Archive for the ‘Job’ tag
Collegefeed rolls out career marketplace nationwide to help students find jobs
Graduating from college involves more than black gowns and senior celebrations. Most students have to find a job, and Collegefeed opened its digital doors nationwide today to help them do that.
Collegefeed is a social network along the lines of LinkedIn, but it’s geared toward students and recent graduates. The online career marketplace helps them find desirable opportunities and companies use the network to search for candidates without having to go from campus-to-campus.
Founder Sanjeev Agrawal used to be Google’s head of products. He observed college students struggling to enter the workforce and saddled by record amounts of debt. At the same time, companies like Google were struggling to fill open positions and willing to spend thousands of dollars to find the right candidate. LinkedIn and Monster.com are often not effective for students who don’t have the professional network or work experience to stand out, and on-the-ground recruiting is a time-consuming and expensive process for employers.
This is the problem Collegefeed is trying to solve.
“It is no easier to get a good start in life today than it was 20 years ago preweb, presocial, premobile,” Agrawal said in a Q&A. “Starting this week, 1-plus million new college graduates will struggle to enter the workforce. Almost 50 percent of them will fail, according to most recent research, but more and more companies understand that their future is somewhere in college right now. Think of Collegefeed as a social career platform that brings together students, employers, alums, industry insiders and college career services in one place.”
Students create short profiles with their work experience, skill sets, and interests and the system will search for matching jobs and internships. They can also enter the names of companies they like and a recommendation engine will suggest similar companies and jobs, “like Netflix does for movies.” Agrawal said this will help them discover new opportunities with companies they may not have heard of or considered before. Students can browse through custom news feeds with updates on their preferred employers. It also has networking and educational opportunities, and students can share experiences with each other.
Employers on Collegefeed benefit from access to a wider network of potential hires at a lower cost. They can push content to news feeds, sponsor contests, and get a newsfeed of their own with recommended students.
Collegefeed launched in private beta in March with Stanford, Berkeley, and Carnegie Melon. Agrawal said students have already secured interviews, jobs, internships, and financial awards with companies including YouTube, eBay, Facebook, Morgan Stanley, and Microsoft. Today, Collegefeed is open nationwide to any students and employer.
Agrawal said that over the past few years, multiple companies have popped up using social media to address challenges in recruiting and hiring, but “no-one has created a new social network that combines everything together in one place for both students and employers.” Competitors include LinkedIn, Readyforce, and AfterCollege. However, Collegefeed makes use of “push” technology and the popularity of news feeds to curate, aggregate, and present the information in digestible form to both students and employers.
The founding team of six has 10 college degrees between them and is based in Mountain View, Calif. It’s a bootstrapped company.
Filed under: Business, Entrepreneur, Social 
     |
Do You Love Your Job? INFOGRAPHIC
From our friends at FreshGigs.ca
Recently over 5000 Canadian professionals responded to a FreshGigs.ca survey that looked at what people really think about their job.
Take a look at the infographic below we created with the results from that survey. Let us know what you think in the comments and please help us spread the word by using the share buttons above or the ‘click to tweet’ below.
“Love Your Job? Compare With Other Canadians: Infographic”
4 ways P&G is dominating the Olympics with online video
Four billion people across the globe are expected to watch the Olympics this year. As a brand marketer, this is a massive opportunity. But the Olympics only last for little more than two weeks. How do marketers capture the Olympics spirit, go for the gold (so to speak), and stretch this unique opportunity as far as they can?
P&G seems to have found a formula for success. The CPG giant started its Olympic campaign, “Proud Sponsor of Moms” early, launching it in January of this year, more than seven months before the games began. Since then, it’s added multiple new creatives and has surged with the opening ceremonies in London. The result is a massive campaign that’s driven more than 37 million views to date, with more than 5.1 million views in July alone — enough to give P&G its debut on the Top Brands in Video chart.
Powered by data from Visible Measures, this monthly chart looks at the most-watched brands in online video, across all of their campaigns. (Check out past charts for June, May, and April.)
Start with your audience
Like any good campaign, P&G started with its core audience: moms. “Proud Sponsor of Moms” is a celebration of mothers across the globe. It shows the love and support they pour into their kids’ dreams, whether their dream is to become the next Michael Phelps, Gabby Douglas, or simply enjoy competing and playing with other kids.
All of the content centers on this simple idea of celebrating moms. The main creative for the campaign, called “Best Job,” is a relatively straightforward yet poignant execution. It shows moms across the world waking their kids up at the crack of dawn, giving them breakfast, waiting for the bus in the rain, all to make sure they get to practice. It subtly highlights the everyday sacrifices moms make to ensure their kids reach their potential.
Is “Best Job” traditional viral content? No. But it’s solid content that resonates with P&G’s core audience. More than 14.4 million views to date for “Best Job” — that number speaks for itself.
Other creative executions for “Proud Sponsor of Moms” include “Raising an Olympian,” which features interviews with moms of Olympians, a “Momifesto” in which Olympians thank their moms for all they do, and more.
How to Get Hired as an Inbound Marketer
You aren’t working? What? What’s wrong with you?
Well, in case you haven’t noticed (if you’re reading this, you probably have) people aren’t just handing out jobs. But if you’re looking for a job in marketing — specifically inbound marketing — there’s some light at the end of the tunnel. Read the rest of this entry »
Social Media – Employers and Social Snooping
It wasn’t that long ago that we posted about why you should watch what you say on social media, especially in the light of the story that appeared in The Drum about the council press officer who was forced to quit his job after an ill-judged 
tweet.
Well, once again the issue has been raised in The Drum, this time looking at the legal perspective of work-related social media comments.
We’ve all been there – after a long and arduous week at work, you’re relaxing in the pub with colleagues and decide to rant about your employer or a client on your Facebook page.
After all, it’s your Facebook page so you can write what you like – right? You know your friends will have sympathy with your plight and will offer the soothing words you crave.
But what happens when your employer also sees your comment?
You could argue (as mentioned in The Drum’s article) that they shouldn’t be snooping and that reading your posts is like ‘reading your personal mail.’ But the post goes on to say that research suggests that ‘30% of employers have taken a member of staff through a formal disciplinary procedure as a result of comments made on their social media pages.’
Yikes!
The problem seems to lie in the potentially viral nature of social sharing. You may well post your opinion on your wall, but you have no control over who shares it, re-posts it on their wall or re-tweets it. Before you know it, your comment could be plastered all over cyber space.
So, is there anyway round this minefield?
Well, we all have lapses of judgement from time to time, but when they occur online in the social world, backtracking can be virtually impossible leading to serious consequences.
Although no company can prevent their staff from using social media, they should have a social media policy in place that clearly outlines what is and isn’t acceptable. Plus, they must also ensure they make it very clear what the consequences will be should anyone overstep the line.
What do you think?
As an employee, do you think it’s right that your employer should be snooping into your social world?
If you’re an employer, do you check up on your staff? Do you have a social media policy in place?
Leave a comment below and lets find out your views – whichever side of the fence you’re on.
Conservation of anxiety
Events scale. The magnitude of our impact and the impact of our decisions can vary wildly, depending on the stakes. You can decide which chocolate bar to buy or you can decide whether or not to take a job.
Our fear, though, can’t scale. It doesn’t work that way.
The screaming fear in your stomach before you give a speech to 12 kids in the fifth grade is precisely the same fear a presidential candidate feels before the final debate. The fight-or-flight reflex that speeds up your heart when you’re about to get a speeding ticket you don’t deserve isn’t very different than the chemical reaction in the brain of an accused (but innocent) murder suspect when the jury walks in.
Bigger stakes can’t lead to more fear.
And, in an interesting glitch, more fear often tricks us into thinking we’re dealing with bigger stakes.
Not only that, but we have trouble overlapping our fearful moments. If that sales call is right down the street, you will probably put more anxiousness into the preparation for the meeting than if it’s two plane rides and ferry away, because you’ll be reserving some of your available agita for the transport.
Fear has very few gradations and it has a ceiling. We evolved to have an alert system that kept us alive, but while it’s powerful, it’s crude.
This is why we’re able to teach ourselves to confidently give a speech to 10,000 or make life or death decisions in the battlefield. Fear is fear, and once we learn to work with it, we can scale the stakes.
All of which is a way to remind yourself that emotions kick in and then we start telling ourselves a story about how important/make-or-break/high stakes this next event is. Fear floods our brain with chemicals, we go on high alert and then rationalize that fear by describing just how vital this thing we’re anxious about is.
No need to fool yourself. We all have a limited fear vocabulary, and it tends to yell.
Microsoft job listing hints at new Xbox console within 18 months
According to a report on Computerworld, a Microsoft job listing on its Careers website provided a bit of an information leak. The job posting has since been deleted, but it said, “Over the next 18 months, Microsoft will release new versions of all of our most significant products, including Windows (Client, Server, Phone, and Azure), Office, and Xbox.”
Microsoft has made no announcements about a new Xbox console as yet, so this is a significant hint. In addition, Computerworld reports that Microsoft’s Brian Hall made mention of a new Xbox in conjunction with other updates like Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. Microsoft, for its part, quickly moved to explain that Hall only meant a new software update.
With the job listing pointing to an actual hardware refresh, Microsoft’s PR response seems too facile. However, keeping quiet about a console that’s in development is vital, as an 18-month drop in sales while consumers wait for the next generation could hurt Microsoft’s bottom line.
An 18-month window would put a possible new Xbox console in the holiday 2013 season. While there are no firm details about a new gaming console from Microsoft, some reports claim that it has Blu-ray support, while others claim the new Xbox will come in two flavors, one full-sized machine and possible a smaller set-top box like the Apple TV or Roku media players.
The current Xbox 360 continues to dominate the sales charts, with models that include high-capacity hard drives, Internet connections, and the Kinect motion control system. The original Xbox 360 came out in 2005.
Filed under: games, VentureBeat 
New Hooters Ad as Obnoxious and Puerile as You’d Expect
Eastbound & Down is a funny show. So, you'd think its co-creator, Jody Hill, might have done a better job directing this new Hooters commercial from ad agency Fitzgerald+CO. Instead, we get a spot that's both crude and unfunny. It's based on a loutish lifeguard who's disgusted by the wrinkly old people he has to watch in the water, and whose inner dialogue is spoken by angel and devil owl puppets over his shoulder (the owl being the Hooters mascot). "I just threw up in my beak," is the best line the devil owl can muster. "How we approached these [ads] was kind of like we do on Eastbound & Down," Hill says in the behind-the-scenes video. "You start with the script. That's kind of your blueprint for the structure. And then you add on a joke or two, and pretty soon you just start improv-ing off that. That's where you get those kind of magic moments that you can't really write." Perhaps those magic moments were confined to future spots—one of which will apparently star former NFL coach Jon Gruden. Of course, it's possible Hill did a remarkable job here—juvenile and obnoxious being this brand's core attributes after all. Credits after the jump.
CREDITS
Client: Hooters
Title: "Lifeguard"
Agency: Fitzgerald+CO
Agency Producer/HOP: Christine Sigety
Creative Director: Evan Levy
CCO: Noel Cottrell
SR. AD: Patrick Campbell
Account Director: Allison Sherrill
Production Company: Caviar
Executive Producer: Michael Sagol, Jasper Thomlinson
Producer: Luke Ricci
Director: Jody Hill
DOP: Mark Williams
Production Designer: Lauryn Leclere
Editorial Company: Arcade Edit
Executive Producer: Damian Stevens
Editor: Geoff Hounsell
Producer: Denise Hutton
 |
 |
Risk Management: Guarding the Gates (Altimeter Report)
Interestingly, I’ve been meeting more compliance, legal, and governance professionals in meetings involved in brand side discussions around social business strategies. To understand the needs of this specific role’s goal is to protect the company but enable business to connect to customers Altimeter conduct an Open Research project
My colleagues Analyst Alan Webber and Researcher Jaimy Szymanski interviewed 33 professionals and vendors on the front end of social media risk management and surveyed 92 professionals who said social media risk management was either a significant part or the primary part of their job. The result is our report Guarding The Social Gates: The Imperative For Social Media Risk Management which looks at the newly emerging field of social media risk management.
If you’re a social strategist, (or serve one on agency or vendor side) it’s important you know how to manage risk as you roll out social business programs. Please forward this research report to those who are guarding the gates.
This report includes
- Interviews with 33 professionals of vendor and risk management, including those from top brands.
- Survey of 92 professionals who have a significant part or the primary part of their job in risk management
- Nearly a dozen frameworks, graphics, charts, and flow diagrams
Lady Gaga on Creativity
