The Career Diva posts that got the most people reading in 2012 were all about the stupid things employers do.

Here are the top ten posts of the year:

Turns out many of you are upset about performance reviews, and you have good reason to be. The experts say such reviews are arbitrary and utterly useless.

And quite a few of you agreed some human resource departments can be clueless, especially when it comes to employee benefits such as family and medical leave.

Another workplace problem that gets under everyone’s skin is the rise in employers trying to get under your skin and find out how healthy, or unhealthy workers are.

A disturbing trend during 2012 was the growing number of employees holding multiple jobs.

It turns out if you’re a tough white woman or tough black man you can’t get a break.

What got job seekers angry this past year was the endless amount of interviews hiring managers think they need to decide on a candidate.

And women are still facing the perpetual problem of not supporting each other. Who cares how much Kelly Clarkson weighs? Quite a few of us, it turns out.

Employers are still asking job candidates how old they are, and they’re not always breaking the law when they do it.

My standing desk is still my back’s savoir, and a popular topic for many of you.

And finally, the Diva post that got the most readers reading was actually about a story I didn’t write. Lesson for 2013, don’t believe everything you read, especially work-at-home success stories.

Happy New Years everyone!! Looking forward to hearing from you all in the new year with your job/career questions. (careerdiva@verizon.net)

(Below is a guest post by Emmanuel Conde, a respected IT recruiter and writer. It is part of a series of guest posts I will be publishing on CareerDiva offering a different perspective and expertise on jobs and careers.)

By Emmanuel Conde

I became a recruiter out of necessity.

I was an IT manager and a technical assistant center manger and then a consultant manager, and through these last few roles I was always called upon to do my own recruiting. It was easier for me to search on Monster myself for candidates than explaining what I needed to human resources. So, after so many years of doing this on my own it changed my career.

Now I essentially run a geek dating service.

Recruiting is often like herding cats. If you have never had more than three cats in your responsibility at one time, then you don’t know. I mean cats are great for stuff like ignoring you, allowing burglars to take stuff they don’t use, urinating in places you cannot locate, and running in different directions.

Geeks are like that if you are scheduling interviews for more than one in a day. So, you get them lined up and they can’t find the cell phone charger, or the server room has no signal, or they forgot, or they found a new place to urinate.

And they’re slow to make decisions, even critical career decisions. The problem can be even worse for geeks who are married. (more…)

(Below is a guest post by Emmanuel Conde, a respected IT recruiter and writer. It is the first in a series of guest posts I will be publishing on CareerDiva offering a different perspective and expertise on jobs and careers.)

By Emmanuel Conde

All the good IT jobs are going to India! Or are they?

We live in an age of fictionalized sensational sound bites on TV. What an undue influence some of this has on our children, and let’s face it, since the television was accepted into our homes we have all felt this influence.

Ask an American kid what they want to do for a living, and you will hear answers based on what TV shows they like. Crime Scene Investigators might be in demand in a few places, but is every wide eyed child going to cut the mustard?

What we do not see are a lot of real world job heroes sensationalized on the boob tube. How do you make an IT geek look good in tights and a cape? It won’t happen! So, we look to our news announcers in their sound-bite worlds saying there are millions of American IT jobs going unfilled. We have to retool our workforce damn it! Well, they don’t generally say damn it, but I do.

There is nothing more boring than watching some geek do geek stuff on TV. Who is there left to influence our young people to step up and take IT careers seriously? The nerds on the TV show, Big Bang Theory are as close as we have come in the USA to glorifying nerds, but they are not IT geeks.

Still, they are inaccurate in their depiction anyway; shouldn’t there be more than one Indian guy? Take a look at the cast and I would challenge any American university to present a ratio of only 25% of a class of science majors who are immigrants. Indian? Yes a lot are from India. Where have all the good IT jobs gone? They are still there, waiting to be filled. (more…)

There’s some good news for job seekers who have been faced with financial issues, or have had brushes with the law.

Fewer employers are snooping into your criminal or credit background today.

Criminal background checks have become increasingly popular partly because technology has made it easier to dig up dirt and partly because hiring managers want any tools to help them weed through the many applicants, given the tight labor market.

But such reviews had a tendency to disproportionately hurt African-Americans and Latinos, according to many labor advocates. Not to mention the fact that lots of other job seekers from all groups who’ve faced unemployment, or underemployment, have faced money woes and may have had their credit histories impacted as a result.

Steps by the federal government and states to crack down on the practice have gotten everyone looking more closely at the process.

“Some of the decline in the use of credit checks may be related to measures put in place by state governments and municipalities, as well as increased attention to the issue,” said Mike Aitken, vice president of government affairs at the Society of Human Resource Management.

The organization just released its figures on such background checks and found:

More than one-half (53 percent) of respondents to a SHRM survey said they don’t use credit background checks in hiring. That’s an increase from 2010, when 40 percent of organizations reported not using credit checks, and from 2004, when 39 percent did not.

“Employers – through their HR professionals – are continually evaluating practices and programs. And this is no different,” Aitken said.

“We think employers are looking more closely at these practices,” he continued. “They want to ensure that any screening or evaluation tool used during the hiring process is related to the duties of specific positions and consistent with federal law prohibiting job discrimination.”

Amen to that.

Can you bench press your weight? Some police departments in this country ask applicants to do this. This, among other physical aptitude tests, often keeps women out of the running.

A recent Justice Department lawsuit against a Texas police department claims such tests discriminate against women.

The government case against the city of Corpus Christi, Texas

“Challenges the police department’s use of a physical ability test for the hiring of entry-level police officers. According to the complaint, the physical test used by the city between 2005 and 2011 had the effect of excluding qualified women from consideration for hire as entry-level police officers and did not screen candidates for job-related skills.”

Cases like this get a lot of anger on both sides. Do we want our cops to be as strong as possible to fight crime, or have we created tests that have nothing to do with the job of policing, and keep out qualified applicants? (more…)

So, employers looking to hire younger workers want many of you to have had internships. Only problem, most of the same employers don’t provide such internship opportunities.

Great graphic by Millennial Branding on what employers are looking for in Gen Y candidates: (more…)

UPDATE BELOW

Some job seekers who thought they had their criminal records sealed or believe arrest records won’t show up in a background check are often in for a rude awakening.

Turns out FBI data bases, and other public and private sources of information, can still turn up past missteps you thought weren’t in the public sphere, said Samuel Miller, a labor law attorney.

“A quarter of U.S. population has some record in FBI data base, and a large number may be situations where someone got fingerprinted or held in jail for a few hours but never got prosecuted,” he said.

Today, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is holding a meeting in Washington where it will announce new guidelines for the use of using criminal background checks in employment, and what they propose could help some workers. But the issue of bogus information, or information that was supposed to be out of the public’s eye for ever, may be hard to resolve. (more…)

There’s nothing worse than getting close to a job offer but getting nada.

Recently I wrote a story on a new job interviewing phenomenon I call the interview odyssey. Applicants are put through six, seven, even ten interviews for one job. They’re forced to meet with everyone from the CEO to HR manager to the guy in the mailroom…not that there’s anything wrong with meeting the guy in the mailroom. But all this work often ends up in disappointment.

One woman I interviewed for the interview-odyssey story just emailed me and said after endless interviews at yet another company, she didn’t get the gig, yet again.

“Well Eve after 9 interviews, for that one same job, I received my rejection notice for the Second Company. It was preceded by a request for feedback on what I thought of their interview process (I wasn’t about to touch that one).

“So I am back where I started, facing unemployment come the second week in May. As I mentioned, I am an adjunct teacher for a community college, and for a local University, and the summer work will be nil or next to it.

“I need to re-evaluate, after coming so close with two employers!”

My first reaction to her saying she needs to reevaluate her situation was why? At least she made it to the interview process. So many job seekers never even hear from hiring managers after they send their resumes into the cyber black hole.

But I reached out to an expert in recruiting to see what she thought of this situation and she actually had a name for people like the perpetual interviewee.

“In our business, we call these people ‘bridesmaids’ because they never seem to be able to progress to the final stage,” said Beth Gilfeather, CEO and Founder, Seven Step Recruiting. (more…)

Derrick Morgan, who has cerebral palsy, worked as a manager for a California McDonald’s since 2006 but when new management took over things changed drastically for him.

According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission the new owners of the Oakhurst restaurant, Alia Corp., illegally demoted Morgan and forced him the quit.

“This is a case where the company illegally stripped a well-qualified worker of his ability to earn a living due to misperceptions about his disability,” said Anna Park, regional attorney for the EEOC’s Los Angeles District Office.

Clearly there’s a problem in this country when it comes to employing individuals with disabilities. The unemployment rate for this group in March was 15.2 percent, almost double to the 8.1 percent rate for those without disabilities. And some experts have told me they suspect the joblessness among those with disabilities is much higher because many leave the labor force out of frustration.

And charges of disability discrimination filed with the EEOC have been rising steadily for the last decades, hitting a record 25,742 last year.

Morgan’s case goes to show that some employers are cool with employing disabled workers and some just don’t get it. Indeed, he was a valued employee to the previous owner.

It turns out there is a recipe that works when recruiting, hiring and keeping disabled workers, and a recent study sheds light on that approach. (more…)

There have been undercurrents of weight discrimination in the workplace for years, but a Texas hospital decided to go anti-fat full throttle.

A Texas newspaper uncovered the story recently reporting about a fat-adverse Texas hospital — Citizens Medical Center — and it’s unheard of policy of refusing to hire anyone with a body mass index of more than 35.

The policy, according to The Texas Tribune, states:

… an employee’s physique “should fit with a representational image or specific mental projection of the job of a healthcare professional,” including an appearance “free from distraction” for hospital patients.

“The majority of our patients are over 65, and they have expectations that cannot be ignored in terms of personal appearance,” hospital chief executive David Brown said in an interview. “We have the ability as an employer to characterize our process and to have a policy that says what’s best for our business and for our patients.”

The hospital’s policy may cause outrage, but it’s an extreme example of an obesity bias that has been percolating in the nation’s workforces, starting with seemingly benign measures such as encouraging workers to walk at lunch. (more…)