By Kelly Clay, PayScale.com
Every weekend, we round up the employment trends, career stories and job news that you may have missed during the past week.
- Easier networking. Popular professional social network LinkedIn is about to get even easier to use. According to AllThingsD, LinkedIn has announced they are acquiring Rapportive, which currently makes a browser plugin that overlays your Gmail emails with contextual information about email contacts. While it’s currently unknown how Rapportive will be integrated with LinkedIn, the additional insight into your LinkedIn connections can only be a benefit to helping you use LinkedIn to network and search for new jobs.
- Longing to work from home. Do you dream of escaping the 9-5 grind and work from the comforts of your own home? In a recent poll conducted by online communications providerTeamViewer, people would apparently give up several other comforts just to avoid their office. LiveScience highlights some of these sacrifices employees would make to work from home, including the startling facts that 12 percent of people would forgo daily showers and that 5 percent of people would divorce their spouse in order to telecommute.
- Fresh employment outlook. Unemployment in January was at its lowest level in three years at 8.3 percent, and while 1.8 million jobs were added last year, there are still 5.6 million fewer jobs than there were when the recession began in late 2007. A recent article in the Seattle PI profiles a few of these “faces” of the of the long-term unemployed, detailing the wide-range of demographics of those who have been out of work for more than six months.
- Credit scores and job hunting. Have you recently applied for a new job and allowed your potential employer to check your credit? If your credit is less than great, or has derogatory marks, it could jeopardize your chance to be offered the job. A recent article in the Sun Sentinel explains how to handle bad credit as a job seeker.
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