If you’ve applied for a job and never heard back—and who hasn’t been there?—you’ve probably had the nagging suspicion nobody even read your résumé. You probably weren’t too far wrong. Many job applications don’t get read with any kind of care or attention, because recruiters spend, on average, an estimated (pdf) six seconds on a résumé.
Salary negotiations have plenty of artistry, but research is showing there’s also an underlying science.
Last year, after reddit was used to spread hacked private photos of celebrities, then CEO Yishan Wong was heavily criticized by users for taking down the subreddits doing so, only to insist that the platform was committed to free speech, no matter how unsavory. Last week, after a negative reaction to a policy change by new CEO Ellen Paot that included banning five subreddits (including the very popular “/r/fatpeoplehate”) because they caused real-life harassment, Wong wrote a post on Quora about why he supports her move.
There’s huge variation in work and leisure culture around the world, often as the result of legally prescribed or enabled policies. Depending on where you are, working 50-plus hours a week might make you a huge outlier, or comparatively normal, according to the OECD’s updated Better Life Index, published last week.
Despite already extremely high valuations, the incredible run-up in biotech stocks continues. The Nasdaq Biotech Index is up 20% this year after five straight years of outperformance, and short interest is at a low.
After years on the back foot, Whole Foods is getting aggressive again.
Access to upper-crust professions is one of the surest paths to upward social mobility, and it’s often unavailable to the working class. That’s especially true of jobs at elite firms in the UK, where a study by the government’s Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission found that class divides strongly persist in recruiting and hiring.
Fascination with dinosaurs is a global phenomenon, according to Nick Carpou, president of domestic distribution at Universal.
Jeb Bush’s anticipated campaign for President may have a logo, and it’s an enthusiastic one. Bush tweeted one out this morning ahead of the official launch of his presidential campaign, expected tomorrow:
It’s a rough time for Greece, to say the least. The economy has utterly collapsed, and there’s been an unending and exhausting cycle of negotiation, heated rhetoric, concession, and eventual bailout. This week saw IMF negotiators stomp off from talks, citing intractable differences, despite the fact that Greece has a huge payment due to the organization at the end of the month. The country is at risk of default, yet again. To top it off, Greece’s soccer team, a source of pride for the country, lost to the Faroe Islands 2-1 yesterday.
Parts of Tbilisi, Georgia, are on lockdown as police attempt to find wild animals that escaped from the city zoo, after massive flooding on June 14. Among the missing are eight lions, tigers, hyenas, a jaguar, wolves, and one crocodile, thought to have broken free after their enclosures filled with water from the Kura river, which runs alongside the zoo.
The great law school exodus continues, propelled by a weak job market for lawyers and securer, better paid opportunities in other professions. According to updated data from the US Law School Admissions Council (LSAC), as of June 5 the number of applicants to accredited American law schools are down 2.5% from the same point last year. As of this week in 2014, 95% of applications had been received so there aren’t likely to be many more coming in:
Dov Charney is not an easy act to follow for new CEO Paula Schneider. In addition to being the iconic founder of the brand, he’s left the company in dire financial straits, and continues to embroil it in a legal morass.
In relatively rapid fashion, online job marketplaces such as LinkedIn and Xing have dramatically changed the labor market in many countries. And their effect will continue to grow, according to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute: These platforms could benefit 540 million people around the globe and add $2.7 trillion to global GDP by 2025, the analysts predict.
One of the major sticking points of the Trans-Pacific Partnership 12-nation trade deal has been the United States’ attempt to include protections for drug prices. American negotiators seem to have given up (paywall) on part of that plan, which would have allowed drug companies to appeal prices they felt were too low when set by governments elsewhere. But according to a leaked document published in the New York Times (paywall), they’re still angling to require governments to disclose how they arrived at price controls and reimbursement rates for specific drugs—a proposal that is profoundly disliked by public health officials, and by other countries involved in the negotiations.
If you want proof of the deep irrationality of America’s health care system, look no farther than Florida. Of the 50 hospitals in America that mark up their prices the most, a full 40% are in Florida, according to a new study (paywall) appearing in the health policy journal Health Affairs.
As billionaires and education advocates go back and forth on the value of a college degree, an in-depth survey (pdf) that the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) just released offers an early glimpse of how most (65%) of the 266,119 people who graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in the US last year are making out on the job market.
Late last month, McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook announced that, as of July 1, the company would end its longstanding policy of reporting monthly sales figures, as a way to shift focus to its longterm turnaround plans. It’s not hard to see why; This month’s numbers, its second-to-last monthly update, according to Easterbrook’s plan, are essentially an advertisement for the company’s decline.
The gender gap in the technology industry is enormous and entrenched. Diversity stats revealed by Google then a series of other companies showed that women make up only a tiny fraction of the workforce.
The culture of working enormously long hours is ingrained in many workplaces. But for men in particular, it also has a lot to do with comparing themselves to peers. When men don’t work as much as colleagues and friends, they report being unhappy and shift their work schedule to match or better them, according to a new working paper from researchers at Maastricht University and Erasmus University in the Netherlands.
Grade inflation has been an enduring controversy at elite American institutions, with Wellesley College and Princeton University attempting to curtail the practice. And yet it seems to be going strong: A survey of the graduating senior class published in the Harvard Crimson revealed that the average self-reported GPA was 3.64, and more than half of the students reported a GPA above 3.67, the cutoff for an A minus average.
It’s tough to know who at a company makes what, or what the average salary is. Companies tend to be cagey about that information, so employees and jobseekers are generally left in the dark.
Two years ago, Harvard Business School took the highly unusual step of removing the word count limit from its application essays, and making them entirely optional. The point was that getting into the school “is not an essay writing contest,” and nixing the word count made the experience more like the real world, admissions head Dee Leepold told Bloomberg.
Though the impressive salaries for engineers in Silicon Valley have been widely reported, it’s tough getting reliable firm-by-firm data.
