Finding a Job in Finance

This morning, the government bailout plan failed to pass and the Dow was down 770 points, or as the New York Times succinctly put it: "BAILOUT FAILS; STOCKS PLUNGE." With the markets suffering their biggest one day loss in two decades, what effect will a declining stock market have on the job market?

From our perspective it's still too early to tell what, how the turmoil on Wall Street is going to filter down to the broader job market, but there's one sector of the job market that has unsurprisingly taken a hit: finance. MSNBC's Career section published an article today titled "Job Hunting on Wall Street. The article points out that while tens of thousands of Investment Bankers have been laid off, top professionals are still in demand:

Indeed, in the past 12 months Alpha Search’s Olman says, “seasoned investment professions have been in a higher demand than we’ve seen in a long, long time. It used to be the life of a trader was like a baseball player’s career. Now that 20-year veteran is in more demand than the rising young Turk.

The bottom line is that if you're working in the Finance industry, make sure you're keeping your options open and always on the lookout for opportunities.

Read the article here.

Photo by Puzzlemepuzzle

Career Tips in a Recession

The New York Times published an interesting article the other day on keeping your career options open during a recession. While the US economy may or may not technically be in recession, it's not an exaggeration to say that the turmoil in the financial markets has spilled over into other sectors and is making people jittery about their job and financial prospects. The best thing you can do in a time like this is to keep all your options open and maneuver yourself in a position to receive multiple opportunities.

The bottom line is that should your job status come into jeopardy due to macroeconomic factors, you want to make sure you have options beforehand, not be scrambling to find a new job along with everyone else who's been affected by the same job cuts as you. This means filling out online profiles and putting yourself in a position to catch the eye of hiring managers; i.e. passively seeking a job.

You can read the article here.

Forbes Article on NotchUp

The September 29, 2008 issue of Forbes has a great article on NotchUp. You can read the online version here.

How to Hire the Best Employees

Well known software blogger Joel Spolsky wrote a guest column for Inc Magazine on hiring the best employees. This article really gets at one of the core reasons we started NotchUp - it's really easy for any decent company to attract active job seekers, especially in a bad economy. The problem is that the people you want to hire almost always already have jobs and just getting them to listen to you is a huge challenge. Taking the easy way out and hiring quickly versus hiring well tends to be very detrimental for a company in long run - Joel pegs the delta in productivity between a top performer and an average one at 10x!

"From a recruiting perspective, the problem is that the people I consider to be in the top 1 percent in my field barely ever apply for jobs at all. That's because they already have jobs. Stimulating jobs. Jobs where their employers pay them lots of money and do whatever it takes to keep them happy. If these pros switch jobs, chances are the offer came through networking, not because they submitted a resumé somewhere or trolled a job site like Monster (NASDAQ:MNST). Many of the best developers I know took a summer internship on a whim and then stayed on. They have applied for only one or two jobs in their lives."

Joel's solution is to hire interns and then retain the top ones, and then goes on to describe his solution for attracting top interns (roll out the red carpet). What's really interesting is that when Joel calculates what his company spends aggressively attracting an intern versus what they get back, his company Fog Creek Software still comes out ahead.

You can read the full article here.

Photo by M@rcopako

Your Personal Career Agent

Last week we changed the tagline of our home page from "Get Paid to Interview" to "Your Personal Career Agent". Why the change?

We created NotchUp to enable hiring companies to connect with passive job seekers. In-demand professionals with successful track records constantly receive cold calls and emails from recruiters. Very few of these cold calls represent meaningful job opportunities which would lead to career advancement for the individual being contacted.

Our members can feel confident that any company contacting them for an interview through NotchUp is serious about talking to them. The fact that NotchUp's corporate clients are willing to pay our members to interview them shows that they respect the member's time. The entire dynamics of the interview process changes.

As Erick Schonfeld wrote in TechCrunch earlier this year, "NotchUp is a really good idea. It turns job hunting into something more people will want to do in a way that makes them feel good about themselves. Even if you don't get the job, you get paid for your time."

There's a lot of exciting new features we're developing right now that will further support our mission of performing the role of a personal career agent for NotchUp members. We'll keep you informed of our progress right here on our blog.

Keeping Your Job Search Private

The New York Times printed an interesting article the other day on "Keeping a Job Search Under the Radar". The article gives tips on looking for a job without letting everyone in your office know that you're looking. According to the Times, that goes double for your boss: "as much as you get along with a boss, it is not a peer-to-peer relationship. In the end, you and your boss might have competing interests."

Of course, the best time to look for a new job is when you don't need a new job - that way you have time to find the perfect opportunity and no pressure to take a job simply to "pay the rent."

You can read the full article here

-Rob

The Best Places to Launch a Career

The September 15 issue of BusinessWeek has a cover article on the best places to launch a career. I was surprised to see a Firefox security warning when I tried to view the table of top 50 companies for new college grads, but found it hard to believe businessweek.com would be hosting malware. I'm also on a Mac.

BusinessWeek is projecting the top three "What's Hot" industries as:

• Accounting
• Technology
• Government

Their top three "What's Not" industries are:

• Pharma
• Telecom
• Transportation

While Pharma is in the "What's Not" list, BusinessWeek is listing Biotech as white hot. Scandals, bureauracy, and patent expirations are the reasons they are listing as why Big Pharma outfits are not appealing right now.

How We Started NotchUp

I've been hiring world class talent for over 20 years - at HP Labs in the '80s, SGI in the early 90's, Zip2 (Elon Musk's first startup) in the late 90's, AltaVista (both in Palo Alto and Europe), and several Silicon Valley startups since. I learned early on that while you can occasionally find a great employee who is looking for a new job, most of the people you really want to hire are already happily employed and not actively seeking a new job. So my challenge in recruiting top talent has always been to identify and connect with these people, where I thought my company and product development effort offered them a step up in their career.

Rob and I got together in early 2007 to start developing the initial notchup.com web site. We chose Drupal as the application framework on which to build NotchUp on, a fortunate choice that saved us 20 engineering years of development and provided a rock solid platform from the beginning. We launched our public beta at DEMO '08 in Palm Desert. At the time we were still self-financed, and I was a bit concerned about personally paying the $18,500 entrance fee. Fortunately the launch at DEMO gave us a great amount of exposure and proved to be a worthwhile investment for us. In particular, we received a lot of interest from the venture capital community and many wanted to talk to us.

We were fortunate to be able to connect with Mike Maples, who we had heard was among the very best of a new breed of investors using a micro-cap approach that suited the bootstrapping nature of how were building NotchUp. We closed our first round of funding with Maples Investments this past spring, using the investment to hire the start of our engineering team.

With the new engineering team in place we were able to complete the first beta release of NotchUp Corporate - the portion of our web site for corporate clients that allows them to search for NotchUp members and make them offers to interview. We ran a pilot program with 12 companies this summer. Most were Silicon Valley startups but a few Fortune 500 companies were also in the trial. Our pilot companies searched for candidates in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver/Boulder, and Boston. They made paid interview offers to members, and some accepted, some declined, and some members made counteroffers. The site worked!

Interview offers ranged from $100 to $1000. While there as a good deal of concern at the time of our launch that people could abuse NotchUp and become "professional interviewers", we saw the opposite. Our members are professionals who care about their time and reputation, and therefore would only agree to talk to a corporate client if there was some possibility they were interested in hearing more about it. One interview offer went out for $900 to a member for a 30 minute phone screen and was turned down! It turned out that person had just left Yahoo to become the CEO of a startup, so clearly he didn't think the timing was good to accept the interview phone screen.

We then paid our members who went on interviews, as well as paying the 10% commission to their friends who have invited them to join NotchUp. One lucky member got paid two commission fees as he had two invited friends who went on interviews.

We received a lot of good feedback during the initial NotchUp Corporate trial on how to improve the site for corporate clients. One key thing most clients asked for was the ability to ask a set of prescreening questions to NotchUp members before extending a full interview offer. We also improved the core search function and added new features, such as the ability to bookmark interesting candidates found in search results, as a result of our feedback.

We've now been able to respond with most of the improvements our initial NotchUp Corporate trial participants asked us for, and have also implemented a robust payment system that allows us to automate the collection of interview offer fees, allowing timely payment of our members upon the successful completion of an interview. We're now getting ready to ramp up our corporate client user base, with 30 new companies signing up to use NotchUp in the past few weeks.

We are extremely excited about what we've started here. We believe the recruiting industry is ready for fundamentally new approaches to career advancement for professionals, and to finding and attracting those employees. That's what NotchUp is all about, and there's a lot more to come this year, so stay tuned.

Why We Started NotchUp

In the spring of 2007 Rob Ellis and I were working at a Silicon Valley startup together. I was the newly hired V.P. of Engineering and like many startup Execs my top priority was building a world class product development team. The time frame for completion - yesterday! It's never easy to recruit great people, and it's that much harder when you're under incredible time pressure to do so.

I was fortunate to be able to tap into my own network of past employees to bring in a few great hires, but after that we were left with the traditional methods of recruiting. We used a contract in-house recruiter, ads on Craig's List, searched on LinkedIn, posts on university alumni boards, attended job fairs... We didn't have the budget to use contingency recruiters, let alone retained search firms. We eventually built the small team we were looking to create, but it took a huge amount of time and energy. Fortunately Rob did most of the grunt work of submitting the postings, filtering the large number of unqualified applicants we received, and demonstrated that he was truly the master of making successful cold calls.

We found that when we were able to get people to listen to our pitch about our company most were interested in talking to us, but it was really hard to get someone's attention to be willing to take our call with the busy schedules and non-stop cold calls and emails successful professionals receive today. At one point Rob was talking to a Google engineer who proceeded to hang up on him before he got a chance to start describing what we do and he thought about calling him back and offering him $100 just to listen to his pitch for 10 minutes. And that thought became the genesis of what would become NotchUp.

Photo by jessica@flickr