If you’re graduating college this spring, consider yourself luckier than your counterparts of the last few years: a survey of businesses shows that most companies said they intended to hire more newly graduated college students this year than in recent years past.

The annual survey by CareerBuilder.com and CareerRookie.com found that 54 percent of business surveyed said they would be hiring more college grads, and increase from 46 percent last year. The survey in 2010 found that 44 percent of employers surveyed planned to hire new grads that summer, with 43 percent saying so in 2009.

As for the majors most in-demand: 39 percent of employers said they were looking for business majors, followed by computer majors (24 percent) and then information sciences grads (23 percent).

As for the other top majors, those who majored in communications technologies, health professions, the clinical sciences, math, and statistics are expected to be the most sought after.

Other good news for this year’s grads: employers are planning to pay more when it comes to starting salaries.

The survey reported that 20 percent of employers said they would pay $30,000 or less, while 38 percent said they’d be paying $50,000 or more. Thirty percent will start new grads out with a salary between $30,000 and $40,000, while 21 percent will deliver salaries between $40,000 and $50,000.

Be sure to watch what’s on your social media profiles: 15 percent of those employers surveyed said they didn’t hire a recent grad because they didn’t like what they saw on the candidate’s social media feeds.

The survey also found that, while a good GPA is important, so are extracurricular activities such as part-time work while in school, internships and volunteering. In fact, of those surveyed, 53 percent of employers said they looked at volunteer work as “relevant experience.”

If you’re still in college, or a recent grad, working in temporary assignments also counts as “relevant.” If you’re at school in the NYC area, contact a recruiter at Winston Resources. We’d love to talk to you more about the short- and long-term temporary assignments we offer, as well as direct-hire opportunities if you’re looking for regular employment. We look forward to hearing from you!

A recent survey of more than 2,300 hiring managers and human resources professionals by CareerBuilder.com showed that more than one-third of them use social media sites to check up on job candidates, about 37 percent. Of those that did, about two-thirds used both Facebook and LinkedIn to review applicants, while only about 15 percent used Twitter.

Companies gave a number of reasons why they used the social media sites. The reason given most often – by about two-thirds of the companies – was to see if the job candidate presents himself or herself in a professional manner. About half looked at an applicant’s online profile to determine whether the person would be a good fit for the company. And half of the companies also said they looked to see if they can learn more about the candidate’s qualifications. Another third reported looking to see how well-rounded the applicant’s background was. And about 10 percent said they looked to see if there was anything on the site that might disqualify the candidate from the job.

About one-third of the company officials who looked online said they found information there that led them to cross the candidate off of their list. Some of the major reasons why candidates were dumped included inappropriate photos; talk about drinking or using drugs; evidence of poor communication skills; bad mouthing a former employer; evidence of discrimination based on race, gender or religion; and lying about qualifications.

The reasons cited by the companies for tossing candidates should provide a warning to everyone who uses social media sites. The number one reason for disqualifying a candidate was having an inappropriate photo on a site. Almost half of the companies disqualified applicants for that reason alone.

So, take heed if you’re actively looking for a job or if you plan to be looking – review all of the photos on your site and make sure all of them portray you in a positive way. Make sure they are professional – you should be dressed well, be well groomed, and look dignified. Lose the goofy looks or poses and remove any photos where you are horsing around. No photo is value neutral, that is, anyone who sees your photo is going to make some kind of judgment about you based on how you present yourself, so make sure you present yourself at your best.

For more tips on how to present yourself successfully to an employer, contact Winston Resources. We’ve been helping NYC-area job seekers find work since 1967, so we know a thing or two (or two thousand) about impressing employers. Contact us today!

s you’re getting ready to leave college and enter the “real world,” read below for some tips on how to craft a professional resume, one fit for the corporate world you soon may find yourself in.

These tips come from Resume 101: A Student and Recent-Grad Guide to Crafting Resumes and Cover
Letters that Land Jobs, by Quentin J Schulze, PhD.

You always should be on the lookout for typos, but you’d be surprised to learn that many people misspell their own name! Don’t just use spellchecker. Put your resume down for at least a day and then look at it again – if you’re name is misspelled you’re likely to see it then.

Watch out for the cute nicknames. If your name is John, Jack is fine. “But don’t use ‘Natster’ for Nate or Nathaniel,” Schulze writes. “Even if you want all of your friends and coworkers to call you ‘Butch’ or ‘Sammy’ (for Samantha), use your formal, given name on your résumé.”

You may want to consider seriously using a middle initial. This can be especially helpful if your first and last names are somewhat common. In fact, Schulze recommends that you use your full middle name if, for example, your name is John Smith. “John James Smith” helps you stand out.

As for contact info, if you use a cell phone, that’s fine. Just be sure, according to Schulze, that you’re going to have that number for several years. Employers often keep resumes on file for a long time and you’ll want to be sure your contact info stays current.

The same goes for your e-mail address. Choose an address you consider your “permanent” address.
And ditch the cutsey addresses, the tonyjean1, the suzieq526. Aim to have your full name as an e-mail address. John.Q.Smith@, or Smith-John@. (Note: it’s far better to have your first-name, last-name as an e-mail address.)

Schulze also recommends you stay away from e-mail addresses with numbers: “(for example, ‘17648he’ and ‘sJgB2O’).”

Make sure any phone numbers include area codes.

And, speaking of the phone, get rid of any too-cute, profane or otherwise unprofessional voice-mail messages: “Yo, dude! I’m not here so you know what to do!”

If currently employed, even if it’s a college, part-time position, don’t use your employer’s e-mail address to receive job queries. Your employer may give you permission to do so, but using the company’s e-mail address (yourname@companyname.com) makes it appear as if you are looking for work while using your employer’s equipment or on your employer’s time. That’s very bad form.

If you’re a new grad looking for your first “real” job in Manhattan, consider bringing your resume to Winston Resources. We can help you get your “foot in the door” with some of NYC’s best companies. We look forward to hearing from you!

If you’re trying to claw back some time out of your busy schedule, what can you do? One thing we can try is to look at things that really amount to little more than busy work in our schedule, but give us the illusion that we are accomplishing something.

Here are a few suggestions from business advisor Dorie Clark.

One is to ease up on checking email, which can act like a stimulus-response activity. We keep hitting that refresh button to see what new stuff has just come in. We tend to back into it more often than we know is good for us just to get that thrill of finding out what’s new. Instead, set up a schedule for when you will look at email, every hour or two hours, for example.

Also stop the mindless habits, things that you continue to do even though they serve no real purpose. One example is sending out the mountain of Christmas cards every year because it’s something you have always done. Do you need to send that many?

Another thing to look at is your reading. Did you get a subscription just because they were offering a deal on it? Do you feel you have to consult an array of news sources each day to keep up with things? Can you narrow down your professional reading list? Are all of those publications you are reading to supposedly help you with your job and career really helping that much? What can you cut out?

Are there tasks you are doing that are more trouble than they are worth? In other words, are there activities that make you jump through so many hoops compared to the return that is delivered that make the task really not worth doing?

Are you tying yourself up by making things more complicated than they need to be? Worrying or planning for things that never materialize comes under this category. Most of the things we fear will happen never do, and so we waste time making plans for nothing. There are a lot of “what ifs” to every project, but it is important to ask the what if only when appropriate.

Have you been wondering “what if” you found a new job? If so, and if you live in the NYC area, contact a recruiter at Winston Resources. We can help you find work with some of Manhattan’s best companies. We look forward to hearing from you!

Turns out the flexible workplace supporters were right after all: workplace flexibility really does help employees’ health and well-being!

A December 2011 study that appeared in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior followed a company that had instituted a new management system in which work was changed to that employees had considerable more flexibility in when and even where they did their work, so long as certain measurable results were met.

The study found that, among other things, employees reported getting almost an hour more of sleep a night. In addition, employees didn’t feel as obligated to work when sick and were more likely to take care of their health by visiting a doctor when ill, even if they had an approaching deadline.

The study also found that employees felt more in control of their schedules; they reported having less conflict between their professional and home lives, leading to better sleep and health, higher energy, and less stress.

Another study, this one reported in The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine in 2008, found that employees of all types – those who work in an office environment as well as a executives, and warehouse and production workers – reported that those employees who believed they had more flexibility in the workplace tended to have engage in healthier lifestyle activities and habits.

If you’re looking for flexible staffing services, whether you need a job or you need workers – contact Winston Resources. We’ve been serving job seekers and our client companies in the New York City area for more than 40 years and we’d look forward to be of service to you! Contact us today.

If you’re a college senior, if you haven’t already started looking for a full-time post-graduation job, get moving!

As you weave your way through the interview process, here are some questions you should ask the interviewer:

First of all, be sure you research as much as you can about your potential employer. This has become exceedingly easy to do via LinkedIn, the company’s own website, Google searches, etc.

During the interview, you’ll want to be sure to let the interviewer/hiring manager know you’ve done your research. This also should be easy to do as the hiring manager will no doubt ask you what you know about the company. If the interviewer doesn’t ask, you’ll undoubtedly find at least one opening as the interview progresses to let the interviewer know you’ve done your research.

As the interview proceeds, or near the end when the hiring manager asks if you have any questions, ask questions along these lines:

1. Why is the position open? You want to know how the opening came up. Did the previous job holder leave for another company, or was he or she promoted? This can be valuable information to you because if the person was promoted, the job can be a stepping stone for you, too.
2. Is the position a newly created position? If no one sat at the desk before, you’ll want to know why the company felt it important to create the position. Companies haven’t been doing a lot of job creation lately, so the fact that the company created a new position means it feels the position is critical to its success.
3. What are the two most critical task/goals you want the person you hire to accomplish first/fastest? This question allows you to show how your skills/experience will help the hiring manager accomplish see those goals met quickly.
4. What kind of people really thrive here? This question will help you see if you and this job will be a “good fit.” Most people who aren’t successful in a position don’t fail because they can’t do a job, but because they don’t fit in well with the company’s culture. A slow and steady person, for example, feels overwhelmed in a “go, go, go!” environment.
5. If you have two great candidates who seem to fit perfectly with your needs, all else being equal, what will help you decide on one person over the other? This question lets you get to the heart of what the interviewer is looking for. You can then give concrete examples of how you fit that description of the “perfect” candidate.
6. What is your next step? This question (almost always asked at the end of the interview), lets you know where the hiring manager is in the candidate selection process. You’ll find out if the hiring manager is still interviewing, if he or she is planning on calling top candidates for a final interview, and so on.

For more interview tips, contact a recruiter at Winston Resources. We can help you get that first post-college job at one of New York City’s top employers. Contact us today!

Coaching plays an important role in business, helping employees gain new insight and skills in their jobs. Some organizations handle the training of coaches internally, while other human resource departments encourage their coaches and managers to get certified in coaching. What are the benefits of coaching certification? Is it necessary?

In order to answer that question, you first need to decide on the goals you want to reach through the use of coaching, according to business consultants Ellen Kumata and Colleen Gentry. You need to set up clear objectives that you want your coaching to accomplish. How do you expect the coaching certification training to improve the performance of your coaches, to help you reach your goals? And will that improvement be great enough to justify the cost?

Sometimes a certification program does not provide enough of the nuts and bolts advice for your particular business that  you may be looking for. Rather, the program focuses on a general model of coaching that can be used by many different organizations. It helps people to understand the process of coaching itself.

You need to choose carefully the type of coaching program you want, Kumata and Gentry say. You need to figure out what kind of support you want your coaches to give; you need to make sure that that support matches your company’s goals and strategies. Do you want your coaches to guide a feedback process on performance, such as 360 degree interviews, or to help with orienting new employees, or develop new skills? The amount of training a coach will need depends on the kind of coaching he or she will be doing.

You may want to consult with outside experts with experience in developing coaching programs for businesses.

And, if you want to get the most out of your training of coaches, you need to create an environment in your company where coaching is valued and practiced widely, according to Kumata and Gentry. You need to find out who in your company is the best at coaching and use these individuals as a nucleus around which you build your program. You also need to establish evaluation methods for your coaching and ways of measuring coaching effectiveness to see how well your coaching programs are working.

Need some “coaching” on how to recruit great employees in the New York City area? Then call Winston Resources. We’re experts in sourcing, vetting and placing terrific professionals in temporary, temp-to-hire and direct hire assignments. We look forward to hearing from you.

If you work in human resources, you are dealing with email, often a lot of it. Like everyone else in business, you are probably trying to figure out how to get control over it.

In fact, email has become such a big issue at some places that they have threatened to ban it entirely. But experts in this area caution against taking such extreme measures, because it remains an important tool. It is becoming harder and harder to reach people any other way these days. To get a handle on it, experts say what you need to do is look at the causes of your email problem, and then follow some guidelines for getting control of it.

The experts say that email overload is actually the result of other shortcomings. For example, if a company does not have a clear decision-making process, and people are left with questions about business operations, they will resort to email to get their questions answered. As more email floods the system, a feedback loop begins as recipients get bogged down trying to reply to all the missives.

If meetings are effective at giving people what they need to know, they won’t have to resort to email to get information they need. Email used effectively reduces the need for meetings, and meetings used effectively reduce the need for email, according to business consultant David Allen.

You can also get a handle on email by reducing the inflow of messages. Don’t sign up for e-newsletters. Turn off notices from Twitter and Facebook. Tell colleagues not to copy you on every action item. Don’t send emails with messages such as “Thanks.”

Empty your inbox as soon as possible. Then, as new messages come in, delete those you don’t need to read or keep immediately. If you can respond to a message right away, do it. Then file the others in folders. Then choose a limited number of times during the day when you look at your email.

The experts also say it’s impractical to come up with sweeping company-wide rules on email use because everyone uses email differently. Try, they say, instead to come up with some email guidelines that apply to smaller groups or departments.

When you’re flooded with requests to fill positions at your New York City company, shoot an e-mail to one of the recruiters at Winston Resources. We can help you find great workers for your temporary and direct-hire needs. We look forward to hearing from you!

As just about everyone in today’s workforce knows, pension plans are going the way of the dinosaur, being replaced by employee contribution plans such as 401(k)s and Individual Retirement Accounts. But with the recent severe downturn in the economy, it has become evident that these retirement accounts leave a lot to be desired. Moreover, an additional problem is that many employees are not putting enough money into the plans.

Because of these problems, many human resource departments are attempting to help employees through the maze of retirement options to help ensure that they have resources after retiring, according to Rita Pyrillis of Workforce Management.

Employers and workers today are taking an intense look into retirement plans and what types work the best. With the recession, the amount of money in employee retirement plans took a big hit, in turn prompting them to delay retirement – which also affects their employers.

Companies are looking at combination plans, for example, that bring together a 401(k) component with some type of guaranteed benefit, such as a cash-balance plan, Pyrillis says. These kinds of plans are among the fastest growing, jumping about 20 percent since 2001.

Because many workers have not even been enrolling in the plans, employers are now taking action to do it automatically. Companies also are offering employees time with financial advisors, according to Pyrillis. Part of the reason for this is that when employees cannot retire, there is less opportunity for growth and advancement for younger workers, which in turn affects employee morale. If the regular cycle of employees retiring and new ones coming on board is disrupted, the company is faced with an aging group of increasingly disengaged workers simply hanging onto their jobs because they cannot afford to do otherwise.

Some business analysts say that the shift in responsibility for retirement from the employer to the employee has led to a big erosion of trust between workers and employers. As a result, in order to attract and retain good workers, employers are increasingly feeling pressure to take a more active role in retirement plans.

Two of the most prevalent trends right now, according to experts, are measures employers are taking to automatically enroll employees in retirement programs, and the increased use of target-date funds, which rebalance an investment portfolio toward less risky assets as a person’s retirement date approaches.

Winston Resources has been helping Manhattan-area companies find great temporary and direct-hire workers since 1967. We’d love to do the same for your firm. Contact us today!

Many employees often undertake big, long-term projects at work. It may be a project with no definite deadline, or with a deadline that is several months away.

These are the projects that often create the most anxiety, says business consultant Peter Bregman. Sometimes they lead to procrastination, until the deadline looms before you. Often, you may not even know what you need to do to get started, and when you do start, you find that you don’t know everything you need to know or have the skills you need to finish it, Bregman says. And, other more urgent things keep popping up, so we lay the long-term project aside.

The standard advice to getting a big project done is to break it up into smaller parts, concentrate on the next step to move ahead, and set incremental deadlines along the way. It’s good advice, Bregman says, but it’s not enough.

It’s not enough because it doesn’t address the real culprit behind our procrastination – our fear of failure. We are afraid that we will fail, Bregman says, that we will spend all of our time on it, neglecting other things, and in the end it won’t be very good anyway.
So how do we handle this fear – the elephant in the room?

Don’t pretend it’s not there, Bregman says, acknowledge that you are afraid. Don’t try to downplay it, because that is just another form of denial – denying the reality of the situation. It’s a natural feeling. Moreover, Bregman says, by trying to ignore it, we stoke that fear even more, because it’s always there in the background gnawing at us.

But by admitting to your fear, you also are admitting that you may not be able to meet your expectations, Bregman says. By doing this, you are acknowledging that your effort is not going to be perfect.  This will help you get started, because it is that desire for perfection, or something close to it, that often prevents us from moving ahead.

Also, by accepting your fear, you also are accepting the fact that you don’t have everything you need to get your project done, and this in turn will spur you to seek out the information, skills or other support you need, Bregman says.

After you have confronted and accepted your fear, make the project a priority. In fact, Bregman says, make it one of your top five priorities. To do this, you may have to figure out what you are going to bump off your priority list in order to make room for the project.

Then, he says, you can go back to the standard advice of breaking it up into parts focusing on those parts and setting deadlines in your calendar.

When you need great people for either temporary or direct-hire assignments at your Manhattan-based company, call upon the recruiters at Winston Resources to find you skilled and reliable professionals. Contact us today!