That physical attributes influence a person’s career is hardly a new revelation; studies linking weigh, especially obesity, to fewer promotions and lower pay have circulated for years. Other studies have shown that attractive women can face discrimination in hiring, especially if the hiring manager is a woman.

More recently, a study involving human resource professionals demonstrated that even this group, which you might expect would know better, is biased against chubbiness. (more…)

The first billboard launches near the San Francisco airport today, and involves a commuting-related puzzle. The billboards point you online, where you have to find the shortest distance between a set of startup companies in San Francisco.

There’s a not-so-subtle message at work here: (more…)

For the first several decades since Congress adopted the law in 1938, the disputes were largely about employer training and apprenticeship programs and whether those trainees who weren’t paid were employees. If they were, they had to be paid and they were subject to other wage and hour rules.

These days, the issues almost all are about corporate internship programs, and whether the college students — and recent alums — have to be paid. If your company pays, even if it’s just minimum wage, you have nothing to fear from the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division.

For everyone else — and that’s a fairly significant one-third of all internships – this week’s decision against movie company Fox Searchlight should give you reason to evaluate the nature of your program and how it is actually being administered by supervisors.

It’s all well and good to declare in your internship materials that you provide training, hands-on experience doing real work, regular evaluations, and the like. But if the interns’ direct supervisors turn them into mere gophers, provide little or no training, and have them fill-in for regular employees who leave, you have a potential lawsuit in the works, even if the students say nothing. (more…)

CACI’s vendor of choice is AllTheTopBananas, a British company that has done work for Sodexo as well as some other high-profile companies.

AllTheTopBananas will announce some other big U.S launches soon.

As for CACI, you can use the app to join the “talent community,” check out CACI on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube, and search for jobs. Once you find a job you like, you don’t apply from your cell phone; you either save the listing, email it, or share it.

Yes, the company is hiring an CEO, but unlike many other job ads, this one you’ll actually remember. (more…)

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last week that on a seasonally adjusted basis some 2,679,800 people were employed as temporary workers in the U.S. last month. In the last year, the temp sector has averaged 15,500 new hires a month. Since the recession ended in June 2009, the average is just over 16,000 a month.

On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, temp workers numbered 2,659,300 in May, not far off from the record 2,767,300 temps working in October 2006. (more…)

According to Venture Beat, GE is among the early partners.

Treehouse has step-by-step videos on topics like designing websites. Its mission is to “bring affordable technology education to people everywhere, in order to help them achieve their dreams and change the world.”

The job board right now is charging $99. Treehouse has about 35,000 students.

Houston + Natural Gas = Jobs

At least that’s the message that awaits you when you click on a new website from Exxon. While working on getting permits for a new facility, the company is using the site and a variety of other public relations to play up the number of jobs that it can create.

Exxon is working with community colleges to get people trained for what it says will be about 10,000 construction jobs and another 350 permanent jobs.

Nonetheless, it was good to see the economy meet and slightly exceed expectations, as this morning’s numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed an increase in 175,000 jobs. The expectation was for about 165,000-170,000. The unemployment rate was up but just slightly, to 7.6 percent. Last month’s numbers were revised downward slightly.

The upshot of all this is that the jobs news is not off-the-charts wonderful, but pretty good.

That has been the story throughout this week, if you had to look at all the data coming out and draw conclusions. The ADP report this week was a bit underwhelming. So was Gallup’s data that “fewer people worked full-time for an employer this May compared with a year ago.” But, other recent reports are mildly optimistic: (more…)

The campaign, valued at about $75 million according to Clear Channel, will run on radio, online and elsewhere (the company’s also involved in billboard ads). It’ll direct people, whether businesses or veteran job-seekers, to the Show Your Stripes website. Monster.com and Military.com (a subsidiary of Monster) are partners in that site.

Several top Asian business schools are putting on an event the Sunday after next, telling future students about careers in Asia. This would not be noteworthy, but for the location of the workshop: Los Angeles.

Yes, the June 16 event at the Athletic Club downtown will touch on career opportunities for Americans in Asia; how hot the economies are in Asian countries; and networking/relationship-building in Asia.

Putting on the event: the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai; Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Indian School of Business; and the Nanyang Business School in Singapore.

Schmidt is the senior director, talent acquisition and innovation. He has been using social media to create an employer brand that’s … well, more cutting edge than NPR’s old career site was. So, he was anxious for a new site to reflect what he felt NPR was all about. (more…)

No, not eHarmony — that’s another story altogether. I’m talking about beautifulpeople.com, which now has a link on the upper right of its home page to “recruit beautiful employees.”

This BeautifulPeople site is not for everyone. (more…)

For those keeping score at home, I’m talking about places like Nashville, Austin, Detroit, Yukon, and even Ireland. (more…)

You then get a description of your “archetype” (mine’s on the left in the graphic) and can hook up with your LinkedIn profile to see jobs that might be a fit for you. On top of that, you can see how you fit into the culture of various companies.

If you want to try it, and you get a box that says “have an access code?” — try your email address with the code eregoodco.

Anyhow, among the many other new companies and developments in recent days: (more…)

Poaching Arthur Toga and Paul Thompson and practically the entire staff of their Laboratory of Neuro Imaging from crosstown rival University of California/Los Angeles came down to things as hard to predict as a senior school official greeting janitors and doctors alike, and as hard to control as a commute.

How USC finally lured Toga and Thompson is a case study in recruiting world-class talent, showing the importance of every part of the process; from building and maintaining a relationship, to encouraging employee networking, involving the most senior people, and creating a culture where deans know janitors as well as they know their medical school faculty. (more…)

This system suggests people who your employees might know — using their Facebook and LinkedIn contacts — who might be a fit for an open job. Employees can then send those people a note. The tool also, graphically, can show you any money an employee may have earned for a referral (e.g. $500), as well as a cumulative total.

This took about six months to make. Meanwhile, in August, SuccessFactors, an SAP company, expects to launch an improvement to the tool, where an employee can more easily distribute jobs on social networks, including Twitter, to their social media “friends” and contacts.

SuccessFactors’ social referral updates (and onboarding updates too) is just a taste of the many recent new launches and updates, such as: (more…)