Yes, You Should Pre-Poach Now

You laid off a bunch of people this year. You’d love to staff back up, but you believe you can’t even think about that … not until the business improves. Right? Wrong. Now – instead of when you’re under pressure to hire – is the best time to identify and build relationships with talent.

Business expert, headhunter and founder of AskTheHeadHunter.com, Nick Corcodilos stresses that in order to effectively recruit great employees, you need to make a connection with them long before you actually need them. You need to seek out those interested in what your company offers and build relationships with those that have common interests and goals when neither you nor they are desperate. The following tips can help you attract and maintain relationships with key talent now…

Small Businesses’ New Balancing Act

The financial turmoil of the last year threw a lot of things out of whack…and not just the overall economy. Small businesses are staring down a future that looks little like the past, with high employee health care and benefits costs, decreased cash flow and increased monthly expenses threatening business as usual.

Many small businesses may not make it. The Financial Times predicted in late 2008 that 62,000 companies would disappear in 2009, representing approximately three million people that would be out of a job by 2010. In 2008, 42,000 small businesses went under, up 20,000 from 2007…

Adventures in Babysitting

If you want to find a babysitter in New York, you can go to myJambi.com, enter your specific needs and get an instant list of qualified sitters who match your criteria. You can check out their profiles and read reviews and ratings by other parents. Or, if you want a plumber in Chicago, a landscaper in Portland, or a Web designer in Santa Fe, myJambi can help out with that, too.

But myJambi, a three year old New York-based company, has only its three founders to turn to when a job needs getting done these days.

Poised for serious growth only a matter of months ago, those plans are now on hold. The company’s five full-time employees were let go. Big plans to expand into numerous service categories are being honed to a handful, with a big emphasis on babysitting. And the number of cities it serves has also been greatly pared back. Meanwhile, the company’s three co-founders, who had graduated to managerial roles, are now back to the grunt work of coding, design work and trafficking ad orders…