Cost of Living Comparison by City and State

CostofLiving.net has your city and state covered. Cost of Living.net provides easy to use cost of living comparisons for over 4,500 cities.

For professionals they offer a free demo of Cost of Living Software. The Relocation Assessor provides Cost of Living data for over 7,500 cities including Canada.

View Cost of Living Data in the 100 Most-Requested Cities, providing Local Cost of Living Comparisons by City and State.

More info at: www.costofliving.net

7 Hiring Trends to Follow in 2009 from MSN-CareerBuilder.com

7 Hiring Trends to Follow in 2009…
Source: http://msn.careerbuilder.com

2008 proved to be a difficult year for the job market. Though employers were cautious in the beginning of the year, they still anticipated a slow, yet steady hiring environment with continued job creation through 2008. The market continued to suffer, however, as the U.S. economy weakened and entered into a recession while employers maintained prudence.

While recruitment levels in 2009 are expected to be lower, employers are not out of the mix completely. Instead, they are taking a “wait and see” approach to hiring, according to CareerBuilder.com’s “2009 Job Forecast,” which tracks projected hiring trends for the new year. The survey, conducted by Harris Interactive, surveyed 3,259 hiring managers and human resource professionals in private sector companies.

Fourteen percent of employers plan to increase their number of full-time, permanent employees in 2009, compared to 32 percent who expected to expand their staff in 2008. Sixteen percent plan to have staff reductions, 56 percent foresee no change and 13 percent of employers are unsure of their hiring plans.

Here are some other key findings from the survey:

• Fifty-six percent of employers plan to raise compensation levels in the next three months. Forty-three percent estimate the average raise to be 3 percent or more, while 12 percent expect a raise of 5 percent or more.
• Staff expansions should be strongest in the Southern and Western regions of the U.S. in 2009, with 18 percent of employers in the South and 14 percent in the West planning to add full-time, permanent employees.
• Nineteen percent of employers in the Northeast expect to reduce staff in 2009, followed by 17 percent in the Midwest.
• Job creation is projected to be the highest in information technology and professional and business services, with 28 percent and 23 percent of employers planning to hire full-time employees in those sectors, respectively.

As employers approach the job market with a cautious attitude, they also plan to utilize the resources already at their disposal. Here are seven major hiring trends to expect from employers in 2009:

Trend No. 1: Bigger paychecks

Despite the fact that many employers are looking for ways to cut costs, they don’t anticipate trimming salaries as a way to do so. Sixty-six percent of employers plan to increase pay for existing employees and one third of hiring managers estimate increasing salaries on initial offers to new employees in 2009.

Trend No. 2: Flexible work arrangements

Companies are catching on to the flexible work arrangements that allow employees more freedom in the office. Thirty-one percent of employers say they plan to provide the following options for workers in 2009: alternate schedules (70 percent); telecommuting (48 percent); compressed workweeks (40 percent); summer hours (19 percent); job sharing (13 percent); and sabbaticals (7 percent).

Trend No. 3: Green jobs

Employers have tried to gain traction using environmentally friendly policies for a while and the New Year shows more of the same. Last year, one-in-ten hiring managers added “green jobs,” which are environmentally conscious positions, compared to 13 percent of employers who plan to add them in 2009.

Read all 7 trends at: http://msn.careerbuilder.com

Career Searches for Those with Lessened Capabilities

Career Searches for Those with Lessened Capabilities…

For those unexpectedly unemployed, ERI’s free job search module of the Occupational Assessor™ eDOT® contains a complimentary application to assist individuals with disabilities in seeking employment, aged workers considering alternative careers, and those returning from the military. Review over 23,000 jobs, matched to 7,000 locations and 12,000,000 employers. Download it free of charge anytime. See why ERI’s employer-supplied data and analyses are unique and how PAQ’s eDOT Skills Project fits with the Assessor Series® methodology.  (PAQ’s eDOT Skills Project is evolving into PAQ’s Competencies Project and, as a consequence, ERI’s Occupational Assessor is to be renamed the Competencies Assessor™. See www.paq.com.)

Other Free Research Links and Products for Researchers

ERI has expanded its provision of free resources to researchers, students, and instructors (with the latter able to receive other complimentary ERI and PAQ materials):

• ERI Distance Learning Center: Online HR courses are provided free of charge for those new to compensation. To date, more than 20,000 individuals have spent an hour or more on the 53 subject matter topics for either certification credit or continuing education.
• Free Global Salary Calculator®: Download a calculator that converts job family data into specific job value estimates (for over 100,000 job titles). See www.erieri.it, www.erieri.co.uk, or any of 190 other countries’ similar URLs.

• Free for Charities: ERI is assisting PAQ Services, Inc., which supplies free, web-based salary planning services using conservative data (typically 15% below competitive norms) for use by nonprofit organizations. See www.paq.com.
• Free International Pay Data: See why Assessor Series datasets and software make ERI unique among those who provide compensation survey data. Click on a dot and review the source data. Review ERI’s C3 job family matrix that allows US specific job methodologies to complement European (and US public entity) job family classification systems.
• Free Looks at Selected Characteristics of Occupations: PAQ and ERI have teamed to make their worker trait measures for over 10,000 specific jobs available to the public. See www.paq.com.
• Download Support: Chat with a seasoned ERI compensation specialist while you download any demo program from our site. We see the “comp world” changing:

Salary Assessor Geographic Assessor Relocation Assessor

Executive Compensation Assessor Nonprofit Comparables Assessor Occupational Assessor

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See more at ERI’s January 2009 Update newsletter.

Don’t Fire Your Recruiters Just When the Recovery is About to Begin from ere.net

Hiring will start to recover in Q2, 2009, and now is the time to rebuild your recruiting team and massively upgrade your sourcing and hiring processes.

If you’re still considering cutbacks in your recruiting staff, think again. Recruiting top people is a repeatable sales process that’s fundamentally different than hiring average people. Instead of cutting back, replace the underperformers with people who can sell complex intangibles and services, those who can learn solution selling, and those who have demonstrated they can follow a realistic sales process including meeting quotas and being managed by the numbers.

Forget the Lone Rangers and those experienced recruiters who have not gotten significantly better over the past two years. Hiring top people is a business process, equivalent to selling your firm’s products and services. Now is the time to start implementing new training programs and changing your outdated pre-recession recruiting processes.

The amount of stimulus Obama, Bernanke, and Paulson/Geitner have already induced and are planning to induce into our economy system will jumpstart the recovery faster than can be imagined. So get ready to rumble. The best people are now sitting on the sidelines waiting for some reason to think about the future, rather than holding onto the past. (Take our annual recruiting challenges survey if you want some instant insight on what’s happening.)

Instead of minor changes and improvements, I’m going to suggest a wholesale rebuilding of your recruiting department is in order. This will give you a chance to hire the best people as soon as there is evidence the economy is changing direction. So starting with a fresh clean slate, here are three things you should be doing right now to get ready for the upcoming hiring recovery.

Read Full Article: http://www.ere.net

6 Job Search Strategies for a Web 2.0 World from CIO.com

To outshine your competitors and land a new job in today’s economy, don’t abandon steadfast career advice. Rather, refine it with Web 2.0 tools that will enhance your job search.

With unemployment at a 14-year high and 240,000 workers laid off in October alone, many Americans are scrambling to update their résumés and turning to job boards and networking sites. Some are panicking as they try to devise new ways to get in front of employers. But even in trying times like these, prospective employees shouldn’t completely reinvent their job-seeking styles.

Indeed, much of the tried-and-true career advice we’ve all heard is relevant in your next job search. To outshine your competitors and win the gig in today’s economy, here’s a secret to success: Don’t abandon the steadfast career tips passed down from generations, but rather, refine them—with a keen eye for the value in Web 2.0 tools like social networking.

Whether you’re one of many IT professionals out of work or among the few making career leaps despite rocky economic times, consider these six ways to express your candidacy with flair.

Read ALL 6 Strategies at CIO.com…

Salary Calculators, Surveys and HR Resources from SalaryExpert.com

Salary Calculators and Surveys from One of the Top HR Resources in the USA, UK and Canada… SalaryExpert.com!

Salary Survey Software
This desktop software provides consensus salary survey data for more than 5,000 positions in the US, Canada, UK, and Europe. Set individual salaries and update salary structures using this reliable salary survey database. Salary calculations are customized to your inputs for industry, employee experience, planning date, and pay strategy (at, above, or below market rates). Survey sources and reliability statistics are provided for each calculation. This database of compensation surveys is utilized by thousands of organizations, including 85% of the US Fortune 500, to set competitive salaries.

Geographic Salary Data
Research geographic salary differentials to set competitive branch office salary structures for more than 7,000 cities in the US, Canada, UK, and Europe.

Cost of Living Comparisons
Calculate employee relocation allowances and per diem rates for more than 10,000 areas worldwide.

Global Salary Calculator
Research salaries for 100,000 jobs in 200 countries. This is the only salary database available for many hard-to-research international locations.

Executive Compensation Survey
Calculate executive salaries for more than 400 positions. Adjust executive salary calculations for industry, location, pay strategy, and organization size (in revenue/assets). Review competing organizations’ executive salary histories.

Survey Salaries at Non-Profits
Research competitive and reasonable salaries for non-profit executives based on ERI’s survey of more than 2 million tax-exempt organizations’ executive pay.

> Visit SalaryExpert For More Information