PAAS, an Ocala-based egg-coloring company owned by Signature Brands, accounts for 80 percent of the egg-decorating market, said Brittany Lacey, PAAS brand manager.

The company, which has made egg-dying kits for more than 130 years, sells about 10 million kits every Easter season, according to its website.

Lacey has been researching the latest trends and creating new egg-dying ideas for this Easter since August, she said.

“I’m obsessed with Pinterest,” she said, “so I’ll go on there and see how people are decorating eggs.”

This year, PAAS released new kits ranging from bedazzled, velvet and marble themes, and the “Eggsplosion” volcano, among others.

Lacey has already begun preparing for next year’s Easter, she said.

Tubby Smith and his staff had no idea they were about to be fired Monday morning as they sat in a staff meeting at 10 a.m. going over recruiting, offseason workout plans and evaluations of the Gophers' loss to Florida the previous day. Members of the Minnesota staff said they were sitting in the meeting when they started receiving text messages from coaching colleagues telling them they had been fired. Smith told them that he had to meet with the administration at 1 p.m. It was then, according to the staff, that Smith and ultimately the staff found out they had been fired.

Earlier this month, Laurie Ruettimann wrote a nice piece for TLNT.com entitled, "Are You Googling Job Candidates? When You Do, Everyone Loses."

As always her advice was spot on, but it really hit home today when I arrived at work and received an e-mail from a former student who had run into a troubling situation where the personal and professional often crosses - romance and work.

This former student was romantically involved with someone outside of work.  However, the ex was none too pleased that my student was involved with his/her former flame, and began to engage in some despicable behavior. To wit, attempting to hack into my student's Facebook and Twitter accounts.    

However, the straw that broke the camel's back this morning was discovering a duplicate LinkedIn account created with my former student's name and location, with a false profession (think bank robber or prostitute).  Now, when someone does a LinkedIn search for that former student's name, not only does his/her real account show up, but the fake account shows up as well with a false title and false interests (i.e., defacing public property or sleeping around).

Given that this student is trying to establish him/herself in a new position and growing his/her network, this is extremely troubling.  His/her colleagues may want to connect on LinkedIn, and could come across this less than flattering profile.  Or, he/she may want to start looking for a new position, and future employers could look up my student and dismiss him/her based on this profile.

So, as always, listen to Laurie - be careful out there when googling candidates....you may come across a false profile or two.

Note:  The scenario has been changed to protect the innocent.  Don't bother searching my LinkedIn connections - this former student is not among them.

One of my favorite terms in HR is "base rate of success."  Its also rarely discussed, but absolutely critical.

Simply put, the "base rate of success" tells us the proportion of employees who would be successful on the job if we hired randomly instead of applying some predictor.

As Gatewood and Feild (2010) write in their book "Human Resource Selection:"

If 100 percent of the applicants would be successful if hired, there is no added information provided by the predictor; one would simply randomly pick from the pool of superstar candidates.  Conversely, if every applicant in the selection pool would fail if hired, the predictor cannot help identify even one applicant who would be successful; none are successful.

Last Friday, I discussed my battles with absenteeism in the classroom.  Not only do students suffer in their performance by missing class, but it creates more work for me in terms of time grading poor answers on exams.

Where absenteeism poses a particular problem beyond just missing class is when assignments are due or exams are scheduled.  Students may have legitimate reasons for being absent; as a result, my policy takes into account three situations:

• A student commutes to class from his/her off-campus home.  On the day an exam is scheduled, he/she e-mails me that his/her car has broken down and he/she will not be able to make it to class.  Per the policy, I required a note from an appropriate party - in this case, the auto repair shop.  The student provides the note, and I notice the home address of the student on the receipt.  It turns out the student's "commute" was less than a mile from a campus, and he/she could have easily walked to class.