WHO’S YOUR CITY?

Dr. Richard Florida Has a new book to be available in March.  You can find all of his stuff at www.creativeclass.org but here is an exerpt/preview…    I LOVE YOU ,  WorkFarce 

How the Creative Economy is Making the Place Where You Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life.

It’s a mantra of the age of globalization that where you live doesn’t matter: you can telecommute to your high-tech Silicon Valley job, a ski-slope in Idaho, a beach in Hawaii or a loft in Chicago; you can innovate from Shanghai or Bangalore.

According to Richard Florida, this is wrong. Place is not only important, it’s more important than ever.

Globalization is not flattening the world; on the contrary, the world is spiky. Place is becoming more relevant to the global economy and our individual lives. The choice of where to live, therefore, is not an arbitrary one. It is arguably the most important decision we make, as important as choosing a spouse or a career. In fact, place exerts powerful influence over the jobs and careers we have access to, the people meet and our “mating markets” and our ability to lead happy and fulfilled lives.

Who’s Your City provides the first ever-rankings of cities by life-stage, rating the best places for singles, young families and empty-nesters. And it grounds its new ideas and data to provide an essential guide for the more than 40 million Americans of who move each year on how to choose where to live, and what those choices mean for their lives, happiness and communities.

HMMM….

Standout Jobs Launches RECEPTION(TM), a Self-Serve Web-based Employer Branding and Recruiting Product, at DEMO Conference

PALM DESERT, Calif., Jan. 28 /PRNewswire/ — Standout Jobs, a startup in the recruiting and online job market space, today launches RECEPTION, a new employer branding and Web-based recruiting product. The launch takes place from DEMO 08, the conference where the newest and best products in digital technology debut.

RECEPTION(TM) is a suite of Web-based tools to power companies’ online recruiting efforts and help them stand out from the crowd. RECEPTION brings the latest Web consumer experiences – easy, personal and dynamic – to the recruiting process. At the heart of RECEPTION is a do-it-yourself interactive career site that leverages social media tools and principles, including video, blogging and widgets, to showcase a company’s culture and team. The goal is to help companies develop and promote their employment brand, in order to find and hire the best talent. RECEPTION also includes candidate relationship management tools enabling HR managers to identify, interact with and track candidates effectively.

RECEPTION includes the following features:

– CUSTOMIZABLE CAREER SITE: A fully customizable career site allowing
  companies to modify the colors, layout and look using drag and drop
  widgets. These career sites include interactive content such as polls,
  Q&A and comments, and employment marketing tools to measure and
  administrate candidate visits and applications.

– VIDEO: Companies can seamlessly integrate video into their job
  postings and create behind-the-scenes tours, to showcase their culture
  and present a more in-depth view of themselves to candidates.

– DYNAMIC CONTENT: Blog postings, employee profiles, photos and more
  allow HR managers and employment brand marketers to discuss, interact
  and promote hiring content directly with candidate pools. HR managers
  can customize and publish content directly to candidates to better
  communicate with them.

– BETTER JOB BOARD MARKETING & METRICS: Job posts are automatically
  distributed to a multitude of free and paying job boards, saving
  companies time. RECEPTION includes metrics on the efficacy of the job
  boards, helping companies evaluate and adjust their job board
  spending.

– CENTRALLY TRACK AND COLLABORATE ON APPLICANTS: Web-based applications
  from candidates can be shared with all the people involved in the
  hiring process, allowing for a central tracking of resumes, interview
  notes and candidate status. By moving applications out of email and
  costly applicant tracking systems, RECEPTION allows companies to
  manage their candidate application process more easily and
  efficiently. RECEPTION has no seat limits, so entire teams can now be
  involved in the hiring process.

– BUILD CANDIDATE PROFILES: RECEPTION bookmarks candidates’ information
  into its candidate relationship management application from popular
  sites including LinkedIn. Automated searches across the Web help build
  detailed profiles on prospective candidates. This will save HR
  managers time and effort in sourcing top talent.

– DEVELOP CANDIDATE RELATIONSHIPS: Candidates can track companies’
  career sites with newsfeeds, allowing them to receive instant updates
  while remaining entirely private. Candidates can selectively disclose
  details about themselves as they interact with companies, should they
  not be ready to apply immediately. Establishing this relationship
  between employer and candidate through RECEPTION ensures that
  companies are providing candidates with a positive experience, and
  improves companies’ opportunities to market jobs in the future.
“Too many companies’ online career sections are outdated, dull and uninformative. To win the war for talent, companies need to create a great employer brand and turn passive job seekers into active, long-term prospects,” said Benjamin Yoskovitz, chief executive officer and founder of Standout Jobs. “While employers continue to spend billions in advertising on job sites, they are also looking to use the Web more effectively to reach the best candidates and provide high-quality information, interaction and communication.”

Pricing and Availability: RECEPTION is a software-as-a-service solution that can be integrated into existing sites or operated as a stand-alone Web site to power companies’ recruiting efforts. RECEPTION is offered with a 90- day free trial, allowing companies to begin interacting with candidates at no cost. Following the trial period, RECEPTION is available for monthly subscriptions starting at $149/month.

“Standout Jobs’ approach to relationship- based recruiting and their Reception product is the most exciting offering for recruiting that I’ve seen in a really long time,” said Jason Davis, a recruiting industry veteran who sold Recruiting.com to Jobster and now runs RecruitingBlogs.com. “Online recruiting is no longer limited to traditional job sites like Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com. The future of hiring is clearly going to where Reception is positioned.”

“Standout jobs helped us reach an audience of developers with a video campaign that lets us stand out from the crowd and show future employees what we’re all about. We’re excited to be able to modify our career site on the fly with video and other tools and without a major investment of time and money,” said Robert Dempsey, founder and project director at Atlantic Dominion Solutions. (For additional comment, contact rdempsey@techcfl.com.)

Standout Jobs is launching with more than 20 customers representing some of North America’s most exciting companies, including b5media, Freshbooks, Jangl, Mobivox, Socialight, and Xobni.

Chris Shipley, executive producer of the DEMO conferences, said, “In the competitive marketplace for talent, companies are looking for new ways to attract great people. Standout Jobs has a powerful vision for improving the job market, and a product capable of delivering the goods. RECEPTION will have a significant impact on the marketplace in the coming year.”

Standout Jobs also announced that it has secured funding from iNovia Capital and a group of private angel investors. The funds will be used for product development and marketing.

To view Standout Jobs’ DEMO presentation live, go to www.demo.com at 9:44 AM (PST) on January 30.

About Standout Jobs, Inc.

Standout Jobs is a startup providing web-based tools to help companies recruit great candidates more effectively. Standout Jobs’ RECEPTION product is a suite of web-based tools to power companies’ online recruiting efforts and help them stand out from the crowd. The company was started by Benjamin Yoskovitz, Fred Ngo and Austin Hill in February 2007. Standout Jobs is based in Montreal, Canada.

Standout Jobs was founded when Ben Yoskovitz and Fred Ngo, two Montreal- based entrepreneurs frustrated with finding good startup employment opportunities, met Canadian entrepreneur and angel investor Austin Hill, who was frustrated with how difficult it was to market startup jobs to potential candidates. After meeting at the local Montreal technology community meetup BarCamp, they quickly decided to rectify the problem and began developing RECEPTION. With initial seed funding from Austin Hill and other private angel investors, the company was started in February 2007 and received additional funding from venture capital fund iNovia Capital. For more information, visit www.standoutjobs.com.

About the DEMO Conferences

Produced by Network World Events and Executive Forums, the semi-annual DEMO conferences focus on emerging technologies and new products, which are hand-selected from across the spectrum of the technology marketplace. The DEMO conferences have earned their reputation for consistently identifying tomorrow’s cutting-edge technologies, and have served as launch pad events for companies such as Palm, E*Trade, Handspring, and U.S. Robotics, helping them to secure venture funding, establish critical business relationships, and influence early adopters. Each DEMO conference features approximately 70 new companies, products and technologies. For more information on the DEMO conferences, visit http://www.demo.com/.

For more information, contact:

Dov Smith
  Standout Jobs Media Relations
  dov@standoutjobs.com
  514.242.1776

Good Lord Help Us All…

Indeedy…no sooner I put up this posting about Marc that I am reminded of another bastion of truth.  

Many people discount him as a bastard (as they do me) but, he is a fine soul singer from South Fallsburg, New York. 

Teenie-boppers scream for him… however, I know him as a dusty-bar piano bar jockey on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. 

His Name is Gavin DeGraw.   He and his older brother just opened up a bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan called “The National Underground”…go and see it.  

It is apparently worth the drive…   

 The National Underground, 195 E. Houston St., NYC — Just when you thought you couldn’t get enough of South Fallsburg natives Joey and Gavin DeGraw, the musician brothers go and open up their very own roots/rock/Americana bar. The two-floor venue opened the weekend before Christmas, and opening weekend celebs included Chris Barron of the Spin Doctors and billionaire Revlon Chairman Ron Perelman, while the stage hosted Lucky Petersen, Andy Clayburn and, of course, Gavin. The joint is open seven days a week and features live entertainment every night. 

I LOVE YOU,

 WorkFarce 

The Chad talks About Big Brother…BUT I want to talk about TRUTH.

Certainly said.

People who repress free thinking will not be able to retain talent nor pass on wisdom.  

Further, people who take stock in an overt REBUKE in what metrics and DATA can offer are simply avoiding the TRUTH. Metrics rule all and Chad is the master of this curtain-parting of all things that you NEED to see…Stay Tuned…The Chad will certainly expose the TRUTH… 

Stand Firm, 

I LOVE YOU, 

WorkFarce  

Nick Corcodilos Speaks the Truth;

Monster.com’s former CEO, Andrew McKelvey, was criminally charged with securities fraud and conspiracy in defrauding investors, but won’t go to jail because he’s terminally ill. Some think Monster’s recruiting model is terminal, too. It delivers only about 2% of the people companies hire. (HR departments spend well over a billion dollars a year on the big job boards to participate in that 2% success rate. Are they defrauding investors, too? Er, ah, do you wanna go there?)If that’s not where good hires come from, then where? A reader sent in this wonderful little story, from the Austin Business Journal: Uplogix execs use contacts to recruit talent.It seems Uplogix practices discriminatory hiring. Yep. They’re a discriminating employer. Check the dictionary on this one, because it’s not bad. Once upon a time, being a discriminating consumer was considered a good thing. My hat is off to Uplogix for discriminating.They put a spin on non-diverse hiring. “It’s much safer and much more efficient to hire people that either you know or someone you trust knows,” says CEO Tom Goldman. Who needs diversity when you can have productive uniformity? Fancy that: You hire only people you know.I used to work for a company like that, Clancy-Paul, Inc. The VP who interviewed me said, “All our hiring is done through the Clancy-Paul people filter. We hire only people our employees know. It increases our success rate and helps us avoid unproductive workers. When you come on board at an employee’s suggestion, the employee keeps an eye on you and makes sure you succeed. Otherwise, the employee looks bad.”Gotta love it. “We try to get like-minded people together and it becomes a driven entity on its own,” Goldman says. What a concept.The article goes on to quote Thom Singer, director of business development for Vcfo Inc. and author of The ABC’s of Networking. “People like to work with people they know well and respect. If co-workers do not have personal admiration and close social ties, you will see more turnover.”I have never heard anyone boast that they make hires like that through Monster.com. Yet HR spends cough a billion a year cough to hire cough who-comes-along.How can your company recruit like Uplogix does? You must be capable of brainstorming with your team, to identify potential candidates and sources of candidates. Here’s something Monster.com won’t offer you: Help doing it on your own. Marketing guru Mark Levy will teach you a great technique for brainstorming that will actually yield useful ideas: How to Build a Better Brainstorm. Bonus: You won’t have to sift through 15,000 “applications.”So, that’s where good people come from. Discriminating employers oughta know. Maybe diversity ain’t all its cracked up to be.

Three More Days… and EVERYTHING can Change

Surely- 

Monday will come sooner than welcomed by most of us.  

However it couldn’t come soon enough for me….

People who know me personally, know that there are MANY changes abound … possibilities, options, and after all is said and done, a comfortable landing…in a place where intellect and talents are embraced, capabilities are explored and the ideas of  ”perform this function, do your job and no free thinking”" are no longer in the vernacular or mindset….

Indeedy–smell that? Just like the song says, “…A change is gonna come,” and yes, in only 3 more days.    

There is something to be said about fortitude and strength of character. 

If you are curious, you will never stop learning, and in the meantime, if you work hard, stay focused, the right people will take notice.  The wrong people will overlook your abilities and talents, forcing you to plot an escape…a freedom ringing… 

People say (mostly corporate types and journalists) that you should be lucky for what you have and be blamed for all that has happened to you.  I couldn’t disagree more…as we are all masters of our own devices and deciders of our futures…

 They claim that the economic climate is an all around cluster-f*ck that has breathing down our necks for a long time… B*llsh*t

 Further, they submit that the job market will suffer because of our transgressions.  Again, WRONG. The Market is STRONG and will only get stronger.  

BUT take stock in who you are.  Stoke the fire in your gut.  

After all it just may be YOU who is being sought after and your boss who may lament your departure…  

BUT it  may not be you…it may be that poor soulless prick who is dying to get out of a situation where he is micromanaged, beaten down, taken for granted and, given his/her freedom will look forward to three more days….

 I LOVE YOU, 

WorkFarce 

A head-scratcher….

Following the heels of job sites like Monster.com, a new type of employment ad is helping companies find the right candidate for the job.

Grover Beach, CA (PRWEB) January 22, 2008 — Following the heels of job sites like Monster.com, a new type of employment ad is helping companies find the right candidate for the job. Popular Web site ClassifiedFlyerAds.com, which lets customers create professional-looking flyers that are posted to a host of online directories, is now allowing companies to post job openings through its flyer service.

Using our flyer service is a professional, yet quick and cost-effective way to spread the word about a job opening throughout the Web’s most viewed job directories.

ClassifiedFlyerAds.com guides visitors through a user-friendly process where they choose from a range of templates and then insert text and upload photos to create a professional-looking flyer that advertises a product or service. Once complete, job listing flyers will not only be optimized to appear high in search engine rankings, but will be automatically posted to top Web job directories and portals, including Google, Lycos, Local.com, info.com and more. The site also provides the code for users to easily post their items to other sites, such as Craigslist, Backpage and LiveDeal.

All flyers offer a variety of functionalities to help capture leads, including a click to call option where viewers can send their information directly to the flyer creator’s mobile phone or email, live view tracking, embeddable widgets to promote the flyer on blogs, email signatures and Web sites, a PDF option for hard copy printing and more.

“A Dec. 2007 report by the Pew Internet & Life project found that 66 percent of people who changed their job status used the Internet to look for information, and I only expect that number to increase,” says Misty Lackie, founder and chief executive officer of Go Smart Solutions, LLC, the parent company of ClassifiedFlyerAds.com. “Using our flyer service is a professional, yet quick and cost-effective way to spread the word about a job opening throughout the Web’s most viewed job directories.”

The Web site offers the first three job ad flyers for free and then various plans, ranging from $4.99 to $29.99 per month.

ClassifiedFlyerAds.com, owned by parent company Go Smart Solutions, LLC, is an online tool popular with Realtors and auto dealers that allows individuals to promote a product or service throughout the Web. A user-friendly process allows clients to produce professional flyers, which are then posted on up to 20 online directories and optimized for maximum exposure on the most popular search engines. A cost-effective way to promote homes or autos for sale, job postings or other services, ClassifiedFlyerAds.com offers many add-on functionalities to its flyers, including virtual tours, live view tracking, embeddable widgets and more. For more information, visit www.classifiedflyerads.com.

Early Reports Suggest that YAHOO! is FUCT!

NEW YORK (Associated Press) – Battered by slow revenue growth and the popularity of social networking Web sites, Yahoo Inc. is poised to lay off hundreds of workers, according to published reports.

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have both reported on the slumping Internet icon’s cost-cutting plans, citing people familiar with the matter.

Precisely how many of Yahoo’s roughly 14,000 employees will lose their jobs hasn’t been determined, the newspapers said. A final decision could be announced Jan. 29 when Yahoo executives are scheduled to review the Sunnyvale-based company’s fourth-quarter results.

If several hundred employees are dumped, it will mark Yahoo’s most extensive layoffs since 2001 when the company was trying to battle back from the dot-com bust.

The payroll purge was first reported over the weekend by Silicon Alley Insider, a blog focused on investments in technology and media. The blog said Yahoo had drawn up a list of 1,500 to 2,500 jobs that could be eliminated, but Monday’s reports indicated management doesn’t expect the cuts to be that deep.

A Yahoo spokeswoman didn’t immediately return calls seeking comment.

It won’t come as a surprise if Yahoo jettisons workers, said Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry. He believes Yahoo has room to trim its work force by about 5 percent, or 700 employees, after phasing out some of its services, such as auctions and photos, during the past year.

Besides falling further behind Silicon Valley rival Google Inc. in the lucrative Internet search and advertising market, Yahoo also has been struggling to hold on to younger Web surfers as they spend more time on hip online hangouts like Facebook.com and MySpace.com.

The problems have slowed Yahoo’s revenue growth even as spending on online ads accelerates. That trend has devastated Yahoo’s stock, which has plunged by nearly 50 percent since the end of 2005. Yahoo shares finished last week at $20.78.

With shareholders clamoring for a shake-up, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang took over as the company’s chief executive last June, replacing former movie studio mogul Terry Semel.

Yang has promised to re-establish Yahoo’s position as the Web’s most popular “starting point” while building a compelling ad network, but his progress hasn’t impressed investors so far. Since Yang became CEO, Yahoo’s stock price has declined by 25 percent while Google shares have surged by more than 15 percent.

Earlier this month, Yahoo opened its mobile platform so outside programmers can develop new applications for Yahoo pages accessed on mobile handsets. Yahoo hopes the mini-applications will bring the company more money from advertising.

The company also unveiled a redesigned home page for mobile phones that includes more content and enables visitors to designate material they want highlighted. 

the winter kills us all…

Surely enough I may be folding in…  Keep me posted and in the meantime, ALWAYS know that…  I LOVE YOU, WorkFarce    

The Last Dance…well maybe after I sleep it off

Sure there will be video coming… a long awaited bastion of truth… but in the meantime there is MUSIC.   Pray for those of us in the recruit o bag that are not with us, nor will make it in the “R”-word-year….this year you will see me in bag “action”  I LOVE YOU,WorkFarce