When prized employees leave a company, bosses almost always act surprised. From the comforts of the corner office, it’s easy to believe that you’re providing a great work environment and all the career-advancement opportunities that workers or managers might want. But maybe senior executives just can’t handle the truth.

LinkedIn launched a new, standalone version of its Pulse news-reading app on Wednesday aimed at giving users a better-tailored reading experience and more reasons to strike up conversations with their LinkedIn connections.

Because it can be tough to sift through all of the day’s news, Pulse is intended to give users the articles they should read to adeptly handle water-cooler talk at work and to know which stories are popular among people in their industry, Akshay Kothari, lead product manager at LinkedIn and cofounder of Pulse, said in an interview.

If you have been in the workplace for a couple of years, you have most likely already learned the lesson that your talent and hard work will not ensure your promotion. The myth of the meritocracy has been shattered. Though it seems unfair to be passed over to less qualified candidates, it can be a rude awakening to the reality of the workplace today. It takes more than your talent and great performance to get ahead.

The folks over at Johnson Controls have put together an interesting report called Smart Workplace 2040: The Rise of the Workspace Consumer, it’s a lengthy 84 page report that explores various scenarios for what the workplace might look like in 2040.

Your company may be suffering from a genuine talent shortage. It may be suffering from a flawed hiring process. It may be one or the other or even both, but the end result will be the same: Companies that can’t find creative ways to find the employees they need can’t grow. Business leaders who can win the talent war (and it is a war) will be able to say yes to new business opportunities while their talent-strapped competition will have to walk away.

Companies often face a severe reality check when they look at how white and male their workforce remains, in spite of their claims of proper efforts at diversity. The problem is so bad that one entrepreneur has developed a software tool directly aimed at giving them the lowdown on it, and an exact system for urgently and sustainably doing something about it. Katapult, a tool described as a ‘Salesforce meets LinkedIn, meets diversity’, is the creation of businesswoman Andrea Hoffman, the founder of consultancy Culture Shift Labs.

Most people’s biggest fear is being put on the spot by oddball interview questions such as these (which are real):

“Describe the color yellow to someone who’s blind.” – Spirit Airlines

“If you were asked to unload a 747 full of jelly beans, what would you do?” – Bose

“Who would win in a fight between Spiderman and Batman?” – Stanford University

Decades of research into the effectiveness of employment interviews has shown one consistent result: we are terrible at conducting them. Our ability to predict success from a typical unstructured job interview is roughly the same as flipping a coin. A round up of 85 years of research by leadership scholars showed that unstructured interviews were ranked so low in effectiveness that they only explained 14% of an employee’s performance.

The most flawed stories are those that we think we know best and are often repeated by those around us – and so we rarely investigate further. Ask anyone in business to name the most important social network for salespeople, and you will almost always hear: LinkedIn, of course. LinkedIn, with its 364 million users […]

The “War Room” – where once battle strategies, and today business strategies, are formed, tactics devised, and actions monitored. By designating a War Room, a company recognizes that from time to time, it’s necessary to take a step back from the flurry of everyday activity and survey the scene from ten thousand feet. From a […]

There has been no shortage of recruiting conferences going on the past couple of months from national events like ERE and SHRM Talent to regional events including Minnesota Recruiters, recruitDC, Seattle SMA, Nashville TANS and the list goes on and on. As Talent Acquisition professionals look to arm themselves with bite size information and stats […]

We’ve all come across this type of person in our careers: the guy who is miserable to work with but who’s also “the top salesman we have.” Or how about “the smartest guy in the room,” who’s also the most unapproachable person you’ve ever met? The talent may well be there but, in today’s increasingly networked workplace, it isn’t a guarantee of success.