Mind the Gap: McKinsey on Boomers Need to Work

The McKinsey Global Institute site has an interesting article about “Serving Aging Baby Boomers”. MGI suggests that the upcoming boomer retirement binge may not be so huge:

While the conventional wisdom about boomers suggests they are widely affluent, only 25 percent are financially prepared for retirement and are aging with confidence. More than half of this generation, a massive cohort comprising 24 million people, envision a comfortable retirement, feel entitled to the good life, but lack the financial resources to pay for it. These boomers share the same aspirations as the affluent but won’t be able to maintain their current lifestyle without continuing to work or cutting spending by 25 percent or more.

This suggests that companies that find creative ways to lure boomers and accommodate their post-retirement working needs will do well in the upcoming labor shortage.

Boomers: “Born to be wild” or “Bored, tubby & mild”? (Amusing animation by Walt Handelsman)

Branding – When It Works Too Well

An employment brand is a great recruiting tool, but a tough thing to build. The folks at MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, are finding out what happens when employment branding works too well:

007 Association Gives MI6 Recruitment Headache

LONDON (Reuters) – The success of the James Bond movies has given the British Secret Intelligence Service a recruitment headache — too many cranks want to join MI6.

“I think it gives people a false impression of what working for the organization is actually like,” the head of MI6 recruitment — named only as “Mark” — told BBC Radio One’s Newsbeat program on Monday.

“So it does tend to turn up quite a lot of thrill seekers and fantasists and we’re really not interested in them”.

As well as dismissing the notion that spying was a never-ending life of fast cars, fast women and shaken not stirred Martini cocktails, “Mark” was keen to demolish another myth surrounding MI6.

“We don’t have a license to kill — we don’t carry Berettas — that’s simply not true.”

Thoughts after a Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving has come and gone, and none of the 15 people at our table yesterday went away hungry. We had a great feast: turkey with trimmings, potatoes both sweet and white, carrots in horseradish, green bean casserole, and home-made pumpkin pie made from home-grown pumpkins.

After the meal (and several bottles of a fine Gewürztraminer), this meal prompted an interesting discussion on, “What separates us from the lower orders?”

It is getting harder and harder to hang a unique trait on our species. Beavers engineer, and crows, vultures and dolphins use tools. Bees dance, cockatoos drum, and whales sing. Elephants can communicate across long distances, and otters play. Aristotle said that Man is the only animal that laughs, but chimps, gorillas, and orangutans are known to crack up, especially if tickled. The research of Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall shows that the higher primates wage war and commit murder.

So what makes homo sapiens different from the other species on the third planet out from an average star in the Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way galaxy?

Man is the only animal that cooks.

The Worst Things to Hear in a Job Interview

From a ten-year-old e-mail, a sample of the Worst Things to Hear in a Job Interview:

1. I take it you didn’t use a spell checker on this resume?
2. You know those picket lines are only temporary.
3. Our company is positioned for major growth… once we get through all this Chapter 11 stuff.
4. We’re going to give the job to an internal candidate, but HR says we have to interview five people before we can do that.
5. I’m sorry – your interview was scheduled for 1:00 PM yesterday.

Hopefully, you won’t hear these.

Tips: 50 Free Job Posting Sites

Over on the Bootstrapper site, Christina Laun has posted a list titled Better than Monster: 50 Free Places You Can Post A Job Online and Get Top Talent. Her list includes some well-know alternative sites like Craigslist, and some other niche job locations.

Recruiters should check the list to see if you can use some of these to expand your posting circle.

Candidates should check the list for new postings not on the majors.

Unknown factor: Does the Indeed search engine go out to these sites?

Tips: Ten Tips for a (Slightly) Less Awful [Programming] Resume

Objective: Obtain a position at IBM
– some idiot applying to Amazon.com

On Stevey’s Blog Rants (Random Whining and Stuff), author Steve Yegge ponders the question: “Why are the resumes of programmers so uniformly awful? And how do we fix them? The resumes, that is.”

Steve knows of what he speaks. Steve is the guy who ported Rails to JavaScript for Google. The hushed silence we non-programmers hear is due to the awe that our encoding brethren have for an accomplishment like this.

The guy is good. But he’s not perfect.

Or that really dumb guy who accidentally listed “work at IBM” as the objective on his Amazon resume. Ha, ha! What a dork!

Oh wait — that was me. D’oh. I sometimes refer to it as my “million dollar typo”. It’s kind of a painful story, especially for my eardrums, since whenever I tell it people predictably point at me and scream with hysterical girly laughter. Dammit.

(Mentioning the wrong company is one of the most common errors I see in resumes – I got one just yesterday. I think Steve would call that a #3.)

Steve has condensed his wisdom and experience into 10 tips that any programmer, firmware engineer, software engineer or web developer can take to heart:

Ten Tips for a (Slightly) Less Awful Resume

Tip #1: Nobody cares about you
Tip #2: Use Plain Text
Tip #3: Check, please
Tip #4: Avoid Weasel Words.
Tip #5: Avoid Wank Words
Tip #6: Don’t be a Certified Loser
Tip #7: Don’t say “expert” unless you really mean it
Tip #8: Don’t tip your hand
Tip #9: Don’t bore us to death
Tip #10: Don’t be a lying scumbag

Go check out the entire article. His advice is good for non-programmers too.

DYHAQFM?

Oh my

So I saw this little quiz on the Anchoress’s site, and thought I’d give it a spin. The Result? Here it is:

Oh My. I hope my writing isn’t confusing to both of my regular readers.

How Not to Get a Job: Bad Resumes in Australia

Matt on the Still as Life blog is helping his employer screen resumes.

Now there have been a lot of resumes come through and since I do most of the email work, I have the job of going over each resume and deciding which one’s are worth printing and forwarding to my boss, and which ones will get a lovely little email in response

Things move along swimmingly, until he runs into Billy’s resume, which Matt provided in total:

Name: Billy K

Address: 85 Bad St

Phone: 0400 000 000

Email Address: billy*****@hotmail.com

Drivers Licence: No

Personal Qualities: Friendly, Fun, keen, patient

Interest & Hobbies: Hanging out with friends, going to movies, talking to peple

Schooling: ********** State High School 1998

Objective: To get a job to save some money and get
Work experience

Availability: Casual

References: Will give when you call.

Matt’s comments are right on the mark.

Now, I’m not the employer, but just reading that, why would I want to work with them? So why would an employer want to consider employing them?

In short – if you’re going to do a lousy job, why bother?

See the whole thing on Still as Life: How Not to Get a Job.

His follow-up, titled “Resume Suicide“, is also worth a look.

TIP: Don’t do this. Use your resume to show your employer how you can help solve his business problems.

Job Fair Calendar updated

The Job Fair vendors are starting to leak their event calendars for 2008, so I’ve been able to update the Career Fair block. It looks like we’ll know more even after the first of the year.

How Not to Get a Job: Cover Letters from Hell

Killian and Company is a creative Chicago ad agency that collects awful cover letters, most presented by intern candidates. They’ve presented many of the submissions they’ve received on a gruesome and horrifying page. Here’s an example, which should be studied by anyone seeking a job (the comments in green are from the company):

“I need real world experience and after reviewing your web site I get the impressing that your company believes in maintain a lax work environment while efficiently meeting the needs of it’s customers (right?).” [We replied to this college senior, on an ill-advised rescue impulse, gently suggesting he get some remedial help with his writing, since he had an error in every single sentence of his three-page letter. His furious four-page reply included some amazing stuff, such as]

“…you should be straight forward and … simply state that your company is seeking a grammar teacher who lacks creativity but knows how to properly write a letter and knows exactly where to place punctuation. If your company takes such a serious position towards proper grammar then I think you guys are in the wrong profession. I believe even the leader of this country that we live in lacks proper grammar yet he is still our leader. I can assure you that he leaves grammar and punctuation to the proper authorities such as his receptionist or grade school English teacher. …I am not precisely sure why you choose to take such a stance perhaps because you have nothing better to do, or maybe because you have personal insecurities that seep out and you feel the need to degrade or target others based on stupid little infractions to make yourself feel better, I don’t know what the case is … if I am out of line please let me know but if I recall properly your companies web site is not the most professional site there is. If you guys are trying to project a laid back yet hard working image through your site and request the same from prospective employees then you should not be so prudent about minor infractions such as punctuation and grammar…. (I reread it before sending it and it states my point clearly and unless you lack the mental capacity to make out the meaning without having exact and precisise grammar maybe you should seek a new proffsion, I hear this country lacks alot of grammar school teachers perhaps that would be a better fit for you) In conclusion I have indeed made many mistakes in this e-mail many on purpose and many accidentaly I did not have the time nor the patientce to deal with it I will leave the grammer checking to the professionals such as yourself.” [Editor's note: although his response fascinated us, you can understand why we no longer reply to the Differently Stable.]

Oh. My.

Go see the whole page of examples on the Cover Letters from Hell page.

BTW: I like Killian and Company’s internship page. The linked page describes their Intern Creativity Test. A sample:

What’s your dress code?
Since naked employees tend to be distracting, our dress code asks employees and interns, politely but firmly, to dress. Those who remain persistently, defiantly nude are subject to a reprimand. (We haven’t had to resort to that yet, but we are ever vigilant.)

These guys are good! Of course, anyone who worships at the Shrine of Strunk and White is at the top of my list!