Margaret

Don’t believe everything anyone tells you. Well, I mean, have SOME trust in people or you’ll end up a miserable, friendless old cynic. What I’m referring to are reviews on the Internet, possibly biased friends, potential future colleagues, company websites ….expounding on jobs, companies, salaries… Company websites: I may be stating the obvious here (never

What salary were you making at your last job/last three jobs? Thanks to NYC legislation in November 2017, it’s illegal to ask that question. It’s also a no-no in Oregon, New Orleans and Puerto Rico. If a potential employer asks you because they didn’t know the law had changed, or they didn’t care, try to

This article could be 10,000 words long. Consultants charge fees, actual MONEY you might not want to part with if you are unemployed, to give you training sessions. This article, on the other hand, will be shorter. And free. None of it will be brain surgery. How to find jobs. Use the Internet; it’s your

At the risk of taking oomph away from the help that staffing agencies can give to job seekers, there’s a nice synergy sometimes between us and LinkedIn. Basically I’m saying, don’t put all your eggs in one basket (oh dear, and avoid clichés like the plague). If you have decent LinkedIn details, agencies are much

And it’s the real deal because it comes from ME, Margaret. I’ve seen enough of ‘em in my time, and so I know whereof I speak. (ok, sometimes other views are valid too, but let’s focus, and not get sidetracked with trivia). Here are some of the comments that other people have given Merit’s adorable

I work for a staffing service so I tend to think in terms of candidates, clients, and of course staffing services. What are the continuing issues? Staffing services. Naturally, Merit never does anything wrong, ever, but as for the others? Oh dearie me… in 2017, it’s going to be a) Return candidates’ phone calls promptly.

If I see that phrase “time out of your busy schedule” one more time in a thank you letter to potential employers, I shall SPIT. It is such a cliché, there is no excuse for using it ever under any circumstances. Whatsoever. Remember, this blog on the Merit website is called “Margaret says” and this

A super line attributed to Dorothy Parker –if you don’t know who she is, check her out on google, and even better, read some of her stuff. Brilliant. She used the line, apparently, in the office whenever the telephone rang. Things were puttering along nicely in the early years of the new Millennium, those first

We had a nice candidate walk through our doors the other day, charming but clueless. She had never been to a staffing service before and presumably didn’t know what to expect. When told about a rather fabby job we had, she somehow didn’t believe her luck and started grilling us; e.g. Us: “Billions in assets”.

Lord love a duck.***(***Stupid English i.e. not British, specifically English… expression uttered when nothing else will fit… often used when stunned or dismayed.) We sit here day and night searching for candidates and clients and suitable jobs, try to put everything together in order to make a few pence, keep the wolf from the door,