We all know we need a good night's sleep to be effective during the day. But often, sleep is the first thing to suffer when something else demands our attention. It could be staying out late with friends, tending to a sick child, or getting caught up in a good book. Sometimes the motivation to stay up late into the night is more alluring than getting a good night’s sleep. But we often forget how important sleep is to productivity.
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Everyone needs a different amount of sleep. But 6.5 to 7.5 is the average.
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The issue with sleep deprivation is an inability to focus. The brain has difficulty focusing, or refocusing, if it has not had enough sleep according to a study from the Journal of Nueroscience.
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According to Cliff Saper, a professor at Harvard, sleep deprived brains suffer more “power outages” than brains that have had adequate sleep.
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When you are tired, the parts of your brain responsible for understanding the world and the data around us start to slow down.
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A recent Harvard study estimated that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity.
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Losing one night's sleep results in the cognitive capacity of being over the alcohol limit.
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To get the best sleep, you need to be tired mentally AND physically.
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Stanford researcher Cheri D. Mah found that when she got male basketball players to sleep 10 hours a night, their performances in practice dramatically improved. Free-throw and three-point shooting each increased by an average of 9 percent.
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According to Jim Horne, Professor of Psychophysiology and Director of the Sleep Research Centre at the University of Loughborough, women need about 20 minutes more sleep than men. The reason? Women’s brains are more complex.
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Working more and sleeping less doesn’t increase your output. It makes you less effective.
So get your sleep and see your productivity rise.
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TechServe Alliance reports that IT employment hit another high-note in April, with 4.4+ million people working in the industry. Those numbers almost guarantee that the competition for top IT talent will continue to be heated and that finding the best workers with the most in-demand skills will remain challenging. The corollary to this is always that retention becomes equally, if not more, important and as much effort as you put in to recruiting, you need to match it in ensuring you retain your best and most critical employees.
I’ve covered this topic before in Staffing 360, offering whatever advice I can give since I know the challenges firsthand, as a business owner myself and working on the frontlines of recruiting. (Employee Retention: Perception vs. Reality; The Key to IT Contractor Retention.) Last week another article on the subject caught my eye at CIO.com – 8 Tips for Retaining Top IT Talent. Here are their suggestions:
- Include them in decisions
- Don’t micromanage
- Offer flexible work hours
- Invest in training
- Provide access to new technologies
- Give praise and acknowledge contributions
- Offer free stuff
- Provide a competitive compensation package
I’ve mentioned many of the things on the list before and seeing others give the same advice is always a nice reassurance, particularly since many of them do not involve big dollar expenditures, something that I have also often preached the value of. It’s no surprise to see flexible work hours on the list, the desire for that cuts across the entire business landscape these days, but “including them in decisions” and “not micromanaging” may make some people pause. It shouldn’t though; it’s just another way of making your employee feel valued and appreciated (see #6 on the list). When it comes to the smart, creative people in our industry, being treated this way takes on added importance. The suggestion to invest in training is music to my ears – I’ve banged on that drum for a long while – and access to new and innovative technologies is also something I’ve touted as important to keeping technology workers engaged. Of course, the inevitable incentive of money is on the list as well, as it should be. But it isn’t all about the $$$. One suggestion they give is tying bonuses to specific projects or milestones throughout the year, rather than only annually. On benefit is that rewarding people in this way creates a more continuous feeling of appreciation and avoids the peaks and valleys.
Read the whole article to get their full take on each piece of advice if you have time but at least take these 8 things and think about how you can implement them in your business, with both your permanent and contingent IT employees. As the summer heats up, the competition for talent will too. Don’t be caught unprepared!
Jerry Brenholz
President and CEO
ATR International
Having trouble retaining your best IT employees? Download: 6 Things You Can Do to Dramatically Increase IT Contractor Retention
It goes without saying that everyone’s career is unique. In fact, it can be argued that most career paths that people take are vastly different from each other. But if you take a step back, and really consider what a successful career path looks like, there is often more similarities than differences. Below is some career advice that cuts across all paths to success; advice from some of the most successful and influential individuals in business and life.
“People who know what they are talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”
-- Steve Jobs
“How are you first, only, faster, better, or cheaper than other people who want to do what you’re doing in the world? What are you offering that’s hard to come by? What are you offering that’s both rare and valuable?”
-- LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman
“It is the people around me who really make the difference.”
-- Richard Branson
"There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure."
-- Colin Powell
"You've got to develop relationships. You can't do things just in a formal context."
-- Ken Chenault, CEO, American Express
“Find a way to say ‘yes’ to things.”
-- Eric Schmidt
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
-- Thomas Edison
"Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Unless you listen to different points of view, your mind will eventually close, and you'll become a prisoner to a certain point of view that you'll never question.”
-- Mohamed El-Erian, CEO, PIMCO
"Every now and then go away and have a little relaxation. To remain constantly at work will diminish your judgment. Go some distance away, because work will be in perspective and a lack of harmony is more ready seen."
-- Leonardo DaVinci
“Don’t pick a job. Pick a boss.”
-- William Raduchel, former CIO, Sun Microsystems
“The key to a successful career is integrity, excellence, and exhibiting respect for each individual you come in contact with.”
-- Jerry Brenholz, President and CEO, ATR International
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Times are changing. And these days, the first person to review your resume is very likely not a person at all. It’s most likely an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). An ATS is a software application designed to help a company recruit employees more effectively. An ATS can be used for a variety of things including screening resumes and generating interview requests to potential candidates through e-mail. It is estimated that 50% of mid-sized companies and almost 100% of large corporations use some form of ATS. Here are some tips for optimizing a resume for an ATS.
Use standard, web-safe fonts - Remember that we are talking about a computer reading your resume. The key is to make it as easy as possible. Use size 11 or 12 font and use Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, or Calibri to minimize the chance of a scanning error.
Focus on your skills - Keep the fluff to a minimum. Focus on accurately describing your skills, capabilities, and accomplishments.
Use language from job description - The ATS will be scanning your resume for certain terms and phrases. These will be most likely taken from the job description itself. Use the job description as a basis for creating your resume.
Only use standard characters - Don’t use fancy characters like arrows, triangles, or asterisks. Simple bullets are fine but don’t use anything else besides letters and common punctuation.
No shading - Keep the entire background of your resume white.
No fancy borders - Many ATS are unable to process visual elements like borders and frames. Some even have problems with simple lines used to break up sections of your resume. Play it safe and don’t use them.
No spelling errors - Spelling errors are often missed by human screeners. But they can be fatal to your resume if it is being scanned by an ATS. It should go without saying that your resume should be free of any spelling errors.
No images or graphics - An ATS only scans words and punctuation. Images and graphics will only cause problems and confuse an ATS. Don’t use them.
Contact info at top - Putting your contact information at the top of your resume is pretty standard. But it’s important to realize that most ATS look for it at the top so make sure you don’t hide it somewhere that an ATS may not be looking.
Only submit once - There are humans behind every ATS and if you submit your resume more than once they will know. And it probably won’t reflect positively on you, especially if the resumes aren’t the same. Stick to investing time into optimizing your resume and only submit it once.
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A few weeks ago I wrote about the STEM industry and what companies can do to drive awareness and promote the career opportunities that exist (STEM Industries Can Learn from Professional Sports). It was just a few thoughts on how we can help close the current and predicted talent gap. As we all know though, it will take a multifaceted approach to solve this problem, so today I want to highlight some news from the education world.
The long term solution clearly involves getting kids interested in science and math early on and being excited to choose those fields when they get to college. Earlier this year STEMconnector, a STEM information database, and My College Options, a college-planning website that uses questionnaires to collect data on students' interests and career aspirations, released Where are the STEM Students? What are Their Career Interests? Where are the STEM Jobs? (Download the free executive summary.) It reports that interest in STEM majors and careers has been continually rising among high school students for nearly a decade. When it comes to STEM, the focus often seems to be on the technology sector but the report says that the largest number of STEM jobs are in accounting and auditing, and that the manufacturing industry has significant openings for STEM skilled individuals, reminding us that STEM opportunities are broad and varied. The Computing Research Association released similarly positive findings reporting that “the number of new undergraduate computer science majors at Ph.D.-granting U.S. universities rose by more than 29% last year,” increasing for the 5th straight year. This recent Computerworld article covers the CRA’s findings nicely. Their survey also showed that more students are completing computer science Ph.D. programs. All of these are good developments on the STEM education front.
Ensuring that these numbers continue at the high school and college level underscores the importance of learning STEM skills at the grade school level. And it’s not just capturing the interest of some young students but preparing all for a world where those skills are critical, no matter what you plan to do. “Computational thinking,” and the suggestion that it should be taught alongside reading and writing, is an innovative idea promoted by Jeannette Wing of Carnegie Mellon University, where the Center of Computational Thinking has been established with help from Microsoft. The Center’s mission, broadly, is “to promote and advance computing research and advocate for the widespread use of computational thinking to improve people's lives.” The key here, I think, is recognizing the extensive application and influence of technology and computer science and understanding that we do have to prepare and educate differently.
Computer Science for Fun and Tynker are two examples of the efforts to make STEM subjects engaging and fun, and there are many more (please share your favorites with us!). Based in London, CS4fn’s mission is to “explore how computer science is about people, solving puzzles, creativity, changing the future and, most of all, having fun,” while Tynker is “a computing platform designed specifically to teach children computational learning and programming skills in a fun and imaginative way.” Does it work? Common sense alone suggests yes. Who among us hasn’t seen an 8 year old with a better understanding of hardware and software than many adults? It’s also completely on trend with the buzz word/concept (depending on your POV!) of “gamification.”
Finally, US News and World has a great interview with former astronaut Robert Curbeam about what sparked his interest in science; Making STEM Matter for the Next Generation of Astronauts and Engineers. Curbeam, as a child “would stand at the end of his street and marvel at NASA's Skylab space station when he could see it floating in the sky. Decades later, as an astronaut, he would see space firsthand and put his STEM skills to use installing and repairing equipment on the International Space Station during several missions.”
When it comes to how to attract and motivate the next generation, Curbeam says, “I think the most important thing is to make it relevant. Learning about how, for instance, combustion worked was very interesting to me because I saw it every day. I understood that that was the key to the automobile, key to how airplanes flew.” One take away for me from his interview was how I can indirectly ensure that science, technology, engineering and math are exciting, interesting and relevant to young students; by supporting things like NASA and space exploration when budget cuts and taxes are discussed. There is nothing quite like looking up into the night sky, dreaming of being there some day and seeing exactly where you will be and what you will live on. We can all work to ensure that future generations are similarly inspired.
I’m encouraged by the news I read and by the attention being paid to the challenge of ensuring that America and its workforce remains competitive and able to meet the needs of our economy and the world we live in. We all can help, and those of us working in or supporting STEM industries and organizations have a special responsibility to pay attention and help support educational efforts on a broad scale and in our individual communities. Inspire and improve STEM education however you can!
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At Staffing 360, we try to do what we say we will in our tagline: “cover the world of IT consulting and enterprise-wide staffing from all angles.” At its most basic this simply means writing articles that appeal to all our readers: hiring companies and job seekers, employers and employees, clients and contractors. Some columns relate more to one constituency or the other but many, I hope, have information that can help either. This post gathers articles that offer interesting views and predictions about the industry in 2013 and the technology trends that will shape the business world including what jobs will be the hottest and therefore potentially the highest paying and most difficult to staff. I’ve also included a salary comparison tool (roughly benchmark what you’re making or paying), a list of the top companies hiring and traits that every good employee should possess, regardless of what industry you work in.
Why does this matter to you?
Well if you’re a business owner, looking at trends and predictions gives you insight into how to run your company, from finding opportunities to expand your current footprint to innovating with new products to meet predicted needs and demand. If you’re an IT professional, working on a permanent or contingent basis, looking at where the industry is going can help you understand how to keep your skills relevant and your career rewarding. As a manager, understanding which jobs are hot gives you an awareness of where salaries will likely be rising or where you will experience longer hiring cycles and have more difficult filling positions. As a job seeker, you’ll be better able to see how your skills and experience match up to what employers are looking for and you’ll better understand your value in the current marketplace. Armed with this information both employers and employees can make smarter hiring decisions.
I hope you will find the ideas in these articles as thought provoking as I did and that they’ll provide some useful information, whether you’re hiring or looking to be hired!
Technology Trends
- The IEEE Computer Society provides this overview of 13 top trends for 2013, including big data, the cloud, cyber security and mobile computing.
- Business strategist Daniel Burrus shares 20 technology driven trends that are great food for thought.
- Forbes covers Gartner’s top 10 strategic trends for 2013.
Job-related Information
- Computerworld’s Hot IT Skills for 2013
- U.S. News Best Technology Jobs
- 25 Tech Companies Hiring Now
- 15 Ideal Traits Employees Should Have
- Computerworld’s Salary Survey Tool
Looking to hire top IT talent? Download our eGuide: 7 Expert Tips for Hiring the Best IT Employees
Selecting References
Choose individuals that know you well enough to speak knowledgeably about your professional and personal attributes. Select a variety of individuals such as a past boss, a colleague or co-worker, a vendor that knows how you conduct business, etc. Be sure to get permission before you provide someone as a reference.
Speak to Your References
Besides letting your references know that you passed along their contact information to a potential employer, you should speak with them and provide them with all of the details about your job search. Explain why you are leaving your current position and tell them why you would like to use them as a reference. Also, contact your references each time you give out their name. Tell them who may be calling them and explain what is important for them to emphasize if they do get called.
Providing References
Your references should include the following information.
Name
Title
Company
Address
Work Phone
Home/Cell Phone
Email Address
Relationship
Notes
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After writing last week’s post, STEM Industries Can Learn from Professional Sports, I kept thinking about the staffing challenges our industry faces and my thoughts turned from finding qualified people to the flip side of that coin, retaining the talent that you have. Retention is always a hot topic and I’ve shared advice before on what you can do to hold on to your employees, whether they are part of your permanent or contingent workforce. (See: Employee Retention: Perception vs. Reality; The Key to IT Contractor Retention; and Increase IT Contractor Retention.) As the competition for people heats up, especially in the big four areas of cloud, mobile, social, and data analytics, retention efforts should be top of mind.
As so often happens, thanks to the plethora of information available on line, no sooner had I started reflecting on retention when an article arrived in my in box with timely advice. Written by Dr. John Sullivan, Bold Approaches for Successfully Retaining Every Innovator, Part 1 and Part 2, puts forth some very provocative ideas. As his bio notes, some consider his approach “thought-provoking and somewhat controversial,” and that certainly holds true with some of what he discusses in the articles, but pushing the envelope is a good thing when done correctly, and many of his ideas are good and certainly warrant thinking about.
Dr. Sullivan focuses on “innovators” but substitute the phrase “key performer” or “critical position” and you can both understand the importance of retaining these people and the need to implement a bolder, more strategic plan. No one wants to lose any employee, the disruption and replacement costs and effort are significant and when that employee is a critical one, the impact and consequences are heightened even more. The articles include many ideas, too many for me to discuss them all so I’ll cover the highlights:
- Identify and prioritize your key employees. While your talent management strategy should include retention efforts focused on all employees, the ideas put forth here are not feasible or practical to implement for everyone, and they are not meant to be. You need to identify who your critical people are, who deserves the time and effort of an enhanced retention plan. Use data and ROI to convince leadership and others of the importance.
- Carefully develop your retention plan. The best plan is one that is personalized, recognizes that different individuals are motivated by different things, puts the responsibility for retention in the hands of the managers not HR, and provides a variety of “tools” that the manager can use.
- Engage the employee. Sullivan provides 10 ideas in Part 1 and most of them involve talking to the person, whether it is “develop[ing] a “how-to-best-manage-me” profile,” or a “more of/less of excitement list.” The suggestions I like the best involve proactive conversations such as “conducting a pre-exit interview” where “instead of waiting until a [key employee] considers another external offer, [you] ask them in an interview or survey “why do you stay… [and] why would you leave?” He also suggests periodically asking key performers to stay and making sure they understand the impact of their work and their importance to the organization. All of these involve being proactive, but not necessarily a big dollar investment.
- Include senior management. Whether it is approving and supporting the overall efforts or direct involvement such as his suggestion to “beat the external recruiters to the punch by having a “level up” or senior manager re-recruit…at least once every two years” or to arrange for a visit from the CEO or President, senior managements buy in and participation is crucial.
- Use HR strategically. Sullivan feels strongly that HR’s role is one of support not ownership. HR should provide the tool kit to managers and ensure that they understand all the possible “levers” that can be used. It’s also important that they monitor retention efforts to make sure that they are being implemented in a timely manner and stay on track with the plan. HR has an important role to play in designing and championing retention endeavors, use them wisely.
There are a lot more suggestions and ideas, some a bit more bold than others, and not all will be to your taste. All in all though, I think many of them are highly implementable or adaptable to your specific situation. Nothing eliminates the need to clearly understand the salary market for your key performers but money is not the only or necessarily the most important factor to people. These ideas are mostly not about money but instead about paying attention and making your key employee feel valued. At a time when others will be trying harder than ever to entice your best employees away, your best defense may be a good offense. Be proactive!
Jerry Brenholz
President and CEO
ATR International
Having trouble retaining yor best IT employees? Download: 6 Things You Can Do to Dramatically Increase IT Contractor Retention
Like many companies, we conduct weekly management meetings here at ATR. We talk about all of the usual things...projects, financials, sales activity, HR issues, etc. These are important meetings that give managers insight into what’s happening across the entire company. But if I’m being honest, these meetings are mostly about the exchange of information and how to address issues. There is very little strategizing on how to make ATR a better company. Very little creative thinking about how to better our competition. For this, we turn to the experts at ATR. The individuals who are on the front lines every day, working to satisfy our customers, finding jobs for our candidates, and making sure that everything flows as smoothly as possible. We give them a forum in which to bring up issues and find creative solutions.
Last week we held one of our Innovation and Creativity Workshops. Ten ATR employees attended the one hour workshop. There were account executives, recruiters, and marketing personnel in attendance. We limit the number of attendees to ten to keep the conversation flowing and we have found that this is a good number that allows everyone to offer up their thoughts and opinions.
I always open these sessions with one statement, “Tell me your biggest complaint about your work?” This is usually the only thing I need to say. The conversation starts flowing and the complaints about what isn’t working gradually turn to solutions. It’s human nature. Complain first, and then figure out a solution. Complaining may be the wrong word though, since we’re just as much identifying issues that need to be fixed. This is the point where some truly unique and innovative solutions to problems occur. The team is collectively able to offer suggestions and work together to come up with a solution and the group is always better than any single person trying to solve it on their own. This is why we have these workshops. And this one was no different. We came away with a handful of great ideas to fix issues that the management team may have never known about without providing a forum for employees to share and solve..
Innovation is in ATR’s DNA. It comes from the top, our CEO Jerry Brenholz, who demands ATR continue to innovate and find unique ways to stay ahead of the competition. Innovation and Creativity Workshops are just one way that we do that successfully here at ATR.
Jeff Monaghan
Director of Marketing
Looking to increase retention of your IT contract employees? Download our free eGuide: 6 Things You Can Do To Dramatically Increase IT Contractor Retention
The news is filled with stories about the shortage of trained workers and the trouble companies are having filling positions. This is especially true in the technology and engineering fields, where unemployment has remained lower and in many disciplines barely exists at all. It makes it challenging to find and retain people especially in the so called STEM industries. There is ongoing discussion about how to fix the problem.
One place I think we can find some inspiration is in the world of sports. Professional leagues like the NFL or MLB have a steady pipeline of candidates to choose from. All business models are complex and involve a variety of factors that contribute to success and the sports world is no different. I do however think there are three things that we might consider emulating or adapting to our purposes.
1. Promote career potential. Everyone sees the career potential as an athlete. We all know the earning potential because contracts and salaries are reported openly. We know the positions that exist, both on and off the field, since the games are broadcast and covered by numerous media and many of us are fans. This all combines to ensure that youngsters (and the young at heart!) everywhere dream of playing first base, sinking a basket or scoring a goal, and making a living doing it, no matter how unlikely that prospect is.
Now obviously STEM industries and their companies don’t have the same exposure and popularity that professional sports enjoy but that just means we should be working even harder to promote ourselves and the satisfying, rewarding careers we offer. Most people are realistic enough to recognize that a multimillion dollar sports career is not in the cards for them but when it comes time to choose a major in college or just think about the career path they will follow, what do they know about us? Do they know the types of positions available, the kind of work STEM industries and companies do? Do they know the earning potential? Are they aware of the projections for which jobs will be most in demand in the future? We need to do a better job of educating everyone about the great careers waiting for them!
2. Work with the schools and education system. If you want to be a baseball player, you know you have to learn to hit and catch. If you want to be a basketball player, learn to shoot and dribble; a hockey star, start by learning to skate. Again, it’s obvious when you see people doing these jobs what skills you need to learn. Does everyone understand the connection between algebra, calculus and chemistry, and achievement and success in our “stadiums?” Do they know what the equivalent of catching and throwing is in our ballpark, that is, our companies? Youth and school sports are organized to train children in the fundamentals and give them a chance to excel beyond the basics. We need to ensure that the same is happening in STEM education and training.
Professional sports would not rely on the system in place now if it wasn’t consistently delivering the kind of candidates it needed. We shouldn’t either. Again, I’m not saying the answers are easy or there is a magic bullet but let’s make sure that it isn’t because we haven’t been clear about the requirements. Let’s make sure that it isn’t silence, lack of effort or cooperation and partnership on the part of the business community that contributes to the lack of qualified workers entering the pipeline. This could be as formal as working with academic and government leaders to formulate policy and curricula or as simple as participating in a career day or mentoring at a local school. We can all contribute in some way.
3. Provide training. Most team sports have “farm teams;” minor leagues where promising players work to improve in the hopes of being good enough to reach the majors. Regardless of the training provided by youth sports and school teams, even at the college level, professional sports teams know they need to provide their own training. They invest time and money in order to keep their pipeline filled. Their training model is necessarily very different than anything that would work in business – farm teams are not going to work! It’s their commitment to training that we should consider emulating. They just do it, even though it doesn’t always work out.
They also retrain and repurpose people. Pitchers go from starters to closers and back again. If the team needs a first baseman or someone to hit as the DH, they move people around and retrain. Football teams recruit track stars and train them to be wide receivers. College QBs become tight ends. It happens all the time. Teams know that if someone is a good athlete, or a fast runner, they can train them to play football or teach them the nuances of a particular position. It’s the basic skill set and work ethic that is the foundation they look for and on which they can build. We need to do the same. Is an aptitude for programming the same as being a fast runner? Can you train someone who has proven abilities in one discipline to be a wide receiver in another? They do it, shouldn’t we consider it too?
I’ll close by acknowledging again that the lack of qualified STEM workers is a complex problem that will require efforts on a number of fronts. My suggestions here are just a small attempt at thinking about the problem in a different way and taking inspiration for solutions from a potentially unlikely, but highly successful source. I’d love to hear your ideas or thoughts on the matter!
Jerry Brenholz
President and CEO
ATR International
Looking to hire top IT talent? Download our eGuide: 7 Expert Tips for Hiring the Best IT Employees
