Developer to submit Ammon plats to planners for review Feb. 5

The ground at the corner of Hitt and Sunnyside Road.

It looks like things are beginning to move with the ground at the southeast corner of Hitt and Sunnyside Road, which is being offered by Ball Ventures and Woodbury Corp.

Ammon City Administrator Ron Folsom said that developer Ball Ventures will be asking the city's planning commission to review two plat proposals at its Feb. 5 meeting. After review, the commission votes on whether the plats should or should not be approved by the City Council, which meets the following night.

Folsom said he no information about who might be planning to build on the land, but said one of the lots being platted has already been sold. He said he has been told that three operators are ready to build as soon as the ground changes hands and the infrastructure is ready.

"I don't know if we're going to see anything going up this fall, but we're going to see things start to happen there this year," he said.

Finding the Right Person for the Job

Have you been one of the lucky business owners, managers, or supervisors in charge of a recruiting project recently?  If you have, you more than likely have sifted through numerous resumes, dodged candidate phone calls and sat through countless hours of interviews to settle on a candidate. Then, in a leap of faith, you hire the candidate and hope that he or she is the right choice.

For people involved in hiring and recruiting, it would seem like finding the right person shouldn’t be difficult, especially with unemployment rates staying steady over 5 percent at the state and national levels over the past few years.  Additionally, Baby Boomers are retiring, leaving positions open for the first time in decades.

So why is it so hard to find the right person? It has become increasingly important for businesses to look beyond a carefully crafted resume and well thought out responses in interviews.  In fact, even a perfect combination of education, experience and skills doesn’t guarantee a candidate will be selected even for an initial interview. 

Today’s businesses are concentrating their recruiting and hiring on finding the best fit.  This means going beyond the right fit on “paper” with the right combination of education, experience, knowledge, skill and ability. This is important because employee turnover is costly and can significantly hurt a company’s bottom line.

It doesn’t seem like it should make a huge difference with a person quitting here or there coupled with a termination or two, but it does make a huge difference.  Not only does a company face increased unemployment insurance rates with high turnover, but there is the time and resources it takes to recruit, hire and train replacements. This can amount to thousands of dollars.

Businesses have decided to get smart for the start about how they recruit. While they are still using traditional methods of recruiting -- newspaper classifieds, career fairs and postings on company Web sites -- recruiting efforts have expanded out to partnerships between management and marketing departments. Professionals and public relations campaigns are being used to match candidates to a company’s culture.

Businesses are going as far as creating mobile applications that send text messages to candidates the moment an opening is posted.  Social media have paved the way for real-time recruiting not only of potential candidates but also to a candidate’s center of influence.

On the outside, companies might seem to be overly selective in their recruiting and hiring efforts.  But these companies are paving the way for operating more efficiently, effectively, and in turn being more profitable, by taking the right steps to find the right people for the right workplace culture. Each company that chooses to recruit with this mindset is taking on a big challenge, but the dividend is huge -- employees that will stay on the job a long time and bring real value to the company.

Waiting for the layoff shoe to drop

When it comes to writing stories about layoffs, you won't find an older hand at it than me. In August 1980, I arrived in Jeffrey City, Wyo., to run the local newspaper. It was a uranium mining town that had boomed in the mid-'70s to nearly 4,500 people. Unfortunately, I caught it on the downturn. The lead story of my first edition, was "Western Nuclear announces 118 being laid off."

I spent a year there, but in June 1981 the other shoe dropped -- 244 lost their jobs at the mine and mill -- and I started looking for a new gig. After a brief layover in Laramie, where I was police reporter for the Daily Boomerang (greatest newspaper name ever), the then-hyphenated Post-Register hired me to be its central Idaho staff writer. I arrived in Challis in October 1981 to learn that Cyprus Mining Corp. would be laying off scores of people at its Thompson Creek molybdenum mine.

Here's the funny thing about layoffs and writing stories about them. Everyone knows they're coming, but corporations seem reluctant to make the news official in a timely way. Are they secretly humiliated or is their aim to torment reporters? Although I could be wrong, I don't think most corporations give reporters enough thought to want to torture them.

Nevertheless, when a layoff looms, we press people make our calls and visits and ask our questions. The supervisors and public affairs people say things like, "At the present time we have no current plans to lay anyone off." We wait and wait for official word before we file our stories. Then we're off to the races.

At present, I'm waiting for a piece of layoff news from a significant employer in Idaho Falls. From what I've heard, employees have already been told, but no press release or e-mail has been issued. It might come today; then again it might not.

Can you guess who I'm talking about? Feel free to weigh in. Let's put the magic off social media to work, people.

Alchemy Bistro brings continental cuisine to Capital Avenue

Chef Tim Leininger at Alchemy Bistro and Catering

I'd never eaten a hard-boiled quail egg for lunch before today, when I visited Alchemy Bistro and Catering at 552 North Capital Avenue, in the spot where That One Place used to be.

Chef Tim Leininger has been cooking there by himself since before Thanksgiving. Prior to that, he had been doing mainly catering from a kitchen in the Trackside Mall. When he saw the kitchen on North Capital had opened, he jumped at it.

A native of Pine Grove, Pa., near Hershey, Leininger grew up in a family of cooks. He worked at restaurants while attending college. After graduate work at Penn State, he came to Idaho in 1989 to work environmental safety and health at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. After leaving the site in 2006, he went to the French Culinary Institute in New York City.

Leininger said he has mixed feelings about the restaurant business because of all the waste he sees. "I don't like waste because of my French culinary background. The French, they use everything. They look at the whole chicken."

Though it has daytime hours -- 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday -- Alchemy is doing some special dinners in February and March. To learn more, visit alchemychef.com or the Facebook page. The phone number is 529-1032.

By the way, though it was the size of an olive the quail egg tasted like most of the hard-boiled eggs I've  eaten.

Melaleuca announces expansion into Mexico

Melaleuca, Inc., one of eastern Idaho's largest employers, announced today it has expanded into Mexico, its 17th market worldwide.

The company makes and distributes close to 350 health and wellness products through a network of "marketing executives" who earn commissions based on product purchases by customers they refer. The move into Mexico, which happened earlier in the month, has already yielded thousands of new customers, said Antonio Lima, spokesman for the company.

CEO Frank VanderSloot said Melaleuca held off on Mexico because the company wanted to first develop its Hispanic market in the United States. Developing a deep leadership team of Hispanic marketing executives has allowed them to enter Mexico with a high degree of confidence, since many of those people have strong personal connections in Mexico.

Israel Palafox, Melaleuca’s vice president of sales for Hispanic markets, believes the company’s success in Mexico will continue for years to come. “Thousands of Mexican families will benefit by taking advantage of the steady residual income that Melaleuca offers to those who refer our products,” he said.

Although the majority of Melaleuca’s business growth has been in the United States and Canada, sales from elsewhere accounted for 45 percent of the company's 2013 revenues. Melaleuca does business in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, South Korea, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.