Friday, February 26, 2010

Keeping Your Social Security Number Safe

Yahoo! Finance has posted this great article on the importance of keeping your social security number safe. The author details reasons why some companies require this information and whether or not you are actually required to provide it.

DISCOVER STAFFING is very aware of circumstances regarding Social Security Number safety. We require this information for two reasons:
1) For payroll and tax purposes as reflected on your W2
2) For the Form I9 verification of employment as required by the Department of Homeland Security


Please be aware that DISCOVER STAFFING maintains your information in a secure location. We use a certified document shredding service to safely dispose of any information that is not needed for employment purposes.

We encourage you to read the Yahoo! Finance article to learn additional ways you can keep your social security number safe.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Social Networking Etiquette

I have often wondered what the best solution to this problem is, so when Yahoo News posted this article about declining facebook friends with out offending anyone I thought I should share it.

Modern Etiquette:How to decline Facebook friends without offence
By Richard Baum

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A colleague I just met at work has invited me to be their friend on Facebook. I don't want to offend them, but nor do I want to share my candid photos and lousy Scrabble scores with someone I hardly know.

Can I ignore their invite?

"Can I be your friend?" might work as an ice-breaker among small children, but it's not a question you hear often between adults, at least not outside of Las Vegas.

Friendship, it is generally understood, is a relationship that evolves through shared interests, common experiences and a primeval need to share your neighbor's power tools.

Yet for many people, Facebook permits a return to the simplicity of the schoolyard.

Rather than inviting someone to be our Facebook friend only after we've become friends in the real world, many of us are using Facebook as a short-cut around all that time-consuming relationship building.

Why bother asking someone you've just met questions about their family, interests and ability to run a farm or aquarium, when you can simply send them a friend request and read the answers in your Facebook news feed? And so we think little of receiving friend requests after we meet someone for the first time at, say, a dinner party.

If you like the person, perhaps because they brought an excellent bottle of wine to the party, then you can accept the request in the hope of further opportunities to sample the contents of their cellar.

If you didn't get to taste the wine because they accidentally spilled the bottle over your brand new party dress, then etiquette experts would probably agree that you can decline the friend request, send them a dry-cleaning bill and humiliate them in a derisory posting to your real Facebook friends.

In the workplace, however, the dynamic is very different. The consequences of offending someone by ignoring their friend request are greater with a colleague you see every day than with a careless dining companion you may never meet again.

So why are people you work with increasingly offering to share their Facebook output?

Joan Morris DiMicco, an IBM researcher who studies social software in the workplace, said it's partly because some people just don't anticipate the ramifications of sharing their personal life with colleagues.

But it's also a function of the Facebook interface, which recommends other people for you to friend.

"Once you've connected to one person you work with you get recommendations to connect to others that you work with," she said.

Of course, many people don't have a problem with being Facebook friends with colleagues, especially those they know well. But for those who would rather keep their work and private lives separate, there are options other than ignoring an unwanted friend request.

One is to accept the invitation and then use Facebook's privacy settings to limit the flow of information between you and your new "friend." To do this, you can create a "colleagues" list from the Friends menu and then add to it your new friend. Then navigate to the privacy settings and use the "Profile Information" section to control what information people on the "colleagues" list can see.

An alternative, says workplace etiquette expert Barbara Pachter, is to suggest to the colleague that you connect instead on LinkedIn, a social network for professional relationships.

"You can just go ahead and ask them to join you on LinkedIn and hope they forget they sent you a Facebook friend request," said Pachter, the author of New Rules @ Work.

"Or you can say, Thanks for asking me. I'm keeping Facebook for my family and friends. I'm asking you to join me on my professional network instead.'"

Pachter said that whatever you do, it's important not to offend your colleague -- and that's not just because politeness is good etiquette.

"The person you offend might end up being your boss next year," she said.

Got a question about the etiquette of email, social networks and other workplace technologies? Send them to richard.baum@reuters.com or via Twitter to @rbaum.

Friday, February 19, 2010

Friday, February 12, 2010

Vancouver Winter Olympics...Did you know?


The 2010 Winter Olympics kick off today in Vancouver with the opening ceremonies. Did you know these fun facts about the Vancouver Winter Olympics?

  • The 2010 WInter Olympics will be the second time that Canada has hosted the winter Olympics, having been the host for the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. Canada has also hosted the summer Olympics, in Montreal 1976.

  • There are 15 sports on the Winter Olympic Program for 2010. The sports of Snowboard Cross and Skier Cross have been added to the program.

  • The mens and women's hockey will be played on smaller (60 x 26 m vs 60 x 30) NHL-sized ice for the first time, saving millions of dollars by not having to build a new rink.

  • Vancouver is the first Winter Olympics host city to hold the opening and closing ceremonies indoors.

  • The three Vancouver Games mascots are Miga, Quatchi and Sumi. Miga is part Kermode bear, a rare white bear that only lives in British Columbia. Quatchi is a young sasquatch, a popular figure in local native legends of the Pacific West Coast. Sumi is an animal spirit who lives in the mountains of British Columbia.
  • Tuesday, February 2, 2010

    Good Morning America Recommends Temporary Employment

    We received this in an email today from the American Staffing Association. DISCOVER STAFFING is a member of the ASA as well as the Georgia Staffing Association

    'Good Morning America' Recommends Temporary Employment

    Temporary employment through an ASA member staffing firm is a great option for job seekers, according to "Good Morning America" correspondent Tory Johnson. That's one of the messages she shared during the Jan. 25 "Get a Job in January" segment with George Stephanopoulos.

    "It seems that all the action right now [is] in temporary jobs," said Stephanopoulos. "In the past six months, 200,000 temporary jobs [were] created," he added.

    Johnson agreed, citing ASA data as well as anecdotal information the association had collected from its board of directors: "The ASA leadership…said that they still feel very positive about strong growth between now and July, adding up to about 300,000 positions."

    To find those positions, Johnson recommended that job seekers visit americanstaffing.net, where they can search for staffing firms' contact information. The accompanying article on abcnews.com provided a direct link to the job seekers search engine on the ASA Web site.

    The GMA Web article also referred to a study by labor law firm Littler Mendelson, which predicts that temporary and contract employees and consultants will fill half the jobs created during the economic recovery. "Temporary jobs are a smart place to look right now," Johnson wrote.

    Johnson also discussed job opportunities in health care, in federal law enforcement, and with small businesses.

    "Good Morning America," a morning news program on the ABC television network, reaches some 4.3 million viewers, according to a recent audit report. The ABC Web site, abcnews.com, receives more than nine million unique visitors monthly.



    Reem El-Khatib

    From Staffing Week