The Solar Foundation is making it easier to track solar jobs with the State Solar Jobs Map, an interactive online tool showing job numbers for all 50 states.

Over 119,000 Americans have a job in the solar industry, and with a 13.2 percent increase in employment in the past year, the industry is quickly becoming one of the fastest-growing industries in the country.

The interactive map breaks down solar employment at the state level, providing information on the size of industry subsectors and shows users how their state stacks up to others on issues like key solar policies, jobs per capita, and number of homes powered by solar energy.

The State Solar Jobs Map provides a singular insight on the growing industry, apart from the numbers. The report noted that California has more solar jobs than actors, and Texas has more solar workers than ranchers.

“We are anticipating that solar jobs are going to continue to increase at the national level,” said TSF executive director Andrea Luecke. “These jobs figures demonstrate that the U.S. solar industry remains a powerful source of local job creation.”

The Solar Energy Industries Association predicts significant job growth as well – by supporting 440,000 permanent jobs by 2016.

California led the nation in solar jobs in 2012 followed by Arizona, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, proving that abundant sunshine is not necessarily essential for a strong solar market. In New Jersey, top jobs include installation, manufacturing and project development.

Although the top states don’t catch the same amount of rays, what they have in common is policy tools that support renewable energy and solar in particular, including green building and energy efficiency initiatives.

It’s also getting cheaper to install solar, which is key to company growth, according to the U.S. Solar Market Insight Report. The top solar jobs states all saw a significant decrease in residential and non-residential costs of installation, and 31 percent of employers agree that price declines drive growth.

“People want solar, people like solar, but the upfront cost has been an issue,” Luecke said. “But the declines in component prices are helping to make the installed costs much lower, and now companies can pass along the savings to the consumer.”

As solar becomes a competitive energy source for more Americans, it continues to grow the economic opportunities from east to west coast.

The Solar Foundation is a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in 1977 that works to increase the widespread adoption of solar energy through educational outreach, policy research, and market transformation.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple has been given a hard time about the accuracy of its Maps app in iOS, and yes, the company deserved it. But at least it looks like Apple is taking more serious steps to address issues by hiring “ground truth managers.”

Most of that Maps data is being improved on the server-side, and Apple recently released iOS 6.1.3 with several improvements to Maps.

The company has posted seven openings on its jobs website for “ground truth managers,” all in different parts of the world. These managers are basically assigned to oversee regional teams that collect and improve map data. The teams test new data in the real world to make sure it is accurate.

Here’s the job description for the U.S.-based “ground truth manager”:

The Maps team is searching for a manager for the team responsible for regional map quality and ground truth in the U.S. Each of our regional teams is responsible for the quality of our maps in their region. This team’s responsibilities include:

• Testing new releases of map code and data around the U.S.
• Collecting ground truth data to allow for analysis of the impact of potential map code or data changes relative to known truth.
• Utilizing local expertise to provide feedback about U.S.-specific mapping details.
• Evaluating competing products in-region relative to our maps.

As the manager of this team, you will be expected to drive all of this team’s work, determine where and how to allocate resources and clearly communicate test results and other feedback to teams in Cupertino. The U.S. regional team is also responsible for driving communication between engineering teams in Cupertino and our other regional teams as well as evaluating new regional testing initiatives in close coordination with the rest of the Maps quality team before those initiatives are rolled out to the other regional teams.

The job requires a “Bachelor’s degree in any field with CS or geography/GIS preferred” and a willingness to travel around the United States once or twice every few months.

Openings are available for the U.S., Japan, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, APAC, Americas, and the Mideast and Africa.

Photo illustration via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat
Original investigator photo via Shutterstock

In case we needed yet another A Bug’s Life vs. Antz reminder that filmmakers and independent thinking are incompatible concepts, there’s yet another Steve Jobs biopic coming out. Ashton Kutcher plays Steve Jobs in Jobs, Aaron Sorkin is producing an as-yet-unnamed Jobs movie, and now Funny or Die announced that has already made its own iMovie.

Actually, that would be iSteve. And they probably didn’t use iMovie to make it.

The New York Times reports that the Funny or Die movie stars Justin Long and, at over an hour, is the longest film the online comedy site has ever made.

“In true Internet fashion, it’s not based on very thorough research — essentially a cursory look at the Steve Jobs Wikipedia page,” Ryan Perez, who wrote and directed “iSteve.” told the Times “It’s very silly. But it looks at his whole life.”

Knowing the site, I’m sure the movie will be funny. But Ashton Kutcher has Justin Long beat by a landslide in actually looking like a believable Steve Jobs.

This movie, however, is all about speed. The script was written in five days, and the movie was shot in three days. And, it will hit the market sooner than Sorkin’s film, which is still in development, and Kutcher’s, which does not have a general release date set yet.

Apparently, the movie escalated from a newsroom prank, as writers for Funny or Die were thinking about creating a fake Steve Jobs movie trailer. Turns out they may have made an entire fake Steve Jobs movie.

InnovateCV will be launching a new company and product, Apploi, in April. I chatted with CEO Adam Lewis about the new product which, taken to its logical conclusion, could obsolete much of the founding company.

“Our enemy is the resume,” Lewis said. “We want candidates to show their true colors  … which you can’t do in a black and white resume.”

Apploi is a modern, mobile solution to the problem of finding employees, or, if you’re a jobseeker, a job.

Essentially, it’s a tablet app which walks candidates through a short and customizable series of basic questions, and then gets to the interesting part: video answers, audio answers, sliders to indicated data like hours of availability, and quick, simple tap-to-submit multiple choice answers. The goal is to give jobseekers the ability to be unique, be interesting, and be memorable … and to give hiring managers the ability to get a much deeper sense of what candidates are like than can be derived from a resume or an applicant tracking system.

At first, Apploi will target high-turnover industries like food and support services, Lewis said, starting in New York and working into InnovateCV’s biggest markets soon after. It’s multi-user, so an owner can use it for multiple businesses, or any particular group of owners can form a group as well, allowing them to share questions and formats without have to recreate the wheel.

“Rather than redoing the resume, which is an old, tired paradigm, it’s reinventing the resume,” Lewis said. “The beauty of this is that it’s very light-touch, very simple for companies.”

Lewis has adopted a pay-as-you-go methodology for Apploi: 40 responses to 40 resumes will cost you $39. The rate goes down as the number of responses goes up. And the results can be fed into an applicant tracking system, if companies wish to do so.

The iPad app will be out first, within a week, and an Android tablet app will follow about six weeks later.

But Lewis and company will have their work cut out for them. Hiring and recruiting is an intensely competitive space, and I see a ton on new startups who are focusing on hiring and recruiting, including KarmaHire, Zao, Path.io, GetHired, Quixey, Wowzer, enRecruit, VisualCV, and Spark Hire.

photo credit: pursuethepassion via photopin cc

This post is written by VentureBeat contributor Jon Soberg 

I recently wrote a post entitled “Hiring B players will kill your startup” and I got some great feedback, ranging from supportive to visceral. I would expect nothing less from a topic so important.  A few of the comments addressed a related topic — the growth and development of B players to become A players — so I decided to write a follow-up piece.

Let me start with a simple statement: B players will not become A players.

Why not? 

I make this statement because moving up is difficult, and it rarely happens.  B players in an organization either don’t have the right skills, the right drive, the right fit, or a combination of all these.

Does this mean if someone is an average employee, they can’t be a great person?  Of course not.  One of my favorite comments I received involved deciding on a brain surgeon. Would you opt for the best (the A player), or the average (C player) surgeon with better bedside manner?  I think nearly everyone would opt for the best surgeon.

If you need a specific set of skills, attributes and attitudes, and a person doesn’t have them, you will be hard-pressed to discover them hidden somewhere.

The best managers can’t optimize everyone’s performance 

Before the comments flow about how this is not black and white, let me delve into context.  I am fully aware that I am not talking about inanimate objects, and that these are not absolutes.  I’m also not going to try to argue with anyone about exceptions.  Of course there are exceptions.  The world doesn’t fit nicely into a bell curve.

That said, the world grades on a curve.  Valedictorian status is given to the best student, not to everyone for giving their best effort.  This isn’t Lake Wobegon — all employees are NOT above average.

Leadership, culture, and many factors contribute to each person’s performance, both in absolute terms, and on a daily basis.  There is no question that environment plays a big role.  There is a full nature versus nurture argument, but organizational culture rarely adapts and even the best managers are hard-pressed to optimize everyone’s individual performance. Many people believe that a great manager can make everyone perform at their best.  I totally agree, but the A players working for that manager will outperform the B players. The best teachers in the world still have some A students, some B’s and some C’s and below.

B players won’t become A players:

1. Within the same organization;
2. Within their role.

Suffice it to say here that taking someone who is coasting in one role and shifting them to another rarely turns them into your best employee.  How many great managers reading this post can relate to having one or two “go-to” people on the team who always rise to the challenge?

A Players versus B Players

The difference between B players and A players is not measured by intelligence, education or raw skill.  It isn’t about who went to Harvard, and who didn’t.  A players possess the rare combination of drive, intelligence and pride in their work that is above and beyond the norm.  They don’t associate their names with anything short of excellence.  The best of the best are those with the lethal combination of natural talent coupled with drive.

At the top of the spectrum, A players are dynamic leaders and visionaries — they take on huge challenges that would seem insurmountable by others. But A players can be great at any level, and in different roles.  We have all had the experience when we spoke to a great customer service person who went above and beyond.  A players tend to transcend roles; they excel, wherever they are.

As soon as I mention the term “A Player” most people have images of Michael Jordan, Jerry Rice, or Steve Jobs. These people are obviously A players, but the key to their success is only partially their innate abilities.  Renowned for their extreme drive, work ethic, and attention to detail, none of them wanted a flaw in their game or their products. A Players don’t have to be selfish, prima donnas, or arrogant.  Plenty are, but that isn’t what makes an A Player.  Some of the most accomplished people I know are humble team-players.

Some will argue that coaching and leadership can make B players into A players.  In some circumstances, that is true, but in most business cases, it just doesn’t happen.  Work ethic is tough to change.  Initiative doesn’t simply appear.  Attention to detail is not simple to coach.  Not saying these areas can’t improve, but you don’t normally see quantum leaps.

Bottom Line

Everyone cannot be an A player.  This is the harsh reality.  In the US we idolize people like Jack Welch, who famously advocates cutting the bottom 10 percent of an organization every year.  It gets more difficult when the worst people are already gone, but at the end of the day, even when it gets difficult, some people perform better than others.  In our competitive world, only a small percentage of people are truly A players, and moving into that echelon from below doesn’t happen often.

Jon Soberg is a Managing Director at Blumberg Capital, where he invests in early stage companies, specializing in FinTech, SaaS, and eCommerce. Prior to joining Blumberg Capital, Jon has been a serial entrepreneur and senior executive in multiple companies including Ditech, Broadband Digital Group and Adforce, which had a highly successful IPO.  

A CFA Charterholder and adjunct faculty in the Wharton Marketing Department, Jon earned a B.S in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College, an M.S. in Engineering from Northwestern University, and an MBA in Entrepreneurial Management and Marketing from the Wharton School, where he is a Palmer Scholar.

Top image via wavebreakmedia // Shutterstock

Top image via Shutterstock

Small business software giant Intuit has announced a partnership with LinkedIn to help small business owners make better hiring decisions.

The initiative, known as “Hire Smart,” kicks off with a free event featuring a host of speakers, including “Apprentice” winner Bill Rancic, Intuit CEO Brad Smith, and LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner (Weiner also serves on Intuit’s board). HR specialists, lawyers and accountants will also be on hand at the event to answer any niggling questions.

Attendees will receive a discounted membership to LinkedIn’s First Hire package of talent-finding software and discounted job listings, as well as three free months of access to Intuit’s online payroll service. This all amounts to about $400 in discounted software.

According to Smith, the event is just the beginning of where the partnership could go. “This event is our initial foray,” he said by phone. “Then we’ll pull back to make decisions on offering similar programs and discounts.” It’s reminiscent of Microsoft’s BizSpark program, which offers free software and support to startups.

Smith said the companies are currently brainstorming other cost-effective ways to help solve problems for potential employers who are competing for talent with large franchises. He said they already have a “leg up,” as small businesses are the preferred employer. Currently, 19 million people in the U.S. work at a small company.

The inaugural event takes place on April 27 at Intuit’s Mountain View headquarters, and registration starts now.

In 2007, 7 percent of U.S. workers spent at least one of their working days in a home office. In 2010, the most recent data that the Census Bureau released, 9.4 percent were telecommuting at least one day a week.

That’s 13.4 million people across the country, and these aren’t low-level employees that we’re talking about.

In fact, the Census Bureau says that they’re more likely to be in management and business, saying that “advances in communication and information technologies have allowed for a more mobile workforce.” And a growing segment of them are programmers, developers, and engineers.

The number of computing, engineering, and science professionals who work at home grew 69 percent from 2000 to 2010.

“The matter of how people work is as it has always been: What does it take to get the job done in a way that affords an equitable balance — a quid pro quo — between the organization and the individual?” said Joseph M. Pastore, a professor emeritus at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business. “For most companies, the issue is pretty clear: Do what works.”

What wasn’t working at Yahoo was home workers who were certainly home, but — alas — not workers. They were not logging into corporate systems like Yahoo’s VPN to get their work done.

But as someone who just had a child might realize, you don’t necessarily need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. As companies like Google, LinkedIn, Netflix, Cisco, Microsoft, AirBnB, Foursquare, and IBM realize.

Unless, that is, you want to do a stealth layoff.

photo credit: Travis Isaacs via photopin cc

In keeping this week’s trend of high-profile tech “AMAs,“ Facebook took to Reddit to tell the social network’s members what it looks for in potential employees.

Facebook engineer recruiter Will Barnett led the Ask Me Anything thread, which touched on subjects like corporate culture, benefits, and that awful GPA you graduated with.

The Facebook culture

This should be obvious, but before you apply for a job at a company, you should first know its corporate culture. Facebook’s is all about one word: building.

“We’re a culture of builders … of hackers. We don’t just expect our engineers to move fast and ship stuff, but everyone [is also] focused on building product and services that create a more open and connected world,” Barnett said.

“The parts I like best are the mutual trust, internal transparency, celebration of each other’s success, appetite for risk, and hair-trigger sensitivity to our values,” a Facebook engineering director added.

What does Facebook look for?

From Barnett’s comments, it’s clear that Facebook looks for candidates who will fit well into its corporate culture — regardless of what country they come from. Facebook hires heavily from places outside the U.S., including Russia, India, and Eastern Europe.

And for you humanities kids out there, the AMA has good news, too: While Facebook is obviously very much an engineering-focused company, no company runs thanks to engineers alone.

“Much of our campus hiring focuses on engineering, but we have hired new grads into marketing communications, user operations, payments and risk, monetization, business operations — the list goes on,” Barnett said, pointing to Facebook’s career page.

GPA isn’t everything, nor is a college degree

For candidates with less-than-stellar grades, Facebook’s solution is actually pretty straightforward: Have some good side projects.

“People who can display their actual skills by building real things beyond class projects are very frequently the stronger candidates. Ultimately, we want to hire people that [sic] build amazing things and push technologies to new heights,” Barnett said.

Basically, it helps to have some Github commits under your belt.

As far as the education question goes, you don’t need to look beyond Facebook’s own Mark Zuckerberg to know that a college degree isn’t everything — and Facebook’s recruiters agree.

“It would we weird for us to require a college degree (see Zuck). If you can build awesome stuff and have big impact, that’s all we’re really looking for,” Barnett said.

Facebook recruitment is serious about applicant privacy

Considering that Facebook is sitting on a trove of user data, an obvious question is whether the company puts that information to use when it’s considering applicants. Fortunately, the answer is “no.”

“We take privacy very seriously at Facebook and no applicants profile is accessed beyond what any other user would be able to publicly view,” Barnett said.

The Perks

Unsurprisingly, the benefits to working at Facebook are pretty lengthy. “Our perks approach is to provide the benefits that most allow people to focus on their work and have impact. Things like food, transportation, small teams, laundry, health care, flexible hours, IT resources/equipment, and connectivity are a priority for us,” Barnett said.

“Oh, god, the food. It’s … really good,” Facebook developer relations lead Chris Blizzard added.

Photos: Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat, Dan Fletcher

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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While some may struggle to call Ashton Kutcher a real artist, he certainly went all-out for his recent portrayal of Steve Jobs.

Kutcher, who features an uncanny resemblance to the late genius, went to great lengths to replicate Jobs, including mimicking his famed fruitarian diet. But as the actor revealed to the Associated Press, trying his hand at the extreme diet wasn’t the healthiest decision he could have made.

Fruitarianism sounds like exactly what it is: Adherents to it eat nothing but fruits, nuts, and seeds. Jobs, who at one point went a whole week eating just apples, was fond of the diet, as Walter Isaacson discusses in his 2011 biography.

“He believed in eating nothing but fruits and starchless vegetables, which he said prevented the body from forming harmful mucus, and he advocated cleansing the body regularly through prolonged fasts,” Isaacson writes.

But as Kutcher pretty rapidly found out, fruitarian diets are tough to stick to — especially when they land you in the hospital.

“I was like doubled over in pain, and my pancreas levels were completely out of whack, which was completely terrifying, considering everything,” Kutcher said of the havoc the diet wrecked on his internals.

Unfortunately, that suffering, while likely given major props from the method actors of the world, didn’t create the best film, which has so far received mixed reviews from critics.

jOBS stars Ashton Kutcher as, of course, Steve Jobs, and Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak, telling “the story of Steve Jobs’ ascension from college dropout into one of the most revered creative entrepreneurs of the 20th century,” as the movies’ producers have framed it on IMDB. Matthew Modine has a small role as well, playing ill-fated Apple CEO John Scully.

The jOBS movie, following on the footsteps of The Social Network just two years ago, shows the increased importance technology and those who create it have in popular culture. No one made a movie about Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in the ’80s or IBM founder Thomas Watson — who led IBM for a staggering 42 years — in the ’70s.

Of course, it helps that Steve Jobs was crazily charismatic. Even though Bill Gates is one of the richest people in the world, and now one of the foremost philanthropists of all time, no one has ever produced a biopic of the Microsoft founder.

While most of us will have to wait almost three months to see the movie, the worldwide premiere is actually in just three days at the Sundance film festival in Park City, Utah. (If you’re attending and want to provide a review for VentureBeat, let me know.)

Meanwhile, the rest of us will just have to settle for a one-minute clip released to Entertainment Week this morning.

Source: Entertainment Weekly

Jobs and Wozniak arguing in an underground HP parking lot

Image credit: jOBS movie

Other tech companies on the list include SAS in second place, cloud services company NetApp at number six, and Qualcomm, Salesforce.com, and Intuit in the top 25. Rackspace clocks in at #22, Intel at #68, and Microsoft at #75.

Apple didn’t make the list, nor did Facebook.

My big question: How is this list made? What data goes into the mix? SAS is the second-best place to work in America? Really? And Wegman’s Food Market is the fifth best? Is retirement planning and personal financial services so much fun that Edward Jones is the eighth-best company?

Part of it is turnover — how many employees leave. And part of it is perks — the prototypical foosball tables and free food. Another part is salaries.

That can all be judged from the descriptions that Fortune includes in its blurbs about each company, and they make sense. But nowhere can I find an actual methodology — what data the publication looked at, what weighting each piece of data had, and why some companies appear on the list while others do not.

Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft topped LinkedIn’s list of most desirable employers, with Twitter not far behind. And college students have quite different ideas about who they want to work for.

Fortune’s list, which doubtless contains many good companies, ranks SAS second partly because it has two artists in residence. Really? And CGH Healthcare Services is third because its employees can compete in talent shows and have dress-up days in which they can “dress as your favorite president.”

I’ve contacted Fortune for details and will update if the company responds.

Meanwhile, here are the top 10:

1. Google
2. SAS
3. CGH Healthcare Services
4. Boston Consulting Group
5. Wegman’s Food Markets
6. NetApp
7. Hilcorp Energy Company
8. Edward Jones
9. Ultimate Software
10. Camden Property Trust

photo credit: @FiverWeed via photopin cc

Washington state is the toughest recruiting market for companies looking for agile developers, according to staffing and recruiting agency Yoh … which makes it the best place to be looking for a job. California is not far behind, with San Francisco being the city with the highest ration of open jobs to job-seekers in the agile market.

Yoh and jobs site CareerBuilder say that the imbalance is resulting in impressive earning opportunities for Java developers, web developers, project managers, business analysts, and .Net developers. Agile developers are getting average salaries of $110,781 — and a 90th percentile salary in the $160,000 to 170,000 range — as startups, development shops, and established enterprises such as Microsoft, IBM, and Northrop Grumman compete for scarce talent.

The states with the most demand include:

• Washington
• Oregon
• California
• Utah
• Minnesota
• New York
• Massachusetts

The cities with the most talent, however, have only a partial overlap — which means that developers who are willing to move could see impressive income gains.

• San Jose
• Chicago
• New York
• Houston
• Atlanta
• Austin
• Dallas

Here’s the full infographic:

photo credit: Tess Aquarium via photopin cc

The infographic is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on work by Yoh at www.agiletalentstudy.com.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Six months after the departure of cofounder John Simon, General Catalyst Partners has scooped up Adam Valkin from Accel Partners, where he has worked since April 2010.

Valkin will dedicate his time to sourcing early-stage investment opportunities, and will work with the firm’s existing portfolio companies, which include HubSpot, Airbnb, GoodData and Taleo. Valkin, who previously worked out of Accel’s London office, is relocating to Boston to assume his new role.

In an interview, he said the primary driver was personal as his family lives in Boston. “This was a friendly move,” he said, adding that General Catalyst was a “natural choice” as the firms have often worked together in the past.

At Accel, Valkin focused broadly on Internet and mobile services, gaming and payments. With roots in London, Valkin had a front row seat to some of the most promising Israeli startups — he made investments in MyHeritage and mobile gaming startup DragonPlay. His investment portfolio also includes Spotify, SeekingAlpha, and $5 tasks marketplace Fiverr.

Prior to joining Accel, Valkin worked as the Global Head of Digital Media and New Business at Endemol, the European television production company. He was also a co-founder, investor and briefly interim CEO of LOVEFiLM, which sold to Amazon.com in 2011. Previously, he worked for Barnes & Noble and Firefly Network, later acquired by Microsoft.

General Catalyst is a long-time partner with Accel; the firms have frequently joined up in funding hot startups like Brightcove over the years. General Catalyst has been slowly creeping into the media spotlight with recent investments in buzzy startups, such as CouchSurfing and TuneIn. It has proven to be one of the most progressive of the traditional firms with its interest in data-driven investing.

Top image credit: LeWeb / Flickr

This guest post was written by oDesk CEO Gary Swart.

Next year we may not be commuting to work in flying cars yet, but it won’t really matter—many of us won’t be commuting to work at all. It’s no secret that telecommuting, flexible work arrangements, distributed teams and even entirely virtual companies have exploded over the past few years. We’re bringing the work to the workers, reversing the almost antiquated model of bringing workers to the work. And in doing so, the way we work is changing rapidly, with everything from organizational structures and team workflows to career paths and education undergoing radical shifts.

Here are four trends I believe we’ll see in 2013:

Specialists will dominate the job market

In the past, being highly specialized in one thing wasn’t usually viable; there just wasn’t enough volume to support it. Today, the Internet is cracking open the potential market available to specialists, creating a long tail of opportunity that not only supports them but seeks them out. Just as Amazon.com created a market for lesser-known books, online workplaces are doing the same for specific experts not commonly available in many local markets.For example, Toronto entrepreneur Sima Gandhi needed a Portuguese translator this year to help with business she was doing in Angola. While finding such a specific and somewhat rare skill was challenging locally, she was able to find a translator online who actually lives in Portugal. The working relationship has already lasted for half a year, and is a win for Sima—who found her specialized worker—as well as for her contractor, who is now a resource for someone halfway around the world.

In 2013, deeper focus will be considered basic career guidance, especially as higher demand for specialization leads to higher compensation.

Custom catered education

To support this career specialization, education will become more customized as well—it will be broken down into smaller, more focused units of learning. We’ve already witnessed the rise of online coursework (as seen in Coursera and Khan Academy), and 2013 will see the emergence of extremely short-term online courses and trainings in very specific skill sets (such as through Lynda.com and Code Academy). This shift towards modular, highly personalized education will enable professionals to learn the specialized skills they’ll need to be competitive and keep pace with the rapidly changing skills landscape.

Big use of big data powering agile staffing

To stay competitive, businesses are moving faster than ever, and creating flexible teams that they can adapt as dynamics change. However, this “need for speed” has to be balanced with process analysis if a business is going to be both fast and successful. Businesses that are using big data to streamline their processes will start applying this analysis to hiring and managing. In 2013, analytics-driven HR will become an important way for companies to gauge the effectiveness of things like team structure, individual progress, collaboration tools, workflows and decision-making processes, and working relationships between team members. Examining data on team interactions and outcomes will help teams keep moving in the right direction even while sprinting.

A new disruptive skill will emerge

If next year will be the year of specialization, what will be the next big skill to specialize in? It likely doesn’t exist yet. Look at mobile apps, for example, and you can see how quickly high-demand skills take off. I work for online workplace oDesk, and while in Q3 2008, businesses spent $62,500 on mobile app development through the site; in Q3 2012, they spent $6.3 million, and that’s still growing at a rate of 133 percent year-over-year.

Interestingly enough, two of the biggest growth skills we’re seeing on oDesk right now are HR (at 272 percent growth this year) and statistical analysis (at 190 percent growth this year), already bearing out the trend towards analytics-driven hiring and managing. In fact, we’ve even seen job posts in those categories that are as granular as a “LinkedIn Specialist” or “Yelp Researcher & Analyst.”Career success today is about watching skills as they emerge, customizing your education, and not being afraid to dive into that niche specialty you’ve always been interested in — it could be the big skill of tomorrow.

photo credit: Alex E. Proimos via photopin cc

Its best, most educated, and highest-paid staff are continually trolling on Twitter for a new job. They’re not actively looking for a better job, just keeping an ear to the ground in case one comes up.

That’s just one of the insights from social recruiting company Jobvite‘s latest poll.

“The mass layoffs that we saw in 2008 and 2009 frightened people so much that essentially they’re always looking for the next job,” Jobvite chief executive Dan Finnigan told me this morning. “The root of it is the presumption people have that they need to be the drivers of their own careers … that one company won’t do it for them.”

The survey looked at 2,100 adults’ behavior on Twitter, finding that college-educated professionals who are open to new opportunities but not actively seeking new jobs — passive career managers — are more than three times as likely to be using Twitter to advance their careers than even proactive high-school educated jobseekers who don’t have a job.

“We’re seeing more and more white-collar professionals doing this,” Finnigan said. “They’re currently employed, more likely to be higher income, and higher educated … and more likely to use Twitter to keep up on job opportunities.”

Those passive career managers are also, unsurprisingly, four times as likely to have found their job on Twitter or another social network, such as LinkedIn.

Passive career managers, Finnigan said, tend to create Twitter lists of companies they admire, plus lists of top companies in their industries and leading professionals in their area. Then, when an opportunity comes along, they see it immediately. Alternatively, over time, they build up a relationship with a hiring company or manager, which can lead to a job switch.

“We have a designer who got his job via Twitter — he followed our lead designer, and, over time, just asked if we were hiring,” Finnigan told me.

Forty-six percent of the American workforce now uses Twitter, Jobvite says, and LinkedIn is at 41 percent. That’s basically half the workforce. But more importantly, it’s the higher-skill, higher-pay half.

Which means companies have their jobs cut out for them to continue to engage existing staff. And recruiters, Finnigan says, need to change their game plans.

“This sought-after talent pool is using Twitter more than ever to stay on top of new opportunities. Recruiters failing to take advantage of this shift are missing out on this to the detriment of their clients.”

photo credit: Stéfan via photopin cc

But, for at least an hour, there was a job posting on the UK government’s website for an James Bond-style “elimination specialist.” And yeah, the job code was 007.

MI6/SIS is looking for a Target Elimination Specialist. Get the full details from DirectGov: jobsearch.direct.gov.uk/GetJob.aspx?Jo…

—
John Graham-Cumming (@jgrahamc) November 23, 2012

The link is now expired, but when it was live The Telegraph took a screen capture of the listing. While the salary is nothing to write home about — 50-60,000 pounds — performance bonuses are available. And the perks are pretty hot: jet packs, mini submarines, and yes, a Walther PPK pistol.

Source: Wikipedia

A Walther PPK

Prior military history is preferred, especially sniper experience, and interested applicants must be willing to “work on a non-attributable basis” and take care of people “whose continued existence poses a risk to the effective conduct of public order.”

Three big clues that this is a spoof?

One, the hours of work contain a misspelling: “flexitime” rather than “flextime.” Two, the ridiculous suggestion that to apply, interested parties should “express their interest somewhere near the large and rather fake-looking rock in Regent’s Park.” And three, the job reference code is the famous 007.

Oh, not to mention the email for more information: mi6recruitment@hotmail.com.

James Bond most certainly does not use Hotmail.

Here’s the supposed job posting:

Source: The Telegraph

The “James Bond” posting

photo credit: johanoomen via photopin cc

In the wake of a tumultuous and divisive election cycle, Facebook has taken the wraps off a new app that’s part politics, part job site, and 100 percent letdown.

The Social Jobs app is the result of a yearlong effort from Facebook, the Department of Labor, and other government agencies to help get unemployed and underemployed Americans back to work.

The resulting application consolidates listings from sources like Jobvite and Monster, with new tools for recruiters to post jobs directly to Facebook. Currently, the app’s big, shiny counter lists 1.7 million jobs and counting.

A recent survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers showed that more and more employers are using Facebook as part of the hiring process — whether that’s doing research to weed out immature or risky candidates or using the site as a recruitment channel and referral network.

“Our labor market is changing, and so should the tools we use to find jobs,” said Facebook VP of global public policy Marnie Levine when the partnership was first announced. “This is really just the beginning.”

The job-search portion of the app is fairly simple, but it’s not as well designed or as cohesive as one might like. You choose your location and profession, and Facebook returns a few tabs — yes, tabs — from different jobs sites rather than presenting you with a pretty, algorithmically optimized single page of results and application options. The entire thing is lackluster, considering a whole group of agencies and the most significant social network on the planet spent an entire year working on it.

Also, this could be first-day-of-school jitters, but the app is returning unexpectedly inappropriate results for some searches. We started out, like the navel-gazers we are, looking for reporting and editing jobs in the Bay Area. When that search yielded no results at all, we tried searching for software development jobs in San Francisco. When that search returned no jobs, we assumed that one of two things had happened: a) Hell had frozen over, or b) the app was busted.

We reloaded the page and found that one of the tabs was showing 499 jobs for Rubyists in the greater Bay Area — hooray! But our mirth was short-lived, as most of the results were actually listings for marketing personnel, receptionists, machinists, and salesfolk. Another tab showed 49 results, but more than half of them were significantly out of geographic bounds, including positions in Washington and Georgia.

Close enough for government work? We guess so. But these days, we expect more from Facebook. The now-publicly traded company can’t make big promises about delivering hope to jobless Americans then return a result so uncharacteristically subpar.

For now, job-hunters are probably best off sticking with their current toolsets, referral networks, and good ol’ LinkedIn. Facebook’s Social Jobs app might improve in time, but on Day One, we have to call it a misfire.

Top image courtesy of Luna Vandoorne, Shutterstock

Behind everything electronic is a chip. And while many manufacturing jobs have gone overseas, the chip industry is still an economic juggernaut in the U.S.

The semiconductor chip industry now employs about 244,800 people in the U.S., according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. The industry added jobs three times faster than the rest of the U.S. economy (3.7 percent versus 1.2 percent for the overall U.S. economy, according to recently released 2011 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The job count is based on direct jobs created by semiconductor companies. Indirect jobs are even more. The $300 billion chip industry is a bellwether for the tech economy, and semiconductor chips are the foundation for the $1.1 trillion high-tech industry that employs nearly 6 million U.S. workers.

“Semiconductor workers – a quarter of a million strong and growing – are creating the technology breakthroughs that improve our lives, strengthen our country and build our future,” said Brian Toohey, SIA president and CEO. “Through their hard work, the U.S. semiconductor industry continues to create jobs and spur growth despite a challenging national economy.”

The data is based on the actual count by the BLS, plus an estimate for the number of jobs created by fabless semiconductor firms, or those that design but do not manufacture their own chips.

“Semiconductor job growth is an encouraging sign for our industry and the U.S. economy,” said Toohey. “With effective government policies that encourage growth and remove barriers to innovation, the semiconductor industry will continue to drive America’s economic strength, national security and global competitiveness.”

[Image credit: Joseph Rupp]

Job transitions can feel like a frustrating, dizzying progression of prospects that do not go anywhere.

Glassdoor has locked up $20 million in new financing to make the job-hunting process more transparent. This career and jobs community provides a range of services such as job search, personalized job listings, company reviews, interview advice, and salary comparisons. Glassdoor strives to distinguish itself by offering “employee generated content,” which can give users insider insight into what it could be like to work at a particular company.

The platform contains information on more than 220,000 companies in 190 countries. With 14 million registered users and more than 13 million monthly unique visitors, the site’s traffic has exploded in the past year, with 40% of the traffic coming from abroad. The company claims that a new user is added every two seconds.

This growth is partly attributable to the release of Inside Connections earlier this year, a tool that lets users leverage their Facebook network into a source for career development. The JobScope technology provides job seekers with a comprehensive look at each listing and the company behind it. Glassdoor can also be used by businesses to recruit, market, and manage their brands.

Competitors include Indeed, Monster, CareerBuilder, and SimplyHired.

This round was led by DAG Ventures, with participation from Benchmark Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Battery Ventures. This brings the total investment in Glassdoor to $42.2 million. The company is based in Sausalito, Calif. Read more on VentureBeat.

AfterCollege, which bills itself as the largest career network for college students and recent grads, helps hundreds of thousands of college students all over the country find the best career opportunities. As part of the career exploration process, students select companies they most want to apply to, and AfterCollege shared some of that data with VentureBeat.

“It’s a reflection of an employer’s brand with students,” AfterCollege’s chief executive Roberto Angulo told me. “The data comes from 200,000 students at 2,000 college campuses.”

AfterCollege segments its data by type of student. Google heads the list of who tech students in computer science disciplines most want to work for, followed by Microsoft and Intel. Apple shows up right behind IBM, in fifth spot.

1. Google
2. Microsoft
3. Intel
4. IBM
5. Apple
6. Amazon
7. National Security Agency
8. Facebook
9. NVIDIA
10. AT&T

For engineering students, the list looks a little different — kind of like a who’s-who of the military-industrial complex. IBM sinks to 9th, and Google and Apple disappear entirely. Intel, however, maintains its high ranking.

1. Boeing
2. Intel
3. Lockheed Martin
4. General Electric
5. Raytheon
6. NASA
7. Exxon Mobil
8. National Security Agency
9. IBM
10. The Aerospace Corporation

Business students, on the other hand, are much more interested in banks, consulting agencies, and telecommunications giants. But Google holds a fascination for business majors (who apparently haven’t been told yet that Google prefers CompSci majors), and Apple reappears at the bottom of the list. Intel, surprisingly, is high on yet another list, in fourth position.

1. Wells Fargo
2. Google
3. Target
4. Intel
5. JPMorgan Chase
6. AT&T
7. Bank of America
8. Deloitte
9. T. Rowe Price
10. Apple

I found it interesting that Facebook appears on only one of the lists, so I asked Angulo about the world’s largest social network, which famously started on college campuses.

“Facebook hovers from seven to eight” based on all the lists combined, Angulo said. “Even though 90% of our users are on Facebook, it doesn’t mean they want to work there.”

And as for Apple, which ranked fifth on the computer science students’ list, behind first-place Google, and tenth on another?

“Google has a very good on-campus recruiting program and is thought to have better work-life balance,” Angulo told me. “So while Apple may be a good company to invest in, it may not be the best company to work for.”

photo credit: Kris Kesiak Photography via photopin cc, fisserman via photopin cc

LinkedIn has released a new list of the most desirable companies to work for, and the technology sector is clearly favored, with Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook sitting at the top.

The rankings are based on the “actual actions of over 175 million professionals on LinkedIn,” according to LinkedIn senior manager Michael Li. He writes:

We cross-referenced our data with thousands of survey responses to pinpoint the specific activities that best indicate familiarity and interest in working for a company: connecting with employees, viewing employee profiles, visiting Company and Career Pages, and following companies. After crunching this data and normalizing for things like company size, we developed our top 100 global list. We then applied LinkedIn profile data to rank the most sought-after employers among professionals in five countries and four job functions.

Of the top 100, 21 companies were labeled as “technology and software” providers, the highest of any category. “Retail and consumer” businesses had 20 companies, “professional services” had 16, and “oil and energy” had 10.

Notably, major brands were listed frequently, but half of the top 100 have fewer than 7,000 employees.

Here’s the top 50:

1. Google
2. Apple
3. Microsoft
4. Facebook
5. Unilever
6. General Electric
7. Pepsico
8. P&G
9. McKinsey & Company
10. The Coca-Cola Company
11. The Walt Disney Company
12. Nike
13. Salesforce.com
14. Twitter
15. Shell
16. Nestle
17. BCG
18. Ogilvy & Mather
19. Expedia
20. Accenture
21. Pfizer
22. Johnson & Johnson
23. L’Oreal
24. Adidas
25. Amazon
26. Bain & Company
27. Roche
28. Diageo
29. Burberry
30. Chevron
31. Razorfish
32. BP
33. Starbucks
34. Warner Bros.
35. Electronic Arts
36. Samsung
37. HP
38. Total
39. Netflix
40. Red Bull
41. Groupon
42. Zynga
43. ExxonMobil
44. ThoughtWorks
45. Bechtel
46. VMware
47. LVMH
48. Kraft Foods
49. Red Hat
50. Oliver Wyman

For more data behind this list, here’s an infographic from LinkedIn:

Jack Dorsey needs to get something off his chest. He was never meant to keep his operational role at Twitter.

Dorsey released a post today, defining for the world just what he does at the social network. The clarification comes as a response to a The New York Times piece that suggests his role was diminished at Twitter because he was difficult to work with. It also mentioned that he no longer had any employees who directly reported to him.

Dorsey explained that he only temporarily took on an “operational role” at Twitter in the spring of 2011, and didn’t intend to keep the role long term. He says chief executive Dick Costolo was always going to take the reins back when he was ready in January 2012. Anyone who reported to Dorsey would also be transferred back under Costolo’s management.

It seems now Dorsey’s role is really just visionary. He pops into the Twitter office every Tuesday to “focus on refining our brand and logo.” Perhaps Dorsey was behind the death of Larry the Twitter bird. He was replaced by the company’s new, sleeker, cooler bird made out of “three sets of overlapping circles.”

The majority of Dorsey’s time is spent as the chief executive of mobile payments startup Square, which recently raised $200 million dollars in its fourth round of funding. It is undoubtedly keeping him busy, partnering with a number of household brand names such as Starbucks, which invested in the round.

Jack Dorsey image via david_shankbone/Flickr

If LinkedIn and eHarmony had a baby, it would probably look and act something like HireQ, a nascent job-matching service that two Stanford graduate students built.

HireQ is a beta-stage product that attempts to predict how a job candidate will fit in at an organization. The two-person company uses a proprietary algorithm and behavioral data to match job seekers with potential life-long partners.

New users identify 10 different positions they might want, and HireQ then categorizes a panoply of attributes based on how similar the qualities are to their personality. It returns matches that should be a great fit for the candidate.

Behind the scenes, HireQ says it determines a person’s hidden preferences and unique traits to figure out their “Career DNA.” Participating employers receive an analysis in similar fashion, with the startup attempting to ascertain a company’s “Job and Culture DNA.” HireQ then scans its database and performs some algorithmic magic to find the right person-company matches.

“We modeled HireQ off of eHarmony in two specific ways,” cofounder Oliver Staehelin told VentureBeat. “First, much like the online dating site, we use questionnaires to gather relevant and valuable information about our users. Second and most important, we use proprietary algorithms focused on creating long-term relationships. The aim here is to help job seekers find their career ‘soul mate,’ a place they will be motivated, happy, and ultimately thrive in.”

Should a candidate find a job match, the person can apply directly through HireQ, and the employer will receive a HireQ-generated report that summarizes why the job seeker is a good fit for the position.

“Quite simply, we believe the recruiting process today is broken,” Staehelin said. “Job seekers still spend countless hours tailoring and sending their resumes to dozens of companies in the hope of securing a coveted interview spot. And employers spend just as many hours sifting through all these resumes looking for the most promising candidates to interview. This is inefficient and misleading for everyone.”

While the idea has merit, it’s very likely that job seekers may spend as much 15 minutes going through the profile set up process only to find that HireQ has no job matches for them. But the barely 1-year-old company is quite young and still looking to build out its employer database, so hopefully this is a problem it might be able to correct in the near future.

HireQ is a two-person startup based in Palo Alto, Calif., that is currently self-funded.

HireQ is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo credit: Nicholaus Haskins/Flickr

The top buzzwords were ”Big Data” (133 mentions), ”Augmented Reality” (106 mentions), ”OpenGraph” (88 mentions) and ”Social Discovery” (72 mentions). So if you are a Big Data developer who’s a dab hand at AR interfaces, you are golden.

In terms of job areas, 33 percent of vacancies are for developers followed by 25 percent marketeers. Product managers trail in at 13 percent implying that marketing your startup product is more important than designing it well.

Other findings were, unsurprisingly, that the average startup job salary is much lower than a banking IT salary, £36,344 as opposed to £51,158. In compensation, 27 percent of startups currently hiring in the UK are offering equity to new starters but given new data on how 3 out of 4 VC-backed startups fail, you might want to ask your potential new employer to show you the money.

Despite the apparent tech boom in the UK as elsewhere, 1 in 10 Computer Science graduates remain unemployed. They might want to look further afield to the Republic of Ireland. In spite of the country being in the IMF program, my sources there tell me that there’s more or less full employment in the tech sector. Go west young man.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Bright.com, the recently launched startup with a scientific method to match you with a dream job, has found something cool to do with its backlog of employment data.

Bright doesn’t just want to find you a job, it wants to find you the job. With that goal in mind, it has developed a machine-learning algorithm that examines thousands of data points and crawls its jobs database to recommend a position for you. The user experience emphasizes personalized recommendations and discovery; it’s like Pandora for the job market.

Today, the startup has launched Bright Labs, a set of infographics and tools that shed light on the current employment landscape.

It’s early days still, but the company has already surfaced some interesting findings. In an interview with VentureBeat, Jacob Bollinger, Bright.com’s data scientist, told me anecdotally that most people job hunt on Friday afternoons, and over 50 percent of dental hygienists have CPR skills.

In addition, the company has done some research on the cities that experienced a bump in jobs in August. The results indicate that California is the place for jobs! Of the Top 10 U.S. Cities:

● San Diego, CA (104.77%)
● San Francisco, CA (28.88%)
● San Antonio, TX (19.05%)
● San Jose, CA (13.34%)

Anyone can use Bright Labs as a resource at any time during a job search, but the company will also release a bi-weekly report with its findings. Steve Goodman, the company’s CEO, told me he hopes people will use the site to mash up raw data to create their own graphs, charts, and reports. You can fill them with content from Bright Labs’ library of white papers and academic publications.

For Bright, the two major initial focuses are technology and politics. Tech is a hot job market, and Bright Labs will release data on the top tech cities for jobs, the tech companies with the most open positions, and the skills you’ll likely need to land a dream job at a startup. It will also investigate how the political elections will impact the job market, and whether the leading candidates are staying true to promises made on the campaign trail.

Bright Labs is comprised of five sections, which include information on jobs trends through the lens of pop culture and current events, positive trends within the slowly recovering or otherwise bleak market, and the wider employment landscape.

According to Goodman, the company has more data than any of its more established competitors in the online job search space, including Indeed.com and Monster. “We have millions of active listings,” he told me. “We realized we could do something special with all of this employment data.”

This isn’t the first time that Bright.com has leveraged its data. For over a year, the company has been building an algorithm they call the “the Bright Score.” According to them, it will generate the straightest, shortest path between two points: an open position and the perfect candidate.

With its focus on data science, the startup is a popular destination for hot-shot researchers and academics, and I’m told that the company even has a nuclear physicist on staff. Bright has raised $6 million in investment and is based in San Francisco.

Top Image via Shutterstock

Finally, a sign that the U.S. government is getting serious about tech: Washington, DC, has beat out every other U.S. city, including California’s Silicon Valley hotspots, as the top city where developers can find jobs.

According to data gathered by job search site Indeed.com, the nation’s capital has the most demand for computer science degree-holders (sorry, dropouts), pulling ahead of New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and every other city tech calls home.

This is largely due to the demand generated by defense contractors, Indeed reps said.

Check out this sweet map we made you:

Now, if you counted Northern California as one market that included Google’s hometown (Mountain View), Palo Alto (home to Stanford University and a scad of startups and older tech giants), Menlo Park (where you’ll find Facebook’s new digs), and San Francisco, just a few miles to the north, we’re pretty sure you’d come up with a slightly different map (we’ve pinged Indeed for the exact numbers and expect to hear back shortly).

When you look at the top employers for computer science grads, you get a list of the usual enterprise suspects, companies with IT and telecom expertise and wide-ranging projects, everything from defense R&D to software testing to computer manufacturing:

Keep in mind that the map above only shows the corporate headquarters for each company. These huge (in many cases, multinational) companies have large satellite offices around the globe, and most have at least some presence in Silicon Valley, the Dulles Tech Corridor (just outside Washington, DC), and Seattle.

Basically, comp sci students, you can brace yourself for a life spent in constant fog, never-ending rain, or stifling humidity. Your pick.

The average salary for the most in-demand job titles for computer science majors is roughly $88,909. The job titles with the most demand are fairly general and software-related, with sysadmins and network engineers squeaking into the top 10 titles. Interestingly, the top language-specific engineering positions were for Java developers. Salaries for these positions ranged from $77,000 for a sysadmin to $98,000 for a Java dev.

Top image courtesy of olly, Shutterstock

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At first.

In fact, according to HiredMyWay, 80 percent of job-seekers are happy to spend a few dollars to ensure their resume doesn’t immediately get round-filed … or lost in the depths of an automated candidate tracking system.

The hiring and recruiting space is extremely noisy right now. From gamified social hiring to daily deals for jobs to  eHarmony for careers to video-based hiring to more video-based hiring to even more video-based hiring – many startups are attacking this market.

This tumult is reflects the noise for recruiters and hiring managers, who review an average of 219 resumes before hiring a candidate, according to HiredMyWay. But chief executive Matt Mosher says that number drops by a factor to ten when using his company’s solution.

“Companies are inundated with resumes,” Mosher says. “What we’ve done is eliminate the spray-and-pray by asking candidates to invest a few dollars in exchange for a guarantee that the hiring manager will look at their resume.”

A job on HiredMyWay

The theory is that when no limit exists on the number of resumes a candidate can send out, job-seekers send out hundreds, if not thousands, of applications. But if a cost — $5 — comes with the application, people will only apply to jobs they think they actually are qualified for, can get, and are passionate about.

“We’re a hybrid between a recruiter and job board,” Mosher says. “We provide a company what a job board would give them but offer more of the result that a recruiter would provide.”

It’s free for companies to post jobs. With each job, however, the company posts how much they’re willing to invest to find a successful candidate, from $500 and up. The higher that amount, the more exposure they get on the site, and the higher the referral bonus.

When a hiring decision is made, the cash is split evenly between the referrer, the successful candidate, and HiredMyWay.

Doyle Mosher, the company’s chief strategist, first funder, and yes, father of the CEO, says  HiredMyWay’s system has other benefits.

“Companies have become more scientific and less emotional in their hiring,” he says, noting that companies rely on automated candidate tracking system which filter candidates by keywords and skills. “What we’ve found is that people who have been rejected by hiring systems can come in and get hired via HiredMyWay.”

In other words, once the noise is out of the system, recruiters can focus on the human element again. It’s not just the algorithm anymore. And that, Mosher senior says, helps companies distinguish between people who might not be the perfect candidate when reduced to zeroes and ones, but might just have the passion and drive and determination that will make him or her a stellar hire.

So far, 1,500 companies have posted jobs, and 45,000 candidates have registered, as the company has had mostly a regional focus in the midwest: Detroit and Chicago. HiredMyWay is currently adding 100 new employers a month, but that number should jump quickly as the company expands in the next few months to New York, Boston, San Francisco, and L.A.

After initial self-funding — the Moshers own a successful real estate development business – the company has already raised an initial $3 million single investment round Detroit Venture Partners and a pool of local angels. The money will come in handy in HireMyWay’s planned expansion.

What might come in even more handy is that HiredMyWay has created a recruiting model that is clearly differentiated from so many of the other startups focused on the hiring process.

photo credit: bgottsab via photo pin cc

High-tech jobs are only six percent of jobs in the U.S., but they are growing faster than other jobs – 2.6 percent versus 1.9 percent – and they pay more on average. In addition, at least 61 percent of counties in the U.S. had at least some high-tech jobs in 2011, the report reveals. And in 2009, more than 72 percent of counties saw at least one new high-tech startup business.

The goal of the report and the timing of its release is to show government leaders that technology is important, that high-tech industries are outpacing others in job growth, and that internet and software jobs are not limited to just a few states. In other words, what’s good for technology is good for the United States.

The subtext? Don’t kill the goose that’s laying the golden eggs:

“Our top priority needs to be unleashing startups and high-tech jobs — and reducing barriers that stifle innovation,” said Google’s VP of Public Policy, Susan Molinari.

Engine, the “voice of startups to government,” collaborated in the creation of the report, and revealed some of its data in an interactive data visualization that reveals the top tech cities and states. For example, cities below such as Austin, Milwaukee, Maryland, and traditional tech hot spots such as Seattle and San Francisco represent locations with more than twice the national average of high-tech workers:

States that are more red, such as Washinton, New Mexico, Virginia, New York, and California, represent areas with higher than average tech employment:

Industries tracked include “computer hardware, software, systems design, and information; high-technology communications and electronics equipment; internet publishing and web search portals; data hosting and processing services; pharmaceutical and medical manufacturing; aerospace manufacturing; architecture and engineering services; and research and development services.”

The report was unveiled this morning at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, and discussions will be held on its significance at the Democratic National Convention next week as well.

Image credits: Engine.is

Seelio, a social network to match college students with cool jobs, has launched its beta to anyone with a .edu email address.

On Seelio, users can spice up their boring, old resumes with graphic designs, computer-aided projects, videos, and academic papers. Students with shared interests can connect, and potential employers can reach out directly through a private messaging service.

Moses Lee, the site’s founder and chief executive, told me he was inspired to build the site after hearing students complain that they seemed identical on paper.

“The career center was coaching them to use the same buzzwords or keywords, even the same active verbs,” said Lee, a serial entrepreneur who developed the site while working at the University of Michigan’s Engineering’s Center for Entrepreneurship.

The site, initially known as “TruApp” in its alpha phase, was developed by Lee, and cofounders David Jsa, and Jerry Wang, at the University of Michigan. The first version was launched late in the recruiting season, and succeeded in placing about 40 students in jobs. Now the site has built relationships with 180 employers, primarily in the tech industry, including Airtime, PayAnywhere, Menlo Innovations, and Compuware.

No doubt, Seelio will primarily be used to source engineers and designers, but Lee said it has been used by employers to fill creative roles. At times, the right candidate for these jobs is an unlikely match on paper. For instance, one student, a brain and behavioral studies major, proved to be perfect for a marketing position.

The focus on college students is reminiscent of Facebook, but unlike the social networking giant, Seelio’s founders have deliberately opened up the site to potential employers. They pay $50 per month to reach out to students on the site, and $150 to post a job. Registered companies can create a multimedia platform of their own to attract young talent.

“Typical students don’t have much job experience, but they are doing projects outside of classes,” said Lee. “Employers are more excited about these projects than their part-time job at Barnes & Noble or the cafeteria,” he added.

Students applying for companies not affiliated with the site can include a link to Seelio on their resume. It’s less time-consuming than starting a blog or building an online portfolio from scratch.

In the height of the recession, digital natives have increasingly gone to extreme measures to stand out from the pack. In March, 22-year-old Lindsay Blackwell developed and designed a website, described as “the best social media application ever“, for an employer, coincidentally the University of Michigan. Lee told me that Blackwell’s job application was an inspiration for Seelio.

Seelio faces competition from AfterCollege, which is targeted at seniors and recent grads looking for entry-level positions and internships. During the recession, a small number of startups developed to make job applications pop. On sites like JobOn, job seekers can record a video to send alongside a resume. Lee told me that Seelio is different, as it’s exclusively focused on college students — a practical decision as they typically own the rights to market their own work.

The next step is to bring Seelio to other universities in the Midwest, including Northwestern and the University of Illinois. Unlike Zuck, Lee doesn’t intend to board the first flight to the Bay Area to reach that elusive Stanford.edu. “A lot of companies are looking for great talent right here in the Midwest,” he said.

There’s good news for some and bad news for others.

In the bad news category, almost a third of tech workers in the West are worried about layoffs. That’s probably largely due to HP’s announcement in May that the company plans to lay off 27,000 people.

Source: Glassdoor

This are looking up(ish)

And, of the companies that made changes to compensation or benefits, 86 percent of them made negative changes: reducing pay or perks.

Employee confidence, which this survey measures, is an indicator both of what employers might do in terms of increasing or decreasing payrolls, and of consumer confidence.

Workers who are afraid of potential layoffs tend to spend less, depressing the economy.

In the good news side of the ledger, however, 90 percent of employees nationwide expect their company outlook to either improve or stay the same. Only 10 percent expect it to get worse, and the number of people concerned about potential layoffs decreased somewhat.

Another stat on the positive side? More jobseekers are confident about finding work — 42 percent this quarter, up from 36 percent last quarter.

Even more telling: It’s 17 percent higher than a year ago, when only 25 percent of jobseekers were fairly sure they’d find work.

One downside for those who are currently employed is that expectations of raises are low: 60 percent of workers are not expecting a raise in the coming quarter.

Source: Glassdoor

Salary: most are not expecting raises

The somewhat positive but definitely mixed results echo the recent Simply Hired jobs survey, which showed that job openings are up but that there’s still plenty of gloom in the market.

Given the economic and financial upheaval of the past few years, however, we may be able to count the absence of too many negatives as a positive.

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