As presented by the Times

Quoth the Raven: I Bake Cookies, Too

Mark Landler in The Times: Surely Germany, cradle of the kindergarten and home to some of the world's most generous maternity-leave policies, would do everything it could to make life easier for mothers who work, right?

Well, no. Few developed countries are more resistant to the idea of working mothers, and the hostility can be summed up in one word: Rabenmutter.

It means raven mother, and refers to women who leave their children in an empty nest while they fly away to pursue a career. The phrase, which sounds like something out of the Brothers Grimm, has been used by Germans for centuries as a synonym for bad parent. Today, it is at the center of a new debate on the future of the German working woman, prompted by the first woman to lead the country, Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Mrs. Merkel herself, a physicist and career politician, has no children, making her typical of her generation of German professional women. But she has appointed Ursula von der Leyen, a physician and mother of seven, as minister for family affairs.

Dr. von der Leyen has taken it on herself to challenge some deeply held, if only whispered, prejudices in German society, chief among them that women must choose either to work or to raise children.

To her critics, many of whom belong to her own conservative Christian Democratic Party, Dr. von der Leyen is Germany's latest incarnation of the Rabenmutter — a driven creature determined to impose her own superhuman lifestyle on women who can neither deal with it nor afford it.

Only someone who knows nothing about Germany would be surprised that the country doesn't "do everything it could to make life easier for mothers who work." As for this line, it just made me laugh.

Immigration can solve only part of the problem. Even if Germany's annual influx of immigrants were to double to 200,000, the population would still shrink 8.5 percent by 2050. And Germany already struggles to absorb the current waves of Turks and others.

First, it's telling that Germany tolerates immigration only because it has a rapidly aging workforce. Second, it's a huge understatement to say non-immigrant Germans 'struggle to asorb' immigrants--the language choice itself is telling of how Germans see immigrants as a necessary evil to be made swept under the rug as much as possible.

Immigrants aren't sheep--they know non-immigrant Germans hate them and are pretty racist, so don't assume Germany can bring in as many workers as it needs, or wants. Heck, just look at how Germans treat their own mothers:

"The thinking that mothers should look after children and men should go out and support the family is a product of our dark past," said Reiner Klingholz, director of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development. "It's still in the minds of people, even if they sound liberal or progressive."

Not so past, I'd say.

To Hire Sharp Employees, Recruit in Sharp Ways

The Times: "There's a new war for talent, but most companies aren't bothering to fight," argues John J. Sullivan, a management professor at San Francisco State University and critic of traditional hiring practices. "Whether it's a store manager or a software developer, there's a huge gap between the business results that average employees deliver and what stars deliver. If you want to win the battle in the product market, first you have to win the battle in the talent market."

This is not, Dr. Sullivan is quick to add, a plea to return to the bad old days of the 90's dot-com boom — when the last "war for talent" became an excuse to lavish big signing bonuses on any self-absorbed M.B.A. or self-impressed Internet marketer. It is, instead, a call for companies to become as creative and aggressive about stocking up on talented rank-and-file employees as they are about designing sleek products or producing flashy television commercials.

"The first rule of recruiting is that the best people already have jobs they like," Dr. Sullivan said. "So you have to find them; they're not going to find you. It's amazing that so many companies still use job fairs to recruit talent. Who goes to job fairs? People without jobs! All you get are worthless résumés and lots of germs. Recruiting has to be a clever, fast-moving business discipline, not a passive, paper-pushing bureaucracy."

As an alternative to the passive approach, consider the hiring strategy pioneered by Quicken Loans, the mortgage company based in Livonia, Mich. This fast-growing company, with 3,400 employees, closed $16 billion worth of home loans in 2005, compared with $4.6 billion in 2001, and has emerged as the country's largest Internet lender.

According to Michael G. Homula, Quicken's director of talent acquisition, the company's most pressing business challenge is to add employees quickly enough to keep pace with such meteoric growth without diluting its highly charged culture. (It is a regular on Fortune magazine's list of 100 best places to work.)

Specifically, Mr. Homula is racing to hire 200 mortgage bankers a month for the foreseeable future. "This is the job that really moves the needle at our company," he says. "These are the people who interact with customers, solve their problems, make things happen. We ask ourselves every day, 'Where is our next great mortgage banker going to come from?' "

The primary answer, it turns out, isn't help-wanted ads, Web site postings or job fairs. Mr. Homula and his 34-member department have mastered the art of discovering talented candidates in unlikely places. This month, for example, they organized a "road rally" in which teams of recruiters blitzed a carefully selected group of shopping malls.

They spent hours inside stores like Best Buy and Circuit City and restaurants like T.G.I. Friday's. They walked the aisles, bought merchandise, ordered meals and hunted for employees and managers who stood out by virtue of their energy, enthusiasm and rapport with customers.

This week's entry in the Times' ongoing quest to bring to the attention of American business things they should already know.

Erasing an Error, One Tile at a Time

The Times: DID you ever make a home decorating mistake?

Not a huge mistake, like buying the wrong 40 yards of very expensive chintz for the dining room curtains, then deciding that Venetian blinds are far better. Or hiring a painter to paint a three-story hallway orange, and then discovering that you hate orange.

No, this was just a small error: I had put some moderately ugly flesh-colored tiles on the kitchen backsplash.

Flesh-colored tiles sound pretty repulsive now, but 15 years ago, the manufacturer called them taupe — although they weren't — and the idea was that they matched the color of the paint lining the paneled wooden cabinets. The paint looked good on the inside of the cupboards, but it never looked good on the backsplash. After about a decade of averting my eyes every time I passed by, I painted them an intense yellow to match the curtains. But after a while, the paint started to chip off, exposing the flesh.

This week's entry in the Times' ongoing quest to ignore its changing city and country. Ironic that it went from taupe to 'flesh-colored' even as the term increasingly makes one wonder whose flesh? What color?

Times Laugh Lines: Jay Leno
The president of China, Hu Jintao, arrived in the United States today. His first stop is Seattle. He stopped into a store to buy some souvenirs to bring home. He was a little frustrated. He said, "Do you guys have anything that wasn't made in China?"

So China's president meets America's president. It will be President Hu meeting President Huh.

David Letterman
In Washington, D.C., today is the annual White House front lawn Easter egg hunt. It's a big, big annual event and the kids found so many eggs, it was unbelievable, and I'm thinking, "Well, maybe they should send the kids to look for Osama Bin Laden."

Photo of German Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen and her family by Jochen Luebke/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.