StlRecruiting

iPhone,Therefore I Am

The keypad makes this slow, and I fear the grammar, but the photos and the ease of use is unreal. I'm also only paying $25/month more, and the data plan on Sprint would have cost as much.

Things To Do In My Absence

I'm heading to NAPS this week in San Antonio to participate in a panel for Margaret Graziano of KeenHire.  Margaret is putting on an executive briefing Thursday morning from 7-8:30 that includes breakfast and an excellent panel of speakers (including Shally). Next week, I'm heading with Franki to the BlogWorldExpo to meet with other bloggers and build up our list of contacts for future programs, so blogging will be light.  If you want to guest post here and get the link, feel free to write me. In the meantime, check out these business and recruiting blogs from friends and clients.

http://keenhire.typepad.com
http://LaborRelations101.com
http://College.Rehabcare.com
http://CorporateCitizen07.com
http://Blog.FeeFiFoto.com
http://MyStarbucks.Wordpress.com
http://www.cogno.com/blog
http://www.situationalmarketing.com
http://flektor-blog.com

or alternately, watch a little Flight of the Conchords. I'll be back November 13th. 

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Visit DiversityJobs.com for articles, news, and advice on Diversity recruiting.

 

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Dell Brings Back Windows XP

I had to replace my laptop a couple of months ago, and was frustrated with the options available at Best Buy.  I ended up purchasing a used Dell Latitude because I didn't want to deal with the complications of Vista, and knew that I needed at least a gig of RAM, really 2 gigs, to make a PC work with Vista.

But I didn't need Vista - I needed something for internet research and blogging.

So I bought a used Dell Latitude, and put my old Windows XP license on it.

Now it seems Dell is pulling the same trick, a huge statement about the trustworthiness of Vista, and the complications of selling cheap computers that have a mandatory upgrade to work.

Vista comes preloaded on computers with 512 Mb of RAM, which means they won't work - which is just about the stupidest thing you can do if you're selling computers with 512 Mb of RAM.

Well, Dell agrees with me.

A Video Portfolio

An example of how to use video to get your next job.  In this case, it's Edvard Voth, a video game designer, using the Flektor video editing software to build his vanity portfolio. In this case, Edvard happens to work for Flektor, but if you are in a creative field looking for employment - maybe you should be building your own Flek?

Compare this to a resume. 

Laptop Reviews: The Neverending Saga

My trusty Vaio died last week.  I took it in to Dimension Computer because the hard drive was making whirring noises, and the power cord was not working so great.  The hard drive crashed when the were working on it (luckily they pulled the data), and the cost of fixing the power plug, the hard drive, and upgrading to what I wanted was almost a new laptop, so I decided to purchase a new one.

Off I went to the internet to look for new deals.  All I use the PC for is searching and the use of the Broadlook Eclipse software, so all I really needed was a cheap laptop with wireless capability.  I went with the Compaq440, a cheap model with a price tag of $499, pre-loaded with Windows Vista.

But there was a problem.

I Heard It On Tech Dirt, It Must Be True

Monster isn't the Monster we thought they were.

The flood of useless resumes that companies receive often means that posting a job to a major site is more trouble than it's worth. The industry is now starting to iron out its kinks, but in a way that's not to the benefit of the major sites, like Careerbuilder and Monster.com. While their traffic sags, business is booming at niche sites (via alarm:clock), like GovernmentJobs.com, which only lists public sector jobs.

The comments are instructive, but nothing new to recruiters.  I actually spoke to a Monster rep when I was at ERExpo.  Eric Winegardner, I think?  He told me that Monster had been into Web 2.0 for 5 years.  I let that sit for a moment, and then asked him to clarify.

What he meant was that Monster had some kind of user-generated content at sites like Military.com and some other niche sites.

It had been my hope to give him a chance to flesh that out - anyone saying they had been involved in Web 2.0 for five years is a bit like saying they've been involved in .Net development for 10 years.

Eric, if you happen to read this - that interview slot is still open.  I would love to hear the reply from Monster, and some further elaboration on what exactly Web 2.0 means to Monster.   

Where Did That Site Go: Domain Registration

Updated:  **  Look Below for Answers

One of the fun parts of being a blog consultant is playing with domain registrars to make your site show up.  I've set up a lot of blogs, both for clients and friends, and every time is different, based on the blogging platform and the domain registar.

Most of the time you can make it work.  Sometimes you can't.  So, as of right now, http://stlrecruiting.com doesn't work.  http://www.stlrecruiting.com works, but without the www, you're in trouble.

Normally, you can set the domain to forward, or create an html redirect page, but I'm using Pairnic.com as my host (on suggestion of Typepad), and if I use Custom DNS, which is required to set up subdomains, I'm, well, out of luck.

Humble Pie and Recruitment Video

One of the hazards of running a cutting-edge interactive marketing firm is you are expected to know everything, even when everything is changing faster than you can catch up with it.

While in Miami for a wedding, I had the opportunity to learn from a fellow blogger who made a comment about putting video into Wordpress.  This is embarassing, but I have to say that I didn't think you could put video into a Typepad account, because all of my earlier efforts had failed.

Adding a YouTube video to your site is as easy as adding a little dash of code, and I do it easily on Blogger.  For Typepad, it was not working so well, and because I never took the time to look it up, I never realized how easy it was.

You just disable the WYSIWYG editor.  That's the little tab to the right of Compose Post.   Now, that may not seem like a big deal, but too concerned clients, a guy who has been blogging for five years ought to know everything, right?  He couldn't even put video into his blog!

As I said in the title - I'm eating humble pie - but it's a valuable lesson - learning how to learn and being curious about what needs to be done is the most important part of blogging.  The word expert does not mean all-knowing - and oftentimes five years of experience is not as effective as one year.

So with that - on the post below - is my first recruitment video post - courtesy of Google Recruiting and YouTube.

What's the Upshot?

Franki and I were married in Santorini, Greece, in the middle of a two week European cruise.  To commemorate the trip, we took over 6,000 photos with our digital camera, many of which were poor quality (I'm not much of a photographer), but there are some great pictures of some very famous places (she is very good).

But taking a good digital picture requires more than the initial shot, so photo-editing when you return home is a big deal. Ask any real photographer what their secret is, and the editing of the photo back in the studio is a big part of their final product.

There's a product we learned about that now brings photo-editing to the masses.  It's built by a company called Bellamax, and the product is called Upshot.  It's currently available only for the PC, and it's in a beta version, but as a private software, it automatically corrects light, color, contrast, red-eye and a host of other minor corrections that the average photo user (like me) can use to improve the overall quality of the pictures they take.

If you're curious - check out their beta version.

Steven Rothberg is famous and on NBC

Steven Rothberg, he of CollegeRecruiter.com fame, just appeared on the NBC news.  I imagine this is just the spark NBC needs to regain their ratings dominance.

Take a look at this video clip of Steven Rothberg talking about blogs as tattoos.

There's much more to it, but the essential story is a good one - don't say anything on a blog you wouldn't want your grandmother to read, or see.

Especially if you're in college.