Dayton awarded ‘First Four’ through 2013

By Doug Harris | Monday, June 27, 2011, 10:21 AM

The NCAA men’s basketball tournament has started in Dayton for the last 11 years, and March Madness will begin here again for at least the next two seasons.

The NCAA has awarded the University of Dayton the “First Four” tourney games through 2013. Crowds in excess of 10,000 turned out for both double-headers for the inaugural First Four last season.

The games pit the lowest four seeded teams against each other, while the last four at-large selections also face each other. Last season, VCU began its improbable run to the Final Four with a win over Southern Cal in one of the games.

UD Arena also will host second- and third-round games (known as the first and second rounds before the field was expanded to 68 teams) in ’13, keeping Dayton in the NCAA spotlight throughout the week.

“We’re ecstatic,” UD Athletic Director Tim Wabler said. “We first wanted to have an opportunity to get another crack at it, and now having it two years, we can really cement this in as a Dayton, Ohio, event.”

Gene Smith, director of athletics at Ohio State and chair of the Division I men’s basketball committee last season, said in a statement: “Dayton has hosted 87 tournament games over the last 41 years, including the start of each championship since 2001, and the feedback from participating schools, the community’s enthusiasm and the commitment demonstrated by the University of Dayton staff make Dayton an ideal host for the First Four.

“Last year, the committee explored several options when determining how the First Four should look and where it would be played. We decided Dayton would be best to host the inaugural event and now we believe we should start the championship in Dayton through the championship’s 75th anniversary in 2013. We’ll continue to evaluate the First Four and explore how we can work with our hosts in Dayton to make it even better.”

Do U.S. Workers Lack Skills?

      A mismatch in the US labor market between the skills of unemployed people and the jobs available is making it hard for some companies to find the right staff despite an unemployment rate of more than 9 percent, one of the country’s largest manufacturing employers has warned.
      Eric Spiegel, chief executive in the US for Siemens the German engineering group, said the problem exposed weaknesses in education and training in the US. Siemens had been forced to use more than 30 recruiters and hire staff from other companies to find the workers it needed for its expansion plans, even amid an unemployment rate of 9.1 percent.
      “There’s a mismatch between the jobs that are available, at least in our portfolio, and the people that we see out there,” Mr Spiegel told the Financial Times. “There is a shortage (of workers with the right skills.)” He said Siemens was having to invest in education and training to meet its staffing needs, including apprenticeship programs of the kind it uses in Germany. His comments, made before Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, visits a Siemens plant in Ohio on Monday, suggest better education and training could help reduce the persistently high US unemployment rate.
      The US labour market does not in general show signs of tightness: average wage growth in the year to the first quarter of 2011 was just 2 percent. Volkswagen, the German carmaker, had 85,000 applicants for 2,000 jobs at its new plant on Chattanooga, Tennessee. However, a recent survey found that 52 percent of leading US companies reported difficulties in recruiting essential staff, up from 14 percent in 2010. In manufacturing in particular there is evidence of a mismatch between workforce skills and available jobs: while employment has fallen since January 2009, the number of available job openings has risen from 98,000 to 230,000.
      Mr Spiegel’s concerns about skills are shared by many other US business leaders, and were reflected this month in the first recommendations from President Barack Obama’s advisory council on jobs and competitiveness. Responding to those concerns, the administration this month launched a nationwide expansion of the Skills for America’s Future program, offering training, workforce development and job placements to help people find jobs in industry.
      The programme is being run with the Manufacturing Institute, the think-tank affiliated to the National Association of Manufacturers. Emily Derocco, the institute’s president, said: “There is very definitely a gap between those that are unemployed or underemployed, and the education and skills that manufacturers require today. The companies are leaner and heavily technology-intensive, and require more than a high school diploma.”
      One staffing industry expert said businesses were more selective while the recovery was still weak and uncertain: “Employers have a much more sophisticated definition of skill requirements. Workers need to be instantly productive, and that makes a higher bar.”

From CNBC

11 Things They Did Not Teach You In School

1.) Life is not fair, get used to it!

2.) The world doesn’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

3.) You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

4.) If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

5.) Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

6.) If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

7.) Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try declousing the closet in your own room.

8.) Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

9.) Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF.  Do that on your own time.

10.) Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

11.) Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

The previous 11 things they did not and will not teach you in school originated in a speech at a High School recently.  They speaker talked about how feel good, politcally correct teaching created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world. The speaker was- Bill Gates.

Employers Use Temps to Hire Judiciously

By Scot Feldmeyer
BarryStaff of Cincinnati Weekly Newsletter

      Judiciously.  I like that word. According to the dictionary judicious means wise, sensible, intelligent, prudent or sane!   I love it when employers are being sane.   Okay I got it from an article I read in the Dow Jones Business News.   According to this article we are seeing a rise in demand for temporary workers because of uncertainty over the economic recovery.   One executive told Dow Jones, “Companies are changing the ways they are looking at their work models in this new, post-recession age.”
      The article went on to say that employers are starting to see increased demand for their products and services but they are uncertain as to how sustainable this demand is.   So they have been stretching their existing workforce through overtime and complimenting that with temps.   It shows that companies are requiring more flexibility.   Demand for temps has increased by about 15% over the same period last year.   Where a company might have had 5% of their workforce consisting of temporary staff last year, that number could now be around 10%.
      The article said that experts expect this trend to continue for a while but as demand increases, companies will reach a point where they need to ramp up their workforces on a more permanent basis.   In the meantime Temp-to-Hire is gaining in popularity with a 100% increase over 2010 in the number of temporary workers who get permanent positions at companies where they are working.   This says that companies are hiring, but they are also being “judicious.”
      The flexible programs at BarryStaff offer some terrific ways to be judicious in your hiring.   We can help with purely temporary staffing needs and our Temp-to-Hire program allows you to try an employee on the job before adding them to your payroll and benefit plans.   Our professional staff can also recruit key employees on a Direct Hire basis or you can avoid the risk of a hiring error by using BarryStaff’s Payrolling service to bring on new employees.   You can find out more at www.barrystaff.com.

On the lighter side here are HEADLINES (from actual newspapers):
“Enraged Cow Injures Farmer With Ax” – The Times
“Sheep Cloners Turn To Piglets” – Edmonton Journal (Canada)
“Microsoft Accuses Federal Judge of Being Impartial” – Sunday Journal
“Coroner Reports on Woman’s Death While Riding Horse.” – The Gazette
“Priest Marries His Mother” – Washington Star-News
“Too Early to Tell if Anti-Cancer Laws Work” – Tampa Tribune News

Dos and Don’ts for writing a resume.

Many people feel overwhelmed at the idea of writing their resume. How can you possibly describe your entire career in a page or two? But that’s thinking about the resume in the wrong way.

Remember this and commit it to memory: Resumes are marketing documents. They aren’t your life/work history. They aren’t required to show your failures and short coming. Their purpose is to quickly tell a recruiter/hiring manager that you have the qualifications to do this work.

Here are 5 Dos and 5 Don’ts for Resume Writing:

Do

Put your jobs in reverse chronological order. Your last/current relevant job goes first. (You can choose to leave off an irrelevant, short term job.) Some people write “functional resumes“, but many HR managers view these as attempts to hide something unpleasant.
Move your education to the end of the page. I know you’re proud of your school, but unless you’re a new grad, your degree in Economics and minor in Sociology should go after your work experience.
Turn accomplishments into numbers. Some departments have 1 person, and some have 350. Quantify yours. “Managed a department of 12 analysts” is a lot stronger than “Managed a department.” Did you have budget responsibilities? “Managed a $2.3 Million budget” is very different from “Managed a $75,000 budget.” How many clients did you juggle? 1, 2, 25? Quantify.
Identify your strengths. What skills keep popping up in job after job? Those are your strongest assets. Make sure to highlight them in your resume by placing them directly under the job title.
Write out your description of each skill/accomplishment. People typically agonize over this stage. Should they write full sentences? Use bullet points? Arrows? Use a period at the end of each line, or perhaps a semi-colon or nothing? Truly, it doesn’t matter. Just be consistent.
Don’t

Write paragraphs. A resume should be scannable. People like white space on resumes. Recruiters want to be able to glance at the resume and get the gist. Blocks of solid text require more attention.
Make the recruiter guess what your actual job was. Put your titles in bold. Translate strange titles into descriptive ones. For example, if your title was “Community Rock Star,” write: Community Rock Star (Public Relations Specialist).
Share Too Much Information. No birthdate, religion, hobbies, weight, social security number, marital status, links to Facebook or personal blogs, children, sexual orientation or life mission statements.
Make your resume too long. 1-2 pages is the generally accepted length. Anything longer will likely get overlooked.
Forget to proofread. Get your friend, your neighbor, your mother-in-law (she won’t be afraid to criticize) to look at it. You want them to look for spelling, grammar, and consistency. Does it make sense?

Do Lower Gas Prices Mean More Workers?

By Scot Feldmeyer
BarryStaff of Cincinnati Newsletter

      Wow, did you notice how gas prices have gone down.  I filled up this week for only $3.79. WHAT A DEAL!!!   Well, not really. I knew this is what they were going to do.  They find some reason, any reason, to jack up the price of gas to $4.29 and then bring it gradually back to $3.79 and we are supposed to feel like we are getting a bargain.  Of course we have to forget that gas was just $2.79 or less only a couple of months ago.  What chumps they must think we are.  But hey, I don’t know about you but I have to have gas to get to work and to the store, so what are we going to do?
      According to an article recently posted on the BarryStaff blog (www.barrystaff.com), the higher cost of gas has convinced many people that it’s just too expensive to go to work when they compare the option of staying home and collecting unemployment. No kidding! Check out the article here on our blog. It shows how some people, with at least three dependents, can bring home up to $524 per week. When faced with losing this money to take a low-paying job they decide to stick with the unemployment, which has been extended from 27 weeks to 99 weeks. These folks feel that they have almost 2 years to wait for a better job to come along and many are doing exactly that.
      Check out the math. A job paying $15 an hour, or about $2,400 a month, would give a worker only about $800 more than the $1,600 a month he or she receives in unemployment.  And that’s BEFORE TAXES!  Then gas prices alone would eat up almost a third of the difference for the average Ohio worker, who has a round-trip commute of about 20 miles.  At current gas prices a worker with a 20-mile commute, working five days a week and driving a vehicle that gets an average 35 miles per gallon would spend just over $250 on gas each month.
      So if you’re having trouble recruiting quality workers, you can thank the gas companies and a generous Unemployment system that pays people to sit at home for a long, long time.  The good news is that BarryStaff has the professional recruiters to find the people you need at the wages your company can afford.  There are good people out there who want to work.  And we know who they are!

ON THE LIGHER SIDE: I should have figured it out sooner. It’s the shampoo I use in the shower. When I wash my hair, the shampoo runs down my whole body. Printed very clearly on the shampoo label it reads, “FOR EXTRA VOLUME AND BODY.”
I have gotten rid of the shampoo and I am going to start using Dawn dish detergent.
Its label reads, “DISSOLVES FAT THAT IS OTHERWISE DIFFICULT TO REMOVE.” Problem solved! Geeze! It sure pays to read the label!

Unemployment Claims Fall

Fewer Americans than forecast filed applications for unemployment benefits last week, making it more likely that the surge in April was caused by temporary events rather than a deterioration in the labor market.

Jobless claims declined by 29,000 to 409,000 in the week ended May 14, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The median estimate of economists in a Bloomberg News survey called for a drop to 420,000. The number of applications were the lowest in a month.

Declining firings and gains in hiring are helping sustain consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of the economy, even as food and fuel costs increase. While payrolls have climbed for seven consecutive months, a jobless rate close to 9 percent underscores the need for a pickup in employment that will spur growth.

“We have essentially come full-circle and are unwinding the run up in April,” said Michael Englund, chief economist at Action Economics LLC in Boulder, Colorado. “The labor market is slowly improving. It allows slow, but positive growth in consumer spending.”

Other reports today showed that an index of U.S. leading economic indicators unexpectedly fell in April after nine months of gains, consumer confidence declined last week to the lowest level in nine months, and manufacturing slowed in the Philadelphia area.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index erased gains and was little changed at 1,340.56 at 10:11 a.m. in New York. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note, which moves inversely to prices, rose to 3.20 percent from 3.18 late yesterday.

No Special Factors
There were no special factors affecting last week’s data, a Labor Department spokesman said as the figures were released to the press.

The median forecast was based on a survey of 49 economists. Estimates ranged from 398,000 to 435,000. The Labor Department revised the prior week’s figure up to 438,000 from the 434,000 initially reported.

Claims in April surged to the highest level in eight months due to events that seasonal variations failed to take into account, such as a late school holiday in New York, a new emergency benefits program in Oregon and auto shutdowns caused by the disaster in Japan, the Labor Department has said. Flooding in the South hasn’t been a significant influence so far on the number of applications, the department official said today.

Claims in New York dropped by about 23,000 in the week ended May 7, the report showed, evidence of the unwinding of the late holiday. Applications in Alabama increased by almost 6,000 during the same period as a result of the storms and tornadoes that ravaged the state the prior week.

May Jobs Report
Today’s report covers the week the Labor Department surveys businesses to calculate the monthly payroll figures. The four- week moving average, a less volatile measure than the weekly figures, rose to 439,000 last week from 437,750.

The number of people continuing to receive jobless benefits dropped by 81,000 in the week ended May 7 to 3.71 million.

The continuing claims figure does not include the number of Americans receiving extended benefits under federal programs.

Those who’ve used up their traditional benefits and are now collecting emergency and extended payments increased by about 4,400 to 4.11 million in the week ended April 30.

The unemployment rate among people eligible for benefits, which tends to track the jobless rate, held at 3 percent.

Twenty-nine states and territories reported a decline in claims, while 24 reported an increase. These data are reported with a one-week lag.

Claims, Payrolls
Initial jobless claims reflect weekly firings and tend to fall as job growth — measured by the monthly non-farm payrolls report — accelerates.

High fuel costs are among reasons consumers are limiting purchases. Target Corp. (TGT), the second-largest U.S. discount retailer, reported first-quarter earnings that exceeded analyst estimates as its credit-card business helped to counter softer- than-anticipated sales.

“Unemployment remains stubbornly high, hampering overall consumer sentiment and spending,” Gregg Steinhafel, chairman and chief executive officer of Minneapolis-based Target, said on a conference call yesterday. “While the U.S. economy is showing some signs of improvement, we expect the recovery will continue to be slow and uneven.”

Payrolls expanded last month by the most since May 2010, even as the jobless rate climbed to 9 percent, Labor Department data showed. Job market conditions had “continued to improve, albeit gradually,” Fed officials said in minutes of their April 26-27 meeting released yesterday.

“We still have a long way to go before labor markets can be described as healthy,” Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland President Sandra Pianalto said in a May 11 speech in Cincinnati. “I expect it could take about five years for the unemployment rate to reach its longer-run sustainable rate of 5.5 to 6 percent.”

Real Meaning of Memorial Day

By Scot Feldmeyer

BarryStaff of Cincinnati Newsletter 5/27/11

      First let me say THANK YOU to all who have served our country. Whatever your role in the military, we appreciate your sacrifice.  But really the day to properly do that is Veterans’ Day. Veterans Day is on November 11 and it’s a great day to buy a beer for all of the guys at the VFW Hall.  However Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day, is a day of remembrance for those who have DIED in our nation’s service. 

      It was started in 1868 as a time to decorate the graves of fallen Civil War soldiers from the North.  The South had several different days to do the same but after WWI, Memorial Day became a time to remember all Americans who had given the ultimate sacrifice in any war.

      Traditional observance of Memorial Day has diminished over the years. Many Americans nowadays have forgotten the meaning and traditions of Memorial Day.  At many cemeteries, the graves of the fallen are increasingly ignored and neglected.  Most people no longer remember the proper flag etiquette for the day.  While there are towns and cities that still hold Memorial Day parades, many have not held a parade in decades.  In 2004 Washington DC held their first Memorial Day parade in 60 years!  Some people think the day is for honoring any and all dead, and not just those fallen in service to our country.  Heck, I was raised in Indianapolis. As a kid I always thought of it as a day to have picnics and go to the Indianapolis 500.

      To help re-educate and remind Americans of the true meaning of Memorial Day, the “National Moment of Remembrance” resolution was passed on Dec 2000 which asks that at 3 p.m. local time, for all Americans “To voluntarily and informally observe in their own way a Moment of Remembrance and Respect, pausing from whatever they are doing for a moment of silence or listening to ‘Taps.” 

      If you have a flagpole, here is a reminder of proper flag etiquette.  The American flag should be flown at half-staff until noon on Monday.  If you raise your flag on Monday morning (as opposed to having an illuminated all-weather flag you leave out all night), you need to first raise it to the top of the staff and then lower it to half-staff from there.  Then bring it back to full staff at noon.

      Here at BarryStaff we are proud of the veterans of our armed forces who are employed by us.  We are grateful for their service and thankful that they returned home safe to find productive employment through BarryStaff. Both our client companies and we are lucky to have you. Also we welcome home Greg Cross’s son who is now stationed in Hawaii after serving as an Army Scout in Iraq.  However we will also take some time this weekend to remember those who were not so lucky.

      Hope you have a happy Memorial Day but don’t forget that moment of silence at 3:00 on Monday.