By 2015, 60% of the new jobs being created will require special skills held by only 20% of the population. In contrast, in 1991 less than half of U.S. jobs required special workers.
Showing posts with label google+. Show all posts
Showing posts with label google+. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Creative Ways to Create an Online Resume
Your resume is boring. How do you expect to stand out in a crowd of job seekers when your black-and-white, list-formatted resume and formulaic cover letter blend with all the rest?
Luckily the Internet is here to save you. With the coming of social media resumes, video resumes and visual resumes, the world of job seeking just got a lot more interesting.
Your Website
First, if you don’t have a personal website or blog, get one. It’s a great way to showcase your passions, thoughts and experience and portray yourself as an expert, whether you are searching for a job or not. If you name your website after yourself, it will probably rank highly when people search for your name online.
Consider listing your resume (or at least an “about me” page) on your website, so site visitors can learn more about you.
Hagan Blount, a self-described writer, editor and producer, hosts a compelling infographic resume (pictured above) on his personal website. The “Resume” tab on his site includes his resume, alongside a stream of his most recent tweets. The resume is creative in that it includes a non-traditional approach to his professional (and personal) history, complete with fun stats, QR codes and recommendation quotes from influential business people.
Document Sharing Websites
You probably already have a .doc or .pdf format of your resume in your job-searching arsenal. To get the most out of it, upload it to document-sharing websites such as SlideShare or Scribd as Erica Swallows has done.
Both sites enable viewers to download, embed and share your resume, giving it the opportunity for many more eyes to see it. As a bonus, these sites ranked highly on search engines so the next time someone is searching on Google for your resume, it’s likely he or she will stumble upon your uploaded versions on these sites.
Both sites allow users to upload revisions of a document. As you change your resume, you can replace it on SlideShare or Scribd to keep it up-to-date. This is particularly useful because the URL never changes, so you won’t lose search engine optimality or confuse recruiters who already have links to previous versions. Furthermore, the view count on each document never starts over, and the upload date, tags, description and document title stay the same.
Slideshare tends to have the best upload quality, because the formatting of the preview stays true to the original document. But it’s advisable to use both sites, as search rankings can vary.
Try to get creative, like Chris Ferdinandi, a human resources professional based in Boston. His visual resume has nearly 29,000 views and showcases his “not-so-traditional” approach.
LinkedIn
Of course, there’s always LinkedIn, a staple of the professional’s online presence. LinkedIn has become the standard online professional network, and like Facebook and Twitter, it often appears near the top of search inquiries involving people, as a result of its high ranking across search engines. When a potential employer searches for information about you online, you’ll want some semblance of your professional life to appear in search results.
Once employers find your LinkedIn profile, you’ll want it to be flawless and 100% complete. For the most part, you can bling out your profile by filling in the basics, asking for meaningful recommendations, using value-added applications and becoming an expert with LinkedIn Answers. For more detailed tips on creating a picture-perfect LinkedIn profile, check out my recent post on “HOW TO: Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile.”
(via Mashable)
Luckily the Internet is here to save you. With the coming of social media resumes, video resumes and visual resumes, the world of job seeking just got a lot more interesting.
Your Website
First, if you don’t have a personal website or blog, get one. It’s a great way to showcase your passions, thoughts and experience and portray yourself as an expert, whether you are searching for a job or not. If you name your website after yourself, it will probably rank highly when people search for your name online.
Consider listing your resume (or at least an “about me” page) on your website, so site visitors can learn more about you.
Hagan Blount, a self-described writer, editor and producer, hosts a compelling infographic resume (pictured above) on his personal website. The “Resume” tab on his site includes his resume, alongside a stream of his most recent tweets. The resume is creative in that it includes a non-traditional approach to his professional (and personal) history, complete with fun stats, QR codes and recommendation quotes from influential business people.
Document Sharing Websites
You probably already have a .doc or .pdf format of your resume in your job-searching arsenal. To get the most out of it, upload it to document-sharing websites such as SlideShare or Scribd as Erica Swallows has done.
Both sites enable viewers to download, embed and share your resume, giving it the opportunity for many more eyes to see it. As a bonus, these sites ranked highly on search engines so the next time someone is searching on Google for your resume, it’s likely he or she will stumble upon your uploaded versions on these sites.
Both sites allow users to upload revisions of a document. As you change your resume, you can replace it on SlideShare or Scribd to keep it up-to-date. This is particularly useful because the URL never changes, so you won’t lose search engine optimality or confuse recruiters who already have links to previous versions. Furthermore, the view count on each document never starts over, and the upload date, tags, description and document title stay the same.
Slideshare tends to have the best upload quality, because the formatting of the preview stays true to the original document. But it’s advisable to use both sites, as search rankings can vary.
Try to get creative, like Chris Ferdinandi, a human resources professional based in Boston. His visual resume has nearly 29,000 views and showcases his “not-so-traditional” approach.
Of course, there’s always LinkedIn, a staple of the professional’s online presence. LinkedIn has become the standard online professional network, and like Facebook and Twitter, it often appears near the top of search inquiries involving people, as a result of its high ranking across search engines. When a potential employer searches for information about you online, you’ll want some semblance of your professional life to appear in search results.
Once employers find your LinkedIn profile, you’ll want it to be flawless and 100% complete. For the most part, you can bling out your profile by filling in the basics, asking for meaningful recommendations, using value-added applications and becoming an expert with LinkedIn Answers. For more detailed tips on creating a picture-perfect LinkedIn profile, check out my recent post on “HOW TO: Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile.”
(via Mashable)
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
5 Human Resource Lessons from the World's Most Admired Companies
Fortune Magazine's World's Most Admired Companies (WMAC) issue is out and once again, the top five seems like a familiar bunch: Apple, Google, Berkshire Hathaway, Southwest Airlines, and Proctor & Gamble. This is the third year that Apple has topped the prestigious list, two appearances shy of General Electric's record for most times as the "World's Most Admired Company". For the past ten years, the Hay Group has performed supplemental research to discover the best practices that make these companies so consistently successful.
Their 2010 study found that top organizations leverage their goodwill and give their employees the conditions needed to contribute and succeed. Here are ways ways that the WMAC achieves these objectives.
1) INVOLVE EMPLOYEES AT ALL LEVELS
Companies on the WMAC list are more likely to engage employees and ask for their feedback. In fact, 91% of the WMAC regularly reach out to employees for ideas on how to improve organizational efficiency, comapred to 76% of all companies. Not only does this generate great ideas for the company but it keeps employees motivated and aligned with the organization's goals. The vast majority of respondents from the WMAC (94 percent) believe employee engagement efforts reduced employee turnover, and 85 percent believe employee engagement efforts reduced employee performance problems, compared to 67 percent and 72 percent at peer companies respectively.
2)WORK/LIFE BALANCE
Half of the WMAC said that intend to focus on improving work/life balance over the next two years to avoid burning out and to retain top talent. This is compared to only 30% of peer companies who has the same focus. Successful managers recognize that people's lives are more holistic and that beng respectful of this fact leads to happier and more productive employees.
3)KEEPING SKILLS CURRENT
The WMAC make efforts to ensure that employee skills are updated to keep up with changing job demands. Employees benefit from personal and professional development while the WMAC benefits from greater employee productivity and effectiveness. Hay Group Vice-President Mel Stark notes that the WMAC "actually manage to pay less for talent than their peers – about 5% less; they tend to have less of a need to hire expensive outside talent for jobs, because they are better at grooming people internally and retaining employees. The lower costs of recruiting and training new people have a ripple effect across an organization"
4) MANAGING PERFORMANCE
Managers are encouraged to coach employees on an on-going basis, providing feedback and solutions. Employees have clear expectations and understand their role in the organization's broader objectives. Managers must be aware of employees' activities so they can provide advice and counsel as well as ensure employees are engaged and on the correct path. However, it is important to make the distinction between managing performance and smothering it with too much attention. While managers need to be there to guide employees in the right direction the employees need to be in the drivers seat.
5) LINKING REWARD AND CONTRIBUTION
The WMAC tend to attract and retain top talent in the long-term and many of their top management were developed internally.
Mel Stark believes this is because "these companies do a better job of rewarding top performers – delivering the best pay increases to those who are truly deserving and holding the line on pay for marginal performers. Over time, this results in a compounded effect of top performers earning appreciably more than others.”
The WMAC have systems and processes that offer significantly higher rewards for their high-performing employees than peer companies. Although this is an incurred cost in the short-term, the long-term benefits far outweigh to increased compensation paid to employees.
Mel Stark believes this is because "these companies do a better job of rewarding top performers – delivering the best pay increases to those who are truly deserving and holding the line on pay for marginal performers. Over time, this results in a compounded effect of top performers earning appreciably more than others.”
The WMAC have systems and processes that offer significantly higher rewards for their high-performing employees than peer companies. Although this is an incurred cost in the short-term, the long-term benefits far outweigh to increased compensation paid to employees.
---
To arrive at the top 50 Most Admired Companies overall, the Hay Group asked 4,100 executives, directors, and securities analysts who had responded to the industry surveys to select the 10 companies they admired most. They chose from a list made up of the companies that ranked in the top 25% in last year's surveys, plus those that finished in the top 20% of their industry.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Facebook Dominates U.S. Display Advertising
According to a new report by comScore, Facebook now has nearly a third of all U.S. display advertising impressions with 346.4 billion in the first quarter of 2011. This is double the amount of display impressions it had in the first quarter of 2010 and 20% more than Q4 2010. At this pace, Facebook is expected to pass 1 trillion display ad impressions within the year.
The next closest competitor is Yahoo's network of websites which had 10.1% of all U.S. display ad impressions. Google, which has dominated the textual ad market, is a relative newcomer to display ads with only 2.5% of impressions.
For recruiters who want to target specific candidates, Facebook's growing popularity and efficiency can be very appealing to your needs. Play around with their "Create an Ad" page to see how Facebook Ads can help you.
Source: Mashable
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Xobni unveils new Gadget Store
This is not Xobni's first foray into integrating third-party applications into its product as the company launched a feature last year that allowed users to integrate Gmail Gadgets within Outlook. Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte commented on the pent up demand for third-party applications for Xobni: "We've had [vendors, partners and customers] approaching us forever on this one, desperate. They've tried to develop Outlook plug-ins in the past and it has been nothing but misery,". Both Microsoft and IBM have come out with similar services called Outlook Social Connector and Lotus 8.x notes respectively.
Xobni's Gadget Store will begin with 20 applications including Dropbox, Evernote, GoldMail, Google Translate, Atlassian JIRA, WebEx, Huddle, Microsoft SharePoint, Salesforce Chatter, Yammer, Facebook, Flickr, Hoover’s, Klout, LinkedIn, Twitter, Xing, YouTube, Yelp and Salesforce CRM.
While the Gadget Store is exclusive to the Xobni’s Outlook version, it will eventually extend to the Gmail plugin. The company, which has raised over $30 million in funding to date, has amassed nearly seven million downloads.
"We've had [vendors, partners and customers] approaching us forever on this one, desperate." - Xobni CEO Jeff BonforteXobni has free and fee-based versions of its Outlook software. There is also a version for BlackBerry devices with iPhone and Android versions still in the works, while a version for Gmail is currently in beta testing.
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| The Xobni Gadget Store will begin with 20 applications. |
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