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Right Coast Careers(June 13, 1997): A cursory search in a couple of search engines for jobsearch/recruitment sites in the Boston area uncovered a plethora. An embarrassment of riches as it were.
The problem is where to start.
Well, a good place is The Massachusetts One-Stop Career Center Network.
This is a "virtual" equivalent to the "real-world" network of State and Federal funded Career Centers.
It's a comprehensive site, although it's fair to say that the architecture can be confusing, largely due to the sneaky use of borderless frames.
Nonetheless, the four sections relevant to job seekers ( Search for a Job, Job Seeker Services, Education & Training, One-Stop News) all contain good, relevant information.
Search for a Job, for example, not only allows you to search their database, but also contains links to recruiters in the fields of Internet Jobs and Business Jobs.
Job Search Tips contains advice on cover letters and resumes, interviewing and negotiation - and even has an interactive mock interview. This latter is multiple choice and more fun than instruction.
(Sample exchange: Hi, I'm Mr. B. Igwig, Director of Personnel. How are you?
A: I'm fine, sir. Thanks for seeing me today.
B: Just ducky, and you?
C: Tripping, dude! Did you know that your face is melting like crayons on a
radiator?)
There's extensive research data in the Labor Market Info section, covering employment trends, prevailing wage and salry scales and so forth.
Employers can also use this site to plug into the "real world" career center network.
Cover Your Assets
(June 12, 1997): A couple of years ago, the way we learned HTML was by finding a page we liked, downloading the source, messing around with it, inserting our own content and using it.
We generally sent a short note to the original author, complimenting them on their design and asking for permission to use it. Invariably, permission was granted, such was the ethos of sharing in those days.
Now, however, it seems that times have changed. The topic of site "theft" is a common one in a newsgroup to which we subscribe, comp.infosystems.www.authorin g.html.
In point of fact, there's literally nothing that one can do about one's design being approriated by another. Except complain to the offending party. And if they're thick-skinned enough, you'll probably be ignored.
This habit has now, apparently reached new heights. Reader Hal Pawluk reports:
"...It's site theft, and they're getting bolder and smarter. Following are a few methods used recently to steal my site, and a few suggestions about dealing with this.
The worst offender as far as my site goes is:
Alex Carvalho
alex.c@mpc.com.br (ALEX C)
Organization: MPCBBS - Informacoes por Teleprocessamento S/C Ltda
He took all of my site and posted it at: http://www.geocities.com/Eureka/1020/. He left my name, my copyright notices and even my picture! Scanning the pages, I was unable to find his name anyplace on the site - it all looks like I'm trying to sell his book (he accepts credit cards). About a week ago he sent me an e-mail saying "sorry" and that he was going to remove my material, but hasn't yet. I'm working with the ISP on this one, but it's taking much longer than I'd like.
Another site in the UK took my entire home page and used all the text in white-on-white type on his home page to make it "invisible." The page scored high on search engines for certain keywords because the engines indexed my content. Once called on it, they removed the material.
Some folks in the US came up with a clever variation on this. They took pages that indexed high from a number of sites, including mine, and created pages with a bit of their material at the top and the misappropriated materials several screens down. The clever part is that when I went to the page with my material on it, I saw it, then clicked through to see the main site. But when I tried to get back to the page with the stolen material, it had been erased. (I immediately retrieved the copy out of disk cache, so still have the evidence.)
So if you value your content, a certain amount of vigilance is called for:
1. Insert unique phrases and even nonsense words in your site (bury them in the header, in image ALT tags, after the tag), then search for these periodically.
2. If pages show up near yours in search results and sound much like yours or look like they don't belong, check them out. If there's very little at the top of the page, do a "view source" to see what's really there.
3. Don't buy the story that your descriptions and titles and other content are "not protected under British copyright" or that "Web content is not copyrighted in Brazil," the excuses I got, because that's just not true. Reciprocal treaties exist, and a new law on Intellectual Property rights went into effect in Brazil May 15, 1997.
4. Contact the site hosting services. They cannot afford to host illegal materials and will generally be very helpful (if sometimes slow).
To find site hosts from domain names:
http://rs.internic.net/cgi-bin/whois
For more information on copyright law:
http://www.bitlaw.com/copyrigh
t/index.html"
Newspapermania
(June 12, 1997): Newspaper Mania contains links to over 5000 newspapers around the world. As such, it's a good place to keep up with what's going on
The site also contains a Job Center.
The Job Center lists literally dozens of links to jobs in journalism, including permanent and contract positions for editors, journalists, editorial writers and freelancers and more.
A block of the links have been compiled by the Chicago Tribune. This bank of links also includes jobs in TV and radio, including Public Radio.
In addition, the site also lists links to general recruitment sites and the Saludos Career Web For Hispanics.
Aleph
(June 10, 1997): Solid information design means minimizing the number of clicks between a user and the information he wants. It's a slow moving and frustrating process to really develop useful interfaces. Simply described, the more information you deliver, the harder it is for a user to find the precise right pieces.
NationJob, the midwest advertising distributor, sets the pace for developing broad, horizontal database interfaces. By organizing search pages along Industry, Functional and Regional lines, NationJob makes the process of finding a particular listing very straightforward. Other services are starting to mimic NationJob's approach with city by city listings.
Still, no one comes close to the elegantly simple design of the Aleph Database. billing itself as "the Global Translation Alliance", Aleph's business is matching translators in 3 skill levels and 42 languages with customers who need translations. Over 5000 possible skills combinations are tightly integrated into a three choice selection process. The user is never more than one click from a solution.
Admittedly, the tight constraints of the problem give Aleph a major advantage in design. Think of them as a model of excellence. While many startup job advertising websites go to great lengths to account for all possible jobs, Aleph's approach highlights the benefits of tightly constraining the problem.
References
(June 09, 1997): We received a very interesting piece of email from a company called Documented Reference Check. The company offers job hunters the opportunity to verify their references. From their home page:
Applicants want to know. . . "How good are my employment references?" When bad data clouds your good name you must take immediate action, or suffer career retardation. DRC provides employment assessments from previous employers.
- When you're eye-to-eye in an interview, how much does your interviewer know?
- Are previous employers passing on conjecture, personal opinion,rumors, or accurate legal facts?
- If DRC does uncover negatives (justified or not), we offer additional services that may clear up future negative comments.
- All investigations are performed discreetly and confidentially.
Further on in the website, Documented Reference Check goes on to suggest that significant money can be made by suing with their solid documentation.
Who Needs Our Service?
Attorneys can turn this, once slippery niche, into a profitable specialty. When clients deliver well documented cases, you can quickly evaluate your case's merit and focus on prosecution essentials.
As easy as the net is to get around, it's wise to be aware of the profit to be made at your expense. The company offers several frightening examples of lawsuits filed on behalf of job hunters who had been given bad references. They claim to smooth the process of suing reference-givers by giving solid documentation.
Advanced Internet Recruiting Seminars
(May 23, 1997): We're delivering Seminars around the country in the Summer. The schedule is:
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Click here to learn more about the seminars and register online. Class size is limited to 30 per seminar. The seminars run from 9:00AM to 4:30PM. Take a look at a list of companies who have been to the seminars.
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