Think like a "pig", make more money?

This 60 Second Science podcast refers to a study that suggests that men who hold more traditional beliefs about male and female roles make more money. Since the snippet doesn't reveal what industry these men worked in, or what city they worked in--which also affects how much cash they make--you can guess that some of them are supporting Real Housewives.

But the women who were surveyed who tend to hold more traditional views, make $1,500 less than women with less traditional beliefs--again, without stating were they lived, worked and did their nails.

However, it does reinforce my belief that if you don't know how much you are worth, you don't know how much to ask for.

Women hate working for other women?

According to this article from Women.Co, women find it harder to work for other women than they do for men. I can only go by my own experience, so I think it is utter baloney. I think this part of the article actually hits the nail on the head:

‘It may be that something about the nature of the work itself is influencing these health differences,’ Dr Schieman told the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

‘For example, women working with a woman supervisor might tend to be found mostly in the caring sector or in jobs that tend to be under-resourced, under-funded and under-valued, such as social work or education, creating stress both for the workers themselves and stress for the boss that might trickle down to her subordinates.

‘These are speculative points that need to be investigated further.’

Less pay, less job security, working in "caring" professions--hmmm, sounds soul-sucking. Add a diva boss or colleague--male or female--and I think I would be putting Maalox in my coffee as creamer, too.

College reviewing service to find the academic library of your dreams

If you're a footloose job seeker looking for work in an academic library, you could really go to any community that you want--provided that they are hiring. And you can use a college reviewing service to do it.

There are the mainstays: the Best Colleges from the US News and World Report, the Princeton Review Best Colleges, the Peterson's Undergraduate College Search--which is one of the few that has information on community colleges--or the new college reviewing site, Unigo.com, that solicits comments from real students about what campus life is like. You can also try Epinions to find "customer reviews" of colleges and universities. You can combine your search with a scan through the Chronicle of Higher Education's Almanac (not all free), and check out the job postings at the same time--and you should be reading the Chronicle if you see yourself working at an academic institution in the US.

Once you have selected some of the colleges or universities that you are interested in, see if they have an RSS feed for employment--make sure this feed covers library positions, as well as any other administrative positions that you are interested in--and make your own Yahoo! Pipe or Rollyo search engine so you can get an updated listing. You can also pull the feeds into your RSS reader, but I thought making your own search engine just makes you seem so savvy.

Now keep in mind that these services and sites are talking about student life, but you can still get valuable information about the work environment, where the college is situated and what it looks like. If the entry really blows your mind, you can put in the name of the city--or local suburbs or towns located nearby--and start contacting the local Chamber of Commerce or Visitor Center, to get any publications or resources that they have about their city. The more you know about a community, the more you will have to say at the interview when they try to find out how much research you have done in regards to the campus community. You won't sound like a local, but you won't sound like you're clueless either. You can also nix communities from your list if you find out the cost of living is too high, or if there isn't any work for your partner or if you find out a library is closing.

A little bit more research than throwing a dart at the map, but if you don't like to look for stuff, aren't you in the wrong career?

On the bias

Jobacle had a post yesterday that encouraged people to explore their biases when it comes to careers--stereotyping by career, an outgrowth of Krumboltz's occupationism. The post linked to Project Implicit, a project that explores biases and I urge you to take some of the tests on the site to explore your biases.

Biases affect us in hiring and working with others, whether they are colleagues or clients, and a greater awareness--and an attempt to neutralize your biases--can only help make the workplace more fair.

In case you think I am chiding interviewers, no, job seekers have the same biases: a fat interviewer won't like me because I am so thin and beautiful, old people are afraid that young people will take their jobs, and they won't hire me because I am too old and a white male. I could go on with all of the nervous, half-beliefs that we all possess, which we believe are gospel in times of stress. Analyzing your biases can help you recognize them when they prey on you and help you mitigate or remove their effects.

Interviews are like blind dates?

Well, this analogy might work for you--how interviews are like blind dates--but this analogy could convince me that a nunnery is a good idea. If I found an order that also needed secular workers, I would be set. I also wouldn't have to worry about the dress code anymore...hey, wait a minute: does this mean that offices are the new monasteries?

Just stick with their metaphor.

Do you want to work in a smaller city?

This isn't a proper review of Job Searches Beyond the Big Cities: Finding Employment in Medium to Small-sized Markets, which is a scaled down version of the Guide to Internet Job Searching. Job Searches Beyond the Big Cities is an ok starter resource, but it shouldn't be the last place that you search, especially if you are looking for work in a "smaller center".

There are basically two different types of "smaller center": a small city or town, or a town or city that is the satellite of a much larger city. If you are fine with commuting, you have more options if you live in a satellite--but the cost of gas and the cost of living outside of the satellite may negate the benefits.

There are also three types of job seeker who look for work in a smaller city:

1. Footloose. Can go anywhere, but want to live in a smaller city. These job seekers have the freedom to choose any city or town--provided that there is a job at the end of the rainbow. These job seekers sometimes forget about smaller cities in their rush to court a big city. For a footloose job seeker try looking with vertical search engines, such as indeed or simplyhired, or my favorite widget on the right. Read Cities Ranked and Rated and Who's Your City? to find communities that match with the lifestyle that you would like to have.
   
2. Trailing. Partners of academics used to be called the trailing spouse--just some extra baggage that you brought along to your tenured position. I use the term trailing here to invoke that image of the person who puts love first, who followed someone home for love...a person who has an aging parent or sick family member. You may be heading back to a community that you know, or a place where your partner will have ties and some clout. You need to make use of the network that your partner or family has created.
   Try searches on the Inside Higher Ed Dual Career Search. Make like Lysistrata until your partner contacts someone with human resources who can tell you about hiring policies for the partners of academics, or if there is a service that will help the "trailing" partner of an academic. For a trailer, you need to make the most of your network, or the connections that your spouse or family has built. Look at the Chamber of Commerce, every directory you can lay your hands on, and make a Yahoo! Pipe that will keep you up-to-date on job matches. Military spouses can also take advantage of any career services, networks or job boards that are available to them--and they should.
   
3. Trapped. This is not a judgment on smaller cities, so don't send me any hate e-mail. Sometimes, people get trapped in a city: they own a house, the kids are happy, your partner still has a good job, you finally found a good veterinarian...but your well seems to have dried up. First step: are you going to stay with the type of library that you have always worked at? Can you transfer from academic to public to school to special? If not, what are you going to do that is similar to library work and still in your community? Is there a library type job that you can do as a telecommuter? Finally, will you stay in libraries? Is this the time to explore another alternative? You are looking for information on a career transition, so your local labor market information office--state, provincial or municipal--can get you started. In that case, you will need Job Searches Beyond the Big Cities: Finding Employment in Medium to Small-sized Markets, since it has all of the links to labor pages in all of the states. If you live in Canada, try Service Canada, Looking for a Job, or select your region for local labour market information.

People begin or find themselves in a smaller center for a variety of reasons, but they have to tailor their job search to match their region, as well as their professional needs.

10 tips to keep down the cost of recruiting

The whole job recruitment process is very expensive: the cost to post the jobs, the cost to contact candidates, the cost to fly them in (or the warm fuzzy feeling that it gives your candidates when you tell them you can't/won't pay), and then the cost to close the recruitment. And the cost we sometimes avoid: when we have to repost the position and go through the same thing all over again.

Here are some tips to keep down the cost of recruiting:

1. Post the job on your website and make your job page into an RSS feed. Obviously, people who want to work for your library can subscribe to that feed, but you can also submit the feed to vertical search engines like simplyhired or indeed.com. If they include your feed in their database, you can get greater exposure on the aggregator.
2. Distribute via listserve and newsletters. Most people are doing this, but sometimes they forget, or they just blindly send the information to the library school recruitment office. Yes, you should send it to them, but don't put something like, please post. Please post where? Get it on the student listserve, and ask if they can distribute it to the local professional listserve. If they have a newsletter, including the alumni newsletter, ask if your vacancy can be advertised there as well. Always include a closing date: if you don't, it's your own damn fault that they keep calling.
   
3. Stop printing the resumes that come in. Do you really need a paper copy of all of the resumes that arrive? You're just being hidebound if you said yes. Now is the time to start reading on a screen and making your comments with the comments feature, or making your notes in a separate document. Take your laptops into the room when you interview. No, really, it isn't intimidating. We know what computers look like, and we want you to save some trees.
4. Interview with Skype or MSN messenger and a webcamera. Do not incur any additional long distance fees. Yeah, yeah, you've already paid for the long distance charges. Are you getting the most out of the long distance fees, or do you only rarely make long distance calls--except during recruiting season? 
5. Have you thought about interviewing in Second Life? How about having a recruitment event, including virtual interview rooms, in SL? I think results have been mixed when using SL to recruit, but it is a way to have an information night outside of the conference season. You can also make a machinima of your talk and post it on YouTube--and with an avatar, you don't have to worry that you look splotchy, only too furry.
6. Do they need to come in for a presentation? Can they post the presentation on YouTube--or can they mail in a disc with the presentation? There's still a grey area around the appropriateness of using internet video in recruiting, but if you have already seen the candidate over the web cam, you know what they look like. Ask them to post their talk on YouTube and allow them to take it down within ten days. Personally, I like the disc option better, but you also have to destroy the discs--no uploading without permission, no matter how hilarious they are--when the recruitment period is over.
   
7. How many rounds of interviews do you really need? Three or more? C'mon. This is just prolonging the agony of the candidates--meaning they could get snatched up while you shilly-shally--and taking people away from other library work. Librarians need jobs, not a thousand interviews.
8. Do proactive hunting. You could post a job and wait for candidates to come--and you could make a list of librarians in your area, who you found via Google and invite them in for an interview. Even better, start handing out your business card at local library meetups and make sure they write down your job feed on the back of the card. They will still have to follow the rules to apply, but why not make use of the pool who is currently available? Also known as networking, which both employers and job seekers could make better use of.
9. Repost, but ask your second and third choices back. You put them on the list for a reason, and they are still pretty high on your list. In some cases, number 2 just missed being number 1 because they had less experience in one area than you thought you wanted.
10. Ask the successful candidate about how he/she found out about the position.Why was this campaign successful? Do you really know which strategies worked in the past, or are you just doing the same thing over and over because this is how you have always done it? Take a poll right now amongst the people who have worked for you for less than 3 years and find out how they heard about the job. Put your money and effort where you found the majority of your successful candidates.
    

If the cost of recruitment can go down, you can use the money for other aspects of HR, like training or extending contracts.You can also streamline the recruitment function by keeping notes on what worked, also known as "best practices". Bring some evidence-based tactics to your recruitment process.

How do referral programs work?

There is a post on ERE.net today about getting more bang for your buck out of referral programs on college campuses. If you aren't sure what a referral program is, here is how it works:

• Your friend or family member works for a company that regularly disseminates job postings throughout the company--or they make a habit of checking an internal job board with offerings.
• There is a notice that the employee will get a referral bonus if a candidate that they recommended for the position applies, interviews, receives an offer and accepts a job. The referral bonus is usually cash and can range from $50 to $2000, depending on the position and how hard it is to staff. (If you know anyone in nursing, they are bombarded with offers).

Just to be clear, the referrer gets the bonus, not the person that was hired--but once the new hire is on staff, they can start sending out postings to their friends and family.

If you are looking for work in special corporate library, or an information position with a corporation, you need to talk to your friends about where they are working and ask them to include you in the postings they send out to friends and family. If they don't know what you do, or what you want to do, explain what you are looking for. Take a look at their company's website and get an idea about the types of positions that they post by what you can definitely do and what you could kinda do.

There are a few reasons to be wary of these referrals: if you blow off the offer, will your friend be mad? Maybe. It could also take time for the bonus to pay out--up to six months in some cases, and usually not before your probationary period ends. But this is a good way to get job postings delivered to your in-box, and if it all works out, your friend might be very very happy. And you'll be employed.

Check out the H3 network to get an idea about how this service might work on the web. I received a recommendation to use this service from someone on LinkedIn, and though I haven't found anyone for a position, I am still hoping it might work for people in my network.

I also feel like I am referring people (I'm your really weak tie) to postings when I put up the Yahoo! Pipe for library jobs and the Career Jet widjet, though I don't expect any back scratching for it.

Pecha Kucha Night

I'm off to my first Pecha Kucha Night. I'm really curious to see how this would work and if it could be effective for portfolios or for finding freelance work.

Pecha Kucha Night is special event for designers (or other freelancers with portfolios) where each presenter is allowed 20 images and 20 seconds to make their point about each image. These events are international and you need only check on the website to see if a Pecha Kucha Night is coming up in your area.

How to decline a job

If you have to say "no" to a job offer, you should say it to a person's face, or if you live outside of the city, by phone. But it should be in your own voice and not on paper or email.

When you say no, you should say, I'm grateful for your offer, but I cannot accept it at this time. You can supply a reason, such as, I have received another offer in this city, or my partner is not able to move with me to accommodate this new job. You don't have to say anything about the offer, if it was full-time, where their offer was part-time, or if the career just fit you better, you can just say, I have accepted another offer--but don't turn around and reapply in less than six months to the same organization.

If you just don't want to accept the offer--there was something weird about the interviewers, or they were rude or inhospitable, and you are afraid to put your career future in their hands, just stop with, I must decline the offer. Don't elaborate with, if you had only brushed your teeth, or your assistant wouldn't validate my parking, or your no flip-flops dress code is too restrictive, just save it. Tirades are for your friends.

You can follow up with a thank you letter, but if you tell them on the phone or face-to-face, politely and with real regret, you will have declined in a way that still leaves the door open for another application at a later date.

Need a tutorial?

If you need a quick fix or a skills brush-up, use Tutsearch to find a tutorial online. It worked for resume writing, job interviews and php (just in case you need a technical skill polishing). Good example of a vertical search engine that you can harness for your professional development. You might also consider submitting your tutorial(s) if you have one.

Keep the light shining

Keep The Light Shining: 3 Unemployment Survival Lessons From Your Canadian English Teacher

I liked the optimism in this piece, but I can also understand the hesitation of the students. Having encountered the same attitude as an ESL instructor (I can't change, I had more before) I can also understand the writer's frustrations. If you suffer from these obstacles (usually called "barriers to employment") realize that everyone has to climb over them.