JibberJobber Anniversary JibberJobber, the Awkward Teen

JibberJobber Anniversary JibberJobber, the Awkward Teen Thirteen. We made it. And now things get awkward. Braces. A body that is growing and not quite there yet. The voice that breaks, not because of emotion but because of hormonal changes. Weird humor, and coming into ourselves. That is who we are this year. Not really more than ever I feel like we are cleaner, faster, and better. More intuitive, and more feature-rich. And I have grand plans for the future. Oh wait, all of that aspiration is the same a 13 year old has. Ignoring the awkward, looking forward to the future with a drivers license, relationships, maybe even a job!! Well, here we are. Thanks for being a part of the journey. And I hope the song lyrics are right: The best is yet to come! JibberJobber Anniversary JibberJobber, the Awkward Teen Thirteen. We made it. And now things get awkward. Braces. A body that is growing and not quite there yet. The voice that breaks, not because of emotion but because of hormonal changes. Weird humor, and coming into ourselves. That is who we are this year. Not really more than ever I feel like we are cleaner, faster, and better. More intuitive, and more feature-rich. And I have grand plans for the future. Oh wait, all of that aspiration is the same a 13 year old has. Ignoring the awkward, looking forward to the future with a drivers license, relationships, maybe even a job!! Well, here we are. Thanks for being a part of the journey. And I hope the song lyrics are right: The best is yet to come!

Should Robots Do Recruiting

Should Robots Do Recruiting You’re sitting in a plush reception waiting nervously for your job interview. Sophie, you are told, is now ready to see you. You walk into the meeting room and are greeted by a two-foot-tall robot. As she asks you her questions, she compares you against data from successful workers. If there’s a match, the job is yours. Sci-fi? Nope. Sophie, who looks like a cross between R2D2 and a penguin, is a real product made by NEC Corp, and has been interviewing trial candidates since 2013. She is part of a growing wave of AI technology which is becoming increasingly commonplace in our day-to-day lives (just ask Siri).  Using technology to help recruitment is already a widespread practice. But should robots ever be given the reign entirely, and be put in charge of hiring decisions? Robots  arent biased Human beings like to think that they are rational creatures. They are not. The biases shaping the job market are numerous and profound, and range from the fact that physically attractive candidates are more likely to be hired  (according to Harvard research) to evidence that candidates with foreign-sounding names are less likely to be asked to interview  (according to DataColada). Some of this prejudice is deliberate, and can be tackled through anti-discrimination regulation and changing social mores. Worryingly, however, quite a lot of bias is unconscious, the result of psychological tics which we could not control even if we wanted to.  Unlike us, robots are not susceptible to the Halo Effect, where our first impression of someone determines our subsequent assessment of their abilities, or the Affect Heuristic, where hiring managers can be put off a candidate because they have the same name as someone they dislike.  Clearly, making the hirer process fairer and meritocratic is an incredibly worthwhile aim. Score one for the robots. Robots  have no social intelligence In the film I, Robot, Will Smith explains his hatred of machines by recounting an accident where a robot, calculating that Smith’s chance of survival was greater, rescued him while leaving a child to die. Referring to the girl’s statistical chance of survival, Smith says: “11% is more than enough. A human would have known that.” Job interviews aren’t quite life and death, but the ethical problem of relying on data alone to make decisions remains. For example, many autistic people (who make up about 1.5% of the population, according to this CDC research) have fantastic skills which could benefit a workplace but struggle with the sort of social conventions, such as maintaining eye contact, which are valued in an interview. Robots designed to measure such social cues and reject those who do not conform to standard would not take into account exonerating circumstances in the same way a human would. Robots  can crunch big data Did you know that, according to this article from  The Economist,  job applicants who use Google Chrome are better workers than those who use Internet Explorer? It’s true, but we only know about it because computers were able to crunch massive reams of data quickly and infer patterns that human beings couldn’t spot. Not only could big data allow robots to shortlist candidates quickly and efficiently, they could also pick up on promising traits in candidates who initially appear a bad prospect. A talented person whose background dictated they received poor education results, for example, might be highlighted by a robot when they would have been dismissed by a human recruiter. But there are problems with this data driven approach. For one, correlation and causation are notoriously difficult to disentangle. The conclusion drawn from the internet browser finding is that people who can be bothered to deliberately install extra software on their computers are also the sort of people who can be bothered to go that extra mile in the workplace. Even if that’s true, it’s highly likely that there are some very dedicated workers out there who just happen to prefer Internet Explorer, and it seems incredibly unfair to dismiss them on a metric they didn’t realise they were being tested on. Robots  can go wrong One word: Skynet. In all seriousness, the worry that clever robots pose a danger to humanity is not restricted to Hollywood â€" it has been articulated by scientific luminaries such as Stephen Hawking. Even putting apocalyptic destruction aside, software is notoriously liable to malfunctions, as anyone whose laptop has suddenly shut down in the middle of an important project can testify. Errors aren’t the only concern regarding robots given sole hiring discretion â€" software is susceptible to hacking. The job market is competitive and good positions are both highly desirable and highly lucrative. Consequently, there is a clear criminal incentive to manipulate hiring software. Pessimistic, maybe, but certainly plausible. Robots are creepy The fact is that most people do not want to be hired by a robot. It’s impersonal, it’s difficult to interact with, and we might justifiably question whether a company uninterested in meeting us before they hire us is actually invested in us at all. Instead, robots are likely to continue their role as an aid to human recruiters, helping them shortlist candidates rather than picking hires. Yet as people become familiar with robots in the workplace, their use is likely to rise. As robot designer David Hanson points out “People become used to the robots. The less startling they become, the more commonplace they get.” So recruiters shouldn’t get too complacent. Their robotic counterparts may have been outsmarted for now, but they’ll be back. About the author: Beth Leslie is a careers advice writer for InspiringInterns, a graduate recruitment agency which specialises in finding candidates their dream internship.

How to Find a Public Sector Job

How to Find a Public Sector Job In the good old days if you wanted a job in the public sector you did one of three things; for admin jobs you looked in the local paper, for professional jobs you looked in a professional journal and for everything else you looked at The Wednesday Guardian.   It used to be bigger than many of today’s papers.   In these days of the WORLD WIDE WEB, it is seen as the answer to every question. So isnt the answer to how do I find a job? simply ‘on the web’. Post your CV on a big jobs board like Monster and sit back and wait? Public jobs are always advertised surely? There are some myths around   that all public sector or at least all local government jobs must be advertised. And they are just that, myths. The requirement is to get the best person for the job and to have a representative workforce. Together these two influences drove many organisations to advertise widely to recruit just such people. But it is not a legal requirement. And think of the cost! Advertising in the press or on the web can cost a lot. So in these straightened times many organisations have changed their strategies. They may advertise only on their own website if at all. It is increasingly common for jobs to be posted in a very limited way. So it is important to understand just where you will find the role you are looking for .. and some of them may surprise you! Public sector jobs on the internet You can use the internet to find a job. There are: Employers’ Sites â€" every local authority has a site and their vacancies will be on there, NHS employers, (NHSJobs) civil service jobs are sites where you can find those employers advertising. These sites require you to register for job alerts and then they will send you an email for roles you are interested in. Dedicated jobs boards â€" who only publish jobs for certain sectors- such as Careers for Leaders, (nearly all local government) or The Ladders which publishes jobs in certain professions about £50k. Registering on CV Library will mean you join 5 million other people in a huge database that employers pay to search. JobsgoPublic, has a smaller database and is a public sector site. Profession specific sites- sites like People Management or Personnel Today, often attached to a professional institute will advertise a range of roles. Try Changeboard for HR roles. Web crawler sites â€" sites like Indeed.co.uk, Simply Hired  or   Jobs1.co.uk can make life easy as they literally crawl the web to look at other sites and collect together all the vacancies. Agencies and search firms- although the world has moved on and profit margins squeezed for these intermediaries they do still have public sector roles to fill. Manpower, Hays, Morgan Law, Badenoch and Clark are all still, Reed, are still handling public sector temp and permanent roles.   Executive search is still active: Odgers, Penna, Gatenby Sanderson and Veredus still have public sector roles to fill, they have their own websites and many have a LinkedIn group that contains jobs. LinkedIn, whilst many local authorities have been dismally slow to post their vacancies here, you will find organisations like Surrey County Council doing so. Do a regular search and see what comes up. Often people turn to these alternative methods of advertising when they can’t recruit. And it is still true that there are skills shortages. The hidden public job market But not everything is to be found on the internet, some roles dont get advertised. So what sorts of jobs don’t get advertised? The short term contract type, the temp roles, the ones where the actual employer is not the public sector organisation, the ones which are filled by contractors not employees. And don’t forget that much of the work that was done by the public sector is now in the private sector. So if you want to collect refuse, care for people, do accounts, answer the phones, run libraries, deliver IT solutions, advise on planning applications or manage multi million pound projects, you need to be looking into the private sector as well as public. There are new players in the digital marketing field, they don’t broadcast advertise, they do targeted advertising. By finding people who work in relevant organisations or who are looking for relevant information. Every time you agree to cookies you are leaving a digital fingerprint. These sophisticated tools use them to find you and target you with their advert. So how can you find them? Talk to the organisations that you want to target. Ask them how they fill such posts, do they have arrangements with agencies? Are they running their own in house agency/talent pool that you can join? Are they sourcing candidates through boards like Monster? Are they using Facebook or LinkedIn. Talk to people who work within the organisations you want to work for. What they tell you about how people get to work there may be different from what HR believes should be happening. In the private sector the golden rule of job searching is ‘network, network, network’. It is not so different in the public sector.   So if you know people, or you know people who know people, get networking and see where the work is and how to get into it. In spite of the tradition of open advertisement there are many opportunities that will never appear in the paper and some more that will never appear on a web site. So think laterally and pick up the phone. Get talking, get networking and good luck! Related:  What Job Boards are Most Useful for Jobseekers? Image: Shutterstock

How to Resuscitate Employee Motivation

How to Resuscitate Employee Motivation You’ve got the best people on board. They can do the job like The Avengers while juggling a bunch of oranges. But The spark has gone. Their performance nosedived, and it feels frustrating. You even tried Cheetos and Lava lamps to get performance numbers back up. Except it had the same effect as a fly on a windshield. Take heart. You’re about to learn how to reignite the spark and get energy flowing. Let Them See the Forest for the Trees Meet Hannah nice clear frame glasses. She manages ad campaigns for small business owners. She’s done Google Ads for three years and can do it blindfolded. But Hannah has hit a plateau. She’s bored to death because she thinks her efforts don’t have real-world impact. The question is How can you help Hannah get her mojo back? Adam Grant has the answer. He’s Whartons top-rated professor and one of the worlds 10 most influential management thinkers. Let Hannah meet several of the business owners she has helped. It doesn’t have to be for long. Five minutes does the trick. That might not sound like much. Here’s why it works: Hannah will see that the problem she thinks is easy is actually hard for the clients she helps. She’ll see her work matters because it helps business owners reach new customers and grow their profits. The result? You’ll inject the antidote for Hannas disengagement. Deep inside, we all want our work to have a purpose. Otherwise, it’s just a job, and that’s not motivating. Adjust Management Style Sometimes, you need to give employees lots of autonomy. Other times, you need to have your finger on the pulse to motivate them. The problem How to pick the right approach? Andy Grove, a co-founder of Intel, knows. Andy suggests that you should be either hands-off or on depending on employees’ performance. Low-performing employees lose motivation without guidance and support. Rockstar workers value autonomy. They have topnotch technical skillsets, and they dont need managers to chime in as often. On board so far? Put your party pants on: You’re about to learn how to adjust your management approach and boost motivation. Assess employee performance. Low Performance: Offer a lot of guidance and help. Explain what, why, and how. Medium Performance: Provide some coaching and suggestions for improvement. High Performance: Unplug and focus on KPIs. Get employees to self-evaluate key skills on a scale of 1 to 3 to get 360-degree data. In the screenshot above, the scale stands for: 1: I need a lot of guidance and help. 2: Ive got my bearings, but I could use some coaching. 3: I’m killing it. Mind your own beeswax. Once you recalibrate your management approach, motivation will spark like a torch stick. Provide Growth Opportunities There’s nothing worse than being in a rut. Hannah hates it too She is among the 80 percent of people who jump ship if they don’t get high-quality training. Solution? Start a personal development fund. It’ll let her learn on-tap. Here are several ways Hannah can spend the budget and revive her motivation: Sign up for an online course Attend a (local) workshop Get a mentor Order a book online Now If you don’t have a training budget, shift gears. Ask A+ players to share their wisdom and coach B players. They can do it regularly through 1:1s until motivation skyrockets. The best part? It’s budget friendly. Recognize Successes It’s a no-brainer you should recognize employees’ wins. But Companies spend a boatload of time and effort without getting palpable results. Not to fret. Here are two battle-tested ways to slash disengagement with acknowledgement: Set up a #kudos channel in Slack to recognize successes. Get employees to vote for employee of the month via Google Forms or SurveyMonkey. Make recognition a part of your company’s DNA and see motivation rise from its own ashes. Over to You What’s your experience of reviving motivation? Have you recently faced office blues? Share your thought in the comments. About the author:  Max Woolf is a writer. He is passionate about helping people land their dream jobs through the expert career industry coverage. In his spare time, Max enjoys biking and traveling to European countries. You can hit him up on  LinkedIn.

The Complete Guide to Becoming a Public Health Analyst

The Complete Guide to Becoming a Public Health Analyst Health is important to every one of us. Even if you do not consider it important and do everything that is against the recommended health practices, if your body decides to ask it of you, at that moment, your health would be very important to you.We have heard it said that health and wealth and probably beginning to think it is just a cliché like other overused expressions such as “money cannot buy happiness.”.The truth about clichés is that they may be overused; it does not change the truth of it. The fact that health is wealth is one of such truths.evalSome of us probably know rich people who lost their lives due to their health. Imagine if the money could buy them health, do you think they would not have readily paid to be whole? It goes to show that indeed he who has health has wealth.This is where public health analysts come in.Who Is A Public Health Analyst?You might be wondering what a public health analyst has to do with your personal health.A public health analyst gath ers data or policies or information, based on general or specific issues, and analyse them in order to test their effectiveness or efficiency.They are important in the health sector in that they analyse or examine trends and data on health related issues to come up with the best health practices or policies for the benefit of all.They are mostly used by the government but other health related organisation could use their services as well.The beauty of public health is that if you are one for the knack for the medical field but cannot stand the sight of blood or if you cannot stomach being around patient or simply are not interested in the patient care aspect of medicine, then you can consider public health.evalPublic health makes it possible to be in the medical line without dealing with patients if you and still helping them indirectly, behind the scene.Why Do We Need Public Health Analyst?The knowledge most of us have of health is limited to doctors and the happenings inside the f our walls of a hospital.The most important people to our health, as far as most of us are concerned, are the doctors and nurses and any other person directly involved with our health in the hospital.But have you ever heard of prevention being better than cure? If you believe it, then you understand that the hospital, while we cannot deny its vast usefulness is nursing us back to health, is only one side of the coin.evalThere are many others working tirelessly to make sure we live in good health and not have to spend so much in curing illnesses and sicknesses.They are constantly finding ways we can live more disease-free lives that would keep us away from the hospital.Public health has been able to get us vaccines, family planning, safety laws, clean air, food and water policies and several health policies as individual or generally that is prevented numerous health challenges.How to Build A Career As A Public Health AnalystEducation Required:evalYou might already be getting excited about public health analytics and wondering how you can become one. It is very simple but it entails going to school.Unfortunately, it is skill you can acquire by apprenticeship. Everywhere you apply for a job would require at least a Bachelor’s degree from you.So the first thing you need to do is apply for admission to a school for a Bachelor’s degree.There are a number of courses you can study at the university that would help you in your way of becoming a public health analyst. You can also study health analytics, health information management and informatics, public health, biostatistics, or epidemiology.Also, it would do you a lot of good if you add professional courses and certification.Professional courses like data management, communication skills, data analysis or data analytics, statistics and any course that has to do with numbers would go a long way in preparing you for the job ahead as well as giving you an edge among all other candidates in a job application.evalA good knowledge of statistical software, for example, SAS and SQL would also come in handy.We all know that most employers would want to employ someone without experience. Luckily, there are some entry level positions that public health analysts can take advantage of. However, largely, employers would ask for at least, three years’ experience.Some schools attach their students to hospitals and other medical centres while in school to gain first-hand knowledge before they graduate. But if you lacked that opportunity in your school, then you might want to volunteer your services during holidays or if you are out of school, you might have to sacrifice some years for internship.This will increase your employability when you apply for a position.The Skills You Need:As mentioned earlier, you would need to be skilled in statistical software because you would need the knowledge of analyzing data in order to analyse your data properly.evalApart from the above, there are also certain skills that are must have for a good public health analyst.Math or statistics skills: If you know you have issues with calculations and would rather be far from it, then you might want to steer clear of public health analytics. You would need to pass your data through mathematical analysis and your skills would be necessary here.Communication skills: There is hardly any occupation that works independent of itself but public health most likely tops one of those that is always interacting with other fields.You would need as a public health analyst to interact with doctors, policymakers, the government, research centres, medical centres and the general public.With everybody that you would need to interact with, communication skills is important but dealing with professionals can even be handled with basic communication skills, interacting with the general public is a different ball game entirely and you would have to know how to speak their language to communicate with them.Critical thinking: You would be analyzing information gathered, finding the most effective and efficient and also finding possible solutions to certain issues; surely it will be necessary to think critically. You would not have the luxury to think like a lay man, it would be necessary to hone your reasoning level.Organisational skills: You would have at your disposal a large number of information and have to write a large volume of reports. The only way it would not overwhelm is if you have good organisational skills. This way, you would be able to keep track of your work without stress.What Type of Public Health Analyst Do We Have?There are two common types of public health analysts, although, largely, their work is intertwined and they practically work as one. They are;The public health data analyst and the public health policy analystsBased on the terms;The public health data analyst deals mainly with data. The nature of their job mostly lies with numbers. They use raw data to search for trends an d patterns in order to determine effectiveness and efficiency of the information gathered.The public health policy analyst, however, mainly deals with data. The nature of their job mostly lies with policies. They would be the one to work closely with the government and policymakers in order to determine effectiveness and efficiency of policies as related to health.We can see that being a public health analyst is an important job as well and we should be grateful to them. They are working behind the scene to make sure we live a disease-free life.

Meet the newest certified Chief Happiness Officers - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Meet the newest certified Chief Happiness Officers - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog Our latest Chief Happiness Officer Academy was a huge hit with 18 engaged participants from 12 countries who are now ready to go out and make workplaces awesome. The only thing that wasnt great about the Academy was the Copenhagen winter weather, but that might be a good thing. One participant wrote this in LinkedIn afterwards: Its been raining most of the last four days here in Copenhagen, which has probably been a blessing, because otherwise I might spontaneously combust from all the incredible energy thats been generated at the Chief Happiness Officer Academy. We had a great time going through the latest research and best practices on happiness at work. We also had a fantastic visit to DHL Express Denmark, where their HR Manager Sarah Olsen gave a passionate tour and talk about their happy culture. Here are some of my favorite pics from this Academy: Thanks for visiting my blog. If you're new here, you should check out this list of my 10 most popular articles. And if you want more great tips and ideas you should check out our newsletter about happiness at work. It's great and it's free :-)Share this:LinkedInFacebookTwitterRedditPinterest Related Meet the newest certified Chief Happiness Officers - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog Our latest Chief Happiness Officer Academy was a huge hit with 23 engaged participants from 14 countries who are now ready to go out and make workplaces awesome. We were completely blown away by how engaged and passionate the group was and how open they were about sharing questions, stories and experiences. We had a great time going through the latest research and best practices on happiness at work. We also had a fantastic visit to Irma, where their CEO S?ren Steffensen gave a talk on their happy culture. If youre interested, the next CHO Academy is in December read all about it and sign up here. Here are some of my favorite pics from this Academy. Thanks for visiting my blog. If you're new here, you should check out this list of my 10 most popular articles. And if you want more great tips and ideas you should check out our newsletter about happiness at work. It's great and it's free :-)Share this:LinkedInFacebookTwitterRedditPinterest Related

What to Know When Writing a Resume

What to Know When Writing a ResumeIf you're unsure of what to write in your resume or if you're looking for some tips to make the best resume possible, then read on. You'll learn a lot about resume writing and how to improve your chances of getting a job.First of all, what to know when writing a resume is quite simple. You need to make your resume stand out from the crowd, especially if you're applying for a technical, non-routine position. By choosing the right information and filling in the right spaces, you can do this.Your resume will always begin with a section that identifies you and your skills. This is very important, because you're going to be answering all of the questions on the application. Make sure to use the same format as well.The second thing to know when writing a resume is that you have to pick your career goals. Your employer doesn't want to be looking at the same resumes all over again and that means you have to be specific about what you want out of the job. You need to choose what job you want and then you have to write about it.Next, what to know when writing a resume is the formatting. Try to follow proper paragraph formatting. The first sentence should include the full name of the person you're trying to get hired and the name of the company you are applying for.After that, list down any experience you have previously held, as well as previous positions you held within the organization where you are applying for the job. This is important because the employer wants to know where you've been in the past. They may also want to know why you left a previous position. A few lines after your work history you should list out your education. You should also highlight any awards or recognition you may have received for your work. Finally, you should end your work history and education by listing down any job offers you've gotten.Hopefully this article has given you some of the information you need to know when writing a resume. You need to be p repared for every aspect of the job interview process, so make sure to do some extra research into the industry you are applying for.