Apply to the Newark Star-Ledger

As you may know, the Star-Ledger is shedding about 40 percent of its newsroom staff.

Recent reports have said that the newspaper, one of the nation's largest, lost almost its entire editorial board in one day and all but two reporters in its business news department. We even read last week that two journalists who did not apply for buyouts have been reassigned to the mailroom.

So the Star-Ledger won't be needing anyone soon, right?

Wrong.

At least one Star-Ledger editor is quietly making calls, getting ready for some January hiring.

Many of the people who are being bought out are still there. Several veterans are looking forward to goin out together on their last day of work: Dec. 31. It would seem inapporpriate to recruit in the open while people are still leaving, but expect some hiring soon after the buyout has been completed.

This has happened before.

Time and again going back to Newsday's big haircut in the mid-nineties and "publisher's clearinghouses" at the Washington Post, newspapers have followed massive staff reductions with hiring,

Here's why: The departures do not all come in the right places and the newspapers sometimes lose people in placs where they simply cannot "go dark."

Also, in addition to the number of people who sign up for the buyoutsthat take the newspaper to its new staffing level, additional people will simply leave, taking staffing below that new level.

Once again, the counterintuitive move of applying during a buyout seems to hold possibilities.

Expect the newspaper to focus on inexperienced, less expensive people.

10 Rules of Dating and Recruiting

Amy Kimmes, director of Field Operations for Technisource, has written a lighthearted guide to recruiting, er, dating.

I suppose the comparisons are inevitable. I try to avoid them.

She handles the analogy pretty well. You can read it on the ERE Web site.

Here's one of her best. Remember, she is writing for the recruiters.

Dating rule #6
Don’t talk too much. People who express the “enough about me, what do you think about me?” attitude sit home alone, a lot.

Recruiting application:
The candidate should be doing most of the talking. Assess what the candidate has to offer, what they need, and then set expectations of how you will work together. Let the candidate talk about the interview before you disclose the hiring manager’s view. If you blurt out “they love you, you are the best candidate they have ever met!” — what do you think happens to the candidate’s salary requirements?

Life After the Buyout

I give Adell Crowe a lot of credit.

Not long after taking a buyout from USA Today, she called me. We have known each other for years, stealing ideas from one another and each other in a loose confederation of newsroom trainers that came together in the early '90s after the Freedom Forum's "No Train, No Gain" report.

Adell, out of work, called to ask whether we could use any training at the Detroit Free Press.

"Sure," I said, "what do you charge?"

"It's free," she said, "just cover my expenses. After all, I'm already getting paid for the year."

Rather than doing some side jobs to add to her buyout money and help her bank something for the years ahead, Adell was jumping headlong into a transitional year that she hopes will get her back into leadership at another paper or puther on a path as an independent trainer.

Brilliant!

While others might mope around about having taken a buyout, she was using it as an opportunity. And, rather than using it to open a soft ice-cream stand up north (a fantasy I share with co-worker), she is preparing for her re-invention in journalism.

She has created a pretty good online profile to market herself and she is staying busy and optimistic.

You could have seen it coming. In her digital stump speech for the board of the Associated Press Managing Editors, 2007-2008, she wrote that newspaper editors must "resolutely challenge with a united voice the predictions that newspapers are near death. We have a platform we must use to champion measurements other than circulation to show our value, our successes and in some areas, our growth. APME must become a champion of newspapers before the gloomy forecasts become self- fulfilling."

Everyone should go into a buyout -- and into the future -- with such enthusiasm.

Resumes on Twitter

In its June 2 cover story, BusinessWeek quotes a Twitter "Tweet" from 23-year-old Amanda Mooney, who just landed a public relations job: "The new resume is 140 characters."

Get a Grip

It has been commonplace to advise job-seekers to pay some attention to their handshaking.

Now, it seems, there is research to back up that recommendation.

At the University of Iowa, 98 student subjects interviewed with five local businesses and had their handshakes related by an independent handful of five raters.

Was there a correlation? Yes. Those who were rated as the best handshakers also scored as being more employable, extroverted, more at ease and with better eye contact. The weaker shakes seemed less outgoing and less impressive socially.

Managementtoday.com said it is ironic that, as employers tune u their selection tools, the handshake remains a powerful dynamic.

Perconally, I have never put a lot of stock in handshakes -- at least consciously -- because there can be so much variation in acculturation and physical strength.

When I advise people, though, I am going to have to tell them to work on their handshakes.

Study leader Greg Stewart told Live Science, 

"We've always heard that interviewers make up their mind about a person in the first two or three minutes of an interview, no matter how long the interview lasts. We found that the first impression begins with a handshake that sets the tone for the rest of the interview.

"Job seekers are trained how to act in a job interview, how to talk, how to dress, how to answer questions, so we all look and act alike to varying degrees because we've all been told the same things."But the handshake is something that's perhaps more individual and subtle, so it may communicate something that dress or physical appearance doesn't.

"We probably don't consciously remember a person's handshake or whether it was good or bad," Stewart said. "But the handshake is one of the first nonverbal clues we get about the person's overall personality, and that impression is what we remember."

The findings will be published in September in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Dealing with difficult people

I have been getting them for years, but I can never get used to them.

"They" are brochures for a workshops on -- well, you guessed it.

But how often is life that simple? Difficult problems, difficult relationships, difficult decisions -- but I balk at  labeling people as  difficult. Maybe  I'm a wimp.

The brochure arrives in my mailbox, at the office, of course. Often, I post announcements about upcoming workshops on a training board so people can see what training opportunities are coming through town. These, I just want to stuff into the bottom of a trash can. Do I really want people I work with to feel that someone has labeled them as "difficult people"?

The subhead on the brochure is "How to communicate with tact and skill."

Yeah, give me some of that.

Excel is the new Word

At the end of a meeting among the top editors at the Free Press, the discussion turned to how much more of our online work has to do with databases.

We have always published information. Now, we need to publish, categorize and store information so that it can easily be retrieved by users, even in ways that we ourselves did not intend or imagine.

We do that with databases.

A Metromix entertainment site we will launch has dozens of details on thousands of venues: hours, charges, menu items, locations, style, photos -- pretty much whatever goes into a person's decision to visit.

Databases  make it all searchable, If the information was just contained in the usual way -- in chunky pargraphs -- it be irretrievable in any kind of useful way. So, it is all -- even the photographs -- in the columns and rows of a database. In fact, the Metromix user interface pulls data from several different databases simultaneously.

As the meeting broke up, one editor said that databases have become much essential for what we do. The other said that the spreadsheet program Excel should be as widely known and used as Word.

I asked, "So, Excel is the new Word?"

They agreed.

Silence Really Can Be Golden

A co-worker said that this was the best piece of advice he ever heard from a professor:

When you get a job offer, don't say anything. That's right, respond with a long pause.

This can make the potential employer anxious and then sweeten the offer.

This co-worker says it has worked for him, bringing him a little extra money without subjecting him to the negotiations he likes.

This is the same technique reporters might use to draw more information out of sources -- and that recruiters use to elicit more information from candidates.

Journarants

Problems in the newspaper industry, as manifested in the newsroom, could give rise to a cottage industry in sites where angry journalists vent.

See AngryJournalists.com, hosted by Kiyoshi Martinez, web editor at 22nd Century Media LLC. He launched it Feb. 10.

One early poster said the site would cut their productivity but had also lowered their blood pressure.

Prediction: Blogs like this will provide an outlet for people whose Web skills are not being utilized at their newspapers.

Silence is Golden

We have all been in a situation where we have used a lengthy pause to elicit further information. Or maybe someone used that trick on us.

The silence, hanging like lead, just begs to be broken. So, we say whatever we think it is that is supposed to come next.

A colleague told me that the best advice he got in college was to remain silent if he ever got a job offer. He has tried it and says it usually works. The offer came, he said that was interesting and then ... nothing. A second, slightly higher offer came.

If this happens to you even once and if the increase is small -- say, $1,000 a year -- the tactic will be worth thousands of dollars to you. You likely would get the same thing by asking, but what could be easier than doing ... nothing?