Standout Jobs

When they say, “a startup is like a family”, they’re not kidding. Today we’re pleased to announce that Gary Haran has joined the Standout Jobs team…err…family. We’ve hired from the “Haran clan” before — Daniel Haran joined a few months ago.

Gary is a combined JavaScript Ninja and Ruby Guru, making him a Nuru or Ginja, I’m not sure. I’ll let him decide. He’s an active blogger at http://www.garyharan.com.

Gary has considerable startup experience so he knows what he’s getting himself into. He’s also responsible for one of the most successful posts I’ve ever seen on digg, which is a game he coded in less than 200 lines of JavaScript.

We met Gary awhile ago at the first or second DemoCamp (there are so many events these days, who can remember…and that’s a good thing!) He fits in perfectly with our burgeoning culture, and jumps on board at a time when things are accelerating insanely.

Welcome aboard, Gary.

Almost every company has a “job section” on their website. We often call this a “recruiting site” or “career site”.

Almost every company’s recruiting site sucks.

At KnowHR they’ve listed their Top 10 Best Recruiting Websites. There are some great ones there. And you see some obvious patterns when you start to look at them:

• More content. All of these career sites are wrapping their job listings in a ton of interesting content.
• More personality. The companies’ brands are heavily represented from their career sites. Even if you’re not familiar with the companies, you can get a very good sense of what they’re all about.
• More emphasis on the people. It’s all about the people. Job seekers want to know who they’ll be working with (not just who they’ll be working for), and they want to get a feel for the culture and team.
• More reaching out. Most of these recruiting sites are focused on the right person: the job seeker. They’re reaching out to the job seeker with taglines like, “See yourself here.” It’s easy to title your job site something like “Jobs” or “Work at Company X” but it’s much harder to build a branded feel and campaign around reaching out to job seekers and making them feel like they want to apply.

KnowHR’s list includes sites like Pixar, Google, Target, Whole Foods Market and others.

The only disappointing thing about the list is that every company on it is big. There are examples of smaller companies producing great career sites - like Etsy and Meebo - but they’re few and far between. And harder for people to find when compiling lists of this sort. Still, KnowHR’s list is a good place to start for anyone thinking seriously about how to brand themselves more favorably to prospective candidates and how to promote one’s culture to the outside world.

Two quick tidbits for you today that might help you find the best cities and places to work:

1. Forbes released its annual list of Best Cities for Jobs (in the US) and it would seem you should look West and South for the best job opportunities. The top city was Salt Lake City, followed by: Raleigh, N.C., Phoenix, Jacksonville, Fla. and Orlando, Fla. To compile their results, Forbes uses five data points. They were unemployment rate, job growth, income growth, median household income and cost of living for 2006 because only partial data is so far available for 2007.
2. For some specific cool places to work check out The 6 Coolest Offices in the World. The list has some great pictures. Unlike the Forbes list, you’ll find some international locations here including McLaren Technology Centre, Canary Wharf and Red Bull in London. They write about Red Bull’s offices, “Featuring slides and table tennis you could be forgiven for thinking you were in a nursery rather than a London office. The Soho based London HQ of Red Bull wins in the coolness stakes though.” Slides? Crazy.

Here are some worthwhile items that you should check out if you’re running an organization (startup or otherwise) or looking to make the leap to a new job.

1. Study Finds Only 1 in 5 Global Workers “Engaged” - This is a sad but not surprising statistic. What’s interesting about the study is that it found “senior leadership isn’t doing enough to increase that engagement.” According to the study, it’s the efforts of senior management (versus direct bosses) to show an interest in all employees that helps those employees stay engaged.

   The study identified 3 areas that senior leaders need to work on to improve engagement (quoted from the story):

   1. Senior leaders must demonstrate inspiration, vision and commitment to their organizations and individual staffers.
   2. High-level managers need to provide a better vision of why employees should want their organizations to succeed–in other words, “what’s in it for them.”
   3. Staffers want to work for organizations that are seen as leaders in their industries, and senior managers must work to differentiate their firms from others in order to draw motivated and engaged workers.
2. Die, resume! Die! Die! Die! - Bryan Person works at Monster, but he’s sick and tired of bland, old-school resumes for creative professionals. As he points out, “The traditional resume just does a woefully inadequate job of telling your career story and showcasing your brilliant work to a recruiter.”

   Bryan wants creative professionals to look at creating a social media resume, which would include items such as: a purpose-build del.icio.us portfolio page, a pointer to your LinkedIn profile, a headshot, links to Flickr photos, Twitter messages and Facebook profile, blog links, a pointer to your shared items on Google reader, etc.

   Bryan’s talking about massively exposing yourself to potential employers. Smart companies will already be using Facebook and other tools to research candidates, so does it make sense to pull it all together in one neat package?

In fact, you most probably are asking illegal interview questions. Most of us are aware that asking questions about people’s age, race, sexual orientation, etc. are not appropriate. As Alex Rudloff points out:

“The general rule of thumb is that anything involving gender, age, religion, disabilities, marital status, sexual preference, ethnicity, and parental status are things to be avoided (especially here in the United States).”

He provides a couple of specific examples that I find interesting:

• “Are you married?”
• “What did your parents do for a living?”
• “Do you have children?”

I understand why these questions can be considered inappropriate and illegal, but it also makes me shake my head that our society has gotten to the point where this is the case. I’m married and have kids, and so I have on occasion (please don’t sue me!) asked these questions. It’s completely out of interest sake, nothing more. It provides something casual for me and the interviewee to discuss, and often creates an immediate bond…

Certainly, there are lines I wouldn’t cross (asking about religion, disabilities), and that’s mostly common sense. But some of the other examples of illegal questions seem almost ridiculous. I guess it all comes down to the hyper-sensitivity of our culture, as Alex Rudloff points out:

“Outside of the workplace, many illegal job interview questions would seem like small talk. In our hyper-sensitive culture however, they can be used as proof of discrimination.”

What do you think? Have you asked these types of questions in interviews? Have you answered these types of questions?

For many people, interviews are unpleasant and scary. Interviewees want to make sure they answer each question perfectly, they’re worried about what the interviewer will ask, and they want to put their best foot forward. It can be nerve-wracking.

For interviewers, it’s less stressful, but no less important to hit a home run with the right questions. You want to make sure, at the end of the interview, that you have a great understanding of the person you’re speaking to. What makes them tick? Would they fit in well?

Interviewers should get a sense of whether a person is a good fit within the first few minutes of an interview — If there’s a connection, a positive first impression, a good “vibe” about the interviewee…

But it helps to have questions prepared and sorted in order. You want parts of the interview to be conversational in nature, but other parts to be faster paced, more direct.

Brian Libby offers up 7 interview questions you must ask. They’re all good options for questions; with a combination of job-specific, personality and behavioral options. I’ve used many of these interviews, although I don’t typically throw the “curveball” question…

I tend to ask a few more questions than Brian recommends, and I’d say most interviewers do. For example, I like to find out what influences a candidate in their personal and professional life — what blogs do they read, what people have influenced them, and why. You can tell quite a bit about a person based on what they envelop themselves in (if they do at all!)

For help in preparing interview questions (and appropriate answers) check out InterviewUp which is a user-generated content site for interview questions.

Apparently so. And in a big way.

MRI Indianapolis has been working heavily with video for their job postings and found a 5x increase in job applicants. This according to a recent conversation between senior VP Chad Peddycord and Cheezhead.

Peddycord believes that 3 fairly simple things have helped generate these great results:

1. They make sure that job post titles state clearly that there’s an associated video. So you’ll see job postings that say, WATCH THIS VIDEO! Sr. Product Engineer
2. They add a link to the video for each job, in the job description. Cheezhead is correct in his post when he says that many job boards are against embedding video within the posting. This is extremely frustrating. So a link is necessary.
3. They also make sure that each video is unique, and not just a general employment branding message. Each video is geared towards one specific job. This is the model we’ve been focused on with Standout Jobs as well, because we believe you can tailor each video specifically to the right audience for a job. Although, I also think there’s room for more general employer brand videos as well.

It’s great to see more and more companies getting on board with video, but also tracking its value. Recently, MarketingSherpa did a case study with Lifetime Fitness to assess the value of their video recruitment campaigns.

Someone recently sent us an email to let us know that Standout Jobs was profile on CNET’s the Queue. The host talks about Standout Jobs about halfway through the video, highlighting a couple of the videos from Xobni, Mint and Freshbooks.

The show itself is quick, and entertaining. Check it out!

It seems, more and more companies are pursuing an open office environment versus a cubicle approach. For startups, the open office is almost a standard, but for larger companies that’s certainly not the case.

But behemoth tech companies like Cisco and Hewlett-Packard are slowly but surely removing cubicles.

I’ve always been a fan of open office environments. Throw in some high ceilings to boot, if you don’t mind! You end up fostering a stronger community and team spirit in an open office. And it’s always easier for communication purposes; just scoot over on your Aeron chair to the guy next to you, without bumping into clunky cubicle walls!

Having said that, I still think the closed office is important. There’s nothing more distracting than people on the phone (or in a meeting) in an open office environment. I can’t concentrate on the phone when other people are working around me. I need a closed off space. I know a lot of startups eschew closed offices, but it’s something I’m not quite ready to give up.

The alternative to a permanent closed office for someone, is to have “meeting” or “talking” rooms — closed spaces that can be used on an “as needed” basis. If you’re on the phone all day, shuffling back and forth between your open office space and a closed room won’t be convenient, but for occasional use, it’s a handy way to balance the open office style and the need for privacy.

A recent onrec report claims that “nearly half of Brits (43%) would feel outraged if an employer used a social networking site such as Facebook…”

Um…that’s a lot of outraged Brits.

As pointed out on the NowHiring blog, companies and recruiters have been using Google and other tools (in fact, any tools at their disposal!) to find out about candidates.

Of course on Facebook people have the misguided notion that things are much more private than they are. And, the site was original designed to be a private network amongst friends, so people feel more free to post stuff that they wouldn’t want employers seeing. Oops. I’ve argued before that social networks are not personal but in fact are professional tools and should be thought of that way. Yes, they can be used for personal reasons, as long as you very clearly realize that other people are using them for professional purposes.

Candidates should also be using the tools at their disposal - Google, Facebook, etc. - to find out more about potential employers. (If you really want to go crazy, check out Jim Stroud’s 200+ resources for researching companies.)

I would always recommend that candidates do this; you need to do your “due diligence” on companies before accepting jobs with them. It just makes sense.