Guy Kawasaki causes a stir

Earlier in the week Guy Kawasaki caused a stir within the blogosphere with his post about How to Get a Job in Silicon Valley.

The biggest issue, the 1 page resume!

Gretchen from Job Syntax disagrees with this particular piece of advice.

So does Gautam Ghosh who provides a perspective from India, which echos much of Asia Pacific.

The rest of Guy’s post is great general advice regardless of where you interview. Jason Goldberg has picked out the key messages:-

  1. be passionate about the company you are interviewing with
  2. pitch yourself
  3. hate the competition
  4. expect to interview with wackos; prepare for all types
  5. get there early
  6. over dress
  7. nail the first question
  8. use the first interviewer to get the inside scoop
  9. remember, no one wants to train you. show you can hit the ground running
  10. take notes
  11. confess your sins; they will google you and find out anyway
  12. correct your bad answers in interviews
  13. prepare your list of 5 ways the company could improve
  14. come armed with references
  15. ask for the job


HRSEO provides Internet recruiting solutions to employers.

links for 2006-08-15

Social bookmarking and news

Over the last few weeks I have been playing around with the different social bookmarking/news sites, specifically Digg, Reddit, Netscape and to a lesser extend Newsvine. The strange thing is I am finding them quite addictive.

A quick backgrounder if you are unfamiliar with these services. Essentially users submit stories, other users vote and comment, the stories with the most votes rise to the top and the result is twofold. Sites with stories on the front page tend to get LOTS of traffic and secondly stories on the front page reflect the “wisdom of the crowd” or in some cases shows the lack of wisdom.

I have previously posted about the Careers & Job channel on the Netscape site highlighting the poor quality of the content. However after playing with the different sites I figured out why the content was so poor. The reason the community was not participating, so I have started to participate! I am not sure the content is much better but at least I can say I have done my bit. Oh and one of my submitted stories has ended up as a top pick on the Netscape front page, pity it wasn’t back to this site.


Furst Person provides call center outsourcing services to employers.

When you web enabled business process is slower/more complex than the old way

(Warning this post includes a RANT, if you are not interested just skip over it.)

We are moving house this week so I am busy tidying up all the loose ends.  It is just amazing to me how poorly implemented the web side of businesses are here in Australia.

Part one, my broadband connection.  Initially I thought fantastic, People Telecom have an easy to use web interface that allows me to transfer the connection.  I asked for connection on 4 Aug 2006, all was well until yesterday when I received an email saying the request was rejected.  Why because the phone service was not connected.  Ok I can understand that but on checking the order status page I found something very amusing I found this:-

People Telecom sent your application to Telstra on: 2006-08-05
Telstra rejected your application on: 2006-08-01

How can Telstra have rejected it BEFORE it was sent? Oh well a glich in the system I will just have to wait until Friday to submit my request, oh wait by then I will not be able to becuase my existing connection will be gone…. I guess I will have to deal with them over the phone.

Part 2.

Electricity & Gas both need to be disconnected and reconnected at the new house.  My current provider is AGL and I wish to use them again.

Initially I tried the web interface but had to stop as I did not have all the information.  Then onto the phone where I need to deal with two separate call centres, one for gas the other for electricity.  After about 15 minutes on hold with the electricity call centre I gave up and decided to try again from home using the web tool.
The web tool, nice and easy up until the point of entrying the disconnection and connection dates.   AGL require you to give
20 clear business days for the connection to be processed!  Now I understand if there is no connection currently or it is a new house it might take a month. I answered those questions as part of the process which told them I was not building a new house, hmm.  The process should be we will confirm within 6 hours if your selected date is possibly after an automated check against their existing systems.

Oh well back to the phone today.

I found the same problems 18 months ago when we moved to Melbourne, and 4 years ago when we last moved.  In that time I am surprised that these businesses have not got themselves more integrated.

SPAM, lovely SPAM, wonderful SPAM, not!

I just noticed Joel Cheesman has posted about how to stop Spam on a WordPress blog (for a history on Spam check out the Wikipedia entry). While I would agree that adding entries to you .htaccess file works it is a fairly brutal way of handling spam. I also just noticed Joel has removed trackbacks and now forces users to log in to comment on his blog, all in the interests of stopping spam.

I completely understand where Joel is coming from but I would suggest a slightly different tatic that does not put too many barriers in the way on the conversation.

  1. Turn on comment moderation for all comments, however this can mean you spend hours going through the 100’s of spam comments.
  2. Implement the Spam words feature in WordPress
  3. Upgrade to a WordPress version that has Akismet installed by default, V2 I think?
  4. Then look at using Spam Karma

If after all thig you still get way too many spam comments getting through THEN look to implementing the registered users feature.  WordPress even has a complete page dedicated to how to fight spam.

Search jobs online at Job Central.

links for 2006-07-21

No posts for a week or so

Once again we are going away for a few days, as such regular programming will be suspended until around 31 July.

We are going skiing, at least that is the plan as right now there is not a whole lot of snow! If you feel so inclined you can watch us on the Snow Cam to see if the snow improves over the next week.

After soccer tomorrow morning we will head off for Cooma in NSW, for those who don’t live in Australia you can check out the map. After overnighting in Cooma we will drive to the Ski Tube to Perisher Blue before catching oversnow transport to Charlotte Pass.

If you need something to read while I am not around check out one of the 420 odd blogs being tracked over at community.hrblogs.org.