By Alyson McNutt English • Bankrate.com

Insurance innovations aren't usually glamorous or trendy. But recently, a handful of major insurance companies have "gone green," at least in their product offerings.

Those who own hybrid vehicles or green-certified homes can benefit from lower premiums on their property. And those who aspire to own a greener home can choose coverage that, in the event of a loss, will pay for rebuilding their home greener than it was before.

The question is: Does earth-conscious coverage make sense for you?

Ashley Katz, spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C.-based U.S. Green Building Council, contends that green insurance is money well spent. The organization is made up of companies, contractors and government agencies that promote sustainable building practices.

"Investing in green strategies is a smart strategy for ensuring that your home performs well, saves money and is better for the health and well-being of the home's occupants," Katz says.
Greening your insurance


Eco-policies for homeowners
There are two types of green policies for homeowners. One covers buildings that already meet stringent efficiency and sustainability standards. The other offers the option to replace any losses incurred on the property with more environmentally sensitive materials.

Fireman's Fund Insurance Co. of Novato, Calif., was one of the first companies to introduce homeowners policies that feed into consumer desire to make homes more energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable.

For people who already own LEED-certified homes, Fireman's offers a 5-percent discount off regular annual insurance premiums. LEED, which is short for the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Green Building Rating System, was developed by the U.S. Green Building Council and is a recognized environmental standard in the building world.

While there are "green" homes that have not gone through the LEED certification process, using this standard allows Fireman's Fund to have a common benchmark for deciding what homes qualify for the green-property discount, says Janet Ruiz, spokeswoman for Fireman's Fund.

While this discount is certainly popular with the small customer segment that owns LEED-certified residential buildings, it doesn't apply to most people searching for homeowners policies.
Go green the next time around
For people who don't own green-certified properties, several insurers are introducing an option that allows homeowners to replace any property losses with more eco-friendly options. Farmers Insurance of Los Angeles recently introduced an option it calls "Eco-Rebuild" that will replace damaged properties with more environmentally conscious materials. This option is available as an addition -- or endorsement in insurance lingo -- to a regular homeowner's policy for $25 or 2 percent of the annual premium, whichever is more.

"There's a continuing trend for individuals to think and act green," says Jeff Reinig, Farmers Insurance senior vice president of home product management. "The Eco-Rebuild endorsement addresses this trend."

Reinig says by this summer, this option should be available to Farmers' customers in 28 states.

Fireman's Fund also offers its "Green Upgrade," which pays for a greener rebuild after a loss, as an addition to the regular homeowners policy. It's available as an addition to a regular homeowner's policy, starting at $25 annually for homes with an insured value of $350,000 or less. For houses with higher insured values, the annual additional cost is $70 per $1 million of the home's value.
So what does a policy mean when it offers to rebuild a home greener than before?

Reinig explains that in the event of a covered loss, the Eco-Rebuild endorsement means Farmers will pay extra to replace your old kilowatt-hungry appliances with Energy-Star devices and recycle debris rather than send destroyed materials straight to a landfill. The Energy-Star label means the appliances meet an energy-savings rating created by a joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy.
Greener auto policies
For owners of hybrid vehicles, saving the Earth and saving money are sometimes as high a priority as saving on gasoline. For these consumers, a handful of companies are offering discounts that make it a sound option for drivers to own these fuel-sipping vehicles.

"Offering these environmentally friendly policies fits with our corporate philosophy as well as a lot of our customers' personal philosophies," says William Pearse, vice president of auto product strategy and design for Traveler's Insurance of Hartford, Conn., which was one of the first companies to offer discounted insurance rates for hybrid autos. The company also has introduced a discount insurance program for hybrid or electric boats.

Even so, most insurance companies charge higher premiums for hybrid vehicles because of the cost associated with replacing expensive components like the nickel-metal-hydride batteries that provide some of the power for hybrids, Pearse says.

An unanticipated effect has been that Travelers has seen a lower incidence of losses from owners of hybrid vehicles. "They're exhibiting a responsibility by owning a hybrid, and that seems to cross over into more responsible driving habits," he says.

Farmers also offers a discount for hybrid drivers of up to 10 percent of the policy's annual cost. Brian Dwyer, senior vice president of auto product management for Farmers Insurance Group, says the company has found that drivers of hybrid vehicles tend to be more mature, more environmentally conscious and drive fewer miles than other motorists. Because they cause fewer accidents, the cost of replacing the expensive hybrid parts is more than balanced out by their "preferred" status as insured.

The bottom line with green auto insurance is fairly straightforward: Finding a company that offers discounts for hybrids is a good move for owners of these eco-smart cars. Regardless of whether your hybrid is an economical Prius or a luxury hybrid Lexus RX, Farmers and Travelers offer a discount of up to 10 percent off a normal policy, depending on individual insurance histories and state regulations.

If you're hoping to score a greener insurance policy for your home, vehicle or even your boat, call your current insurer and ask if any discounts are available. And as you should do anyway, shop around and see who gives you the most bang for your insurance buck. Howard Mills, chief adviser for the insurance group at Deloitte & Touche USA LLP, says insurers are increasing their offerings of climate-change-related products, including incentives for customers who have, or want to have, greener homes and vehicles.

"My sense is that the insurance industry feels this isn't going to be a fad," Mills says. "This isn't something that's going away in a couple of years. It's driven in demographics with younger consumers who will be purchasing insurance products for years to come."

This Article is published here.

By STEVE LOHR
Published: April 11, 2009

In the Depression, smart college students flocked into civil engineering to design the highway, bridge and dam-building projects of those days. In the Sputnik era, students poured into the sciences as America bet on technology to combat the cold war Communist challenge. Yes, the jobs beckoned and the pay was good. But those careers, in their day, had other perks: respect and self-esteem.

Big shifts in the flow of talent can ripple through the nation and the economy for decades with lasting effect. The engineers of the Depression built everything from inter-city roads to the Hoover Dam, while the Sputnik-inspired scientists would go on, often with research funding from the Pentagon, to create the building-block innovations behind modern computing and the Internet.

Today, the financial crisis and the economic downturn are likely to alter drastically the career paths of future years. The contours of the shift are still in flux, in part because there is so much uncertainty about the shape of the economic landscape and the job market ahead.

But choosing a career is a guess about the future in which economics is only part of the calculation. Prestige, peer expectations and the climate of public opinion also matter. And early indications suggest new career directions that are tethered less to the dream of an immediate six-figure paycheck on Wall Street than to the demands of a new public agenda to solve the nation’s problems.

The deep recession has clearly battered industries — and professions — whose economics were at risk before the downturn. Law firms are laying off lawyers as never before and questioning the industry’s traditional unit of payment, the billable hour. Journalism is reeling from the falloff in advertising and the inability of newspapers and magazines to make a living on the Web.

Still, the industry whose troubles are having the greatest impact on the rethinking of careers, especially at the nation’s elite universities, is the one at the center of the country’s economic downturn — finance. For years, the hefty paychecks and social status on Wall Street proved irresistible to many of America’s brightest young people, but the jobs, money and social respect there are much diminished today.

“In choosing careers, young people look for signals from society, and Wall Street will no longer pull the talent that it did for so many years,” said Richard Freeman, director of the labor studies program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. “We have a great experiment before us.”

What will the new map of talent flow look like? It’s early, but based on graduate school applications this spring, enrollment in undergraduate courses, preliminary job-placement results at schools, and the anecdotal accounts of students and professors, a new pattern of occupational choice seems to be emerging. Public service, government, the sciences and even teaching look to be winners, while fewer shiny, young minds are embarking on careers in finance and business consulting.

For the highest-paid business fields, the outlook is for a tempering correction instead of an all-out exodus. At Harvard, for example, about 40 percent of undergraduates in recent years went into the most lucrative corporate arenas like finance and consulting, based on surveys at the school year’s end. “That certainly won’t be the case this year,” observed Lawrence Katz, a professor and labor economist who has studied undergraduate career choices at Harvard going back to the 1960s. “We’re seeing students who would have been part of the Ivy League pipeline to Wall Street in the past considering very different career paths.”

Kedamai Fisseha, a 21-year-old senior, is one of them. An economics major, Mr. Fisseha says he always assumed he would go into finance, and his summer internship last year was at the investment bank Morgan Stanley. Yet after Wall Street’s meltdown, job prospects there have withered. Instead, he is interviewing with Teach for America, a nonprofit group that recruits college graduates to teach in hard-to-staff schools for two-year stints. (After that, only one-third stay in the classrooms, though two-thirds remain in education.)

Mr. Fisseha regards the turn of events as an opportunity to broaden his horizons. “It’s been liberating, and lucky for me,” he said. “But your situation does dictate your preferences.”

Graduate schools of government and public policy are seeing a surge of applications. In a survey of its members released last week, the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration found that 82 percent reported an increase in applications this year, and many saw the largest percentage jumps in several years, or ever. The most-cited reason was the expectation by students that government will be hiring.

Still, the appeal of public sector careers extends beyond job openings, say school officials. The laissez-faire presumption that government is not the solution but the problem, dating back to the Reagan era, has been cast aside, they say.

The government’s need to step in with financial bailouts and recovery programs to steady the economy is seen as the immediate proof, they say, but not the only one. The environment, energy and health care also pose huge, complex challenges. “Young people today understand that government has a powerful role to play in solving these problems,” said Sandra Archibald, dean of the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington, where applications this year are up 26 percent.

Government school officials also point to an Obama effect: his election as an endorsement of government activism.

The economy, other long-range policy issues and the new administration, according to David Ellwood, dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, add up to a “benevolent perfect storm,” which could lure talented people to public service in a way not seen in decades.

Yet even before the economic crisis, Mr. Ellwood said, there were signs of a drift among young people toward trying to work on public problems, influenced by everything from the 9/11 attacks to climate change.

Matthew McKnight attended Phillips Exeter Academy and was a freshman at Dartmouth College during the 9/11 attacks. The event and its aftermath, he recalled, left him with a conviction that he should serve his country “because of the opportunities I’d been given.” After graduating from college, Mr. McKnight joined the Marines. His four years in the military included a stint at the State Department in a counterterrorism unit, and he recently returned from 13 months in the field in Iraq.

Article Published in New York Times

Evan Hessel, 04.27.09, 12:01 AM EDT
A parade of new automated ad platforms aim to reshape digital media.

Tim Cadogan pities the plight of the digital advertiser.

Big brands would love to advertise on small, niche-focused Web sites--think Mountain Dew on blogs about windsurfing, or Gerber baby food on sites about vegetarian parenting--but don't have the manpower to screen every site for quality content, let alone negotiate thousands of deals with different buyers.

Yet publishers have it even worse, says Cadogan, Yahoo!'s ( YHOO - news - people ) former head of global advertising. Editors who run small Web sites are so consumed producing content that titillates readers that they turn over their ad inventory to one of hundreds of resellers in exchange for pennies per view.

Through his Pasadena, Calif., start-up OpenX, Cadogan is working on an application to alleviate the anxiety of both beleaguered ad buyers and frustrated Web publishers. OpenX recently unveiled Market, an application that allows advertisers to automatically bid on access to narrow niches of readers across an array of small Web sites.

OpenX is one of many outfits seeking to automate the selling of hyper-targeted digital ads on the Web. A slew of firms--ranging from tiny start-ups to Web giants like Google ( GOOG - news - people )--have rolled out applications purporting to analyze online ad opportunities and help publishers and advertisers figure out how to allocate their respective ad inventories and budgets.

Many of these new applications promise to deploy demographic, geographic and personal interest data to identify attractive readers for advertisers wherever they land on the Web. Such micro-targeting may seem like a potential invasion of privacy, but user data analysis is an established practice. Most data collectors skirt privacy complaints by allowing Web users to block their tracking software.

The boom in new advertising optimization tools could reshape the $7.6 billion market for Internet display advertising. Leery of attaching the brand to sketchy Web content, big advertisers have historically preferred to deal with large Web publishers, such as the digital arms of newspapers and consumer magazines.

But ad tech executives and media planners say the new ad sales tools promise a cheap and efficient way for brands to screen and buy ads on smaller Web sites and blogs.

"These systems help advertisers cut through the clutter online, which will clearly help the 'long tail' publishers,'' says Kelly Twohig, a senior vice president at media planning agency Starcom ( SCME.PK - news - people ) in Chicago, whose clients include Allstate ( ALL - news - people ) and Capital One.

The potential for a reallocation of ad budgets from big publishers to smaller rivals comes at a stressful time for media giants. The New York Times Co. ( NYT - news - people ) announced this week that Web ad sales fell 6% and overall ad revenues dropped 28% year-over-year during the first quarter of 2009.

Earlier this month, Gannett ( GCI - news - people ), publisher of 85 daily newspapers including USA Today, reported that quarterly revenue decline 18% compared to last year.

Publishers participate in the OpenX Market by entering their advertising inventory--the spaces on their Web pages where ads can appear--into an online database and set a floor price for each slot. If an advertiser bids above that minimum, their ad appears on the Web site.

Along with buying on specific Web sites, Cadogan says that ad buyers will be able to use third-party data on Web users' personal interest, browsing history and demographics to find desirable segments of readers across all publishers participating in the market. Web sites currently use OpenX's software to deliver an estimated 300 billion impressions each month.

In addition to the challenge of convincing marketers to spend their ad budgets in a drastically different way, outfits like OpenX have to figure out how to emerge as leaders in an already competitive field.

"We've seen half a billion dollars of venture capital poured into building optimization and planning companies,'' says Matthew Hulett, chief executive of ad network and analytics firm Mpire.

This week, Hulett's firm unveiled an application to help advertisers track on which Web sites networks place ads, where on the actual screen the ad appears and if Web surfers pause their cursor over the ad. The tool is intended to help marketers better figure out how much of their ad spending is essentially worthless.

Google and Yahoo! both operate advertising exchanges that allow publishers to analyze how much revenue different ad sales techniques attract and help advertisers secure the best ad placement for the cheapest prices.

Rubicon Project, a two-year-old Los Angeles start-up that processes 40 billion impressions each month, helps Web sites compare ad prices delivered by different third-party ad brokers. This week, the company unveiled OnDemand, a service that lets advertisers automatically buy ads delivered to specific geographic, demographic and personal interest groups across a network of publishers.

PubMatic, a Silicon Valley start-up known in the ad world for publishing market reports on trends in ad prices, offers a similar optimization product aimed at big media companies' digital arms.

It's too early to say whether advertisers embrace the automated ad buying tools en masse. As people spend more of their lives online, marketers are desperate to reach them cheaply and efficiently. But, as Starcom media planner Twohig says, a human salesperson and trusted media product go a long way in attracting ad dollars.

Evan Hessel and Taylor Buley, 04.29.09, 01:00 AM EDT

A start-up says it can figure out what's powerful or pointless. Time for struggling online publishers to worry?

LOS ANGELES -- Advertisers spend nearly $8 billion annually pumping trillions of ads into boxes and banners across all other corners of the Internet.

Who actually looks at all that stuff?

Other ads get better placement, Hulett says, but suffer from such confusing text or dull graphics that readers never so much as pause their cursor on them.

Mpire, Hulett's Seattle start-up, just unveiled a new Web application designed to help marketers cut out such wasteful and pointless ad spending. The service, called AdXpose, allows advertisers to track precisely where on individual Web pages their ads land, how long they are visible and whether readers' cursors linger over any particular ad box.

Jones Soda ( JSDA - news - people ) and Viacom's ( VIA - news - people ) MTV Networks are among the first advertisers to use AdXpose to track their online marketing expenditures.

Mpire's ad analytics are among the latest and most powerful in a growing market for applications tracking how marketing dollars are spent online. Since 2004, the Interactive Advertising Bureau has maintained technical standards mandating how display ads should be tracked online. PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte & Touche and ABC Interactive offer tools for auditing online ad campaigns.

Outfits like Mpire may prompt a reshuffling of online ad dollars at a time when many Web publishers are fighting to stay alive. Microsoft ( MSFT - news - people ) just announced a 16% drop last quarter in online ad revenue, compared to a year ago. At the New York Times Co. ( NYT - news - people ), Web ad sales dipped 6% compared to 2008.

The demand in ad tracking outfits is a direct result of gradual changes in the way ads are bought and sold online. During the early days of the Web, advertisers knew exactly where their ads appeared because they negotiated directly with Web sites' salespeople. Direct sales practices still dominate at big Web publishers, such as the digital arms of newspapers and broadcast television networks, but they are losing market share to third-party ad brokerages.

For legions of small Web publishers, ad sales occur through one of 400 or so networks, which purchase bulk ad space from Web sites and resell it to advertisers. Today, 80% of Web ads are sold through such brokers.

Advertisers often use several different networks to reach their target consumers across countless niche Web sites, blogs and social networks. Keeping track of where every ad lands and who sees it is a seemingly impossible task.

Launched in 2005, Mpire first developed WidgetBucks, an application that helps Web publishers compare cost-per-click prices among advertisers to find the most lucrative ad deals.

Hulett recently offered advertisers in the WidgetBucks program complimentary ad auditing tools. Marketers used the tool so much that he decided to rebrand it as AdXpose and offer it to advertisers unaffiliated with WidgetBucks.

Mpire is far from the only enterprise pitching ad-tracking products. Still, Hulett bets he can win over advertisers with sophisticated analytical technology. AdXpose embeds a Javascript tag into each ad and tracks the Web address of each page where the ad appears, along with the placement on the page.

The tool also measures if the Web users let their cursor wander over the ad. Hulett calls this procedure "heat-mapping," and provides the resulting data to advertisers in real-time.

How will new insight into the precise placement of ads affect the fate of digital media companies?

Hulett says his product is unlikely to suck significant Web revenue out of big publishers like the digital arms of newspapers, magazines and TV networks, as those firms collect the bulk of their revenue from direct sales of premium ads placed at the top of Web pages.

The biggest impact could be on social networks like Facebook and News Corp.'s ( NWS - news - people ) Myspace, as well as blogs, Hulett says. Purveyors of so-called "user-generated content" are among the booming ad network industry's biggest suppliers of inventory. Once advertisers realize how much of their Web budget goes to ads running at the bottom of humdrum personal profiles and blog posts, Hulett predicts brands will find other places to spend their money.

Between jobs? Good health insurance might not cost you as much - or be as hard to come by - as it used to.

By Amanda Gengler, Money magazine writer
April 27, 2009: 11:51 AM ET

(Money Magazine) -- The only thing more anxiety-producing than losing your job: losing your health insurance. Traditionally, post-pink slip coverage options have been pretty pricey. But in February, Congress signed off on a short-term premium subsidy for laid-off workers. This came on top of the fact that insurers have been responding to the needs of a "freelance nation" with a greater variety of individual-market plans.

Trouble is, the system is still pretty confusing. Need coverage till your next gig? Follow this guide.

First: ask for more. Over the past decade, exit packages have gotten less generous, says Bill Belknap of the Five O'Clock Club, a career counseling firm. It was once standard to include health benefits. But today 26% of large employers pay nothing toward former employees' insurance costs during their severance periods, reports benefits consulting firm Hewitt Associates. If yours offers little or no help, "it doesn't hurt to ask your boss for more," Belknap says. Longtime employees, senior-level staff, and those with sick family members may have the best luck, he predicts.

Second: piggyback. If your spouse has a group plan that will cover you, sign up fast: A job loss is a special circumstance in which you can be added - but you have only 30 days from your coverage end date to enroll. "It's the best option," says Paul Fronstin, director of health research at the Employee Benefit Research Institute. "It's the least costly and least disruptive, and you're guaranteed coverage."

Third: buy the status quo. Under the federal COBRA law, companies with at least 20 employees typically must give laid-off workers the option to extend group coverage for 18 months. Many states have continuation requirements for smaller employers as well. (Check at naic.org.) The catch: The company usually no longer pays any of the premium. Until recently that meant you'd foot an average of $400 a month for an individual and $1,050 for a family, according to Kaiser Family Foundation.

But with the new subsidy, Uncle Sam may pick up 65% of your bill for up to nine months (see the box above). You can keep benefits, at full cost, another nine. For most people - except, perhaps, the young and healthy - this is still cheaper than a comparable individual-market plan, says Tom Billet, a benefits consultant at Watson Wyatt. Besides, if you have an existing condition, you may have to exhaust COBRA to guarantee coverage of that health issue in a future plan.

You have 60 days to take COBRA, but it's retroactive over that time - so you can enroll at day 50 and file a claim for a doctor visit on day 49. Your employer or insurer will notify you about the subsidy (the companies get the money, so you're billed for only 35%). To qualify, you'll need to have been let go between Sept. 1, 2008, and Dec. 31, 2009; if you turned down COBRA already, you have a second chance to enroll. You can't be eligible for Medicare or a spouse's plan. And if your modified adjusted gross income for the year exceeds $125,000 - or $250,000 for couples - you'll pay some or all of the benefit back at tax time.

A final note: If your company goes under, so too does your COBRA coverage, unfortunately.

Fourth: go it alone. Research your next step well before COBRA expires: You want to avoid gaps in coverage to avoid exclusions on pre-existing conditions in your next plan. Check if trade groups in your field offer insurance. Also shop the individual market at sites like ehealthinsurance.com. (But know that premiums listed are estimates - your outlay will be based on medical underwriting, which figures in your health risks.)

The past five years have seen an explosion in plan types. On one end are policies with comprehensive benefits and low deductibles (premiums for a healthy family can exceed $1,000 a month); on the other, catastrophic plans with very high deductibles ($200 a month).

The decision comes down to what you can afford and how much risk you're willing to take. Just watch out for low coverage limits, which leave you vulnerable; and skip short-term options, which make you undergo new medical underwriting when you renew. Before you buy any policy, verify that it's licensed with your state department of insurance.

If you can't get coverage due to a health issue or will struggle to pay premiums while unemployed, check at naic.org for state-based last resorts, such as high-risk pools and subsidized programs for children.

And when you land your next job? Sign up for insurance posthaste.

Tara Weiss, 04.17.09, 06:30 PM EDT

JobAngels, a grassroots online group, doesn't even have its own URL yet, but it has gathered thousands of followers and found employment for hundreds.

Early in January Michelle Catania heard about JobAngels from a friend. It couldn't have come at a better time. She signed right up--and she's very glad she did.

JobAngels had just been born. It started when Mark Stelzner, owner of a small human-resources consultancy in Washington, D.C., sent a message to his 650 followers on Twitter saying, "What if each of us helped one person find a job. Are you game?"
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"The response was immediate and overwhelming," he says.

His message was retweeted (forwarded) more than 150 times within minutes. A few hours later it had produced a budding movement called JobAngels, with a Facebook page, a LinkedIn site and a mission: to help bring people together in a community setting where each person commits to a single goal--helping just one person find gainful employment.

People started sending Stelzner messages about job openings and their willingness to mentor job seekers, so he could post them on Facebook and LinkedIn and forward them on Twitter. Job seekers started replying to those messages.

Catania took JobAngels to heart. Her hometown of Richmond, Va., had been hit hard when a major employer, Circuit City ( CC - news - people ), closed its doors. She knew many of the layoff casualties. Then she herself got laid off from her job as comptroller at a publishing company.

She sent Stelzner a message saying she wanted to be a job angel, a volunteer who advises job seekers on forming a job search strategy and writing a résumé and a cover letter.

"I figured what I needed to do was what I'm best at," she says. She had once been a hiring manager. "I knew of specific job opportunities in the area, and this is a small town. People won't forget that. If I can help, someone will pay it forward."


Catania has now mentored about 25 people in their job searches, and she has noticed some trends among them. "Everybody's cover letter was an atrocity," she says. "They weren't personalized and didn't show their understanding of the position or the company."

Her first mentee got a job at a software company within a few weeks. Another person she advised landed a marketing job at a global law firm within a month.

And she was right that helping others would help her. A fellow JobAngels member tweeted her a posting about a finance position at a local nonprofit. She applied and was hired. She started work at the end of February.

She hasn't stopped advising job seekers, though. She wakes up at 5:30 a.m. to peruse résumés and cover letters. She's back at it after work and often has to drag herself away from the computer to go to sleep at 1 a.m.

This couldn't make Mark Stelzner happier--or more surprised. In its three months JobAngels has built a following of more than 12,500. He doesn't know how many job seekers have found work as a result, since connections are made so informally, but "we know it's in the hundreds," he says, judging from how many stories he hears.

JobAngels remains a very casual operation because Stelzner and his team don't have the means to enable formal introductions. Some job seekers and volunteers simply tweet to everyone signed up to follow JobAngels on Twitter. Other connections arise when people peruse announcements on Facebook or join the group on LinkedIn and communicate through that.

Stelzner and his five-team board all work remotely as volunteers. They have never met. Their next order of business is to get a Web site up and running, which will help them formalize the process of pairing job seekers with mentors. "Right now we put announcements out there and keep our fingers crossed and hope people find each other," Stelzner says. "With the Web site we'll do extensive profiling so the right people connect."

He hopes to have JobAngels.com up in May. It will include a questionnaire where users can enter their location and areas of expertise and pick from drop-down menus to indicate their professions and what they're looking for. Eventually he'd like to make it a go-to site for all sorts of job-related content and listings of local job boards.

Even human resources professionals are taking note. Becky Allen, a recruiter for Serco North America, a global management services firm, was using Twitter professionally to follow other H.R. people when she heard about JobAngels. She liked the idea of one-on-one job-seeking help, so she tweeted about three positions in Puerto Rico she had been unable to fill.

Within days, she had hired for all three, thanks to JobAngels.

"It's the first place I go to now," she says. "It's a great collaboration tool."

Author Ramit Sethi's advice for getting started with investing in a vexing environment: Automatically invest and rebalance, and don't time the market

By Ben Levisohn

At a conference on financial literacy on Apr. 20 in Chicago, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said it was time for Americans to learn to manage their money. Ramit Sethi couldn't agree more. The 26-year old personal finance guru has made it his mission to help Americans do just that and he tries to make it as simple as possible. In his new book, I Will Teach You to Be Rich, and on his blog of the same name, Sethi shows twentysomethings how they can automate their financial decision-making and learn how not to overanalyze. This is especially true when it comes to investing. He says money should be automatically diverted to investment accounts, then automatically invested and rebalanced, according to a set calendar. Sethi met with BusinessWeek's Ben Levisohn on Apr. 17 to discuss how fearful investors can get started in this vexing environment.

You're only 26. How did you start investing?

When I was in high school, I applied for a number of scholarships because my parents told me we had to. The first scholarship, for $2,000, was written to me and I invested it in the stock market. This was back in 2000. I lost a lot of money. I still have some of those stocks. One is worth 90¢ in total. I probably lost 99% of that money. That was a great eye-opener. It made me realize that just because you see a stock on TV that does not mean you should invest in it. Just because you're wearing clothes from Gap (GAP) doesn't mean it's a good investment. That's when my eyes started to open. But if you ask most people, "hey, what investments do you have," they say, "you mean stocks?" Which causes me to throw my hands up in the air.

So you're not a big believer in buying individual stocks. How should people invest?

I want to reduce choice and encourage people to invest. For most, a target date fund is perfect. That's the 85% solution. It's not perfect, but it's good enough. There's no need for people to rebalance by themselves. The fact that we have 60- to 70-year olds losing 50% of their money speaks volumes that just because you should rebalance your investments, it doesn't mean you will. Just like you should practice safe sex does not mean you will.

But what if investors want a little more control?

If you really want to tweak it, if you're a type-A nerd and you're reading about all different asset allocations, then let me show you how to do this. Here's a recommendation: the Swensen model, by Yale's Chief Investment Officer David Swenson. Take this and tweak it as needed. [The Swensen Model allocates 30% to domestic equities, 15% to developed world international equities, 5% to emerging-market equities, 20% to real estate funds, 15% to government bonds, and 15% to TIPs.]

But we need to build systems around automating rebalancing so people are not depending on more will power. Investing and personal finance—we've shown that it's not about more will power. It's about creating systems that do this by default for us.

So you wouldn't recommend trying to time the market?

There are people now who pulled their money out. And when the market comes up, they will be some of the last that get in. It drives me crazy. They think this is binary. You either put money in the market or pull it out. That's not how investing works. There are so many gradations and nuances. You can change asset allocation, you can diversify differently, you can change your time horizon. There are a million things you can do. If you try to time the market, then you are a fool. I'm trying to focus on the long term. I really believe in investing for the long term.

Have you changed your outlook because of the bear market?

I was given the opportunity to completely revamp the book in light of the crisis, but the material stands on its merits. What I tell people is that what's in the newspaper today and what President Obama decided to do today has very little to do with your personal finances. Personal finances are personal. You can turn off your TV, close down all the Web sites for the next six weeks, and your finances, if you optimize them, would get much better regardless of what happens.

Young investors have watched their parents lose a good chunk of their retirement savings. What do you say to them to coax them into the market when they may feel like socking away their cash in a mattress?

Although it seems catastrophic, we're in our twenties and thirties and essentially the market is on sale. If I told you one year ago that the market would be 50% off for the same equities you're buying now, what would you have said? The answer, of course, is I would have been ecstatic. Now there's a lot of psychology and uncertainty involved and that's changing things.

How have your investments done in this environment?

I'm roughly indexed, so I was basically in line with the market.

Did you expect these kinds of losses?

I was surprised. The models don't predict this loss typically. We know there are a lot of problems with models. But as a young person, I'm comfortable knowing I can afford that kind of risk. I was consciously invested and am still consciously invested in a risk seeking way. My readers in their twenties and thirties who are invested are interested in the same. They understand this is a long-term play. They understand there are trade-offs. I'm comfortable knowing that not only do I have a long-term perspective, I'm comfortable managing money, earning more, so it can flow back into my infrastructure.

Levisohn is a staff editor at BusinessWeek covering finance and personal finance.

Tara Weiss, 04.15.09, 10:41 AM EDT
It will be jammed with job-seekers--so follow these steps to set yourself apart as someone to hire.


When Monster.com held a career fair in Manhattan in March, 3,700 job-seekers packed the place. A recent job fair held by General Dynamics Information Technology in Fairfax, Va., attracted 1,000. And Targeted Job Fairs, a company that holds fairs across North America, reports that traffic to its events is up by 64% in the first quarter of this year over a year before.

With so many people crowding job fairs, are they even worth attending?

"Absolutely," says Eric Winegardner, vice president of client adoption at Monster.com, which is sponsoring more than 100 job fairs across the country. "It cuts out the Internet way of recruiting and brings people together face to face."
In Pictures: How To Stand Out At A Job Fair

Yes, but you sometimes have to wait in line for an hour just to get in. How promising can that be? Well, consider this: At the General Dynamics fair, about 30 candidates were offered jobs on the spot.

How did those lucky few break through the sea of job-seekers?

"They had the right combination of skills, and they presented themselves well," says Tim Strike, senior manager of recruiting and staffing at General Dynamics. "They fit our opportunities exactly, and they were professional and prepared."

That's the key.

There are several ways you can find out about job fairs in your area. Targeted Job Fairs' Web site, targetedjobfairs.com, lets you search by city or ZIP code, and you can sign up to receive e-mails when something's happening in your area. Monster.com offers a list of upcoming career fairs on its homepage, and nationalcareerfairs.com also allows a search by region or ZIP code. Also check your state's Department of Labor Web site. It too will list upcoming fairs

When possible, pre-register. In so doing, you will learn what companies will be there, which means you can research those companies and get a sense of what jobs they'll be trying to fill.

"If you come to my table and say, 'I read about your company, and I understand you're hiring for customer service positions,' that says you took the time and found out about us," says Gregg Fiorentino, human resources manager at DGA Security Systems, a New York City company that provides security and fire systems for commercial properties. "That makes you stand out for sure."

Once you're in front of a recruiter, you'll have five or 10 minutes to deliver your sales pitch. "Prepare five key talking points about your experience," says Tom Silver, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Dice Holdings, the parent company of Targeted Job Fairs. Explain what kind of position you're looking for, how your experience fits that job and what you've achieved in past jobs. For example, talk about money you saved a company or initiatives that got clients.

"It's your time to shine, so tell us your success stories," says Fiorentino.

Don't try to be a jack of all trades, Fiorentino says: "So many people came up to our table, and when we asked what kind of opportunity they were interested in, they said, 'What kind of opportunity are you hiring for?' That tells me you don't know what you're looking for."

Recruiters say they're very often surprised by how unprofessional candidates are in their personal presentation. Even if you're looking for a job that doesn't require business attire, a man should wear a suit, and a woman a blouse with either a skirt or slacks. Also, when you meet a recruiter, offer a firm handshake, and always look him or her in the eye.

"That tells me this is a person who is confident and has a personality," says Fiorentino.

While at the job fair, visit as many employers as possible. Start with the ones you're least interested in. That will enable you to practice your pitch, which will boost your confidence for the ones you most want to impress.

After meeting with a recruiter, ask what the next step is and when it will occur. Take their business card, and be sure to follow up with a thank-you e-mail or handwritten letter.

That step is very important, says Tim Strike: "It sets you apart as someone who is confident and serious and eager to become part of a company."

New grads needing work can choose between three strategies. Jack and Suzy Welch like the boldest one best

By Jack and Suzy Welch

In about a month, I'll have an MBA—but no job. I'm at a respected school, my GPA is 3.5, I've got two years of retail consulting experience and great references, and I've been doing all the right things to get hired. Please help.—Anonymous, Chicago

What a terrible bind you're in—you and thousands upon thousands of others. Word is that at some business schools upwards of 30% of this year's grads, even in top-tier programs, have yet to land positions. Recruiters just aren't coming to campuses like they used to, and if they are, it's for "informational" purposes only. Word also is that many companies, hit by worsening results and alarmed by dire forecasts, have delayed start dates for their MBA hires or rescinded their offers altogether. It's not a jungle out there, it's a wake.

But you didn't ask for sympathy. You asked for advice.

And so allow us to pass along the exact three recommendations we offered a twentysomething MBA friend we met up with this week, who is, like you, still empty-handed and beginning to feel desperate.
Three-Forked Road

You can settle and learn to love it. You can go a little crazy. Or you can do your own thing.

Settling first, because it's the fastest and easiest.

Look, you already know you're probably not going to get the kind of job—in terms of industry, title, and salary—you were dreaming of the day you started your MBA, back when trees grew to the sky. But there is, very probably, a job out there, here or abroad, that offers you a reasonable amount of relevant experience and a livable salary.

You could accept that job. And more important, even with its disappointment factor, you could embrace it, working ardently to innovate processes, improve your team, and make yourself indispensible by constantly overdelivering. In your case, you might work at a retail store of some sort, with the goal of having your stellar performance eventually land you in management and get you noticed at headquarters. Sure, the day-to-day work of ringing up sales might seem like a pitiable return on your MBA investment at first. But think career strategy. Being a star performer at virtually any solid organization is a ticket up or onto a better opportunity elsewhere. In time, your humility—and results—will likely be rewarded.
The Long-Shot Strategy

Now for going a little crazy, which is the approach we prefer in the current circumstances but still recommend with trepidation. Because not everyone can pull off a highly targeted beg-and-plead campaign while remaining likable, and that's basically the program we're suggesting. With this option, you pick the one or two places you've always wanted to work (or the two executives you'd give a kidney to work for) and repeatedly make your case to them in the most creative, appealing, and persuasive way you can—with letters, e-mails, phone calls—just to get a five-minute interview. Which you then have to nail with your brilliant insights and positive energy.

Yes, this is a long-shot strategy. But when it works—and here's why we like it—you'll be starting your career in the right place. And you'll have experienc­ed the kind of hunger it takes to get ahead.

Finally, if settling and a little craziness don't work for you, there's starting your own business. Figure out what you know and what you're good at, find a friend who brings something to the table—like brains, contacts, seed capital, or very little need for sleep—and then, like entrepreneurs the world over, get out there and hustle. If consulting becomes your gig, for instance, take jobs for $5,000 or $10,000, or negotiate with clients for a percentage of the increased revenues you bring in or the savings you create. You know the drill, and you probably know the risks, too. The current climate makes becoming an entrepreneur an extraordinary act of courage, and only you know if you have the mettle.
Self-Awareness Is Crucial Now

Not to sound harsh; we're just trying to be realistic. These are unprecedented times for MBAs, as they are for any job seeker, requiring unusual levels of self-awareness. The global economic crisis will likely last another year or two, and there's no point in waiting and hoping for a miracle.

You really just have three options. Make a choice and press on.

Key strategies for maximizing your deductions and holding on to the cash your business needs.

By Justin Martin
February 18, 2009: 9:33 AM ET

(Fortune Small Business) -- When your accountant prepares your business tax, you may feel a bit like Bill Murray's character in Groundhog Day, only this time forced to relive the indignities of 2008 again and again. Yes, last year was a bummer for many American entrepreneurs. But like Murray's cynical weatherman, you have an opportunity to improve upon the past.

With smart tax moves, you may be able to recover some of the money you lost in a bruising 2008. Fortune Small Business talked with a dozen tax experts, who identified such savvy strategies as carrying a loss back to previous years, accelerating write-offs for equipment purchases and claiming deductions for unsold inventory. We also found small business owners who have effectively used each strategy to preserve much-needed cash rather than forking it over to the feds.
Profit From Losses


Foxfire Printing had a rough 2008. Based in Newark, Del., Foxfire creates in-store signage for clients such as Pep Boys and Supervalu. Last year many of its other retail customers closed stores and slashed marketing budgets - one valued client even went bankrupt. As a result, Foxfire's revenues fell from $25 million in 2007 to $23 million in 2008, and the company posted its first loss since 2000.

But founder John Ferretti plans to recoup some of that money by executing what's called a net operating loss (NOL) carryback. "Bankers aren't lending," he says. "So I'm grateful there's a piece of the tax code that will put some capital into my business."

Here's how the carryback works. Say you lost $1 million in 2008 after turning a $500,000 profit in each of the previous two years. You carry the loss backward by having your accountant amend your 2007 tax return to offset the entire profit for that year. You would then be due a refund on any federal taxes you paid on that profit - and state taxes in roughly a third of the states. You would still show a loss balance of $500,000, which you could carry back to 2006 and offset your profit for that year as well.
Talk back: How are you coping with taxes?

Generally you can carry a loss back for only two years. (In light of last year's red ink tsunami, the economic recovery bill President Obama signed Tuesday extended the carryback to five years for businesses with gross receipts of $15 million or less.) Some companies may still have a loss balance even after amending two years' worth of tax returns. Luckily, you can also carry a NOL forward to offset profits for up to 20 years.

Be aware that the IRS can take up to a year to refund money from a NOL carryback. But there's an expedited form (IRS 1139) that will get cash into your hands twice as fast, though it can be used only by businesses that are organized as C corporations.
Accelerate Write-Offs

Ordinarily you would depreciate purchases of, for example, equipment and machinery, both of which are treated in IRS form 946. The list is broad and allows plenty of wiggle room - it includes everything from drill presses and desk chairs to landscaping shrubs. The IRS sets depreciation schedules for these sundry items, typically ranging from three to 15 years.

Depreciation helps you recoup your money, but often in small increments over more than a decade. There's also a cunning and perfectly legal strategy that you can use to take a large write-off in a single year; it's called a Section 179 deduction.

"The name is dull," says Blake Christian, a C.P.A. with Holthouse Carlin & Van Trigt in Long Beach, Calif. "But Section 179 can really supercharge your deductions."

Taking a large one-time deduction makes sense, especially in the current economy. You get a bigger chunk of change to plow back into your business right now. And you won't lose ground to inflation, which happens when you depreciate a purchase over many years.

Peerless Saw manufactures round steel blades that are used by such companies as International Paper and Pella, the windowmaker. Based in Groveport, Ohio, Peerless is coming off one of its worst years since the company was founded in 1931. Revenues dropped to $9 million in 2008 from $9.5 million in 2007. Profits plunged as well.

During this challenging year, CEO Tim Gase chose to keep his firm competitive by buying new equipment. Among his purchases were two state-of-the-art grinders capable of crafting steel to tolerances of less than a thousandth of an inch. The total tab: $150,000.

Gase could have opted to depreciate the machinery over seven years in accordance with the IRS's schedule. Instead, thanks to Section 179, Peerless was able to write off the entire $150,000 in 2008. This will lower its tax bite, providing fast cash to the struggling firm.

"Why wouldn't you take the whole thing now if you need it?" asks Gase, adding, "We need it."

Section 179 is truly a small business tax break. It cannot be used by companies whose equipment purchases total more than $1,050,000 in a given year. (Businesses that have posted a net loss are also disqualified.) For 2008, firms can write off a generous amount under this section. Last winter, as part of an emergency economic stimulus package, Congress raised the limit from $128,000 to $250,000. The new economic recovery bill extends that higher limit through 2009.

Another write-off accelerator, bonus depreciation, was also created as part of last year's emergency stimulus package and extended through 2009 in this year's stimulus bill. Bonus depreciation allows you to write off half the cost of a piece of equipment during the first year. Say you spent $5,000 on a computer, an item that depreciates over five years. Under bonus depreciation, you could write off $2,500 in the first year and depreciate the balance over four years.

It's even possible to combine Section 179 with bonus depreciation. For example, if you bought $800,000 worth of equipment, you could write off the first $250,000 this year, maxing out your Section 179 deduction. For the remaining $550,000, you could use bonus depreciation to immediately write off half ($275,000). The balance would be depreciated over multiple years according to the usual schedule.

If your family business declined in value last year, now is the ideal time to pass some of it along to the next generation.

Estate planning is all about tax policy, which makes for uncertain planning given that the estate tax is slated for a one-year suspension in 2010. But it appears that Congress will act this year to freeze the estate tax at its current level. At death a person can pass along $3.5 million tax-free, but anything above that is taxed at rates as high as 45%.

By transferring as much of your business as possible to your heirs while you're still alive, you minimize any estate tax they may have to pay after you're gone. As of 2009 you can give $1 million worth of gifts during your lifetime, tax-free. The amount is cumulative, so you can make the gifts incrementally or all at once. You can also make tax-free gifts of up to $13,000 each to as many individuals as you choose in 2009. That's up from $12,000 last year.

So how does a family business that has declined in value take advantage of the gift-tax rules? It's simple. Right now you can give larger blocks of ownership shares to your children and still stay within the limits. Say your business is worth half what it was a year ago. That means a stock gift worth $13,000 equals twice as many shares as last year's.

If the business appreciates in the future, you'll have picked the perfect time to transfer some or all of the ownership. Your kids will think you're brilliant.

Of course, the IRS imposes detailed rules on these gifts. Tax experts advise having your business assessed by an independent valuation firm before transferring shares.
Put Unsold Inventory to Work

EnLiten markets novelty items that are sold at the checkout counter at such chains as Walgreens (WAG, Fortune 500) and Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500). Unfortunately, beleaguered consumers weren't in the mood for many impulse purchases in late 2008. The Delray Beach, Fla. company had roughly $1 million in revenues but posted a deep loss. It also got stuck with a warehouse full of unsold doodads.

John Burke, a partner in the business, decided to donate some of the items to charity. During the holidays EnLiten gave 500 Unsound Advice dolls - battery-operated fortunetellers that answer questions with preprogrammed phrases such as "The prospects look good" - to a soup kitchen in Boynton Beach, Fla. Many of the soup kitchen's patrons are recent Latin American immigrants who don't speak English well.

"My company is struggling mightily, and this product didn't exactly fly off the shelves," says Burke. "Unsound Advice helps people new to America learn English phrases. At least we're doing something good with the dolls."

In exchange for donating this inventory, EnLiten will receive a tax deduction equal to the company's original cost. For goods manufactured in-house, the deduction is generally equal to the cost of producing the finished goods. EnLiten's Unsound Advice dolls are manufactured in China at a price of $9 per unit, so EnLiten will get a write-off worth roughly $4,500 for donating 500 dolls.

To claim a donated-inventory deduction, a company must provide goods that a nonprofit organization will actually use. "You could give unsold paper to a school," says Barbara Weltman, author of J.K. Lasser's Small Business Taxes. "But you could not unload a bunch of unsold steel ball bearings on said school."

If you can't find a charitable use for your leftover items, you can dispose of them and claim an abandoned-inventory deduction, which confers identical tax benefits. Take time-stamped photographs that show your goods were, in fact, discarded, says Weltman. In case of an audit, you'll want to show the photos to the IRS.

Finally, the tax experts we consulted said not to worry if you've already filed your 2008 taxes: These tips will all work next year as well. Here's wishing you better fortunes in 2009. To top of page

The founder of Silicon Alley Reporter and Mahalo.com offers advice to employers trying to make the right hire and candidates struggling to land a job

By Jason Calacanis

Unemployment in the U.S. is going to race past 10% in the coming months and probably peak at 11% or 12%, according to the smart folks with whom I'm privileged enough to spend some time. There's an outside chance (call it 20%) that we might have a "disastrous event" that causes it to hit 15% to 20%. Sounds impossible, I know, but there are many regions in the U.S. already in the mid-teens.

The smarter folks whom I speak with think the recent market rally is "dead cat bounce" in nature and that we're "testing the top" before a return to the bottom. Who the heck knows what's going to happen with the stock market? What I want to talk about today is your employment—or employee—market. The stock market is the 10,000-foot view, but butts in chairs working? That's the 10-foot view. Let's stay micro in this essay, shall we?

Witness: We just put out a job for an entry-level researcher and had 200 résumés from highly qualified candidates in under 24 hours. We posted the gig at $10 an hour. Recent searches for a director of product and various sales positions at my company, Mahalo, resulted in 400-plus applications per position in a week. My In-box is flooded with really great folks desperate for a lead on a gig ("Hey, Jason, we've met a couple of times. I've been working in the Internet since 1997 and I was laid off in October…") My heart goes out to everyone who is stuck, or up against it, right now. I've been there; it sucks.

Anyway, let's cut the small talk get to the big pink (slip) elephant in the room: who gets laid off—and who gets hired—in a down market.

Some Background

Over the past 15 years, as a CEO and entrepreneur, I've hired well over 500 people, laid off over 50, fired a couple dozen bad apples (many of whom are on my e-mail subscriber list!), and actually helped make a handful of people millionaires. Before I ran my own company, and even while running my companies, I've received countless job offers.

Bottom line: I've been around the block, and I know exactly why people get hired and fired.

Before the recession hit, I was actually convinced that my techniques for hiring could land almost any willing candidate a job. In this current mess, I can't make any guarantees, but I can definitely tell candidates that if they follow my advice, they'll have a much stronger chance at landing their dream job. For employers, I promise you that these tests and techniques will land you more killers then duds.

In each of my points below, I'm going to start with an overview and then move on to a "For Candidates" section and a "For Employers" section. I'm really blending two essays into one here so that each party can understand the other's perspective. I hope this isn't too confusing, but you guys understand that sometimes I ramble before getting to something worthwhile.

For Candidates: People Who Work Harder Win

Wait, don't give up on me yet! I'm well aware that this first point is absurdly obvious, but for some reason, many folks overlook or discount this basic fact. The truth is, hard work pays off in almost all things: sports, education, relationships, and work.

The more you put into something, the better it tends to work out. (Brilliant observation, I know.)

If you're looking for a job, you want to send out as many signals as possible that show that not only are you not afraid of hard work, but you're actually turned on by it. You must understand that, right now, there are too many candidates fighting for each position. The leverage that led to bidding wars between employers two to three years ago is gone—just like the bidding wars over houses are over.

There is no sense in fighting the balance of power. In fact, you need to embrace it, because it will flip again in a couple of years.

The best way to signal that you're hardworking is to explain your routine and method for working explicitly to your employer. As someone who does a couple of hundred interviews a year, I can tell you I almost never get a proactive candidate who does this!

If I were coming into a meeting with me looking for a job, here is the script I would follow:

Candidate: "Thanks so much for having me in to discuss filling the role of VP of BlahBlah. May I tell you how I've been able to make an impact at the companies I've worked at before?" (Translation: "I'm confident I can fill this position. That's why I didn't put the word 'possibly' in front of 'filling the role.'")

Employer: "Certainly." (Translation: "Thank the Lord! Finally, a candidate with whom I don't have to pull teeth!")

Candidate: "My belief is that hard work—not busy work, but hard work—is what differentiates the teams that win from those that lose. My method for working is that I like to prepare for the week on Sunday. I read up in the trades on where the industry is on the weekend, and I prepare a game plan for myself for the week ahead. This only takes an hour or two. Just a simple list of some goals I want to achieve and what I think will help the company reach its goals: I make it a point to get into the office on Monday an hour or two early. This gives me a chance to get an even bigger jump on the week—something I believe is very important. I tend to do working lunches with clients or hit the gym to get myself thinking. Finally, I've made a philosophy of not leaving the office until my boss does…. I think that's the honorable thing to do."

Employer: "When can you start?"

Seriously, I've been waiting for someone to say that to me for a decade, and it still hasn't happened. Now, I'm not saying folks can't have a life and family—let's not start that whole controversy up—but in a market like this, people seriously are going to need to sacrifice.

Bottom line: Employers are going to hire the hardest-working people and lay off the clock punchers first in an economy like this (as they should). If you want to get employed, your best strategy is to put yourself into the hardest-working bucket.

For Employers: How to Spot the Hardworking People

Wouldn't you just love to fill your open sales, marketing, or operations position with a candidate who gave you that speech above?

Yeah, me too. Too bad it never happens! You're going to have to figure out exactly who the hardest-working and most resilient people are when you're hiring. You have only a certain number of slots on your team, and you'd better start looking at it just like that.

You cannot—and you will not—give one of your few remaining slots to anyone who is not going to bust their ass. If you do that, your company is fracked. Period. You have to be cutthroat in an environment like this, because you're not doing anyone any good if you bring on—or keep on—a weak team member. Those folks can, and will, sink the entire ship in a market like this.

Let the weak people collect unemployment while the strong folks create strong companies that create more positions. (Positions that will, ironically, go to the weaker members of the herd.)

So, how do you find out if someone is a killer? Here are some of my favorite things to ask in an interview:

1. Do you live to work or work to live?

2. Do you consider yourself a workaholic? Do you think there is anything wrong with being a workaholic?

3. Are you able to turn it off at 6 p.m. and on Friday for the weekend? You don't get obsessed by work, do you? (Trick question!)

4. Do you consider yourself a balanced person?

5. How would you feel if we all needed to come in on the weekend to make a deadline?

6. How would you feel if this happened two weekends in a row?

7. It's a tough time right now, and we're super short-staffed—how would you feel if I asked you to cover for [insert job lower than candidate's experience] when they're on vacation?

8. Speaking of vacation, do you bring your BlackBerry and laptop with you to check in? Or do you like to unplug completely?

These types of questions will quickly get you to the point of understanding the kind of person you're dealing with. There are folks who work to live, and that's just fine. However, it might not be fine for your company at this time. In a hot market, you might deal with a clock puncher, because the people who really kill it are in short supply. However, in a market like this, you should start with the killers and work your way down to the clock punchers.

Hey, wait a second…are you anti-family and life/work balance?

Absolutely not!

If folks hate their day job and want to get out at 5:01 p.m., sure, go for it. I just think it's better to find a job you're super-passionate about, so you don't feel like running out at 5 on the dot. Also, you have to keep in mind the backdrop in which I'm writing this piece: an economic tsunami that we haven't seen in our lifetimes, or our parents' lifetimes, for that matter.

In this market, it's going to be a lot worse for families if Mommy or Daddy doesn't have a job than if Mommy or Daddy has to work late. This is not playtime, everyone—this is real time.

Bottom line: Employers should focus on the hard workers first so their companies survive long enough to hire the 9-to-5ers!

For Candidates: Establish That You Can Move the Needle

In my mind, there are three basic types of people in the world: people who make it, people who sell it, and people who support those first two groups. If you're a developer or designer, you're obviously making the product. If you're in sales, you're obviously selling the product. CEOs, COOs, accountants, and administrators obviously support those groups.

Folks who are most dispensable in this market are the folks who are not directly selling (i.e. bringing in money) or making the product:

1. Marketers/Public Relations

2. Strategy

3. Business Development

4. Product Managers

5. Managers in General

Like you, I've watched layoff after layoff at companies, and the first groups that get cut are the ones that the business can survive without. If you cut a couple of project managers, PR people, and your strategy folks, the business keeps running.

Does it run as well? Perhaps not. But it survives—and that's what matters in a market like this.

In fact, Google GOOG could cut half of its staff tomorrow and its revenue and earnings would be exactly the same, in my estimation. Would it be building cool new stuff? No. Would it be as effective? Probably not. However, its revenue machine (text-based ads) doesn't require this huge staff.

This is all really depressing stuff, I know, but I'm not telling you this to get you depressed. No, I'm telling you this to help you get your next job! If you want to get one of the small number of positions that will open up in 2009/2010, you need to place yourself in the "high-impact" bucket of employees, not the "low-impact" positions.

If you do strategy, marketing, and business development, I suggest positioning yourself in sales.

If you do product management or are a midlevel manger, I suggest positioning yourself as "player/coach"—someone who does a bunch of work and manages people in their "spare" time.

For Employers: Hire Impact Players

As I've mentioned above, you have a small number of positions opening, and you need to be very selective. Once you've narrowed your pool down to the folks you think are the hardest-working, you need to do another round of figuring out the folks who are the smartest and most versatile.

It's great that someone wants to work hard, but do they have direct experience closing a client? Do they have direct experience leading the building of an actual product that makes it to market and is embraced by customers?

Here are some very basic questions I like to ask folks in an interview. (Have I interviewed you? How was it for you?):

1. Who are the top three clients you've worked for? (This could be internal or external.)

2. What problem did you solve for these three clients?

3. How long did you work for these clients?

4. Can I have the names of these clients as references?

5. What was the best product/service you ever created/sold and why?

6. What was the most disappointing product/service you ever created/sold and why? What did you take away from that?

If folks can't answer these types of questions quickly and sharply, it might mean they had one of those "soft jobs" where they didn't have to produce a product that absolutely delighted customers. Every position serves a customer in some way: The mailroom guy serves the people getting the mail, the IT person serves the people who bring her frozen laptops, and the CEO has to deal with a range of "customers" in the form of investors, partners, employees, and board members.

This is a long and obvious way of saying that you need folks who can get stuff done.

If you're one of the 17 folks who made it to the bottom, I'm wondering the following:

1. What's your best technique for getting hired?

2. What are your favorite interview questions for figuring out if you're hiring a winner or a clock puncher?

3. What's going on in your backyard? What are you seeing in terms of hiring and laying people off? Who's getting let go and who's getting hired?

Note: Three ways to answer these questions:

1. You can jason@calacanis.com

2. You can answer this question over at Mahalo Answers in an open fashion by following this URL: http://digg.com/u17Rc (You can log into Mahalo Answers with your Facebook ID, so it's super easy. Yes, this is a backhanded way to get you to try my product. Hey, I'm a hustler, baby! Hate the game, not the player!)

Should you use your retirement nest egg to pay down a mortgage? Gerri Willis answers viewers' questions.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Question 1. My husband is 62 and retired. I am 59 and working. Our mortgage payment is going to go up by $125 a month. We can barely afford it now. My husband thinks we should take out money from our retirement accounts and pay off the house. But we would only have $40,000 left in our retirement account. What do you think we should do? -- Irma, Texas

Wiping out your retirement money when you're both in, or near retirement isn't the best move you can make.

First, try to see if you can modify your mortgage at all. Otherwise, you may consider doing a reverse mortgage if you intend on staying in the home. A reverse mortgage is a type of loan where your equity is converted into cash. And you receive this cash either in a lump sum, a monthly payment or a line of credit that you can tap into.

There are a lot of nuances you should consider before buying a reverse mortgage. In fact, you are required to get counseling before buying this product. Contact the Housing Counseling Clearinghouse at 800-569-4287 to find a lender in your area. AARP.org also has a lot of information on reverse mortgages.

Question 2. I had two credit cards, but last month the issuer closed both of them. Now I received a "change in terms" notification from another credit card I've had for almost 15 years. If I do not agree to the terms, I can opt out and the account will then be closed. What is going to happen to my credit score? -- Sheila

Credit card issuers are more frequently closing accounts proactively if they haven't been used in a while. And unfortunately, your credit score has probably already taken a hit.

You should be wary of closing the account you've held for 15 years. That will just add to the damage especially since it's an older card. You can always try calling the credit card issuer to see if you can get your old terms back. Highlight your long history and good record with the company. And in the future, try to spread out your balances over a few credit cards so they're not inactive.

Question 3. I was left with several credit accounts that an ex-boyfriend "promised" he would pay for things he bought. He just walked away and said "too bad." It was $8,000. My credit is shot. I have been slowly paying back on the accounts but I have one that the company would not work with me. What are my rights for reworking this loan? -- Anonymous

Unfortunately your rights are limited to the terms of the agreement since the lender isn't doing anything other than attempting to collect, which is their right according to Credit.com. They can choose to work with you on a lower interest rate, lower balance or longer terms but that's completely up to them.

If your ex-boyfriend had promised to pay for the charges (via e-mail for example) then you might be able to recover the money through a civil lawsuit, but that's going a long way to collect a relatively small amount of money.

With slow sales and tight credit, many small businesses are caught in a death spiral that contributes to the hemorrhaging job market.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Employment at small businesses with 500 or fewer employees decreased by 614,000 positions in March, marking one of the sharpest drops yet in 14 consecutive months of declines, according to an employment report released Wednesday by payroll processor ADP (ADP, Fortune 500).

The magnitude of the losses indicates that the recession is ravaging the small companies that employ an estimated half of America's workers.

Compared to large firms with more than 500 employees, which shed 128,000 jobs, those with fewer than 50 employees lost 284,000 jobs.

"The resiliency displayed by these businesses earlier in the recession, as compared to medium- and large-size ones, is no longer apparent," says Joel Prakken, chairman of ADP's research partner, Macroeconomic Advisers.

Although shaving staff is often a last resort, many owners are finding themselves with no other choice if they want to keep their business alive. Credit is tight, consumer spending is down, entire industries are cutting back, and customers are paying their bills more slowly than they used to.

"It's the domino effect," says Pat Veesart, director of the Kansas Small Business Development Center at Garden City Community College. "In a city like Wichita, for example, there are layoffs in the aircraft industry and there's an ancillary effect with the suppliers, but also an ancillary effect with the bars and restaurants who cater to the employees of those firms when they are on lunch breaks."

Take Dorothy Gonzales, owner of A-Plus Counters in Clearwater, Fla. After five years of growth, she and her husband saw a dip in the demand for their countertops in 2007, as new home construction took a dive. Homeowners also held back on making renovations that would have spurred business.

"As the economy changed, we got hit hard. We started by pulling our salespeople because we couldn't afford them," she recalls.

In September she approached a lender to seek a Small Business Administration-backed loan but was told that because she had a loan for a company truck that was still active, she was ineligible for another loan.

"My credit isn't bad, I always made the payments on that loan, and I never had a great deal of debt," she says. "When the [loan officer] told me she couldn't help, my reaction was, 'Well, what's the point of the SBA if I can't go to them when I need help?'"

Gonzales has pulled $235,000 from her own savings to keep the business going. But paying employees continues to be a problem, and Gonzales had to lay off more of her staff. In 2007 she had 60 workers. Today she has 12, and is unable to offer them health insurance.

"You work your whole life, and in a blink of an eye - it's just not fair," she says. "The fear is that we'll lose everything, but we seem to be keeping busy enough to stay open because we're still a vendor for Lowe's and we get some word-of-mouth jobs."

Veesart says that as the job market remains grim, more people are walking through her the doors of her business development center asking for help starting up their own business. She's also talking with many established small business owners who are seeking expansion help, but they're doing it cautiously.

"Entrepreneurs are risk-takers, and many feel that this is the time to establish your name when others are leaving," she says. "But if they expand, they are being careful about it - they don't want to hire too many people and then have to lay someone off. They'd rather have solid jobs for three than shaky jobs for six."

Government efforts to revive the small business sector haven't yet had a significant impact. The Small Business Administration will soon release its loan statistics for the just-ended first quarter of 2009, a figure expected to be grim. President Barack Obama said last month that the agency was trending toward a loan volume of less than $10 billion for the year, almost half what it did last year.

"The Fed is working to heal the markets and the Treasury has details on proposals to buy toxic assets. But we have to see that they are actually working. We need to see credit flowing out of banks," says Macroeconomic Advisers' Prakken. "It'll [take] months for the stimulus to start having a larger influence. We're only on the leading edge of that now."

As for Gonzales' countertop business, she is not optimistic that it will rebound.

"We'll never be as big as we were. If we grow again, we'll have to hire again because our countertops require a certain craftsmanship and we need people with those skills," Gonzales says. "But right now we can't afford to grow the way we did before."

CNN

It's a growing field without enough people going into it.

At 51, Ray Pettigrew is the oldest student in his nursing school B.A. program at the University of Kansas. He's also one of only six men in a class of about 130.

That doesn't bother him. Pettigrew is a firefighter who started thinking about nursing school a few years back when he noticed that his body didn't recover after fires as fast as when he started 15 years ago. He'll be eligible to retire and collect a pension in two years, but he doesn't want to rely on that income, especially since his wife's corporate job might disappear like so many others.
"With the economy the way it is, I need to work," he says. He has two children, ages seven and nine. "I need to transition to something where I can work for a long time, and I think my job prospects in nursing are excellent."

He's right. About 30,000 registered nurses need to enter the workforce each year to meet the nation's growing health care needs, according to the Council on Physician and Nurse Supply, an independent group of health care leaders with offices at the University of Pennsylvania.

The need is great because the aging population will require more and more health care, and retiring baby boomers will leave thousands of vacancies in the field over the next 10 years. The shortage is exacerbated by a lack of educators to teach in nursing programs.

The good news for people like Pettigrew, who want to work while attending school, is that there are several ways to get training. Associate programs at community colleges take about two years to complete, and many schools offer a variety of courses online, in the evenings or on weekends.

"Many of our students work 40 or more hours a week while going to school," says Jean M. Wortock, dean of the College of Nursing at St. Petersburg College, near Tampa, Fla.

Another option is an accelerated nursing program, which compresses all the training into about 18 months. Here is a list of accelerated nursing programs.

There are also B.A. programs like the one Pettigrew is in. The advantage of a B.A. is that you can then go on to get an M.A. or even a Ph.D. and become a nurse anesthetist or another kind of nursing specialist, or teach nursing yourself.

All programs require you to complete some number of clinical hours. You typically can do so with eight-week rotations at a hospital or community clinic. At St. Petersburg College, students are required to do more than 600 hours of clinical time. They can complete 25% of it using a human patient simulator. The simulator can do things like suffer a cardiac arrest that requires CPR and the administration of drugs.

Before you begin your formal training, you must complete certain prerequisites. They vary from school to school, but often they include courses in anatomy and physiology, psychology, microbiology, statistics and ethics. For Pettigrew, who had a liberal arts degree, that meant about three and a half years of coursework. He spread it out, taking some online, some in the evenings and some on weekends.

Before landing a job, all beginning registered nurses must pass a universal licensing exam. Once that's completed, there are many paths they can take. "Throughout your life, this career gives you so many options," says Karen L. Miller, dean of the nursing school and senior vice chancellor at the University of Kansas Medical Center. "Not only are there many specialties to get into, but you can have a variety of choices in terms of how much you work, how many hours and where you work."

Many nurses choose to work three 12-hour shifts a week. Some sign up with a traveling nurse agency that sends them to spots all over the world for varying periods. Salary depends on your specialty and where in the country you work. Miller says that in the Midwest, where most of her students work, starting salaries range from $45,000 to $50,000. In California, she adds, a new nurse can make more than $80,000.

There's even more money to be made for nurses who work three days in one hospital and then a day at another facility on the weekend.

It's that flexibility that Pettigrew is looking forward to. "The great thing about nursing is you don't have to be bedside nurse," he says. "I can be a teacher, a nurse practitioner or an administrator. I'll be 52 by the time finish, and I'll be able to work in the field another 10 years and still teach after that."

This is the first installment of a new feature that will look at career choices that provide strong job opportunities across the country right now.
Forbes

We've all worked for tyrants and hypocrites. But before you blow up or break down, consider the alternatives

By Jeff Schmitt

It happened again. Maybe the boss broke his or her word, bad-mouthed you, or torpedoed your promotion. You're not surprised. Your boss already ignores your ideas, talks down to you, and expects you to be a mind-reader. And that doesn't even count the eavesdropping. What's worse, your boss won't talk about it with you, telling you to "move on." as if nothing ever happened. O.K., you've been saddled with a bad boss.

Having to answer to a boss is a fact of working life. But what are your options when you're undermined by the person whose goodwill you need? Sure, you can lash out or call human resources. Unfortunately, companies are like Vegas casinos: The house always wins. Still, you have options. When the anger starts to boil, consider the following:


Don't Act Immediately

Initially, you'll want to fight back. You may fantasize about writing a blistering critique of your rotten boss…and e-mailing it to the CEO. And those thoughts aren't necessarily harmful. But thoughts don't have to lead to action. Sure, your boss may be small-minded, two-faced, spineless, and technically inept. But would a dramatic gesture be worth the lost salary? Is it worth a hole in your résumé, the one you'll be explaining for years to come? This isn't the economy to choose pride over practicality.

Play the Game

You were cheated or unfairly smeared. Welcome to the real world. But don't let it turn you sour or sloppy. And don't let your boss get to you, either. Nod and smile when he delivers another self-serving sermon. Maintain a can-do attitude, like you have your dream job. Respect and defer, even when trust is lost. You'll work with plenty of jerks over your career. You may as well start practicing now.

Prepare

Start collecting references and recommendation letters from clients, peers, industry pros, and local leaders. Keep a file of positive citations to your work too. Even more, focus on activities that position you to lead and produce measurable results. No one can take those experiences away from you. And they'll enhance your credibility when the next opportunity arises.

Forge Alliances

Identify the job you eventually want. Get to know the players in that department. Grab lunch with them. Help them out during downtime to prove yourself. Build a relationship with a mentor or your boss's own boss, too. They can provide direction, intelligence, and even a reference. Beyond that, get involved in corporate initiatives, such as community outreach or strategic planning. Your boss has the power and network to blackball you. Stay visible and broaden your circle to counter that.

Don't Jump to Conclusions

Sometimes, there is more going on than meets the eye. The higher-ups may veto your boss's efforts. Conditions change or extenuating circumstances emerge. Your boss probably has a full plate—and you may not be his or her top priority. And your boss may simply be unaware of his or her behavior and its impact on you. Bottom line: Management is often grueling and thankless. We all need someone to blame, but give your boss a little empathy. Don't mistake the person for the perception. They're usually far more complex than your caricature.

Keep Your Boss in the Loop

Everyone likes to feel like an expert and give back. Your boss is no different. Maybe you need to reel yourr boss closer, rather than pushing him or her away. Ask what traits or skills you need to develop to reach the next level. Ask for specifics; look at establishing benchmarks to measure your growth. What's more, become a true partner with your boss. You know your boss's flaws: Train yourself to ask the right questions, clarify, and work through the details. This is perfect training for what's really important in business: anticipation, flexibility, relationship-building, collaboration, and execution (not to mention making your boss look good).

Focus on the Big Picture

Your boss will betray your trust, then tell you to stay positive. Your boss will chastise you for your behavior, then act the same way. Sure, you can quit, but have you gained anything besides an ulcer? Instead, make the most of your time. Focus on gaining the right experience, building your interpersonal skills, and policing your attitude. They are your ticket out. Absorb those daily humiliations, so you never become like your boss. Most important, don't write off the message because of the messenger. Your boss didn't reach this level by accident. Be open to criticisms and suggestions. You'll likely miss some valuable nuggets if you completely tune out your boss.

Wait

If your boss really is a jerk, chances are the clock is ticking on him or her. Charm, connections, and reputation only give bosses so much rope. They'll inevitably drop their guard and slip up with someone higher up—and it won't be pretty. In the meantime, view your job as a means to an end and start laying the groundwork to get there. You have bigger things ahead of you.

Jeff Schmitt works in publishing in Dubuque, Iowa. His monthly column, "The Personal Touch," is published by Sales & Marketing Management magazine at salesandmarketing.com. His e-mail is jschmittdbq@mchsi.com.

Gerri Willis helps you navigate the tricky path of financing a college degree.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Many students are now receiving their college acceptance letters and with that comes offers of financial aid. Here's how to compare your financial aid offers.

Getting the true cost of college can be a daunting task because comparing offers can be like comparing apples to oranges. Different colleges will have their figures and costs in different formats.

What you want to look for first is the "Expected Family Contribution." That's the bottom line - the amount of money your family will be expected to contribute.

Only you can judge whether you can afford this amount. But some colleges will include loans in your total financial aid package.

To get the true cost of any school, subtract out any loans from the financial aid package. Remember, these loans must be repaid says Kalman Chany of Campus Consultants.

Consider the cost of tuition and fees, out of pocket expenses like books and room and board and transportation. You can find calculators at the collegeboard.com and finaid.org to compare offers.

1. What to look for

Here's what you'll need to layout side-by-side:

First, look at the specifics of loan offer -- like interest rates and repayment terms. These provisions can vary widely from loan to loan.

Next, you'll want to analyze affordability over time. Make sure you ask how your financial aid package will change over time. The aid offered in the senior year may look very different from what was offered for the freshman year.

And finally, look at the cost of attendance. Make sure you're looking at the big picture, including the cost of health care and transportation.

Generally speaking, you'll want to accept grants and scholarships first -- that's free money. Then accept the loans that are interest free while you're in school, like the Perkins or the Subsidized Stafford loan or any work-study. Take the Unsubsidized Stafford and lastly -- only if you have to -- consider private student loans says Chany.

2. Get more aid

Your financial aid package isn't set in stone.

You can always ask for an appeal. It's called a professional judgment review says Mark Kantrowitz of Finaid.org.

If something changed in your finances, like you lost your job or you overstated your income when filing the FAFSA, you have the right to determine whether to give you more aid.

Experts recommend not going to the financial aid office in person since it's harder to negotiate, but rather writing a letter or phoning the financial aid office

CNN Money