AOL Company Rating: 2.9 (Neutral); CEO Rating: 64% Approval (as of 11.20.09)

Now comes the questions of whether or not one should take a voluntary package or not, and what message does that send to the hiring market if you do take the money and run?

Well, that all depends on how taking the package fits in your overall plan and your career story.  Certainly if you have something else lined up, have a plan in place for change and you are just in waiting mode, then taking the package and moving on is fine. That fits in any career story.  However, if you are just thinking “this place sucks” or “I gotta get out of here before the ship sinks” or “I just have to take care of me”, then you might want to think twice about how that fits into a positive career story.  There was a time when that was fine, like in1999 during the dot com bust.  We all had to talk to the candidates who took their voluntary packages or their severances and sailed around the world.  It was in vogue, you know. You could get away with a “me” attitude and while the other side of the table may have questioned your loyalty, self-interests, etc. the hiring market was such that this became a nuance that was overlooked.  But in today’s market where a hiring manager wears the weight of having already put people on the street and doing all they can to keep people employed, when she/he sees someone who thinks cavalierly or doesn’t value the fact that they had a good job, it can leave a sour taste in their mouth.  What hiring managers and recruiters want to see are people who love their work, value and appreciate their jobs, care for their companies and who better and grow themselves in their performance and careers.

So, it might make all the sense to take a voluntary package without having another job, if there is a good reason that you can honestly portray and that others will understand and empathize with.  But, if you have any doubts on how you might feel about your reasoning, as if it is was presented to you by a candidate, then you might want to take a real hard look at yourself before you make the voluntary jump.

Voluntary Layoffs: Should I Stay Or Should I Go Now? is a post from: Glassdoor.com Blog

Related posts:

1. Microsoft Layoffs Do Not Compute?
2. Layoffs Hit Thousands at IBM and Agilent: Why is High Tech Getting Hit so Hard?
3. Be The Hero In The Career ‘Story of You’ During An Interview: Part 3 – Act I

Many of us are on the front lines of recruiting and reviewing talent for our company or clients and dealing with the numbers are not easy. Most work with applicant tracking systems, a the technology platform, to help manage the flow and these help, however when the data from the candidate is formatted in ways that are not easy to deal with they can be overlooked. Yes, these systems do a fine job of uploading data. It’s how the recruiter or hiring authority uses the information that matters. Here are a few tips to consider when formatting your resume:

• Ease of contact: Our contact information needs to be seen and easy to retrieve. Use a word doc or PDF and have all your contact information together so one can easily cut and paste the information into an email. A hiring authority or administrator needs to schedule an interview and they need the contact information with the resume attached. I like to send the contact information in the email so one can quickly see the data and make the call or send the email. It is frustrating when the name, address, phone and email are in separate boxes or have been formatted in a way the makes the simple cut and paste difficult. Check yours and see how easy it is. A simple point but when sorting through the deluge it matters.

• Clean Format: And speaking of copy and paste…Corporate and third party recruiters, at times need to copy and paste your information into a doc with corporate letter head or into a standard format for hiring manager review. When the resume is formatted into boxes, for instance they look great but once copied the good looks fall apart. Personal suggestion, use a straight word doc format or PDF file that it easy to use. I know, many of you and for good reason don’t want people manipulating your resume…understand completely, just know that making it difficult may slow the process that may have led to a timely call…have seen it happen more than once.

• Easy to read: There are more resumes styles than we know how to deal with and because people are reading people’s work it makes sense that multiple styles satisfy the market. The simple point, please remember to make your content  easy to read. And you don’t have to check with an expert. Next time you’re at the coffee shop ask the person sitting you don’t know next to you for help. Let them read and react to your resume / CV / profile and be willing to listen.

And hey, your new ‘friend’ may very well be the channel to a new opportunity. As a matter of fact, it may be worth asking everyone there for the help and input….guarantee it won’t hurt.

Three Useful Tips To Format Your Resume is a post from: Glassdoor.com Blog

Related posts:

1. Tips To Define Your Resume Story
2. The Resume/Profile/CV Tsunami – Hit by the Talent Wave
3. Try A Human Voice In Your Resume

How much personal health information should employers have about employees or job candidates?

Moderator: John Sumser

This month’s debate question is “How much personal health data should an employer be able to use to make job-related decisions?” Companies are getting more and more access to increasingly cheap ways to measure the physical status of their employees. Where should the limits be?

John Sumser: My desk is littered with the gadgets of personal health monitoring. Blood pressure cuffs, a blood glucose monitor, biofeedback gear, a breathing trainer and a meditation device. Nearby is a scale with a USB port. I’m looking at all of these devices to try to understand the future of personal health data.

My iPhone tracks all sorts of things. It manages health information, food consumption, the number of steps I take, exercise logs and medication schedules. It tracks where I am, what I’m doing, my finances and my physical status.

For me, it’s an amazing mirror showing me aspects of my personality that I never considered. A three-mile walk on the beach clobbers my blood pressure and sugar. The right blend of nutrients drives my mood over the following 24 hours. The more I quantify my behavior, the more I am able to manage it.

I’ve just ordered the new sleep-monitoring tool. It helps optimize the rest you get and gently wakes you at the right point sometime close to your desired wake-up.

All of a sudden, I’m swimming in personal data. Every item on my desk is rapidly getting wired into the cloud. I have little doubt that I am just an early adopter in the movement to self-quantification .

I understand that I am on the geeky edge of things. But, you can be certain that the ability to measure lots of physical aspects of human performance is right around the corner. Airports have begun measuring body temperature remotely to manage the spread of the flu.

The combination of at home DNA testing (a Google affiliate has introduced sub-$1,000 screens), health records and routinely collected bio-data offer unimaginable possibility and risks.

On the one hand, you will be able to spot and correct your own long and short-term performance problems. From weight management to diet and fitness, every aspect of your physical life will come under control. The ability to understand and improve one’s physical potential is an amazing leap forward in evolution.

On the other hand, you should expect that employers are going to be increasingly interested in the physical dimensions of performance optimization. It’s easy to imagine compensation tied to biological peaks.

For example, a study released Tuesday discusses some of the chronic health issues associated with obesity, which is expected to plague 43% of Americans by 2018. Why wouldn’t you ask less healthy employees to pay more for health insurance? Imagine scheduling the workforce based on the basis of predicted productivity. Expecting employees to submit evidence of adequate restful sleep or specific dietary intake to maintain a healthy weight doesn’t seem that far afield.

My view is that as the employment social contract changes, both employers and employees will be increasingly interested in understanding the physical aspects of job performance. My bet is that we’ll have less privacy and improved job performance.

I’m for that.

Hank Stringer: No, we should not start using all the data available to measure how well an individual does their work. We should measure how well an individual does their work but the moment we start concerning ourselves with all the data available simply because we can, we are halfway down the slippery slope.

When I first saw your point I had dreams of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and Orson Welles’s “1984” all rolled up into one scene of the future American work place and it sucked. The next thing we know we will be testing 14-year-olds to see if they have any future physical obstacles that could get in the way of their contributions to work and society; sorry FDR and Stephen Hawking. I know I am carrying this two steps too far but at some point we have to check ourselves and understand we don’t have to do everything just because we can.

Jeff Hunter: Two words come to mind when I think of companies evaluating talent through health and other personal data: Apollo Thirteen. The first reason this comes to mind is because when I read statements like “you should expect that employers are going to be increasingly interested in the physical dimensions of performance optimization,” I feel like saying, “Houston we have a problem.”

But Apollo 13 is important for more than just that one phrase. The story of Apollo 13 is a great example of why employers using health data to create performance optimization is such an astoundingly bad idea. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, Ken Mattingly was originally slated to be the command module pilot for the mission.

Three days before launch he was replaced with Jack Swigert. The reason? Health data. Specifically, Ken had been exposed to the German measles, a disease for which he had not been inoculated. Swigert was a superior health risk, and therefore more likely to perform better during the mission. The rest of the story is history. An oxygen tanks explodes three days into the flight, Mattingly (having never gotten the measles) helps save the three astronauts by figuring out how to conserve power and everyone returns safe and sound.

In short, Mattingly (the health risk) saves Swigert’s life. An astronaut’s health is measured seven ways to Sunday. They are quarantined and monitored. Even in the wildest dreams of a corporate actuarial no company would ever undertake to measure and control this much of a person’s health (or any other data, for that matter). But it turns out that you can poke, prod, measure and manipulate as much as you want: the real threat is the one you aren’t watching.

In the case of Apollo 13 it was bad quality control on the wire that connected to the lead that stirred the oxygen tank. The teflon coating on the wire was compromised, causing the explosion. Putting Mattingly on the flight with measles was never as remotely dangerous as a system failure that was created years before poor old Ken ever had the bad luck to be exposed to the disease. And this is the broader lesson, and the reason attempting to increase performance through measuring and managing health is such a bad idea.

Corporations are poor at evaluating risk. They much prefer to examine the data in front of them than to evaluate system weaknesses and hypothesis about unpredictable but catastrophic events. At the same time, all companies are being inundated with urgent but strategically irrelevant data. Into the midst of this risk paralysis and information overload steps the overworked hiring manager, who is already doing the work of three people.

Adding to that hiring manager’s info-glut won’t just fail to have the desired effect of predicting or optimizing employee performance. It will add to the distractions they already face, taking what precious little time and attention they have left to think about unpredictable change that will ruin their business and focusing it instead on whether the chunky engineer is as good as the distance runner. And all the time they will be missing the point: the reason their business objectives are at risk is general systems failures built into their team long before their dream candidate caught a cold. Houston, let’s not start this problem.

Rusty Rueff: There’s no doubt that this type of information will eventually become part of the menu of performance management, the question is who will have the guts to do it first?

As people first, employees second, we already are all over this. Just look around the office and the cubicles and see the assortment of vitamins, energy drinks, herbs and tonics, that we all use to make our overall human condition better and we are already smart enough to know when we have to perform and peak, that we get a better night sleep the night before and we caffeinate (okay not all that healthy) and we ready ourselves for the big moments.

So, why not add this into better performance management? Imagine that Lance Armstrong would proceed into any race without all the data in front of him? I doubt he would.

Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf have been on this for a while with their Quantified Self tools (http://www.kk.org/quantifiedself/) and continue to push the boundaries on what can be measured. We already try as employers to assess some of this already in the interview process.

Haven’t we all sat in debrief meetings where someone says, ”it seems like they just ran out energy at the end of the day?” I see it this way: we are each a human operating system. We boot up each day and all day long we run routines until we run out of battery. We refresh and then we do it all over again.

The problem is that we are variable in our operating procedures and if any other operating system was this variable we would throw it out the window faster than we hated Vista. So, why wouldn’t we want to take the variability out of the human operating system to improve and predict more consistent performance?

Again, who will have the guts to try first? There will be lots and lots of ’big brother’ and privacy conversations but with a little bit of good design thinking and the right incentives, we could be there sooner than we think.

I’d love to be in the test group.

Liz Ryan: Employers are limited in what they can legally learn about an employee’s health situation before making an offer. They can require a physical after an offer is extended. I would hate to see an employer’s right to collect more health data increase. Employees — people in general, in fact — have little enough privacy as it is!

I was thrilled to see public pressure convince Clarion Health Systems, a midwestern hospital organization, to back off on its plans to weigh employees at work and fine them for exceeding a certain body-mass index, a few years ago. I remember stories from Ceaucescu’s Romania, where that sort of intrusion (and much worse) was a matter of course for working people. What was especially galling about the Clarion plan was the idea that employees exceeding a certain BMI should be fined, because their health claims would cost the company money….notwithstanding the fact that hospitals are among the most unhealthy and stressful places to work!

My hope is that if employers attempt to push the health-information envelope when it comes to extending offers, talented candidates will Just Say No to those employers and leave them to their talent-deprived fate. For the record, I believe that pre-employment drug screening should be used sparingly and that in general, the pendulum is already too far over to one side with respect to pre-employment poking and prodding. I can’t wait for the economy to improve so that affluent older Boomers can begin to retire in droves and force employers to pick up their recruiting game in order to get and keep talent.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Sumser: Health and fitness are the first areas that will come under management (as they say). In the short time involved in having this conversation with the Clearview team, several new interestedin products have come to market that track and monitor our health:

• The Zeo which tracks and analyzes your sleep patterns and acts as an alarm clock
• The MioWatch which gives quick access to on the fly heart performance.
• Directlife from Phillips which includes corporate fitness programs in its agenda.
• In addition, the MIT Technology Review is reporting the development of a A Battery-Free Implantable Neural Sensor – with one of these, you can have your measuring chip implanted without ever having to replace the battery. It’s activated by a radio.

We’re entering an era of evidence-based decision making. The degree to which the aggregate data about the employee group is a valuable corporate asset is just beginning to be understood. Every increment of measurable behavior is going to be utilized to help improve personal and collective performance. There are ways to embrace it and there are ways to recoil from it.

As we enter the data onslaught, issues like the  one we have discussed here will give us polar conversations at the dinner table and in the media. Remember that you heard about the personal performance data issue first here on Glassdoor.

Clearview Counterpoint: Career Experts Divided On Medical Privacy Issue is a post from: Glassdoor.com Blog

Related posts:

1. Clearview Counterpoint: Is Corporate Recruiting Broken? Career & HR Experts Debate
2. Clearview Counterpoint: Transparency – How Much is Too Much for Your Career?
3. Need Career or Job Search Advice? The Glassdoor Clearview Collection Can Help

“Wow, what a hard worker – comes into the office even when they’ve got a terrible cold.”

(or)

“Why are they here? They are going to give the rest of us their flu. Great! I know I’ll get sick this weekend.”

The government recommends that anyone exhibiting the physical symptoms associated with cold or flu stay home. As fall turns to winter,  consider these reasons to stay home or encourage your co-workers or employees to stay home when sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching and complaints of being up all night strike:

• Work/life balance takes a toll. Most people in the working world appreciate a company that offers a good work/life balance. However, if the company culture silently supports employees coming in when feeling under the weather, their appreciation for a good job combined with a solid personal life is likely to be impacted. In turn, an employee’s overall satisfaction at the company could go down and even contribute to a shorter tenure with that employer.
• Office productivity goes down when employees are sick. Rest really can do wonders. If you go into the office with severe symptoms, you are likely contagious, and you can cause the rest of your office mates to get sick too. Depending on the size of your office, a cold and flu can often take days if not weeks to cycle  through. Instead of suffering through the work-day, compare  the impact to your environment and office mates to coming in and  getting a job done and out the door. Not to mention that we are coming into job review season – do you really want your boss to look at your latest work effort and wonder why it didn’t turn out quite as good as expected?
• Healthy office competition takes a hit. Encouraging a healthy competition that supports innovation and quality work is one thing, but fostering a workplace that causes co-workers or employees to feel like they really should come in when they are sick as a dog in order to be looked upon as a good worker among peers is another.

We understand that some people like to stockpile their allotted number of sick days so that they can use them for a personal day or perhaps cash them out at the end of the year. But if you are still thinking that you are not really that sick, refer to WebMD’s list of questions to consider before jumping in your car and heading to the office:

• Are you contagious?
• Will resting at home help your body to overcome the illness?
• Are you taking medications that could impair your ability to think, work, operate machinery, or drive?

If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, stay home – this is why the sick day was invented. Giving yourself time to relax can help you get back in the saddle a lot sooner than if you are to push yourself.

Sick Days: Use When Under the Weather or Overworked? is a post from: Glassdoor.com Blog

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1. March Review of the Month

Of course they told you that! They are amoebae – it’s their job to make that speech. They have their priorities, and those priorities have everything to do with bureaucratic practices designed to keep job-seekers coloring inside the lines. Luckily, the hiring manager has other concerns. The hiring manager is the person we need to reach. The black hole and its amoeba tenders are not our friends.

The hiring manager has pain. If he or she did not have some kind of pain, there would be no job. Our job is to spot the pain, and address it in a pithy Pain Letter that will go with our resume directly to the hiring manager’s desk. If we can spot the pain and speak to it, we can get that hiring manager’s attention. Not every hiring manager has the budget to hire us, either as a W-2 employee or a consultant. Those opportunities, unfortunately, may be unavailable to us for financial reasons. But if the particular pain we solve is keeping the hiring manager awake at night, and driving him crazy by day, we may be able to convince that hiring manager to create a job opening where none existed, just yesterday. Thus, we can send a targeted Pain Letter to any decision-maker whose pain is likely to be related to our expertise. We don’t need to respond only to posted job openings. We can reach out to hiring managers who don’t have jobs posted, as well.

Here’s a Pain Letter story to illustrate the process…

Caroline had been a bookkeeper for ten years and the president of her homeowner’s association for five years when she began her job search. Caroline was based in Atlanta. We decided to build on her bookkeeping background and the valuable HOA stint by creating a property management resume and pursuing commercial property management jobs. Caroline hadn’t held a paid property management role at that point — and so what? We wrote the property management resume, emphasizing Caroline’s most relevant accomplishments. We made a list of commercial property owners who might need her help.  For each firm, we dug around to find the name of the most likely hiring manager. We didn’t bother looking at job ads. We knew that any job ads we might spot at these enormous national firms would only direct us into a deadly black hole. We found the head honcho’s name for each company, and wrote to him or her directly.

For one large firm, we couldn’t find the names of any Atlanta managers, but we could see the names and bios of each of the firm’s top execs, right on the organization’s website. We wrote a Pain Letter to the COO of the firm (using the logic that the COO is less likely than the CEO to have an admin standing by ready to toss all unsolicited correspondence) and sent it to him via snail mail with Caroline’s property management resume. About a week after that letter was mailed, Caroline got a phone call from the company’s regional VP in Atlanta.

“I’d like you to come for an interview,” he said, and off Caroline went. When she got to the interview, she saw her Pain Letter and resume, folded in thirds, sitting on the VP’s desk. The COO in New York must have shipped it off to the Atlanta fellow through the inter-office mail system. Caroline had her interview, and she got the offer. Until that moment, she hadn’t had one second of official property management experience. What got her over that substantial credentialing hump?

It was Caroline’s Pain Letter that did the trick. She didn’t write the typical boring, boilerplate cover letter to tell the COO and his VP all about her accomplishments. She figured that those guys get dozens of those letters every day. Instead, she wrote a letter that talked about them. She talked about the company’s news (she found it on their own website) and made an educated guess about their property management pain. It wasn’t hard to guess what that pain might be. Their company is growing, and commercial tenants are hard to find and keep. They’ve got to be kept happy, and a diligent property manager keeps tenants happy by working proactively to make sure their needs are met. A good property manager looks out over the horizon to stop any signs of trouble and stamp them out before they can do damage. Caroline talked about the business pain she imagined this company to have, and her own relevant (and specific!) experience slaying the very same dragon in other assignments. She sent her super-targeted Pain Letter along with her super-targeted resume directly to the guy with the pain, and wasted no time nor words talking about all the other fabulous, unrelated things she’s done.

There may well be a property management certification. Caroline doesn’t have that certification, if there is one. So what? She came prepared to talk about the issue at hand. She got the job, and here’s the best part: she had no competition, because there was no job posted. We can use Pain Letters and targeted resumes to reach decision-makers when there’s no job posted, and when there is one.

In my job search approach, the important points to remember are:

• Write to the decision-maker directly, not to the black hole address or to HR. Use LinkedIn, ZoomInfo and the employer’s own website to find that decision-maker.
• Write a Pain Letter that talks more about them than about you. Speak directly to the decision-making manager in a conversational tone. Make an educated guess about the business pain the employer is facing. (Next week in this space, we’ll share a Pain Letter example.)
• Use one concrete, highly relevant example to illustrate your past success solving a nearly identical variety of business pain — a la “I slew that same type of dragon last year in Romania.”
• Keep your Pain Letter short and simple. Don’t veer off into a litany of your skills and accolades. End with a simple call to action, e.g. “I’d love to talk when your schedule allows.”
• If you are writing a Pain Letter to a decision-maker in response to a posted job ad, remember to keep your focus on the pain — NOT on the list of requirements specified in the job ad. That list of requirements is trivial — the belief that you can solve the decision-maker’s pain is not.
• Send your Pain Letter with your highly-targeted resume (not the generic resume you send out in response to every job ad you see – you’re going to burn that thing and never, ever use it again). A snail mail letter to the decision-maker’s desk is the best choice if you can’t find a personal connection. If you can — via your 3-D network or LinkedIn – use that trusted-colleague avenue first, of course.

We cannot always locate ‘our’ hiring manager’s name. In an enormous organization like IBM, it may be nearly impossible to do that. For organizations of about 10,000 employees and fewer, we have a decent chance of locating ‘our’ decision-maker, and for organizations of 1,000 employees and fewer, it should be a slam-dunk exercise that takes about five minutes. More on that topic — finding the decision-maker — along with a sample Pain Letter in next week’s blog post. The big message for this week: no more resumes wasted in the black hole!

How To Circumvent The Resume Black Hole is a post from: Glassdoor.com Blog

Related posts:

1. Who’s Got Your Resume — A Decision-Maker Or An Amoeba?
2. Try A Human Voice In Your Resume
3. Three Useful Tips To Format Your Resume

Eligibility Requirements:

• At least 25 Glassdoor-approved company reviews from United States-based employees between January 1, 2009 and December 1, 2009
• An overall rating of “satisfied”, and each cumulative workplace factor category must also be at least “satisfied”
• A current CEO with an approval rating of at least 50 percent

Here’s where employees can get started: Submit a company review

Deadline: The deadline for this year’s Glassdoor Best Places to Work is Tuesday, December 1, 2009 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

2009 Winners: 2009 Glassdoor Best Places to Work Top 50

And remember if you won last year, it doesn’t mean you get any special treatment when it comes to the 2010 list. Awards are based on annual review submissions and not cumulative contributions.

More Questions? Contact us at BestPlacestoWork (at) Glassdoor.com

Now what are you waiting for? Start submitting those reviews and ratings!

Two Weeks Left Until Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work Awards Deadline!! is a post from: Glassdoor.com Blog

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1. Glassdoor Announces ‘Best Places to Work’ Awards Deadline
2. Employees’ Choice Unveiled: Glassdoor Announces Top Best Places to Work
3. Fortune Announces Best Places to Work: How does it compare?

• Act 1 is the story of the protagonist.
• Act 2 is the story of the barriers/challenges.
• Act 3 is the story of the achievement of the goal.

For the past two weeks we have been exploring how you can get the best attention by being able to tell the “story of you” in the most compelling and unique way so that an interviewer/recruiter walks away with her/his own story to tell about you. As a long time talent recruiter the ones who got the job were the ones where I could sit with a hiring manager and say, “you gotta hear the story of this person.”  If I was excited about telling their story to someone else the chances of their getting hired went up exponentially.

Last week we discussed six mini-plots about you that you should have prepared and are ready to go.  Have you gotten those down on a piece of paper yet?  If not, take the time to do so.  Once that is done, then you can wrap those together to create you as the protagonist in the story of your career and you.  What makes a protagonist interesting is that we gain just enough detail that offers insights into that person’s history or motivation.

When you think about how you describe yourself when asked, what are those elements of you that are unique and interesting that have propelled your career and the decisions you have made to this point?  I typically cringe when I hear, “I was born….”, but many times there is something right there that is the catalyst that creates the story arc of someone very interesting. Without doubt, my interests, goals and overall career have been significantly shaped by the fact that my Father was a radio disc jockey when I was born and did radio, TV and theater while I was growing up.  And because, at least at one time, radio and TV people were interesting and intriguing to most people, I have always been able to catch the interest of an interviewer by starting the story of me with “I was born with a Father who was a radio and television personality”.  Everyone has their own unique traits that can set a story in motion. Think about yours.  Find those unique details that when you string them together give someone else a good picture of who you are and what makes up you. If you need help here, go back through your six mini-plots from last week and make a list of the five to 10 unique attributes of you and start working with that list to create the character that is you.

Some other traits you might want to consider in the ‘Story of You’ include:

• Overachiever
• Ambitious
• Athletic
• Well-educated
• Unique family
• Dreamer
• Entrepreneurial
• Gifted
• Listener
• Reader
• Outgoing
• Driven

Whatever the traits are that make up you, figure out what makes you the protagonist in the ‘Story of You’ and find a way to express them in a unique and interesting way that gives the listener just enough detail to catch their attention and  set the story of you into motion.

Next week, we’ll discuss Act II – the Barriers in telling the ‘Story of You’.

Be The Hero In The Career ‘Story of You’ During An Interview: Part 3 – Act I is a post from: Glassdoor.com Blog

Related posts:

1. Tips To Define Your Resume Story
2. How To Tell The ‘Story of You’ In A Job Interview: Part 2 – Plots
3. How to Tell the ‘Story of You’ in A Job Interview: Part 1

Based on the company and interview reviews on Glassdoor, we did some digging around to give you a better picture of what it’s really like to be a recruiter today.

What recruiters don’t like about their jobs: In a nutshell, being a recruiter requires long hours, sometimes a low commission based salary, and a continual uphill climb given a tough job market.

Long hours, commission brackets are impossible to reach, once you reach then you still aren’t making that much money. – Aerotek Recruiter

Overall, the staffing industry isn’t a prime place to be. Go in wanting to learn about the job market and what you need to succeed, and get out while you can. – Aerotek Recruiter

You will not have a personal life. – Spherion Recruiter

There isn’t much of a work-life balance, my average week as about 60 hours, and that was nothing compared to some of my colleagues. – Robert Half Recruiting Manager

In a down economy it’s about numbers vs. the past or the quality of the individual. – Kforce Account Manager/Recruiter

What recruiters do like about their jobs: On the plus side, recruiters enjoy getting to see firsthand the fruits of their labor, and some report that the more elbow grease you put into it the more you will get out of your career in recruiting.

You get to see the result of your hard work. There is nothing better than seeing a person get a position they really wanted and having them thank you for it. – Aerotek Recruiter

This job is exactly what you make of it. They reward hard work and integrity with chances to increase your load and advance. – Spherion Recruiter

Excellent opportunity to make money when the economy is doing well. The ability to earn commissions as a sales person there are excellent. – Robert Half Recruiting Manager

You are paid for your performance and income potential is unlimited. –  Robert Half Recruiting Manager

Provides an insight into large corporations hiring practices or the lack there of. You can earn a decent entry level paycheck with a bachelors degree in social science or even liberal arts. – Volt Information Technical Recruiter

And last, but not least, what is it like to get a job as a recruiter or at a staffing agency in this market? What do recruiters get asked in an interview?

What does diversity mean to you? – TEKsystems Technical Recruiter

There is a man on the ground with a broken window and a rock in the same room. What happened? – Microsoft Recruiter

Tell me about a former colleague you didn’t get along with. – Apple Recruiter

What would you do if you got a job at a company and you hated it? – AeroTek Recruiter

Remember that this snapshot is just the tip of the iceberg for the recruiter and staffing agencies reviews on Glassdoor. If you have questions on how to determine if a recruiting job at a specific company is right for you, contact Glassdoor’s Clearview Collection, a panel of career experts with expertise in recruiting, HR and other workplace issues, with your questions (askclearview@glassdoor.com). Or, if you are looking to work with a recruiter and staffing agency, take some advice from Glassdoor career expert Jeff Hunter who offers tips on how to evaluate a job and career recruiter.

Job Recruiters Dish On What They Like About Their Careers, What They Don’t, And What They Get Asked In An Interview is a post from: Glassdoor.com Blog

Related posts:

1. Attention All In-House Recruiters: Extra Grace Required
2. Don’t Let Your Ego Ruin Your Interview
3. They asked you what during the interview?!?

Anyone who has worked as a recruiter knows the horror stories. You find the perfect candidate. They have an amazing portfolio of work, outstanding references and are great during the interview. It’s a slam dunk. All that’s left is negotiating the offer.

And then disaster strikes. Maybe someone said something during an interview like: “You are our top candidate” or “I can’t imagine the hiring manager not putting you at the top of her list.” Somehow, someway, the candidate becomes overly confident that the job is locked in. They move from guiding the process to believing they can control it. The perfect candidate is now the perfect nightmare.

Usually it starts with the candidate making scheduling demands. Next comes the dismissive emails, the constant reminders about other offers, the number of recommendations on LinkedIn and all the other options they are considering. The next thing you know the recruiter is making it their life mission to figure out how to get this “perfect” candidate on the reject list

We all know that it is far more common for a recruiter to be rude to a candidate than the other way around. That bad behavior usually happens because the recruiter is overly confident that they are controlling the recruiting process and can afford to make the candidate dance to their tune.

That’s inexcusable and something that every recruiting leader needs to fix as fast as possible. But this blog has been about how to make you brand talent. You need to be in control of your career, not waiting around for overworked recruiters, overfilled job boards and distracted hiring managers to help you find the job of your dreams.

But once you get that desperate call, once you nail that interview and feel on top of the world, don’t make the same mistake as a bad recruiter. No matter how good you are you can’t afford to be uncivil, demanding, petulant or overbearing. Remember, recruiters and hiring managers are people too, with egos and expectations. They expect to be treated well, just as you do. If you want the job you want them on your side.

Don’t Let Your Ego Ruin Your Interview is a post from: Glassdoor.com Blog

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Here is some career advice Kate may be subconsciously passing on to us…

Organization can equal success when chaos hits: With eight kids, Kate Gosselin knew that in order to keep things running as smoothly as possible she had to create consistency and order. Watch any of the early Jon & Kate Plus Eight episodes and you’ll see that Kate operates with a kind of modern efficiency that even the Army could be proud of. And thanks to her planning, all the trips and events whether it’s going to pre-school or a Fourth of July parade, go off without a hitch because she has anticipated what the kids will need and when.

When tough times hit, figure out how best to stay afloat: Unless you’ve been hidden under a rock for the last six months, you probably know that it’s now Kate Plus Eight, minus the Jon Jon has decided that, after five seasons of blatantly supporting putting his kids on TV, it is no longer good for them, and the show is on hold indefinitely. . For Kate, this means another source of income needs to be found. So according to the New York Daily News, Kate has decided a nurse’s salary might do the trick and has renewed her nursing license in the Pennsylvania in an effort to keep some money flowing in.

Try to keep your cool when under the spotlight: Kate is famous for her somewhat abusive tone and “holier than thou” attitude, but the tables have now turned on and Jon’s squeaky clean image is tarnished by young women and Ed Hardy shirts. Kate, on the other hand, has managed to take the high road. In Kate’s interview with NBC reporter Natalie Morales, she admitted that she wasn’t perfect, but she’s managed to keep herself somewhat together in light of the ongoing marital issues and public scrutiny. So what’s the career lesson out of this? If you’re under pressure remember that how you speak and act during tough times will be a reflection of your ability to handle difficult situations. Take a breather when stressful times hit and try to take it just one step at a time.

Bottom line is that, even if you don’t care much for Kate Gosselin, these are still important tips to remember for your career. Sometimes even the weirdest or most annoying news topics can offer us a piece of advice that helps in us in the workplace and in our jobs – just think positive!

Kate Gosselin Career Lessons is a post from: Glassdoor.com Blog

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