Recruiting Animal

SXSW Tech Career Expo

The dudes over at Engage Digital are doing a deal with the  South By Southwest (SXSW) Conference

They are like launching a Tech Career Expo @ SXSW.

It's on March 9-10, 2012

Man, 20,000 people go to SXSW Interactive so employers are goingsto get the opportunity to screen and recruit your best people when they go there to check out the scene.

Who's all participating in the Tech Career Expo - a bunch of companies, that's who. Check them out at  http://TechCareerExpo.com

Jobseekers who want connect with employers b4 the show - go here: optional pre-registration page.

Companies who want space call 512-633-4132 or careerexpo@engagedigital.com

Related: Recruiting Conferences

 

Song of the Day

 Play - Chicago - The Counter-Offer

If you leave me now, you'll take away the biggest part of me
Oo, oo, oo, No, baby, please dont go

And if you leave me now
You'll take away the very heart of me

Oo, oo, oo, no, baby, please dont go
Oo, oo, oo, girl, I just want you to stay

A love like ours is love thats hard to find
How could we let it slip away ?

We've come too far to leave it all behind
How could we end it all this way ?

When tomorrow comes and we both regret
The things we said today

 

Networking Hitchens Style

From Bernard Avishai, Hitchens (edited)

 

I knew him fairly well in the early 80s b4 he really became Christopher Hitchens.

He had just arrived from England.

He had followed my writing in the New York Review, he said, and so called me to ask (quite boldly, and charmingly, I thought) if I would introduce him around.

I brought him to a meeting of the Dissent Magazine board at Irving Howe's apartment and we kept in touch sporadically the way one did back then, before email and free long-distance.

Once I hit my own professional turbulence and took refuge of a kind at the Harvard Business Review, we pretty much fell out of touch.

In 1991, we debated about the 1st Gulf War at Wellesley College. He was against it, I was for it tho neither of us really knew what we were talking about. Then we went out for a drink and that was pretty much that.

My Comment: The fact that he was charming made his boldness easy to take. The same behaviour by a less competent schmoozer would not have been as acceptable. And most people don't have that pzazz.

Schmooze: To converse casually, especially in order to gain an advantage or make a social connection.

The Most Generous Generation

I used to ridicule all kinds of GenY hogwash from the 2 Ryans and I used make fun of the Gen Y Princess too  and I was noted for doing so.

Eventually I got tired of it and I stopped following their stuff and I assumed that the GenY Baloney Sandwich had already been totally consumed.

I was wrong though, I suppose, because last week I discovered @ValueIntoWords and @ResumeStrategy discussing this article on Twitter.

Where GenY Shines: What Goes Around, Comes Around Networking - Jan 5, 2012 - By Alexis Grant

The typical complaint about GenY is that we act entitled, lazy and even rude.

But here’s a soft skill GenY has mastered far better than other generations: Millennials are generous. Particularly in professional situations, 20-somethings understand the value of helping others, that what goes around comes around, perhaps especially in an increasingly digital world.

Whenever I chat with new acquaintances who are interested in learning about me or my business, some look at the conversation as something that’s benefiting them. Regardless of whether I contacted them or they contacted me, they ask how-can-this-help-me questions.

But GenYers tend to approach these conversations differently. Yes, they’re eager to learn about how I’m selling digital guides online or helping small businesses with social media or whatever project they’re interested in. But they also ask how they can help me.

Fawad Khan, Day Trader

From: The Toronto Star, These Men Profit From Wild Market Swings, Sandro Contenta, Oct 9, 2011    

“90% of the people lose money,” says Khan, “and the money they lose goes into the pockets of the 10% making money.”

“It’s beautiful work,” he says. “I can do it any time I want. No business will give you that freedom.”

“I love it,” he says.

Consensus

From: The Economist, The Faith and Doubts of our Fathers (edited)

The founders of the USA didn't want people to fight about religion or have political disputes which were religious in their intensity.

They wanted to create a state run by a political system to which people with utterly different ideas could offer loyalty.

People who disagree over things they regard as ultimate usually can’t compromise. That's one reason for the separation of church and state.

Here is Jefferson on the topic:

“Let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.”

 

Literature and Success

From: Peter Hitchens, Small Expectations

As I suspected they might, my criticisms of the BBC’s Great Expectations drew more comment than anything else I said on Sunday. 

Given that the prosperous world trembles on the lip of a great precipice, with a real prospect of permanent and irreversible economic decline, is this reasonable?

Actually, yes. Books such as ‘Great Expectations’ were part of the great moral revolution which made this country prosperous, ordered and civilised.  They are crucial to our civilisation. 

Like all great moral books, it makes the reader envy the good characters their goodness, and want to emulate them .

It made us recognise the good and the bad in ourselves - in fact Dickens ceaselessly did this,  probably because he was himself struggling all the time against his own cruelty and selfishness, and loathed these things in others.  ....

A good modern example of the influence of books for good is Patrick O’Brian’s fine series of historical novels set in the Napoleonic Wars.

Having read them, almost any thoughtful person will be a better human being, thanks to his or her encounter with Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend Stephen Maturin.

Heather Mallick Loves Old People

Toronto Star columnist, Heather Mallick, is paid to ridicule and complain. It's good business for the paper and it got me to write this.

Today, on January 1, 2012, she warns that the Canadian Prime Minister is at war with old people. She claims that he doesnt want to fund their health care.

Well, I like old people. Most of my relatives are old and I am happy when the government spends lots of money to help them.

However, I can see that most people over 80 do not lead happy lives. They are broken down. Their health is failing, their friends and spouses have died and they have to depend on other people to care for them.

Also, anyone can see that health costs are growing and a great deal of the health budget is spent on keeping old people alive but not really healthy.

So, we are spending a lot of money to keep people who have a short future alive but not healthy.

I'd love to know Heather's solution to this whacky situation but she doesnt offer one here.