StlRecruiting

Free St Louis Job Postings

If you're one of my clients or you know me well enough to ask, I'll be offering free local job postings on your own blogs as part of a pilot program.  This extends your reach into a new medium, and will help you find savvy candidates who use search engines instead of the monster board 

It won't cost you anything, now or in the future, it takes very little time, and if you're in St Louis, there's no better way to increase your search engine ranking and put your jobs in front of candidates.

You'll get, a self-loading, turnkey site that takes no maintenance, a write-up on this site, exposure to a national recruiting blogging community , and if you want your logo on the site, we'll talk. 

Contact me at jim@recruiting.com or call me if you have my cell.

How to Spend your Week

No matter who you are or what you do:

While you're organizing your desk for the new year, look out for business cards.  Call every person you don't remember and thank them for their business card - making sure you end the conversation with a clear understanding of what they do and how you could help them.  Call them this week - next week we will al be too busy. 

This version of cold-calling will warm you up for the big work - call every person on every business card you own and ask them what you can do for them in the coming year. That's it.  Whatever you do, if you actually follow through with this - you will have your most successful year, ever.

Sales - Outside and In

Patrick Graves, one of the managers in the StlMgmt Networking Group, is looking for some good salespeople.   Free job postings from your friendly neighborhood recruiter are just a few things you get from knowing me.

From Patrick:

I am in planning mode for my recruiting efforts for 2006, and I wanted to touch base with you to see if you might know of any "A-Player" salespeople who might be good candidates for the positions I plan to hire for. They are:

Inside Sales: Candidate could be somewhat inexperienced (recent college grad to 5 years of experience), but must be willing to make lots of contacts with accounting, finance and human resources executives. I am looking to bring on two (2) of these folks. First year expected earnings are 40-60k.

Outside Sales: Candidate would need to have at least 3 years of outside sales experience, selling intangible, conceptual services to accounting, finance or human resources executives. Experience selling back office or outsourcing services would be ideal. This role requires more of a hunter than farmer, and someone who is motivated to increase his or her income to a realistic six-figure income within 18 months. First year expected earnings are 70-80k.

Interested people should contact him at pgraves@dataservsolution.com

Don't send a boring resume - you're a salesperson - figure out a way to call him in you want the job.  I can think of two ways, myself.

Design as the New Technology

There's an old story that runs in engineering circles about a group of engineers who were laid off from a major manufacturer.  To protest their condition, they formed picket lines in public with signs that read "Will build a bridge for food."  The context ran that engineering was a highly specialized skill requiring years of training, but the lack of projects forced these people on the streets - because there was nothing left to build.

Technology had caught up with a specialized skill - leaving those who built the discipline behind to start new careers.  In the real world - this happened with the aerospace layoffs and mergers of the early 90's that caught McDonnell Douglas engineers in the midst of a transformational economy. 

Those layoffs, in a economy with 10% unemployment, were a devestating blow to the field of aeronautical engineering.  Men who banked their livelihoods on having a job for the rest of their lives found themselves obsolete - forced to change or left to fail with nothing when the company (now Boeing) did not hire them back.

Can this happen to Information Technology?  It already is happening, and you're reading the results.  This blog, written on a Movable Type Platform, allows me to mimic the development skills that programmers used in the mid-90's to create personal websites.

This site, with my little skill, can now be built without using any of the old computer languages, but more important, none of the new.  I build in a WYSIWYG editor - and this is a feature, not a bug of the new economy.  The design of the site is still poor, but that's my failing as a designer.  The tools are still here. And if I take the time - I can change this site without learning the code.  The technology allows me to skip learning the highly specialized skills of a developer.

Jim McGee at tthe Enterprise Systems site has a good article on Design as the important skill in a 21st century economy.  (I pulled this from his column at Corante, Future Tense.

My high-school friend went on to become a successful chemical engineer. He's definitely a smart guy. His mantra was “just give me the equation.” Give him the formula and he’d return with the right answer. Ted was successful in a school setting and he’s been successful as an engineer. While he’d probably still be successful in school, I don’t believe he’d do so well in the economic world we live in now. While execution was the signature skill of the 20th century, success in the 21st century will depend on our design skill: our ability to invent and craft new solutions to our problems.

My wife is a designer.  From her I've learned quite a bit about how designers approach solutions, but also how the failure of developers and programmers to address design has led to their planned obsolescence in the history of the web.

I have three words for you. Object Oriented Design.  What's the point of OOD if it is not to simplify the coding process?  Software developers, in creating these wonderful tools that allow untrained amateurs like myself to post to the web, have put themselves in a position where fewer and fewer developers are needed.

This trend is not limited to software  Desktop technicians and Help Desk employees are finding their salaries crunched as the need for truly experienced personnel is minimal at best.  Why hire someone for $60,000 when a kid out of school can do the job as part of their normal work for $30,000?  Experiences with computers at an early age means kids are Power users when their parents are sill fumbling to send out an e-mail list.  If the kids know more than the Help Desk techs, how can you justify raises, salaries and promotions inside a corporation?

You can't, which is why infrastructure projects are increasingly outsourced to specialty companies who only do infrastructure, while experiend and expensive network techs are finding their only hope of making the good money is starting their own business to server as a outsourced version of IT for smaller companies.

This topic grew beyond my ability to address in a single column, but the goal of the column is to highlight the coming obsolescence of many of the fields in technology we take for granted.

The future of large corporate IT departments will be for business analysts, project managers, and designers - souped up versions, to be sure, but soft skills emphasized over hard skills with the exception of a few very talented technical wizards.  Your comments are welcome, but there is far more to this now that I got it started.

Strange Fourth Quarter

It's hard to be comprehensive when I have not spoken to everyone - but from my sales and client calls, this fourth quarter - this December in particular - has been different than most.

Managers often have more time in the month of December - the biggest problem they have is people using their vacation at the end of the year - and so employees pop in and out for the entire month.

This December - there seem to be a large number of projects coming due - must haves that require the attention of the entire staff - but without additional resources.  It's not the money - it's the lack of people to do the job, combined with the problem of training someone up in a few weeks to finish a mission-critical project.

Strange.  It's like everyone was waiting for next year - and then got notice that next year is coming a few weeks earlier this year.

Marketing to the Plain Girl: A Blog Marketing Campaign

(this was a comment I made over at Stephen's Baker's post on Businessweek's Blogspotting - I've been thinking about it - and even pitched it to some people as the best way to run a blog marketing campaign. )

Marketing to the Plain Girl:  A Blog Marketing Campaign

Marketers would be better off focusing on well written blogs that address their niche markets - some of the most influential blogs have neither the links nor the traffic to prove it - but they would do a better job driving stories than an A-lister. 

The reasoning behind this is the nature of the network.  Spreading your ads among smaller bloggers has two major advantages over a large buy with a known traffic source.

1) The smaller bloggers will love the attention.  This is, for lack of a better word, a strategy of talking to the plain girl to get the pretty one to like you.  Small blogs - of 50-1000 uniques don't ask for much - but are still an important part of the blogosphere.  Buy 1000 ads with small bloggers for $20 a piece, and the possibilities of getting your ad campaign picked up by A-listers is almost at 100%.  A well-run campaign benefits the blogosphere as a whole - and that is the story the bigger blogs will then write to.   

2) Purchasing on small blogs gives you wide appeal.  Buying 1000 ads, or placing logos on 1000 sites gives you 1000 people talking about your message. Buying ad space on one large blog is essentially no different than buying ad space on a website.  You're not leveraging the power of the blog network to tell your story.

This does not mean that A-listers shouldn't have ads - there are uses for them - but since most of the ads are for t-shirts and mortgages - I don't see the ad money flowing in the way it was projected to from large media buys.

There's more to it, of course - but I think the major problem is most advertising companies think A-list bloggers have some magic power of influence, when the truth is the A-list bloggers are filtering the good ideas from the long tail of the blogosphere and benefitting from the way that a scale-free network functions.

Voting at Recruiting.com

The voting for the 2005 Recruiting.com Blog Awards should be up and running - I'm onthe panel for best overall blog, and want everyone to know that I can be bought to throw the contest one way or another.

Posts are light because I'm working on some big ones, fighting a three week cold, and oh yeah - I;'m a Honeymooner!

In all seriousness, I did shoot up to Toronto to meet the Recruiting.com bloggers last week.  Franki and I  have never been to Toronto, so we thought it might be nice to visti someplace new and meet Jason Davis, Michael Kelemen, and Anthony Meany.  Good guys all - very knowledgeable, and Toronto is a fantastic city from what I could see of it.

Although - I did show my old fogeyness, as I called security on a group of accountants who were throwing a party next door when they woke me up at 12:00.  That's right - I called hotel security on people having a party in a hotel on a Saturday.  Turnabout's fair play, I say.

Good (read as long) posts coming on the future of the internal recruiter and the third party corporate recruiter - as well as the use of blogs by job-seekers.   In the meantime, go vote!

Content Management Tool Request

One of my clients is curious about CMS tools. 

There are a number of content management systems out on the market.. These systems are specifically designed for publications departments for use in managing project work flow, controlling content, archiving, version control, and allows delivery in multiple formats such as HTML, XML, print, PDF, etc. It also allows better and more consistent delivery and return to and from translation venders.

He had questions about VASONT. Anyone ever use Vasont?  How does it compare to Macromedia's Contribute?  Please send me a note if you have used either of them.

There are also five questions the manager wanted to ask.  Please feel free to comment on them below.

STl Mgmt Networking Group: Self-Googling

Notes on the December 9th STl Mgmt Networking group presentation on Managing Internet Presence:

earches are quickly coming to be as common as e-mail.

Employee blogs - they are out there - your employees writing about their daily lives - and sometimes letting their guard down and talking about you, or your projects, or your vendors. 

From identity theft, to corporate transparency, to your career and reputation - the Branding of You as it is called - you need to manage your online presence.

What you are looking for:
Google searches - softball rosters, church programs, dating services - all online.  Now you have to think about interviews, layoffs, promotions, lawsuits, court records - I can even look up your mortgage information online - at least in St Louis.  It's here - whether you like it or not, whethery you want to be seen or not - so the question is how to manage it.

Sourcers- Google and Microsoft - the next wave of recruiting in pipline sourcing.  Sourcers are paid $10-$100 or more for your names with updated contact information. It's an old industry - and most of you wuld be surprised to find you are on ABI leads as managers with the approximate revenue of your departments - all for $.07 a lead.

I've been nominated

Really it's just an honor to be nominated.  It doesn't quite seem right for me to be in the contest - seeing as I'm actually a writer for Recruiting.com

I do appreciate the thought on who sent in the e-mail. 

These are the 2005 Recruiting.com Blog Awards 
They are the recruiters, HR managers, executives, and vendors trying their best to increase your chances of finding the right employment.  Browse their sites and find your next recruiter blogger for advice, tips, tricks and, it seems, contests!

Also sign up for the Recruiting.com newsletter, edited by the sma...well, by me.