Japan Inc's ritual hiring past sell-by date

TOKYO (Reuters) - Each April, hundreds of new graduates report for work in Japan's corporate world, all on the same day, all dressed in standard business black, and all ready to be molded into staunch company loyalists.

When new hires don’t work out, they end up costing companies a lot of money. This can be especially hurtful in a small-business environment. Making a bad hiring decision not only hurts your business’s bottom line, it has a negative impact on your employees and your company’s culture.

OAKVILLE, Ont. — Hundreds of hardy Canadians welcomed the new year Tuesday with a splash into icy waters at Polar Bear Dip events across the country. About 800 participants at this year’s largest charity gathering, the Courage Polar Bear Dip, stripped down to their skivvies or donned outlandish costumes before jumping into Lake Ontario in Oakville, Ont. According to organizers, the event, held just west of Toronto at Coronation Park, first began in 1995 and has since raised a total of $1,060,000 for the charity World Vision Canada.

The fewest workers on record were fired in January and job openings rebounded, showing employers are gaining confidence the U.S. expansion will be sustained even as lawmakers battle to trim the federal budget deficit. There were 1.51 million people let go in the month, down from 1.57 million in December and the least in data going back 12 years, the Labor Department said today in Washington. The number of positions waiting to be filled climbed by 81,000 to 3.69 million after slumping by 177,000 in December.

We recently noticed that Amazon was hiring an unusually large number of salespeople for Amazon Web Services, its enterprise arm that rents computing power over the Internet to other businesses.

By Smith On Stocks: Investment Opinion and Background

(Joshua B. Leners)

Article written by Prieur du Plessis, editor of the Investment Postcards from Cape Town blog.This post is a guest contribution by Dian Chu, market analyst, trader and author of the EconMatters blog.