Author: knjohn

5 Common Hiring Myths Debunked | Business News Daily

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Hiring a new employee is a big decision for businesses of any size. Whether it’s your first hire or your hundredth, there are numerous factors that need to be considered before sending a job offer to a candidate.

This monumental task is made even more difficult by the conflicting advice hiring managers receive. Are job hoppers bad hires because they’re disloyal, or should they be hired for their well-roundedness? Should you ignore résumés without any direct industry experience, or give those individuals the chance to start their careers? Do you set aside a decent candidate in the hope that your perfect employee will apply for the job?

Read More

U.S. job creation weak, even as unemployment rate falls to 4.7% | CNN Money

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

U.S. unemployment fell to 4.7%, the lowest rate since 2007. But job creation was very weak.

The U.S. economy only added 38,000 jobs in May, according to the Labor Department. It was the worst monthly job gain since 2010.

It’s also well below April’s meager job gains of 123,000. Job creation in the last two months has been markedly below the average of 200,000 jobs created per month over the past couple years.

The drop in unemployment came as more disheartened Americans stopped looking for jobs and dropped out of the labor force in May.

‘It’s a pretty gloomy report, hard to find a silver lining in this one,” says Curt Long, chief economist at the National Association of Federal Credit Unions.

Read More

5 Things to Do to Fight Business Security Risks | Getentrepreneurial

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Business security has come into the spotlight in the past few years, mainly due to high profile security breaches like the ones at Sony, Ashley Madison and Kaspersky Lab. Small businesses are routinely targeted by cyber criminals, due to the unsophisticated security systems that they have in place, making it easy for the attackers to steal money, data, and other business information.

Security breach compromises sensitive business data and, in many instances, lead to complete destruction of data. When credit card or financial information is stolen, it makes millions of your users or customers highly vulnerable to fraud. Digital natives place a lot of importance on how companies deal with cyber security, and prefer to do business with brands that will value and protect their personal information.

C-suite executives need to be aware of the cyber security risks that businesses face, and should have a sound plan to tackle them.

Here are a few of the top business security risks, and the ways in which you can deal with them.

Read More

Japan babies cash incentivie | Business Insider

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Japan’s nationwide fertility rate just hit its highest level in 21 years.

The total rate increased to 1.46 in 2015, slightly up from the previous rate of 1.42 in 2014, according to the health ministry.

The biggest contribution to the increase came from women aged 30 to 34, according to Bloomberg.

This is no doubt a good sign for a country struggling with a looming demographic crisis.

However, what’s particularly interesting about this spike in fertility is that there was a correlation with cash incentives for new parents.

Read More

Demanding That Nonprofits Not Pay For Overhead Is Preventing Them From Doing Good | Co.Exist

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

When foundations or individuals donate to an organization, they often expect their money is going to triage the issue—providing clean water, feeding children—and not to paying for office space or corporate retreats for nonprofit workers. To solve this, most foundations pay only up to 15% of any socially good group’s indirect costs, things like office space, salaries, or equipment.

But a new report from Bridgespan, a consulting firm for nonprofits and philanthropists, says this is incredibly damaging. The result is a “starvation cycle” in which foundations are crippling the outfits they’re trying to support. In the commercial world, investors have come to expect that companies in different spaces require different overhead. There is no boilerplate expense sheet. That’s a lesson nonprofit funders have failed to learn.

Read More

Cellphone radiation is still safer than viral science stories | Mashable

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

You are almost definitely slowly killing yourself.

Eating poorly, smoking, riding motorcycles, watching The Bachelor — they’re all statistically proven to shorten the average life span (except maybe that last one).

As for using your cellphone? Not so much. The World Health Organization has said that cellphone radiation is “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” putting it in the same category as drinking coffee. In other words, we have no proof of an established causal link, but we can’t rule it out either.

That kind delineation is quickly trampled when it comes to new studies, one of which came out Friday, resulting in the usual freak out.

Read More

Commuter Smart Jacket From Levi’s Introduced |Small Biz Trends

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The barrier between us and the digital connectivity we need to work, play and live has been reduced by another factor with the announcement of the Levi’s Commuter Smart Jacket. So if you see someone walking down the street talking to themselves and swiping and tapping their clothes, no need for alarm, they could be wearing this Commuter smart jacket.

The new Levi’s Commuter smart jacket is fashioned in collaboration with Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) research along with Project Jacquard, which was created to embed technology in the clothes we wear.

Read More

The Importance of Manual Link Building: Why It Can’t Be Automated | HigherVisibility

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

There are certain goals that always seem to stay on the priority lists of brands and businesses. Drive traffic? Definitely. Grow the brand? A must. Develop relationships with consumers and other businesses? Absolutely. All of these factors are crucial to any given brand’s success and long-term achievement, and finding ways to address all of these goals is a necessity.

One of the most fundamental and widely performed strategies used to work on such goals is link building. A practice known to fuel site traffic, link building tends to be used by brands and businesses to leave a trail of bread crumbs across the internet leading back to their own page. While that’s not necessarily a bad way of looking at the SEO practice, it does take away from the emphasis that should be placed on the importance of manual link building with quality in mind.

Read More