The Top US Staffing Trends of 2015 [STUDY]

The Top US Staffing Trends of 2015 [STUDY] LinkedIn recently released a report on the US staffing trends of the last four years, which has pin-pointed three  key trends to incorporate into your business strategy for 2015. The report was  based on LinkedIns fourth annual survey, which covered  11 countries, 1,994 staffing leaders and 300 million members; drawing conclusions about the recruitment industry in the US. This slideshow by LinkedIn gives an insight into what 2015 has in store for recruitment in the US and the three trends that they  recommend firms  build into their 2015 strategy are investing in and managing branding, utilising social professional networks  job boards for ROI, and better candidate  job matching. Here are some tips on how your firm can take these on board. Branding: Business branding  can be paramount  in building a reputable name for a company  and is definitely something worth investing money and time in. Social media can be incredibly beneficial for  building a positive reputation for the company and a brands online presence can help to in recruiting the top talent and increasing business. LinkedIns survey found that the number one use of their network is for viewing members profiles and 76% of job applicants reportedly viewed an employees LinkedIn profile 6 months before applying for a job at that  company. This demonstrates the importance of branding on social media, not only for the company itself, but also by their employees and it is therefore crucial that employee profiles are kept up to date and professional, exhibiting the business in the best possible light. The impact that branding can have on placements and prospects has also been recognised, as it was revealed that 75% of B2B purchases are influenced by social media and 57% of buying decisions are made before a sales rep is involved. When asked about the branding within their organisation, 68% of staffing leaders said that their brand has a significant impact on their ability to grow business, however only 58% have a branding strategy and a small 33% measure the health of their brand in a quantifiable way. Online professional networks and word of mouth from friends and family have been identified as the top channels for promoting firm brands; whereas the effectiveness of the firms website and traditional job boards have dropped. Some steps that you can take to measure your firms brand in 2015 are, to communicate your expertise in  what you do; use cost-effective social media tools, such as the free version of LinkedIn; specify  your branding budget and measure your brand in terms of clients, placements and company followers. Make use of social professional networks and job boards for ROI: It has been found that social professional networks and job boards provide the best quality and quantity of placements, ahead of internet resume databases and internal databases and it is important to use different sources of ROI, in order to target both passive and active candidates. The growth of social networks such as LinkedIn has resulted in an increasing talent pool and therefore a higher number of potential candidates, making them an essential tool for recruitment. Performance can be measured in terms of client satisfaction and placement quality, however the most valuable performance metric is the number of placements. Hindrances to the recruitment can also be monitored, with the top obstacles being availability of top talent, the offer made by the client and competition. Some steps that you can take in order to make the most of ROI sources are, to equip yourself with data about your target market and  talent supply and demand, using LinkedIns free Talent Pool Reports; use different search tactics for passive and active candidates; generate tailored messages to candidate based on what you think might motivate them to move jobs; and define what what ROI means for your firm and measure it. Optimise your candidate and job matching: Improving the ability to match suitable candidates with jobs  was the top identified staffing trend for 2015 in the world and this can be achieved using the  LinkedIn Matching Engine. It has also been found that 50% of job views on LinkedIn come as a result of recommendations from other members, meaning that both passive and active candidates can be reached. Some things that you can incorporate into your 2015 strategy to improve your candidate and job matching are to boost your job views with the use of industry keywords and by making use of the correct channels to promote jobs, and to understand the importance of illustrating the whole opportunity, rather than just the job in hand, including aspects such as the culture, team and company.  

Using Our Services While Youre Still Here University of Manchester Careers Blog

Using Our Services While Youre Still Here University of Manchester Careers Blog If you plan your time wisely over the next few weeks, youll still be able to fit giving your future a little consideration around your remaining lectures, deadlines and exams. I graduated last summer and by planning out my weeks during my final year and timetabling in when I would tackle essays or revise for exams, I managed to squeeze an hour or two of job hunting into each week. This meant that Id already been offered a full-time graduate job before I attended my graduation ceremony in July. What could you do before summer comes? Well firstly you could find time to complete our three essential actions for first years or mid-degree students, if you havent already. If you want to explore your options a bit more  Read about different job sectors on our website to see what sort of work might interest you. No idea at all what you want to do? Use our tips to help yourself get started. If youre looking for some work experience or a part-time job for the summer Search vacancies on CareersLink or use this 5 Minute Fix to help you. If youre already applying for jobs/internships or  have interviews coming up Brush up your CV, get tips on applying and find advice on how to prepare for interviews with our resources. (Read about my very recent interview experiences here!) All Undergraduate Undergraduate-highlighted advice career planning careers Careers Service first year First year students jobs mid-degree mid-degree students Options planning pre-final second year second year students services summer

Career Confession Its not all competition

Career Confession Its not all competition This post should probably start with a little disclaimer: I’m a very competitive person. I come from a long line of competitive people and we tend to find a little bit of competition in everything we do… Hey, it’s human nature. Right?! When I was hired for an entry level position, my firm hired someone else at the same time at the same level. We had similar backgrounds, were the same age and were both clearly dedicated workers. Although we were friendly, the smell of competition filled the air. It wasn’t cutthroat, but we rolled up our sleeves and drew black under our eyes each morning. We typed faster, stapled harder, and compared the depths of our paper cuts. We threw ‘bows, sabotaged Starbucks orders and, worst yet, stole post-its and sharpies. Oh no you didn’t! OK, so not all of that was true, but the competitive atmosphere lasted for a little while until one day we had a beer together after work and quickly learned we were on the same page with our thoughts about the job. We quickly learned we needed to be challenging ourselves and not each other. Especially at a lower level, we needed to be team players and support each other, and that’s how we’d move ahead. We needed to give advice and band together when we shared frustrations. I’ve grown to realize just how important it is to have a support system at work. You’ll quickly learn who you can trust, and those people are certainly worth your time. Work life, and life in general, is so much more tolerable if you embrace your colleagues. Having a trustworthy colleague is like having a friend who actually understands you and your job (crazy, right?)… …they understand the inner-office politics and can provide adequate advice …they can relate to your frustrations and you can pull out your hair together (and if you’re both pmsing at the same time, you can even cry together outside of the office, of course) …they will sing “Friends in Low Places” with you at karaoke and not judge you for your inability to carry a tune …they can support you in all facets of life, beyond the windowless cube and silly office dramatics they will never  ever judge you for the amount of junk food you eat in any given week While it can be difficult at first to determine who’s there to help you and who’s there to use you, I didn’t actually love my job until I became comfortable with a few other people in my office.   If you’re still on the fence about getting too comfortable at work, try giving and seeking advice from a few coworkers â€" I think you’ll be surprised by how many people want to help you and truly appreciate your help, professionally and personally. I swear your Monday-Friday will be much more worthwhile, and even fun! What about you do you think its better to make friends at work or keep your distance?  

How to get a career that provides stability

How to get a career that provides stability I spent a lot of the last decade writing about what each generation  wants from a job. I wrote for Time magazine that Generation Y wants engagement. I wrote  that  Generation X wants flexibility. I wrote that Baby Boomers want power. But the common truth is that we all want stability. Each generation just has their own idea of the right path to a stable career. A  unifying  thing about a multigenerational workforce is that  career stability is the same for all of usits about keeping us with the changing demands of work. Heres what you need to do to create stability for yourself over the next ten years, no matter what generation you were born into. Get great at improvisation. Increasingly we are accustomed to output through computers. While some titles, like this one, are certainly not generated by a robot, Science magazine  reports that most of us cannot tell the difference between sports news generated by a robot or by a person. Today 20  million twitter accounts are generated by robots, and  its pretty safe to say youre following  some of them. Jacob Bakkila  spent a year imitating a robot on his twitter account. His followers loved the insane robotic tweets like Are you ready to have a swan? (re-tweeted 1000 times)  and  people were thrilled by the idea that he had made the content himself. Buzzfeed uses  robots to find trending topics online, but the secret sauce of Buzzfeeds immense appeal  is that a human organizes the information, in a matter of minutes, into bite-sized nuggets that are easy to nibble. Its that  live improvisation between a human  and technology that generates traffic. The same is true with photos online. The best are authentic photos, happy improvisations between the subject and the snapper. Photos that get re-pinned on Pintrest are those with a conversational feel rather than staging, like my son up top, about to slip and fall between hay bales. This is true in music as well. With YouTube we can see hundreds of excellent, planned performances from any artist under the sun. So in a sense the perfect performance is commodified and therefore, not nearly as interesting as it used to be. Instead the music thats most exciting to hear live is improvisation. Pianist  Helene Grimaud does this by not practicing her music so that both she and her audience are surprised by what comes out in concert. Francisco Vila  did it by taking out his cello in an airplane and accompanying Maximillian, a beatboxer who was a few rows away. If you google  Francisco Vila, you wont find his perfect performances up top. Youll find hes most famous for his three-minute airplane improv. Feel comfortable going  with your gut. If you can teach a person to do the job then you can teach a robot to do the job. So the best jobs  for people will be ones that have gray areas, jobs that require a non-scientific decision, based at least partially on human instinct. This means we can all stop training school students to give right answers. Because right answers are available to everyone via  Google. School is preparing people to fail in a world where  all right answers are indexed. This is why suddenly we are not celebrating kids with Aspergers (they are crazy geniuses) but are putting them into special education (they are, sadly, rigid black-and-white thinkers). This is also why boys (who receive  most of the Cs in school) end up making more money than girls  (who are getting most of the As). And if you click on no other link in this post, click this one  (warning: NSFW), where I got the quote about Cs and As. One of the best examples of a go-with-your-gut job is Melissa editing my photos. I send her thirty photos. She keeps one. She usually cant tell me why she keeps this one and not another, and she has no written rules for cropping, but her finished  photos always reveal something  I didnt see before. Another example of a go-with-your gut job is the hardest to fill position at Rent the Runway. The company allows people to rent extremely expensive clothes instead of buying them. The companys profit margins are dependent on being able to keep the clothes  clean, and you can bet all these dresses  are dry-clean only. So the company employs spotters. People who decide what the stain looks like (is that red from lipstick, blood, nail polish or berries?) and which chemical  would the best thing to remove the stain. This is not a job with right answers. Even after ten years on the job, you still are only making good guesses. Which is why Rent the Runway poached every spotter in NYC and then began training their own. Another job based on instinct with a huge shortage of candidates: Food scientist. Who makes sure the new macaroni and cheese still looks orange enough when its cooked? Who  do you call when your berry soda is green? And where is the hero who will finally find a satisfactory artificial flavoring for banana? The answer is a food scientist. Every consumer food producer hires these people, but no one wants to advertise their arsenal of food scientists, so you wouldnt know theres a shortage unless you talk to one. My friend the food scientist  gets a recruiting call once a week. Be creative, yes, but in moderation. Youd think the world of ill-defined problems and gray-area answers would be great for the creative types. But in fact, its very scary to be highly creative. Cody Delistraty  explains: The most creative people are continually making associations between the external world and their internal experiences and memories. They cannot focus on one thing quite like the average person. Essentially, their stream of ideas is always running?â€"?the tap does not shut off?â€"?and, as a result, creative people show schizophrenic, borderline manic-depressive tendencies. Really, that’s no hyperbole. Fink found that this inability to suppress the precuneus [part of the brain] is seen most dominantly in two types of people: creatives and psychosis patients. The idea of the crazy, starving artist is too overwhelming  for todays workers. People with a nonstop stream of new and exciting ideas are also people most likely to be depressedto the point that creating  is almost inextricable from suffering. Unlike earlier generations that celebrated the crazy, mad artist, Generation Y are big fans of pharmaceuticalssometimes with off-label benefits  but always without chemical dependency. The pharmaceuticals tame creative spurts, but more importantly  depression and inactivity  are such painful places to live. Pharmaceuticals are the  rescue squad. 99U suggests you package your creativity into one of four types of people: the survivor, the cross-trainer, the called, and the specialist. On the one hand, this strategy allows you to market yourself to people in a memorable, digestible way that makes you more likely to land a job.  But more importantly, stepping back from your creativity so you can  wrestle it onto a resume allows you to treat creativity like  firecrackers you control with a match, rather than a roller coaster you ride on constant loop. In this new world you cant just show up for work you have to actually give a part of yourself to the work to get it done. Which means that in-between jobs, you need to empty out your head, or refill your head, whichever feels right to you.    An article in Art News  surveys what painters do in-between canvases  and its clear that each painter interviewed sees what they do during the gap as essential to their success. This is the time when you moderate your creative streak. You tone it down and you make sure, frankly, that youre not a lunatic. I sent Melissa a bunch of fall photos to edit. She said, You have enough fall photos. You need to write something. I cant write. I am overwhelmed with the links Ive saved to put into posts. Did you save the one about how the Vikings were women? Im sending it to you again. https://librarysciences.tumblr.com/post/96553989368 Dont tell me more links. My brain  is suffocating  in links. I need fall pictures. I convince Melissa the pictures are what I  do to calm myself  down when Im  not writing.  I need to look at something thats not words, I tell her. And she  sends me a gift.

New Year. Time to Revisit and Refresh Your Personal Brand - Executive Career Brandâ„¢

New Year. Time to Revisit and Refresh Your Personal Brand

Teaching Career Helping You To Decide Which Age Group - CareerAlley

Teaching Career Helping You To Decide Which Age Group - CareerAlley We may receive compensation when you click on links to products from our partners. A lot of people decide to go into a teaching career after they have completed their major at university. After all, its one of the most rewarding careers you can go for. As we said before, it can very satisfying watching the students improving their skills. However, once you have decided on a teaching career, you need to decide which age group to go for. As you can see on http://teacherprobs.com/which-grade-should-you-actually-teach/, it can be a tough decision. After all, some people prefer to head to an elementary school to teach younger children. While other individuals would rather go to a high school or even opt for adult education instead. Therefore, when you are heading down a teaching career, here is some help for you to decide which age group to go for. Is there a specific subject you are passionate about? We all have subjects we are better at than others. But when it comes to your teaching career, you need to think carefully about whether you would be happy to teach a whole range of subjects. After all, if you are thinking about teaching younger kids, you are going to need to be able to teach a variety of subjects to them on a daily basis. Therefore, this might make you reconsider going for an elementary school level. After all, you might be super passionate about one subject and want to teach this every day. So if this is the case, you should look into high school, college, or even adult education to be able to do this. How do you feel about working with kids? Not everyone loves working with children. After all, its not going to be straightforward when it comes to teaching in the classroom. They might be so keen to listen as you might find with older students or adults. So it can be a lot harder to make them work. Some people like the challenge and thrive of helping kids to develop and learn. But if its not something you want to deal with, it might be the case you teach adults instead. It can be a different ball game teaching adult learners. In fact, there have been lots of theories about the adult learning process such as the malcolm knowles and the six assumptions underlying andragogy via hrdevelopmentinfo.com. Therefore, make sure its something you think you could handle before deciding on this age group. Image from Pixabay What kind of hours do you want to work? The hours of work can be very different depending on what age level you are going to teach. If you opt for elementary or high school level, its likely you will work from 8 to 3 with the kids. A lot of people like this as it means they can head home earlier in the day which can be useful if they have their own family. If you opt for adults, it can often be in the evening or even weekends when you are working. After all, a lot of adults do courses to fit around their own work. So make you think about what time would suit you before you decide on which age group to go for. And remember to look into the topics you might have to teach if you go for a particular age group to help you make your decision. We are always eager to hear from our readers. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or suggestions regarding CareerAlley content. Good luck in your search,Joey Google+

Business Communication Skills Makes Your Resume Strong

Business Communication Skills Makes Your Resume StrongBusiness communication skills are an essential asset for all business people and their supervisors, but being able to write a successful resume will definitely help in achieving this. In fact, the skills that are most essential for your resume writing business communication skills, are really valuable for other career related activities. Thus, being a great writer is also an essential skill for those who work as writers for businesses and organizations.Resume writing is a necessary activity for many. It is actually one of the most basic activities that every employer should do, especially when seeking out new employees. Resume writing and editing are at least twice as much effort as it actually is.To be able to write an excellent resume, it is essential to have some experience in resume writing and to have the ability to analyze the content of a resume that has been written by someone else. The better your skills in managing your time and to be able to deliver quality output, the better you will do in writing resumes.Writing resumes can be overwhelming, but you don't have to put a great deal of stress in doing so. You just need to know the basics of resume writing and follow a few simple rules to ensure that your resume will stand out. Remember, writing resumes is not something that can be learned overnight.Business communication skills are an essential part of your resume writing, because they go a long way in helping your resume to become more appealing. And if you happen to know these two skills well, then you should be able to easily generate some of the best resumes in the business.Business communication skills are important when it comes to the writing skills of a resume. A resume is basically the first presentation made by an applicant to a potential employer. Hence, it is very important to get your resume written and edited well, so that it will be effective and will provide the required information for the particular position for which you are applying.Employers prefer to hire professionals with good business communication skills for various reasons. They may be trained in specific fields, or they may even have an expert knowledge of certain aspects of resume writing and communication, but they are mostly based on these two basic skills.But being professional is not enough to make you the best candidate for the job. For that, you have to use the skills that you have in writing a resume in order to make your resume as powerful as possible.