Reveille and Hyperbole
Resolve Staffing has acquired Ready Nurses, a Fulton, Missouri-based medical staffing firm. Ready Nurses, located in Fulton, Missouri, provides a variety of medical staffing services including travel nurses and
other healthcare related professionals. With $1 million in annual sales, this acquisition is Resolve's fourth in the burgeoning medical staffing industry. Moreover, this acquisition brings Resolve's medical staffing division to approximately 15% of the company's annualized staffing sales, which are currently
approaching over $75 million.
Cook Ross, a diversity training and consulting company, is offering monthly web seminars on cultural competency in healthcare. A free seminar, "Making the Case for Cultural Competency," is held the first Wednesday of each month, with the next
event April 5. A paid seminar, "The Clinical Case for Cultural Competency," with 0.1 CEUs, certified by the International Accreditation for Continuing Education Training, will be offered the fourth Wednesday of each month, beginning March 29. The seminars will be held from 2 p.m.-3 p.m.
Sonic Software Corporation, a leading supplier of e-business messaging (EBM) software and services, announced today that Vivant(TM) Corporation, the leader in e-Procurement of services including contract labor acquisition and management, has
chosen the SonicMQ(TM) E-Business Messaging Server to be embedded within its Web-based solution to ensure secure and reliable delivery of e-payment messages.
Employment Referral Marketing releases Referral-Trac* version 3.0. Referral-Trac* is a tool used by HR departments to dramatically improve recruiting and retention results through Employee Referral Programs.
HRsmart has selected REAL People Group to launch its technology in the United Kingdom. HRsmart chose REAL People because of their strong
presence in the UK and desire to add a complete suite of talent management solutions to their existing e-recruitment offering.
Deck Chairs
TECOM Investments has appointed Nasser Abdulkarim Al Awadhi as its new Director of Human Capital....Talentology®, LLC, developer of the
PeopleFilter® Applicant Tracking System, today announced that Tim Beaumont has been recruited by the company as senior vice president of
Sales. In this role, Beaumont will leverage his more than 20 years of sales expertise in building and maintaining a high performing sales force in addition to developing and growing strategic partnerships for Talentology....David
L. Wigler of West Bloomfield, Mich., has joined Workscape Inc. of Marlboro as its central regional sales manager for work force management solutions. Mr. Wigler has more than 15 years of experience in account sales at organizations including
Bank One, Boeing and GMAC. Before joining Workscape, he was regional vice president at SmartTime Software Inc...
You
Should Know
Australia:
Australia labour shortage update
A heavy duty diesel fitter is the most needed employee in the country, commanding a salary from $150,000, according to the head of one of the largest employers of tradesmen in Australia, Phil Smart. Engineers, accountants, electrical estimators, draftsmen and bakers are also in high demand in all parts
of the country, particularly regional areas. The managing director of the Brisbane-based Workpac said diesel fitters easily bring in $150,000-plus as long as they were prepared to fly in and fly out of jobs at remote locations, mostly in the mining sector. "The most important thing about the skills shortage
is to understand that it is a Western world shortage and likely to be there for some time to come – it is not a trend and we will be in a skills shortage for the foreseeable future which will be at least 10 years," Mr Smart said. (WorkPermit.com)
China:
China newspapers and magazines sales revenue over RMB 30 bln
The annual sales revenue from China's newspapers and magazines exceeded RMB 30 billion, announced Yu Changxiang, director of Newspaper and Magazine Division of General Administration of Press and Publication. Currently, there are 9,500 magazine titles and 1,900 newspaper titles in China. The newspaper and
magazine industries have become among one of the fastest growing industries in China. Within the 1900 titles, about 50%, or some 1,000 of them are dailies a rise from the 20% in 1990. (China Knowledge)
Global:
Advertisers' woes spill over onto newspapers
Advertising is the lifeblood of newspapers, supplying 75 percent to 80 percent of their revenue. So it is not good news for newspapers that many of the nation's biggest newspaper advertisers have problems of their own. Four of the top 10 advertisers, for example, went through mergers in the last two
years. All cut advertising afterward. "Those are a lot of punches to absorb, and I think they do explain some of the recent difficulty newspapers have had in attracting advertising dollars," said Jon Swallen, senior vice president for research at TNS Media Intelligence. (Philly.com)
So papers are dying? Who says?
I don't so much mind that newspapers are dying -- it's watching them commit suicide that angers me. Let's use this as a handy exercise in journalism. What is the unexamined assumption here? That the newspaper business is dying. Is it? In 2005, publicly traded U.S. newspaper publishers reported operating
profit margins of 19.2 percent, down from 21 percent in 2004, according to The Wall Street Journal. That ain't chopped liver -- it's more than double the average operating profit margin of the Fortune 500. So who thinks newspapers are dying? Newspaper analysts on Wall Street. In fact, the fine folks on Wall
Street just forced the sale of Knight Ridder Inc. to McClatchy Co., a chain one-third KR's size. (Knight Ridder is the Star-Telegram's corporate parent.) McClatchy's CEO, Gary Pruitt, pointed out in an Op-Ed piece in The Wall Street Journal that investors are so chicken that his company picked up KR for a
song. (Actually, he said no such thing -- he was far more dignified. But that's what it comes down to.) (Star-Telegram)
Newspapers try new ways of boosting readership
Looking for ways to shore up their readership and broaden appeal to advertisers, many U.S. newspapers are adopting a new tactic: targeting narrower and younger audiences.Newspapers are launching youth-oriented publications designed to attract smaller advertisers that can't afford to advertise in
mainstream papers. They're also building search engines to compete with Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. eon a local level. And they are offering "self-serve" classified ad Web sites, where consumers can create their own ads. In many cases, profits are small, but papers are willing to take the hit in order to break
into new markets."In the past, what newspapers did well was reach broad audiences, but that is not where the growth is occurring," said Scott Flanders, chief executive of Freedom Communications Inc., the closely held parent of the Orange County Register in California and other publications. "If we're going to
get growth, it will come from capturing new readers, being able to segment them and being able to let advertisers target audiences." (Myrtle Beach Online)
Technology transforms campus recruiting
n an effort to stand out with prospective applicants, some colleges try offbeat approaches: DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., offers a virtual tour of the campus in the form of an interactive video game that mimics popular "quest" games. Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa.,
created a series of humorous video cartoons in which Benjamin Franklin and United States Chief Justice John Marshall (who served from 1801 to 1835 and for whom the school is named) go on a road trip searching for a college. Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge features 15 blogs on its
site, including 10 written by students. Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa., offers a series of podcasts -- interviews with faculty members and undergraduates that prospective applicants can download and listen to on their iPods. The day after the Super Bowl, the undergraduate admissions office at
Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland e-mailed 108 high school seniors in the Pittsburgh area to congratulate them on the Steelers' victory. That might seem odd. After all, what does the Super Bowl have to do with college admissions? But technology is transforming how colleges communicate
with high school students they are trying to woo. (Florida Today)
IT Recruiting Changes In The Outsourcing Era
IT executives pick entry-level workers based on tech skills, but they value business skills more highly.
A CIO complains about poor communication skills and lack of business knowledge among the team. The CIO says those are the critical skills least likely to be outsourced. The CIO then hires entry-level people--and focuses entirely on technical skills like programming that are most likely to be outsourced. This
disconnect is reality at most companies. That's one of the intriguing findings in a research project backed by the Society for Information Management and carried out by a team of 19 academics. The study asked 89 top IT executives what skills they most value, with the goal of helping IT workers and
universities adapt to market changes such as global sourcing, declining IT enrollments at U.S. colleges, and baby boomer retirements. At the entry level, the study raises questions about how companies will nurture IT talent if they're outsourcing many routine tech jobs entry-level staff used to do. Of the 10
top skills most often cited for entry-level workers, only one is nontechnical: communication, cited by less than a third. Programming is No. 1, cited by almost half. But programming also is the most likely skill to be outsourced. (Information
Week)
India:
Caught in the human capital trap
There were collective media gasps recently at the record salaries now offered to agri-business (agbiz) graduates. A country predominantly of farmers is startled to discover that studying the basics of farm economics in top-line B-schools can fetch you a cushy packet. So what's happening here? Why are
companies rushing to hire with salaries that only finance and marketing grads could dream of? Equally importantly, why are students and their parents, not the world's biggest risk-takers, putting their eggs in this basket? (Economic Times)
Intellectual capital — India's hidden wealth? Intangibles are scoring over physical assets
Corporate leaders are looking for tools to monitor the intellectual capital of their organisations.
WHILE ACKNOWLEDGING that foreign direct investment (FDI) and infrastructure contributed in a large measure to China's blistering growth, economists are beginning to express concern over the efficiency with which this capital is being used. They are also beginning to recognise that India makes much better use
of its overall capital. (The Hindu)
Netherlands:
Recruiting foreign staff'good for the economy'
Expat workers exert a positive economic impact, but companies still underestimate the importance they can have on profit and turnover growth, a new study claims. The study by ING bank investigated four forms of internationalisation in small and medium-sized firms in Flanders, the Netherlands and Poland.
The results negated many prejudices, revealing the number of workers with a foreign passport in comparison with a company's total workforce remains quite limited. (Expatica)
Phillipines:
Job prospects bleak for 400,000 new grads
CLOSE to 400,000 new college graduates will add to the 1.2 million workers who join the labor force annually, according to official estimates. "The class of 2006 is bound to suffer the same fate which has plagued the previous batches," said Raymond Palatino, Kabataan Party president. Kabataan Party, a
youth sectoral group, has predicted a sharp rise in the number of unemployed by April this year. Stunted wage levels, poor quality of education and raw training of college graduates contribute largely to the unemployment and underemployment problem.
(Manila Standard)
Qatar:
New software to make recruitment easier
A software application that enables electronic handling of corporate recruitment needs by allowing firms to post jobs onto their own website has been released in the US by a South Asian-led team. The new software, still in the trial stage, will allow companies to post jobs onto their own website and store
candidate data in a database to allow effective searching, filtering and routing of applicants. Cognizo Technologies, an IT consulting firm that has developed the software codenamed "Ravi", claims that it is the staffing-recruiting industry's "first and only open source, web-based ATS package". "I am looking
to add project members to the team from both India and Pakistan. It's open source; the bigger the community, the better the product," Minneapolis-based Asim Baig, president of Cognizo Technologies, said in an email interview. (The
Penninsula)
Russia:
Online Sites Are Doing The Job
Twenty million Russians now use the internet and more and more of them are using it to look for employment. According to the statistics, this year the amount of applicants who look for jobs online has by increased by 50 percent. The majority of these live in Moscow (about 40 percent), St. Petersburg (15-17
percent) and other cities with more than one million people (3-7 percent). "Due to its unique character — not being limited by time, space or any situation — the internet has become the main job search resource for a large proportion of applicants," said Natalia Bocharova, director of the recruiting site
e-prof.ru. (St Petersburg Times)
Scotland:
HR award winners
THREE of Scotland's best human resources professionals picked up the most prestigious HR awards in Glasgow yesterday. Gillian Tinson, of the Glasgow-based CBES group; Sean Reddy, head of group HR at the Craig Group, based in Aberdeen; and Andrew Walker, head of HR of Scottish Water, are this year's
winners. (Scotsman)
US:
People Person: A passion to see others succeed drives GSA CHCO Gail T. Lovelace
It's the early 1970s and Gail T. Lovelace, working for the government and also studying for a degree in chemistry, enters a room in a federal agency where a dozen women, seeming oddly isolated, sit silently typing. Later, at lunchtime, she talks with them. "These mostly minority women were typists—at
[pay] grades 2 or 3—in a typing pool. "A couple of them could have been my grandmother, and here I was already something like a Grade 7, so I asked, ‘Why are you sitting in this room at grades 2 and 3 when there's a whole world out here? Why don't you run on down to personnel and they'll tell you what else is
available'." They were aghast. "We can't do that," they said. "They told me they could lose their jobs if their supervisor found out they'd gone to personnel," Lovelace said. "These ladies were raising families on very small salaries and they were grateful just to have jobs and be able to provide for their
families." (Government Leader)
Survival Guide: Perspectives from the field:Evan Lesser, founder and director of ClearanceJobs.com
In the late 1990s, when Evan Lesser was working as an IT professional for a defense contractor, his boss asked him one day to find five job candidates with security clearances to work on a Navy contract the company had. He placed ads online and in the Washington Post, and got hundreds of resumes from
candidates who did not have clearances. As he sifted though his stack looking for a match, he came up with an idea for a secure, online job board that listed only job seekers with current security clearance and would restrict access to authorized government contractors. Thus, ClearanceJobs.com was born and
launched in July 2002. Dice.com, a provider of online recruiting services for technology, engineers and security-cleared professionals, acquired the Web site in September 2004. ClearanceJobs.com now has registered about 64,000 job seekers with security clearances. Lesser talked with Staff Writer Roseanne
Gerin about the security clearance problem and perceptions. (Washington Technology)
A boom in Dixie — Land rush: Historic growth setting records
Allan Carter will never forget the night he went back to the future. Like the rest of Washington County, Bloomington is growing rapidly. The county's population jumped 8 percent in the year ended June 30, 2005. It was August 1971 and Carter, a Brigham Young University student at the time, remembers dreaming
that he was standing at the intersection of 300 West and St. George Boulevard in downtown St. George, looking across his native city and marveling at what he saw. "I could see homes as far as I could see," Carter said. "Thousands of homes."Back then, Washington County's population of 14,000 was roughly
one-tenth of its current size. St. George was viewed as little more than a dusty stopover between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City. There were no gated communities, no million-dollar homes and certainly no traffic jams.
But the city was about to shake off its small-time status. And for Carter, whose dream convinced him to quit college and take over his father's St. George-based title company, the timing could not have been better. (DeseretNews)
"Boutique" recruiting firm seeks tech execs
What: Laurel Group, a technology-focused executive-recruiting company in Seattle. Who, when and why: Co-founders Jeff Hibbert and Thomas Taft hung their shingle in 2002, "one of the worst times you could start up a search firm," Taft said. They landed their first deal after 29 days in business, beating out
Heidrick & Struggles, their former employer. "We just felt there was a huge need for a regional boutique but with a national reach of candidates," Taft said. They now have 22 employees and a second office, in California's Silicon Valley. Faster, wider searches: The partners do everything from making initial
calls to completing the deal. And they can search more firms without raiding their client pool, a recruiting no-no. They also have a consulting arm to find the .NET developers and Oracle database administrators. (Seattle
Times)
Wabash National backs trucker recruiting effort
Wabash National Corp. has made an investment in the trucking industry. The Lafayette-based truck-trailer manufacturer recently announced a long-term financial commitment to the American Trucking Association for a new national truck driver recruitment advertising and training campaign. The amount of the
funding was not disclosed, but is described as "substantial" by the ATA. (JCOnline)
'Kamikaze parents' at job interviews
In interviews with a job candidate last year, Deborah D'Attilio, a recruiting manager in San Francisco for Enterprise Rent-A-Car, was surprised when the young woman brought a companion: Her dad.Saying "he was interested in learning about the work environment," the father sat in the lobby during the interview,
D'Attilio says. D'Attilio didn't hold it against the candidate and wound up hiring the young woman.Helicopter parents are going to work. From Vanguard Group and St. Paul Travelers to General Electric and Boeing, managers are getting phone calls from parents asking them to hire their 20-something kids.
Candidates are stalling on job offers to consult with their parents. Parents are calling hiring managers to protest pay packages and try to renegotiate, employers say. (Lexington Herald)
Merrill-Morgan Stanley recruiting feud raises old issues
Merrill Lynch & Co.'s (MER) effort to bar former executives working at Morgan Stanley (MS) from recruiting Merrill brokers is a seasoned strategy. Merrill for decades had rushed to court within hours of receiving notice from brokers to prevent them from taking clients with them. It sought temporary
restraining orders, which often were granted, preventing brokers from contacting their clients for a time and sometimes giving Merrill a cut of the broker's revenue at the new firm. The law firm that represented Merrill in hundreds of these cases - Rubin Fortunato of Paoli, Pa. - is leading the current
action against Morgan Stanley. The restraining order granted this week, a variation of those brought against brokers, prohibits Morgan Stanley retail brokerage head James Gorman and a top Merrill sales executive he hired from "directly or indirectly" contacting Merrill brokers, even those who have left the
firm, provided they haven't been gone for six months. (Marketwatch)
Coming Soon