I think Peter Schiff is brilliant.  You may or may not agree with that, but he hits on a real hot button for me in a recent blog post:

Everybody has got degrees, so what are they worth?

What people need are real skills, on the job training, acquiring a knowledgeable skill that actually makes them more productive. That`s what a lot of americans lack. - in recent video interview while discussing why isn`t America more competitive.

I live very…

Whether you are working in internal our outside recruiting, when there are too many candidates something is wrong.  The problem is that the job specs are off.  They are either interpreted and written incorrectly or given incorrectly.

Too many candidates is an enormous time waster and has a numbing effect.  Great candidates can be lost in the process.  Many times great candidates are left without being reviewed if there are too many.  Filling a job is not necessarily…

Tonight we get the State of The Union.  I don’t care about the speech or the politics.  I do care about the actual state of the country. Here’s how I see the state of the union and a couple of other things.

State of the Union (Country) – Mature and overburdened with debt and a bloated political system.

State of the Economy (Business Conditions) – Pretty good, at least for the time being.  Recovered from the bubble burst and moving…

I love all of the stories about Kodak today.  Times changed and evolution of digital photography and the end of an Iconic American Brand……..etc….

The hard truth is that management wasn’t smart enough.  They weren’t as good as others they were competing with.  Kodak is a perfect example of a company that was put in a great position but the people running it were not good enough to evolve, to continue to grow.  Is there any doubt that others could have done tons more with…

We’ve still got high unemployment but it sure feels like a candidates’ market out there, at least for the highly desired candidates.

We’ve seen a number of positions lately where candidates are in high demand, and they’ve got options.  The sense of urgency is there for clients to schedule interviews quickly and do everything they can to land the right candidates.

This is always the case for unique and valuable candidates, but it has become more normal lately and is…

Strong business conditions for recruiting continue into the new year.  When we look at our Best Opportunities and New Jobs each week we see the same industries and types of positions we have seen for a while.

IT, Healthcare, and Heavy Industrial Manufacturing at all levels are still probably the hottest areas.  I heard from a client in Civil Engineering / Construction the other day…more layoffs and no real sign of things getting better.  We used to do a lot of work for…

There is a general thought out there that social media will eventually connect us all.  Billions of people.

Here’s the problem I see with this.  Most people that I know who use social media really only engage with a small amount of people.  Even those using social media (and that’s certainly not most people) tune out the noise and the advertising.

So it appears that most of the population of the world is not any more connected than they used to be.  The ones…

A candidate interviewing with two different companies gets two offers.  One is comfortably better than the other.  But the candidate lets both companies know he is deciding between the two and the company with the lower offer increases their offer to match the other.

Recruiters are on both sides of this situation often, and I think many times we don’t give a clear picture to the candidate.  You want the candidate to truly understand what they are looking at and help them…

Just a little point to worry about for a Monday….All of this talk of consumer borrowing being up a ton in November doesn’t sound like a good thing to me.  Most of what I’ve seen on this topic talks about it as a sign of economic recovery.

That could be.  I do believe a certain segment of people (the gainfully employed) are making more money now than they did several years ago and consumer debt certainly did go down for a few years.  So you can make the case that this is…

Personal Income up 4%.  This is a totally baseless claim.  I read it in a blog and the blog did not site any source at all so I have no idea if this is even close to true.

However, it might be true.  In our totally unscientific survey, we have seen higher salaries.  Who believes the actual reported numbers anyway?  Our unscientific results are probably more on target.  But we have seen higher salaries over the last few months and maybe even over the last six months to a…

A Businessweek article today says:

Jan. 3 (Bloomberg) — Stocks surged, driving the Dow Jones Industrial Average to the highest level since July, and commodities rallied on signs of increasing manufacturing output around the world.

Hard to believe, maybe because it has been so long or maybe because there is still so much bad news out there, but we’ve been seeing it as well.  Increasing Manufacturing, Increased Needs In Manufacturing, More Jobs, More Trickle…