How Technology Services are Displacing the College Career Office
I had a meeting today that made me think of the changing role of college career development offices. Twenty years ago, before the internet, the career office was the one and only place you could go for connections to jobs.... save for the random cousin you had that your mom guilted into helping you. I'm sure every single student made it their business to walk through the doors of that career office...otherwise, you'd be hard pressed to find employment.
Today, things are different. I know plenty of students who never even set foot in a career office, and its not because they're lazy. In fact, quite the opposite. They're using a host of online tools available to them to connect to the right positions in a much more effective way than resume dropping.
Consider this:
Let's say I'm a student interested in a market internship. I go to Indeed, because Indeed has nearly every job listing there is on the net... from Monster, Careerbuilder, etc... down to individual jobs posted on corporate websites. I type in "Marketing internship" in "New York, NY."
The first job that comes up is this one:
Internship - Fall - International Marketing
ESPN -
US-NY-New York
Internship - Fall - International Marketing US-NY-New York RESPONSIBILITIES ... of consumer promotions in coordination with Marketing departmental staff
From
New York Times - 2 Days 21 Hours ago
Hmm... well, that's pretty good. I could drop a resume, but that's very impersonal and that's what everyone is going to do.
Instead, I'll see if I'm connected to that job somehow on LinkedIn.
I do a search for people who work for ESPN in the NYC Area. I find Sharon Otterman. She's the Vice President of Integrated Media & Market Planning. Since the job is working with the Marketing departmental staff, seems there's a good chance that she's either the right person to talk to or knows who that is.
Now we're getting somewhere.
But wait, what will I even talk to her about if I connect? I don't really know too much about sports marketing. Perhaps there's a blogger who works for ESPN.
Type in "ESPN Blogger" in Google:
Get this guy. Ok, so the post is old and now it appears that he now works for Foxsports Interactive Media, but still, he probably knows a lot about the industry. And look! Down at the bottom left, he's got his e-mail address right there. I could ask for an informational interview and talk to him about sports marketing... get his advice, insites, etc.
What about other sports marketing blogs?
I google for "sports marketing blog" and get this one. This is a branding blog with a whole category of interesting stories about sports marketing.
What about del.icio.us? Does del.icio.us have any good links on ESPN?
Well, most of the people tagging ESPN seem to be tagging the site itself as a bookmark, but look down at the bottom, its a link to a recent story in Wired:
Wired 13.09: ESPN Thinks Outside the Box
The article is all about ESPN taking advantage of technology to be a ubiquitous sports presence on cell phones, the computer, tv, radio, etc. Interesting stuff. Certainly I should talk about some of this stuff when they ask me on the interview why I want to work for ESPN. Its definitely coverletter material as well. Nice job, del.icio.us community. I would have never found that just Googling "espn".
So, now I'll contact the Reemer guy for some insights by e-mail. I'll read the sports marketing posts and the Wired article. Then I'll use LinkedIn to connect to the interactive marketing woman regarding the job that was posted in the New York Times that Indeed found for me.
So, tell me, if I'm a student, what, then, do I use the the college career office for? Resume help? Interview help? Perhaps... but then that makes career planning more like an academic department than anything else, doesn' t it? It seems that, instead of actually doing the placing and connecting, they just need to do a lot of teaching.
So why don't they just get out of the "placement" end of their task entirely? Teach them how to use LinkedIn, how to use Indeed, how to blog professionally and read other relevent blogs and then let 'em free on the world, guns blazing. No more job fairs that don't get all the students or all the companies. No more maintaining a seperate job board specific to the school. The web connects better than a single office ever could... why would anyone try to compete with that? Its interesting that a lot of career offices are looking for ways to keep the students coming to their centralized web presence first, instead of focusing on getting them to create their own web presence via blogs and to comb the web for opportunities via vertical search, tags, RSS, social networks, etc.
The answer I hear a lot is that students don't know how to use these and they're too technical. Is that really a good answer if they work? Where are the courses on managing your online identity and using it to your benefit? Why aren't students flocking to linkedin? Why doesn't every career office in the country say, "Hey, to heck with this Monster thing, we get all those jobs on Indeed plus all the rest"? Ideas?
More Block Island Highlights
Last Saturday, we found a guy renting vintage Mustangs... I made a package deal with him to rent bikes for a few hours and then to come back and get the car. It was a lot of fun, and it makes me really anxious to get my new car. The Mustang is a beautiful car, but it definitely drove like a 38 year old car... no power steerings, drum breaks, etc. Still, it was a blast.
Plane with busted landing gear landing at LAX any minute now...
Fuckin' scary...
Link: CNN.com - Jet Blue plane readies for emergency landing - Sep 21, 2005.
LONG BEACH, California (AP) -- A Jet Blue airliner was dumping fuel over the ocean Wednesday afternoon as officials tried to determine how to make an emergency landing with the plane's front wheels turned sideways and unable to retract.
Umair becomes the competition
Ugh... I'll just start cleaning up my spot in reception now and get that Indeed job search up and running. I concede.
No, but seriously... Someone should hire this guy.
Link: Bubblegeneration - Evil Corporations Only.
"Hi everyone, just a quick note to let you know those of you I don't
know personally that I've decided against continuing towards a PhD and
am looking for a new full-time position.
Ideally, I'm thinking an Associate spot at a fund, or a strategy role in www/media/tech, but I'm open to interesting ideas."
My 50 Favorite Movies -- The Hudsucker Proxy
Sorry for the late movie again... another busy week.
"When is a sidewalk fully dressed? When its Waring Hudsucker!"
"..when the president, chairman of the board and owner of 87% of the company stock drops 44 floors... ...then the company too has a problem. "
When I was a senior at Fordham, I worked with my friend MaryAnn and a Jesuit scholastic, Andrew Wawrzyn, to come up with a spiritual retreat for business students. I was on the spiritual retreat team that year, and very few of the business majors were taking advantage of the program. However, there was certainly a need for a little "refill" after recruiting was done in the fall. Many of our classmates complained that they found recruiting--figuring out who they needed to be to get hired--emotionally and spiritually draining. Therefore we targeted a weekend program specificially to them, but modeled on the Emmaus retreat format.
It turned out to be a great program. Our activities generated a lot of great reflection and conversation. However, we didn't want to make it too intense, so we needed something to do at the end of the overnight to relax, but something that tied into the theme.
We watched the Hudsucker Proxy.
The Hudsucker Proxy is a movie with a nice little message about dreams, perseverence and the pitfalls of greed in business. Tim Robbins is a bright eyed young man with a big idea (you know, for kids) and a lot of ambition. He stumbles into a scheme led by a perfectly cast (sure, sure) Paul Newman that puts him right at the top of a pubic company. The movie is very styled... very 50's, boomtown and big... hats, rotating job boards, fast talkers and a little bit of innocence. Jennifer Jason Leigh is entertaining as the undercover reporter trying to get the scoop on why an imbicile is now running a company.
In the end, Robbins gets the best of them all by turning his big idea into a big success, but not without learning what happens when you let money and greed go to your head. Its a charming story with a solid cast, amusing charactors and a nice pace.
The Hudsucker Proxy
Creepy: Google Secure Access Installer
Remember when your mom told you not to take candy from strangers? She knew that candy was what strangers used to lure kids into their cars and drive away with them... and she also knew how our stupid candy seeking minds worked. We'd do anything for candy. We didn't care about the consequences.
Well, security is the new stranger candy.
Jack everything I see and do on the net in exchange for "security." No thanks.
You can keep your Snickers Bar, Google.
Back on campus
I'm recruiting for a finance mentoring program. Rose Hill is beautiful in September... I'm kind of jealous.
A two headed emu and a llama scare.
We've now moved on to another animal... well, another animal moved in on us.
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"He's kind of bottom heavy."
Obviously, Adrianna is rather discerning about her exotic petting zoo animals. She had a lot of commentary on the emu.
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Our hilarious emu discussion
Ok, so there are three of these emu & other animal videos. Frankly, I found the off camera discussion to be pretty funny. If you didn't find the first one to be amusing, you probably won't be amused by the next two either... just a warning. If I see a big drop in my Feedburner number, you might read about an emu disappearence on Block Island.
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Goating to Block Island
We're on our way to Block Island, RI...(thanks to Greg, Christie for tagging links and emailing suggestions)... We met this guy Billy on our way...
Corporate E-mail Stupidity
My softball team got caught up in a "reply all" fest over the past week and we kept getting "system administrator" bouncebacks from this guy who worked at Goldman Sachs. We figured he gave Zog the wrong e-mail or something.
Nope... we went on vacation and his mailbox was full.
So, basically, Goldman Sachs limits the mailbox size of this guy who works in Risk Management to something like 75 or 100 MB, and decides that anything above that should get bounced back. GM used to limit my mailbox size as well.
Why? To save server space... i.e. money.
GM did the same thing on our file server. They'd send out notices to everyone to clean out their folders on the common drives to conserve space. For e-mail, they taught everyone how to "archive" by putting their old e-mails on their local drives. Archiving was long and slow.
Up until yesterday, it never occurred to me how UFR (Utterly Fucking Ridiculous) a practice this was. How is it possible that Google can offer 2+ gigs of storage and Goldman Sachs only gives its employees 100MB?
First off, let's estimate the costs of e-mail limits. Let's say that, in GM's case, everyone managing the pension fund spend just twenty minutes every two weeks cleaning out their inbox. If the average person there makes 75K, which is probably right given that it was a buyside, mostly Post-MBA shop, it works like this.
75k/52weeks/45 hours a week = $32.05 an hour.
$32.05 an hour x 26 weeks x .33 hours a week= $277.78 a person in time lost managing e-mail storage.
$277.78 x 150 people = $41,666 a year in wasted e-mail storage management time.
I think you can buy storage servers cheaper than this, no? :)
PLUS, what about the other costs?
Like, what if someone e-mails you with a major deal with lots of revenue for your firm and gets a bounceback because your mailbox is full? Is that what you really want to have happen?
What about important notifications that you miss?
How unprofessional will your firm look when it can't match its server capacity with its storage demands?
There are lots of technologies out there that de-dupe corporate mass e-mails, attachments, etc. and save lots of storage space, if its that much of an issue. But seriously, its 2005... I make spreadsheets that are 50MB. Let's stop playing e-mail storage tiddlywinks, suck it up, and buy another server. Your best people should spend ZERO time worrying about staying under 100MB.
My 50 Favorite Movies -- Beverly Hills Cop
Its Wednesday, so you know what that means... my movie selection two days late. Sorry.
So last night, I went out with my new Zog Sports softball team. I signed up as an individual, so now I have a whole new set of people I'm getting to know. I asked someone what their top five movies would be to take to a desert island. This is a little bit different than saying favorites. I love Shawshank, but I couldn't watch it over and over and over again on my desert island.
One selection she had was pure brilliance: Beverly Hills Cop. And you know, it doesn't even matter which one. Frankly, I don't even know which one was which. There's one with Wallyworld and another with Bridgitte Nielson... They're all kind of the same. Same plot. Crime gets committed. Eddie Murphy is on vacation or accidently around or follows up a lead from across the country and isn't supposed to be there. He pokes his nose where he doesn't belong. The local cops haven't a clue and he's just nosey enough to figure it out. He laughs a lot, flashes that big smile, and impersonates a lot of wacky charactors to get by underpaid rent a cops or receptionists or hostesses. Judge Reinhold has a gun fetish... and his partner has an ulcer. hmm.. did I forget anything?
But, the one thing they have in common... no matter what time it is, or how many times I've seen them before, I'll stop to watch Beverly Hills Cop if I'm flipping through the channels. That's what makes a desert island movie. I seriously think I could wake up every morning on my desert island, watch a little Axel Foley, and not get tired of it. Its not even that its that entertaining... its just entertaining enough, simple enough... Its kind of like the movie equivilent of Livan Hernandez. The guy goes out and throws seven or eight innings every time and gives up three or four runs. If you knew you had a pitcher who could throw eight and give up four runs, you'd take that every time. Same with Beverly Hills Cop. Solid, but unspectacular entertainment every time.
Plus, how cool is that theme song? Go ahead... hum it. You know how it goes.
So what's your desert island movie?