Guest Post By Brynn Chandler

Anyone can go a little stir crazy during the “job search” period of your life.  At first you spend hours each day roaming the internet, writing cover letters, emailing contacts.  Then you start to watch more TV, play more video games, roam the internet aimlessly and occupy yourself on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Perez Hilton….whatever you need to distract yourself from the fact that you don’t know where to look for a job next.  Pretty soon you find yourself staying in your pajamas all day, never leaving the apartment, and eating frozen for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  You still send resumes out, but the hope and excitement is gone as the black hole of the internet sucks in each resume, never to hear from it again. 

I speak from experience.  I’m a two time veteran of the “job search.”  During my first stint, I spent an entire day in bed watching Season 1 of “Lost”. In bed!  I also became addicted to The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time.  Maybe that wouldn’t be so strange if I wasn’t a girl that is so terrible at video games that my guy friends ban me from picking up the controllers.

Eventually, I found a job when I went out to lunch with a friend who had a connection and my days as a slob ended. 

A year and a half later, I quit, moved to a new city, and started job search Round 2 of my life.  This time, however, I was determined to do it a little differently.  I didn’t want to turn into a depressed couch monster all over again.  Unsure of what I wanted to do, I walked up and down a restaurant loaded street close to my house with my resume in hand.  I popped my head into each one, located the manager, and asked if any serving positions were open.  Within one afternoon, I had a job.  Now of course waitressing is not one of my life goals. But at least it gives me a little bit of income and still leaves me time to perform my more serious job hunt. 

 When thinking about the types of jobs I wanted, micro-finance has always come to mind.  I’d talked to many of my friends about my interest and one of my friends knew a girl who started a micro-finance non-profit.  I got her info and set up a dinner.  After one meal, I had joined a volunteer board for the non-profit.  It wouldn’t make me any money, but it fulfilled one of my interests and gave me something interesting and current to put on my resume. 

 This article at DumbLittleMan.com by Kate Mortell has some good basic suggestions for keeping yourself busy and feeling purposeful during the “job search” period of your life. 

 Yes, some of them are pretty obvious/basic, but they’re also effective.  These are my favorite six:

(1) Get clean and get dressed.  Get up at a decent hour and get clean. Also, you’ll never leave the house if you’re dirty and smell bad. You’ll feel better about yourself I promise.

(2) Create a daily ritual. This is one of my favorite suggestions.  Give yourself places to be and tasks to accomplish whether it’s running simple errands, exploring a new museum, going on a bike ride, or calling your grandmother. Even if you don’t get a job that day, at least you can feel the day had some purpose.

(3) Conduct brief, organized online job searches. Make this a part of your daily ritual.  Keep it short.  Sign on to job sites (like GrouperEye) that send you emails about positions that you’re interested in.  Have a purpose when you go online and stick to it.  When you find yourself starting to roam aimlessly, it’s time to get off.  Push the power button and leave. 

(4) Connect with former colleagues and old friends.  Email people you know that work in an interesting field.  Meet with them face to face.  Have lunch or coffee.  Go on a walk with them.  Just tell them you want to pick their brain and then do it.  

(5) Volunteer. Make sure you pick something you’re interested in.  You could make friends and meet people with similar interests that could connect you to job opportunities.  Furthermore, chances are that your future job won’t fulfill all of your life interests.  You can use your volunteer work to fill in the gaps.  It also gets you out of the house and will give you something interesting to talk about in interviews.  
 
(6) Take a class or take up a hobby.  Do something you’re excited about.  If you take up a new hobby, aim to make it a social one so that you’re interacting with other people. 

Follow these suggestions, and I promise you’ll stay out of the job search slump!

HR is one of the most rapidly changing and fascinating fields of work. But, you will seldom hear a young person say, “I want to be an HR executive.” The creative students go into marketing and the numbers-oriented students go into finance. That is the current state.

I recently read an article titled Down On HR. Here is a quick excerpt:

As approximately 2.9 million young people begin their pursuit of a college degree this fall, Chicago-based outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. released its list of the best fields of study as advised by 150 human resource executives.

It may come as no surprise that the surveyed HR executives selected computer science as the most recommended field of study for students (16 percent), followed closely by engineering (15.2 percent) and medicine (14.3 percent).

But, in an ironic twist, and perhaps a troubling sign indicative of the state of the overall industry, only 2 percent of the human resource executives actually recommended HR as the best field of study for college freshmen. HR scored next to last, just above law (1.4 percent). Read More…

What the heck is going on? Sure, maybe I’m crazy, but I believe HR is totally intriguing. Without a doubt, HR needs the bright, creative, innovative young people   How can we make HR more appealing?  A fascinating observation - something is wrong and we need to fix it. More coming…..

Guest Post By Brynn Chandler

This fall, Dell is looking outside company walls for new and innovative product design ideas.  And where did they turn?  Students!

But these aren’t just any students.  They are enrolled in the Interdisciplinary Product Development Programat the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Over the entire school year they will  will compete in teams to develop the newest, coolest gadget for Dell.  In return, Dell is sponsoring the competition with a cool $125,000.  In Michaels Ardnt’s BusinessWeek article “What’s next for Dell,” he breaks down the mechanics of the program:

“By the end of the fall semester, each team is expected to have one product idea, culled from perhaps 100 concepts after market research, focus groups, consultation with their professors, and periodic reviews by a squad from Dell. By the end of the spring semester, each of these ideas is supposed to be honed into a fully formed product, complete with prototypes and marketing plans. Add up all the students’ time, and Dell is getting more than 10,000 man-hours for its money—or $12.50 an hour.”

Sounds like a pretty good deal.  More and more companies are realizing the benefits of working with student talent communities to come up with new ideas.  As stated by Michael Ardnt, “for $125,000, Dell could put a product designer on its payroll for a year, or maybe two given how dreadful the job market is these days,”  but they teamed up with a University instead.   Not only are students less expensive than paying an employee, but they think outside of the box and are eager to prove themselves and their ideas. 

Working with students is a trend that’s just starting to gain momentum.  GrouperEye is here to light a fire under it. This is what GrouperEye does – except easier and more scalable! Every company should develop a student talent community, it just makes sense.

Today, Netflix wrote one of the most innovative $1,000,000 checks ever.

In October of 2006, Netflix issued a difficult and intense challenge: come up with a recommendation software that could do a better job accurately predicting the movies customers would like than Netflix’s in-house software, Cinematch. To qualify for the prize, entries had to be at least 10 percent better than Cinematch.

You can read more about the challenge details at NetflixPrize.com. The goal for Netflix was summed up by Chief Product Officer, Niel Hunt: ““Accurately predicting the movies Netflix members will love is a key component of our service.” But, it’s a lot more than that, isn’t it? This isn’t just about creating a better recommendation engine (although that did happen), this is about “work” as we know it. This million dollar challenge is a testament to the fact that the crowd (when tapped effectively) is brilliant. And, it’s worth talking about.

This made Netflix cool and talk-worthy – don’t ever underestimate the importance of this.

Damn, Google is smart. They understand employer branding. They understand that top talent loves challenges. They understand that the genius outliers love unusual stuff.

Google has recently been posting these banners around MIT:

It reads, “If you can figure this out, you may have a future at Google.” How flipping cool is this? This is what gets technology and math students revved up – they compete against each other to see who is the smartest. And at the other end of the equation is a job with Google! Rumor has it that nobody there has cracked the code yet (banners are less than two days  old) and that there is a phone number at the other end of the code which you call and leave a voicemail. Brilliant!

So, while your HR team is busy posting jobs on Monster, Google is receiving brand recognition, PR, genius level hires, and more product adoption. For the love of the game, think more like Google – quit viewing HR as some boring transactional process! It’s not. Google is right, follow them.