If you’re a student at one of the eligible Canadian universities or colleges, you can get the top-of-the-line edition of Microsoft Office 2007 for CDN$64. For more details, see my article in Global Nerdy.
Category: Work
I saw the illustrated map titled The Road to Success on the Strange Maps site and thought that there can’t be a more appropriate day than today, the first day of school, to post it. Enjoy!
Click the illustration to see it at full size.
If you’re wondering who the “Caruso” in the “Caruso can’t touch you” line is – it’s spoken by one of the people in the Mutual Appreciation Society building, in the lower-right hand corner, just above and to the left of Hotel Know-It-All – it’s Enrico Caruso, an opera tenor who became a star thanks tp his embrace of then-newfangled recording technology, namely the phonograph (a.k.a. gramophone).
Here’s the view from a conference call I participated in on a recent sunny day:
Over at my Coffee and Code blog, I write about a topic close to home for me: cafe owners in New York, fed up with laptops users lingering but not buying anything, are shooing them away.
Allen Stern blogs about a sign that’s outside Rice to Riches, a rice pudding place in New York City’s East Village:
The sign reads:
Help Wanted
Start a career in the fascinating, fast-paced lucrative pudding business
- Long hard hours
- Very low pay
- Lots of heavy lifting
- Work for a ball-busting asshole
- Dead-end job
- No benefits
- No advancement
- Must be college grad
Start immediately
It’s attention getting; Allen says that he saw a number of people read the sign and as a result step into the store. There’s more in his blog entry about the sign.
I wonder how many people read it and thought “Sounds great! Where do I sign up?”
This article also appears in Global Nerdy.
Here’s an interesting bit of information for those of you who are reviewing prospective hires: people are more honest on their LinkedIn profiles than they are on their resumes. That’s what LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman said at the Social Recruiting Summit held last week at Google.
It’s understood that people “pad” their resumes. A sizeable portion of the interview process seems to be devoted to determining if the candidate is as good as his or her resume says he or she is. I’ve been in interviews where a prospective employer had a member of the development team to sit in and act as a “bullshit detector”; I’ve also done the same duty when working at companies that were interviewing prospective developers.
I think that Kris “The HR Capitalist” Dunn’s theory about why LinkedIn profiles are more honest is spot-on:
…if you’re truly looking for "what’s up" with a candidate, you need to rely on the LinkedIn profile. Why is that true? Because there’s a community of co-workers, friends and past colleagues that always have access to the LinkedIn profile, and there’s no such community with constant visibility to a random resume the candidate sends in, and you have no means to circulate the resume to that type of community to fact check.
Simply put: it’s harder to lie when you’re in front of a group of colleagues who might call you on it.
Kris also talks about how many candidates don’t include the “5 – 6 bullet points that you;re usually used to seeing on the resume” on their LinkedIn profiles. This isn’t the case with me: when I got laid off from my last job back in September, I rewrote my resume completely, starting with my LinkedIn profile, after which I simply pasted the LinkedIn information into a Word document and gave it a little formatting. This approach killed two birds with one stone, affording me more time to concentrate on my (thankfully short – 17 days from my last official day at b5media to my first official day at Microsoft) job search.
I don’t know if it applies in other fields, but in the tech sector, I think that LinkedIn profiles are resumes and that you should based your resume off your LinkedIn profile rather than the other way around. Yes, the social networking aspect of LinkedIn means that you can’t pad your resume as much, but it also means that prospective employers can trust that your credentials are genuine.
Categories
Hello from Ottawa!
The view from my hotel room.
I haven’t been to Ottawa in 20 years. The last time, it was to visit a girl, and it ended badly. Every pedicab and rickshaw guy in town was in love with her and wished hot death upon me during my visit, and in the end, she decided that she wanted to be “just friends”.
Months later, a friend would tell me that she paid me a very nice compliment after a horrible experience with some jerk: “There are three kinds of men in the world: scum, art fags and Joey!” It’s nice for the present-day me, but did 1989-me no good.
This time, I’m here on bidniss, doing a presentation on how to code accessible websites, followed by catching up with some friends. Should be fun.