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Skill Evaluation: The Basics of Evaluating Oneself

geek — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 00:56:36 +0000

A person who is just beginning to settle in a new job or someone who has already been in the same job for an extended period of time, usually drive for (or at least should) for the same thing: a good stand/position in the company in order to gain positive experience for a future job or promotion. While this is not difficult to judge, but succeeding in a position can boil down to a couple of essential variables that an employee can completely control if he chooses to:

a) The Work Attitude or Behavior

b) Genuine Interest in Work

c) Knowledge of the position

While the first two remain, by and large a bit difficult to alter depending on the work environment, the underneath meaning remains that, if the person is professional enough then he/she should be able to work in any environment. Professionalism is defined in different ways in every company and companies at large spend a sizable amount in the skill assessment of potential employees before taking them on board.

As for the second variable, the employee must also be flexible enough to learn more about their position so that they can develop an interest if one is not immediately there.

The third one is easy to alter and this is the one we should focus on. Being exceptionally knowledgeable on a subject requires regular and methodical reviews of all topics related to the job. Accessing diverse educational resources frequently can help develop your professional career. There are various online skill evaluation programs which are helpful in order to assess you or your employees’ skills.

Being a Sales personnel for example, you can register at all of the big Sales websites to learn of the latest Sales information and products. Further, participating in Sales Conferences, will foster knowledge-sharing including insight into what other companies are doing and so on. While, some may feel that having in depth knowledge on such basic aspects of the job is unnecessary (since others can comprehend the information themselves), a part of what defines an expert is the one who can effectively speak on a topic without aides or assistance. Start with the easy variable and become a knowledge center by setting some time aside for reoccurring review sessions.

What is the Cost of Maintaining Non-Performers

geek — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 19:49:37 +0000

Many companies do not realize the amount of money wasted on people that turn out to be non-performers in the company. While most companies have felt the economic crunch, others are still trying to keep upbeat about it. It becomes then really important to be able to recognize those who are hard workers, and from those who are only costing money to the organization. Although an early step of identification is to weed out wrong hires during their skill assessment, but many a times due to reasons such as lack of judgment, lack of proper skill evaluation etc. companies’ end up hiring the wrong candidate. There are many reasons why eliminating non-performers in your business would turn out to be a smart business move.

Reasons why not to keep Non-Performers in the Company:

They Cause Unworthy Customer Service- A non-performer generally brings in a wrong attitude towards your business and work in general. If you have a non performer at work, their attitude will ultimately show up on your client. These are the kind of people who do not want to do anything to help the company and are not impelled or inclined to provide a good customer service. You client would naturally not like to deal with someone who is not catering to its needs, and as a business owner you must address these issues before you lose your precious clientele towards competition
They Cost You a Lot of Money- They Cost You a Lot of Money- Money and productivity is lost when a non-performer is not doing his or her job. Additionally, you may be missing out on gaining new clientele. Having an employee who works hard and gets the job done is what will help you and your business grow and be more productive. There are many online skill evaluation services available which may help you to target on a good hire. It is ultimately your responsibility as a leader or a manager to keep productivity high and the employee focused on the company goals. GeekEvaluation provides a similar kind of service.
They Bring Down Company Morale – Often because the non performer is not doing his own work, other in the company end up completing his task. This causes frustrations amongst the employees and leads to low company morale. This again in turn can lead to lower productivity and in a Catch 22 situation, this has the potential for creating more non performers. This should be avoided at all costs. Otherwise, there is an inherent risk in losing employees and clientele.

When you eliminate non-performers from the payroll, or better still have a robust process of online screening for hiring, your business can grow and prosper. Non-performers are like opposition wicket-keepers, not helping you anyway to reach your goals. As it is your responsibility, you need to know your employees well, keep them focused and productive, and keep others from becoming non-performers

Companies Need of ‘Conscious Hiring’

geek — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 01:44:18 +0000

Make no mistake about it, any companies hiring decisions make or break its business. What companies often overlook while making a wrong hire is the cost of: training time, management time and workforce productivity losses which ultimately leads to loss of company morale, employee productivity and its sales. Elementary to building a business with top resources, is implementing a hiring process that attracts the right people ; screens and evaluates candidates who have the right attitude and engages them to come on board ready to hit on the company’s challenges.

Companies with specific goals and mission require a strategic Talent Acquisition plan tailored with a carefully defined ‘New employee selection process’ to get them where they wish to reach. Business leaders of these organizations know that the success of their organization depends on the quality of their people inside. Hence, a conscious hiring process takes into account for this very purpose.

Each employment position in the company is defined by its company’s business philosophies, mission, and vision and core values. Only after the core business objectives are considered concrete, can the selection process get implemented. Conscious Hiring trains and enables the HR department to identify the right candidate suitable for the right role affecting an early engagement of the candidate throughout the hiring process. A fundamental aspect of a Conscious-hiring process is the systematic integration and ‘on boarding’ of the new hire into the organization.

The bottom line is, to have a healthy organization with the right people, with an effective and ‘can do’ attitude.

Geek Evaluation’s online Skill assessment tool helps you in hiring the right candidate

Why is it so difficult to find an excellent employee?

geek — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 16:03:53 +0000

How many excellent managers, doctors, salesmen, secretaries, cleaners, cooks or designers do you know? I bet very, very few. It’s damn hard to find a good worker, of any kind. Since being in the recruitment field it puzzles me a lot: why only few people are becoming true dedicated professionals in their area? Why are so many just mediocre performers?

Can it be that mostly people are just in the wrong jobs? And if it is so then why are they not trying to find the right one? Can it be that for some people it is just not important?

Based on my personal experiences and observations, I think the lack of drive in employees varies depending on individual circumstances that can range from burnout to “it’s just a job” attitudes. The rationale can include psychological reasons that hold back that many, which includes: “Show me the money (no real loyalty), no matter how hard I work, I will never get a promotion”; “It’s not what you know, but who you know, the economy is gone to hell and a hand basket, I have no passion for what I do”

All of this said, yes most people feel they are in the wrong jobs. They are forced to work from their weaknesses because they have to conform to a job description. As such, people cannot use their passions to work from their strengths to flourish in their work. This ultimately leads to burnout and a losing proposition for the employer and employee. Also, if an employee is only focused on just “getting that paper” their performance is distinctively different in comparison to someone, who is career driven. The drive, dedication and loyalty is grossly different.
The mediocrity is perpetuated in many ways in our modern culture and people see no reason to excel at their jobs or in their lives. Only a leader who believes in the people’s potential for brilliance can help overcome the mediocrity in our modern culture. It’s a daunting task, but is needed if we are to evolve in our economics let alone our existence.

Don’t forget to try to our online Skill assessment tool

Passed out from college , No Job- Sue the college !!!

geek — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 03:18:45 +0000

Sounds very strange but this has been the case recently. Trina Thompson is suing her alma mater Monroe College in New York city for the $70,000 tuition because the school has failed to secure gainful employment for her. She claims that the college’s Office of career advancement was not helpful with her job search. Thompson is suing for an additional amount of $2,000 for stress caused by her inability to find work.

Not a very good example in this economy in US when 10% of population is with work and graduates who are passing out of college are finding themselves burdened with college loan and not in situation to pay that off.

Twitter’s programming language

geek — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 15:21:58 +0000

If somebody would have asked me few days back this question , I would not have known the answer. But I always wanted to find about the technology and tricks used at high performance sites like twitter , facebook and ebay.

During discussions with one of the colleagues, I came to know that core of twitter has been written in Scala. And that set me going . Twitter had really high load going to 5000 tweets per minutes at times.

I really wanted to find out more about Scala and learn about it.

What is Scala ?

Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages, enabling Java and other programmers to be more productive. Code sizes are typically reduced by a factor of two to three when compared to an equivalent Java application.

Many top-notch programmers and industry leaders have already been captivated by Scala. James Strachan even says that scala is the long term replacement of java and javac.

Find more about scala here

Google launches Chrome OS. Moves into Microsoft and Apple’s turf

geek — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 02:54:31 +0000

If I write it down today and say “I always told you so” , you would not believe me. But couple of years back while discussing with my friends and colleagues I was telling them that google has the best chance to give challenge to Microsoft in Operating Systems. It is not that google has best brains(I do not doubt that) but because it is following a very planned strategy. The reason for this was as follows :

When you own a computer , except all the computer game junkies and programmers most of us open up a browser ,surf internet, use MS office suites , email , listen songs or download pictures.

Since google had integrated its own application suite in the web, there was very little use of an Operating system. So why can’t a browser like Firefox(Chrome was not out then)not be installed on Linux and sold to customers.

So on browser you surf internet , upload and share pictures. For work you can use google office suite which works very well within browser . So you do not need a full fledge OS. A lightweight linux can be used and you save your $100 which you pay for OS.

And this I was saying before Chrome(Google’s browser ) was released.

Today google has announced they are launching Google Chrome Operating System in second half of 2010.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

Read it here in google blog

Currently they are targeting net book , but no reason why it cannot be upgraded for laptops in coming years.

There is a lot of business learning from this piece of news and with what Microsoft has been doing for years. We will cover that in next post.

Spring Framework 3.0 released

geek — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 01:56:51 +0000

Spring team has released 3.0 version of their popular Spring source framework. This is a third major release after 2.0 and 2.5 .

What are the new features in Spring 3.0?

1. The Spring Framework is now based on Java 5, and Java 6 is fully supported.

2. The entire framework code has been revised to take advantage of Java 5 features like generics, varargs and other language improvements. The code is still compatible with older versions of Java

3. Spring Expression Language – Spring has introduced an expression language which is similar to Unified EL in its syntax but offers significantly more features

The following is an example of how the Expression Language can be used to configure some properties of a database setup

4. Some core features from the JavaConfig project have been added to the Spring Framework now. This means that the following annotations are now directly supported:

@Configuration
@Bean
@Primary
@Lazy
@Import
@Value

5. Additional annotations such as @CookieValue and @RequestHeaders have been added

6. Early support for asynchronous method invocations through the use of the new @Async annotation (or EJB 3.1’s @Asynchronous annotation).

7. The most exciting new feature for the Web Tier is the support for building RESTful web services and web applications

8. Object to XML mapping functionality (OXM) from the Spring Web Services project has been moved to the core Spring Framework now

9. Extended support for meta-annotations: Spring’s @Scope and @Transactional annotations, as well as specialized stereotypes such as @Service and @Controller, can be applied as meta-annotations on custom annotations now. for eg

@Service
@Scope(”request”)
@Transactional(rollbackFor=Exception.class)
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface MyService {
}@MyService
public class RewardsService {
…
}

Source : Spring 3.0 documentation

Google fast cash – Way to make money or just another scam?

geek — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 03:10:50 +0000

You must be reading about stories of some entrepreuners that how they can make couple of thousand dollars a month from google by using google fast cash. Man I was amazed that google had such a program and I never knew . How stupid of me to stick with adsense which pays you so poorly.

I did a little research and found that this is nothing but a scam (was’nt surprised) . The only thing which google offers is google adsense and nothing like fast cash.

Please do not fall for it and waste your time and money . There is no short cut to success.

Google wave and Bing

geek — Sat, 30 May 2009 03:05:15 +0000

May 28 had been a pretty exciting day for tech industry . There were 2 big news .

1. Google unveiled its stealth project Google Wave. Although google wave is not open to public yet but looking at the preview of it is sure to get you excited. So what is google wave ?

Google Wave is a in browser communication and collobration tool. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client.

More about google wave here .

2. Microsoft its search engine Bing . With the bing came a joke “But it is not google”

There was so much hype around the bing but on the day of the laucnh , looked the site had real issues.

But we need some real challenge to google. It is getting smarter day by day and has established a near virtual monopoly.

I am not sure what microsoft is up to. On the one hand it has launched wave and on other hand it is talking to yahoo.

The news should be out pretty soon.