The Trouble with Recruiters

There is trouble in recruiter-land.

Talk to any in-house recruiter and they know it. Talk to any job candidate and they suspect it.

Heck, as someone who has run small, medium, and large size talent acquisition operations I even know it.

You probably do too.

So what’s going on?

Back in the pre-online application days, circa 1996,  internal recruiters working for employers customarily carried (preface: at least the good employers who knew to balance workload with quality) 10-15 job requisitions – openings they were trying to fill – at any one time.… Read the rest

Fix the Pinch and You (Too) Can Avoid the Crunch

I’m guilty.

In the land of do as I say and do as I do, I’m buckling on the latter and hoping you do the former.

It happens.

Despite best intentions to behave true to my own advice I slipped into behaviors that others rely on me to avoid modeling. It happens. Welcome to being human.

I have a conflict with someone on a board on which we both sit and rather than address it early, it’s gone from a minor annoyance to major avoidance.… Read the rest

[Your Career] Hiring Time?

There is  seasonality –  cyclic variations based on the time of year or season – to any number of things. Just as it helps to know that back-to-school hits in July/August (so you avoid ending up with the dregs of what’s left for your kids), it advantages you to know the times of year when firms are hiring, and times when they’re likely not.… Read the rest

[Reading Tea Leaves] Candidate Job Fair Suggests Job Market Uptick

As someone who worked with a quantitative asset management firm – Barclays Global Investors –  I know the value of seeing data in terms of broad patterns. But as someone who has worked extensively with the research and development side of biotech, I’ve also learned to note signs and signals by the ones and twos. This is the latter.

BioSpace.com, the country’s leading news and jobs/career web portal for biotech / pharma is hosting a job fair on March 9th, 2010 in South San Francisco from 2-7 PM.… Read the rest

[Life Back West] December 2009 – The Darkest Days

In earlier times, people in the northern hemisphere marked the winter solstice – the time of the year when daylight for the hemisphere is at its shortest – with rites and rituals. Even today those traditions live on with things like the California Revels and their event productions held in Oakland.

This time of year was regarded as marking the sun‘s ebbing presence in the sky, and the deepest moment of the cold winter’s dark.Read the rest

Is a Job Still A “Job”

Where communications abilities takes us a host of other trends and patterns follow.

For better or worse it’s given us a world where you can be tethered to work by iPhone or computer, and share information via short text bursts and immediate access And as this week’s Wall Street Journal chronicles in “Why E-Mail No Longer Rules“, changes in the nature of communication have changed how we fundamentally think of a host of related relationships – such as jobs.Read the rest