Dealing with the aches and pains of an embattled economy

Posted on August 30, 2010
Filed Under Employment, Health, Keeping your Job, Recession | Leave a Comment

Imagine for a moment that you are participating in a group exercise.  Now imagine that you, part of a group of people, are standing at a wall.  The purpose of this exercise is to, one-by-one, get each person over the wall.  With numerous people working collectively to hoist each individual person over the wall, this feat is one that is easily surmounted.  The weight of each individual is dispersed as everyone in the group participates in supporting the weight of the person climbing the wall.  Now imagine what happens when everyone has made it over the wall, or rather, disappeared, leaving just handful of you (two or three) to do the legwork of several people.  If you read enough employment-related news touching on the health labor market and recent hiring trends, you will discover this is precisely the situation in which many American workers currently find themselves, and, as one CNN article reports, it is beginning to take its toll. Read more

Things you might not want to say or do at an interview

Posted on August 26, 2010
Filed Under Interview | 2 Comments

A CareerBuilder blogger, in a post called Interview mistakes you wish you could take back, asked job seekers to share their most embarrassing interviewing moments. Trust me, after reading these, you should feel a bit better about your own interviewing faux-pas or gaffes. 

According to the post, job seekers admitted to various sins of interviewing, including: Read more

A conundrum in the age of long-term unemployment

Posted on August 23, 2010
Filed Under Employment, Finding a Job, Recession | 1 Comment

The issue of long-term unemployment has received repeated attention on this blog as I have sought to discover why and for how long the problem of staggeringly high long-term unemployment numbers will persist. Despite this pervasive need for jobs, somewhat of a paradox has emerged. A recent Wall Street Journal Article, Some Firms Struggle to Hire Despite High Unemployment, goes to great lengths to describe this phenomenon, although fails to explicitly acknowledge its apparent paradoxical nature. Read more

Career Builder and USAToday’s Mid-Year Job Forecast 2010, Part II

Posted on August 19, 2010
Filed Under Employment, Finding a Job, Hiring Forecast, Recession | Leave a Comment

Before this week, I last treated the issue of Career Builder’s quarterly forecasts in one of my earliest posts—Examining CareerBuilder’s U.S. Hiring Forecasts for Q1 vs. Q2 2010. While the hiring forecasts for Q1 and Q2 certainly contained a kernel of optimism, there still existed a considerable amount of ambivalence about whether global markets were headed in the direction of a sustained recovery. As I discussed in my last post, USAToday and CareerBuilder’s Mid-Year Job Forecast is not too dissimilar from the Q2 forecast: that labor markets are beginning to show some signs that they might begin to loosen, if only somewhat. Upon further analysis, this is not all the report indicates. Hiring forecast aside, the report contained interesting information related to employee perceptions and how the downturn has affected America’s workforce.  Read more

Career Builder and USAToday’s Mid-Year Job Forecast 2010, Part I

Posted on August 16, 2010
Filed Under Employment, Finding a Job, Recession | Leave a Comment

Fed Chairman Ben Berneke’s recent statements to Congress that “the economic outlook remains ‘unusually uncertain’,” have helped to reinforce fears that the American economy is only slowly trudging towards recovery, with the hope that it won’t backslide. Unfortunately, a cloud of uncertainty continues to linger over global markets (particularly American and European markets). Despite this ominous cloud, however, CareerBuilder and USAToday’s Mid-Year Job Forecast 2010 contains the same trace elements of optimism as CareerBuilder’s Q1 and Q2 reports. Their findings? Read more

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