Recruiting a great team makes business growth so much easier. Unfortunately, sorting out good from bad job applicants can be extremely complicated, costly and time-consuming. With greater staff mobility and increased job applications due to the downturn, it is becoming even more difficult to find star employees.

There are hundreds of applicant tracking systems and recruitment software solutions out there but most fail to address the central problems of recruitment. Most recruitment software offer basic automation of the recruitment process but a 2008 Gartner study showed that most recruitment databases fail to address these key challenges: (more…)

There are ways to improve speed between your branches and your core servers.

What do you do about your WAN connection bandwidth being consumed by low-priority applications? For example, sales people are logging orders at the branches, and the ERP application is slow to respond. Do you know that streaming music or radio can consume 128kbps? If your WAN connection is 2Mbps, then each music listener consumes 6.25% of that bandwidth. It would only take 4 employees to eat up 25% of precious bandwidth, literally QR 12,000 to QR 15,000 per year!
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Since electrical devices are designed to operate at a certain voltage, fluctuations in the supply voltage can seriously damage the equipment. During the summer months, there tends to be an increase in power cuts and over-voltage, so it is essential to protect against these surges.

A spike voltage that hits a PC or server will probably stop working, and even fry some of the internal components and circuitry. You can protect against such spikes by using a surge suppressor – a device designed to protect electrical devices from voltage surges. If there is a power cut altogether, then an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) will ensure constant electric power to the equipment. (more…)

Besides the obvious importance of social responsibility and the consequence of being a global citizen, having a Green reputation is an important competitive advantage. For improving brand value, over half of global consumers are more likely to purchase from companies with strong environmental reputations. And within your own workforce you can raise employee morale as well as engage and empower employees since 80% of people prefer to work for organizations that are environmentally friendly.

Video is a workable green solution available today. The eco-advantage is immediate when staying off the roads and out of the skies means adding less CO₂ to the atmosphere. The average user reduces unnecessary meeting travel by 30%. Visual telecommuting programs attract and empower employees. Here are some companies that have had a true environmental impact by leveraging videoconferencing: (more…)

Speed up your network by optimizing the slowest component.
Part 1: Storage

While you are hard at work trying to meet a submittal deadline, the file server works against you by not pulling up the documents fast enough. Why was this thing fast when it was first installed, but now it is bogging down? (1) More people are on your the network, (2) more employees access saved files as a routine part of their job, (2) documents keep getting larger. In the end, it is usually the increased usage that affects file save/retrieval performance.

You may not need to upgrade your entire network, just the slowest part. In the case of storage, it could be as simple as the hard drives. A dedicated files server, cluster or SAN is a significant investment, so management is reluctant to replace it. (more…)

Wolfram|Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com) is a new type of web engine. Not a search engine like Google, but rather a computational knowledge engine. It generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links. The ultimate goal is to allow users to enter questions rather than simply typing keywords.

It has a wealth of information, for example you can type in Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani and get the basic biography of His Highness the Emir. However, you can also type in How old was Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani when Barack Obama was born, and get the exact answer (which is 10 years, 8 months, 3 days). (more…)