By Ben | November 2, 2009
A thought-provoking interview this morning with Professor Victor Mayer-Schönberger on Radio 4’s Start the Week with Andrew Marr examined how we deal with the mass of personal information that we publish online: should more be done to build obsolescence into our personal data trail? This is an issue that I’ve written about before and to which [...]
By Ben | September 28, 2009
I’m always a little wary of self-help books, but one book that I’ve re-read recently (out of curiosity, not the need for a new job) deserves recommendation: Successful Interviews Every Time by Dr Rob Yeung should be studied by anyone engaged in job search. I first read this book about five years ago when I [...]
By Ben | September 16, 2009
Time for our quarterly look at unemployment with the news that in the three months to July the total number of jobless rose by a massive (and scary) 210,000, the equivalent of the entire population of an outer London borough.
Over to you Lord Sugar: ”Hounslow…you’re fired.”
By Ben | September 15, 2009
My book of the week is ‘Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature‘ by Mark Earls, a highly original take on marketing, consumerism, and the way we are influenced by business (or not as it happens). This book turned out to be so compelling that I placed on hold my two [...]
Every business has customers. And generally speaking the cost of selling to an existing customer is far less than the cost of acquiring a new customer. Thus businesses will value highly any employees who can demonstrably assist with maintaining good customer relations. So how can you demonstrate expertise in customer service? The key thing to [...]
Following hard on the heels of my earlier post about censoring your Facebook profile comes this excellent guide to managing your online profile from recruiters Badenoch & Clark. An easy to read, concise summary not only of the dangers of letting your online reputation get out of control, but also of the positive things that [...]
Well they may not be coming until 2010, but the announcement by Tesco that it is to create 800 new jobs in Glasgow as part of its growing finance business is good news. Why Glasgow? Doubtless a £5m grant from the Scottish Executive helped to sweeten the deal, but it’s likely that Tesco was looking [...]
A worrying piece in Personnel Today quotes both John Philpott, chief economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and Richard Lambert, director-general of the CBI with the same observation: that the much touted creative alternatives to redundancy (e.g. 4 day weeks and job sharing) may only serve to delay redundancies rather than prevent them altogether. [...]
A further illustration of the paucity of new jobs about comes in the announcement by Diageo that it was to ‘create’ 400 new jobs at the same time as it made 900 redundancies, which is beginning to unravel. As this report in the Daily Record shows, many of those new jobs are in fact [...]
