It’s National Deer in Headlights Month at many colleges and universities around the country—otherwise known as graduation time.  Are you freaking out about finishing school?  Know someone who is—pass this on!  These are our best tips for new college grads, but please feel free to add your own in the comments!

1. Start a blog about your career interests, even if you’re not sure what they are yet.  If you were a photographer, you’d have an online portfolio.  Well, most of you are knowledge workers now, so where’s your “portfolio”?  A blog is a great way to make sure you’re regularly doing some career thinking, but also to make yourself findable.  Do you come up first in a Google search for your name or a regrettable quote you gave to the school newspaper on the legalization of pot? If you want to be a stock trader, for example, blog for three months straight about the ups and downs of the market, your portfolio, companies you like, etc.  Worse comes to worse, you have demonstrable proof that you’re passionate about the industry and something to talk to professionals about when you meet them.  Start a free one at Blogger or Tumblr, and make sure you use Disqus to manage your comments and make responding much easier.  More thoughts on blogging here.
2. Read what people in your industry are reading, especially blogs.  When you go to interview somewhere, what newspapers, magazines, mailing lists, and blogs did that person read over the last week?  What do they say about where their industry is going?  Shouldn’t you be reading that stuff, too?  If the latest issue of Clown Monthly says that red noses are back in, and you’re interviewing to be a clown, don’t get caught without a crimson honker!  Blogs are great sources if you find a popular one, because their writers are practitioners and they’re often very accessible. 
3. Explore things that you are passionate about.  I once talked to a student that “didn’t know what he wanted to do” but told me he linked playing intramural soccer.  Soccer is a huge industry, from Major League Soccer to FIFA to all of the clothing and equipment makers!  I told him to go start out with all of those companies, and then to check out the media players who broadcast soccer games as well.  Like music?  Check out jobs in the music industry.  Whatever it is you like doing, chances are there’s a company out there somehow paying people to be involved with that.  You just have to be creative in thinking outside of the box of all the finance companies you see on job boards (unless you love the stock market, then apply apply apply!).  Just add “company” to whatever you’re into and see what Google has to say if you’re really stuck…  Soccer companies, anyone?
4. Use Indeed to search jobs.  Indeed.com is a search engine that aggregates all of the jobs from big sites like Monster, Careerbuilder, Hotjobs, but also small niche sites you’ve never heard of and company home pages.  It’s the most comprehensive place to look for jobs on the web, and I’m not just saying that because my former employer invested in the company back when I was a VC analyst.
5. Do informational interviews.  We know you graduated.  We know you need a job.  However, asking for a job will either get you a yes or a no, while an informational interview will help you get to know companies better and help them get to know you.  Maybe this company isn’t a right fit, or maybe they don’t have something for you right now, but trust me, if they have something, and you’re a fit, you don’t need to ask for a job for them to bring it up. 
6. Join LinkedIn.  LinkedIn is like Facebook for professional people.  It’s a way to leverage your network to connect to the people likely to hire you.  Use it to reach out to people for informational interviews.  Anytime you apply for a job, check to see if you have any connections to the company via LinkedIn.  You probably won’t at first, but over time, if you make sure you’re connected to all the people you meet (since you’re getting out there and meeting lots of professionals), you’ll get more and more use out of it.  Think of it like a rainy day fund of people.  Connect, store, and then one day when you need to contact someone who works at ESPN, you’ll find that someone you know used to work there.  Check out this post on how to get the most out of LinkedIn.  Also, get your parents and family members to join, because, chances are, they have a larger and better network than you do. 
7. Join your local professional society.  National Association of Basket Weavers?  Springfield Clown Society?  Whatever your interest, there’s likely a professional association with lots of members, meetings, information.  You should reach out to them to see if they have student discounts, classes, or ways for you to get involved.  Professional societies are a great way to network, and if you get involved in helping to organize their events, you’ll show very well to the more experienced folks who participate who may not have the time that you do to pitch in, but will appreciate your efforts.  Also, see if they have groups specifically for students or young people.  They might not, or the group they have might need some help.  Do what you need to do to be a leader of that group and help them figure out ways to reach people just like you.
8. Take the most interesting “springboard” job you can find, even if it’s an internship or just temporary, or the pay is low.  A lot of students don’t quite get on their feet financially until after a full year of working anyway—so why not take the job that gives you the best chance of getting a great second job.  If you have the choice between one job at 40k where you’re sure never to get noticed by the outside world, and one at 28k that will give you some really great work experience and publicity, taking higher pay at this point is short sighted.  Do what you need to do to make it work, because you’ve got lots of time to make more money and any financial sacrifices you make now are an investment in the future of your career.
9. Brush up on the skills that get you in the door.  You may have received a great academic education, but a lot of times, students find themselves falling short on the kinds of skills required in the workplace.  Are you a designer that doesn’t know HTML/CSS?  Are you a finance major that isn’t fantastic with Excel?  Are all the social work jobs you’re looking at requiring fluency in a language?  Take this summer to continue studying hard on the skills you need to get in the door somewhere.  Take a certificate class and pick of a few training books. 
10. Research and meet all the competitors!  Make sure you don’t only interview at the companies that happen to be offering jobs this week. The companies posting jobs all have competitors, and those competitors all have the same types of positions.  Maybe they’re not offering anything right now, but resume drops and interviews are a bit of a craps shoot, so stack the numbers in your favor by uncovering ALL the companies large and small likely to be looking for someone similar anytime soon.

Some of the most interesting pieces of feedback we've received lately is about how Path 101 might be an interesting internal tool for enterprises--mostly around retention and the career development of employees.  The problem of retention is an interesting one.  Clearly, there's less and less company loyalty with each passing generation, and many people would argue that's a byproduct of less and less loyalty to the employee by companies.  It seems that as the world has gotten more competitive, and both companies and employees are more focused on their own financial bottom line, that relationship has suffered.

Now it seems that companies are realizing that poor retention can actually hurt the company's bottom line as well.  In a knowledge economy, holding on to your best people is critical, not only because of what they can do for you but because of what they know about the company, best practices, where all the bodies are buried, etc.  Information and experience stored in particular people has real monetary value.

High turnover increases recruiting costs as well.  It's obviously cheaper to hire from within than it is to go out into the market, paying recruiters, posting jobs, etc.

Fixing the problem, however, isn't easy.  Part of the big issue is that very few employees have open dialogues with their supervisors about their own career tracks.  Personally, I've been very lucky to work with people that were just as interested in my career development as I was, and so "What am I going to do next?" was a completely acceptable discussion at my previous jobs, whether or not it meant staying at the company or leaving.  HR departments are looking for ways to foster those types of discussions.  If an employee has decided that their current position isn't leading anywhere, it's not like the company has a lot to lose by trying to have a sincere discussion about their career.  Some companies are starting to hold internal career fairs, where employees are encouraged to check out other departments, offices, etc. and consider growth opportunities within in the company. 

Of course, no supervisor wants to see a great employee move to another department, right?  However, if you gain a reputation as being a great "springboard" that can prepare employees to move on to great things, the quality of the applicants you receive the next time you need to hire are going to significantly improve.  With some companies, being a springboard is part of the plan--like consulting firms.  Not everyone who works at McKinsey stays on to become a partner, and it's the strong ex-McKinsey network that those consultants depend on for not only research, but client revenues.  Other organizations have similar vested interests in making sure their alumni wind up going on to bigger and better things.  We've gotten a lot of great feedback related to professional sports organizations.  All the major sports leagues have staff members in charge of the professional development of their players post-sports.  Since, by number, most players don't actually "make it", it seems obvious that these groups would want to make sure their alumni achieve success (or certainly don't burn out) after their playing days are over.

So the question is, who's out there from a web service perspective?  There are certainly a lot of vendors selling HR software that touch employees in one way or another, but is there anyone doing anything to help guide an employee's career from within the enterprise?

For quite some time now, Alex and I have been hard at work finding the right people to join our team.  It has been quite difficult.  No, no, there's no more of a shortage of qualified developers in NYC than there is anywhere else.  The problem has been finding people whose timing works out in that they're ready to leave their current position, people who have the right skills, and moreover, people we'd love to work with. 

I'm excited to say that, within the same week, we found two highly qualified developers, Jennifer Oslislo and Hilary Mason.  In addition, we've brought on a very promising and enthusiastic developer intern as well. 

Jen, a Senior Developer at Metafoundry, came through us via a very specific algorithmic search on LinkedIn.  I typed in the word "developer" and got a few thousand second degree hits.  She's been a fulltime developer for 10 years and will no doubt take on very significant responsibilities on our development team.  The breadth and depth of her development experience caught my eye (I won't overwhelm you with all of her languages, frameworks, etc... but it's extensive), but so did her creativity.  She not only keeps a regular blog at Poeks.com, but an art blog as well and is working on developing her talent.  We're anxiously looking forward to this unique perspective and how it gets reflected in the applications she develops. 

A testament to her quality and experience came at our own expense.  Last Friday, we had drinks with Adam and Joyce from Renkoo.  When I told Adam that Jen had accepted, his first response was, "Really... you guys got Jen?  Really?  Oh...um... wow... that's awesome." 

Hilary Mason, who blogs over at 3GreenEggs, also brings a unique perspective.  She teaches web development at Johnson and Wales University and has an academic background in machine learning.  She comes to us via a combination of blogging, Twitter, and finally some more extensive conversations at SXSW.  She's been extensively involved in Second Life, particularly regarding education initiatives around it, but also working on data collection projects.  She has strengths in data mining, parsing, and analysis which will be a great help to our Resume Genome Project.  She also has front-end expertise, so she'll be able to take what she's mined from our database and help build interactive and compelling interfaces around it.   Her academic and research qualifications are balanced with a prior stint as a web developer at a startup, so she knows the ropes of getting things done yesterday.

Not too long ago, we also took on a development intern from Columbia University, Shannon Tan.  Shannon has had a very promising first couple of weeks with us, working mostly in PHP.  Her enthusiasm for her work will surely help her development into a top notch coder--especially now that we've got two more experienced teammates for her to learn from. 

I think the most important part about hiring our team is our commitment to their development.  From our first conversations, we made it a point of saying that we wanted Path 101 to be a place where they could grow in responsibility, try new things, and be continuously challenged.  We feel like we have the potential to make a major impact on how people choose careers, and so we're in this to built a sustainable, long-term business.  It is our hope that these early hires will be able to look back on wildly successful and meaningful careers here, and get recognized as the kind of leading developers in the NYC area that attract others to join our community.

Last week, I had the great fortune to participate in a startup panel at the ERE Expo in San Diego.  My presentation was recorded on video and, lucky for our blog audience, it's the first one, so if you've got 15 minutes, you can see the whole thing by playing the video below.  Of course, I encourage you to watch the rest of the presentations as well.

There were a ton of really smart and enthusiastic people there, and we got lots of great feedback on our product.  I have to thank David, Todd, Amy, and the rest of the ERE team for giving us the opportunity because we came back with so many great contacts, I'm just barely catching up.

One thing I was sort of surprised about...  It seems like so much of the technology in this industry is built around an initial assumption of failure.  It's as if everyone assumes that you have to post a job opening and you're bound to get a firehose of junk from that, and so there seem to be about 400 companies in the applicant tracking space--all focused on herding the resumes, marking them, managing responses, etc. Very few companies seemed to be focused on the idea of actually helping you get a more relevant candidate flow or at least being able to filter them.

We like the fact that we are aiming to build a site where we get to know candidates better.  Not only are we helping them to get to know themselves, but we hope to make it possible for companies to do a better job targeting appropriate candidates.  Disseminating more information to both sides should make for a lot less spam and a lot better matching, saving everyone a lot of time and resources.

Here's the video from our presentation:

Getting fan mail like this is awesome...

Hi, guys.

I just want to say that I'm in the midst of a career transition, and I'm really looking forward to Path101 launching!

To explain, I'm a 30-year-old American living in London, with an engineering degree from [school], a master's from [business school], and a background in the military as a submarine officer and a couple of years consulting.  It's not a typical career path, and as I've found myself in a bit of a career cul-de-sac recently, I've become really frustrated with my options.

There is such a great opportunity for your site not just to be helpful for those just launching their careers, but those of us who are having a big of a "quarter-life crisis."  We're not so far into a career where we're essentially committed to a path or industry, but there are much more significant barriers to shifting, particularly for those people like me who have dabbled in a couple of paths.

I've been reading your blog since you launched, and love the transparency.  Good luck, and as I said above, I really look forward to the launch.

Best regards,

J.C.

When you're a startup, support comes in a lot of ways.   Sometimes it comes in the form of funding.  Other times, people contribute code.

Today, for Path 101, it was pieces of fudge and some almond cake.

The fudge came from Amanda Jones, who is taking a class at ITAC for entrepreneurs that I've been teaching.  She's the Virginian (accent and all) behind, of all things, Brooklyn Fudge.  What's a Virginian doing making fudge in Brooklyn?  Well, if you've been to Brooklyn, you'll know that the outer borough has many flavors to it, as does her fudge!  She stopped by the office today to follow up on some website questions from class and to drop off pieces of dark cinnamon almond, wasabi pecan, dark raspberry almond, dark orange almond, and dark pecan.   mmm...    The raspberry is my favorite, but they're all pretty great.

Too balance out Amanda's down home personality and her bootstrapped baking startup, we were fortunate to get a visit from another Brooklyn based supporter, New York Times Magazine food editor Amanda Hesser.  Alex and I both met this Amanda at an event in Brooklyn a while back, and she came into the office with a really amazing almond cake.  Half of it was gone in the first ten minutes of cracking it open.   We're pretty sure we'd be able to pay rent with this cake if we had to, so startups low on cash, take note!  Perhaps we can get the recipe to publish on SAI. 

If there are any foodies out there who would like us to feature their goods on our Path 101 corporate blog, feel free to send stuff over, and we'll post it.  Even though we have angel funding, every cake and piece of fudge keeps us sugared up and one more meal removed from running out of cash.

What does this have to do with careers?  Nothing.  We just have a great knack for getting free stuff.

Involving parents and family in a career search can be tricky business.

Of course, they have the best of intentions.  They try to set their kids up on interviews--pulling strings where they can, without much regard to figuring out if its the job you want, just as long as it's a secure position in a stable company.

This can be very awkward, even stressful, and it certainly doesn't make you feel like much of an adult.

Now, online applications can be used to empower students while at the same time making families a helpful part of the process.

LinkedIn is a powerful social network that is all about professional connections. It helps you discover inroads to people and resources through the networks of people around you. Not too many college students use it for that very reason--they don't have much of a professional network.

That's where families come in...

Members of your family undoubtedly have more professional contacts than you do. By getting them to use LinkedIn and connect to you, you can be in the drivers seat when it comes to initiating introductions.  You can start deciding for yourself who you'd like to talk to and what companies and jobs look interesting to you.

Keeping their network up to date on LinkedIn by uploading their contacts from Outlook and/or their webmail account is one of the most helpful things a parent can do for their job seeking kids.

At Path 101, we're hopeful that future LinkedIn APIs will allow us to build wizards to help our younger users through this process.  For now, here's a letter kids can send to their parents and other family members to help get them started:

Dear Loving Family Member:

Congratulations! Your helpful guidance over the years has produced a young person (me!) actively interested in their future career. However, I could still use some help building out my network.

That's where you come in.

It's obvious that you've built some great professional relationships with friends and colleagues and there are bound to be people that you know that I would love an introduction to. Without knowing who you know, that process could get pretty random and inefficient, so I'm asking everyone in the family to use LinkedIn to manage their professional contacts.

LinkedIn is a social network of millions of professionals and you probably already know people on it. By uploading your Outlook or webmail contacts and connecting to the people you know (including me!), we'll both have a way to see who we're connected to, what they're up to, and selectively make appropriate introductions to people. Just make sure you completely fill out your work and educational history so even former coworkers and schoolmates you may have lost touch with can find you.

Thanks for your help. I'll be following up though the system to see if there are any useful introductions you can make and I'd greatly appreciate getting your permission to reach out to these people if you think its appropriate.

Love,

Your Son/Daughter/Grandchild/Cousin/Etc

The DailyIdea.tv folks are way more creative than we could ever be, so we're glad they made this video before we attempted it....   It's a great daily video blog that you should check out!

Blogged with Flock

We have just started a Facebook group ("1,000,000 people who have no idea what to do with their career") and I am have been soliciting advice as to how to run a fun and successful Facebook group. Even though this post on Inside Facebook isn't from the last week, I found it incredibly helpful and well organized- some great pointers.

Charlie tagged this Wired Magazine post for me. This post is about the rise of "freeconomics" and how providing free services is the future of business.

        "The rise of "freeconomics" is being driven by the underlying
        technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore's law
        dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every
        18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping
        even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the
        cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero."

Zenhabits always has a wide variety of useful information that is presented in a light-hearted way which makes it easy to read and identify with. Although some may seem obvious, I think that everyone, at some point, will be able to use at least one of these tips on learning how to go with the flow . My favorite: Accept change and imperfection.

Pierre Far's guest post on techipedia on the relationship between social media and marketing is chalk full of great information and fun diagrams to help reiterate his points. He has some great insight into the trend of social media marketing. I found it especially helpful that he brought up the issue of feedback.

          "You can see that without consumer feedback, advertising
          is mostly one entity (the seller) talking at another (the consumer).
         With the new powerful feedback mechanism implemented in
         social media, the loop is closed: the communication
          becomes two-way."

I am firm believer that career advice can come in many different forms and that we should all be open to receiving advice from a variety of outlets and places. That being said, I never thought I would consider taking career advice from a comic book. However, this BusinessWeek article completely convinced me to be open to that possibility. I am not sure if there is a market for this type of comic book in the United States, however if this did come to the US I would definitely have a subscription.

As of next week, we will have been incorporated for 5 months.  I don't know what that makes us in dog years, but if anyone has a conversion method, let us know.

We have been talking about getting some live code up on the site in February, and we've accomplished that... only we're not linking to it quite yet.  No, it's not some kind of private beta.  We'll release it as soon as its properly cached to be able to withstand lots of inbound traffic.  No worries, we're still anti-stealth.

But the bigger questions that people have been asking are whether we're going into "alpha", "beta", and what the definition of "live" really is.   We thought it might be useful to talk about our approach to getting things up and ready and what progress we've made so far.

First off, we're focusing right now on data gathering and our Resume Genome Project.  We've aggregated over a million resumes (with lots more to come).  We've only began to scratch the surface in terms of the career path analytics we can do with it.  In fact, we're starting to work with some Columbia University Machine Learning folks to dive into this.  What we'll have next week is just a set of simple queries like, "Top 10 majors that go into field x" and "Top 10 fields that people with major x go into."  We're excited to get this out in front of people, because the complexity of our analysis and quality (and creativity) of our presentation will dramatically improve with lots of feedback.

Does this mean that we're "launching" next week?  Frankly, I don't even know what launching means anymore.  When I was working on Voki (just nominated for a SXSW Web Award, btw), IAC's Zwinky product "launched" after they already had two million registered users. 

There will be some live code up on the site next week.  You can call it "launch" or "banana" for all we care.  It won't change the fact that we'll be working our butts off everyday to get more functionality out, respond to feedback, and make it better.  It's certainly not nearly representative of all the stuff we're going to have in our fully functioning service, if that's any clearer.

Our technical focus, thus far, as been on data modeling, optimization--all the nuts and boltsy stuff that no one appreciates until your favorite app has scaling issues and goes down when you want to use it most.  No matter what you hear Web 2.0 pundits say, building scalable web applications is not "easy".

We have lots of other functionality we want to offer, and we'll be working on that over the next few months, like a syndicatable network of career advice, personality testing, and career blogging.  We have our personality tests written and we're working on mechanisms to publish them automatically to the site, collect data, etc.

Here's one area where we had hoped we would have made more progress--hiring.  No, we don't subscribe to the whole "there are no developers in NYC" theory.  Rather, I personally made the mistake of not following the credo "always be hiring".  The reason is simple:  Not every candidate is going to be the perfect fit and not every company is going to be the perfect fit for a candidate.  We made a bet that we'd be able to secure the services of three different people over the last two months--people who we knew or got to know pretty well, and for various reasons, didn't close the deal.  In hindsight, we should have been getting a lot more volume through the door for interviews.

So that's what we're doing now.  We have nine developers coming in to talk with us this week (5 on Friday alone!) and hiring is my primary focus right now.  We've seen an excellent flow of candidates and haven't even gone as far and wide as we could have with posting.  We've even been using our own resume database to source some folks.  We're confident that we'll be getting Alex some more help soon, enabling a lot of new technical developments over the next two months. 

Rather than call any singular point in this whole process a launch, we'd prefer to say we're "dribbling" code out day by day, as much as we can, as soon as its ready.  

We're really excited about next week as well, because we'll be opening up our resume database for contributions from people who get our vision and want to help shed some light on otherwise hidden career paths.  So, if you've got a really interesting background or know people whose histories career searchers simply need to know about, tell them to get their resumes handy.

Anyone who contributes their resume will be the first to be notified when we're ready for users to start creating accounts.

Call it "Data for Beta".    :)