An article in NYTimes yesterday (”More Employers Use Social Networks to Check Out Applicants“) shared this flurry of statistics about how potential employers are finding you all over the internet:

“According to a new study conducted by Harris Interactive for CareerBuilder.com, 45 percent of employers questioned are using social networks to screen job candidates — more than double from a year earlier, when a similar survey found that just 22 percent of supervisors were researching potential hires on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The study, which questioned 2,667 managers and human resource workers, found that 35 percent of employers decided not to offer a job to a candidate based on the content uncovered on a social networking site…

The report showed that Facebook was the most popular online destination for employers to do their online sleuthing, followed by LinkedIn and MySpace. In addition, 7 percent followed job candidates on Twitter.

More than half of the employers who participated in the survey said that provocative photos were the biggest factor contributing to a decision not to hire a potential employee, while 44 percent of employers pinpointed references to drinking and drug use as red flags.”

Tips to avoid being on the wrong side of these statistics:

• As we’ve always said, google yourself thoroughly and see what potential employers are finding. Run a google image search as well.
• Set up a Google alert on your name
• Protect your Twitter updates.
• Jazz up your Facebook security settings.
• De-tag incriminating photos
• Check out this past blog post with other tips on hiding your indiscretions

Last night, I stopped by San Francisco Green Drinks (sponsored by the RMI2009 conference), which has become the place to “see and be seen” if you’re involved in a green business or organization in San Francisco. The event is jammed every month with folks who work on green from all kinds of different angles - activism, carbon investment funds, sustainable jewelry, nutrition, you name it.

Green Drinks is great for wide exposure and catching up with other greenies you know, but given the crowded space and the noise level, it’s not going to be great for an in-depth conversation about your professional background or talking about why you want to work for that person’s company. By the same token, I met about 4 different people last night who I’ve connected & worked with online and finally got to put a face to a name and connect with them on a more personal level, even if just by way of a brief conversation.

I liked Seth Godin’s post below - though he’s talking about the quality of interactions in terms of marketing, the same goes for networking. As he says, “There’s a huge correlation between how much interaction there is and how powerful a medium is (at least among successful media). Telephones changed the world because the interaction is so real. As you get more interactive, though, you exchange less dense media.” Chatting with a bunch of different people for 3 minutes at a network event is like Twittering to a big group at a low cost to you, but there’s a lot more value in following up with them on a “high bandwith” interaction like volunteering together or collaborating on a project.

O.K., not a perfect analogy, but the take away lesson is this: Leveraging different types of networking - online & offline - will help you balance quantity of interaction with quality of connection and allow people to get to know you on a variety of levels.

The bandwidth-sync correlation that’s worth thinking about (by Seth Godin)

Check this out. Every once in a while a cool graph pops into my head.

Here are a dozen or so forms of communication, arranged on two axes.

On the horizontal, they rank from asynchronous (meaning the creator and the responder are separated in time–like a letter) and synchronous (meaning the creator and the responder are in real time proximity to each other–like a phone call).

Up and down, I’ve charted the quality of the medium. Quality in terms of density of information exchanged. The 140 characters in Twitter is about as low density as you can get other than a stop light. A movie, on the other hand, is loud and bright and two hours long and there’s audience reaction and it is edited and designed to evoke a response.

To be clear, then: movies take a long time to make, but they’re high impact. Twitter takes a second to do, but there’s not a lot of info there. One on one coaching is high enough bandwidth that it can change your life and make you cry, in real time, and the Mona Lisa, while less bits per second than a TV show, has enough emotional bandwidth to matter, even if it’s 400 years old.

So, what can you learn here?

1. There’s a huge correlation between how much interaction there is and how powerful a medium is (at least among successful media). Telephones changed the world because the interaction is so real. As you get more interactive, though, you exchange less dense media. You can’t have a real time conversation online that carries the digital impact of a movie or some other high bandwidth entertainment.
2. The bottom left corner is the scrap heap. It’s hard to place a commercial value on this part of the grid and there’s not a lot of commercially interesting work being done here. People just aren’t interested in low bandwidth, non-interactive media. Graffiti, for example, rarely draws a paying crowd.
3. The top right of the corner is where huge value and difficult sales lie. Not everyone can pay for the scarce resources needed to deliver an in-person seminar or one on one coaching, but those that need and can afford it, love it.

If you had seen this chart three years ago, you obviously would have invented Twitter. Now that you see it today, what will you create?

This past Sunday, our new marketing intern Dana and I were featured in the Business section of the SF Chronicle in an article called Tough Job Market Requires that Grads Adjust.

The article is copied below, but I’d suggest you also check out the comments. Clearly, the job market is a hot topic - the comments range from fiery to frustrated to constructive. Lots of people suggested that recent graduates who are having trouble finding a job go start their own business. While I do know several friends who’ve been laid off and started in on their own projects, some of the same problems persist: recent grads’ networks aren’t as strong for funding and business support, they have a tougher time convincing investors they’re serious, and they don’t have the savings to back up the ventures on their own.

What this article is really about, then, is bootstrapping — that recent graduates are having to come up with creative ways to stay afloat and to pursue what they’re passionate about. That might mean working for free 3 days a week while supplementing with a restaurant or childcare job; it might mean working nights on getting a business up and running; or it might mean going back to school to get some more targeted experience.

For some of our job advice for recent grads, click here.

Tough job market requires that graduates adjust

Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Stanford graduate John Dryden didn’t have a job lined up before he got his diploma in June, but in this economy he feels lucky to have been offered a contract post.

“I look at it as a case where the glass is half full,” said Dryden, 22, a business major who had an internship last summer that, in better times, would have led to a job.

“The company has a hiring freeze but they’re still interested in bringing me back in the fall, not as a full-time employee with benefits but as a contractor,” Dryden said, adding, “I feel very fortunate.”

Young people nationwide are being forced to adjust their expectations and try new tactics as recent college graduates face the toughest job hunt in decades.

“The current situation compares to the early 1980s, which was also an extremely difficult job market for college graduates,” said Edwin Koc, research director for the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

The association regularly surveys the nation’s largest employers about their plans to hire graduating seniors.

“Typically we have a positive story with an annual increase in the number of hires,” Koc said. “But when we asked employers what they expected to hire from this graduating class relative to last year, it was down 22 percent.”

The association also asked a sample of this year’s 1.6 million college seniors about their employment prospects and discovered a sharp drop from a prior poll.

“In 2007 when we surveyed students, over 50 percent of the class had a job offer before graduation,” Koc said. “This year it was 19.7 percent.”

Desiree Fabunan, 23, is one of those who beat the odds by getting a job with AT&T’s Western Region headquarters in San Ramon before graduating from Stanford in June.

“A lot of people were down in the dumps,” Fabunan said, recalling the mood on campus. “Back in January, people were really panicking because you know that at Stanford so many of the grads that had come before you had jobs by that time.”

Dana Lin, a recent college graduate who lives in Mountain View, said employers in this market are demanding more than a degree.

“Many jobs call for three or four or five years of work experience,” said Lin, 22, who earned her undergraduate degree in business from Cornell University in 2008.

April layoff

Back then, when the college job market was still strong, she got a marketing position with a Silicon Valley software firm. But she was laid off in April. To bolster her brief work experience, Lin is doing a part-time, unpaid internship with the San Francisco startup Bright Green Talent, a recruiting and staffing agency for the sustainable energy industry.

“We did not have much of a problem taking these internships when we were in college,” Lin said. “It allows me to learn new things in new areas.”

At Bright Green Talent, Lin works with full-time employee Carolyn Mansfield, a 2008 Stanford graduate who found that, even then, her anthropology degree didn’t impress employers. She also worked for free to gain experience, first as an unpaid media intern for the Sierra Club and later at Bright Green Talent, which hired her after a two-month trial period.

“It’s about getting your foot in the door and letting employers see your work ethic and how you perform on the job,” Mansfield said.

But while young college graduates face a tough job market now, long-term trends work in their favor.

“Many employers can forecast a large number of retirements coming up in the next three to five years,” said Tom Devlin, career center director at UC Berkeley.

Positions will open

Koc, the employment expert, said this retirement trend means positions will open up for young college graduates once the recession ends even if the recovery is too weak to create job growth.

But at the moment the circumstances are less favorable.

“Opportunities that may have been there in the past have not been as plentiful for our graduating class,” said Dryden, the Stanford alumnus.

E-mail Tom Abate at tabate@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/02/BU6I18SL7L.DTL

This article appeared on page D - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

We’ve recently had a couple of marketing/sales positions come up in solar, and were amazed by how many candidates came in. For one of the positions, we had nearly 200 people apply within 72 hours of posting the position.

Clearly, differentiation in this space is really important. Having experience in and expertise in solar will automatically bump you up to the top of the bunch when so many people are applying.

A first step in that direction: Check out the website of Intersolar, “the most diverse international business-to-business trade show in the United States for the global solar industry.” Intersolar happened a few weeks ago here in San Francisco, and featured 444 different exhibitors, 17,000 trade visitors, and 170 speakers.

If you want to get oriented in the solar space, exploring the conference’s website is a great place to start. They’ve posted video from the event, an event directory and there’s event a job board.

From the site, create a list of target companies that interested you in some way. Find them on LinkedIn. Who’s working in the role that you’d want to be in? What’s their educational and work background? Which associations are they part of? Are you connected to anyone who’s there? Start to create a profile of who’s currently in these jobs … and then start working towards getting those qualifications yourself!

If you’re starting a job search, probably the first thing you’ll do is start to hang out on job boards to see as opportunities come up.
But be wary: job boards have the potential to be a waste of time.

Yes, this may seem counterintuitive, given that we at Bright Green Talent post all of our jobs on job boards. However, it seems like every day we get an email from some new “green” job board, claiming to be all sorts of superlatives (the “best,” “largest,” “most relevant,” etc).

The creators of these job boards are correct in identifying a market opportunity - there are a LOT of jobseekers right now, there’s a LOT of interest in green jobs, and it seems like you can make a quick buck by setting up a posting site and charging per post or just for advertising given increased traffic.

However, in the end, another green job board doesn’t really help anyone — it wastes the jobseeker’s time who has to add another site to the list of places they visit; it wastes the employer’s time who feels like they have to post their job in another location. The reality is that, as of yet, there aren’t the mass numbers of green jobs that necessitate so many different green job boards, so each of these hundred-odd sites basically shows the same set of jobs.

So, how can you fight back and make sure you’re using your jobseeking time efficiently and effectively?

1. To reiterate: You should not be spending hours daily perusing job boards. To stay up to date on what’s being posted, set up a Google Reader account with RSS feeds from your favorite job boards. This way you can see at a glance when new jobs are posted without getting bogged down in visiting all of them.

2. Install the Alexa ranking tool bar on your browser so you can see which job boards are actually getting a lot of visits. Some of our personal favorites include GreenBiz’s, Treehugger, Net Impact, Justmeans, Idealist, StopDodo and SustainLane (we post in a lot of other niche places according to the specific job).

3. Use a job board aggregator. In your RSS feeds, set up a search within SimplyHired or Indeed with specific keywords you’re interested and the locations you’re open to — the feed will do all the work for you of grabbing jobs from across the internet.

4. Use a recruiter. Signing up with a recruiter like Bright Green Talent will put your search in the hands of folks whose job it is to actively place people all day long — plus, we’ll be your advocate to get you an interview, coach you in advance of that interview, and help you negotiate should an offer come through.

5. Get well-integrated on social media sites so you can make direct connections with hiring managers. The best tool is LinkedIn, where you can see exactly who posted the job, who you know at the company, and can be much more strategic about your application.

6. Get in front of people. The truth is you’re much more likely to get a job through spending half an hour having coffee with someone each day than spending that time on job boards. 80% of people are hired through having some sort of connection with the company. Plus, given that companies know they’re going to get swamped if they post a job on a job board, a lot of jobs are going under-the-radar right now, and are being sourced exclusively by recruiters doing targeted searches or through employee referral networks without ever being posted publicly.

From Net Impact SF’s site, in regards to last week’s green jobs event:

Penned by Carolyn

• The Department of Energy published a 48-page e-book called “Smart Grid: An Introduction,” which explores in layman’s terms the nature, challenges, opportunities and necessity of Smart Grid implementation in the U.S. and beyond. There’s a great glossary of terms in the back.
  
• The Demand Response and Smart Grid Coalition has information on the companies in the sector. Its member list (copied below) will give you a sense of some of the big players in the field.
• This map of 101 Cleantech Startups shows several Smart Grid companies.
  
• Smart Grid News gives information on companies in the sector, deals and transactions and trends in the industry.
• Wikipedia has some basic background and interesting links.

And now, dive in to these companies and see where you might be interested in fitting in. Our usual thoughts on networking apply - run a search through LinkedIn to see who you know there; join some groups that the company’s employees are a member of to get exposed to the industry dialogue; read through the company bios; and check out job openings.

Aclara
Ambient
Amplex
CalAmp
Comverge
Conservation Services Group
Corporate Systems Engineering
CPower
Direct Energy
Echelon
Eka Systems
eMeter
Energy Capital Partners
Energy Curtailment Specialists
EnergySolve
EnerNOC
Enfora
Enspiria Solutions
General Electric
Google
Honeywell
IBM
Ice Energy
Itron
KMC Controls
Landis + Gyr
Lutron Electronics
Oracle
PCN Technology
Sensus
Silver Spring Networks
SmartSynch
Steffes
Tendril
Trilliant Networks
Ziphany

Penned by Carolyn

So by now, hopefully you’ve set up a profile, joined groups, and created a strategy for LinkedIn usage that will keep you from looking desperate.

Now down to business: who has the job you want?

1. Make a list of companies you think you’re interested in working for. If you haven’t figured that out (solar? green consumer goods? carbon finance?), use the industry search function under the “companies” tab to browse who’s out there.  Find out who’s who in that space. Use other resources like GreenBiz to see which companies are making headlines.

2. Now, search those companies - if you can narrow down to the job title you’re interested in, all the better (use “keywords” under the company search). Who do you already know there? If appropriate, send them a note to connect - as always, don’t be too pushy.

3. For people that currently hold the position of your dreams, what does their career path generally look like? Do they have a graduate degree? How many years work experience? What accreditations do they have (LEED AP, etc)?

Do this for 10-15 folks in 3 or more companies - the more the better. You’ll start to get a sense of general trends in qualifications, and also in what specific companies are looking for. For example, if you’re looking at sustainability consulting firms, are they generally hiring people who have 5 years in environmental non-profits? Or out of traditional consulting backgrounds?

About an hour of poking around like this will give you an idea of whether you have a good shot at being noticed and hired when you apply for positions at that company.

Penned by Carolyn

Okay, you’re more or less set up on LinkedIn? Good.

Before diving into specifically how to use LinkedIn (next week and beyond), I want you to step back and think about your frame of mind as you use it.

Following Michael Pollan’s advice on what to eat (“Eat food, not too much, mostly plants”), I put forth my own LinkedIn manifesto: Be open, not too open, and choose quality over quantity.

And putting a few disclaimers first:
- Some people disagree with me on the quality over quantity point. I’m going on what I’ve personally seen be effective in my almost-year at BGT.
- Everyone uses LinkedIn for the own purposes (business partnerships, advertising, jobseeking, etc), and will have different takes on what’s useful for those aims. I’m focusing on jobseeking.

Be open:
Yes, make sure you’re marked as “Interested in Career Opportunities,” have a public profile, a photo, a completed profile, etc. (See LinkedIn’s own tips on jobsearching through the site).

Not too open:
Know someone whose LinkedIn name looks like this? “Bob Smith BOB.SMITH@GMAIL.COM OPEN TO ALL CONNECTIONS”

These people make me shudder for a couple reasons: they look desperate, and they look like they don’t have a clear idea of what they’re looking for. If you want to connect with people you don’t know, they have to see the value in connecting with you. The age-old dating rule applies: while you need to be open and accessible, do play a little bit hard to get.

Drop the CAPS lock, the exclamation points. asterisks, etc. Your resume and experience should be able to market you. If they don’t, spend your time getting some experience instead of adding Wingdings to your profile.

Choose quality over quantity:
To me, flags are raised when people have 3000 connections. Or when they have 5. Find a sweet spot between those numbers, comprised of solid connections with people you’ve met or worked with. The point of LinkedIn is you can access all their second and third degree connections, so you don’t need to link to every person you ever come across. If you want to expand your networks quickly, join a bunch of groups that you’re interested in (like BGT’s — in order to be able to vouch for everyone in our personal networks, we link to our community through our group rather than through those 3000 connections with people we’ve never met).

Oh, and file this under Carolyn’s Serious Pet Peeves: If you are going to request to link to someone you don’t know, PLEASE add an introduction or reason you want to connect — it drives me nuts when people I don’t know at all request to link to me without any explanation — or, worse, they just mark that I’m a “friend.” If you take a minute and think about what you and that person share, they’re more likely to check out your information, link, and remember your name. Make people want to help you.

Penned by Carolyn

This week I’m launching a To-Do list for students and grads who are getting into the job search.

LinkedIn is basically the cheap & easy way to start virtually networking. Here’s some homework for the uninitiated:

Step 1: Create a profile. Fill out your profile with the internships you’ve had, positions held.  My general resume tips apply — but you can be more concise on LinkedIn. Just the most relevant and impressive things you’ve done.

Step 2: Find folks. The genius little robots behind LinkedIn can get into your Gmail/Yahoo/AOL contact list and find folks you already know that are on LinkedIn. As you invite people to connect, take the chance to include a friendly hello — and, if you like, politely mention you’re jobseeking.

Step 3: Join groups! Find alumni organizations, interest groups, and, especially, Bright Green Talent’s group. Groups are a great way to find interesting discussions, job postings, and links, and to connect with folks who share communities and interests.

More next week on how to get set up and start using these tools to find yourself a job. We’ll also be hosting a webinar with our friend George Kao in the coming weeks on more tactics for leveraging LinkedIn in your job search. Stay tuned!

Oh, and if you don’t believe me that LinkedIn is the way to go, check out what Guy Kawasaki has to say on the matter.