How to (or NOT to) Stand Out With Your Resume I recently came across an article on MSN careers, titled 20 Unusual Resume Tactics to Avoid. In it, the author, Autumn McReynolds, shared what she believed to be tactics to avoid with your resume, based on the annual CareerBuilder survey. These 20 tactics were: Candidate said the more you paid him, the harder he … [Read more...]
Getting The Best Out Of Your Staff
Guest post by Rebecca of chillsauce. The key to being a great manager is to monitor your staff's performance, identify strengths and weaknesses, and ultimately make sure your team is working productively. There are many approaches to motivating your staff and rewarding them for hard work and success, from a mention in a meeting or in a internal publication to a promotion in … [Read more...]
The Capable Employee
As a modern business owner, I’ve caught the fever to rely on gadgets and depend on electronic communication in lieu of actually picking up the phone; but I wonder, have I done my company a disservice? As I visit client sites and assess the challenges they face, it becomes clear that sometimes the culprit is not the employee, it’s the technology. Excessive reliance on … [Read more...]
Hey Boss, Your Policy is Stupid!
As business owners we often set policies and procedures from a reactive point of view. Something happened that brought the situation to our attention and then we put things in place to ensure they don’t happen again. But is this the best way to create policies? Can your staff weigh in on their effectiveness and when they do, do their opinions matter? If you have a sense that … [Read more...]
The Inside Scoop on Recruiting
Once you strike out on your own, your relationships with recruiters change. When you were looking for a full-time job, they represented a way to get your foot in the door at a company. As an entrepreneur, their roles shift slightly. They still help you get a foot in the door, but now they also bring the ability to provide new projects. The one thing that continually frustrates … [Read more...]
Retaining and Developing Talent that Represents the Future
Jill is an African American woman with ten years of experience in consulting. She is certified and versatile in the areas of practice in which she might contribute now and in the future. She has deep community roots in the major metropolitan area in which she works and she has shown great promise in promoting the organization in the market. She has demonstrated ability to … [Read more...]
Making Sure You Aren’t The Problem
This article, http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/09/08/make-sure-youre-not-the-problem-with-your-boss, gives everyone some questions to ask yourself when you are having problems with your boss. Most times bosses mean well, but if everyone, including the bosses, took a step back and asked a few questions of themselves a lot of office politics could likely be … [Read more...]
Swearing in the Workplace?
Post by Jane K. Stimmler, contributing Women on Business writer There's been a great deal of buzz lately about Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, who was recently fired. Her apparent fondness for "salty language," as it has been described, has been a big part of the conversation. The premise put forward is that her profane language is being called out because she's a woman and her … [Read more...]
A Woman’s Perspective
Consider these selected quotes from a well known novel: " A startling thought this, that a woman could handle business matters as well or better then a man. Never before had she put this remarkable idea into words. She sat quite still with the heavy book on her lap, thinking how in these past lean months she had done a man's work and done it well. She had been brought up … [Read more...]
The USPS Lesson
The post office is nearly bankrupt, the cost cutting is not working. We are in danger of losing a service that is vital to many small businesses. So while other business blogs are looking at this situation and wondering what went wrong, I’m asking “what can we learn?” The postal situation is not unique and what it highlights is how the wrong type of organizational culture can … [Read more...]