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8/8/04
HIRING Attention, Donald Trump wannabee's. The search for fresh applicants for ''The Apprentice'' now includes cyberspace: Yahoo HotJobs, the online recruiting site, has launched a micro website linked to its front page to attract individuals who would like to compete for a $250,000 internship at one of Trump's enterprises. Last season, the NBC television show pitted eight men and eight women in a high-stakes competition to win an internship with Trump. The show, applauded by some and denounced by others, culminated each week in the firing of an applicant by the New York real estate tycoon. The firing was tied to the applicant's inability to complete an assignment successfully. ''The Apprentice'' was the number one reality program among viewers 18 to 49 years old, said its producers. In all, they say, 20.7 million people tuned in each week to see the show. Yahoo HotJobs hopes to garner some of the buzz generated by the television show. The reality show will be promoted on its site and on the Yahoo network. The job site's name will also appear on the taxi cabs used to escort fired contestants from the show. Online job sites may argue that they offer workers a better-than-average chance at landing a job, but specialists say success is tied to the level of demand for a particular skill. ''Timing is everything,'' said Kenneth Goldstein, an economist at The Conference Board, a New York-based nonprofit business and research organization. ''If you are looking when employers are looking for someone like you, then the timing is perfect. If employers are not looking for your particular skill set right now, then the timing will not be for you.''
Two years ago when the Society for Human Resource Management looked at the recruiting habits of 281 US employers, it found that 50 percent relied on newspaper ads, 34 percent relied on online job sites, 8 percent turned to trade publications when recruiting workers, and 1 percent used the radio. Seven percent used other means to lure workers, according to the society, based in Alexandria, Va. Today, said Goldstein, employers rely on a variety of methods to land potential hires. Online recruiting and Internet job searches are the latest in a list that includes traditional print ads, networking groups, and alumni organizations that share information about job openings -- and potential candidates -- with individual and corporate members. --DIANE E. LEWIS
OUTSOURCING Here's something that might give US journalists pause: outsourcing their jobs to India. The notion that American journalists' jobs could go abroad was so intriguing that Business 2.0, a California magazine, decided to test it by sending a section of its magazine to writers and an editor in India. The results appear in the August edition of Business 2.0, which has about 550,000 subscribers. Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner confirmed the magazine hired an Indian writer named Shailaja Neelakantan to take on the role of an editor. She was expected to hire staff, edit stories, and make sure the articles got to the magazine's headquarters in San Francisco on time. Quittner said the magazine came up with the idea after receiving a flurry of e-mails from readers criticizing its support for offshore outsourcing. ''Like many business magazines, we favor open markets,'' he said in a telephone interview. ''But whenever we wrote stories about offshoring, we got e-mails from readers that said, 'Shame on you! We hope your jobs are offshored.' Readers complained that we were being insensitive, and that someday the pox would be visited on our profession. So, one day, one of our editors suggested that we try it.'' Business 2.0 realized a savings from its experiment, according to an article in the San Jose Mercury News. Ordinarily, the magazine's US freelancers earn about $2 per word. By contrast, the Indian freelancers earned 25 cents per word, the newspaper said. But there were a few problems. Time differences made communicating difficult. Plus, the stories lacked the kind of local color that onsite reporters tend to contribute, Quittner said. For journalists, the experiment raises a question: Could offshore outsourcing affect US journalists? ''I don't think it's a solution for most of American journalism,'' said Quittner. ''Our jobs are very local. If you rely on the telephone to do all of your reporting, you get a less colorful story.'' --DIANE E. LEWIS
JOB MARKET Layoffs in the United States rose 8 percent in July from June, according to a report last week, as the job market recovery struggled to gain momentum. The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. said employers made 69,572 job cuts in July, up from 64,343 in June, but 18 percent below July 2003. Hirings also declined, but companies do not reveal hires as frequently as layoffs. The number of revealed hires fell to 26,880, a 30 percent decline from June's 38,377. --REUTERS
STUDY SAN FRANCISCO -- California paid an estimated $86 million in pubic assistance in 2001 because workers at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. earn such low wages, researchers said last week. Many of Wal-Mart's 44,000 California employees in 2001 relied on food stamps, Medicare, and subsidized housing to make ends meet and also need more public healthcare than typical retail workers, said the report issued by the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center. Report co-author Ken Jacobs said he obtained data on Wal-Mart wages from a lawsuit that revealed information for 2001. The study said that 54 percent of Wal-Mart workers earned less than $9 an hour in 2001, 21 percent made from $9 to $9.99, and 16 percent from $10 to $10.99. He said that since salaries had risen slightly less than inflation since then, the costs to California were likely higher today than in 2001. Wal-Mart spokeswoman Sarah Clark criticized the study. ''It's disappointing that UC Berkeley would release a study whose findings are questionable,'' she said. ''Their researchers are going to get faulty conclusions when they are working with faulty assumptions.'' For example, she said that two-thirds of Wal-Mart workers were either senior citizens, college students, or second-income providers likely to have healthcare coverage. Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart, whose roughly 1.3 million US employees make it the largest private sector employer, has been called the most-sued company in America and faces dozens of cases alleging wage and hour violations. Researcher Jacobs said his study was not funded by any union, although part of the Labor Center's mission is to help train union leaders. --REUTERS
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