‘Can I Get Paid Without Doing Work’

Students joining the work force are less concerned about getting top dollar than they are about having a flexible work schedule.

That’s one finding of a survey by Jobtrak.com, an online job listing service for students and alumni.

Thirty-five percent of college students and recent grads participating in the survey said flexible hours is their No. 1 employment incentive. The others, in descending order of importance, are:

* Stock options, 19 percent.

* More vacation time, 13 percent.

* Ability to telecommute, 13 percent.

* Better health plan, 12 percent.

* Large signing bonus, 9 percent.

“It’s interesting to note that a majority of the responses (61 percent) had to do with lifestyle, while the financial considerations came in second,” said Julie Cunningham, manager of global college relations for Tellabs. “This strongly supports the opinion held by many that today’s new graduates are putting a high priority on work/life balance, and that employers who can support that will more easily attract them as employees.”

You’ve got mail

The number of companies that track, record and review employees’ office e-mail has climbed to 37 percent, according to a recent study by the American Management Association for The Washington Post.

An additional 9 percent of companies nationwide said they plan to begin monitoring workers’ e-mail in the future.

Some companies said they consider misuse or private use of office e-mail to be a firing offense. About one-quarter of the businesses surveyed said they fired workers for doing it, and about half said they had given workers either formal or informal reprimands or warnings.

The survey of 1,139 companies found the practice of monitoring e-mail most common among financial services businesses and at companies with more than $1 billion in annual sales, with about half of those saying they do it. It is least common in public administration positions and among companies with fewer than 50 employees, with less than one-quarter of the employers saying they do it.

Online job hunt

Job seekers are finding it so easy to mass e-mail resumes to potential employers that corporate human resource managers are being inundated with applications.

The boom in Internet job search sites has made the process of matching the right person with the right job haphazard, according to Neil Fox, chief information officer at Management Recruiters International Inc.

Companies receive thousands of resumes per post with no way to filter top candidates, which means they may be missing out on some good prospective employees. And because the online application process is so easy, some job seekers are putting in for positions they’re clearly not qualified for.

“Some companies have even complained about short order cooks putting in for senior management jobs,” Fox said.