Hi gang – After a brief hiatus, I’m back to JobSyntax. October has been travel / vacation month for the Ledgards.
On our first stop, Josh, the dogs, and I drove down to Sonoma, CA. Josh was attending the Online Community Summit. (Click here for his live blogging notes.) Josh and I love road trips so driving trip was the cat’s meow. The dogs even had a good time. We, of course, took a day to wine taste (must go back!), and then it was off to the conference for him. I worked from our hotel in Sonoma during the days and had the great opportunity to mingle and network with his fellow attendees in the evenings.
Getting to hang out with the OCS attendees was an awesome opportunity for me since Zoe and I see ourselves as working in the online marketing and community space - but often have difficulty breaking into that crowd. (After all, recruiters are the used car salesmen of the professional world, no?) :) We dabble in hosting a community here on JobSyntax (that’s the dream anyway), but the real value we lend is teaching jobseekers and employers how to leverage existing communities and even build or enhance their own communities to ease their job search and recruiting efforts.
I’m saying all this because being around the OCS attendees (and gearing up for the Blog Business Summit later this week) has really re-confirmed for me how JobSyntax is not as much in the recruiting space as we’re in the online communities space. We've always known that; it’s just easy to lose your direction sometimes. I’m not sure if I’ve ever written about this on the blog or not, but a big thing we always tried to keep in mind while forming, launching, and running JobSyntax is Seth Godin’s advice about picking and then embracing your own category.
From the beginning, Z and I knew our category wasn’t resume writing or recruiting consultation or anything standard like that. For a while, we thought our category revolved around our expertise and passion for software engineering. I’m sure it does. But the more we realize that we are marketers at heart, the more we believe that our people … those in similar categories … are more likely those in the online marketing and communities space. We’re just cool that we have that recruiting and software engineering bent to our category. :) So I was just happy to have reaffirmation that we needed. But enough about that.
After Sonoma, it was off to Destin, Florida for a real vacation. 10 days of relaxation and fun in the sun. I have no epiphanies to report from this trip except to inform you that ghost crabs burrow into the sand up to 4 feet deep during the day and sprint to the sea at night to obtain oxygen. If you find any ghost crabs in your pool, trying to release them back to the shore at mid-day will only result in a feeding frenzy for hungry seagulls. Ah, the circle of life.
But I’m back now. I tried to keep up a bit with recruiting news while I was gone and, really, the only buzz I heard was about Google. All with a slightly negative tone, actually, which is an interesting turning of the tide. Here are a few stories I read that you may or may not have caught while I was gone.
In India, Even Google Finds Job Recruiting Tough
via Jim
Google Catches Flak for Its Hiring Procedures
What Makes Google (vs. Microsoft) Tick?
Well, with that, it’s nice to be back!
gretchen