media organization that can tell their stories through pictures.”

A recent Mashable article announced that President Obama recently opened his own Instagram account- “In less than a day, and with just two uploads, the U.S. President has already amassed more than 15,000 followers. Obama’s campaign staff, who runs the account, are inviting Instagram users to tag their own campaign shots with the hashtag #Obama2012.”

Another notable achievement for the application, App of the year. Instagram was selected as a favorite from the people over at Apple in their recent iTunes Rewind 2011. The application itself may be new and interesting to some, but it really takes what we’ve always done and makes it easier. Taking pictures and sharing them, whether that be printing them out and sending to grandma or snapping them on your phone and sharing it with the world.

So although Instagram won’t be taking over the world anytime soon, they are enabling people to share and connect with people all over the world, with a simple photo.

You can find us on Instagram- Simply search “Alstin” on the app. Be warned, we take a lot of photos of candies and pastries, we are not responsible for the junk food cravings that will follow!

SHARE: What are some of you favorite mobile apps?

As we are coming to the end of another long year, it is easy to forget the basic manners we were taught as children and apply them to the workplace. While this year hasn’t always been easy like a few before it, sometimes we all need a little reminder to thank the people around us who helped make it a little less stressful and a little more productive. An article recently posted to Business News Daily echoes this same sentiment and during the holidays is the perfect time to let people know how much they really do make a difference, even if it isn’t always obvious at first. The article titled, “Staff Recognition Results in More Productive Teams” reveals why now (better late than never!) is the best time to reach out to your staff and say a simple “Thank you.”

The article explains, “Businesses that take time to recognize employees for their hard work this holiday season can expect a staff that is more motivated and productive, according to researchers with the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Many of the professors, who teach at universities and colleges across the country, agreed that there are long-term benefits to companies that give gifts and parties to their employees. Providing celebrations, bonuses and other forms of year-end acknowledgement has symbolic significance beyond the objective value that may be attached, said Kimberly Merriman, an assistant professor of management and organization at Pennsylvania State University.”

But what is your business is currently a little strapped for cash and end of the year bonuses aren’t possible at this time? Fear not. Even something as simple as a holiday party in the office, allowing employees to dress casually and order a pizza or two, is a perfect way to send a positive message to your staff. The article reiterates- “‘They send a message that the employment relationship is more than simply a transactional one,’ Merriman said. ‘That message is especially important to convey if employees have endured a year of no raises, extra workloads, threats of layoff or many of the other conditions common in workplaces right now.’ But the recognition must be sincere for it to be effective, said Robert Eisenberger, a professor in the psychology department at the University of Houston. ‘If the employer just goes through the motions of giving a gift that doesn’t really indicate they value employees, then it doesn’t count for much,’ Eisenberger said. ‘What really is important is a genuine indication of valuation and caring.’”

If you’ve got a bit more to spend, consider taking employees to lunch or dinner, but really think about how to make it a little special and take time to think about what they might enjoy instead of a paperweight or a mug. “‘It’s easy to give them a few dollars, but taking the time to treat employees to a meal involves effort and planning,’ Eisenberger said. Tom Becker, chair and professor in the University of Delaware’s Department of Business Administration, notes it is important for supervisors to know each staff member’s needs and values in order to select a recognition or reward that employees will welcome. ‘For some, it might be money, and for others, a simple and sincere verbal acknowledgement of a job well done,’ Becker said, adding that nonmonetary recognition can be just as effective as a cash bonus.”

Whatever you decide to do, make sure you don’t forget that fundamental manners goes a long way in the workplace. Saying “please” and “thank you” can be done in so many creative ways that aren’t always pricey.

As a manager, how do you say “thank you” to your employees at the end of the year?

As an employee, what was the best “thank you” you ever received in the workplace during or apart from the holidays?

It’s been another great year on the Alstin blog! Wishing all our readers, clients and coworkers a wonderful holiday season. (We’re giving the blog a little holiday too and will be back on Tuesday, January 3, 2012.)

Rebecca Black may have topped Google’s list of rising searches for 2011, however on the Alstin blog it was Cindy Brady. Yes, it seems that this blog – Take it from Cindy Brady, it’s Not Nice to be a Tattle Tale – received about 1,000 additional views this year from people who happened to Google dear Cindy and click over to my blog.

As for our overall top blogs of 2011, it was no surprise to me that once again, those  that involved an Alstin contest were a big hit. Click here to check out the most recent round of Picture This! and we promise more fun contests and chances to win next year too.

Here are a few others that were in the top 10 that you might want to take a second look at:

Mobile Recruiting with QR Codes – We’re adding QR Codes to all sorts of advertising and marketing applications, email me if you want to learn more. adehaven@alstin.com :)

An Ocean (City) of Opportunity – Christy wrote a great blog here on her “first taste of work” with a summer job in Ocean City, NJ. Many of you will relate, I’m sure.

Behavioral Economics: Can Twitter Predict the Stock Market? – Anne’s got an interesting debate going on in this blog. If you missed this one the first time around be sure to click over.

We’re taking requests and suggestions for 2012 – let us know what you like, or want to see more of from us – we love when we get feedback and are looking forward to bringing you more insights into the world of HR, employer branding, general musings and the occasional silly stuff.

Thanks to all of our readers for checking out our blog, sharing our posts and adding a comment or two – best wishes for a happy holiday season!

Mashable recently posted a video created by the fine folks over at You Tube with the top 10 most viewed videos if 2011. I think it’s awesome to see the things that people really love, or hate so much they can’t stop watching.  I took the time to actually list each video below in-case you may have missed them, but be sure to watch the round-up below!

10. Cat mom hugs baby kitten: 37,799,824 views
9. The Force: Volkswagen Commercial: 45,248,798 views
8. Maria Aragon – Born This Way (Cover) by Lady Gaga: 45,108,486 views
7. The Creep (feat. Nicki Minaj & John Waters): 48,562,705 views
6. Look At Me Now – Chris Brown ft. Lil Wayne, Busta Rhymes (Cover by @KarminMusic): 49,603,838 views
5. Nyan Cat [original]: 53,839,094 views
4. Talking Twin Babies – PART 2 – OFFICIAL VIDEO: 56,354,483 views
3. Jack Sparrow (feat. Michael Bolton) 60,495,847 views
2. Ultimate Dog Tease:: 74,327,452 views
1. Rebecca Black – Friday – Official Music Video : 12,534,147 views

You Tube surpassed 1 trillion views in 2011 and that is a massive and impressive number! My personal favorites are The Ultimate Dog Tease and the Look at me now cover by Karmin.

Which one did you like the most? Did your fave not make the list? Share below!

As we wind down 2011, this December I am taking a second look at some of my favorite blogs. In case you missed it the first go-around, here’s my favorite – enjoy!

The blog post I wanted to highlight this year was “So What Did You Learn This Week?” To be honest, I’m not even sure this is my favorite—there were just so many interesting topics to blog about this year including the idea of Information Sickness, the passing of Steve Jobs, stereotypes of the millennial workforce, the candidate experience (again), outliers, Black Hat SEO and so much more. However, I’m choosing this post because I think that the drive to always be learning and embracing new ideas and concepts will be a key differentiator for recruiters–and all employees–over the next few years. Some will welcome these new strategies and concepts, and the rest will be left behind. My feeling is that it simply doesn’t matter who you are or what you do—your job is changing.

Earlier this year, we featured a blog highlighting the Ten Questions that James Lipton asks his guests at the end of each interview on “Inside the Actor’s Studio.” The format was actually inspired by the French TV host Bernard Pivot, who would submit to his guests the “Proust Questionnaire,” named after the great French writer Marcel Proust. Proust believed that a person’s answers to these ten questions revealed a great deal about them. Ready to show your true colors? Post your answers to the questions that follow. My answers are below.

 1.) What is your favorite word?

Serendipity

 2.) What is your least favorite word?

Leverage

 3.) What turns you on?

Authenticity

 4.) What turns you off?

Phoniness

 5.) What sound or noise do you love?

The call of the green frog (click here).

Tied for first: A camera clicking.

Close second: A good, old-fashioned typewriter.

6.) What sound or noise do you hate?

Whining

7.) What is your favorite curse word?

Poop

8.) What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

Psychologist

9.) What profession would you not like to do?

Ice Road Trucker

10.) If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

Welcome back.

Do you find it difficult to pick out applications to add to your phone? Don’t know which game would be better to make your commute to work fly by? You are not alone.

A brick and mortar app store, Open Space, has opened it doors on Colorado and allows people to walk into their store and get advice on which apps are better for them depending on their likes and interests.

Like the idea of shopping in your PJ’s? Perfect, they also created a website where you can visit online and still receive app advice along with being able to search niche categories which ensure you don’t let one download go astray. Categories include, “things 10 year old girls like” and “zombies”. Click here to check out the video below from the fine people of Mashable telling us more about what Open Space has to offer!

Do you think this will last? Or fail?

An article recently posted to the Harvard Business Review titled, “Why I Hire People Who Fail” reveals how Jeffrey Stibel, Chairman and CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp., reveals why he seeks candidates who have experienced defeat, learned and adapted. While you might be scratching your head thinking, “Why would I ever want to do that? Wouldn’t that just mean I’m leaving room for candidates who might fail my company?” Stibel actually does make some valid points in his piece.

Stibel starts off by explaining how this all began in his office. “One random Thursday night, I returned to our corporate headquarters afterhours with a bottle of wine and a box of acrylic paints. My assistant and I used stencils to paint about three dozen such quotes onto a large white wall in our break room. As first time stencilers, this project itself seemed destined to end up a byline on the (slightly gloppy) failure wall until we gratefully accepted some much-needed painting assistance from my wife. After we finished painting around 1:00AM, we fastened a dozen Sharpies to the wall alongside these simple instructions: (1) describe a time when you failed, (2) state what you learned, and (3) sign your name. To set the tone, I listed three of my own most memorable (and humbling) failures.”

The results at the meeting the next morning? Interesting, enlightening and overall helpful to the workplace in general. Stibel dubbed it the company’s “Failure Wall” and it offered some good incite. “In the beginning, the wall was met with surprise, curiosity and a bit of trepidation. We didn’t ask anyone to contribute and we didn’t tell people why it was there, but the wall quickly filled up. Some of the entries are life lessons: ‘After 7 years of practicing, I quit playing violin in high school to fit in. Lesson learned — who cares what other people think.’ Some are financial mishaps: ‘I thought buying Yahoo at $485 a share was a good idea.’ Many are self-deprecating: ‘My successful failure is working in online marketing when I came to LA to work in showbiz.’ Some are more than a little amusing: ‘I thought it was spelled ‘fale.’”

Okay, but what exactly does this mean and how did it help? Read on and find out:

 “I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: success by failure is not an oxymoron. When you make a mistake, you’re forced to look back and find out exactly where you went wrong, and formulate a new plan for your next attempt. By contrast, when you succeed, you don’t always know exactly what you did right that made you successful (often, it’s luck).

We don’t just encourage risk taking at our offices: we demand failure. If you’re not failing every now and then, you’re probably not advancing. Mistakes are the predecessors to both innovation and success, so it is important to celebrate mistakes as a central component of any culture. This kind of culture can only be created by example — it won’t work if it’s forced or contrived. A lively culture is nebulous, indefinable, ever-changing. Try to package it in a formal mission statement and you just may suffocate it.

The best way to shape culture is of course to focus on hiring the people who will ultimately make up that culture. Yet this is often overlooked, replaced with corporate values, slogans, and mission statements. It took billions of years to create and define all of the world’s great cultures — through failure after failure — so it is with arrogance alone that we executives think we can create and define one for our company. To be blunt, cultures are not created or defined by executives; they evolve around the people who make up a company.”

Have you as a hiring manager purposely sought out a candidate that might have admitted to “failing” at something? Was it a successful decision?

Have you as a job seeker found that admitting to past mistakes has helped your job search or interview process? Were you ever hired because of something you “failed” at in your past and overcame?

In Part I of my blog on my Favorite Fiction from 2011, I talked about some great reads by Chad Harbach, Adam Ross and Emma Donahue. There’s always so many great ones I miss (sorry to Eleanor Henderson, Karen Russell and others—but I did just start Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, which The New York Times named one of the top 5 fiction books of the year). Let’s continue with Part II of my list of the year’s best in fiction.

The Anthologist
Nicholson Baker
Paul Chowder has been asked to write an introduction to a new poetry anthology—and he can’t do it. He misses his girlfriend Roz (who left him because of his procrastinating, among other reasons), his house is falling apart, and his poems aren’t really being published anymore. Haverford College grad Nicholson Baker is a writer wonderfully out of the mainstream who writes slim novels with the pleasing contradiction of being very entertaining despite not a whole lot happening. In his novel Room Temperature, the entire novel takes place during the bottle feeding of an infant, Vox is a phone-sex conversation, U and I, a fan-like appreciation of John Updike, and The Fermata is about a man who can stop time and chooses to use that amazing ability to undress women. The Anthologist features what I thought was Baker’s most likeable protagonist yet, and it really is a love letter to poetry. I think The Anthologist also serves a lesson on why we like rhyme and poetry, the great poets in history, and a thoughtful meditation on how poetry affects our life.

Jo Nesbo
The Snowman
What is with these Scandinavian writers and the great mysteries they write? Publication of The Snowman set off a fun, silly debate over who’s better, the late Stieg Larsson or Jo Nesbo. Both are excellent. In The Snowman, Detective Harry Hole is drawn into a complex and grisly murder that looks like it might match a series of unsolved murders. Norway has never had a serial killer, so many around Hole are suspicious when he starts to link the crimes together. In so many murder mysteries, every character seems like a cut-out caricature, but not in this gritty and creepy thriller. I don’t read many mysteries, but I really enjoyed this one.

John Casey
Compass Rose
John Casey is best known for his wonderful novel Spartina which none other than the New York Times called “possibly the best American novel . . . since The Old Man and the Sea.”). In this follow-up, the focus is less on Dick Pierce (the main character in Spartina) and more on his daughter from his affair with Elsie, Rose. Casey’s novels (including the also-excellent The Half-Life of Happiness) have more to do with people than plot, and there sure isn’t much to criticize in the natural, estuary Rhode Island world Casey creates, or his lyrical writing. For me however, the characters that were so compelling in Spartina are a lot less interesting—and likeable–in Compass Rose. Still, I’m glad for Compass Rose, not just because we get to revisit the lives of these characters, but because it gives me an opportunity to recommend a truly great and unfairly underrated novel. Read Spartina today!

Tom Rachman
The Imperfectionists
Another great first novel. The Imperfectionists follows the writers, editors and publishers of an international English language newspaper in Rome. Each of the main characters gets a chance to tell his or her story from their own point of view—I know that sounds like a bit of a gimmick, but it really works here. This novel is very funny and very sad, and the characters seem both crazy and completely real. The novel also deals with the chaos in trying to put out a paper, and how the Internet has changed newspapers forever. Fiction is so subjective, but I’ve yet to meet someone who read The Imperfectionists who hasn’t really liked it. One of my favorites of the year.

A Sense of an Ending
Julian Barnes
Fantastic. This is one of those slim, literary novels that packs more depth and narrative punch between its cover than a ponderous 800 page epic. Tony Webster and his school friends welcome the brilliant Adrian into their pseudo-cool group where they talk philosophy, smoke cigarettes, drink and vow to be friends forever–until things take a tragic change. The novel then picks up 40 years later with Tony, alone and living a quiet life of humdrum routines. A lot of wisdom and insight is squeezed into this novel, especially on the subject of the everyday, and how we all have our own version of the past that we can’t help but constantly edit and embellish. I’ve heard this novel accurately described as a “mystery of memory.” Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize and, along with Skippy Dies, my favorite novel of the year.

 
Skippy Dies
Paul Murray
Want to read a 672 page novel about boys at a catholic prep school in Ireland? If you said no, you’re really going to miss out. The pacing is great, it’s both hilarious and heartbreaking, and it captures adolescence in all its wincing, cringing glory. Even though yes, Skippy dies (he’s actually a goner on the first few pages), the way the novel unfolds and builds back to that moment—especially once we learn about all the pain and drama surrounding his demise–makes his death all the more heartbreaking. This novel also smartly captures what it means to be a teenager today, where everything is available on the Internet, friends text instead of talk, etc. What I think I liked best about Skippy Dies is how Murray takes what seem like the most obvious stereotypes (the smart, fat kid; the pretty, rich girl; the shy student, the nerdy teacher; the psychotic bully;) and makes them into fully rounded, sympathetic characters without resorting to clichés or epiphanies. Skippy Dies isn’t the type of novel that gets the snooty literary awards and fawning press, but for pure storytelling and reading entertainment this was my favorite novel of the year.

That’s it for me, but please help add to this list. I’d love to hear what novels made your best-of list in 2011!

My kids brought their most recent report cards home last week.

Altogether, a great showing. My daughter got straight A’s but was less than stellar in the “Learning Related/Self-Directed Learning” categories. This included, but was not limited to:

follows verbal directions; follows classroom routines; demonstrates organizational skills; maintains attention.

What was I saying? Oh, yes. The social skills side of school was where she fell a little short. But when you see great grades, it’s tough to take that other side of the student progress report too seriously. She scored well, and that’s what counts to schools, so what more do you need to know?

My son got three A’s and two B’s and shined in every learning category except maintains attention and contributes to classroom discussions. But what my husband and I loved was that this marking period, he barely even showed us his homework. Never told us — or wrote down — when he had a test. Hardly ever asked for help, unless some tougher math had him down (Dad is a CPA so, yes, I defer anything past 4^th-grade math to him). He did what he did on his own, without a whole lot of pressure or review on our part beyond the normal, “Hey bud, do your best work today.” And, “Take your time with stuff.”

Considering today’s version of the report card got me thinking about RFPs. Requests for Proposals are, at least from our agency’s viewpoint, never an envelope or email a recipient jumps for joy over. Sure, it can mean new business. An influx of potentially great projects. And (CHING CHING) more billings. But the thing about an RFP — defined as, “An invitation for providers of a product or service to bid on the right to supply that product or service to the individual or entity that issued the RFP.” — is that it never tells the whole story. Its answers have probably, at least in part, been recycled. And we’re all going to try our best to tell the “individual or entity” what they want to hear.

Two things I don’t like about this definition I just cited…

#1 – “invitation”, to me, brings to mind carefree times and, usually, alcohol. No RFP I’ve ever been part of has ever included either.

#2 – The phrase “to bid on the right to supply that product or service” is off-base because a.) bidding isn’t really bidding when you don’t know what others “invited” to the fun are bidding, and b.) supplying our service — creative thinking, strategic solutions, and service — isn’t really a right. It’s kind of an honor, but definitely not a right. It’s really more about our ability to meet the expectations of the inviter. (Is inviter a word? I don’t think so because I keep getting a red line whenever I type it. Sorry. Maintaining attention now.) If we don’t perform as expected, we really have no “rights” as a supplier — we’re shown the door, regardless of how well-written and substantiated our RFP response was.

Which brings me to my biggest gripe about the RFP: it’s a ton of work. Not that we mind work, but RFPs can be daunting in size and in scope, especially since many of them are not written by the people you’ll actually be reporting to. Typically, an RFP is put together by the Purchasing Department. And, pardon any unintended aspersions cast at the Purchasing industry, but they really don’t care too much about what we do. They just want 43 answers to the questions on their checklist. We’ve received some RFPs that looked as though they were intended for tire suppliers. For example, “Please define the total quantity of radial tires you would be able to provide in last minute/’rush’ situations.” But they cut “radial tires” and replace it with “innovative recruitment ideas”.

But don’t get me wrong. I’m not completely against RFPs. Alstin has won quite a few of them over the past few years — even against much larger, much more well-known firms. (Insert fist pump here.) They do allow the organization requesting information to do a sort of side by side comparison of breadth of services offered. They do work to level the playing field and, if you do an accurate job of representing yourself, help you win business you might not have otherwise had access to. They, at the very least, let the individual or entity make fun of people for making typos.

But the real problem is that what we’re able to offer in list format — even with excellent full color samples — isn’t even close to definitive when it comes to truly explaining the competitive differences that make our agency best suited to win the business.

My daughter’s report card listed that she’s Progressing (P) at “listening without interrupting”. But in the case of discussing alternatives and brainstorming creative ideas, listening WHILE interrupting is when some of the best work comes about. Do I really want her to get a “Demonstrates Consistently” (DC) in that area? Sure, she’ll probably replace that “P” with a “DC” by the end of the year, and on paper, that looks great — especially, eventually, on a college application. But what does it really mean? What does it really sacrifice?

RFPs are a valuable tool for beginning the process of getting to know a group of individuals you may choose to work with. But it’s just one of many, and maybe not the most telling. Give us a test project and compare our ideas to what our competitors come up with. Or, try our recommendations out for three months and compare your numbers to those from the three months prior. Talk to us face to face — because sometimes, gut feelings are the most accurate “report” you can get.

Oh, and if we do surprise you with a great RFP response, take us out for ice cream.

Because along with winning a million dollar account, nothing’s better than someone taking you out for ice cream. Even if you’re older than eight.

Here we are again. Another holiday season of shopping, eating and spending time with the people you love. We are always so caught up in holiday cheer, listening to the nostalgic tunes on the radio and marking off countless Christmas lists.  It’s fun, exciting and always makes for great memories.

It’s also during the holiday’s where some families struggle the most and with the economy still unsteady and jobs hard to find, it’s usually the holiday season where some people are the most sad. I didn’t post this to give everyone a trip down guilt lane, but instead some really easy ways to help this holiday season.

TOMS SHOES

In 2006, American traveler Blake Mycoskie befriended children in Argentina and found they had no shoes to protect their feet. Wanting to help, he created TOMS Shoes, a company that would match every pair of shoes purchased with a pair of new shoes given to a child in need. One for One. Blake returned to Argentina with a group of family, friends and staff later that year with 10,000 pairs of shoes made possible by TOMS customers.

WARBY PARKER

With the same idea in mind Warby Parker allows you to buy a pair of stylish and inexpensive frames and in turn they will donate a pair to someone in need.

What I like about the above sites is how it takes something that you already probably need or want to give to someone else and makes it easy for someone like you and I to make an impact and help people around the world. I’ll turn this into a social media piece by sharing with you another company that takes our social nature and creates a space where people can come to and ask for help, a granted wish. People who are looking for a hero.

WISH UPON A HERO

Wish Upon A Hero was first conceived by founder Dave Girgenti shortly after the September 11th attacks on New York City. From his home in NJ, Girgenti watched as thousands of people posted pictures of missing loved ones throughout the city. He thought there had to be a faster, more organized way to connect people in need. That was the moment in which the idea was born.

This is a site where you should probably have a pack of tissues at hand. Some wishes are very saddening to read and make you wish you could offer more help. But others are very much so within our reach. So if you can’t help a family with their electric bill or hospital bills, you might be able to help someone by sending a pack of Christmas cards or even some words of love or encouragement.

So there you have some very easy ways to make your holiday season even brighter!

How do you help during the holidays (or all year round).

In the workplace there is frequently a sense of urgency that can sometimes hurt employees and production as opposed to help them. While you might think as a boss, manager or any position in which you supervise other employees, it is important to remember that when tasks start to pile up or when deadlines are approaching in mere minutes, to keep your cool and try to help your employees to do the same. According to an article recently posted to SmartBlog on Leadership titled, “Is stress ruining your leadership-development efforts?” there are some things to keep in mind on how to support your team during these pseudo dramatic moments.

The article begins by identifying the real problem and giving it a name- “Does your organization have a process for leadership development? If so, then you’ve probably heard about or experienced what I call the ‘pressure cooker’ experience: Toss a bunch of smart, driven people into a time-pressured scenario, ask them to perform a task and see how they handle it. It’s the corporate version of reality television’s ‘Celebrity Apprentice,’ minus The Donald’s bad comb-over. Many executives favor this format, reasoning that promotable people need to be able to handle high-pressure situations. This is true — but what’s the right mix of pressure and learning? I once heard an executive stand before a group of high-potentials and declare, ‘What we see during your presentation has the power to make or break your career. If you’re not able to deliver, don’t bother coming back tomorrow.’”

While this might sound like it makes sense on determining who your best employees are and weeding out the employees you deem to be too venerable for this type of work, it is actually harmful to your entire team. The article continues to clarify, “Here’s the problem with that over-the-top approach. There’s very little development going on. The word ‘develop’ means to aid in the growth of or to strengthen. If, in fact, the aim of leadership development is to aid in the growth of one’s leadership capabilities, then heaping on excessive stress is counterproductive.”

So how does this type of leadership really come off? Here are the three less-than-flattering ways it can be interpreted:

“It sends an ugly signal about organizational culture. There’s something sadistic about corporate leadership that intentionally applies pressure to the point of making its employees ill. These aspiring leaders want to do well. They don’t need ultimatums about their career to motivate them.

The focus is misplaced. When the message is your job is on the line, people focus on dazzling executives during the presentation, not on the foundational leadership skills needed in group projects like research, critical thinking and collaboration.

They won’t learn much. Excessive stress leads to production of the stress hormone, cortisol. The area of the brain that’s highly sensitive to cortisol is the hippocampus, which is the center for spatial awareness and memory formation. Simply put: too much stress equals no learning.”

To find out more about what you can do to prevent this from happening in your company culture, click on the link to read the entire article. As the piece concludes, “High-stakes project work makes for great reality TV, but it has no place in the learning environment.”

Have you as a hiring manager learned how to reign in the stress level and find a balance to keep your employees productive? If so, what have you done to support your team?

Have you as an employee experienced this in the workplace? What have you done to keep yourself sane a high stress environment?

Can we really be in December already? This month not only means the holidays, overeating and the end of the year, but also the time for my annual wrap-up of the best fiction I read in 2011. To see my picks from previous years, click here. Like last year, I read so many worth talking about that I’m going to need two blog posts to fit them all in.

My biggest lament, as always, are all the great ones I didn’t get to. I hope our readers will help add to this list by posting comments at the bottom. Okay, on to Part I of my favorites from 2011!

The Art of Fielding
Chad Harbach
There was so much buzz around the publication of this excellent first novel, and when I learned that the novel revolves around both literature and baseball, I knew this one was for me. The Art of Fielding follows Henry Skrimshander, an incredibly talented shortstop at small Westish College in Wisconsin. Henry, with the coaxing and coaching of his pal Mike Schwartz  (my favorite character in the novel), blossoms even further, and by his junior year major league scouts are showing up as he nears Luis Aparicio’s amateur record of consecutive games without an error. It’s hard to tell much more without giving away the plot, but all is not smooth sailing for Henry as he has a Steve Sax/Chuck Knoblauch type meltdown (baseball fans will know what this means, and it’s absolutely excruciating to read). While the novel has some of the best writing about baseball I’ve read, especially on the artistry and grace of fielding, this is much more than a “sports” novel, as there’s complicated relationships, romances, and heartbreak exploding all around. If I’m being cranky, my one complaint would be that some of the narrative twists felt a bit forced (especially near the end), but this was easily one of my top books of the year and I heartily recommend it.

PS: On Wednesday, the New York Times named The Art of Fielding one of the top 5 fiction books of the year.

The Lonely Polygamist
Brady Udall
Golden Richards has four wives, twenty-eight children and some serious despair in his heart. He spends a lot of his time in a near-impossible quest for some peace, and his increasingly frigid relationship with his wives, kids and a super-stressful, failing business venture are killing him. Needless to say, all is not well on the home front, with one wife ready to leave him and one son plotting revenge. Richards is building a brothel in Nevada, and there he falls in love with a woman he sees walking near the construction site. There’s something really winning about the hapless, pitiable Richards, but I can’t say I loved this book. Perhaps it was just me, but I found the pacing slow (most reviewers felt otherwise) and long stretches uninvolving. Finally, the concept of the polygamist life not being all it’s cracked up to be didn’t really strike me as revelatory.

Mr. Peanut
Adam Ross
The first two sentences of this novel let you know what you’re in for: “When David Pepin first dreamed of killing his wife, he didn’t kill her himself. He dreamed convenient acts of God.”

Actually, David loves his obese wife Alice, but not her dread, mannerisms or obsessions, and he dreams of endless ways of killing her. Once she’s dead, the detectives Hastroll and Sheppard step in and (initially at least) it seems the novel will loop back solely to the story of David and Alice’s marriage. However, things take a very unexpected turn, both in subject matter and style, and that risky move seems to divide people’s opinion of the book. Personally, I really liked Mr. Peanut, both for the admirable intricacy of the plotting as well as its focus and ruminations on relationships and marriage. I’ve read that this book is becoming something of a quick cult classic, and I bet most people will tell you they either love it or hate it. Give it a try and see what you think.

Sunset Park and Invisible
Paul Auster
I’ve read most of Paul Auster’s novels, and we’re so lucky to have a novelist who never stops redefining and pushing the boundaries of storytelling. Auster is always playing with structure, voice, point of view, meta-fiction and postmodernism; and Sunset Park and Invisible are his two most recent novels. I really liked Sunset Park and really hated Invisible, and a lot of Auster fans will tell you that dichotomy is completely normal. In the case of Sunset Park, a story about Miles and his friends squatting in foreclosed houses in Florida, his unusual approach really works. I found that Sunset Park hit squarely on the feelings of despair and hopelessness many in our country have experienced over the last few years. In Invisible, young and eccentric Adam Walker meets the enigmatic Rudolf Born and his lover, the beautiful Margot, while at Columbia University. This one was not for me, but the New York Times loved it, so what do I know?  If you’re interested in Auster, some of my favorites are The Book of Illusions, Man in the Dark, Oracle Night, Travels in the Scriptorium, The Brooklyn Follies and his famous New York Trilogy.

The Ask
Sam Lipsyte
Another novel that reflects these tough economic times, and this one really pulls no punches. Sad-sack Milo Burke is not only a failure at bringing in donors at the small university he works for, but in life. His chance at redemption is hauling in a large fish: “The Ask,” represented by Purdy Stuart, a former classmate who has hit it big. This darkly comic novel is not for those looking to be inspired or uplifted, as you can feel the sting in Milo’s acidic comments and dim view of the world. I know this type of cynical, bleak novel is not for everyone, but even if it’s not always enjoyable, I thought this funny, biting satire of our society was very well done. Still, not a holiday gift for Grandma.

Room
Emma Donahue
Wow, wow and wow. Along with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Room might be one of the most unnerving novels I’ve ever read. The story is told from the point of view of Jack, a boy to whom Room is the whole world. To his mother (Ma) Room is the prison where she has been kept for seven years. Ma has done her best to try to create a life for her and Jack in Room, but things have to change, and she has a plan for her and Jack to escape Room and Old Nick. I found Room harrowing and impossible to put down. I hate when reviewers over-gush about books, but even if you don’t love this one, it truly is unforgettable.

I’ll be back in the next week or so with Part II of my list, which will include my two favorite novels of 2011. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from our readers on their best fiction reads!

The online version of Black Friday – Cyber Monday – came and went this week.  For those Americans who decided to bring a bunch of coupon codes to their laptops vs. a can of pepper spray to their local Walmart, we can now say that it looks like another $1.2 billion in online sales got pumped back into the economy on Monday.

While this campaign for Target is just all kinds of awesome, I’m among the former group, not the latter – give me a coupon code, a laptop and I’m off!

I have to admit though, my online shopping experience this year was almost as frustrating as hitting the stores. This is what I ran into. One site that I wanted to shop at had crashed and was totally out of commission (boo!), another required me to call in my order because I got a wacky error message right after clicking checkout (ugh!), another site’s order didn’t reflect my gift card contribution which required (rats!), another phone call. Oh and Target? By the time I got to you Target.com, several of the items I wanted to snag were out of stock online – oh well.

All the annoyances aside, it was the best way for me to cross off my entire list and get some great deals. I bet next year many retailers will be better prepared too. I never had issues like this in the years prior.

I did my shopping in the usual position, from my comfy couch in my slippers that night , but it looks like almost half of us Cyber Monday shoppers logged on at work. Were you one of them?

For those who can’t resist an online bargain while on the clock, take note. CareerBuilder reported that 21 percent of employers surveyed have fired someone for using their computer for non-work related activities – five percent specifically indicated that they had fired individuals for holiday shopping.

While I am not advocating that y’all start using these tactics to secretly shop online at work, especially that missile launcher option, but here’s an infographic via DailyInfographic.com that offers up some telling stats and silly tips on all things Cyber Monday and the workplace. Happy shopping!

I had the wonderful opportunity to go to the SM Plus Conference this year over at the Philadelphia Convention Center and hear some really informative and helpful presentations.

This was a two day event where a bunch of different speakers came to talk about their specific experience with social media and how it affects their particular industry. There are different “tracks” you could go on like Marketing, HR, PR, General Social Media and some others. I mixed up my day between HR, Marketing and General Social Media and got a great variety of information from some really amazing people.

I wanted to highlight some of my favorite key points from the presentations I attended.

Social Media Recruiting isn’t about Recruiting: @susanstrayer

Mistakes 101:

• Don’t take on social media just because everyone is doing it or because you just want to test it out and see what happens. Have a plan and a goal.
• Do not simply push content. Have a plan behind everything you do.
• Just because someone you work with uses Facebook or Twitter all the time does not mean they are ready to take on social media efforts for your company.
• Just because setting up accounts on Social Media platforms are free doesn’t mean you should just set it up and leave it alone.

Another great presentation came from the fine folks over at Under Armour. Dan Mecchi did a wonderful job going over how the “The Ultimate Intern” program was so successful through the use of social media. Emphasized throughout this entire presentation is making sure that the audience you are trying to reach FEELS the following things.

• This is about ME
• This brand is making ME feel apart of what they are doing, apart of the brand.
• This brand is inspiring me. Motivating me to take action.
• This brand is giving me content.
• This brand is getting me involved.

Ready to work out?

Next week I’ll recap the other half of the presentations. Let me know if you have any questions as to how to take the above and transfer it to your brand in order to make social media work for you.

In an article recently posted on US News Money titled, “10 Faux Pas to Avoid When Starting a New Job,” new hire mistakes range from poor etiquette to poor dress code. Considering the fact that it hasn’t been easy to find a job recently, the last thing you’d want to do is sabotage yourself within your first week, or even your first day of employment at a new workplace. It’s easier than you think to fall into bad habits in a new environment or to accidentally give off the wrong impression to co-workers. Although some of these mistakes might seem obvious a little reminder never hurts, especially if you have been out of the workforce for an extended period of time.

Here is a sampling of a few of the worst things you can do as a new hire:

 “1. The late bird gets in trouble. Being late occasionally is one thing, but chronic tardiness is another. Showing up perpetually late will put your new job at risk, so set your alarm earlier and get out the door on time.

5. Dress however you want. Even if you’d rather wear your slippers and daisy dukes to your new job, it could make you some enemies and put you on the black list immediately. Check out what everybody is wearing when you visit the office. A good rule of thumb is to dress more formally when you first start work. You can always dress down once you see that everyone is more casual. Also, pay attention to who dresses in what way. Managers may be dressier than their subordinates, so follow suit (pun intended). It never hurts to dress nicely!

7. Figure out the hard stuff on your own. Hate asking for help? Failing to do so could be detrimental to your paycheck if you make a big enough mistake. Don’t be a turkey—ask for help, ask questions. No one expects you to know everything early on, so it’s perfectly acceptable to ask once how to do something. Take notes to avoid having to ask the same question over and over.

8. Let your tasks stretch further than your job description. This one might not get you fired, but if you’re getting more and more work dumped on you that wasn’t mentioned in the interviews, you may be overloaded and want to quit. Make sure you fully understand the role. While many companies will want you to get your hands dirty and participate in duties that might not be ‘part of the job description,’ you’ll have to approach the subject with your manager if you find yourself in a situation where you are given much more than one person can handle.

9. Be who you think people want you to be. Everyone wants to put their best foot forward on a new job, but going overboard can make it hard for people to get to know the real you. Let your personality shine (quietly, if it’s a strong one). Never lie about your skills (or anything, really), and you’ll be on the fast track for success.”

Have you recently found yourself tip toeing towards any of these common pitfalls? Fortunately, once you know about some of these mistakes, most of them are easy to avoid as long as you can master some self-awareness. While it’s true that sometimes there is no avoiding certain conflict and that you “can’t always please everyone” steering clear of these new hire mistakes can help you at your new job in the long run. To read the entire list, view the full article to see more of what you should evade.

Did this list miss anything? Do you have another tip or two to add? Let us know what you think new hires should try to avoid when getting a feel for a new workplace.  

Happy Thanksgiving to all from Alstin Communications! We’ll be back to the blog on Monday, 11/28/11 – take care and have a wonderful holiday!

CBS Money Watch recently posted an article on the “Three types of bosses that should be fired,” offering hiring managers some incite on who they should avoid making an offer to at all costs. Why does this matter to you and your company? If you’re looking to hire a manager, executive or any position that will supervise the performance of other employees, it’s important to understand that not only should this candidate be qualified by typical standards (education, experience, etc.), but they should also possess the right personality type. How can you tell? This article can help you know what to look for in a manager and what to stay away from.

The commentary by the author starts by explaining, “I’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds, maybe thousands of brilliant people over a 30-year career in high-tech… When it comes to management ability and leadership qualities, however, bosses tend to follow a pretty standard bell shaped curve: consistently successful managers at one narrow end, remarkably ineffective ones at the other end, and everyone else in between. After all the years, experiences, and observations, I’ve got a pretty good handle on what it takes to be a great manager and what kind of behavior will tend to land an executive at one end of the bell curve or the other. And while one size manager does not fit all situations, I have been able to identify, with relative certainty, three types of managers who shouldn’t be running anything, let alone an organization or a company. Not only will they fail, they’ll take the whole organization and everyone in it down with them.”

So what types of people make the list and why shouldn’t you hire them? Here are the three that make the list:

“The smartest guy in the room: This is the guy who has all the answers and can never, ever be wrong. He doesn’t just breathe his own fumes or drink his own Kool-Aid, he makes and mass-markets it, as well. He wants everyone to agree with his grandiose vision of how things should be and makes sure of that by surrounding himself with yes-men and women and ruthlessly beating down dissenting views.

The reason these people fail is they’re blinded by the power of their own vision and therefore lack objectivity. They tend to be rigid and inflexible in their thinking and unwilling to see what’s really happening until it’s too late. Unfortunately, markets don’t behave according to anyone’s plan. They’re populated by competitors and customers with free will and have a funny way of determining their own outcome.

It’s all about me: Some people never grow up but get stuck in one phase or another of human development. They look just like normal adults, but inside, they’re petulant, narcissistic children with oversized egos. Since their overriding goal is to get attention, to be adulated and worshipped by all, they’re often charismatic and charming, almost chameleon-like in the way they appeal to all sorts of constituents. And their positions and strategies can flip and flop from one day to the next based on one data point, meeting, or conversation.

While a healthy ego is necessary and good for leaders, business isn’t really about any particular individual. It’s about meeting customer needs, achieving long-term growth and success for shareholders and employees, and being passionate about your products and services. People who think free market capitalism is about selfish greed couldn’t be more wrong. Every company, board, CEO, executive team, serves its stakeholders and constituents. If it doesn’t, it’ll fail.

The has-been: We may as well call him by his name, Peter, because this person is more or less defined by the Peter Principle. Peter was once effective and successful; at least it appeared that way. But the situation had a narrow set of boundaries and variables and now, things have changed and Peter is out of his depth, beyond his level of competency.

Perhaps he was promoted, the company grew, the market changed, or he’s now in a new position in a new company. Regardless of the circumstances, Peter is no longer effective and his inability to see or believe it renders him toxic to the organization. For whatever reason, Peter lacks the ability to grow, scale, or adapt. And since he’s still in a position of power and authority, he’s not just an old relic, but a heavy anchor around the company’s neck.”

The article concludes by asking a question we would also like to present to you, “Got one to add to the list?” Can you think of a type of boss that should never be in that kind of position? Have you worked with or under one of these employees? What was your experience?

As a hiring manager, what steps do you take to ensure you are hiring a manager that doesn’t fall into one of these categories?

If you read our blog (or ever see me out at a meeting) you know how obsessed I am with iced tea. That’s why I’m so sad to report on the demise of the TBar, formerly at 12th and Sansom.

The TBar was located just a few blocks from our office. I would often sneak out around lunch to get one of their delicious iced bubble teas and take a deep breath. Tastefully decorated and with super-nice people working there, it was a welcome oasis from the din and hustle of Center City. In fact, its closing reminded how upset I was when another great tea shop closed, Great Tea International at 17th and Sansom (hmm, it’s starting to dawn on me that selling $2-3 teas and then having customers stay for an hour–all while you’re paying Center City rent–may not be the most profitable business plan).

Anyway, I’m sorry to see them go but happy to report that you can find them online at www.tbarteas.com/tbar/ Please visit the website and give them a try. They have over 70 types of loose teas, as well as teaware and accessories. Tea makes a great holiday gift.

Consider the image of your company as a place to work, your employer brand, in the eyes of applicants. At each touch point you have when sourcing for new talent: ads, postings, social media interaction, landing pages/Microsites/company career portals, job descriptions, applicant tracking systems, relationship tools, interviews, office environments, staff, salaries and benefits, and onboarding and training, you have the opportunity to impart a positive image of your company in order to attract the best and the brightest, as well as discourage those who don’t seem to be a fit. A positive, engaging employer brand is priceless and needs to be protected at all costs.

This brings up an interesting phenomenon popping up these days: brandjacking that’s going beyond undesirable tweets, blog posts and comments from disgruntled applicants and ex-employees. According to multiple news outlets, Bank of America’s Google Plus page was brandjacked, meaning someone not affiliated with BofA created a false page that trashed the bank by including mocking photos, images and posts. (For more on Google Plus pages, see our November 8^th blog post titled, “Say Hello to Google+ brand pages.”) Here’s a snippet, “Starting tomorrow, all Occupy Wall Street protestors with Bank of America accounts around the country will have their assess seized as part of BofA’s new Counter Financial Terrorism policy.” Another post read, “We took your bailout money and your mortgage rates are going up.” Amazingly, the page stayed visible for an entire week! It’s pretty damning stuff and you can imagine what this does to the bank’s image (not that it hasn’t taken a number of hits over the last couple of years but that’s another story).

With social media taking on an increasing role in engaging with and recruiting potential employees it’s important to take a lesson from this. Even if you have assigned someone internally as your designated social media person or if you use an agency like Alstin to coordinate your efforts, make sure you monitor the web for any and all information related to your company. A daunting task? Nope, just use technology in your favor. Create a Google Alert to email you on a daily basis everything on the web related to your company. (In the black box at the top of the Google home page, click on More…, then click on Even More. Scroll down to Specialized Search and fill in your preferences. ) You’ll keep on top of what’s out there and can take steps to control it, ensuring that the message you want to convey is the only message seen by applicants.

Writer’s Block.

Answering questions can be really helpful when you hit writer’s block. It can help unlock different ideas and inspire your next literary masterpiece. In my case, I just need to find something interesting to say today so I go to Tony, master blogger, and ask for some inspiration.

A while back Tony did the 10 questions from Inside the Actor’s Studio. Deep, thoughtful and provoking are great words to describe these questions and Tony answered them all. He suggested I give it a whirl, so hopefully today, you get to know a little more about me through this list of questions! Enjoy!

1.) What is your favorite word?

Illumination.

2.) What is your least favorite word?

Sag.

3.) What turns you on?

Mozart.

4.) What turns you off?

Negativity.

5.) What sound or noise do you love?

Old music boxes.

6.) What sound or noise do you hate?

The sound of people complaining.

7.) What is your favorite curse word?

F.M.L

8.) What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

Classical Dancer. As in Ballerina. Don’t laugh at me.

9.) What profession would you not like to do?

The other kind of dancer.

10.) If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

Nothing. I’d expect the most EPIC high five/chest bump ever.

What do you do when writer’s block strikes? 

A recent article posted to CNNMoney titled, “How flexible work actually works” delves into some workplace issues such as time clocks and sick leave, offering suggestions based on what a few companies chose to change and how it worked out. While we recently posted a blog on how working from home might not be the best choice for everyone, what about a more flexible workplace? Some people consider this a workplace “perk,” but are these perks actually effective enough to consider mandating them in some companies? This article sure makes a decent argument for it. “Imagine unlimited paid vacation and sick leave, with no mandated office hours. Chaos, right?  Not according to a handful of award-winning employers profiled in a new report on effective workplaces.”

The article starts of by examining a company and their policies- MeetingMatrix. “At MeetingMatrix International, a communications firm based in Portsmouth, N.H., employees have no defined work schedules, unlimited paid time off, and meetings are optional. How do they ever get any work done? That’s actually the only thing that matters: results. MeetingMatrix executives point to longer customer support hours, increased sales during a down economy, and 100% retention as evidence that their focus on the end results — and not hours in the office — works.

‘When you start treating people like adults, they start acting like it,’ says the company’s CEO Jmichaele Keller, who in 2008 shelved his company’s employee monitoring systems in favor of a more flexible approach. Under the new regime, ‘people have a lot of ability to shape what is going on in their world and not a lot of micromanaging…. There really is no direct tie in an office environment between the amount of time spent and the productivity of that individual.’”

Are you under the impression that your company is just as flexible and hasn’t seen these kinds of results, especially in the midst of the recent recession? CNNMoney examines “Faux-flexibility vs. the real deal” next. “‘Because of the recession and because of the global economy and because of technology, work has become so much more demanding,’ says Ellen Galinsky, president and co-founder of the Families and Work Institute. Galinsky says that successful companies have begun to tackle these challenges by legitimately loosening their hold on their employees rather than resorting to halfway measures. For instance, companies that replace a 9 to 5 schedule with ‘flexible’ hours of 7 to 3 aren’t necessarily accommodating employees’ need to handle personal affairs, whether it’s a sick child, leaky bathtub, or car repair. Other businesses are redesigning work such that incentives and rewards are aligned with the results that an employee delivers — not the hours that they show their faces in the office, Galinsky says.”

But is this too much freedom? How can these companies be sure this is a problem and this is the solution? The tax company, Ryan, proved it through their own experience after losing one of their best employees. “Ryan, a tax services firm based in Dallas. A few years ago, a resignation letter from a rising star in the company prompted CEO G. Brint Ryan to reevaluate the firm’s focus on long hours and face time.

You may think all I do is dream about iced tea and carp about the darker side of today’s technology. However, I do know the secret to saving the economy and creating jobs:

The answer? You can’t.

Not really, anyway. There’s a great article in the New York Times Magazine by Adam Davidson titled Can Anyone Really Create Jobs? The answer, unfortunately, is no.

The fact is that creating [jobs] in a far-too-sluggish economy is practically impossible in our current capitalist democracy. No corporate leader is rewarded for hiring people who aren’t absolutely required. Most companies hire only when its workforce can no longer keep up with the demand for its products.

If you’re not familiar with Adam Davidson, I highly recommend checking out his Planet Money podcasts. He does a great job of explaining complicated financial issues and their ramifications in an unbiased way. I often turn to these podcasts when I want to learn about issues like toxic assets, the mortgage crisis, why we bailed out banks, etc.

Okay, so there’s two schools of thought on how we create jobs, and while you may favor one over the other depending on your political view, the truth is that neither one does much good.

Many on the Democrat side champion the Keynes’ view that the government can create jobs by spending a boatload of money. The problem with that, as Davidson states, is:

The stimulus…has to be borrowed, and it has to be really, truly huge — probably something like $1.5 or $2 trillion — to fill the gap between where the economy is and where it would be if everyone was spending at pre-recession levels. The goal is to goad consumers into spending again. And President Obama’s jettisoned $400 billion jobs package, hard-core Keynesians argue, is nowhere near what it would take to persuade them.”

The Republicans obviously champion a more fiscally conservative view that says that a Keynesian stimulus can’t grow jobs or fix the economy — only time can, and that any meddling we do only delays the recovery. Davidson points out the irony of this viewpoint:

It’s a puzzle of modern politics that Republicans have had electoral success with a policy that fundamentally asserts there is nothing the government can do to create jobs any time soon.

Of course, I wouldn’t expect Romney, Perry, Cain or any GOP candidate to shout, “Just sit tight, we’ll get through this!” In fact, many of the “jobs creation” ideas proposed by the Republicans like tax cuts and loosening of regulations are at odds with this wait-it-out philosophy.

So is there any hope? Davidson closes the piece with his opinion:

An economy is truly healthy only when its people know how to make and do things that others will pay them a decent amount for. Jobs, in other words, are not the cause of a healthy economy; they’re the byproduct. And that’s another thing most national politicians know but will never say. So perhaps instead of (or, at least, in addition to) arguing over plans that aren’t going to happen, we should focus on what almost certainly will come true. The economy that emerges from this recession is going to be different. Without the distortion of a credit bubble, it is clear that far too many Americans don’t know how to do anything that the world is willing to pay them a living wage for. No economic theory offers them easy salvation. We don’t need to become a nation of app designers. An economic downturn is a great time to learn things — carpentry, say, or aerospace engineering — that others will eventually pay for.

As a long-term graphic designer and the resident Mac tech-guy at Alstin, I found Steve Job’s’ recent demise to be the closing of a window that I’d often peered into. Though I think some of the eulogizing was over the top and overly simplistic, I found much of the criticism directed towards Jobs’ and his apparent deification to be equally ignorant.

One of the most repeated comments I read was that all Apple did was make things shiny and market them well, with Steve being little more than a huckster pitchman preying on the easily distracted masses. Sure, you could attribute these POVs to Android fans who think their superior platform doesn’t get a fair shake, developers who froth over Apple’s “walled garden”, the “those who hate anything popular” crowd, and an abundance of rambunctious 13 yr. old boys, but in reality, you simply have a group that doesn’t understand or respect the concept of complete design.

Steve Jobs understood this, and he was a bit of a prick when it came to getting other people to grasp and embrace the concept. It mattered a lot to him, possibly more than anything other than his family. It was his life’s philosophy. “Make it great!” was all about elegance–the inseparability between form and function. Because his vision was so clear, he believed that the best way to keep people from making the wrong/inelegant choices was to remove them altogether. In the end, this led to products that had built-in limitations, but that’s because of Job’s philosophy that the device knew better than the user did. When you let the device make all the decisions, you no longer have a computer. You have an appliance. And who tinkers with their microwave oven?

When you plunk down your cash for an Apple product, you’re not buying a shiny product with a great marketing campaign (though these are givens at this point), what you’re buying is a vision, what design luddites call the “Kool-aid”, simply because the value of the concept is not apparent to them. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.

For those of you that DO get it, here’s another product to look at – nest.com. And trust to just work… – j

Google announced yesterday the release of Google+ brand pages.

“So far Google+ has focused on connecting people with other people,” Google SVP of Social Vic Gundotra said in a blog post. “But we want to make sure you can build relationships with all the things you care about—from local businesses to global brands—so today we’re rolling out Google+ Pages worldwide.”

I have been pretty skeptical with Google+ and have hardly used it at all personally. I check it out once in a blue moon to see only 2 people of my 100 some connections updating religiously. I don’t know if this will work, if brands like Ford, Macy’s and Angry Birds are just jumping on to hold the coveted “first!” medal. But I think it’s still cool to try out something fresh and new.

I created an Alstin page today, and if unlike me you actually put your G+ account to good use, be sure to follow us and I promise that I’ll provide you all with interesting content and fun agency news!

Follow us here: Alstin Communications

Other than Alstin Communications, what other brands do you love and follow on Google+?

An article recently posted to Fast Company titled, “Giving Kick-Ass Presentations In The Age Of Social Media” shares 7 tips on how to create impressive presentations for the tech savvy. The piece starts off by including an anecdote about a presentation gone wrong. “It was painful to watch. Jon Bond, the former ad giant turned social media honcho, was actually getting heckled at the Pivot Conference. When faced with what was a feisty crowd to begin with, Bond admitting that he ‘didn’t like Twitter’ was like throwing fresh meat at rabid dogs. But rather than raise their voices, they let their fingers do the shouting. So while Bond continued to speak, a steady stream of snarky tweets projected on the wall behind him, acting like foghorns and essentially drowning him out.” Sound familiar at all? Ever finish what you thought was a great presentation, only to find that critics took to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. to demolish your appearance entirely? Read on, friends.

“Being a great speaker was never easy, but now, with your audience likely to have a mobile device in hand and real-time access to multiple social channels, the challenges have gotten that much greater. To get a sense of the impact of social media on conference presentations, I interviewed a bunch of regulars on the social media circuit. In the process, they helped me identify these seven (somewhat snarky) new rules for public speaking in the social media era.” So what to do when you’re nervous about what to say?

Here are a few golden tips they have shared:

1. Don’t Panic if They Aren’t Looking at You

Sure, it’s disconcerting when you gaze out at the audience and no one looks back. But whatever you do–don’t panic. Just because they are transfixed by their mobile devices, doesn’t mean they aren’t all ears. “I think the body language tells you if they’re paying attention–it’s far more distracting to see people whispering to each other than it is to see someone tapping on an iPad” said Jenny Dervin, VP of Corporate Communications at JetBlue, who received raves at a recent BDI event.

 2. Stifle the Temptation to Ask for a Device Moratorium

As tempting as it might be to ask your audience to shut down their devices, every speaker I talked to thought this would be a huge mistake. “I might get their undivided attention, but it would be mixed with their ire at being told how to watch my presentation,” said former actor and speaker extraordinaire John C. Havens, who reminded me that in the old days, before digital devices, a lot of people would take notes on a pad of paper, which isn’t all that different than tapping out a tweet.

 3. If You Aren’t Nervous, You Should Be Now

When I first learned public speaking, an experience advisor suggested that you “imagine the audience is naked,” to quell the initial butterflies. Today, speakers are probably better off reminding themselves that they are the naked ones. If your facts are wrong, your audiences will Google then tweet the corrected data before you can say, “I’m just sayin’.” And if that isn’t scary enough, as author and speaker Jeff Jarvis proclaimed last year at TED-NY, “the lecture, as a form, is bull****,” so you better ask yourself what you’re doing up there, anyway!

 4. If You Don’t Speak Twitterese, It’s Time to Learn It

Let’s just imagine for the moment that your audience is absolutely riveted by your every word. Chances are some, if not many of them, will want to share your wisdom with their network, not tomorrow when they get back to the office, but right at that very moment. It is for this reason today’s effective speakers are not just sharing their Twitter handles upfront but also mixing in tweetable quotes. “Puns, sound bites and pithy phrases are [also] ways to aid in retention,” Havens said.

The article mentions that all of this valuable information is actually from some credible sources, just in case you were wondering. “All of the people we spoke to for this piece are very effective speakers, and though each has their own distinctive style, there are a few other commonalities I’d like to point out. First, none of them depend on word-laden PowerPoint presentations. Second, most are good storytellers and use humor, often self-deprecating, to connect with their audiences. Finally, each of them manages to keep their presentations short enough to allow time for a healthy Q&A.” To read all of the tips the article offers, click on the link to view.

 Have you ever experienced problems with your presentations and keeping your customers, employees or any other audience engaged? Have any of these tips helped for you? Do you have any tips that aren’t mentioned here? If so, feel free to share them below!

And we are about done with the Facebook Summit (#sadness) and I have more information than I know what to do with. It’s really exciting getting to learn how big companies use Facebook and how they implement so much of what Facebook has to offer to benefit their fans. This past week the presentations ranged from “How big consumer brands are using Facebook”, to “How to successfully measure Facebook marketing campaigns” to my favorite so far, “How to enchant your Facebook customers and prospects”.

The presentation that I decided to delve into this week is Guy Kawasaki’s, How to use Facebook to enchant your customers and prospects. I thought this was such a great presentation, 1^st because I love Guy Kawasaki. His attitude towards life is super positive and that alone helps you connect with him along with want to learn more about him. This is probably one of the best take away from his presentation. If your company, its people and your product are likeable, people will in turn…like you.

Another idea that Guy went over was product. What type of product do you have? Now I know everyone thinks they have the best product, but the perfect product or service should have a few components. Guy went over them with a nifty acronym that will help you evaluate (or re-evaluate) your brand/service/product. The acronym is DICEE.

• Deep: How deep is your product or service? Does it have a lot of features, functionality, and intelligence?
• Intelligent: Does this product or service work with or cater to your lifestyle?
• Complete: Does this product or service add on to your life or does it complete? Think iPhone…
• Empowering: This product/service empowers you. It makes you feel more creative, productive… A great product/service makes you a better person.
• Elegance: They make you feel happy and cool. A great user experience…

If you answered “yes” then you might want to reevaluate what you’re tweeting. While not every company has jumped onto the social media bandwagon, there are many that are starting to see the light and incorporate Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more into their advertising campaigns and even their business plans. But does your company really use social media to its fullest even to respond to complaints or would your company’s use of social media seem frightening to your customers?

An article posted to eMarketer.com asked an important question, “When Consumers Tweet Complaints, Should Brands Respond?” Although this might seem like a hassle and the last thing to do on your work to-do list, the article reveals “consumers view brands that respond via Twitter positively.”

Think this is just a Halloween trick? For a treat, here’s a brief excerpt from the article that details why you should be responding to consumers no matter what method they use to reach you:

“For many social network users, Twitter is both a water cooler and a complaint department. Although most are there to engage with peers, many consumers are using Twitter to talk about their experiences with brands—and from time to time share their grievances. As more and more brands have joined Twitter, consumers’ expectation for interaction with brands has risen.

According to customer experience research company Maritz Research, nearly half of consumers who tweeted a complaint directed toward a brand expected the company to respond—or at least to read their tweet. However, only a third of those consumers received a tweeted response from the mentioned brand.

Consumers ages 55 and older are particularly expectant of a company to read their complaint on Twitter. Gen Y and Gen X consumers, who tend to be more active on Twitter, were less hopeful that a company would read their complaint—perhaps because they believe those expectations will not be met.

Despite the gap between consumer expectations and brand delivery, consumers are overwhelmingly positive when brands take the time to actually respond to them on Twitter. The Maritz study indicates that 86% of Twitter complainers would have liked or loved to hear from the company regarding their complaints—and out of those who heard back, 75% were satisfied with the company’s response.”

Click the link to view the research in its entirety and more details on results from utilizing social media aggressively. How does this translate for your company? Get to tweeting back to your consumers or you might realize the nightmare of losing them. Boo!

Does your company incorporate social media and take it a step further by actively responding to consumers’ complaints, praise or inquiries?

My post today is really less a blog post and more a call for help. I’d like to get our readers’ feedback on LinkedIn groups that focus on Human Resources or Recruiting. In many ways, these types of discussion groups are the whole point of social media, but (in my humble opinion) I often find that there isn’t a whole lot of value inside the different LinkedIn HR and Recruiting groups—at least the ones I’ve come across.

The problem could very well be my own lack of knowledge or involvement, and perhaps there are great groups out there I need to join to change my opinion. Of course, a big industry-wide problem is that many of these groups are populated either by recruiters who blindly throw their candidates or searches into conversations:

QUESTION: “Hello, I am a healthcare recruiter in North Carolina, and I’m wondering if you’re still blocking social media sites at your healthcare institution?” Amy Recruiter, NC Health System

REPLY:  “Accounting Professional with 7 years experience AND knowledge of defense industry. Contact me today!”

Or the discussion threads are started disingenuously by people using a group as a slimy way to promote their own business. We’ve all seen the online discussions on groups that follow this script:

“Does anyone know of a good background checking software that is price competitive and can make a recruiter’s life easier?” Joe Blow, recruiting industry veteran.

Hi Joe. Why yes, there is a wonderful solution out there. ABC Background Checking is the premier background checking…” Jane Doe, HR systems vendor

Dig a bit deeper, and you’ll never guess what company both Joe and Jane work for.

Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit, but even when the discussions are legitimate, I rarely find them compelling enough to make me want to comment or read more. In fact, I usually find that the articles I read from places like www.ere.net have “comment” sections below each article with discussions much more relevant and interesting for the recruiting industry.

Are other people feeling the same way? Or am I missing something?

Social Media’s marketing reach is catching on and spreading fast, and the forecast shows a new twist on targeting – one that will capitalize on the health-related ailments of those of us who use social networking sites.

Sickweather, a new start up social media network, based in Baltimore, has taken a dose of disease-tracking data aggregator and a dose of social networking to ultimately comprise the method of “symptom-targeted advertising”.  Like the Doppler radar scans for signals, Sickweather has its own specialized weather detector to scan social networks like Facebook and Twitter, mining for signs of headache, cough, fever, cold/flu, aches & pains, chronic illnesses, the list goes on. It then filters these reported symptoms, cross referencing the location tags, and creating real time weather maps that can monitor the movement of all types of physical/mental/emotional illness, and house these findings among relative news and information, and interactive channels where their registered online community can manage their healthy lifestyle…or lack they’re of.

Sickweather seeks to establish an audience that is interested in what ailments are impacting their area – specifically those busy members of society looking to actively avoid any possible illness sweeping their neighborhood. Adweek dubbed it a “Facebook for hypochondriacs”. What better place for healthcare and pharmaceutical marketers to advertise their pain-relievers, fever reducers, allergy medications, medical devices for self management, and the like?

While this may be a good resource for advertisers to locate and target the perfect consumers for their products, this also brings up the issue of privacy, yet again. From a consumer’s perspective, some illnesses we suffer from are more personal than others, and being involuntarily tracked by these ailments may be offensive to some – presenting one more reason to be more selective in what you share on social media sites.

With the arrival of this new feature, and the forthcoming updates to Facebook, it remains to be seen, that soon everything we read online, open, research, comment, question, or share could be tracked, broadcasted and recorded for market resource purposes. Extreme targeting could be on the horizon. How do you feel about that?