Here goes:

1. Research the company you are applying for and tailor your resume to fit the specific needs of the opening. I can tell if you are just submitting the same resume without considering the specifics of the job I have open.
2. If the position says 5-8 years of experience, don’t apply if you have 15 years. I take the time to write a job description with specific requirements, so please take the time and read them to see if you match up.
3. If the company is a social recruiting company (i.e. Jobvite) and the application allows you to submit your LinkedIn profile, please do!
4. Submit a cover letter and make sure it’s tailored to the opening/company not a form letter that you use. If your experience does not quite match the job posting explain why you think you are a good fit.
5. Do some investigating to see if you know anyone at the company (all Jobvite customer career sites let you see if you know anyone that works their via your LinkedIn connections). If you do know someone, try to get them to refer you in, typically employee referrals receive preferential treatment and will at least get you a phone interview.

While I think these are pretty basic things when applying for a job, especially at a tech company, I am simply amazed at how many applicants just throw in their resume and click apply.

If you are reading this and are a product manager in the Bay Area you should already be ahead of the game. Click the following link to see if you are a fit for the Senior Product Manager role I am looking for here at Jobvite.

Apply Now

Product managers are always taught to listen to your users/customers, understand their needs through 1:1 in depth interviews, usability tests, focus groups, surveys, etc.. In general I agree that these methods should be part of any good product managers arsenal, however, if this is all you do your product will evolve only on a linear path and most likely not be truly innovative.

Customers/users for the most part have a myopic view of what your product can and should do. Do you think people who were using CD players were really asking companies to digitize music and create MP3 players?

In my view a great product manager is receptive and understands the customer / user requests; but rather than take them at face value tries to really understand the key issues behind them. They must have a view on new ways to do things that may not directly address the customer requests but in the long run changes how customers interact with your product and creates a better overall experience.

Should you really listen to customers? Absolutely.

However, a truly great product manager takes this as only one input and couples with their innovative view of where the product should go. It’s too easy to take the input from customers and manage product development based on requests, but game changing products are led by product managers that have a healthy balance and eye toward innovation.

9:35 am
Reid Hoffman, CEO of  LinkedIn
new member joins LinkedIn every second
40+m current members
86% companies  plan on using social and professional networks more to recruit
60% of recruiters say they find better employees when hiring passive candidates (may 26, 2009 survey, 548 responses)

Three beliefs that guide LinkedIn

1. every individual is an entrepreneur

• job tenure on the decline
• greater global competition / availability of labor
• online profile = business listing

2. every person will have an ionline professional identity

• accuracy of profile (post 10 connections) is higher than resumes (people don’t lie in public)
• the public profile will be professional

3. your network = your success

• connect wiht people you know or willing to help and will support and inform you

LinkedIn Enterprise Solutions

Identify and engage hard to find talent
build your employment brand with precise targeting
let the network distribute your jobs

Search challenge
demo of linkedIn recruiter
showed how filtering can narrow results of potential candidates

questions

1. Twitter is on fire, can you use via LinkedIn?
have app for company buzz, show twitter stream on linkedIn
tweet your profiles
tweet  content that potential candidates would find interesting to build a following

2. where is social media going?
every professional will have prof and social profiles
more productivity tools on social networks
new ways to communicate every 1-2 years

3. as more people use LinkedIn recruit tool, how do you keep it fresh?
will provide indivduals tools to turn down requests
need to make sure people are not spammed

4. use plaxo, use to sync w/ linkedIn, is it going to do it again?
plaxo hacked apis on the system, so it broke with changes in api
maybe

5. will linkedIn be good to find grad school type talent?
yes it should, vision is to even have college students with interships, not quite there yet

6. how do you deal w/ spam from recruiters?
monitor acceptance rates and other monitoring, if abuse will cancel account
have analytics group that monitors

7. are there tools to help expand network on linkedin more virally?
best way is to upload address book, working more on groups to help bring people together

8. how many college undergrad and grad are on linkedIn?
college is millions

9. what other tools to manage constant stream of info?
LI is trying to provide lens to the professional streams, there will be a lot of tools

10. what does LI do for minority recruiting?
put effort to be OFCP compliant

11. can company have a profile on LI?
yes companies can now manage their profiles, eventually will be more of a CRM

12. company profile, more workforce planning?
not highest priority right now, follow this company will be coming on the roadmap

13. hard to convince students to sign up and way to monitor adoption?
nothing now, will look into

14. are company profiles indexable by search engines?
not yet but coming in a couple of weeks
sttarting to get more validation from a company admin so they can edit the company profile

11:30am
Unconference Session – what is social recruiting and what methods actually work?

Panel: Josh (entice labs), Dion (simplyhired), Ryan (EnticeLabs), Doug (founder Jobs2Web)

Need to have a corporate view of social network (fan pages, groups, etc.). if left up to a recruiter on staff and they build up their network, if they leave then company looses all the contacts.

social media is both public and permanent; having someone focused and committed to it

big job boards are “watering holes  for the desperate”

will wait longer for core team vs. non core on time to hire

each social tool must have a purpose such as find talent, keep in touch talent, etc.

90% of visitors to corporate career site don’t apply

one idea is to put up videos with in house recruiters taking about the job positions and posting on you tube, puts a face on the company and job opportunities

too early to tell ROI on socail recruting given how early it is

MSFT measures time from open req to submit of candidates, if building social pipeline the time should be quicker (i.e. 7 days) and high quality

recommend talking to CRM and ATS vendors and make sure they have social recruiting features and ways to track the entire process

CRMs will be huge in ATS in the future

even if candidates don’t have resume (becoming more common), you should spend the time to research them on social networks

12:30pm Lunch

The past three years at Trulia has been amazing as we grew the team from about a dozen people to over eighty. It does not seem that long ago that the product was just a beta mashup site that just launched in California to today where it is national, added local guide data, built the largest real estate community and creative some really innovative ad products for real estate professionals. To the Trulia team I wish the best and I will be sure to follow Trulia’s ascent within the industry and who know’s I might have time to lend some of my thoughts to the RE.net.

Why move to a recruitment solutions company, you may ask?

The answer is multi-faceted and really begins back with some of the work I did while working at Knight Ridder Digital. I was part of the team that sold off Career Path, then acquired CareerBuilder and Headhunter.net in connection with the Tribune Company. Early on, I was always fascinated with the online recruitment industry and have seen it evolve over the past eight or so years. Just as the real estate industry is trying to survive this economic crisis, as to is the recruitment industry and employers are ever facing more challenges in finding quality candidates in a cost-effective manner.  Jobvite has an innovative way to match talent and jobs which will transform how companies recruit in the future. Lastly, I will be working with a very seasoned team, including Dan Finnigan and Tim Lambert, whom I previously worked with at Knight Ridder Digital.

I have spent the better part of the past 10 years in online real estate in some fashion and it will always be part of my DNA, but I look forward to bringing some of the same innovation to the online recruitment space to revolutionize the way companies hire and job seekers find the ‘right’ position.

I hope all of my business contacts will keep in touch and if I can be of any assistance just drop me a line. Also, I plan to keep this blog more up to date moving forward, so feel free to add it to your RSS readers.

update: here is the official announcement

Jamie

Fast forward a few years and I suppose you can say I got accustom to having to sync my Zen every 30 days to update the DRM license, trying to forget the multitude of times I was on a business trip cursing at my Zen because I forgot to update the licenses. I was now paying Yahoo! ~ $80 per year (yes still getting the employee discount) so I could not bring myself to break the addiction despite the limited music library that Yahoo! Music had and the latency in getting new releases. All was seemingly fine till I got this email last week

Yahoo! Music is no more. I have already transferred to Rhapsody and the process actually was not too bad. However, the closure of Yahoo! Music spurred some questions:

• why did yahoo ever get into this business?
• how does this impact Digital Rights Management (DRM)?
• will this cause more people to just give in to Apple and iTunes?

I don’t presume to know all the answers, but I will share my thoughts, for what they are worth.

Yahoo! made a big push into the music business when they acquired LaunchCast, MusicMatch and a few others. I spent some time with the Y! Music folks when I ran Yahoo! Tickets back in 2004 and it was pretty clear that the Yahoo! Unlimited service was a key component to the strategy, a monthly recurring revenue base. I think the problem was no one expected iTunes to become so dominant and the subscription model just did not really take off. In addition, a subscription model did not necessarily fit with Yahoo’s business model as everything is evaluated on a revenue per visit basis, so when trying to get home page placement or house ads on the network it was hard to prove the ROI and get an allocation, something I also faced at Yahoo! Real Estate.

One of the side effects of the Y! Music Service closure is the fact that if you bought songs from it, you are basically out of luck at the end of September when they turn off the license servers. If you try to transfer purchased songs to another mobile device or computer it won’t work. The proposed solution, burn a CD with the songs and then rip them back to your computer. Sorry that is just an epic FAIL.

I certainly can’t speak for others but I know I will muddle through my Rhapsody subscription until it runs out and then join the rest of the world and either buy an iPod or iPhone (hopefully one with better battery life) and enjoy iTunes.

Bottom line, I think Yahoo! should have never gone into the music subscription business, but rather stick to the music video and entertainment media business. The handling of the transition could have also been smoother and will ultimately leave those of us as loyal Yahoos with a bitter taste and hesitation to pay for other Yahoo! services that may be on the cutting block.