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The Greatest Recruitment Videos. Ever.

Just about every mid-size-to-large company today has one on their career site: the recruitment video. The vast majority are so alike – stock music, shots of smiling workers, people raving about working there – that they all pretty much blend together. And, for that reason, they become ineffective. We get it, your video says you can move up at your company – but every video says that, so can you really? We get it, your video says your company is a great place to work. But every company’s video says that, so is it really so great? And then, you …Read more »

Is Amazon’s Data-Focused Experiment The Future Of Hiring?

In 2012, Target famously got in trouble when it was revealed that, through big data, it knew a teenager was pregnant before the girl’s father did. What happened was that through the girl’s purchases and Target’s data algorithms, the company correctly determined she was pregnant and began sending coupons for cribs and baby clothes to her house. Her father saw these coupons and went to Target to complain, only to discover that his daughter was indeed pregnant and she was hiding it from him. It makes for a kind of funny, if not a bit scary, tale of both the …Read more »

The Genius of Wearing the Same Outfit Every Day

  What do Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, our current president and Homer Simpson all have in common? They’ve all worn the same outfit, pretty much every day. Why? It isn’t a coincidence. Jobs and President Barack Obama, for example, are both part of the same-outfit club, but for different reasons. And both are logical, from both a scientific and business perspective. The Science If you notice, Obama wears a blue or gray suit all the time (when he wore a tan suit earlier this year, it nearly blew up the Internet). Why? Here’s the explanation he gave to famed writer …Read more »

The 10 Scariest Job Applicants We Almost Hired

We’ve all had it happen before. You get that resume that has everything you’re looking for. Expectations are high. They sounded lucid enough on the phone. But yet you bring the person in for an interview, and after a few minutes, something comes pretty clear: They are completely nuts. Hopefully, you don’t actually hire them. But either way, you have just wasted everyone on your hiring team’s time and now have to deal with a candidate that, in some cases, won’t go away. So who are these people? They are:   1. The Clinger The person comes in, the interview …Read more »

Why Performance Reviews Are Good (And How To Do Them Right)

It is pretty clear: everyone hates the performance review. The Wall Street Journal, every so often, writes an editorial saying it is time to get rid of the performance review. Invariably, it is incredibly popular, with workers across the country chiming in with stories of their own horrible experiences. The battle cry is similar to dozens of other populist arguments favoring the proverbial little guy against “the man”. But, like many populist arguments, what it lacks in precision and real-life applicability it makes up for in appeal. The fact is, performance reviews of some sort are an essential part of …Read more »

12 Traits To Look For While Hiring

Everyone wants to hire “purple squirrels,” aka the rare, one-in-a-thousand candidates who catapult companies into the stratosphere. But the question is this: how do you find those people? What should you look for? Well, if you want an ordinary candidate, you can look for three-to-five years of experience, a bachelor’s degree and firm handshake. But if you want a truly extraordinary person, you should look for these 12 characteristics:   1. They Are A Little Crazy Henry Ford ate grass sandwiches as a boy. Albert Einstein didn’t wear socks. Why? Because really innovative and creative people, by their very nature, …Read more »

11 Amazing Insights Google’s People Team Discovered About People

Google’s People Department (nicknamed POPS) is like no other Human Resources team on the planet. The group uses data to try to improve just about every aspect of their employees’ happiness, from pay structures and 401K plans to how long the lunch line should be. Through its research, the department has uncovered some pretty astonishing insights into human behavior. Such as? 1. People Like Having Bosses Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin originally believed in having a flat organization, where nobody was the boss of anybody. But POPS discovered people were happier and more efficient with the right bosses. …Read more »

What Every James Cameron Movie Says About Hiring

When you think about it, all the big James Cameron movies have the exact same premise. In all of them, humans are either over-confident or over-enthusiastic about new technology, it is used wrongly and the technology’s unintended consequences lead to their demise. Don’t believe me? Here’s the proof: Aliens: Humans create new technology that turns otherwise-inhabitable planets habitable. It works great until acid-spewing creatures stumble upon and attack the humans on the planet, and everything falls apart. The Terminator Series: Humans create robot soldiers to fight their battles for them. However, the robots soon perceive humans as a threat and start wiping …Read more »

Is The American Worker Getting Shortchanged?

Each month, when the new jobs report is released, we are bombarded with news about the unemployment rate. And lately, the news has been mostly optimistic, with the unemployment rate slowly decreasing since its high of 10 percent in October of 2009. But what’s not being talked about is what these new jobs are. Specifically, higher-paying jobs are being replaced with lower-paying jobs, and while American workers continue to be more and more productive, wages are lagging far behind. Meanwhile, corporations – facing increased pressure by Wall Street to meet short-term expectations – have increased their profits by 84 percent …Read more »

Uncle Sam’s Un-American Hiring Process

There’s one word that keeps popping up in American government job postings that raises an eyebrow: required. Just about every government job posting we saw, particularly higher-paid ones, had very specific requirements to apply. A specific amount of experience. A certain degree. Certifications that needed to be acquired. The message sent was clear: the quickest way to move up at a government job – or get hired at all – is to ascertain higher degrees and earn certain certifications. Clearly, America’s governments have a very structured, very requirement-based hiring model, which when analyzed feels patently un-American, and certainly is not …Read more »

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