Free Republic

“We’re feeling a little bit of the tightness in the market,” said Tim Grace, the global chief talent officer for Toys “R” Us. Mr. Grace said the retailer is on track to meet its goal of hiring 40,000 seasonal workers, but added that “we are not getting as many applicants as we have in the past.” With unemployment at a seven-year low, hourly retail work is becoming less attractive to job seekers who now have more options. The number of people employed part-time for economic reasons—those who want to work full-time but can only get a part-time job—has shrunk by...

Facing accusations that it cannot adequately protect the White House, the U.S. Secret Service plans to hire 1,100 more officers and agents for an agency besieged by embarrassing scandals and security lapses, two law enforcement sources with direct knowledge of the plans said. The addition of 700 uniformed division officers and 400 agents over five years would expand its staff of 6,647 by nearly 17 percent, the biggest hiring increase in more than a decade at the 150-year-old agency whose job it is to protect the president, his family, and senior officials, along with fighting financial crime. The Secret Service...

Myles UdlandSeptember 2, 2015Deutsche Bank's Torsten Sløk thinks the labor market is more than strong enough to justify interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve In an email on Wednesday, Sløk writes that he continues to talk to clients who don't believe the US economy is anything other than weak, "not good," or on the verge of recession. But the indicators Sløk is looking at show nothing of the sort. In fact, the opposite. Last week, we highlighted charts from Sløk that showed, to him, an economy picking up steam. On Wednesday, Sløk turned his focus to the labor market,...

Hillary Clinton’s recent speech in which she decried “quarterly capitalism” has predictably generated a great deal of commentary. With good reason. Not only is “quarterly capitalism” a whopper of a myth, Clinton’s solution to what is not a problem would bring great harm to the economy. Missed by Clinton is the basic economic truism learned the hard way by European countries that you can’t hire people easily if you can’t easily fire them. As readers will soon see, the hiring analogy is apt. But first, it’s important to address her argument that excessive investor focus on quarterly earnings has somehow...

Last week the Labor Department offered some seemingly very good news: U.S. employers now have more job openings than ever previously recorded. There is a bounty of opportunities to be had. And yet to unemployed workers, it may not feel that way. That’s because many companies are acting like big teases. They say they want to hire, then drag their feet. In fact, the average time required to fill a job opening has also just reached an all-time high: 27.3 days, or almost a month, according to an important and underappreciated monthly data release called the DHI-DFH Mean Vacancy Duration...

Percentage of African-Americans in U.S. Police Departments Remains Flat Since 2007 But police hiring of other minorities has increased, report shows By Ben Kesling and Cameron McWhirter May 14, 2015 2:43 p.m. ET 28 COMMENTS The percentage of African-Americans in U.S. police departments has remained flat since before the recession, even as police hiring of other minorities has increased, according to a U.S. Department of Justice survey released Thursday. A lack of black officers, especially in communities with large African-American populations, has been cited frequently in the wake of police-involved deaths of black residents that sparked riots in cities from...

A pair of researchers from Cornell decided to test the theory that there is a bias against women pursuing academic careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) and found that there is none. “Results revealed a 2:1 preference for women by faculty of both genders across both math-intensive and non-math-intensive fields, with the single exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference,” Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci wrote in an article published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They surveyed “873 tenure-track faculty (439 male, 434 fmale) from biology, engineering, economics...

>With more than 330 million people using the service to list their resumes, find jobs, or find new hires, LinkedIn has a lot of data about the job market. To close out 2014, the company released a list of the top skills people who got hired this year had listed on their profiles and that recruiters searched for the most. These are the 10 skills that got people jobs this year:

Ann Coulter: Would It Kill You To Hire More Black Cops? (Yes) Ann Coulter August 27, 2014 As the story of Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson’s shooting of Michael Brown begins to look less clear-cut than we were led to believe by Brown’s friend, Dorian Johnson, the “voices of oppression” on MSNBC now say the real issue is that there aren’t enough blacks on the Ferguson police force. As Brown may or may not have said seconds before his death: I give up. If the Ferguson police are forced to hire more minorities and women for the sake of...

Bank Robbery Suspect Who Fatally Shot Himself During Chase Was Former Atlanta Police Lieutenant Police said Dodd was a former lieutenant with the Atlanta police and was visiting Matteson from Georgia Wednesday, Nov 19, 2014 • Updated at 4:05 PM CST A man suspected of robbing a bank Friday morning and leading police on a car chase through the south suburbs before fatally shooting himself has been identified as a former lieutenant with the Atlanta Police Department. Maurice Chester Dodd, 44, died of a gunshot wound to the head and his death was ruled a suicide, according to the Cook...

The Labor Department just released statistics that show that job openings in June are at a 13-year high. But while hiring is also up, it's not nearly at the levels that the job openings are. For job-hunters, the disconnect can be frustrating and painful. What's going on, and how can you get around this? * Not all jobs posted will be filled. Sometimes businesses post jobs with no intention of actually filling them. They're looking for applicants to put in their files so that they have a supply of candidates when a job does open up. Sometimes, positions are posted,...

WMBF in Myrtle Beach, SC, reported Wednesday on the growing trend of businesses hiring only part-time workers, due to an inability to afford Obamacare. This situation leaves workers without healthcare and without a full-time income or other benefits. Local staffing agencies say more small business are starting to hire more part time employees. Not because there is more full time work, but as WMBF reporter Mandy Noell found out, it's because they can't afford to have more full time employees. Obamacare places requirements for health care benefits that many small businesses just cannot afford to pay. As a result, they...

As we reported previously, and as hardly anyone else will discuss, in June the composition of added jobs was rather abysmal: according to the Household survey, while over half a million full-time jobs were lost, this was offset by less paying, benefits-free part-time jobs rising by 799K, the most since 1993. So what does that mean for the job quality as reported by the Establishment Survey. Let's dive in.Of the 288K jobs added in June, here were some of the biggest contributors: Retail Trade: 40.2KLeisure and Hospitality: 39KEducation and health: 38KGovernment: 26KTemp Help Service: 13.1K What about the well-paying...

It happens to most people at some point during their careers: They find themselves applying for jobs they’re overqualified for. There are several reasons this happens -- they may have been out of work for some time, they’re switching fields, or they’re simply interested in trying something new. [....] To overcome that perception, here are some ways to get hired when you’re overqualified.

I have some good news, and I have some bad news. First, the good news: Employers have more job openings today than they’ve had at any time since the Great Recession began. The bad news: Employers may be posting jobs, but they’re taking longer than ever before to fill them. It now takes 24 working days for the average job opening to be filled. That’s the longest hiring delay since at least 2001, the first year for which numbers are available, according to a recent report from Dice Holdings based on research by Steven J. Davis, R. Jason Faberman and...

Hiring managers are less picky than they used to be, but misspellings and typos can still count against you. So can “creative” job titles. It was bound to happen, now that millions of us are merrily texting and tweeting away. Job interviewers have become more tolerant of spelling mistakes and other errors on resumes than they used to be. Consider: Only about 17% of hiring managers say they would toss a resume in the circular file if it had a single snafu in it, according to a new poll from staffing firm Accountemps. That’s a sharp drop from 40% who...

"Our local field sales leader and recruiters are seeking professionals with financial or sales backgrounds, who are dedicated to customer service and want the support of the Allstate brand and team behind their new business venture."

COLUMBIA, SC — The story of an accused arsonist’s employment at a South Carolina nuclear plant ended quietly when SCE&G learned more about the criminal charges and fired him. But while the man isn’t believed to have been a threat to safety at the V.C. Summer power plant, experts say his hiring underscores the need to thoroughly check prospective employees before putting them on the payroll and giving them access to atomic energy plants. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week cited SCE&G for not completely checking the worker’s background and allowing him “unescorted access” to the nuclear plant about 25...

<p>The great division among businesses and economists over the impact of raising the minimum wage rages on. More than half of all businesses who pay minimum wage say they would significantly slow their hiring if the federal wage is raised to $10.10 per hour, according to a new survey from a staffing firm that was cited by The Wall Street Journal.</p>

The computer giant can afford to abandon traditional measures of intelligence. Most companies can't. Laszlo Bock, the head of human resources at Google, made quite a splash with his announcement last year that the technology firm has changed the way it hires people. Gone are the brainteaser-style interview questions that so many candidates abhorred. But also gone, it would seem, is any concern with discovering how smart applicants really are. "GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless.... We found that they don't predict anything," Bock told the New York Times. Let's take Bock at...