One of the main concerns for many people in tough economic times is the job search process.  Researchers have found that a poor economy can have a significant psychological effect on individuals looking for jobs. Individuals affected by downsizing will likely have low confidence and self-esteem and will think that it is necessary to appear
super-qualified to get a job. Many studies have found that around 40% of people already provide false information on their resumes, and with the tendency mentioned above, lies on resumes are likely even more prevalent in tough times. Organizations should realize that in traditional face-to-face interviews, recruiters are able to catch a little under half of the lies with which they are confronted, and so they should be careful in these settings. However, they should be even more aware of interviewers' abilities in the computer-based settings that many companies are starting the recruiting process with now. Many job-search websites now provide features so that the interview process can be started online, using e-mail or instant-messaging (IM) chat communication. While these features are useful because they allow organizations to easily interview many candidates in different places, the also present new challenges, such as detecting interviewee lies. Unfortunately, interviewers are only able to catch about 8% of the lies with which they are confronted when using computer-based communication, such as email or IM. However, in a recent study conducted by faculty at IESE and by researchers in the US, it was found that when other individuals (that were not involved in the interview process) review transcripts (or recordings) of computer-based interviews, it is possible to more than double the lie detection rate in these new interview settings. This is good news, because with this added step in the interview process, distance-based interviews that take place over the computer may be effective enough for initial interview stages.

To find out more about these studies and some of the new findings about lies and new interview settings, take a look at "Hiring. How to Separate the Wheat from the Chaff" and "Truth, Lies and Audiotape: Finding Fibbers Before Hiring Them" at the IESE Insight website.

A couple of posts ago, I talked about Microsoft’s potential move into cloud computing. However, since that time, Microsoft formally announced their development of a cloud-based system and cloud computing has been getting even more media attention. This post is a follow-up to the previous post, and it is meant to be a quick guide to a few more of the current discussions about this new technology.

David Chappell describes the importance of cloud computing in a research report sponsored by Microsoft. He talks about the potential impact that a new type of application environment can have. As he says, “A new kind of application platform doesn’t come along very often. But when a successful platform innovation does appear, it has an enormous impact. Think of the way personal computers and servers shook up the world of mainframes and minicomputers…” While the old world of desktop applications will not go away, a new approach can quickly become the center of attention for new applications, and so desktop development may be passed by for many new and cutting-edge applications. When talking about another way that cloud computing may cause a major disruption, CIO.com reported that cloud computing will likely allow organizations to more easily outsource non-critical computing processes. This means that cloud computing could also cause further reductions in IT workforces in the coming years.

One recent discussion in the cloud computing arena that has been gaining momentum is related to legal and ethical issues involved with online information storage. Once applications are stored online (as they are with cloud computing), much of the data associated with these programs will likely follow (if it is not already there). The economist reports that “several governments have recently passed new laws forcing online firms to retain more data, and at some point, cloud providers may find themselves compelled to build data centers in every country where they do business.” This is potentially a major obstacle for small to medium sized companies that want to get into the cloud-based infrastructure business. Also important are the ethical issues regarding information storage. A BBC article questions, “What happens when Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google and IBM are actually running programs and storing data behalf of their customers? We may criticize Google for censoring search results in China, but what happens when Microsoft data centers are being used to store data on political prisoners or transcripts of torture sessions?” Clearly, the decision of how to handle ethical issues related to the information stored on cloud-based machines will be important.

Another recent discussion looks at how one of the key challenges for cloud providers is to create the entire infrastructure needed to support business applications. Information Week mentions that many platform developers are using other online resources to support their own infrastructure. For example many providers use Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service and Simple Storage Service (S3) to support their online processing and storage needs. As they say, “The advantage is that tasks needing an extra blast of processing power or storage capacity can be handled by Amazon, so-called cloudburst computing.” Also, providers are trying to allow easy integration (for applications on their platforms) with other online environments, such as Facebook. A resource such as Facebook can make it possible to connect employees, customers, and partners in new ways.

These are just a few of the early discussions related to cloud computing. However, as companies develop more owerful infrastructures, application developers will recognize new opportunities for online applications, and the issues related to cloud computing will get larger and more complex. It probably isn’t a bad idea to read up on it now, before the possibilities and issues are hard to get your head around.

In the past decade, email has become one of the most central applications of any manager. Still, email programs have not changed much. Since the amount of email we get has grown tremendously, email has a significant impact on our overall productivity. The average information worker gets far more mail than s/he can cope with, and an increasing number of people suffer from significant “email overload”.

Are you are one of those people who receive hundreds of emails a day, and have you sometimes thought to simply “delete all email of your mailbox”? Now that financial bankruptcies have been become part of our day to day readings, I would like to draw your attention to “email bankruptcy”, which essentially means that you delete all your pending email and start over. The term was invented already years ago (although we still don’t know if we should attribute the invention of the term to Stanford’s professor Lawrence Lessig or to MIT professor Sherry Turkle). This “start over” approach may be a very radical solution to a common problem, but more people than we might think have been trying to get out of the email overload spiral (have a look at, “leave me alone” or this Wired article for some popular examples).

And nowadays, we are even spreading our attention more and more: we need to pay attention to our Facebook, read the different blogs for which we have alerts on, we twitter, myspace, … and, above all, our email follows us conveniently wherever we, since we have now have push-mail!

It’s hence not surprising that more and more people declare their collapse vis-à-vis their email. But before taking the last and really radical step of declaring yourself in email bankruptcy –with the implications of having email creditors and all those other nasty side-effects of loss of reputation- let’s go a moment back to the basic and rethink our email practice.

To start with, remember that email initially was conceived to overcome one of the big problems of the phone: it queues messages, and hence does not require your immediate action. Unlike synchrounous communications like phone calls or meetings, people can communicate via email without both paying attention at the same time. This means that YOU pick the moments at which you pay attention to email. But if you are paying continuous attention to your email, this means that anyone can interrupt anytime what you are doing. Hence, somebody else picks the moments at which you pay attention (even any spam emailer gets your mindshare, at least for a second).

Does this sound familiar to you? If yes, it’s probably time to think a little bit more about our productivity (and a healthy state of mind!), and less about continuous emailing, microblogging, or microsharing. In the last years, some practices have shown how to increase productivity by changing little bis of our email behaviour. You may think that these are too radical to you, but if you are close to email bankruptcy, you may try them before becoming really radical. And who knows, most people that try them out report back that while no disaster happens, there life has improved. Although I’m still trying to formalize on this topic (I will inform you about my results in some weeks) let’s start naming a few that seem to work quite well:

1. Turn-off your email program and check it only from time to time. It should be you who controls when you want to be interrupted. And remember, our productivity goes down badly with increased numbers of interruptions. Set aside some few dedicated times for dealing with email every day. If you think that this is not possible, think that even Bill Gates checks his email in general only twice a day… or at least that’s what people say…

2. Some things should not be in our email: don’t criticize, and avoid long (often technical) debates. Use face to face meetings or phone calls that are of an intrinsically interactive nature. Even if it may be tedious to set up a common time to talk, we will get things done much faster if we do this effort for issues that require joint work. Tricky or personal issues require personal contact, so we should not put those things on our email.

3. Filter! Most email clients have some filters that allow us to automatically redirect or store emails with certain characteristics. In this way, we can separate emails with important information and actions to be taken from those repetitive alerts that only add to our email pile. Even if it takes some time to set up convenient filters, the initial effort quickly shows its effects in terms of (apparently) much less email traffic!

4. Work on the easy ones. If you can retire an email with a quick response, do it now. And then, go back to work!

5. Schedule some time for the difficult ones. If an email requires a significant amount of work (more than 15 minutes), this should be reflected in your calendar and to do’s list.

Obviously, these are only some of the many things that one can do to get in control of its email, but you may want to give a try to one or two of these. Actually, it’s inaccurate to talk about email management without mentioning task and calendar management. More about this will come in future post!