Do You Use LinkedIn to Follow Potential Employers?

Most jobseekers think of LinkedIn as a tool to network with individuals. While LinkedIn is certainly useful for this purpose, it can also provide invaluable information about companies you want to target during your job search.

LinkedIn now allows you to follow all the activity related to a particular company. You can do this by searching for the company on the site and clicking “Follow Company”. This step adds the company’s activity to your news stream on LinkedIn in the same way that adding a connection adds their individual activity. This is an absolutely invaluable tool for keeping track of events at a company you’re targeting.

This information can give you a sense for whether the company is hiring at all and it allows you to see the backgrounds of the candidates who are landing jobs there. It can be frustrating to see who’s beating you out for particular positions but having that information is also priceless for knowing how to position yourself as a stronger candidate going forward. One more bonus: you can tell when someone was hired for a position even if the company doesn’t directly contact or notify you.

The Follow Company feature on LinkedIn also allows you to see how many other people are following that company. If thousands of people are keeping an eye on things, chances are good that you have a lot of competition for open positions there. Additionally, LinkedIn includes very useful information such as the average tenure of employees at the company, the male/female ratio of the staff, and the median age of employees. Larger companies sometimes even indicate which specific universities a high percentage of their staff attended.

The new Follow Company feature on LinkedIn is a great research tool for job seekers trying to find a creative way in to organizations that they otherwise may not have an open door to.

Excerpted from article by Jessica Holbrook Hernandez http://www.careerrocketeer.com/2010/07/do-you-use-linkedin-to-follow-potential.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CareerRocketeer+%28Career+Rocketeer+%7C+The+Career+Search+and+Personal+Branding+Blog+%29

Dr Shruti Bhat at http://thehappenblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/do-you-use-linkedin-to-follow-potential-employers/

Did You Wind Up in a Default Career?

As a career coach and former High Tech manager, I’ve noticed that most people wind up in careers that are completely out of line with their college degrees or interests. When you ask people how they “chose” their careers, many of them answer with something very much like a track through the jungle. They didn’t know where they were going but moving forward was the direction they took. When I ask many college students what career they were headed towards I get two categories of answers:

I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out.
Something in my major (read: I don’t know).

In other words, most of us end up in “default careers”. Meaning we had no intention of that career but due to various circumstances, that’s where we ended up – by default.

I recently wrote about the national statistic I heard on TV this spring that 60% of all workers are dissatisfied with their job. I think this is due, in a large part, to the fact that we give very little effort or thought to the career we would do best in. Collectively we simply don’t know how to identify a career we would love so we go with the time honored tradition of “finding something”. The “finding something” career strategy usually involves bouncing around applying for jobs until some lucky company hires us. Little wonder we’re not so happy at work.

Why am I bringing this up? I am talking about this because 60% of all workers being unhappy in their job make this problem a moral imperative. This has to change. There are too many unhappy people out there working right now and there is some prevention that can take place and a remedy for those in this unhappy group.

There is a reason for how we got this way and there is something we can do about it. I think the genesis of this has to do with how we go about finding our careers to begin with. We put more planning into a 2 week vacation than a lifelong career. The factors that go into the complex soup of job satisfaction are largely ignored. It’s easier to figure out how we want to spend our free time (what little there is of it) than how we spend of our work time (which is most of our life). Figuring out what can constitute a rewarding and nourishing career is not rocket science but it does require some effort. You will not wake up one day and simply know, by magic, what will best suit you.

What needs to be done to prevent default careers in the first place?
At whatever point people are starting to ask the questions about their career, is the time to begin the work of self discovery toward a great career. Self discovery is more than a career assessment test, although it can be thought provoking and add to self discovery. Self discovery should become an ongoing, lifelong pursuit. Self discovery is being in a process of experimentation, exploration and research with the goal of unearthing something that will truly resonate within you. It’s as simple as trying something new a few times to see if you like it well enough to keep doing it. Most everything in existence can be turned into a career and with that much opportunity you need to start as early as possible in your life to understand what will ring your chimes.

How do you pursue self-discovery?
You are essentially finding out what your values are, where your natural inclinations lie, where you build skills easiest and what draws you in to “want” to keep doing it. The best and easiest place to start is by making a list of all the things (not necessarily jobs) that interest you or did interest you earlier in your life. It’s not unlike planning for that 2 week vacation. You think through the things that sound interesting or fun, research them and put it on your itinerary to do. Systematically pursue each item on the list, trying each thing long enough to get beyond the roughness of trying something new. Eventually you will discover what kind of interest that item holds for you. If it doesn’t interest you, move on. But before you do, think through what aspects of it you liked and didn’t like. That learning is key to the direction you take on the following discoveries. While you are in that process, you will discover other related items I call “threads”.

Let those threads go on the list and as you do that you will notice a natural expansion of new things to try. This experimentation can be trying different jobs, pastimes or education. I have seen examples of people who have made a great career and income out of building sand castles – the wisdom here is to not discount anything.

What do you do if you are already in a Default career that you don’t like?
No matter your age, changing careers to something you love will be one of the healthiest things you can do for yourself. The discovery process is the same. Our culture really does nothing to promote the idea of self discovery, particularly as it relates to a career. In general, most of us have no clue about how to go about selecting a career much less a job. We see very few examples or discussion around us, so we have almost no one to use as a role model for this kind of behavior. We are also collectively impatient with ourselves and others thinking we should automatically know what we want to do when we grow up. That assumption is the farthest thing from the truth. There is nothing automatic about finding the career of your dreams. Making self discovery an ongoing behavior will ensure your personal and professional success. Doesn’t that make it worthwhile?

http://www.careerrocketeer.com/2010/07/did-you-wind-up-in-default-career.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CareerRocketeer+%28Career+Rocketeer+%7C+The+Career+Search+and+Personal+Branding+Blog+%29

Disclaimer- The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.

http://www.drshrutibhat.com/
Expert at leading Pharmaceutical R&D.
Translates innovative concepts to PROFITS.
YouTube Channel : Http://www.youtube.com/user/ShrutiBhat10

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Drug Makers Shed 35,000 Jobs- The New York Times.

Friday, July 2, 2010

The nation’s drug makers have eliminated nearly 35,000 positions in the first half of this year, second only to government in cutting jobs.

Government and non-profit sectors announced 98,776 job cuts this year to date, compared with 34,987 by pharmaceutical companies, and 26,181 by the retail industry, according to a new report by Challenger, Gray and Christmas, a Chicago-based outplacement consulting firm.

The firm noted in a release that the pace of retrenchment has slowed compared to last year, when drug companies cut 51,000 jobs; retail 85,000; and government 102,000. And the report said more employers are confident looking ahead.

Still, the industry faces the prospect of more job losses to support the bottom line as patents expire on prominent drugs within the next year.

Complete report at http://www.challengergray.com/press/PressRelease.aspx?PressUid=141
http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/drug-makers-shed-35000-jobs/


Myth, fabrication and tomfoolery: The stuff of life and law for laid off work force.
By Howard Levitt, Financial Post.

It seems the more dismissal law becomes part of everyday experience, the more misapprehensions exist between employees and employers. Here are a few of the more common ones:

A fired employee is entitled to one month's severance for each year of service. Wrong. An employee is "entitled" to no more than employment standards minimum severance, just a few weeks pay for most workers. A fired employee cannot sue for more unless, despite his best efforts, he remains unemployed beyond that time.

However many years worked, however assiduous that work and however "unjust" the dismissal, employers can get off virtually scot-free if a fired employee is re-employed comparably or the court finds they could have been. But even if an employee remains interminably unemployed, there is no judicial formula.

Length of service is only one of many factors used to determine severance, including age, status, remuneration and re-employability. Many employees get more than one month for each year; even more get less.

An employee cannot be discriminated against. Wrong again. You can hire or fire employees based on their looks, their approach to life, their personality, their height or even whether they wear lipstick.

What you cannot do is discriminate against them based on one of a few factors delineated in the human rights Code, which are race, gender, sexual orientation, colour or national origin. Everything else is open season. It is hardly a secret, and it is a statistical fact, that good looking employees, as well as those with British accents, earn more than the rest of us.

Those who work hard are entitled to promotions or salary increases relative to weaker workers. An employer has the right to be wrong-or capricious. They can withhold salary increases from the meritorious and reward them to their relatives or the laggards.

A strong performer of unimpeachable character and conduct cannot be fired. There need be no cause at all to fire an employee. There is also no appeal mechanism and a court lacks the power to reinstate employees. If an employer improperly evaluates an employee or believes a false allegation, that employee has no recourse when dismissed, other than appropriate severance.

For that matter, if the employer fires an employee by drawing her name out of a hat, as long as she is paid proper severance, she has no other recourse. Even more infuriating, severance entitlement is no greater than that of a mediocre performer.

A worker who is told to work out severance instead of receiving the money, can refuse. If a worker does refuse, he is treated as having resigned. One of the most underutilized weapons in an employer's arsenal is working notice. That is, if an employee is told he is to be terminated six months from that date, it is legally equivalent to dismissing him on the spot and paying six months severance.

Employers tend to be uncomfortable with this option, but not half as much the fired employee is, after all he or she is working away the severance. Often it leads to a reduced offer of severance. But even if that is not the case, the employer is getting value for its severance dollar.

Working out a severance does not work for everyone, especially employees with access to confidential information or considerable customer contact.

A properly drafted non-competition covenant can keep a dismissed employee out of his industry for a year. Only very rarely is this the case. Few non-competition covenants of any length are enforceable because of a series of recent cases.

Such contracts only bind fiduciary employees with significant ability to damage the employer who would be approached by customers and employees even if they did not approach them. And even those employees likely could not be restricted from their industry for more than six months. With respect to the other 98% of employees, non-competition covenants are unenforceable.

Contracts limited to restricting former employees from soliciting customers or other employees, if limited to 12 months or less and restricted to the narrow geographical area in which they worked, are much more likely to be enforceable for those.


Read more:
http://www.financialpost.com/careers/Severance+entitlement/3218553/story.html#ixzz0seFz4Im2