Must have job skills in 2013 and Phantom Job postings..Carpe Diem. Take control of your career!

Must-Have Job Skills in 2013

Even as employers remain cautious next year about every dollar spent on employees, they'll also want workers to show greater skills and results.

For employees who want to get ahead, basic competency won't be enough.
To win a promotion or land a job next year, experts say there are four must-have job skills:
1. Clear communications
Whatever their level, communication is key for workers to advance.
"This is really the ability to clearly articulate your point of view and the ability to create a connection through communication," says Holly Paul, U.S. recruiting leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accounting and consulting firm based in New York.

Looking for a job? Looking for a promotion? Marketwatch's Kelli Grant and WSJ's Simon Constable discuss the top skills you must have to have a successful career in 2013.

For job seekers in particular, clear communication can provide a snapshot of their work style to employers. "I can walk away from a five-minute conversation and feel their enthusiasm and have a good understanding of what's important to them," Ms. Paul says.
As office conversations increasingly move online, some workers are losing or never developing the ability to give a presentation, for example. Others may be unable to write coherently for longer than, say, 140 characters.
"Technology in some ways has taken away our ability to write well. People are in such a hurry that they are multitasking," and they skip basics such as spelling and proofing, says Paul McDonald, senior executive director of Robert Half International, RHI -1.19% a Menlo Park, Calif., staffing firm.
2. Personal branding
Human-resources executives scour blogs, Twitter and professional networking sites such as LinkedIn when researching candidates, and it's important that they like what they find.
"That's your brand, that's how you represent yourself," says Peter Handal, CEO of Dale Carnegie Training, a Hauppauge, N.Y., provider of workplace-training services. "If you post something that comes back to haunt you, people will see that." Workers also should make sure their personal brand is attractive and reflects well on employers. "More and more employers are looking for employees to tweet on their behalf, to blog on their behalf, to build an audience and write compelling, snappy posts," says Meredith Haberfeld, an executive and career coach in New York.

Ms. Haberfeld has a client whose employee recently posted on her personal Facebook FB -0.28% page about eating Chinese food and smoking "reefer."
"I saw it on Facebook. Her supervisors saw it," Ms. Haberfeld says.
3. Flexibility
The ability to quickly respond to an employer's changing needs will be important next year as organizations try to respond nimbly to customers.
"A lot of companies want us to work with their employees about how to get out of their comfort zone, how to adapt," says Mr. Handal. "Somebody's job today may not be the same as next year."
The ability to learn new skills is of top importance, says George Boué, human-resources vice president for Stiles, a real-estate services company in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. "We want to know that if we roll out a new program or new tools that the folks we have on board are going to be open to learning," he says.
4. Productivity improvement
In 2013, workers should find new ways to increase productivity, experts say. Executives are looking for a 20% improvement in employee performance next year from current levels, according to a recent survey by the Corporate Executive Board, an Arlington, Va., business research and advisory firm.
"When you are at your job, do you volunteer for projects? Are you looking for creative ways to help your organization," Mr. McDonald says. "The way to really differentiate yourself is to be proactive."
Companies that are considering adding workers in coming years want current employees to operate in growth mode now. "My clients are looking for employees that have a great ability to understand what is wanted and needed, rather than needing to be told," Ms. Haberfeld says.
Even hiring managers need to work on certain skills as organizations consider expanding next year. "The ability to spot talent and hire people has fallen out of use over the last several years," says Ben Dattner, an organizational psychologist in New York. "As the economy turns around, companies will have to work harder to retain talented employees. Companies have trimmed the fat, and now they have to build the muscle."

Phantom Job postings
Hiring Manager John says he was planning to hire a new design manager eventually. But when he heard a talented fellow alumnus of his design school was looking for a job, he wasted no time: He created an opening and hired the man right away.
Under normal circumstances he might have posted the opening on the Cleveland-based company's website or LinkedIn page. But in this case, he says, he couldn't afford to wait. "Someone good was available, and we just grabbed him," he says.

With the labor market remaining weak, such back-channel methods are becoming the rule, not the exception, when companies hire. Many open jobs are never advertised at all, or are posted only after a leading candidate—an internal applicant or someone else with an inside track—has been identified. Sometimes, as in John's case, a hiring manager creates a new position ahead of schedule to accommodate a favored prospect.
While this "hidden" job market frustrates applicants, companies point out that it is perfectly legal to hire without advertising a job or to advertise one almost certain to be filled by an insider. They say internal hires generally perform better than external ones, at least initially, as research has shown.

Duncan Mathison, an outplacement executive and co-author of the 2009 book "Unlock the Hidden Job Market," concedes that anything hidden is difficult to measure but, by parsing labor statistics and recruiting surveys, he calculates that around 50% of positions are currently filled on an informal basis.
Even though federal labor rules don't require employers to post openings, human-resources departments at many companies require them to be listed on a job board or career site for some period, says Debra Feldman, an executive career consultant based in Greenwich, Conn. Such postings are meant to make hiring fair and transparent, and may help to protect employers from discrimination lawsuits or audits by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
But hiring managers frequently sidestep personnel requirements, forcing HR representatives to step in and "re-educate managers about the reasons for the policies," says Lynn Hutson, director of talent acquisition at Brookdale Senior Living Inc. BKD -1.57% in Brentwood, Tenn. "We tell them we have resources to help them, and we can find them a bigger pool to draw from."

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At a previous job, Ms. Hutson says she sometimes warned hiring managers that the organization could lose federal grant money if they didn't recruit widely, and added that the established recruitment process occasionally turned up better prospects, especially when a manager's preferred candidate proved to be a bad fit.
Not all HR departments are willing to fight that fight, and not all managers want to sift through a pile of strangers' résumés. Nottingham Spirk's Mr. Nottingham says his 40-year-old firm has built up a reliable workforce mainly through word-of-mouth hiring. The company often recruits on the campus of Case Western Reserve University, where its offices are located. "We can go to a professor and say, 'Who's your best student?' " he says.
Some HR officers don't mind being bypassed. Tim Sackett, a former staffing director at Applebee's International Inc. who often had hundreds of openings to fill, says he was relieved when hiring managers chose not to involve him in recruiting.
The size of the so-called hidden job market fluctuates with the broader economy, according to Mr. Mathison. When the talent market is tight, companies must advertise to fill key positions, making more open jobs public. In a soft economy, however, companies do more "opportunity hiring," creating jobs specifically to lure or keep promising individuals, he says.
Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Mr. Mathison calculated the difference between the number of jobs that employers said they hoped to fill in the following month and the number of employees they actually hired. When a company hired more employees than it officially estimated, he surmised that they were filling unadvertised positions. To that he added another 30% of all jobs filled to account for the number of advertised positions that ended up going to inside candidates.
"Managers are still looking for people and keeping track of the best talent," even when hiring is frozen; when jobs do open, companies already have a handy pool of candidates, Mr. Mathison says.
Fair or not, the practice irritates many job seekers, who feel shut out of companies and often don't know they are applying for phantom positions.
"You never get a fair opportunity to show what you have to offer," says Jo Ann Bullard, an HR specialist who was laid off in April by Orc Software. She says she has since applied for more than 500 jobs and has interviewed for several of them, only to later learn from HR contacts that those companies preferred to promote insiders.
It can be nearly impossible to know whether a posted job is real, Ms. Feldman says. She recommends staying current with people who work in a given company: they will be among the first to know when someone is being transferred to another division, or when a firm is building a new team for a product launch.
Sometimes, it is obvious when a listing refers to an all-but-filled position. Take, for instance, a recent posting for a head football coach at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Division I Big Ten school.
"There are probably four or five people in the country who would be considered for that job, and I doubt any one of them will hear about the job from the ad," says Mr. Sackett, now president of HRU Technical Resources, an information-technology staffing agency in Lansing, Mich.
The university, which has a policy of posting ads for all openings, admits the ad was "a formality." The eventual hire, former Utah State University head coach Gary Andersen, was recruited by the school's athletic director, says spokeswoman Amy Toburen.

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