Category: Your Career (Page 48 of 62)

57 Million Visit Job Placement Sites

February 22, 2011 / Michelle Burton

More than 57.2 million job seekers visit job placement sites each month, according to a Forbes report about the best ways to find a job. The three most popular sites include CareerBuilder.com, Yahoo! HotJobs, and Monster.com. Although these sites have been around for more than a decade, a number of other sites have cropped up, stealing the market share from the top three.

Other job placement sites such as Simply Hired, Indeed, Snagajob.com, and Beyond.com gather postings from other job sites and reorganize them to make them easier to surf.

“Many corporate companies post job openings on their own corporate Web sites, so aggregators knock out the necessity to go around from site to site targeting specific companies,” says Chuck Schilling, research director at Nielsen.
Certainly the rotten economy is driving demand for more job sites. But there’s a heavy psychological component at work here, too. Newer sites carry “the shiny-and-new syndrome,” says Lorne Epstein, recruiting expert and author of You’re Hired! Interview Skills to Get the Job, so even if another site does the same thing, there is a hope that a newer site will do it better.

Job seekers also use government job sites to search for employment. The two top government websites are USAJOBS.gov and GovernmentJobs.com. These sites attract 2.8 million and 1 million visitors a month, respectively.

Your Career

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Taipei Gaming Companies Recruit Cream of the Crop

February 21, 2011 / Michelle Burton

Taipei

Although Taiwan’s gaming market is smaller than China’s, the Island’s industry is worth $42.2 billion, which is up 20 percent over 2009. Growth in the industry has been spurred by ways to consume games from PCs, game consoles and online games, to smartphones and games on social networking sites such as Facebook and more, according to PCWorld. Because growth in Taiwan’s gaming industry is so great, 15 of the islands’ top gaming companies are now looking to fill 50 spots for gamers, programmers, graphic artists, and research and development professionals. PCWorld reports that some jobs even offered the chance to play computer games for a living with a salary of around NT$35,000 (US$1,194) a month, which is about average in Taiwan.

Jamesina Lin, a representative at Chinese Gamer International, one of Taiwan’s biggest online gaming companies said “people hired to play games would be heavily involved in game development.”

Chinese Gamer and other companies teamed with Taiwanese employment website, Job Bank, to host the Taiwan Game Job fair at the same time as Taipei’s biggest gaming show. “We had over 2,000 people apply at the job fair on Saturday and over 2,600 applications in all,” said Charlene Chang, spokesperson for Job Bank, which ran the job fair. Taiwanese gaming companies are serious about their work.

A total of 2,600 people applied for the 50 positions. Two thousand applied at the job fair, which took place Saturday, February 19, 2011 at the Taiwan Game Show at Taipei World Trade Center.

Your Career

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Both parties shill for the for-profit college industry

February 17, 2011 / Staff

Some Democrats and Republicans are trying to scuttle attempts by the Obama administration to impose new rules on for-profit colleges to prevent abuses against students to rack up huge debt for dubious degrees.

The Department of Education is tired of federally subsidized student loans going to shady for-profit colleges that have poor track records of getting the students who do graduates good work — often leaving them stuck with mountains of debt. To curb this phenomenon, the agency has been moving along with a new regulation they call the “Gainful Employment” rule.
Under “Gainful Employment” rules, for profit schools would have to show that their students can find work without getting stuck with unreasonable debt in order to qualify for federal loans.
But behind the scenes, a bipartisan bloc of House members see things differently. They say the rule would reach too far and clamp down on institutions that do a decent job of educating and preparing students. But they want to tie the Department of Education’s hands completely, and block the funds they’d need to implement the rules at all.

Fortunately, many members of Congress are with the administration on this, and Obama could veto any bill with this language.

Your Career, Your Education

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Employers Rejecting the Unemployed

February 16, 2011 / Michelle Burton

Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, promotes jobs for lower-wage workers. She, along with worker advocates, claims that employers are screening out job applicants who are unemployed.

Owens said a telephone company in Atlanta, which she didn’t identify, ran an help-wanted ad saying only the employed should apply. Jobless applicants were also turned down by a temporary staffing firm and a Texas recruiter because they were unemployed, she said.
“What’s startling are the lengths to which companies are going to communicate this such as including the phrase ‘unemployed candidates will not be considered’ right in the posting,” she said.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is investigating similar claims after media reports revealed that some employers are keeping applicants without jobs from being considered. The practice has also raised concerns about discrimination. Still, many others feel that the practice just doesn’t exist.

The Society for Human Resource Management, which represents more than 250,000 personnel managers, is “unaware of widespread recruiting practices” that exclude the jobless, said Fernan R. Cepero, representing the Alexandria, Virginia-based group.
Applicants who have been out of work may struggle because their skills are more obsolete than those who are employed, said Cepero, vice president for human resources at the YMCA of Greater Rochester in New York.

If you feel you have been discriminated against by an employer, contact the EEOC at 1.800.669.4000 or email info@eeoc.gov.

Your Career, Your Workplace

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Are Work Relationships Really That Important?

February 15, 2011 / Michelle Burton

Business_People_Socializing

Just when you thought the workplace was supposed to be for, well—work, someone comes along and says otherwise. Lois P. Frankel, Ph.D. and author of Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office 101: Unconscious Decisions Women Make That Sabotage Their Career, claims that workers need to build relationships on the job in order to advance their careers. She also mentions that it only takes 5% of your day, which is around 20 minutes or so a day, to build strong 360-degree relationships. How? Frankel provides the following tips on how to work on relationship building without neglecting your responsibilities at work:

-Take a moment to compliment someone on a particular accomplishment.
-During a business phone call.
-On the way to or from the parking lot.
-Over lunch (even if it’s lunch at your desk).
-Before, during or after a meeting.
-In a brief doorway conversation.
-After work at professional association meetings.

If you’re confused about how this can help advance your career in today’s shaky workplace, it’s probably a good idea to pick up a copy of Frankel’s book. Let us know what you think.

Your Career, Your Network, Your Team, Your Workplace

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