If you haven’t used Ning it is an easy way to make your own social network/topic group. (There will be a pgroup for you on Ning as they now have 500,000 of them)

For example, I am a member of New Zealand Recruitment 2.0 which is for New Zealanders who want to discuss innovations in Recruitment.

Today I found a clever and easy way to of using Ning as a specialist Job Board combined with a Social Network Wirelessjobs

There is a blog, events listing, industry news, links to LinkedIn and Facebook. Having used Ning (and I am not a developer), I know that a Ning network could be easily set up by somebody with no programming skills.

On the Wireless Jobs site there is also a job board that is powered by StandOutJobs. Standout Jobs is free HR software for building your own career web site, marketing jobs and managing candidates through the hiring process. As far as I am concerned, if Kevin Wheeler is endorsing it, this is a good thing.

“One of the best of the tools [for building recruiting websites] is provided by Standout Jobs.” Kevin Wheeler

It looks perfect for New Zealand companies. Here are a few examples.

Freshbooks

Curve Dental

Technorati

And here is one from an Australian community organisation

TRCare

SocialLight is featured as a Case Study on Stand OutJobs.

Does this sound like your company?

“a technology startup with less than 10 employees. The company has an exciting workplace, but limited resources for hiring and staffing programs or recruiters.

Since its creation, Socialight used a variety of tools to find employees, including personal and professional networking, Craigslist, targeted technology forums, and university career sites.

These options varied in terms of the number and quality of job candidates they could reach. But across the board, they failed to effectively brand Socialight as a desirable employer, and empower the company with the tools and flexibility to stand out in a competitive recruiting environment.

Socialight recognized that it needed a more effective way to develop its employer brand, attract job candidates, including “passive” job seekers exploring their options, promote a positive candidate experience, and manage applicants more efficiently through the hiring process. Rather than wait until conditions permitted the company to design its own career portal, Socialight started using StandoutJobs, which enabled it to showcase its culture and team, advertise open positions, and input job applicants into the hiring process.

According to Socialight CEO Dan Melinger, the career site was easy to create: “Just a couple of hours’ work and we were presentable to the world. It was important to us that we could launch the career site quickly, but also make sure that we were doing a great job of representing Socialight as the fantastic and exciting work environment it is. Standing out in a crowded job market isn’t easy, but we’re empowered more than ever now with Standout Jobs”

Does your company hire people in a specialist area that would benefit from a professional group/job board?

I would love to hear from you if you are interested in working with these products for your company in New Zealand

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• Recruitment Site Standout Jobs Receives $2 Million Backing
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• Ning closes in on 500,000 social networks

Je crois qu’il y plusieurs informaticiens qui recherchent des emplois qui ne sont pas du genre “9 à 5 dans une banque”. Loin de moi l’intention de généraliser ou stéréotyper trop les environnements de travail des banques, mais en général il s’agit d’endroits plus conservateurs et probablement un peu moins adaptés à la réalité des jeunes informaticiens de la génération Y.

C’est dans ce sens que StanoutJobs vient vraiment répondre à un besoin en offrant une manière différente de recruter à des entreprises qui veulent se présenter autrement que ce qui se retrouve sur les sites traditionnels d’emplois tels que Jobboom, Monster ou workopolis. Si vous consultez les offres d’emplois ici, vous verrez que les descriptions de poste sont souvent elles-mêmes très créatives.  En voici un extrait :

L’Internet n’est pas un camion. C’est un réseau complexe de tout plein de logiciels mystérieux, d’équipement dispendieux et de garde-robe protégés par des systèmes d’alarme à sécurité maximale. Akoha et Standout Jobs ont besoin d’un professionnel qui saura manier nos technologies de fine pointe pour le bien être de l’humanité.

Le site semble attirer surtout des opportunités d’emploi en TI. Je me demande si d’autres domaines professionnels vont adhérer. Aussi, StandoutJobs offre la possibilité aux recruteurs de présenter un vidéo, ce qui est très intéressant pour pour les candidats qui souhaitent mieux connaître l’entreprise avant d’entreprendre une démarche pour y obtenir un emploi. Un exemple se retrouve ici.

Je trouve que la mission de StandoutJobs est parfaitement en accord avec l’évolution du monde du travail et la façon dont les employeurs devront se présenter pour attirer de bons candidats. J’espère vraiment que ce stratup sera un succès, les fondateurs me semblent très dynamiques. Après quelques semaines d’activité, il y a déjà un nombre intéressant d’emplois affichés, un peu partout en Amérique du nord. Je vais suivre l’évolution du site pour valider si de plus en plus d’entreprises saisissent cette opportunité d’innover dans leurs efforts de recrutement.

Il y a un nouveau joueur au niveau des sites Web de recrutement : Standoutjobs. Cette initiative est expliquée ici, dans cet excellent post de Ben Yoskovitz sur son Instigatorblog : 9 Signs the Online Job Market is Broken . Je vous le recommande fortement, Yoskovitz y décrit habilement les lacunes des options actuelles de recrutement en ligne. Il y a quelques objections dans les commentaires, mais pour ma part je suis entièrement d’accord avec lui sur son constat illustré principalement par ces faits à propos des sites Web de recrutement bien connus :

1. Les entreprises ne s’y distinguent pas vraiment, elles se présentent toutes de la même façon;
2. Il n’y a pas assez de différences entre les emplois offerts qui finalement se ressemblent entre elles;
3. On n’y retrouve pas seulement des emplois de qualité, ce qui les rend moins prestigieux;
4. Il y est trop facile de poser sa candidature, cela rend encore plus difficile l’identification des meilleurs candidats;
5. Ils exigent beaucoup de temps, d’efforts.

Dans un contexte de pénurie de main d’oeuvre, les candidats vont commencer à exiger de la part des employeurs qu’il se distinguent et démontrent pourquoi travailler pour eux peut être satisfaisant. Comme cela n’est pas possible en ce moment, Yoskovitz et ses partenaires ont eu une très bonne idée en créant Standoutjobs. Standoutjobs offre effectivement une alternative intéressante qu’il me serait inutile de vous décrire puisque Yoskovitz le fait habilement dans cette présentation vidéo. Disons que ce service ne sera pas uniquement utilisé pour des emplois en informatique, mais tout porte à croire que de comaine sera actif avec cette nouvelle approche.

En visionant le vidéo, on voit à quel point le concept est innovateur. Il représente à mon avis une excellente application du Web 2.0 qui aide des entreprises à mieux “connecter” avec des professionnels. Les leaders du projet semblent avoir la drive, la vision et l’expérience nécessaires pour réussir. Ils ont d’ailleurs convaincus des investisseurs d’avancer une somme de 2 millions. Je vais suivre l’évolution de Standoutjobs avec beaucoup d’intérêt car cette nouvelle façon de recruter a le potentiel de plaire aux entreprises autant qu’aux candidats. Pour comprendre encore mieux la vision derrière ce nouvel outil de recrutement, passez ici lire leur ce post dont je retranscris un extrait ici :

“The idea is to give companies the power to truly showcase their cultures and teams. Candidates want more information and interactivity from companies, and we hope to provide that. By allowing companies and candidates to build on-going relationships we make the process of hiring a more human one, which is ultimately, what it’s all about any way. Job descriptions and job requirements are nice (or not!) but what candidates really want is an inside view into your company – they want to know if it’s a good cultural and personal fit.”

O hi,

Yesterday, we had a team breakfast quite early so Austin (one of the co-founders) could talk to us about TED since he got to go (I want to go!). He also brought with him a big box, which I thought came back from TED too. I remember he tweeted that he stopped by the TED bookstore to pick up some goodies. When came the time to open the box, there was a lot of filler material like old newspaper. My mind was wondering how small were these books. But a Wii came out to a lot of oohs and aaahs. Hahaha. Pretty funny ^_____^ Austin so nice.

Here’s a trio of links for March 3rd.

• Peter Strom’s Music Blog – While not specifically jazz music oriented Peter has recently relaunched his music blog.  Peter is a prominent member of the lindy hop community and is widely respected for his dancing and musical taste.  He is one of the administrators for the Lindy Hoppers Fund, an organizer for Swing and Soul, and a world-class instructor.

• Alain Bikes for Microcredit – Alain Wong, lindy hop blogger and instructor out of Montreal, will be biking to raise money for microcredit and to empower women.  He has already raised 750$ and a good portion of donations (up to 1000$) will be matched by StandoutJobs, a recent Montreal startup co-founded by Cat’s Corner’s Fred Ngo.

• Northeast Girl Jam – Northeast Girl Jam continues the trend of many outstanding Girl Jams but this time on the east coast.  The first girl jam was organized by Giselle Anguizola in 2005 and they have since sprung up all over the west coast and even Australia.  If you didn’t catch the video round-up, Jojo (the organizer of NE Girl Jam) and Giselle (teaching at NE Girl Jam) are featured in the Hot Pockets routine.  I’m excited to attend (as a lead) and am even featured as a guest instructor.

Enjoyed the links or would like to submit an article of interest, let me know.

Here’s the code and slides of my presentation : http://github.com/macournoyer/mor7/

Hope you liked it!

Yeah I know, I’m very late on this. I’m the latest one of the gang to blog about it.

StandoutJobs.com has launched a couple days ago and demoed at DEMO earlier today.

We’ve worked very hard on this and I’m really proud of the result!

Please give it a look and let me know what you think!

With our CEO about to take the stage at DEMO08 to showcase our product Reception, those who made it through the rain (very lame in winter) to get to the castle are on standby.

I must say I am a bit nervous. Most of us are watching the live stream from DEMO for our entertainment. This is at the expense of some companies’ unconvincing or cheesy presentations, even silly. Still, a few look quite impressive. But taking a step back, I think this is a good thing as long as people are trying to come up with new useful products. Even our product has received some criticism already, and it will go into improving it.

Got in the castle, and just made some tea (red with lychee if you were curious), but the sky is cloudy this morning. I thought I’d share some of our excess sunlight from yesterday.

Our castle has a very nice view, overlooking the Mount Royal. In winter, it looks like we work near a ski resort ^_^ But this also means we get a lot of sunlight reflected here. It kind of sucks having to pull the blinds down and waste all of that energy, so we made our own DIY light diffuser. No duct tape! Wait until we do it for every window.

In a side note, -_-;;;; I also wasted time wrestling WordPress trying to get the image to float for this post. Anyway. Back to defending the castle.

Early this morning, StandoutJobs finally lifted the veil off Reception, our amazing product/service that will be our take in spicing up the boring world of online job recruiting.

I haven’t had the chance to blog about this until now (sleeping soon), since I am trying to increase the acceptance test coverage of our product. I wonder if my bosses have had any sleep yet; they are in California right now preparing for DEMO08, making sure the media knew about Reception being released and writing about it, as well as gearing things to production leading up to this morning.

Things have been hectic for a few weeks already. Although we have been in crunch mode for some time, I only really felt it last Friday. Perhaps the stressful faces on the founders have rubbed on me. Nevertheless, things are very exciting and I do not regret this. Swearing is good for team morale! Remember this.

What is my role in all this? I’m still the new guy at the company, having started only a week before the Christmas holidays. My tasks so far were to expand on the Selenium prototype one of the guys started and make it work with virtual machines (VM). I also had to migrate our build server to a VM, which allowed me to get intimate with Ubuntu. I suppose a bit of everything to whet my appetite, but there is obviously so much more to learn. Moreover, I’ve worked with Ruby on Rails on personal projects, but it did not prepare me to the size and complexity that Reception is. Impressed at the team ^_^. And lately, I am putting some effort into increase the acceptance test coverage. Sometimes, I feel I am not contributing enough to the war effort, as there are bugs to fix.

We still have good laughs here and there. ^_^ If only you could peek inside our Campfire chat logs.

Guard cats. Why not? But a little back story first.

At my previous workplace, we were in the process of changing offices, and our administrator felt the security at the new office was a bit lax, since not everything was in place yet to protect the server room. He suggested to get some guard dogs, in a matter-of-factly way. We’ve had a dog running around in the office before. So I believed him, and countered with guard cats (my mother will not let me keep a cat at home). It led to be lively discussion of guard dogs in general with the whole team. Then finally when I asked again if we were really getting one, he smiled and said no. Disappointment.

I work at StandoutJobs now since before the Christmas holiday, a web startup based in Montreal. There is a healthy obsession with lolcats here. I approve. One day the discussion fell on the topic of security, and I suggested guard cats. Our CEO replied “After series A”. So I guess we’ll have to wait and see, because we have been tracking all the things to get after series A (which includes a pony!).

Montreal is white and snowy
Ruby is red and pretty
Rails is red (also) so lets party

In case you don’t know it yet, we’re hiring more Ruby hackers at Standout Jobs!

Instead of trying to convince you that this is the best place to work, I’ll describe my typical day of work and let you judge if this is the right thing for you.

7 AM

Sleeping

7:30 AM

Sleeping

8 AM

Wake up!

8:15 AM

Back to sleep

8:30 AM

All right, I feel like an early-riser today!

Narrator: In fact at Standout Jobs, there’s not schedule, arrive when you want! Just get things done!

9:30 AM

Arrive at the office, grab a juice in the fridge. Say hi to Ben. Ben has one of the 5K most popular blog in the world. He’s so famous, people ask him for autographs on the beach! He’s at the office at like 4 AM, he never sleeps (he has 2 kids).

9:32 AM

Put my Mac Book Pro next to my Apple Cinema Display, my keyboard and mouse and sit on my CEOish chair.

Narrator: as a Standout Jobs employee, you’ll get a all the Apple stuff you’re dreaming of!

10 AM

Reading some news in my Google Reader while looking at the Mount Royal.

10:15 AM

Check out tickets in Trac to see what needs to be done. Accept one, svn up, mate ., put my headphones on and I’m gone in my coder’s bubble.

10:20 AM

Fred arrives at bicycle and does a little swing dance while going to his desk. (Fred can dance, code, bicycle all at the same time, plus he’s always in the newspaper or some internet tv show. He’s famous too!)

10:30 AM

Daniel arrives not at bicycle. Daniel dances too, has a blog, code and presented at more DemoCamps then you would think humanly possible. He’s a famous Ruby Guru too!

11 AM

code, code, code, code

11:30 AM

Most of the time we communicate throught our Campfire chatroom. This is a lot better then behing continuously interupted. You can ignore if you’re deep into some code, but most of the time, it’s serious stuff!

… ok bad example.

12 PM

Feeling hungry and realize Fred and Daniel are there.

12:30 PM

Eating spaghettis in Ikea plates while watching some Ted Talk videos on youtube.

1 PM

Making coffee, while talking about some styling issues with Fred.

1:30 PM

Discuss (argue) some design decisions with Daniel.

Narrator: unlike many places, we believe in beautiful code and writing tests. We’re hackers and we sometimes get emotional when something is one pixel off or one space is missing or not properly aligned. We do more then care about our craft, we’re passionate about it!

2 PM

In our Campfire chat room:

Adding some code and fixing things

A   standoutjobs/trunk/--------
A   standoutjobs/trunk/-----
A   standoutjobs/trunk/-------/---------

Narrator: Whenever someone commits something to the subversion tree a message is sent in the chat room. This way we know what everyone is doing. We also get notified of build failures. Hey the chat room can display useful stuff too!

3 PM

But chat room is only for serious, corporate stuff, always:

… ok bad example again! But I swear we have some deep tech discussions in the chatroom!

4 PM

Coding and fixing more tickets on Trac.

5:30 PM

Goodbye pretty office, I’ll miss you!

(While Marc is on his way home, in the Standout Chatroom …)

9:30 PM

Back on the computer, see the build failing!!! Aaaaah!

Fix the damn build

  U   standoutjobs/trunk/------------------

The End

You too wanna live the life of a Rails rockstar ?

Apply now!

You don’t need to be a Ruby “Guru”, but you do need to be a great hacker.

And also be sure to include code samples or references to some of the most gorgeous code you’ve written (not necessarily in Ruby) or else put [VIAGRA] at the start of your email subject to help us sort the applicants.

Montreal on Rails was yesterday. It was the place to be for Rails and even web people in general. 3 great presentations with really useful stuff, you can actually use. How’s that ?

Ext on Rails

Chris Scott showed the Ext Javascript framework. Lots of cool stuff, really crowd pleaser and exciting. Fancy javascript dialog closing the gap between desktop and web apps. But man does the code reminds me of Swing. Bad, bad, bad memories! Chris strangely claimed that Ext was better then Prototype and that Prototype was the past… I think this is like comparing tomatoes and cream cheese and salmon bagel. Prototype is what Javascript should have been from the start, it’s a framework to write beautiful Javascript code that looks almost like Ruby. Form the demo and by looking at the doc, Ext is a UI toolkit framework. It sure has all the cool stuff Prototype and Scriptaculous has, but I didn’t like the API. With hash arguments like script, callback I sure miss the expressive evalScript and onXXX. Ext looked really verbose on many levels, from event management to layout setuping. Small details you tell me, but “This is all your app is: a collection of tiny details.”. Even though my reluctance here, that was an amazing presentation, though provoking! Nice work Chris!

Authentication with Rails

Chris Lamothe then coded live in front of us a Rails app from scratch using Acts as authenticated plugin. Chris said he’s not a Rails expert, even a beginner, so I think this is an exploit to be able to code a live app in front of a crowd like this. He covered pretty much all you need to know about this and after his talk we all had a brief discussion on other alternative plugins: Restful Auth and Salted password generator. A nice presentation for people starting with Rails, plugins and authentication.

Client side debugging with Firefox

Terje Tjervaag was last with a series of tips on how to debug your Javascript. He started off with a really brilliant quote: “Debugging your javascript should be the last thing you do”. Wow! He advocated unit testing and validating your code before even thinking about debugging. How brilliant and such a nice introduction. I never though about js debugging this way. How come you don’t have a blog Terje ? Living in 1994 ? Come on!
He presented tools like Firebug, HTML Validator, YSlow and Web Developer toolbar. He showed how to used them next, hacking some css and js live in Firebug console.
After his talk he proposed that we (Montreal on Railers) do a RRobots tournament, everyone jumped of joy!

After all this, some people, including Carl, Mat, Camillo, Mathieu, JF, Francois and me got together and grabbed a bite somewhere (I don’t remember where, I was drunk) we had mind blasting discussions and time passed faster then your last vacation.

If you didn’t come because there was no place left, you’ll be happy to know that the next Montreal on Rails is gonna be at our StandoutOffice (if everything goes well on that side). If you come, not only will you be among the most talent web developers in Montreal, you’ll also see where I work ! Oh, how exciting ! Maybe I’ll even let you sit on my chair, but don’t you touch my beautiful thin Apple keyboard or I’ll hit you on the head with my Mighty Mouse!

Thanks to all the people who make this happen!

Update: Heri wrote a better report then mine, (he was not drunk).

Montreal on Rails was a big success yesterday. I think my presentation went well too, I got lots of good feedback, thank you all! You can get the famous slides here, the code here and the plugin here.

Carl presentation on HAML was uber cool, I’ll give it a shot soon no doubt, the outputted HTML is so sexy. Thanks Carl for showing this!

I met many new cool people too, Alain, Mathieu, David, Francois, Josh and many more. The usual suspects were there too, James, Daniel, Gary, Fred, Heri, J-F, Fred B. ! I hope you all enjoyed this event as much as I did! Look out for the next one next month. Or see you next week at the Entrepreneur Breakfast.

A big thanks to Carl and Mat for organizing this and letting me shamelessly plug my blog, projects and standoutjobs.com in my presentation, you’re the best!

Any feedback on my presentation is greatly appreciated, or if you have any suggestion or comment about the event, please post them on the event blog, Mat is looking for some feedback.

Update
Heri has some photos and Josh has some videos.

Oh what a catchy title! Notice I’ve used “simple steps” not “easy steps”. Getting your dream job is hard! If it wasn’t, everyone could do it and every good position would be filled, worlds would collide and I would have an iPhone in my pocket right now.

So, since I’ve just landed my dream job and had been in the hirer side for a couple of years now, I tough I’ll share some of my personnal tips.

1. Be remarkable

Being remarkable does not mean being perfect. It means doing something that is worth making a remark about. So do just that! Have a colourful resume, a singing presentation letter or have your CV delivered in a golden box by flying elephant man. The point is, don’t be afraid to do remarkable things to get noticed. It’s always better to have the employer find your resume cheesy then boring. Boring and average are career killers! Seth Godin’s blog and books are a great source of inspiration on how to be remarkable.

2. Invest in your knowledge portfolio

This one is from The Pragmatic Programmer. Your brain is your most valuable tool, but like your wallet if you don’t invest in it properly you won’t grow it’s value.

1. Serious investors invest regularly – as a habit.
2. Diversification is the key to long-term success.
3. Smart investors balance their portfolio between conservative and high-risk, high-reward investments.
4. Investors try to buy low and sell high for maximum return.
5. Portfolios should be reviewed and rebalanced periodically

- The Pragmatic Programmer, p.13

Read books, listen to podcast, fill up your feed reader, you can’t learn too much. If you’re still no convinced, Eric Sink wrote an amazing article on why knowledge is the only thing you truly control in your career.

3. Showcase yourself

Even if you’re the best programmer, graphist, sys admin in the world, if you can’t prove it, it’s worthless. Not having any portfolio, showcase or work sample is like a tree falling in an empty forest. Action speaks louder then words, so you got to prove yourself to be a great doer ratter then a great talker. Good employers (and Joel’s readers) always look for two things: smart and get things done. Be proud and care about what you’ve done!

4. Aim for the best

Don’t spam employers with unpersonalized cover letters. Focus on the one you really like and show them you care. Jobboom and Workopolis job spamming was dead the day it started. Looking for a job is marketing yourself, so think about it the way you’d like to be approached for a product: intrusive phone call at lunch time, spam or personalized funny email ?
When interviewing with the employer make it clear you think they are the best and that’s why you’re applying. In return, they should make you feel that they’re looking for the best candidate and care about finding the one. If you get the feeling like they only want to fill a position with anyone that can fit the mould, run! Employees are not commodities but investments. When you’re about to be hired you should feel like the best in the world not like being fooled.

5. Be passionate

Actually this is not really a step as it’s a requirement. If you’re passionate about what you do, doing all this will be a breeze and so much fun. If you’re not, maybe you should start thinking about changing career path…

And when you can standout as a candidate you can get any job you want! Really!
(Conditions may apply, see small invisible footprint for details).

What are your tips on finding your dream job ?

If you liked this post, please digg it!

That’s right! I’m StandoutJobs new Ruby Guru!

If you’ve been living under a rock for some time, StandoutJobs is one of the hottest new Montreal startup about to change to whole recruiting experience!

Three months ago I would never dreamed about having a job like this in Montreal. I though that things like this only happen in Boston, New York, Silicon Valley and stuff. It was Fred’s DemoCamp that opened my eyes to the whole local scene and was the first event that started a series of amazing meet with brilliant and passionate people. Since then, I’m starting to believe Montreal is becoming a central point in tech startup. looking at Heri’s Montreal Tech Watch was too an amazing eye opener.

If you’re in the same mind-state as I was, maybe you should give a look at some of StandoutJobs video posts.

Thanks to Ben, Fred and Austin for taking me on the team even tough I’m heavily handicapped (I got really tiny ears and can’t eat peppers)

Ben Yoskovitz, a founder of StandoutJobs, which recently closed a $1.5 Million round has an excellent post on whether a startup should raise money from VC’s or not.

Coming after yesterdays broohaha with Guy Kawasaki’s post on starting a website for $12K – its extremely timely.

The question of startups getting VC’s or angels, versus Skunkworks projects on your visa, or as i like to call it Spaghetti Ideas from ‘throwing spaghetti against a wall to see if it sticks.’ Is a perfectly legitimate way to see if a project/product has legs, though common sense should be applied before setting out on the journey.

Closer to home my company is working on a program that helps develop startups. Part of my daily routine is working with small teams of bright energetic engineers/programmers/biz-students to work on projects that may or may not turn out, we have a number of teams on multiple projects. In web 1.0 it sounds like an incubator, but with a bit more than a Web2.0 budget than Ycombinator. We just simply call it our Ventures Program.

I also disagree with Guy about location, we bring the teams to our offices to work with us, they go back to their place of origin eventually but their time here is necessary. While some of the plans developed are our own (internal) ideas, the teams have the opportunity to branch out and if we see merit develop their own opportunities. We don’t develop spaghetti idea’s, people can (and i occasionally do) develop them but not in our program, we want viable stand alone businesses. Not a weekend project that costs us $15K, to me thats just stupid. I don’t know about Guy but my time costs me. I enjoyed the fact that Guy never mentioned that his time was worth anything, but I digress. For a more nuanced view Checkout Rick Segal.

In the end how you develop and or finance your business depends on your circumstances. No one can tell you the best way forward without actually sitting down and working it all out. Ben’s article which sparked this post is a great place to start on the the thought process you should be having when looking to start your next big idea.