It’s Not Your Imagination. It Really IS Much Harder to Get Hired During A Recession.

It’s Not Your Imagination. It Really IS Much Harder to Get Hired During A Recession. | Crooks and Liars

I used to be an executive recruiter and I can tell you: the worse a recession is, the more demanding the prospective employers become. I remember trying to fill high-level software sales positions after the dot com collapse for hiring managers who didn’t want “any of those dot com people.” (Apparently they showed too great an affinity for risk-taking.) And yet, all the experienced candidates worked for them, so they ended up hiring people who didn’t know what they were doing.

July 4, 2009 · Filed Under Business, Interesting tidbits, Psychology, Society

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Incentives, Disincentives and Spoiled Brat Syndrome

charles hugh smith-Incentives, Disincentives and Spoiled Brat Syndrome

One of my carpentry masters was an African-American gent from New Orleans. Back in the early 1970s when I first began working for him and his partner (a Caucasian gent), he told me that how he’d found work in tough times was to approach the foreman of a construction project, point to a worker on the site and say that he could do more work than that guy.

The foreman would give him a once-over and put him to work. The next day, the other guy would be gone and my boss would have his job.

That’s called getting and holding a job based on output and nothing else.

June 21, 2009 · Filed Under Business, Interesting tidbits, Psychology, Society

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Google develops algorithm to stem talent loss

Google, concerned by the recent departures of several top executives, has developed an algorithm to try to identify which employees are likely to quit, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

I guess the first version is just a keyword analysis tool applied to performance reviews, looking for particular keywords (”demotivated”, “concern”) and statistical analysis tools looking at data like last date of promotion, ongoing training, denied requests for raises, etc…
It is not particularly difficult to do, companies don’t have to be Google to do the same thing!

May 20, 2009 · Filed Under Analysis, Business, E-business, Interesting tidbits, Society

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My Personal Credit Crisis - NYTimes.com - Expertise is overrated

We are supposed to feel sorry for this individual…yet The fact that he was advising others on financial matters through such
a prominent newspaper and earning 120k/year tells us a lot on why we
are where we are, and how much the “experts” know or can be relied on.
He knew much better than
most people all the way (wrote articles about it!), he fell for it, he
continued spending (Christmas, vacation…), didn’t sell the
house…and on top of that he writes this article mentioning names and
making himself and his employer look even more incompetent
that you would ever guessed they could be.
I wouldn’t be
surprised if he soon loses his job and his wife.

My Personal Credit Crisis - NYTimes.com

If there was anybody who should have avoided the mortgage catastrophe, it was I. As an economics reporter for The New York Times, I have been the paper’s chief eyes and ears on the Federal Reserve for the past six years. I watched Alan Greenspan and his successor, Ben S. Bernanke, at close range. I wrote several early-warning articles in 2004 about the spike in go-go mortgages. Before that, I had a hand in covering the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the Russia meltdown in 1998 and the dot-com collapse in 2000. I know a lot about the curveballs that the economy can throw at us.

May 19, 2009 · Filed Under Business, Interesting tidbits, Society

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15 Recession Proof Job Markets

The recession has led to massive layoffs and downsizing. But not every job field is in trouble. Some professions are expected to see faster than average employment growth over the next few years. Here are 15 job markets thought to be recession proof.

May 14, 2009 · Filed Under Future, Interesting tidbits, Society

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City development, key to economic prosperity

jacobs.html

But even better are the less read The Economy of Cities (1970) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), twin volumes which do nothing less than demolish and rebuild macroeconomics. Economics went wrong, she explains, with the work her titles allude to, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Nations aren’t the proper unit of macroeconomic analysis; cities are.

Jacobs arrives at this conclusion by considering the stagflation of the 1970s– simultaneous high unemployment and high inflation, something that was not supposed to be possible under either left-wing (Keynesian) or right-wing (monetarist) economics. They were supposed to trade off. She points out that this condition– high prices and not enough work– is normal for backward regions; Western economists mistook the fitful but constant economic boom from Smith’s time on as a permanent condition.

March 28, 2009 · Filed Under Analysis, Business, Culture, Interesting tidbits, Society

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About the wage productivity gap

t r u t h o u t | Dr. Ravi Batra: New Thinking on the Economy

The wage-productivity gap is the gap between the real wage and labor productivity. The real wage is the purchasing power of the average salary. If productivity rises fast and the real wage rises slowly, then a wage-productivity gap develops and grows.

March 28, 2009 · Filed Under Analysis, Business, Society

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50% Of Americans 2 Paychecks Away From Having Big Financial Problems

Emergency Funds: 50% Of Americans 2 Paychecks Away From Having Big Financial Problemos

US News reports that half of Americans are two paychecks away from hardship.
They quote this from a recent MetLife study to highlight the problem:”Without a steady paycheck, 50% of Americans say they could not meet their financial obligations for more than a month - and, of that, a disturbing 28% couldn’t support themselves for more than two weeks of unemployment.”