Tag Archives: recruiting

On the Recruiting Value of Slogans and Bluster — Not

Business Ethics, Business Mistakes,

Is this just me? The message says “looking for ball busting MBAs to join my firm. (no wimps) great opportunity to kick tail in renewable energy.” Does that make you shudder?

It reminds me of big-company sales mentality where quality is measured by bravado and the customer is a tool to be conquered. It smacks of a now-obsolete world in which fake enthusiasm is an important currency.

It’s hard to imagine that this kind of message works. Ask with slogans and bluster, and you’ll get people who like slogans and bluster.

Solving the Job Crisis One Job at a Time

Family Business, Marketing, Self Promotion, , , ,

Blogs are supposed to be personal, right? So allow me to personalize. Let’s consider the plight of one Megan Berry, 22 years old today, graduating from Stanford in two months with close to straight As.

Megan wants a job. More specifically, she wants a job related to social media and Internet marketing in the Silicon Valley.

In any normal year, this would have been no problem. Google would have snapped her up. Yahoo would have. So would a couple of dozen other companies. She’s an opportunity. A “fuzzy” political science major who won Web awards for programming Cold Fusion databases before she reached puberty, and did serious Web programming work for darfurgenocide.org while still in high school; she’s kind of a bridge, a writer and marketing type who understands the depths of programming. She has her own blog, and blogs at Brazen Careerist and Huffington Post. She’s been on Facebook for four years. She’s on Twitter. She’s on LinkedIn.

But then came the downturn. And the worst year for graduating seniors since sometime in the 1930s. And Megan’s got some possibilities, some things might still work out — one of which came directly from Twitter, by the way — but we’re passing mid April now, and she’s still available.

Think of this strategically. She’s as young as most college graduates, but in her chosen world of social media and Internet marketing, that whole world started about the same time she got into it. So maybe she has something special in the strengths and weaknesses category, something that might help even in this toughest of all years to get a job.

All her information, links to her various blog posts, and all the rest are (right where they should be for a young social media marketing person) at meganberry.com.