Archived Blog Posts
Feliz Navidad y Prospero Año Nuevo
December 13, 2011Last weekend, a friend gave me a beautiful candle as a gift. No surprise there, given it’s the holiday season. But more than the candle — beautiful as it was — here’s what caught... More
Co-employment Is Not A Dirty Word
December 8, 2011You are a co-employer. There. I said it. Co-employment is unavoidable in most contingent labor situations. In fact, that’s not a bad thing. Nevertheless, the very term causes many... More
Online Services Take Aim at Small Jobs
December 5, 2011Some online services now act as middlemen in parceling out small tasks. With a few clicks on a keyboard anyone can summon an assistant to pick up the groceries, help put together Ikea... More
Google is so last year
November 29, 2011I am “old” enough to have lived through the dot.com bubble. After which a large number of useful online resources and technologies disappeared because they could not answer the... More
Tra La La La La: Why Services Procurement Strikes a Chord
November 29, 2011Suppliers and customers are all raving about services procurement. But here’s the catch: It means different things to different people. So I decided to explore this term a bit by... More
Before Leaping on the Metric Bandwagon, Define It
November 18, 2011Everyone’s talking about metrics in the industry. From time to fill, submittal rates, open rates etc., the verbiage is being tossed around. SIA’s VP of research, Jon Osborne fields... More
Natural resources boom — workers needed
November 17, 2011Mine workers are in such short supply in Western Australia that The Wall Street Journal reported on a 25-year-old high school dropout earning $200,000 a year running drills underground.... More
Koosharem Downgrade a Sign of Pricing Pressures
November 7, 2011It’s a wake-up call up for the entire staffing industry. Vendors as well as contingent workforce managers need to rethink the pricing of temps. I admit it’s hard to do in today’s... More
Scatter Yourself
November 4, 2011I have just spent a very frustrating couple of hours trying to add text labels to a xy scatter chart. Only to find out that in Microsoft Excel 2010 “there is no built-in command... More
Fishing
November 1, 2011You may well have heard the Chinese proverb that if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. But if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Our purpose here... More