A winner in the Game Your Office contest was chosen and will be announced shortly. We’re totally jealous.
Aug
19
Lotame, an Elkridge, MD based startup whose name is shortened version of “LOcal TArgeted MEdia”, just received a $13 million series B cash infusion for its “Crowd Control” platform. We at Jobmatchbox are excited for Lotame, a business partner, which we’ve watched have a strong 2008 as they moved into a larger office this Summer and have been building their teams all year.
To learn more about how the Lotame products leverage social media intelligence to better serve and monetize ads for users, check out their website.
Also, you can check out their current job openings on Jobmatchbox.
Aug
15
The third ever Social Matchbox was a success. We had about a dozen new companies including recent graduates of the Launchbox Digital incubator program here in DC as well as from the greater Mid Atlantic region. We broke the format up into two segments - companies hiring and companies doing demos.
Here are our photos from Social Matchbox (Shashi’s photos here). Check back for updates that will include more photos and video of the presentations.
Update:
Zach Goldfarb of The Washington Post attended yesterday’s Social Matchbox. Check out what Zach had to say.
Here is a list of the companies who presented:
*Clearspring
AddyMate
100 Dimensions
emPivot
Contribune
folioFN
Freewebs
Hireworx
Hotpads
iBelong
Innovative Query
MixedInk
OurCoupleSpace
Positive Energy
Razoo
ScriptAct
ShareMeme
Ubernote
Viscape
Aug
9
While watching the opening ceremonies in Beijing’s Olympics last night, the bright lights going off were not just the ones on the performer’s suits. The announcers spent a great deal of time talking about the US athletes who had immigrated from other countries. They also talked about how many of the countries participating in the Olympics have never won medals at all. I could not help but make the connection between recruitment of star athletes and success in Olympic team success. Building your team isn’t any different.
When recruiting athletes, an Olympic team is not just going out a checking a database. They are proactively scouring the countryside and engaging in team marketing. The good news is that team marketing and talent scouting are not concepts exclusive to sports. Your organization can do much the same thing. Before you decide that this is something that you want to do it is important to realize that there will be both opportunity costs and budgetary decisions to be made.
The first opportunity cost comes in the form of time. You and your team will have to spend time outside of the office. And by team I don’t mean that you are just going to be sending your recruiter or admin out. If you want to bring them along with you then great, but your team – you, your star players, and maybe even a few of your second string players need to coordinate your efforts when it comes to talent scouting and marketing your organization. Oh, one more thing – your marketing team may have some good advice but they are usually not going to be able to accomplish what you can so don’t event think about delegating this to them either (unless your team is marketing and that’s a different story).
Once you have a team you can get started. The good news is that by getting out of the office with your team members you won’t lose anything except for time. The bad news is that you will lose time. By contrast, if your organization hires bad people or doesn’t hire the people that you need then you will all lose even more time. Just remember that your actions today determine your success or failure tomorrow. Do you really want to hire a staffing agency that will warp your message and focus 100% of their attention on the low hanging fruit? The success of our Olympic team and of college and pro sports teams isn’t an accident, neither should your organization’s success so get over the initial time loss.
The hardest part of talent scouting is usually in deciding where to look. Most people’s initial efforts center around online user groups and on places like Linkedin. While these are good for filling in holes, they are not good for figuring out where to start. The best place to do that is with a great calendar. Here in Washington, DC we have a great resource in the form Ross Karchner’s DC Tech Events. In New York there are similar lists available. I haven’t found a good one in the bay area yet so if you know of one please send a note to email@jobmatchbox.com. When you are choosing which events to go to you need to remember that you may have to go a couple of times before you know if an event is worth attending for talent scouting purposes. Not everyone goes to every event.
Now remember that talent scouting does not mean that you go to an event with the notion of coming home with a hire. The process of talent scouting in person isn’t something that happens overnight. You have to commit yourself to it and to getting to know members of the community. You also have to realize that some of the best people are going to come from referrals made by others who you might not be potential candidates (ever). And believe me, if you go into a group and don’t get into the subject matter that the attendees are talking about then you are in for a different experience. You will be bored, uninspired, and so will your conversations. People will not want to talk to you. With that said, you need to invest some time as an individual in becoming a scholar on the subject mater, even if this means that you are an amateur scholar.
One personal example that I can share is with the Ruby on Rails community here in Washington, DC. I read two books on Ruby on Rails programming and development practices and read countless blogs before I ever attended a Ruby on Rails user group. That was about three years ago. Today when I walk into meetings I am still reading up on Ruby on Rails and the community. It can mean the difference of whether or not you can have a conversation or just recruit people.
So far I’ve talked primarily about talent scouting. Let’s change the subject for a moment. If hiring team members with Olympian abilities was as simple as herding people then resume databases and Linkedin would get the job done. The hardest part isn’t figuring out who to talk to, it is winning them over. Now I’m not talking about how to win people over in some sort of generic play by play method or process. There are probably a few things to be said about having some sort of process (I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly), but what is important here is having conversations with the people who you want to win over and listening to what is important to them. If you listen long enough you will start to learn that what people think is important usually is not.
What people want is often reduced to money, commute and growth. For the sake of brevity I’m leaving out a few other big box categories. If you approach people with this mindset you may win over the people who are looking for jobs because they just got fired by their third boss in a row or who are ready to jump ship for the third time in three years. You will not win over your next star team player that way (not on that basis alone). So the message here is to listen to what people want and decide if your company can offer that to them or not. If it can then don’t wait until they have jumped into your ship to implement these measures – do it now. Great minds think alike and your own team members will probably appreciate the same things that your future team members will.
Good luck in your efforts to recruit the best and brightest. If you would like help you may want to talk to someone who can help your company with attractive hiring practices.
Aug
7
7 days left before Social Matchbox 3 and only two socializer tickets left. If you want one then you need to act fast. We may issue a few extra tickets next week, send a note to email@socialmatchbox.com if you don’t get one of the last two.
There are still tickets available for Job Seekers, Hiring Team, and people seeking co-founders.
Thanks to Jimmy over at East Coast Blogging for the really nice review of the event!
Aug
5
Some people will never get it, and those people are usually the same ones who try to sell their services by spamming the job listings of recruiters. There is absolutely no value proposition to a corporate recruiter or HR professional or hiring team member to be found in a spam message that follows a job posting intended only for qualified job seekers. In fact, job seekers do a really good job of spamming job postings so when a staffing agency follows up with spam they pretty much guarantee two things: 1) that their message and profile (in this case their Facebook profile) will be flagged as spam, and 2) that they will be blacklisted by the hiring team (HR, Recruiter, hiring manager, etc.). If you are sending messages and are not sure what these sorts of spammy communications look like then feast on this one:
“Good Afternoon-
Our company is ”<generic name> Technical Staffing” and we are located in downtown Bethesda Maryland. We are a small technical staffing firm with over 30 years IT experience in house for your technical staffing needs. Since we are a smaller firm we provide an extra emphasis on service and treat each client like they are our only one. We are simple and streamlined to work with and have staffed people in long term contracts with in hours. We have a pool of candidates ready to staff, and have constant access to fresh candidates that do not post their resumes on job hub sites.
Our rates and contract length are as follows:
• $75-85/hr depending on the candidate and position, if this candidate does not work to your specifications we will replace them with no fee.
• If you decide to keep this candidate after a 2-6/month temp contract, then we would let this person assimilate into your company for no fee.
• If you are looking for a perm placement right away, we ask for a 20% placement fee (of the annual salary) that can be paid in full up front or a payment plan can be put in place for your convenience.
If you have any other questions, comments, or want to see our candidates please check out our website at www.hire-power.net or you can give me a call directly at 301.***.****.
Sincerely,”
If you need help selling your services then perhaps you should a) hire a sales rep who has a track record or b) get another job.
Aug
4
If you are an AOL’er and happen to be nervous about Time Warner’s plans or just feel like its time to move on to something more, ahem, interesting…our team here at Jobmatchbox would be happy to talk to you about what your options are in the DC and Baltimore Metro areas. We’ve got friends who would love to hire an ex AOL’er or an ex Advertising.com’er with talent in design, marketing, product, programming and other areas. To get in touch just drop us a line using email@jobmatchbox.com or on Twitter where we are @Jobmatchbox . In either case, we hope that things go well. If you care to go it on your own then don’t forget to check out our list of jobs with area startups and companies who are always looking for the best and brightest creative, tech and web professionals.
Jul
30
A couple of months ago, I asked my LinkedIn network if they take take job descriptions seriously. I also asked them to be honest. Outside of the occasional comical answers I got more negative feedback (directed at HR departments and recruiters) than expected. If you want to see what everyone had to say click here. One thing that I’ve found that most job seekers have in common with each other is that they don’t feel like job descriptions are a very good indicator of whether or not a company should consider them.
In fact, job descriptions are considered by be laundry lists. One person said that they were concerned that HR departments might actually take job descriptions seriously. Since my departure from agency staffing and internal recruiting I have had a chance to put a lot of ideas to the test. I’ve been experimenting (mostly on my own jobs) with some really interesting and potentially innovative (I don’t want to toot my own horn) approaches to job descriptions. If you are an HR person close your browser now, this isn’t for you!
What I’ve found is that some of the core elements of a job description actually cause people the most trouble. For example, when a skill is presented as a requirement people tend to think of the requirement as a challenge that they a) can overcome or b) might be able to overcome or c) can’t get past. An example of a challenge that someone might not be able to overcome could be “performing calculus and advanced physics as part of an average day”. This is an example of what I would consider to be a limiting parameter. Most authors of job descriptions (and I’m talking about the ones who didn’t copy and paste one written by someone else) think about requirements as limiting parameters. Job seekers don’t.
So I what I have found to be useful is an active effort to deconstruct the traditional notion of job description requirements. This begins with eliminating the requirments section.
Yes, I just said ELIMINATE the job requirements section.
If you are still reading then you must not think I’m crazy and you are probably much more like the target audience that I’m looking for anyway. Job descriptions work much the same way. Remember that I warned HR people to close their browser a moment ago because this wasn’t for them. You may recall that I talked about video resumes and video job ads quite a bit over the last few years. In talking about these tools I didn’t suggest that they would replace traditional resumes and job descriptions, but that they would help like minded employers and job seekers to connect. There is more than one way to skin a cat. Video isn’t an easy endeavour for most companies or people and isn’t event necessarily the best way to go about getting your intended audience’s attention. So I’m going to talk about a few ways to get to the people who you want to be talking to in the first place.
You can start by throwing out the job description. After you’ve done this you should write down as many things as you and your team can think of that describe someone who would be a great member of your team. NO SKILLS, just attributes. For example, if you are looking for someone who is going to build a web 2.0 application you should probably write down “uses Facebook”. I can’t imagine hiring a web 2.0 programmer who isn’t on Facebook. Next you might want to write down “likes computer games”. Web 2.0 people tend to be on the edge of their seats for new games (at least in my experience). Sure, there are people who are not, but that isn’t the point - a lot of these types play computer games. Next you might want to write down “owns iPhone or N95 or Treo or Geek Devices” Etc.
Once you’ve figured out what the attributes of a person are, now it is time to write down the attributes that your office offers that someone looking to build web 2.0 applications might be interested in. An example might be “flexible hours for programmers who work late” or “super amazing starbucks machine in office” or “iPhone hackers present” or “computer games happen HERE”.
After you’ve figured out the attributes that represent incentives for both parties to talk you’ve got your work cut out for you. Now all you have to do is decide what you can’t live without. For example, “must be smart and have built own web pages for fun on the side (maybe even for others to make extra cash)”. For a non-entry level position you might even throw in a line of code that has to be translated into the requirement. For example, if a person has to know PHP you might want to say something like “must know how to install LAMP without a script”.
Now here comes the part that you are not going to like.
Once you have all of this information in one place you might not have a page long job description. You may not even have more than a paragraph or two. Do not be afraid. You should take what you’ve got and get it up in places where you know that your target audience will be found. For example, Facebook…or Jobmatchbox.
Jul
28
When you spend too much time in the social media community you get the sense of what Matt is talking about when he writes that Brandstreaming and how it is different than engagement (i.e. interaction). He makes a good point about how community engagement isn’t the same thing as achieving spame (not a typo, though it has been before). I’ve decided that “spame” is the state of SEO nirvana achieved by consistently tossing out content with no meaning, no originality or just plain poor taste. The alternative, as Matt suggests, is to interact with the community. In interacting with the community you develop your niche or at least get a sense for what represents value to your audience. I can’t say that I’m an expert at this, but I’ve definitely been exposed to the good, the bad and the ugly.
Jul
28
The team here at Jobmatchbox wants your office to win Rock Band or a Nintendo Wii.
To enter, submit the following by email to email@jobmatchbox.com by August 13, 2008:
Employer Name
Employer Contact Name
Employer Daytime Phone Number (not your cell)
Employer Physical Address
1-2 Paragraphs That Summarize Your Company
Group Photo of Your Team
Winners will be drawn at the August 2008 Social Matchbox Event.
RULES:
Entrant companies must be within a 35 mile radius of Washington, DC (20036); void where prohibited.
Only one prize will be awarded per company; odds of winning based on entries.
Only companies from 2 to 150 employees are eligible to participate.
No purchase necessary to enter; must be over 18 to participate.
Prizes are not redeemable for cash and must be accepted as-is.
Entry grants usage of names, likeness, photographs, or other submitted information (this may include here).
Jobmatchbox.com waives responsibility for any injury or damage to persons or property as a result of acceptance of prize offered.
Deadline: all entries must be submitted to email@jobmatchbox.com by August 13, 2008.
