It's all about the jobs

Even Conan can't keep his job, although I am sure many of us would welcome a multi-million dollar payout as he got last week. But as our economy tries to re-start itself, I have seen first-hand how hard it is for people to get new jobs. Over the past seven months, I have been working with our local Regional Chamber and Growth Association in an effort called the St. Louis Job Angels, to help get information about new jobs quickly disseminated to the right people, and also provide self-help and peer networking to job seekers.

The effort was started nationally by consultant Mark Stelzner and has since become very successful here in St. Louis. We have more than 600 people on our LinkedIn group and a new job is posted almost daily. We also send out the postings via Twitter too, although trying to fit an entire job description into 100 or so characters is a challenge. Based on these efforts, I have some advice for employers and job seekers that I want to share.

First off, if you are going to post your opening online, make sure your Web jobs board is both search and Twitter-friendly. Try to have unique and simple URLs that people can email and Tweet to bring job seekers directly to the position at hand. Put all the information about the job on one page, including salary range, prerequisites, and reasonable experiences and skills required. Include a job number or some other identifying string that job applicants can use and reTweet so that others can quickly find the opening. And be specific about how to be contacted and with what information.

You would be surprised (well, maybe not) how many job openings I look at that don't have this basic information. This isn't rocket science (and we do have a few openings here in St. Louis for rocket scientists, believe me) and you would think that Al Gore still hasn't gotten around to inventing the Internet, what with some of the postings that I see.

Some online job boards that are part of individual companies are behind registration walls, so you have to provide all sorts of information about yourself before you can get to see the actual jobs themselves. Bad idea! You want people to browse your board, because they might see something else that they are more qualified or more interested in.

There is a reason not to skimp on descriptions. The more information you can provide the job seeker, the better and more of a match your applicants will be when it comes time to apply.

The unique URL per job makes it easier to reTweet the openings: you use a URL shortening service such as Bit.ly and you can send out the job post quickly without having to worry that Twitter will mangle the URL or that users won't be able to find it on the Internet someplace.

Some recruiters are told not to divulge the company name for fear that the company will be buried in resumes. Fair enough. But then provide more detail about the job so that applicants can understand what they are getting themselves into.

Also, be fair about telecommuting options. It is time to realize that many of us want to stay put for various reasons. If your management can deal with finding the best candidate in another city, then support this practice. I mean, we are in 2010, people!

Second, spend some time on LinkedIn. Yes, there are still plenty of places where you can post job openings, including Monster, Craigslist, and hundreds of other more specialized sites. And yes, employers should be promiscuous and post openings widely too. But the right use of LinkedIn by both employers and job seekers can be useful.

I keep adjusting my online LinkedIn profile all the time, even though I have had it for many years. I keep forgetting to add particular experiences, or to ask for references from previous bosses. So don't try to create your entire profile in one sitting, but come back to it frequently. I have some more tips on how to improve your LinkedIn presence here if you want to view my slides:
http://slideshare.net/davidstrom

Most of the people I know are still new at using this service, and some are unaware about the more advanced features such as Groups and Answers that can help augment your job searching and make the service more valuable too. Answers can help build your expertise and demonstrate your knowledge of a topic or niche. Groups can be used, as we do for St. Louis Job Angels group, how to find others who share similar traits and can be quickly scanned for updated information.

LinkedIn can be both a blessing and a curse. Getting groups setup is a slow process, and you have to follow an arcane series of rules if you want to play in their sandbox: for example, as group Admin, I can send out exactly no more than one weekly email to the group. I try not to bury people in emails, but still, sometimes you want to get the word out if we have had a lot of postings or some with very short response times.

Third, become better at marketing yourself. One of my colleagues here and the supervisor of the MissouriCareerSource local office, Frank Alaniz, talks about how to develop a resume that will present your qualifications in a way that a job interviewer or HR screener can quickly see you online. Most employers spend less than three minutes reviewing resumes, which means you have to grab them at hello:
http://docs.google.com/View?id=d6kgf4r_20gr2v5xg8

Good luck with your own job search, and maybe you too can host a late-night show in the near future.

Using Windows 7 Remote Server Administration Tools

RSAT makes it easier to manage your collection of Windows 2003 and 2008 servers remotely and securely from your Windows 7 desktop. This screencast shows how it works.

There’s plenty to learn, including setting up new file shares, managing the built-in Internet Information Server Web services, handling group policies and other sophisticated features. The installation is somewhat convoluted and you’ll want to spend some time reading the help files too.

See my screencast video at: http://itexpertvoice.com/home/using-windows-7-remote-server-administration-tools/

Using the Windows 7 PowerShell Scripting Environment

PowerShell ISE is a visual command-line editor that used to be called Graphical
PowerShell. In this video, we show you how to become familiar with its extensive
command set which can be used to automate common tasks.

You may view the latest post at ITExpertVoice here:
http://itexpertvoice.com/home/using-the-windows-7-powershell-scripting-environment/

Tune Up Utilities 2010 to tweak your PC's performance

Make your Windows PC run faster and more reliably with this updated utility program. It can do many common tasks quickly and automatically, and clean up your hard drive and registry settings too.

www.tune-up.com
Price: $49.95, for up to three PCs
Supports Windows 7, Vista and XP with SP2, in both the 32- and 64-bit OSs

ITExpertVoice screencast: Using Laplink's PC Mover to Migrate XP to Windows 7

If you are running Windows XP and want to upgrade to Windows 7 without having to reformat your machine’s hard drive, you currently have one choice: a utility called PC Mover from Laplink software. This video shows you the steps involved in the migration, along with things to look out for in using PC Mover.
http://itexpertvoice.com/home/using-laplinks-pc-mover-to-migrate-a-windows-xp-desktop-to-windows-7/

ITExpertVoice screencast: Using Windows 7 Mobility Center

Windows Mobility Center is a new feature of Windows 7. Microsoft has collected in one place for road warriors a powerful series of controls that can help you quickly connect to wireless networks, adjust your screen for presentations, and set up other important adjustments. No more hunting around the Control Panel settings for busy people on the go. This video shows you the lay of the landscape with Mobility Center.
http://itexpertvoice.com/home/using-windows-7-mobility-center/

Developing the next gen of iPhone apps programmers

I had an opportunity to audit a computer science class this week at Washington University, a class that was teaching students how to write iPhone apps. It was their final presentation, and I got to see a dozen apps that were very impressive. As I was watching the kids present, I was thinking back to my college days and the similarities and differences about my education.

Of course, back in my day real programmers wrote in Assembler, and maybe Fortran. None of this object-oriented stuff had even been invented. We also had punched cards, which is probably why I never became a programmer. In grad school, we had video terminals because PCs were still being tinkered around inside Silicon Valley garages.

In the Wash U class, most of the students had their own Macbooks, some better than my own. Each was given an iPod touch to use during the semester and this session was the moment of truth, where they had to demo their apps in front of the class. Most of the programming projects were functional, although there were a few students that had obviously been putting some long hours trying to get the bugs out of their apps. One of the kids was working on his presentation and actually debugged his app during class. Some things never change.

I was impressed first of all with the apps, which ranged from tracking what is in your fridge to being used by a personal trainer to track their clients' workouts to locating friends on a campus map during free times. There was an app that taught people how to count cards at Blackjack --this could have helped one of my dorm-mates who would periodically make a run to Tahoe where they still used single decks and come home with enough money to pay for his living expenses. Another was used to collate and tag photos from Flickr. Each team had to research and find an app to build that wasn't yet sold on the App Store, too.

I hope the kids take the time to finish them and post them to the App Store. Some of the apps were very polished and could probably be used as is with almost no additional effort, while a few just crashed with the slightest tap on the screen. I was also impressed with the quality of the presentations and how polished the kids were in front of the class. This isn't what I remember of my nerdy classmates back in the day, where we seldom even spoke to each other, let alone spoke Powerpoint. Most of the kids put together a few slides that showed their decision-making and progress during the class. Some of the apps were built in teams, some solo. There were about 25 kids in the class, with two women. (This is about the same sad gender ratio in my day, too.)

These were not beginning computer science students by any means. Each of them had to have an understanding of a lot of different pieces, including the graphics interface of the iPhone itself, database calls, Web services, and the Apple development environment that is used to build the app itself. That is a lot for any programmer to handle, but the kids took it in stride. You could tell that they learned a lot during the semester, and were proud of it too. Heck, I was proud of them and I didn't even know them.

One of the things that I was struck with during the class was how collaborative the kids were. This wasn't the introverted nerds of my misspent youth -- these kids were calling out suggestions to help each other and try to remove the remaining roadblocks in each other's apps. Some of them had tried to go down a particular path with one tool, only to change horses and use something else. It was fun to watch them get all excited about some arcane code fragment. Part of this I think was because the iPhone environment is so new and so contained that it makes it easier to collaborate, because there are so many things to learn that are outside the normal coding process.

They also learned first-hand about feature creep and trying to hit their requirements on time and how to balance making things work with making things look pretty.

Speaking of which, most of the students had high standards for the look and feel of their apps. There isn't much screen real estate on the iPhone to fool around with, and you have to make every pixel count. Some of the kids took the time to find the right icons to display on screen, and they all took pains to make use of the various menus and screen controls that make the iPhone apps easy to use with one or two fingers. That was impressive, and showed me that the iPhone really has a future and why 100,000 plus apps have been already created.

You could also see the beginnings of professional computer scientists here too. A few of them mentioned how they coded in pairs, using extreme programming techniques. I think that meant that the pair stayed up all night to meet a particular deadline, but still, that is how it happens in the real world too. And learning object-oriented languages is part and parcel to today's programming world, unlike the world that I entered after college.

One kid had the funniest line, talking about his mother, who is a project manager and a programmer. "My mom is very old school and knew all these Unix shell script commands that she never told me about when I was growing up." Oh, youth is so wasted on the young!

If your local university offers a class on iPhone apps, you might want to stop by and be inspired. I know I was. Thanks to the teacher Todd Sproull for letting me sit in.