A friend of mine (thanks Bruce!) pointed me at a totally cool personal file sharing service called Dropbox.
In a nutshell, Dropbox smartly and automatically synchronizes a hierarchy of folders among any number of Windows PCs, Macs, Linux PCs and iPhones. All of the synchronized changes are automatically backed up on Dropbox’s servers, and you can go back into the past to retrieve previous versions or deleted files.
The Tamale RMS team at Advent Software (NASDAQ:ADVS) in Boston, where I have been happily ensconced for almost three years, is hiring Operations, Quality Assurance, and Software Engineers, Client Services Specialists, and Product Managers. Advent Tamale is full of great people doing exciting work for demanding clients.
At Advent, we offer competitive compensation and benefits, treat our people well, and strive to be a good corporate citizen. Furthermore, we successfully weathered the recent economic storm, with no layoffs, and came out of it stronger than before. I love coming to work every day at Advent!
If you work in the high-tech field like I do, and especially if you’re in management, you probably get regular cold calls from recruiters looking to either (a) hire someone into your company, (b) convince you to let them find you a new job, or (c) sweet-talk you into giving them the names and phone numbers of other people at your company for them to call as their next victims.
If I were looking for a job myself, I wouldn’t use any of these people. I decided years ago that the way you find a good recruiter to work with is through word of mouth and networking, not through cold calls from pushy, often dishonest people who don’t actually care about you or your career.
If I were looking to hire someone to work at my company, I wouldn’t use any of these people, both for the reasons given above, and because we have in-house recruiters and it is very difficult to convince senior management that a job is sufficiently difficult to fill that external recruiting expertise is needed. Even if I were going to use an external recruiter to fill a position, it would be handled by my HR department, not by me.
Nevertheless, I get several of these calls per week. It’s gotten so bad that I don’t answer my desk phone when the caller ID doesn’t show a number I recognize. If it’s someone I actually need to speak with, they’ll leave a voicemail message.
Today’s annoying recruiter incident was sufficiently egregious that I felt it appropriate to post about it on my blog to warn others off from the perpetrator, Oxford International.
The Oxford International recruiter called not once, not twice, but three times, and the third call was after I actually spoke to him and told him to leave me alone.
Interestingly, I am not the only person who has written on-line about bad experiences with Oxford International.
The other recruiting firm mentioned in the title of this blog entry, High Tech Ventures, found me a job in 1997. However, I was so bothered by the way they worked that, after thanking them for finding me the job, I told them to please never contact me again. What bothered me about them was:
As I said, I asked High Tech Ventures back in 1997 never to contact me again. Nevertheless, I continue to get phone calls and email messages from them, both at home and at work, on a regular basis. I have repeatedly asked them to stop contacting me, and it does no good.
If you do find it necessary to work with recruiting firms, I suggest you take a pass on Oxford International and High Tech Ventures.
Last week, the internal training division of my company sent out the June schedule of one-hour seminars they hold regularly on various topics.
One of the seminars, entitled “The Working Parent,” was described as follows:
This workshop is for anyone interested in learning ways to assess our current lifestyle, set priorities and choose realistic goats. Review tools to help meet the multitude of demands facing the working parent. Topics discussed will include:
I was interested in attending this seminar until I checked my calendar and discovered that it was taking place during the all-but-compulsory managerial training I’ll be attending next week, away from my family at a hotel in Connecticut for two whole days.
As of the beginning of the year, my employer is using PayFlex Systems to administer their healthcare flexible spending account (FSA).
My experience in the past with third-party FSA administrators has ranged from mediocre to bad. However, this time I’m writing to give kudos, because when I went today to submit my first claim through PayFlex’s self-service Web site, I discovered that they have an intelligent, well-designed, innovative claim submission process, the kind that makes you say, “Why the heck can’t everybody do things this way?”
A little less than a year ago, my employer, Tamale Software (since acquired by Advent Software, in what I would happily classify as the fourth successful acquisition of the five in which I’ve been involved), decided to outsource its human resources function to the Professional Employer Organization (PEO) Administaff (note: Tamale used Administaff, but Advent doesn’t, so I am no longer a current client of Administaff).
Administaff uses a “co-employment” model, wherein the employees of Administaff’s clients become employees of Administaff as well, and Administaff handles health insurance, payroll, recruiting, performance management, etc. Administaff clients don’t necessarily use all of Administaff’s services; it’s a menu from which they choose what they want. The biggest reason for a company to use Administaff is probably to reduce the cost of health insurance. Administaff can bargain with the insurance industry for lower rates than a small or medium-sized business can on its own, since they have a far larger employee pool.
Tamale has always had awesome benefits, including great health insurance with 100% of the premiums paid by the company. But the company and its employees got a little older and more mature (read “got married and/or started having babies;” I must confess that I’m a major contributor to this!), and at the same time the cost of health insurance skyrocketed across the board. It’s therefore not surprising that Tamale went looking for a way to reduce its costs, and perhaps switching to Administaff was a necessary evil.
Nonetheless, from the point of view of the employees, it was not a positive change. (more…)
I’m sitting in a meeting right now discussing Green Card labor certification, which is the first step in the process to get one of the people who works for me his Green Card. I am having the same reaction today that I had the last time I want through this…
The Green Card process seems intentionally designed to encourage employers to game the system. It is an entirely unrealistic process, in which what employers are ostensibly doing is actually completely different from what they are actually doing. The only people who benefit from the process are the lawyers who guide employers through it.
Someone recently asked this on a mailing list I’m on:
I am once again faced with the situation of having to take my vacation days for the Jewish High Holidays. Instead of passively standing by, I plan to take this issue up with my company and human resources department, as I am tired of corporate America assuming everyone is of a Christian faith. I am looking for some advice on how to handle this situation, if anyone has dealt with this before and would not mind sharing that would be greatly appreciated.
I think my response is worth blogging:
Recently, a backup tape containing over 800,000 unencrypted names and social security numbers for Ohio taxpayers and state employees was stolen from the car of Jared Ilovar, a 22-year-old college student working for the state as an intern.
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