For Employers and CEOS- Empowered Employees Are The Key To Hyper Growth

Heard the expression "you catch more flies with honey than vinegar"? It rings true also in getting things done in the office. Happy employees are productive employees. Happier employees lead to much higher employee retention rates that, in turn, keeps clients more content, and signed up longer and ensure your profits and signed on clients stay as high as possible at all times. It doesn't matter if you employ 5 or 500 people, the key to success is a happy and non hostile work enviroment.

Making your office a happy place doesn't mean you stop enforcing rules or running your business as a business, it simply means you allow people to contribute more at work while you also focus on their welfare.

 Here are five aspects of the culture of a very successful social media company "Likeable" that in the cofounder's words "contributed directly to the company's hyper growth...

Read More

 http://www.inc.com/dave-kerpen/secrets-to-hyper-growth.html

INFOGRAPHIC - THE VALUE OF THANKING EMPLOYEES

http://wtginsights.com/news.asp?newsid=6396#.UPIUTG9QQhA

VIDEO - SKILLS YOU NEED TO GET HIRED

Hi y'all!!

There's been a lot of talk about how to get a job in Nigeria by building your skill base but can you honestly say you understand what this means? Technical skills are great but in today’s offices, Employers and CEOs need employees who add value to the organization beyond their technical skills. In the video link below, Technical hiring managers tell what they look for in new employees during the interview process, so why not have a watch!! 

Take care everybody and have a lovely Sunday!

21ST CENTURY SKILLS NEEDED IN TODAY'S WORKFORCE

Recruiting new staff is a blessing at times because it gives you an opportunity to hire the skills that you need and in the video below, Chuck House, Executive Director of Media X, Stanford University's membership research program on media and technology, talks about the new skills needed for 21st century jobs. If you are a CEO and run your own business, have a watch, you may learn something valuable :-) take care y'all 

HARD TRUTH - FIRST IMPRESSIONS COUNT ESPECIALLY AT JOB INTERVIEWS

Hi y'all and how are you doing this evening? In this age of more job seekers that jobs, it's shocking that so many people lose job opportunities simply because of bad manners and improper dressing. Nearly 40 million youths in Nigeria are unemployed and in case you didn't know, most employers believe more than more than half of this number is unemployable!! What does unemployable mean? Simply put, if you are unemployable, it is believed that you do not possess the basic and technical skills needed in today's job market. And untop of this unemployable palaver, we all know more and more people are returning from outside the country with their foreign Bachelors, Masters, and PhD degrees in order to job hunt so that means millions more added to the 40 million already looking for work!!!Despite all this, may young people apply for jobs, get through to the interview stage, and then never hear back from the company. Do you want to know why? Hard truth guys and girls, FIRST IMPRESSIONS STILL GO A LONG WAY IN NIGERIA. A bad attitude, bad dressing, and lack of preparedness will have you lose out on your job from the 1st minute and it doesn't matter how many 1st class degrees you possess nor certifications you have undertaken. So here are my free - acing your job interview - tips.

      

      Unless you are a technical genius and companies are begging you to   work for them, buy yourself a nice black trouser suit (guys and girls) and a pair of black shoes that you will use ONLY during interviews.

      Don’t color block the interviewer(s) to death

    Do NOT wear slippers, platforms, or wedges (if you have leg injury ladies, wear flat ballet pumps)

      Smile A LOT, and be confident (not arrogant)

I did a TV interview on job hunting tips for job seekers in Naija which I will post on my blog soon. Till then,

Take care y'all!!

NEW WEEK!! NEW WORK OUTFITS!

How are all my lovely ladies? Do you have an important meeting, interview, performance appraisal you need to be at next week? Remember, you are the brand and your dressing will determine how you are addressed so  how about we try a spot of power dressing this week starting Monday? I'll be rocking a fierce Ankara dress, heels, and a red cardigan - have to remember to take a pic and post :-) 

Here are a few  outfits I spotted online that i'll be using as inspiration for my work outfits this week. 

Have a great Monday ladies!! 

11 TIPS ON HOW TO COPE WITH A TERRIBLE JOB OR WORK SITUATION

If everybody loved their job, they probably wouldn't call it work. The lucky ones are people who have figured out how to get paid for doing what they love or have built up their skills set and put in hard work to get a job/Starter company they love.

But for some of us, the workplace can be miserable, so much so that it consumes your whole life. lets face it though, you will not always have the luxury of leaving a job you don't like and sometimes we are responsible for our misery at work - sometimes we pick the wrong jobs, pick a fight with the wrong person, or simply ignore all the warning signings of a bad situation at work until it becomes a TERRIBLE situation. 

If you find yourself dreading work in the morning, or unable to relax at the end of the week, here are a few tips to help you cope with a job you hate - whether you decide to tough it out or find something else.

These 11 tips will help you cope regardless of why you hate your job, whether it's a terrible supervisor, or nasty coworkers.

Read more: http://www.askmen.com/money/career_100/123_career.html#ixzz2Ho64996v

Nigeria: Anarchy in Government Recruitment Process

we must always shine our eyes when it comes to Job hunting in Nigeria...read on 

A series of revelations in the recruitment process of some federal government agencies raises troubling questions regarding the role of the Federal Character Commission (FCC).

Early last year, the Federal Road safety Commission (FRSC) was the focus of a sustained public outcry over its recruitment pattern. There were reports that the commission ignored laid-down rules to recruit personnel mainly from a particular group of states in the south-south region. Similar allegations surfaced with regards to the Nigeria Customs Service recruitment exercise. The FCC made the right noises about looking into the allegations; if it did, the result has not made any impact.

And the reasons are beginning to become clear. Last month, the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) was forced to defend itself by intense public complaints following reports that the 4,560 officers it had scheduled to recruit this year came mainly from the geographical region of its Comptroller General, Mrs Rose Chinyere Uzoma, whose retirement from service is imminent.The scandalous nature of the recruitment pattern appeared to have embarrassed the supervising Ministry of the Interior where the minister, Abba Moro, announced that the exercise had been cancelled.Though Mrs Uzoma denied that there was no exercise in the first place to warrant the government to cancel it, the details were leaked to the media. The details illustrate the seedy schemes that generally characterize recruitment processes in various government departments, and the influence politicians have over them.

culled from the Daily Trust Online Newspaper 

Paradoxes women will still face in 2013

Easing into the New Year, one big hope we have for 2013 is that women continue to bridge the gender gap in terms of pay equality and access to leadership positions. So much of the news was good last year: women were better educated than ever, we continued to claim coveted CEO roles at companies such as IBM and Yahoo, and one study even reported that women were the primary breadwinners in a majority of households in the US. That sounds like progress. Yet, in order to clear a path for greater advancement and parity in 2013, we need to address the difficult paradoxes that women leaders continue to face

Read more....

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/01/six_paradoxes_women_leaders_fa.html

HOW TO SEARCH FOR A JOB WITH EYES WIDE OPEN AND GREATER CONVICTION

Hiya dear readers, Happy 2013!! It’s a new year and I am absolutely delighted to bring you an article from a guest writer - Oluwaseun Babajide. He is a writer, entrepreneur, and an operational risk manager working/living/excelling in the United Kingdom and he is here to share with us how to win that job with a winning resume/Cover letter

ENJOY!!

OK, SO WHAT’S THE ISSUE? Millions of people are currently not working in Nigeria and cannot get a job no matter how many resumes they send and people they beg. WHY IS THIS? People are still failing to understand that a job search is much more than writing a jagged resume and sending it randomly to companies that post adverts for vacancies! Unfortunately, this is still a common practice followed by Nigerian job aspirants and is goes like this

ü  send applications to prospective employers with resume attached

ü  Become too lazy and bothered to write a proper message to accompany the resume.

ü  Forget to spell check the resume and make sure it’s professional

ü  Write clichéd objective statements and generic cover letters that contain all the wrong information and not enough of the right information.

But before we discuss how to formulate a job application along with a resume, it is worth discussing where to look for a job. The majority of Nigerian job aspirants don’t know which door to knock to enter a state of employment.

HELP! WHERE DO I START MY SEARCH? While there are a plenty of job agents out there in the market, trusting them is always a risky proposition. Nothing comes for nothing and sometimes your hard earned money will be taken from you and a job still will not materialize. The most reliable way of searching for a job is through the various online job portals which have tie-ups with all the companies in Nigeria and keep advertising vacancies relating to every profile. Some of the most reliable online job sites include:

·         jobberman.com

·         Naijahotjobs.com

·         Ngcareers.com

·         hotnigerianjobs.com

·         jetheights.com

·         latestnigerianjobs.com

All you have to do is to register yourself on these websites and upload your resume. They will contact you for any job vacancy that suits your qualifications and work experience. It is also important you network so make sure you are active on twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIN.

OK BACK TO THE BUSINESS OF WRITING A WINNING RESUME... What the Nigerian youth must realize is that their resume is your BRAND identity and how you shape it will determine the impression you make on who sees it (LIGHT BULB moment!) the nicer the Resume, the better chance you stand to have it shortlisted for you to come in and get one step closer to your job. Your resume should be created in a way that it highlights real professional achievements and skills. If your Resume was a person, it must remind the reader of a three piece suit not a scattered tattered colour rioting pair of brown shorts and a T-Shirt.  If you are someone with prior work experience, make sure your responsibilities and achievements with the previous employers occupy the bulk of the space on your resume. If you have a problem with selling yourself or with spotting written grammatical errors, don’t kid yourself – Go get a professional writer. BEYOND YOUR CV - THE COVER LETTER...While sending out the applications to employers don’t just say ‘hi’ with one more line to follow, such as “Enclosed is my resume”. The body of the mail should be a VERY SHORT summary of the application so that the person reading the application has a fair idea about YOU. Once again If you have a problem with selling yourself or with spotting written grammatical errors, don’t kid yourself – Go and pay for a professionally written cover letter or seek/plead/cry/demand for help from someone better at writing than you are. THE WAY FORWARD...Nigeria is marred by many issues and sadly people, unemployment happens to be one of them and as a job seeker, you need more than zeal and a roughly patched up resume to get a job – so put in the grunt work and produce the 3 piece suit of all resumes and cover letters and I guarantee you’ll be one step close to your goal!

AUTHOR BIO

This article was written by Oluwaseun Babajide, the founder of www.sbabzy.com  and www.islotterygenerator.co.uk.  Blogging and crafting e-articles are a passion of his and he is an avid learner who loves to share knowledge with others. He believes that networking and partnership are key to personal and business success so feel free to follow him on twitter @sbabzy1 or send him a mail oluwaseun.babajide@sbabzy.com, he’ll be delighted to hear from you for sure!