Who are the fattest workers?
Yes, yes, I know. That is so politically incorrect, but CareerBuilder started it. In 2005 the careers company did a weight gain survey discovering 47 percent of workers admitted to gaining weight on the job.
That percentage hasn’t much changed over the years, though this year only 41 percent admitted to putting on the pounds. Before you go buying into that statistic, look up “social desirability bias,” which may also explain why CareerBuilder’s polltakers reported that 59 percent of the 3,690 workers taking the online survey claim they work out regularly; 45 percent said they go to the gym three times a week.
More: CareerBuilder’s survey says 55 percent of the respondents admitted to being overweight.
Back now to that first question: It turns out office workers, as in administrative assistants, as a group were the most likely to have gained weight; or they were the most likely group to answer honestly. The poll says 69 percent of the admins responding report gaining weight after taking their current job. They made last year’s list, too. Ditto for attorneys, judges, and other legal professionals, teachers, and techies.
The two primary causes of this: sitting at a desk all day, say 56 percent, and stress eating, say 35 percent.
Want to lose weight and get a 9 percent earnings bump? Get out there and actually exercise that three times a week your colleagues claim to be spending in the gym. A different study (don’t you just love these studies?) says people who exercise regularly earn and average of 9 percent more than those who don’t.
Shifting gears here, it was a relief to read that the Central Intelligence Agency is getting more creative in how it recruits. This experimentation with virtual job fairs and analytic simulations is only a year old, so don’t blame recruiters (the HR kind) for that debacle in Moscow recently.
The “Clandestine Service” needs to talk to some real recruiters and get a few pointers about hiring passive talent. Bad enough the spies sent a kid in a blonde wig with a briefcase full of money to go pitch a job to some Russian official. But really now, having him deliver an offer letter that begins “Dear Friend?” Insulting.
They used to know how to do it. Former spy Lindsay Moran wrote a book and even did a bunch of videos about CIA recruiting. Her first tip, once you’ve sourced a potential candidate, is you develop them.
… and to develop that person means, basically, to become a friend with him, to approach him, introduce yourself, try to find some common interests. Even if you don’t have a common interest, you have to pretend that you have a common interest.
