Writing a Goodbye Note: Sometimes, it can take a lifetime to learn how to do it right

Copyright: artursz

I’VE WRITTEN MANY goodbye notes over the course of my career. That happens when you have worked a long time. But what I’ve found is that  writing a goodbye note can be challenging and difficult to get just right. I have had a lot of practice writing them, and much of what I believe about

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What do college graduates want from employers? A four-day week is a good start

RESEARCH CAN BE GOOD or bad, but when it is good AND useful, it can help guide us to better insights that improve our decision-making moving ahead. Here’s some research from earlier this summer that caught my attention — a survey that shows what new college graduates really want from their would-be employers. It comes

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Yes, this is probably the Greatest Job Candidate Cover Letter of all time

Editor’s Note: I’m occasionally republishing some classic Skeptical Guy posts throughout the summer. This one is from August 2018. REMEMBER THE OLD military concept of “shock and awe“? It got a lot of attention during the Iraq War, and is defined as rapidly dominating an opponent “by the initial imposition of overwhelming force and firepower.”

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Here’s why one analyst thinks pay is key to better employee retention and satisfaction

I CAN’T TELL YOU HOW OFTEN I’ve heard that “people don’t leave because of pay, they leave because of their boss.” Now, as we continue to slowly recover from the pandemic and lockdown, we’re finding out that people leave jobs and take new ones for all sorts of reasons. But what seems to be most important to people today is what has ALWAYS been most important

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Is “Ghosting” a workplace problem? Well, I was ghosting when ghosting wasn’t cool

Editor’s Note: I’m occasionally republishing some classic Skeptical Guy posts. This one is from January 2019 . WHO SAYS THERE’S no such thing as “fake” news? I’m reminded of this whenever I read about how the “ghosting” trend (people skipping job interviews, failing to show up when they get hired, or bailing from a new job

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The pandemic may be over, but the fallout is causing HR pros to stress out and burn out

DO YOU KNOW WHAT GRABS my attention? It’s stories that say that HR leaders are getting battered by crises that are leading to burnout and higher turnover, and that managing a workforce in flux is causing “chaos for HR professionals.” For the love of SHRM, what is going on with human resources today? It seems that even though we’re finally recovering from the global

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More reasons to embrace remote work: Silly pet peeves and dumb workplace data

WORKPLACE DATA COMES IN all shapes and sizes. It also highlights a variety of workplace issues. I try to showcase interesting data here. Sometimes I find it as I’m looking for things to share, but other times, the data finds me — usually courtesy of some PR or marketing professional. This data comes courtesy of a PR person working for blankcalendarpages.com, a company that touts itself as “a leading provider of

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I’ve attended many conferences, but this one had the strangest session I’ve ever seen

LAST SPRING I COVERED the HR Transform conference in Las Vegas for a website I founded and used to edit — TLNT.com. I also attended HR Transform last year, and it’s a smart conference that’s clearly on the rise. I recommend it to anyone who is looking for a cutting-edge event in the HR and talent management space. When

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A nutty principle I never learned in biz school: Teams that swear more win more

IT’S BEEN A FEW YEARS since I went to business school, but I thought I had learned just about every basic principle of business that really mattered — until now. Yes, here’s one business basic that my grad school professors never spent much time on, and I’m sure I would have remembered it if they

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It never ends — yet another use for AI and ChatGPT: Getting out of a parking ticket

THERE SEEMS TO BE NO END to the creative (some might say strange) uses for Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT. Here’s a new one I had not heard of before: appealing a New York City parking ticket. Wilfred Chan, writing in Fast Company, told his tale in a story titled I asked ChatGPT to contest my parking ticket. What followed

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