This is not a peak hiring season. But there are jobs to be had in blogging.

IMN is hiring an inside sales rep to work in Newton, Mass, selling blogging and newsreading tools.

Siemens is looking for a contract ActionScript developer to work with Microsoft's Social Computing Group on Wallop-related stuff. Blogs + Social Networks.

Amazon.com’s Customer Content Team is hiring a senior software engineer. "We are the “discover” in “find, discover and buy.” Current features and projects include the world-wide deployment of features such as Customer Reviews, Listmania, Buying Guides, and Blogs, as well as workflow, customer service services and web services for all of the above."

IBM's hiring researchers into a team that's worked on weblogs in the past.

And the Ebay Developer Community Manager is expected to post to their public weblog.

SixApart has openings for a Web Designer/Developer and a Software Engineer. You too can make MovableType and TypePad better. Technorati has jobs for a Analytics Engineer, MySQL Administrator, and a LAMP Software Engineer.  

Or how about a six month blogging user experience contract in Dulles, VA.

And then there's Monster's Rebecca who blogs pseudonymously.

What's a "Why Sayer"? LEO says:

I suspect it may be an attempt at a play on 'nay-sayers' -- people who never do anything but criticize. 'Why-sayers' is a coinage that emphasizes positive thinking, creativity, and questioning authority. (Go Ikea!)

On a flyer at Ikea:

We're Hiring
Why
Sayers

People who want to make things better. Make things more fun. More clever. People who aren't restricted by convention, but challenged by it. People who fit perfectly at Ikea. Because it's the why that makes us successful. Just give us a call and submit a voice application. We'll be in touch with you as soon as possible.

Call (866) 831-8611
or visit us on the web at
www. IKEA.com.

On the reverse...

Tied together by a hand-drawn triangle:

The Dream
to create a better everyday life for the many people

The Business Idea
by offering a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them

The Human Resource Idea
by giving down-to-earth, straightforward people the possibility to grow, both as individuals and in their professional roles, so that together we are strongly committed to creating a better everyday life for ourselves and our customers

Followed by:

The Realization
it takes a dream to create a successful business idea
it takes people to make dreams a reality

Things I love about this: 

1. The inner rhetoric of the organization, plainly exposed to the public. Values, goals, the mental model holding things together. Do you speak our language?
2. Psychographic positioning. Being stark about who you are improves the quality of the inquiry pool. Are you in or are you out?
3. Simple action directions. Call us.  
4. The promise of prompt human contact. Competitive advantage in an era of form-letter-non-response.

[aka staffing]

OK, I gloated for an hour.

I'm only a little surprised.

A few factors contributed to the success.

1. The big management change in the Kerry camp in November. Strong organization on the ground.  
2. All the candidates spent a year turning up voter turnout. With high turnout, a GOTV machine isn't a competitive advantage.  
3. Kerry put all of his energy behind one punch. Can he keep his balance and sustain that level of effort? Will the same tactics that worked in a 2.9 million person state scale to one with 35 million people?  
4. The whole message thing changed then too: They Let Kerry Be Kerry. He's great with people. Great on discussing issues. Totally affirms my view that campaigns are conversations.
5. Bush bagging Saddam elevates warrior status. Kerry served in combat, highly decorated. Served on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee for 20 years. A long time architect of America's war on narcoterror and political terrorism.
6. Dean and Gephardt nuked each other. Not civil, and Iowans punished them for it. It's to Dean's credit he survived.
7. Kerry and Edwards have a higher Emotional Quotient (EQ) than Dean. Dean wasn't very likeable in the debates or in interviews. One long note of derision, frustration, just ready to burst out of his skin. Other candidates, like Kerry and Edwards, showed many emotional notes, in appropriate circumstances. 
8. By process of elimination (angry Dean, babyfaced Edwards, civilian Gephardt) you're left with Kerry.

What should Dean do?

• Keep on plugging, the machine was working.
• Work on yourself. Get high, drunk, a massage or something so surgeons can expose your warm fuzzy side, the side that laughs, giggles, cries. Your true believers know it's in there.
• Go two weeks without mentioning Iraq. It'll scare the bejeezzus out of Clark.

What should Kerry do?

• Franchise your HQ. Start building tools so your volunteers can do more kinds of things. "Franchising" your headquarters roles lets each metro area lay solid groundwork before you come to town. (Call me. 510 444 8234)
• Get six hours of sleep and keep eating your oatmeal.
• Money follows support. Put supporter enrollment above donor armtwisting.   

All said, I'm proud of my local team. Our small crew has five people on the road in Iowa and New Hampshire. We're actively working on our campaign craft, studying from old hands. We're doing the basics badly but learning from each experience, better each week. We're communicating well with each other, despite our circle growing.

Slowly those of us who were afraid to commit are becoming true believers. We can say things like:

John Kerry is the Real Deal.

We're sending a president to Washington, not a message.

He's the one we want on the podium opposite Bush.

and believe them.

And we have the nerve to ask people to join us.  

• Come to a Kerry meetup this Thursday night.
• I'm shopping for a media relations strategist for the Bay Area, to help us take back the White House.
• I need a team that understands precinct, CRM profiling, and direct marketing software, so all Americans can have health care at least as good as Federal employees.
• Curriculum developer wanted, so we can build the Opportunity America we all deserve.
• Speech communications professor, to give voice to the average American instead of powerful interests.
• I need a conversation with someone who can coach newbies on project templating, so 20% of our children don't go to bed hungry.
• A digital artist, to bring sunshine and transparency back to government service.    

Call me. Or write: phil@dijest.com.

You're not seeing a lot of me here. I'm doing most of my blogging over on EastBayKerry.com (all politics is local). And spreading myself thin in bulletin boards, other people's blogs and doing campaign related stuff. My apartment flooded, throwing off my schedule and keeping me away from my computer for a week. Small stuff.

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Shelley Powers' Burningbird essay The State of Geek: Part 1 -- Temp Job, No Health says the IT labor market sucks and ain't gonna improve much. But says it better. She closes saying she wouldn't encourage kids to go into IT. My take... 

Temps first. I used to be vp for strategy and technology of the world's largest staffing company. You're right about employers using temps/contractors to minimize risk at the early stages of an economic recovery. Watch quarterly reports from Manpower and Kelly for upticks in temp hiring. btw, contractors and temps are the first to go too.

Barriers to entry. In tough times it is very common for employers to raise barriers to entry since they can do so and still meet their staffing needs. Project management certification books are flying off the shelves at Amazon. And employers aren't just looking for code warriors when they can get someone with a masters or PhD in compsci for the same price. The low barrier to entry that permitted millions of "accidental" programmers to enter the workforce has let millions more continue to enter around the world. At the same time, the enterprise need for code-level customization fell through the floor.

After the offshorin'. So you're already in IT. What should you be studying now? In this economic model, what's left for US IT are jobs that require:

• "high touch", like requirements professionals;
• cultural sensitivity, like localization and UX pros;
• proximity to systems, like the overnight sysadmin who has to physically touch a box, but with skills not much more than a cable installer;
• world class niche specialists, being the world's best in corrosion algorithms, or the only people who understand documentation of military control systems in a Czech, Russian, and Spanish blend;
• content creatives that use IT for artistic and aesthetic expression that resonate with world markets;
• teams that use proprietary tools to achieve 10-fold leaps in productivity over developers using off-the-shelf and open source tools;
• work allotted via nepotism, pork, graft;
• legacy system specialists, caring for dinosaurs until the business need for them evaporates;
• coordinators that can rapidly assemble the talent needed for a project and provision them with the tools to work together; and
• managers that plan and deliver outsourced projects.

It shouldn't surprise you that most of these roles have steel industry counterparts.

If I had kids in school, I'd be telling them:

1. The future lies in molecular manufacturing (chem, physics, materials science), pharma and cognitive sciences (neurochem) all informed by IT.
2. Assume you need postdoc work for job security.
3. Learn Mandarin, Spanish, and Hindi. Along with English you'll be able to speak with more than half the world.
4. And start your professional networking early (Can you leave your Ryze friends list to your kids?).

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DiceLaRed ("The Network Says") helps its customers see and understand.

For example, here is a picture of a real time graph, shown in the browser, that shows Spain's political parties by share of the current news cycle. In real time. Clicking on a wedge lets you dive into the news stream.

The flow of news and blogs is beyond understanding. The headlines alone are overwhelming.

So we need machines to helps us make sense of the flow.

DiceLaRed creatively blends news crawling + lexical analysis + data mining + data visualization + customization + alerting.

Apply this to your customers' weblogs, your industry magazines, and local newspapers for an environmental scan.

Apply this to job board postings. Understand labor market demand across the usual dimensions. Then stretch to discover new buzzwords and "terms of art". Can you say competitive analysis? How about strategic recruiting?

Apply this to medical discussion boards. Look for spikes in conversation about symptoms to detect outbreaks and public health problems. Look for swings in interest to retarget investment in health education and social programs.

Apply this to your citizenry, to understand what political issues are emerging in importance, and with whom, in real time.

We are much closer to a dashboard that helps us understand and respond, sooner and with more precision. Thank goodness.

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I ran into Mason Wong on Ryze in August. Mason is the staffing manager for Advent Software. I asked him if he thought Ryze-like social software would find its way into the features of staffing solutions from companies like Hire.com. He wrote:

While the fundamental mission and functionality of Ryze is to expand an individual's network while employing a relatively narrow set of criteria in identifying new contacts, the fundamental mission of Hire and the functionality of its applications are to bring efficiencies to processes involving high volumes of people and heavy criteria sets in sourcing and selection. I, too, have wondered if the similarities between Ryze and Hire can ever be enough to bridge the differences so the two worlds could connect.

I could envision a highly progressive and online savvy recruiter, with a lot more available time than any actively working recruiters that I know, trying to maintain an online community of potential job candidates using a Ryze-like guest book style site as a supplement to a more traditional email newsletter subscription list, but this really is limited to the sourcing side of recruitment, which is only one part of the full recruitment process supported by Hire-like systems.

I must admit, I have mostly doubts about the value in linking up Ryze-like social services with Hire-like systems, especially because it has been my experience that to effectively use Ryze and to effectively use Hire applications, it takes a lot of time and focus for each. Without a clearly viable profit driven model behind such an effort, I don't expect many recruiters, much less hiring managers, diving into some sort of synergy between the two.

I agree with Mason's observations but I have a few other conclusions.

Imagine that, upon signing up at your career site, job seekers got a Ryze-like page. Even better, you get a weblog and news aggregator too. You can not only look for work, but easily subscribe to job listings as RSS feeds, mingle with other data mining software engineers, post about your new explorations in technology and work.

In other words, what happens if you make it easy for job seekers to build social capital?

A few guesses...

• Better Navigation. Social network features (like Technorati, blogrolls, buddy lists) make it easy locate clusters of related professionals. Job seekers are effectively answering in advance the question "Well, if you aren't available, do you know someone who is?"
• Pre-branding. The knowledge reflected in the blogs, wikis, and discussion forums becomes a way for your employees to become aware of potential candidates.
• Fresher Content. Bloggers tend to post frequently, hundreds of times more often than they update HR profiles or resumes. Contact information is up to date.
• Transparency and Conversation. It may take getting used to, but you'll start to get useful and frank feedback about the job seeking experience, the company's products, etc. Engagement that's ongoing, perhaps throughout a career.  
• Career site as destination. To the degree your organization niches, your career site may be a magnet for people in related industry or occupational categories. Hang out with the other financial engineering leaders.

About your reservations, Mason, you're right for now. The positioning of the smart folks at Hire.com, and every other Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or Human Capital Management (HCM) solution, has been to automate HR bureaucracy. Their systems can save time, effort, and money in the day-to-day life of a recruiter.

This won't be enough.  Skilled labor shortages will become more pronounced in the next 9-18 months. Recruiter workflow optimization, once executed, is yielding diminishing returns.  

So where do you put your next staffing dollar? The inputs to the process: job seekers.

Manufacturing went through the same deep shift, widening from an internal focus to an external focus. From managing internal logistics to reaching outside the corporate boundary to the external supply chain. None of the new skills and practices, like MRP or quality circles, were abandoned. Attention widened to include a network of suppliers. And new practices emerged to better harmonize the internal and external.

When raw material is talent, the processes are more difficult than manufacturing lives with. The products are widely differentiated (people don't have SKUs). What they can do and where they fit changes day to day. The goods can't be moved when and where needed via UPS. And, unlike a can of soup, these goods have opinions and desires of their own.  

So ATS and HCM vendors can expect pressure to serve this new focus. Employers like you will demand features that create value for candidates. Increasing a job seeker's social capital is just one type of value, one that Ryze supports.

So I see a future for Ryze's in HR.

• As extensions to the career relationship.
• As new tools for data mining.
• As personal branding tools.
• As a retention tool, binding workers to your intranet and extranet social networks. 

After all, schmoozespace isn't so far from recruiting, is it?

[aka staffing]

Monster is getting into schmoozespace. Ryze, LinkedIn, et al are in for some competition. A gang of Monster execs tried Ryze in July: CIO Brian Farrey, VP Dan Miller, SVP Danielle McCabe, VP Douglas Hardy, software engineer John Hayward, VP Michele Pearl, Director Sean Luitjens, and Creative Director Sue Duro. Michael Schutzler too, SVP responsible for Monster Networking. Schutzler stopped by LinkedIn too.  

Why does Monster care? Two problems:

Monster spams employers.

Monster makes it easy for job seekers to apply for a job. So they do. To lots of jobs. Multiply the number of job seekers times the number of jobs to which they apply, divide by the few jobs offered. Monster spews a supersonic torrent.

Employers are treating Monster-generated job applications like spam. The bigger ones spend heavily on applicant tracking systems that filter, blacklist, and screen, typically less effective than your average bayesian filter.

Monster needs to show employers the handful of needles in the career pool haystack. But how? 

Monster needs to improve on the 4% Relationship with Workers.

The average job search lasts around two months. The average person gets a new job every 3.5 to 4 years, about once per presidential election. So you need Monster 2 of 48 months, between 4 and 5% of your career. What about the other 95%?

Monster has to advertise to you for four years so you return. That's expensive.  

And your profile becomes stale the week after you post it. So employers won't pay to mine Monster's résumé bank.

Can Monster bribe you to keep your profile current? To share your professional network? To write about your work life?

If so,

• Your continuously fresh profile will be at least 20 times more useful to employers.
• The record of your electronic relationships with others in the community helps employers find clusters of like-minded people, the better to recruit.
• And you'll already be in the house the next time you launch your career campaign. Monster won't need to advertise to you again.

Monster's head start, challenges, and opportunities:

Monster's lead:

• Traffic. 40 million job seekers have visited Monster sites. If even some of those email addresses still work, they might be able to draw a million people to try the community. Compare that to
• Motivation. Job seekers have an economic interest in making it work.
• Conditioning. They are trained to fill out forms.

Monster has real challenges.

• Resumequity. Their current policies are hostile to user privacy. They claim ownership of all data you write when on their site, or any data they infer from your behavior. This runs counter to a strong cultural and political trend moving power and control of information to individuals.
• Pay to Play. They want to charge for membership. It's not clear that anyone has made a go of that in schmoozespace.
• Tone. Executive and contractor experiments failed in the past, not least because of the tone of the places Monster created. Time and staff have passed. Can they create a place that is safe, fun, social, purposeful, casual? 
• Friar's Fallacy. Groucho Marx wrote in a letter to the Hollywood Friar's, "Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." I don't feel any particular connection to other people in the phone book. Monster needs to foster feelings of affiliation and membership beyond a credit card transaction.
• Big Walls. Monster doesn't open its databases to the world's programmers. Amazon and Google have, and thousands of experiments helped these giants discover new ways to create value.
• All Work. Many other communities created for business find that people want to explore and band together about non-work things. Can Monster aggressively follow and support their users?

Opportunities:

Nodespace Neighborhoods. BostonWorks' Jason Butler describes "nodespaces" as those data intersections that connect people with each other. Monster can create just-in-time community around specific job postings, employers, occupations, and interests. And there is no reason some of those spaces can't be branded.

Fellowship. Cynthia Typaldos addresses professional and personal workplace isolation with her professional guilds. If Monster can match and beat that, it's scale will have a chance to work.

Built in Word of Mouth. More jobs are filled by referral. By helping you form tribes, Monster multiplies the effectiveness of your job search. And increases the chance that you'll refer a Monster employer to a Monster networker.

Cross-Property Inolvement. Monster operates relocation, training, testing, and other businesses. An active and lively social network can be used to improve customer acquisition, retention, and satisfaction in many of their properties.

Hosted Blogspaces. There's no reason Monster can't host weblogs for every user, both on the job seeker and employer side. Most people won't try blogging, many will try and leave, but millions will try and stick. Monster could become one of the top blog hosts, along with Google, AOL, and Yahoo!

Humanization of Candidates. Job seekers are people. But you wouldn't know it from datafied personas job boards pass to employer databases. Social networks offer employers a chance to understand more of people than their résumés.

Will Monster execute well and fast enough for employers to defer to Monster's network instead of rolling their own?

It all comes down to social capital. The more you help your customers harness it, the stronger your competitive advantage.

# # #

From the Monster PR site:

Monster Redefines Career Management By Harnessing Professional Networking; Network Available to 40 Million Job Seeker Members. excerpts, bulleting and empahsis mine:

Monster ... today announced plans to launch Monster Networking, a professional networking service.

Monster Networking is an online community where professionals across all industries and levels can exchange information about jobs, offer expertise and help others achieve their goals.

• Monster will serve as the host in this community,
• fostering introductions between members and
• encouraging them to:
• share career advice,
• cultivate long-term professional relationships, and
• support each other's goals.
• Proprietary matching technology will allow Monster to
• proactively initiate introductions between participating members as well as
• promote relevant career opportunities based on criteria in a member's professional profile.
• Member profiles will include skills, occupation, employment history, schools attended, titles, interests, and geographic location.

"In addition to leveraging the Internet as a powerful recruiting tool, consumers continue to rely on their network of friends, colleagues and peers when seeking professional guidance or advice about how to best achieve career goals. Today, we embark on a new Monster - one that serves all professionals who are looking to manage their careers, not just those seeking work."

Monster Networking is a subscription-based service that is expected to be available in Q1 of 2004.

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I'm presenting at BloggerCon and needed to post a short bio. What do you think?

Philip Wolff hails from Oakland, California. In the last year he presented at the ProjectWorld conference (project blogging), BlogTalk Wien (the future of blogging), and BloggerCon (blogging behind the firewall). He posts regularly to a klog apart and Blogcount, and in moments of apoplexy to Don't Blog: Blogging the Weblog Backlash. Phil has been blogging for 5 years, computing for more than 30 years, a marketing and technology veteran of the Naval Supply Systems Command, Gateway, Compaq, Wang Laboratories, Bechtel National, and Adecco SA where he served as global VP for strategy and technology. When Phil isn't helping companies rethink their employment sites, his Evanwolf Group helps them develop strategies, plans and technologies for workplace blogging.

Contact: Ryze, Skype, email, Yahoo! IM, AIM.

I tried to say who, where, work history, affiliations, interests.  And keep it short.

Suggestions? Things to add, subtract, restate?

Should all bloggers post a professional bio?

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Matt Mower skyped me in my early morning hours. Blame errors or recollection on being awake all night.

Speaking from theory, what might be some core business cases for intranet blognets?

Project communication.

Team blogs. Project aggregators and RSS feeds. Individual blogs. Blog your thinking as you scope the project. Blog flash reports. Meeting minutes. Task notes. Use a blog-to-email gateway for stakeholder communications. Socialize new project members faster and more completely. Create better after action reports.

Projects often fail due to poor communication. Blogs aren't a magic pill, but they are a fast and cheap way to produce more and better communication. More, because blogs lower some of the barriers to communication and create personal and peer reinforcement for sharing. Better, because blognets' social nature also improves the quality and context of those communications. The PMBOK describes a basic project communication; you can live it with blognets.

Scale social network from small to medium, medium to large

When your workforce can fit in your neighborhood Starbucks, everyone knows each other. Blognets help you scale that experience. Do you plan for growth? Foster blognets to smooth the way, to preserve values and culture, to reinforce the informal organization that gets things done.

Cross stovepipes

Marketing doesn't talk to engineering? Raise two blognets. Expose them to each other with discovery tools. Not only are you getting blogging's baseline benefits, hidden processes and thinking see daylight, and you can improve the quality of dialog.

Due diligence

Merging with another department or company? Buying one in the next few years? Selling your company? Start your blognets now. Help appraisers value your org's social capital. Reveal the power of your informal networks, your workforce's individual and collective knowledge and capacity.

You're buying one of two apparently identical firms, but one has a healthy blognet. Which has lower risk? Which gives you an added factor to consider, reinforcing management's claims?

Transition and Continuity Management

Your chiefs adopt a new strategy. The new direction calls for changing the workforce over 2-3 years. Layoffs. Mergers. Retraining. Recruiting. Retirement. For the chiefs, blognets shorten new hire learning curves. Help two organizations merge their informal social networks faster and with less struggle. For individuals, blognets strengthen your personal brand (good or bad, but stronger) and improve your marketability within the enterprise.

And I haven't even evoked tying blogs to your enterprise systems and processes.

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Do you live for the elegant hack? Compete in the Google Code Jam 2003. Say you don't slay the competition.How dying for a living? Win a walk-on roll starring your own demise in Showtime's Dead Like Me (the Win A Job To Die For sweepstakes). The drawing is around October 1st.

I love it.

Rob's Availability. Interests. Experience. Links to resumes in various formats, for various roles. Professional colleagues by name. Professional affiliations. Blogrolls. Just throwing it all out there for the search engines.

This is a simple, free use of a blogging tool. It adheres to the four principles set by the Software Product Marketing eGroup for this project:

1. "I Own Me": SPM Members to retain as complete control over their own professional information as possible, and to allow for flexiblility in the display and inclusion of content
2. "Zero-Budget": Bootstrap infrastructure using publicly available, free / cheap / open source tools and services as well as establishing desirable alliances and partnerships
3. "Absence of Presence": Establish standard mechanisms for evaluating accuracy and strength of SPM members' information
4. "Social Networks Work": Drive ResumeBloggers to develop key skills in social networking, virtual collaboration, and social software application / use

Now if Rob only blogged about what he knows, thinks, experiences. It would not only be worth finding, it would be worth reading.

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