Evan here. Please note that Robert Kinney and I will be back in Hong Kong all next week for meetings. Although our schedule is tight, we can fit in some meetings with prospective biglaw or in-house candidates. Feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
In just the past few weeks, we have seen a noticeable rise in the expat / cola allowances for US associates at some of the most competitive group of US and UK firms in HK / China. In fact , it appears that for the first time $80,000 may be taking hold as the eventual standard in HK / China. For the past several years, while there were anywhere from zero to four firms paying as much as $80,000 expat / cola for associates with no children, most of the top US and UK firms remained in the $60,000 to $65,000 allowance range. The competitive range continues to be $60,000 to $80,000, but more firms are at the top of that range than ever before in HK / China. Further, two top US firms pay $90,000 expat / cola (although one of those has tax equalization on the base).
While there has been already a trend in ‘10 for a number of the US and UK firms with less competitive expat / cola allowances to step it up (see http://www.theasiachronicles.com/archives/2264), there has until very recently not been much movement in the competitive group, most of which have allowances in the mid $60,000’s (keep in mind that many major US and UK firms are still not in that competitive expat allowance range of $60,000 plus, but the size of that group is becoming smaller).
Further, we are seeing a trend this year of the top US and UK firms paying their US associates in mainland China the same expat allowance as their US associates in HK receive (some firms still give a smaller allowance in the mainland than in HK, but we are seeing this much less often than in previous years).
Two of our four placements in HK / China last week received expat / allowance at $80,000 and we are aware of a few firms recently raising their allowance from the mid $60,000’s to $80,000. Further, at firms where expat / cola is determined on a case-by-case basis (up until this year, that has almost always meant a very low allowance or no allowance), we are seeing a surprising trend for top market expat / cola being offered. For example, two of our recent placements in HK received $80,000 and $70,000 expat / cola, respectively, in HK at firms which have only recently started to pay competitive expat / cola consistently and which determine allowances on a case-by-case basis. Sure, there was negotiation involved and those two new hires had leverage due to being extremely marketable, but the allowances offered were well above market.
In only the past couple of weeks two of our firm clients have raised their expat allowances from $65,000 to $80,000 USD in HK / China, near top market, and other firms are considering doing the same. This is not a surprise, considering the competition now for the best US associate candidates on the market is fierce. A number of firms have reached out to us for help keeping up with the changing expat / cola numbers in the market, due to rumors going around that some top firms are raising their allowances.
As recently as mid ’09, the highest US associate expat allowance in HK / China biglaw lowered to $70,000 (for associates with no children), after the two firms that were paying $80,000 allowances dropped to $65,000. Before the global economic downturn hit China in late ’08, the expat allowances in HK / China had been on a steady rise, with many firms doubling their allowance over a period of just a few years. But in ’09, even as the China IPO market rebounded dramatically in midyear, expat allowances were taking a small step back. It appears now that expat allowances are on the rise again, due to the competition heating up among top US and UK firms for the best US corporate / cap markets associates on the market, both those coming from the US and those already in HK / China.
Catelynn and Tyler
They’re shown living with their parents on the show, working part time jobs and struggling to pay for basic necessities, but the stars of MTV’s Teen Mom are not broke. Life & Style reports that they earn over $60,000 a year, which actually sounds pretty cheap of MTV considering how popular the show is. After so many of you suggested it, I’ve watched the first five episodes of the second season and I definitely get why so many of you watch this show. It’s kind of fascinating and you feel for these girls and their babies. Now that I know how much money they make I understand how Farrah affords that nice apartment despite complaining constantly about money. It also explains how these kids are able to go out to dinner all the time. Amber and Gary especially seem broke, but it sounds like they’re doing just fine.
Life & Style has learned that the stars of MTV’s hit show Teen Mom are raking in the dough!
“The Teen Mom stars earn $60,000 to $65,000 per season,” a series insider tells Life & Style. It’s enough to provide on-again, off-again couple Amber Portwood and Gary Shirley with comfortable lives — but neither one seems to be a good saver. “Gary says he’s broke,” Gary’s best friend, Jordan Sanchez, tells Life & Style. “The money is the only reason he’s willing to do the show. You can’t walk away from money like that.”
It’s true–in fact, Jordan tells Life & Style that Amber and Gary have already started filming the next season of Teen Mom in Tennessee. Lately, they’ve talked about moving to Florida, where Amber’s uncle owns a business.
[From Life & Style]
Like I said I’ve only seen a few episodes of this show, but this really makes me question how “real” it is. They present it like a kind of documentary and the kids are constantly worried about money and cutting corners to make ends meet. It just seems so false to me if they’re paid so well. Sure $60,000 isn’t a huge amount of money, but it’s good pay and it’s not like they’re living hand to mouth.
It’s easy to imagine Amber and Gary wasting their money because they’re just so trashy. Amber is so damn cruel and nasty and she can be hard to watch. Catelynn and Tyler, who gave up their baby for adoption, are good kids and are probably giving the money to their families. Jezebel is soliciting donations for a college fund for them and on the show it seems like they really need it. Their families look very poor. Maci comes from an upper middle class family and is very responsible, so I can see her managing her money well and continuing to work for her son’s sake. Farrah is somewhat of a dimwit and was shown getting victimized by an online scam in which someone wrote her a bad check and then had her wire them money in exchange for selling her car. (Her mom is a manipulative, abusive bitch though and she’s dealing with a lot.) Farrah’s bank told her that her account was overdrawn for nearly the full amount she wired, so what happened to her MTV paycheck? Does MTV make the stars save that money separately?
It’s good that MTV is paying these kids but then how do they justify showing them barely getting by? Are they putting the money in trust and making them live on whatever they make? I doubt it. Do only the women make $60,000 or do their partners pull in that money too? Producers have some explaining to do.
Maci
Gary and Amber
Farrah
bench craft company rip off
bench craft company rip off
bench craft company rip off
bench craft company rip off
bench craft company rip off
bench craft company rip off
bench craft company rip off
bench craft company rip off
bench craft company rip off
bench craft company rip off
bench craft company rip off
bench craft company rip off
bench craft company rip off
bench craft company rip off
bench craft company rip off
bench craft company rip off
bench craft company rip off
We are often asked if professional SEO (search engine optimization) can be done effectively utilizing in-house talent. Despite our obvious self-interests on the subject, our answer is always a qualified "yes"- you can achieve professional SEO results using existing talent. However, for every company we have known that has met with great in-house SEO success, we know of many more that have seen their in-house efforts fail. We have also discovered the companies that have succeeded share some common traits.
If your company is considering doing SEO in-house, there are some critical questions that you should address before you proceed.
Do I have the proper resources at my disposal to achieve professional SEO results?
Search engine optimization takes time, and your internal SEO expert will need to have a great deal of it at his or her disposal - especially at the project's outset when target audiences, keyphrases, and optimization schemes are first being established. Even after the initial optimization effort, the nature of SEO will require this person to spend ample time keeping up with industry trends, monitoring campaign progress, performing A/B testing, and expanding the campaign as new product and service areas are added.
Perhaps even more important than time, achieving professional SEO results requires a unique set of aptitudes. The person responsible for your internal SEO initiative must possess the ability to learn quickly and to look at your website from a macro-perspective, marrying together the needs of sales, marketing, and IT. He or she can not be an aggressive risk taker, as this is often a surefire way to get your website penalized and potentially removed from the major search engines. These gifted people exist in many companies, but given the unique attributes that these individuals possess, their time is often already spent in other crucial areas of the business.
Without enough time to invest in the project or the right type of person to execute it, an internal SEO initiative is likely doomed to fail.
Do I know which departments of my company should be involved, and will they work with an insider?
As mentioned above, professional SEO, by necessity, involves marketing, sales, and IT. The SEO expert must work with marketing to find out what types of offers and initiatives are working offline to help translate them effectively online. He or she must work with sales to identify the types of leads that are most valuable so that you can target the right people in the keyphrase selection process. And, finally, your SEO expert will need to work with IT to determine any technical limitations to the SEO recommendations, learn of any past initiatives based on a technical approach, and get the final optimization schemes implemented on the website.
Sadly, in many businesses, these departments have a somewhat adversarial relationship. However, it is the duty of the SEO expert to act as a project manager and coordinate the efforts of all three departments if you are going to get the most out of your campaign. No professional SEO project can be completed in a vacuum. For whatever reason, it is often easier for an outsider to get adversarial departments on the same page, in the same way that a marriage counselor might convince a woman of her undying love for her husband while the husband is still grimacing from a well-placed knee in the parking lot.
Will someone be held accountable for the results?
This may seem like a small consideration, but it can have a tremendous impact on the success of the campaign. If you have added this responsibility to some poor soul's job description with the direction that he or she should "do the best you can," you'll be lucky to make any headway at all (especially if the person is not enthusiastic about SEO). Whether SEO is done in-house or outsourced, someone will have to take responsibility for showing progress, explaining setbacks, and continually improving results. Without this accountability, it is very common to see an initiative fade as the buck is passed.
Can I afford delayed results based on a learning curve?
It's a reality - professional SEO expertise has a steep learning curve. While the information on how to perform the basics of optimization are freely available on the web, much of the information out there is also contradictory, and some of it is actually dangerous. It takes time for someone unfamiliar with the discipline to sort the SEO wheat from the SEO chaff (on a side note, a "quoted" search of Google reveals that this may actually mark the first occasion in human history that the phrase "SEO chaff" has been used - we're betting it's also the last). Simply put, if the person you are putting on the job has no experience, it will take longer to get results. This may not be a consideration if you aren't counting on new business from SEO any time soon. However, if you are losing business to your competition due to their professional SEO initiatives, time might be a larger factor.
Will it cost me less to do it in house than it would to choose a professional SEO firm?
Often, companies will attempt this specialized discipline in-house in order to save money, and sometimes this works out as intended. However, accurate calculations of the cost of in-house labor that would be involved versus the price of the firm you would otherwise hire should be performed to make an accurate comparison. When making this calculation, also factor in the opportunity cost of the resource - the tasks that your in-house people are not able to perform because they are involved in SEO.
In addition, if worse comes to worst and your in-house SEO expert is led astray by some of the more dangerous "how-to" guides available, it can cost even more to repair the damage than it would have to hire a professional SEO firm to perform the optimization from the outset. And an internal SEO campaign gone wrong can cost even more than the stated fee - websites that violate the terms of service of the major search engines (whether intentional or not) can be severely penalized or even removed, costing you a lot of lost revenue when potential customers can not find your website for a period of time.
Do I believe that the end result I'll get in-house will be equal to or greater than the results I would have gotten from a professional SEO firm?
Search engine optimization can create huge sales opportunities, and slight increases in overall exposure can have not-so-slight increases in your bottom-line revenue. If you believe that your talented in-house resource will, given enough time, achieve results equal to or greater than those that could have been achieved by the professional SEO firm you might have chosen, it may make sense to do it internally.
However, in addition to a better knowledge of industry trends, one clear advantage that search engine optimization firms have is the benefit of the experience and macro-perspective that comes from managing many different websites over time. Professional SEO firms can watch a wide range of sites on a continual basis to see what trends are working, what trends aren't, and what formerly recommended tactics are now actually hurting results.
This macro-perspective allows professional SEO firms to test new tactics as they appear on a case-by-case basis and apply those results across a wide range of clients to determine what the benefit is. It is harder for an individual with access to only one site to perform enough testing and research to achieve optimum results all the time, something that should also factor into the equation.
Do I have at least a slight tolerance for risk?
Neophytes to SEO can make mistakes that can lead to search engine penalization or removal. This happens most commonly when they have an IT background and treat SEO as a strictly technical exercise. We are often called in to assist companies who have had an internal initiative backfire, leaving them in a worse position than the one they were in before they started. The simple truth is that you cannot perform effective SEO without marrying your efforts to the visitor experience, but this is not something that is intuitively understood when people approach SEO for the first time.
However, professional SEO firms are not perfect either. Some firms use those same optimization methods that violate the search engines' terms of service and can get your site penalized. So, if you do decide to outsource, educate yourself on SEO and do some research on the firm. Know the basics of the business, find out who the firm's clients are and how long they've been in business, and ask for professional references - just like you would do with any major business purchase.
If you have considered all of the above questions, and your answers to all seven are "yes," your company may be uniquely equipped to achieve professional SEO results in-house. If you answered "no" to any of the first three questions but "yes" to the rest, it does not necessarily mean that you can't perform SEO in-house - just that you may not be in a position to do so at this time. Taking the actions required to get you in the right position to answer in the affirmative might be worth your while. However, if you answered "no" to any of the last four questions, you may want to consider outsourcing the project to a professional SEO firm.
A professional SEO firm has the resources, the time, the expertise, and, most importantly, the experience, to launch an SEO initiative for your website that will have a positive effect on your bottom line. Whichever option you choose, it is important that you fully embrace the channel. A half-hearted initiative, whether done internally or outsourced, can be as ineffective as taking no action at all.
About the Author Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing. He has contributed content to many publications including Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, SEO Today, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue, an Atlanta search engine optimization company, serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DuPont, and Georgia-Pacific. To receive internet marketing articles and search engine news in your email box each month, register for Medium Blue�s newsletter, Out of the Blue. Article Source: |  |
No comments:
Post a Comment