Lucky for Shami Marangwanda she landed a recruiting job with Starbucks, because the irascible and profane Gordon Ramsay and his cohorts dashed her hopes of becoming a MasterChef. The Zimbabwe native had been laid off from her previous recruiting position when the opportunity came along to participate in the third season of Fox’ cooking show.
“I went in just having fun,” she told the Seattle Times. She made oxtail stew in a wine sauce made with sadza, a cooked corn meal that is a staple of traditional Zimbabwe diets. Alas, it fails to impress the judges and she was sent back to Seattle sans the apron that denotes a MasterChef semi-finalist.
Boss been a monster lately? Then boost those endorphins. We mean the boss, though a little more exercise all around couldn’t hurt.
Turns out that abusive bosses can be tamed (though we doubt domesticated) by some time in the gym. There’s real science behind this. Three researchers experimented on 98 workers and their bosses and found “that increased levels of supervisor-reported stress are related to the increased experience of employee-rated abusive supervision.” Okay.
But here’s the biggie: “We also find that the relationship between supervisor stress and abusive behavior can be diminished when supervisors engage in moderate levels of physical exercise.”
So next October 16, instead of taking up a collection for a lunch, or cookies, or those soon-to-be-extinct party balloons, buy the boss a gym membership.
Why are we not surprised there’s now an SEO service for job seekers? It only seems fair, of course. Employers have been optimizing their career sites and their job posts for years, using services like Jobs2Web or one of the dozens of marketing firms that promise to get your job a top Google ranking.
Preptel works the other side of the street, promising job seekers that for $25 it will analyze their resume against a job description the way an ATS does and give them both a ranking and advice on what changes to make to improve their score.
The video demo is like watching David Blaine do his magic. First the resume scores a relevance rank of 48. (Preptel shows a Taleo system, but they all work about the same.) The resume is then put through the Resumeter, which shows what’s missing, what formatting should be changed, and what keywords to add. Voila, the resume now scores 100, which will practically guarantee it gets a recruiter’s attention.
So you think that’s gaming the system? Really? We think it can only help recruiters connect with top talent, who have the goods, but not in the just-so way that some algorithm wants them.
In accordance with the federal journalism law that every media outlet has to run a Father’s Day story — and a Mother’s Day story for that matter — this week, we will obey, and tell you that CareerBuilder finds that “43 percent of dads who had a child in the last three years did not take any paternity leave; many felt pressured by their office to stay working.”
If we haven’t put you in a bad enough mood already, the poll of 729 working fathers also finds that more working dads are bringing work home since the beginning of the recession, and “22 percent of fathers say their work has negatively affected relationships with their children,” and 26 percent their relationships with significant others.
With that, we’d like to wish you a happy father’s day.
Recruiting VeteransThe Buller Group is launching a “Certified Veteran Recruiter” program. It’s a two-day recruiter training class on recruiting people with military backgrounds.
It’ll get into subjects like overcoming hiring manager resistance; recruiting for retention; assessing cultural fit; skills translation; interviewing; and setting up relationships with veteran’s groups.
HRCI credits are available.
For those interested in global recruiting, labor markets around the world, and all else relating to jobs, pay, and skills in various countries, McKinsey has a killer new report out. The PDF, more than 100 pages, is available here.
Lee Salz, who has written a number of ERE articles, most on sales hiring, teamed with two others on a new sales-onboarding survey. As Forbes mentioned, a comprehensive onboarding program can get someone up to speed in 251 days; without it, it’d take a year.
The study also shows that “fewer than one out of five executives surveyed reported being satisfied with the amount of time it takes for their newly hired salespeople to get up to speed.”