These are the afternoon speakers at Gnomedex Day 1.
Gnomedex Day 1 Afternoon Shoot
Gnomedex Day 1 Afternoon Shoot
TechWag
Dan Morrill’s personal views on Technology, Education, Web 2.0, bringing people together
Gnomedex 2010 Day 1 Morning Speakers
This is the morning shoot of Gnomedex 2010 – unfortunately this is the last Gnomedex forever or until Chris figures out that he would like to do this. This feels almost like the last huzzah – and in someways is fairly sad.
Gnomedex Day 1 Morning Shoot
Last Gnomedex ever – the morning shoot
tags: gnomedex
Tags: 2010, Gnomedex, photo shoot
Turn about is not fair play on the broken hiring process
Turn about is not fair play on the broken hiring process
We have all heard about the problems with finding the right employee for the jobs you are trying to fill. Usually from my vantage point as a hiring manager my biggest problems have been about resumes that did not make sense for the position being filled. It is very hard to go from an AA working at a McJob to a required PhD working in research which is usually the kind of job I am trying to fill, and my average job candidate resume is the McJob. Usually that means they are just filling out the paper work and spamming the job systems with garbage resumes on some forlorn hope that they will get a job they are totally unprepared for.
The interesting flip side to this is that I recently posted my resume on one of the major job boards because that was the price of looking for jobs at their site. The resume I posted was my teaching resume; I am only looking for teaching gigs, preferably online so that I can go pursue the other things I think are worthwhile, like my startup. What has been flabbergasting to me are the responses I am getting back from recruiters.
I am dead clear what I want to do, the opening preamble of the resume is:
“The idea job will focus on teaching the next generation of technology and business leaders the skills, creativity, thinking, and business/technology acumen to succeed in business and technology. As well, the job will have significant Social Networking, virtual meeting, and online interaction that lead to better comprehensive learning on the part of students.”
Fairly clear cut and dry, I just want to teach, been teaching now for seven years and I really love it a lot as a job.
What has been coming my way though has been a mishmash of job “opportunities” that have no relationship to what I posted online as a desired job description. I have gotten offers to be a program manager for an environmental company selling their environmental products. I have had three opportunities to become an insurance salesperson (and a direct sales job is something I am not suited for in terms of personality or temperament). I have had multiple franchise opportunities so I can go open some form of restaurant which is also something that shows nowhere in my background. The last restaurant job I had was in high school asking “do you want fries with that?” And the military would like to have me back, which is cool I loved the time I served in the navy, but not sure if I am really cut out to be a navy band member at this time. I play a pretty good bass guitar but that is about it, and the navy does not do punk rock.
What this tells me is that not only is there a major disconnect between the people who are applying for jobs that they are not suited for, but to add insult to injury there is also a major disconnect between people who have jobs to fill and do not really look at the resumes that are on the job sites.
With all this not looking, the real talent is getting buried in a morass of people working on divergent ends, where no one gets hired because in the impersonal way we look for jobs, there is no way to rise above the noise. The most frustrating part of my job is going through resumes that do not match the job description, and that is looking like it will be quickly followed by fending off recruiters who didn’t really read my resume.
We often laugh about how finding a job is broken, and now I know it is broken from both sides of the process. Sadly this means that the only real way to find a job is to do this by personal connections. This makes LinkedIn and other sites like that more important than the general job boards that have millions of members. Of all the people I have hired lately, none came from a job board; all came from personal inside recommendations. It is time to seriously make some friends because the public systems are seriously broken from both sides of the process.
Tags: business
Best meeting ever with a banker and it was still no sale
Sometimes you decide that you really do want to continue to grow your company beyond cash flow so you decide you want to go talk to a banker and see what all they would be interested in loaning money and providing deeper banking services than you have now. I did not want a traditional bank because I already have a traditional bank that does not quite do it for me.
I was ushered into this nice conference room where I pulled out my P&L statements, growth rates, what I need to do to grow more, and otherwise, here is my business after 2 years and 10 months with a year over year growth rate of 200%. Traditional banking has always had a hard time with small business, because so many small businesses fail. This is no surprise that banks would be cautious given the current economic climate, and the level of unemployment, the level of loans that have gone south due to unemployment and the near collapse of the banking industry.
What made this amusing, and almost laughable were the conditions that the banker in all earnestness and with due care put even just on the conversation.
1. Must have a pool of 25K in cash that they can immediately take under management at 1K per month in service and control fees
2. I must pay into the pool of cash at least 1K, preferably 5K per month just to be a relevant customer
3. I must have assets of at least 3 million before they can talk to me with a very low debt ratio to asset pool. At no time can my “assets” fall under 3 million in realizable value or I can be punted out of the game and everything given recalled
I do not know many small companies that can afford to set aside 5K a month or have the desire to knowing that the costs per year are going to 12,000 just to maintain the account. I also know of few small startups that have a maintainable base of 3 million in assets because the level of investment to get there is truly no longer required. For small money, you can build out a cloud-based web 2.0 services and not even scratch the surface of 10K in total expenses let alone assets that have a tangible value. It is hard to build up three million in tangible assets when working as a small startup. No startup needs that level of assets, there is no real reason to build up that level of assets in tangible goods that the bank can use if the loan is recalled.
In many ways, this is more of a tragic tale of the banking industry and how they are looking at small businesses right now. If I had the money and assets they wanted, I would not need them. What makes this all the more interesting is when I have what they are looking for they will beat down my door to get to me, but by that time I’ll have an awesome cash flow and really will not need the bank. It is almost the catch 22 that many small businesses keep on dealing with, and one of the reasons why Angel funding might end up being the answer. That is if I want to sell part of the company.
Cross posted at Techwag and at Alternating Reality
Data pooling or data streaming in social networking
- Image via Wikipedia
Over the last few months, my startup has really been taking off so we have been working on different ways to engage with our audiences. We have two distinct startups – one an ebook publishing firm, and one a comic book seller.
What has been interesting to see though is that as we turn on social components, we see a pooling behavior in the way that the data is presented rather than a streaming behavior depending on the system. Facebook seems to handle data streaming better, while Twitter and FriendFeed tend to pool data then carpet bomb the reader with a ton of stuff.
This seems to be based on the polling cycle of the systems involved. If Facebook is indeed better at streaming in near real time what is being posted at all the web sites we are using, then the overhead in processing is going to be fairly large as there is a near continuous polling cycle. While twitter and FriendFeed seem to have inbuilt delays into their polling cycle, meaning the carpet bombing effect. Which from my viewpoint as a startup owner is a net negative, as it is our belief that no reader wants to be carpet bombed with data as the polling cycle catches up with the post or comment rate on customer and potential customer engagement.
While the net effect remains to be seen, it is an interesting observation on how social networking components work, either as a pool of data (carpet bombing) delivered all at once to the reader, or as a steady stream of data that updates in near real time. It would be interesting to see how people relate to the idea of data pooling with a rapid release or a steady stream of data throughout the day. If you have a preference, talk about it here.
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Tags: Facebook
