There’s a new website called Cladwell that essentially serves as a personal shopper for men buying clothes. It’s pretty cool. Cladwell asks you seven questions, including your body shape, hair color, if you prefer fashion over function and your budget, and then it recommends clothes from around the web. So if you are 5’10” and prefer function over fashion and don’t want to spend a lot of money, they’ll recommend you some comfortable, cheap outfits from stores that will fit well. The concept of Cladwell is a perfect representation of where the economy is headed. Today, companies are working to …Read more »
Tag Archives: Hiring
Why Most Stories About Millennials Are Bunk
We’ve all heard it before. They only wear skinny jeans and chubbies. They can’t go five minutes without taking a selfie. According to NPR, they are “post-gender.” Heck, one 60 Minutes expose portrayed them as so dependent that if their boss says anything negative about their performance, the boss can be sure to get a phone call from their mother within 20 minutes, demanding an apology. They are obsessed with themselves, but want to do work that helps others. They are changing the world with new technology, but are lazy and unmotivated. They put money above all else, but they …Read more »
Black Friday Flopped And Cyber Monday Might Go Away. Here’s Why.
Black Friday profits were down this year, pretty dramatically. Bloomberg reports that sales were down by 11 percent compared to last year (which was down from the year before that), as six million fewer shoppers showed up. That decline certainly isn’t attributed to the economy. While wages haven’t increased much the past two years, America’s unemployment rate has steadily dropped from 8.6 percent in November of 2011 to 5.8 percent in October of this year (the latest stats available). When I saw those numbers, I assumed customers were going online, and Cyber Monday would be a big hit. While it …Read more »
What HR Teams Need To Learn From United Technology’s Big Hire
United Technologies shocked the business world Monday when it announced its CEO of the past six years, Louis Chenevert, was abruptly retiring and would immediately be replaced by their longtime CFO, Gregory Hayes. What’s interesting about the move is not necessarily that a longtime CEO abruptly left a company that generated $62.6 billion in revenue in 2013 or the rumors that go along with that. Or even the person who replaced him, Hayes, who has served as the company’s CFO since 2008. What’s interesting about it, at least from an HR perspective, is how commonplace the hire was. Hayes, a …Read more »
Want To Be More Creative? Don’t Sleep
Wednesday, famed sportswriter Bill Simmons released a podcast where he interviewed Lorne Michaels, the man who created and still runs Saturday Night Live. In the interview, Michaels said something particularly interesting about the creative process. Simmons asked him about the grueling nature of SNL, where Michaels and his staff have been putting on a live hour of television each week for the past 40 years. Specifically, Simmons asked if that sort of schedule was too difficult, if there would be a benefit to cutting back. Michaels’ answer: no. “There’s a mantra that I have, which is fatigue is your friend,” …Read more »
Is This Company The Next Chipotle?
My co-worker, the legendary Bill Palifka, came up to me today and had some advice for what I should write about next: Zoe’s Kitchen, a Texas-based “fast-casual” restaurant chain that serves kabobs, pitas and other Mediterranean food (full menu here). “I’d invest in that company,” Bill said, who raved about the food and how he felt like he was getting good food, served quickly, as opposed to the traditional fast food fare. He said he wouldn’t feel guilty taking his son to dinner there, which he said he would if he took him to McDonald’s. Investors agree. Zoe’s went public earlier this …Read more »
Why Smart Businesses Love Hard Times
As you have probably noticed while filling up, gas prices are down. In fact, The Wall Street Journal reports that crude oil prices have hit a four-year low last week at $81.76 a barrel, thanks to growing supply. While that’s good news for you and me, you would think that would hurt a company like Halliburton, a $47 billion provider of oilfield services and equipment. Higher oil supply means lower margins for oil companies like Halliburton, and many would guess that the company would be conservative right now, not aggressive. But, in fact, the opposite is true. On Monday, Halliburton, …Read more »
Why I Won’t Shop On Thanksgiving
This will be the first year in at least the past five that I won’t have to work on Thanksgiving. Before, I worked as a journalist, and news breaks every day, including holidays (in fact, particularly on the holidays, as alcohol and families don’t always make a good fit). My girlfriend is working this Thanksgiving at her job as a CNA. Her mother, a nurse, is probably working as well. So are her two brothers; one a security guard, another a police officer. A lot of waiters and cooks will work on Thanksgiving. So will most movie theater employees. And …Read more »
The Impossible Proven: Lose Weight Just By Thinking Differently
Today is a pretty amazing day in the world. The European version of NASA landed a probe on a comet. No big deal, really, except that the comet is roughly the size of a dishwasher, it’s 300 million miles from Earth and was traveling at roughly 25,000 miles per hour. Simple, right? Not that we should be surprised. The human mind is unquestionably the most powerful force on planet Earth, as we are capable of both the unbelievably extraordinary and the astonishingly awful. We’ve built medicines that have saved millions of lives, systems that connect the entire world and bombs that …Read more »
An Emmy Doesn’t Qualify You for a Job at the Container Store
A post on café.com by Deborah Copaken, an Emmy-winning, best-selling author, has gone viral after she was not hired at The Container Store. The premise was pretty simple: Copaken won an Emmy, she’s a best-selling author; surely, she’s good enough to get a retail job. In the post, Copaken wrote about several other troubles she went through recently; most notably, getting divorced, being diagnosed with breast cancer and losing her health insurance. Those are some terrible ills and I sincerely hope she wins her battle with cancer. But not getting a job at The Container Store does not belong on …Read more »