StlRecruiting

StlRecruiting.com Advertising Possibilities

I've had a few requests, so I thought I'd go ahead and put up a rate sheet for advertising on StlRecruiting.com.  The site is a Google Page Rank 5, averaging about a 100 unique visitors a day, 80% of them from Search Engines.  In the last year, we've had almost 45,000 unique visitors come to the site.  Feedburner Subscriptions are at 134, which mostly represent recruiting bloggers from across the country.

First, thank you to all of my readers, and second - if you do want to advertise on this site, here are your options.

1) A banner ad in the top right or left ad space runs $75 a month, and we'll create it.  The ad will replace the GoogleAds on that side, so there will be no visual competition.  A maximum of three banner ads will at any given time.  We also build a landing page if you purchase three months.   
2) A Text Link from the site is $250 a year.  We're a PR5 Site with excellent targeted recruiting searches.
3) In–post text ads (also excellent for SEO) run 5 for $75.   
4) A three month sponsor campaign runs $500 and includes a text link, banner ad,  a landing page on your site and 13 in-post text ads wrapped around content and with the right anchor text.

If you are looking just for SEO,  I have three other sites that are PR4, and the in-post text ads can be run on all four platforms.  (SeattleRecruiting.com, Charlotte Recruiting.com, and KCRecruiting.com).

World's Greatest Accountant/Bookkeeper On Open Market

A good friend of mine has suddenly found himself on the open market due to surprise layoffs at his work.

He is a bookkeeper/accountant for small to medium sized businesses, with lots of experience in Great Plains, Excel, and of course, Microsoft Office.

His true experience lies in finding ways for you as a business to save money.  In previous positions, he was a management process consultant, working to show companies how to decrease expenses and improve productivity.  He holds a BA in International Business from KU.

He's honest, loyal, hardworking, and has deep roots in the St Louis community, including an impressive network of social contacts.  He's a family man, with a wife and a daughter, and I will personally vouch for him.

So if you're looking, contact me at jdurbin[at]durbinmedia.com and I'll send you his resume and contact info for you to contact on your own.

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Find information on Diversity recruiting at DiversityJobs.com.

Jobster And RecruitingBlogs.com Make Up

Jason Davis just wrote a post detailing a happy ending for the Recruiting.com/Recruitingblogs.com kerfuffle.

Jason Davis comes out and says that he understands Jobster's viewpoint.  While he says it was not his intention to compete, he understands that Jobster has a right both to hold him to his non-compete and in their view, they felt Jason was violating the terms of their agreement.

Jobster, on the other hand, has agreed not to try to shut down RecruitingBlogs.com, and seems to have given Jason Davis some leeway in pursuing things that interest him.

In return, Jason Davis is going to use the RecruitingBlogs.com platform to help promote Recruiting.com (which he was already doing, but it will be more visible now).

All in all, a happy ending for everyone.  Could it have been headed off prior to the public airing of the Cease and Desist letter?  Possibly.  I'm always a little leery of anything getting done with lawyers get involved - they are paid to win, not to play nice.  Check out a recent article from Techdirt to understand who should be in charge of such decisions.

But still - maybe we can all use this moment as a way of breaking tension, and starting over. 

The Recruitosphere, or whatever we want to call it, is small.  It's influence is small because so very few recruiters know about us.  As I've mentioned before, the knitting blogs are kicking our you-know-what in numbers.  Cyberspats between influentials in the recruiting blogosphere make no sense, because we're fighting over such small turf, and the results create negative backlash for all of us.

So I'm hanging up the gloves, and let me be the first to extend a hand to every person I squabbled with, and wish them the best.  I want Recruiting.com to succeed with John Sumser at the helm.  I want Jobster to succeed with Jason Goldberg at the helm (I am a stockholder, after all).  The more successes for each of us, the better for all of us.

A lot of people have taken a negative stance towards Jobster, and I think that's a mistake, and has been on occasions, unfair.  Despite their faults, Jobster has done more than any other online employment company to spread the idea of new and more effective ways to hire more people.  In the end, that is the purpose of all of this blogging. We want to hire more people and make more money.

So while I'm not a big fan of holding hands and singing Kumbaya, I would very much like to see recruiting bloggers start to work together, and my posts will reflect that - beginning with social media marketing strategies that companies can employ to tap the potential of the recruiting blogosphere.

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Find San Francisco jobs at SanFranJobs.com.

Local Staffing Firm Raises Compensation Stakes: Paying Overtime

Elite IT Services, an IT staffing firm, just raised the bar in the search for local recruiting talent. In an announcement on their blog, Elite IT says they are now paying full-time employees overtime for their work, above and beyond the required amounts by law.

They're also announcing therir medical package, life insurance, and the paid holiday schedule.

Why is this important?  Because it's information that job-seekers crave.  Trying to determine if a three paragraph job description is a good fit it a poor way to find a job.  The more information you have, the more likely you are to follow up on the job posting.

I'd like to see more of this from recruiters - especially those who have concrete information about what they can pay, and what the benefits are.  Candidates crave information and fear lack of detail.

But EliteIT has something else in their arsenal.  In addition to a blog, I noticed from their site stats that a large number of theri vistiors go directly to the Elite IT Services blog from the Indeed.com vertical search engine.  What that means is that without paying for job posting, EliteIT is tapping into a new candidate pool.  As knowledge of vertical search increases, they will have less need for large, generic search boards with high fees and a swarm of unqualified resumes.

What are you doing to make your staffing firm more competitive?

Don't Hire US Workers Says PA Law Firm

MNHeadhunter has an unbelievable video - as in - you won't believe it when you see it.

A Pennsylvania law firm, Cohen and Grigsby, gave a presentation in a marketing seminar where they taught US companies how to disqualify US workers from jobs so they could hire H1-B workers for cheaper rates.

You heard that right.  First - watch the video, which came from Slashdot.

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Next, take a good look at the number of H1-B workers in your local companies here in St Louis. 
Ask yourself if your company could be so low, so disloyal, that they woud voluntarily disqualify talented US workers to get a cheaper rate.

Cohen and Grigsby can't be the only ambulance-chasers pulling this on the American worker.  If you have any information on this going on in St Louis, send a confidential e-mail via that link on the right hand side.

And if you're an immigration lawyer, feel free to send me a note defending the practice - if you can.

Despicable.  I say we deport the Cohen and Grisby lawyers.

And one last thing.  If we're going to make it a practice to bring back indentured servitude, can we drop the high and mighty rhetoric about immigration being good for the country?  The people who are the worst treated in this situation are the H1-B workers themselves, who are paid less than they are worth on the open market, locked into their jobs without hope of moving for fear of losing their employment status, and also put in a position where they are intensely disliked by American workers because the companies are using them to squeeze down wages.

There is supposed to be a law that H1-B workers are paid the market rate, which means no cutting wages.  I wonder if the attorneys at Cohen and Grisby can be caught cheating on that requirement. 

I'm On The Recruiting Animal Show

I'll be on Animal's show this afternoon, arguing with him about non-competes, Watergate, and of course, Recruiting.com.

Wednesday, 12:00-1:00 EST.

Outsourcing Your Own Job

There is a lot of anger in the tech community about the outsourcing of jobs to India.  Developers and help-desk reps find themselves increasingly marginalized by profit-hungry corporations whose biggest cost is, roll drums please, labor costs.

But not everyone is taking it sitting down. This could be an urban legend, but Wired reports on a a tech who decided to reap the benefits of outsourcing by cutting out the middle man.

Did you hear the one about the programmer who outsourced his own job? I read about it on Slashdot.org, the "news for nerds" Web site. A pseudonymous poster wrote, "About a year ago I hired a developer in India to do my job. I pay him $12,000 to do the job I get paid $67,000 for. He's happy to have the work. I'm happy that I only have to work 90 minutes a day, talking code. My employer thinks I'm telecommuting. Now I'm considering getting a second job and doing the same thing."

Of course this isn't a mass movement.  If it's even happening, it will quickly be squelched, as advertising it will lead to the loss of the job by the clever consultant.

But still - God Bless American Ingenuity, eh?

Breaking News: Jobster Tries To Shut Down RecruitingBlogs.com

I guess it had to happen eventually, but Jobster, the owner of Recruiting.com, has decided that rather than compete in the online employment space, they're going to try to shut down Recruitingblogs.com, the new site started by Jason Davis.

Last Thursday, I received a letter from Lawyers representing Jobster letting me know I had to shut down RecruitingBlogs.com immediately or Jobster would take action. They say that RecruitingBlogs.com is causing damage to their business and that I am in violation of my non compete.

For those not aware, Jason Davis was the founder of Recruiting.com (I was one of his writers, added later in the process), and he sold the property to Jobster last Spring.  When it happened, everyone was full of excitement that Jobster, who in our minds was the first Web 2.0 employment company, was going to take Recruiting.com and build on its success.

Jason worked for Jobster for a year on contract, a year that saw Recruiting.com turn from a group recruting blog to a Digg-type site.  Users could submit stories, and readers would vote on them.  The site was given very little attention from Jobster, and improvements were rare, so when Jobster decided that it wasn't worth it to renew the contract on the same terms, they brought on John Sumser of Interbiznet.com to run the place.

Cue the evil music.

John is a well-known industry figure, but he spent the months before taking the reins bashing bloggers in general, but specifically calling out the people who kept the recruiting community vibrant.  In other words - he trashed his users - repeatedly.

John has been at it a couple of months now, and traffic has been plummeting.  It's been falling from its peak since December, but it's gotten worse since John came aboard.  An unofficial boycott, created by people like me who stopped submitting, commenting, or reading Recruiting.com when John came aboard, is the most likely reason.  We protested his arrogance and his insulting words

But that's not how Jobster and Jason Goldberg see it.  The failure of Recruiting.com is a failure of Jobster and their staff to use the website correctly.  So what is the answer?  Do they ask for help? Do they reach out to the people who were responsible to the success in the first place?  Do they apologize?

Nope.  They try to sue Jason Davis - sending a Cease and Desist Letter to him, when only the most twisted and torturous logic would show how Jason's not-for-profit community built on a Ning platform is damaging the Recruiting.com website.

Well, they just made a huge mistake.  Wait until Ning, a darling in the Web 2.0 space, finds out one of their communities is being sued because they compete with a company that has $50 million in venture capital.  It's the perfect moment for Ning.

Their social networking platform is so powerful, companies feel the need to sue to prevent Ning-sites from competing with large companies.

Expect much more on this.  If JL Kirk and Associates can't push bloggers around, what makes Jobster think they can? 

Disclosure:  I own Jobster stock, as a result of the purchase of Recruiting.com last spring.  I was listed as on contract with them for one month, last June.

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Find thousands of Bilingual jobs at LatPro.com.

There's A Small Problem With Infidelity

If you happen to live in Chesterfield, and drive up and down Baxter in the morning, you might have come across the interesting bit of graffiti in the last two days.

It seems someone, we don't know who, decided to spraypaint the back fence of one person's house out there on Baxter.  The text says "I'm embarrassed that I have a very small ....."  I've cropped the photo and cut the line, but the spraypainter did not.

Franki thinks its a jilted lover, striking back at a man who lives in this house.  I find it hard to disagree, and wonder if the guy is married, and got caught cheating, but the bigger question, since this has been up for two days.

Does the guy even know it's there?  This is his back fence.  It's conceivable that when he drives out of his neighborhood, he goes the opposite direction, which would mean this could stay up until someone tells him, or until the Chesterfield police notice and go to knock on his door.

And of course, the question is who you feel sympathy for - are there kids in the house, was the woman (and we're assuming it was a woman) justified.  Hard to say.  Good luck, whoever you are.  You're going to need it.

Writing A Book On UnEmployment

I have a really cool book that I'm writing on unemployment.  Okay, when I say writing, I mean I have the outline and four chapters and I know what the rest of the book is supposed to say, but I haven't taken the time to write the rest of it.

Sad, I know.  Especially when I'm clearly not suffering from writers' block - but the question is how I put the book out.  Online?  Self-published?  Send off a manuscript?

It's got a great title, a good story, relevant information, and my social network, is well, it's not small.  I'll try to post up small bits here and there on the different recruiting blogs - but if anyone has suggestions on the publishing - please let me know.