Jason, Gretchen and Zoe all had dinner together. They had a few to drink started to talk and came up with the idea of the GREAT BIG BLOG SWAP!! The basic run down is get a
bunch of blogger to write post for other blogs, with a bit of organisation.
Anyone who has an interest in recruitment, job hunting, careers AND has a blog can play. Sounds like a great idea, head on over to Blog Swap and register your interest.
Well today is 23 June, an important day in history for two reasons.
Firstly it is my blogoversary! 23 June 2004 I typed up my first post on Blogger. I decided on Blogger after failing to get MoveableType up and running after a couple of weeks of trying. I suspect it was me not the tool! Eventually I bought my own domain and settled on WordPress. Why did I start blogging? Really just to document my thoughts, although I did have grand plans for using the blog as the basis for research and maybe a book. Not sure the book idea will ever get up, but you never know.
Second reason the day is important. Australia advanced to the second round of the World Cup. We had a small gathering in the office to watch the match on the big screen. The room erupted when Harry Kewel scored our second goal to draw 2 -2 with Croatia. Next game is now against Italy.
After several hours of research, bug fixing and testing I have got hrblogs.org back up and running. Sorry if the outage has impacted you in any way.
Over the last 24 hours my hosting provider has been having problems with their environments. It seems they have been over run by spam and phishing attacks which has brought some of the servers down. We are back up at the moment!
This problem is also impacting hrblogs.org (still having problems) and community.hrblogs.org, sorry for any inconvenience.
There must be something in the water because I received an email late last week announcing a new International Job Board (in Beta), recruit.net which covers Australia at australia.recruit.net, along with Japan, China, Hong Kong, Singapore and India. What is really interesting is this seems to be a vertical search play!
I really like the Browse Jobs feature which provides a Refine Your Search option that tries to pick Keywords from the selection of jobs, sort of a “drill down” function in job searching. This feature would be excellent if it worked correctly, it seems especially poor when browsing by Industry. I tried Australia > Human Resources > Director of Human Resources. Many of the jobs listed either reported to the Director of HR or required you to apply to this position.
Once again I think this might be a case of trying to be smart but actually ending up being a dumber for it. But if the bugs can be worked out the feature will rock!
Now if we can combine all of these great new features into a single board I think we are onto something.
Just caught that a new IT job board launched last week, gurus.com.au from the team at NowHiring. You can read about the launch at the NowHiring blog.
What I like about the tool is it has combined both jobs and resumes in an easy to use interface, while not the first to do this but probably the easiest to navigate. Also I can get an RSS feed of either jobs OR RESUMES, this I think is a first.
Another very nice feature is the LinkedIn button on the side of each job. This allow the job seeker to very quickly check their network for links into the hiring organisation. My only suggestion would be to have agency jobs check for links in not just the agency but also the hiring organisation. For example I saw an IP Telephony Product Manager role, it is with Cisco but being recruited by Hudson, when I clicked the LinkedIn button I was shown connections to Hudson not Cisco.
Following my post on Resume 2.0, Robert Scoble posts that the resume is dead! (Ok I have taken some poetic license here.) A recruiter from Yahoo has been courting him for a few months now, but continually wants a resume.
One of the emails is from a Yahoo recruiter who has been talking with me on and off for the past few months. He keeps bugging me to send him a resume. He told me why a resume is needed, cause it’ll help him find me a job that’s a good fit for both of us.
Hmmm. Robert replies to the latest email request saying he does not want a job that requires a resume, he gets a very concerning reply from the recruiter.
I just wrote him back and said “I just took a job that didn’t require a resume, sorry.” Oh, I can be such a snarky jerk sometimes. Sorry.
Update: it gets even funnier. He just asked “where are you going?” Um, not to Yahoo!
There are so many issues on the table here I am not going to try and address all of them! The Marketing Headhunter answers some of these by saying your blog is NOT your resume! Which is true but it is part of you and a part that hiring managers need to be aware of, even if the results are not so good for you. 2 months ago Robert provided us his thoughts on if blogging was good for his career. But just because it is good for him does not mean it will be good for you.
My take.
Yes you need a resume if you are applying for a job. However if the recruiter is contacting you and you are a public figure in your industry you should at least be able to have initial meetings and discussions without a resume. And they MUST of conducted some basic research using their favorite search engine, Robert suggests that a search engine is a recruiter’s best friend, completely agree!
Even if the person is not a public figure, if the industry or role is technical in nature a search is mandatory. The mistake by this recruiter indicates they are just that, a recruiter and not a head hunter or talent scout.
Do your recruiters use search engines? If not look at sacking them!
Ok this one came from the Careers Channel over at the new Netscape site.
With everything being 2.0 these days I guess it wasn’t long before Resume 2.0 came along. Vianney Lecroart a 30 year old French developer has created a resume based on Web 2.0 features and ideas. To quote Vianney:-
I’m a 30 years old French guy living in Jouy en Josas / France.
I’m looking for a job as a Team Leader, I enjoy working on challenging projects using Extreme Programming methodology.
What is interesting other than being a bit “gimmicky” this style of resume actually provides you a better idea of what Vianney has done and can do, it also shows the type of person he is. In my mind a great example of showing your skills to a prospective employer. I also love the use of colours and styles that simulate many of the popular Web 2.0 companies out there.
I know what a good recruiter would do, but what the average recruiter would do if he applied for a job using this resume?
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One of the big technology stories going around today (not the one about Bill Gates) is the AOL relaunch of Netscape.com, currently at beta.netscape.com, long the same lines as Digg. The site relies on member participation to vote on stories, this provides a pulse on what is hot at the moment. I was going to ignore this but a couple of things conspired against me and I had to step up.
Ben Barren wrote about the launch (Hey Ben I can now read and understand what you are writing, a good change), and I clicked through to Jason Calacanis’s comments and found myself in the site. So given I was there I had a look, below are my thoughts.
Overall an interesting site. Not sure if I will long term I guess it depends on the content,
Michael Specht 