Every start-up as it chugs along gets to a point of success where they need to hire for a position they haven’t hired before. And hiring for new positions is a big pain. It’s outside your experience, it seems very fuzzy, opaque and difficult to determine what’s required, and the pressure from your colleagues, your Board and yourself is to get this hire done. Now.

So there are two paths that start-ups go through, and they usually go through both:

1. A detailed process of figuring out what makes somebody in this position successful, what duties they’ll have to perform, and determining who has a demonstrated track record of enjoying and succeeding at just this type of work.

2. Or hiring a friend, who they know really well, is a great person, has been very successful at something else, and will take the job.
Yep, start-ups tend to go through both. Unfortunately, they go through them in reverse order and do #2 first and #1 second. (I should know, I’ve done it.)

Because it’s particularly maddening when you’re a group of engineers trying to hire a PR person, or a bunch of direct marketers hiring somebody to cover brand, or a group of sales guys looking for a product person, the tension to just hire good ol’ Charlie and get it done can be enormous. It’s frustrating to try and pierce through the curtain and figure out what goes on back there in an area you are so unfamiliar with.

I think the White House got itself into just this type of personnel goof this week. Every White House is a start-up, and I think the people issues they run into are relevant to fast-growing companies (how would you like to try and hire several thousand people to run an $11 trillion business in the space of two months? Over the holidays no less?)
Desiree Rogers, a fashionable, well-educated, successful businesswoman who loves the limelight, was named White House social secretary and is in hot water for the security lapse at the White House this New York Times article points out.
And it has led to embarrassing PR like this SNL skit from last night:

Ouch. And the fact that it was Obama’s first state dinner makes it double ouch.
So what can be learned from a recruiting point of view?
First, let’s presume, as her resume seems to indicate, that Desiree Rogers is a highly accomplished professional.
Second, based on the article, she was in the wrong job. Ms. Rogers is a personality unto herself, enjoys being in the center of attention, and is an inventive, creative person (rather interesting to find in a utility executive, by the way):

She posed for Vogue, turned up at the Thakoon runway show in New York and was quickly named the city’s best-dressed woman by readers of The Huffington Post…
The public conversation quickly turned to Ms. Rogers herself and whether she broke some unwritten code of social secretary dos and don’ts. She shouldn’t have attended the dinner as an invited guest. (Social secretaries rarely do.) She shouldn’t have paraded in front of photographers in an avant-garde Comme des Garcons gown. She should have been something Desiree Rogers is utterly unaccustomed to being: invisible.

The job of White House secretary is an operational job — making sure the lists are collected, the guests are inspected, and mistakes are corrected. It is not a job where you show up in bleeding-edge fashion yourself.
So the White House needs somebody in that role that is really watching all of the nuts and bolts details, is happy being in the background, and will make sure “the trains run on time.”
In retrospect, the Obamas should have hired somebody with a background as an ‘invisible’ social secretary, accustomed to making sure his or her boss’ were in the limelight and that they wouldn’t be embarrassed.
And in the case where they were looking to stretch the functioning of the role to cover both this branding and promotion role (at which Ms. Rogers seems to excel) and the “wedding planner” role (where there can only be one bride), they should have separated the jobs and hired two people.
The lesson for start-ups is: nothing beats a good job specification and an open conversation among you and your colleagues about what it takes to succeed in a job and whether a particular candidate has those qualities.

I loved the design in this (believe it or not) Vegas noodle bar. Negative space punch outs of the ceilings and walls is a clever idea that I’d never seen executed before.

And found images on Flickr show that even with tourist camera angles, it looks intriguing.

I remember when I raised money for my first company — Forbes Pacifica Trading Company — back in 1995. Focused on the export of US-made pet foods to Japan (yep, not a typo) and using my Mom’s maiden name for the name of the company (because it sounded kind of famous over there), I was ecstatic that I’d raised $250,000 on attractive terms from a group of suppliers in the pet food industry.

Except I missed the most important term.

I would have to work with them.

And that really sucked.

Because uninformed, inexperienced, rookie investors are the absolute worst. They don’t understand what they don’t understand and the future time invested in mollifying them comes at the highest marginal cost to you, while the benefits you derive from their experience range from zero to negative. Remember, something as simple as an earnestly put-forward hiring recommendation can deceive you into a very dark and blind alley.

Similarly, during my time in the private equity industry at The Riverside Company, I had a chance to work with top-tier and no-name firms, and experience the difference.

Which comes to mind today as Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon asks “Does a VC’s brand matter?” and my friend and TLC angel investor Roger Ehrenberg ruminates upon the question: “Thoughts on taking venture money.”

In short, is a buck is a buck is a buck? Or does quality matter?

Both Roger and Chris agree that brand of the deal partner matters tremendously, in fact, far more than that of the firm itself.
When a firm invests in you, a firm doesn’t invest in you. The partner on your deal does.

In the same way that success when joining an HMO, or hiring a law firm, or picking a personal trainer at the gym is far more dependent on the individual you work with within the institution than the institution itself, the partner who will come on to your Board and manage all of the relations between your company and the VC will be the determinant of whether you enjoy that relationship or not.

And while it’s true that a firm’s recruiting and retention practices can result in a higher mean caliber at one firm compared to others, it can not eliminate variation around that mean. Which is to say that even great firms hire and keep duds.

At the time we raised VC money for TheLadders, we got some great offers from those I would call “deal pigs” — guys who were looking to jump on a hot market and maximize their IRR over the next 18, 36, or 48 months — and some great offers from high-quality brand names like Matrix and others. Ultimately the deal pigs came out pricing higher and offering us more money per share for our Series A round investment.

It was an easy choice. We went with quality and accepted a lower bid to work with our partner at Matrix.

And while the choice was probably good all by itself — better-run and more-challenging board meetings, intelligent investor interactions, and effective use of the VC’s brand name in recruiting all materially contributed to what others have called our success — and would have undoubtedly have justified the “discount,” maybe there’s a reason we’ve built our business successfully into the high double-digit millions of revenue with just seven-and-a-quarter million dollars in equity funding. Maybe it’s not accidental that in building a business, where team and teamwork are most important, that treating the selection of your VC partner as you would any other hiring decision, a hiring decision where you always err on the side of excellence and caliber, a hiring decision where you’re glad to take the hit of a little extra cost to get a lot of extra firepower, a hiring decision that you know leads to outcomes an order of magnitude apart (if not in many cases binary); maybe then it’s not accidental that choosing based on quality and not price is the only route to success.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s a cause and not merely a correlation.

Very interesting take from Fordyce Letter on taking the path of least resistance:

I know at least 10 previously very big-billing recruiters who fell into the email “addiction” and, like a drug abuser, it sent them into a living hell and out of this business. Don’t become one of email’s victims.
Email is the classic case of confusing activity with productivity. Remember to never use email in this business for anything related to selling. That means 95% of everything you do should not involve email. Additionally, only use email before work and after-hours. There is nothing on email that cannot wait until after telephone time.

Good advice for recruiters, and probably good advice for job-seekers as well.

This is simply brilliant. Anybody who grew up Catholic with big dreams of space and science fiction will love the Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar from the Big Picture. From Boston, of course, home of lapsed Catholics and techno-geeks alike

The internet is such an amazing phenomenon and has created such uniquely interesting products for we humans that we often ascribe to it, and the developers behind those cool products and features, an almost magical power to solve any data-related conundrum we may face.

The problem of recommending jobs to job-seekers, and recommending specific job-seekers to recruiters looking to fill specific jobs, is one of those conundra.

The gold medal for predicting what will titillate, please or amuse humans in their quest for accurate machine-generated recommendations must surely go to Netflix. Netflix launched CineMatch in 2000 and famously offered, in 2006, a $1,000,000 prize to any computer scientists who could improve it by 10%. The story that followed – three years of toil on the most tedious problems in computer science, the collaboration of and eventual merging of championship teams in order to mount the winner’s podium – inspired the Web community and illuminated the power of the crowd-sourcing model in a highly entertaining way. Just the characteristics one would hope for from a publicity stunt! (Interestingly, Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix has mentioned to me the twenty other projects they’ve tried on a similar basis but never got “legs”. I suppose that’s how it goes in igniting the public’s imagination. Lots of dross to produce the one filament of gold.)

A persistent hope for our industry – online recruiting – is that we will also invent the algorithm that makes sourcing candidates for jobs or suggesting jobs for job-seekers as easy as the Netflix Queue.

Alas, not yet.
(I’m reminded of my doctor’s always-amusing comment to when he prefaces his diagnoses with “in our present state of ignorance, we believe….” And I think for any scientifically-minded person, that’s the right approach. So let me re-state: Alas, in our present state of ignorance, not yet.)
The movie to movie-watcher problem is a stable relationship between two static entities: users and movies.
Users’ preferences stay roughly the same over their lifetimes – the list of favorite movies they enjoyed in their thirties are similar to the movies they’ll enjoy in their fifties.

And movies stay the same over the years. “The Godfather” that we watched in the movie theaters is exactly the same as “The Godfather” we watch today – the same actors, plot, cinematography, etc. It seems like an obvious thing to say, but when we’re talking about expressing human preferences for things, it becomes important to define its characteristics accurately, as we shall see.

The result of movies staying the same is that movies have a consistent ISBN number over the years. “The Godfather” has been identified by the same numeric code and its successors since it was released.

So improving Netflix’s Cinematch is about improving the predictive capability of a system that compares static preference sets over a (growing) number of static entities. “Collaborative filtering” enables us to predict a particular user’s preference for a movie based on all the other users that have similar preferences.

It might help to think about it visually — if you imagine the movies themselves as points in space and the user’s preference set as the shape of the line connecting those points. Over the years, as you collect more and more and more shapes to compare to each other, you improve your ability to predict the shape of one preference set based on the shapes of all the others.

By contrast, the job search is a bi-lateral search between two human agents each with a depreciating, perishable, information entity.

The job-seeker’s resume changes regularly. As a human works and takes on new projects, accomplishes new achievements, and earns new responsibilities, the document outlining a description of that human changes. In theory, it’s a continuous change, but for practical purposes, let’s say it changes annually.

Jobs are perishable. For the moment, let’s focus on the jobs I work on day-to-day at TheLadders, professional jobs at the $100,000 per year or more compensation level. From the time the paperwork is approved to the time the job is filled may be as long as six to eight months or more. And the actual time that a job exists on the web as an identifiable entity with a unique number varies quite a bit, but let’s use 3 months as the typical length of time it is published and available on the internet.

So improving the job matching system is about improving our predictive capability in comparing a group of annually changing entities (resumes) to quarter-annually disappearing entities (jobs).

Compared to our ever-growing and stable “movie” shapes above, our “job” shapes keep disappearing! The lines disappear with too much rapidity to be of any value. It’s as if a user’s preferences for movies they watch rapidly evolve each year, so that after ten years, there is no resemblance between their current and prior preferences. And it’s as if the entire catalog of movies available for watching was thrown out every three months to be replaced with a new set of movies, slightly different, slightly updated, but that after five years bear almost no resemblance to their earlier form. (Think about the change in duties for a ‘Product Manager’, a ‘Developer’, or a ‘VP, Marketing’ since 1999.)

And to understand the scale of the problems, consider what the Netflix Prize actually accomplished. With the stable universe of un-changing users and un-changing movies, a $1 mm prize and plenty of notoriety attracting the world’s best computer scientists to the problem, over three years they improved the predictive capability of the system… by 10%? As others have mentioned, that makes the silver bullet of an improved recommendation engine a very rare case indeed.

So the collaborative filtering problem is very hard in the case of movies, and very, very, very hard in the case of jobs.

That is why “recommended” features can so often miss the mark in online recruiting.

And, of course, I reserve the right to update my present state of ignorance immediately upon your enlightening me.

“There’s no Santa this year,” says one frustrated job seeker quoted in this story from the AP. I spoke to the reporter, AJ Connelly, and we discussed job-hunting during the holidays.

And that got me to thinking about all of us. As I mentioned in the story, this has been a dreadful year for everybody, and especially tough on those looking for work. Which can make the search all the more lonely and distressing.

Honestly, a lot of people check out during the holidays and allow themselves the pleasant distractions of family and friends and festivities to take their mind off their employment worries. I can’t say that I blame them. But I can say that won’t do much to make the problem go away.
So let’s combat the stresses of job-hunting during the holidays by doing something counterintuitive. Something clever. Crafty, even.

Let’s go shopping – for a new job hunt. Each day for the rest of the year, let’s read just one article from our extensive advice on resumes, interviewing, networking, and salary negotiation and get smarter and better informed on the job hunt.

We’ve got just five weeks until the first Monday of next year; that means thirty-five days till the 2010 work year kicks off. And during that time, sure, you’ll be looking for work. But even more important than focusing on that new job, is focusing on a new job hunt for you. You’ll take a lot longer to find the right job if you’re looking the wrong way.

We go out and hire the best career experts and writers in the country to give you free, regular advice on the job hunt, your resume, interviewing, and all other aspects of the search.

If you read just one article per day from our Career Advice section, you’ll be improving your skills, getting smarter, and hopefully feeling a little bit less distressed during these holidays.

To get you started I’ve collected a few of the best ones from our resume section:

• How to send a resume by email
• Resume formats to use
• Getting the right keywords in your resume
• When to use nicknames (I thought this article was particularly clever and insightful).

So when people ask how you’re doing, tell them you’re shopping … for a new job hunt.

And that is how we are going to make 2010 a much, much better year.

Are you with me?

Construction is a largely unionized activity in New York City, and the union guys would like to keep it that way. If you think about it, it’s a marketing problem — they want to maintain or increase market share in the market in which they compete.

Anybody who has lived in New York for some amount of time becomes familiar with the unions’ tried-and-true marketing approach:

The Rat.

A union picketing a site where the workers are non-union bring along this large inflatable rat, presumably to shame the site’s owners into hiring union workers. I spotted this fella on my walk into work this morning.

Union marketing methods seem very, very Neanderthal. “Negative consequences” marketing — if you don’t use or product or service (or union), you’ll be bad or unpopular or picketed by unflattering hot air balloons — can’t be that effective in the 21st century. Can it?

I wonder what it would be like to start a union that demanded higher pay, benefits, perks, etc., for sure, but offered, instead of intimidation, threats, and giant inflatable rats, a better-trained, better-behaved, more-productive workforce. Perhaps show that their workers attended more training classes, learned more skills, were more flexible in the various jobs that they could do, and would make your business better.

I understand how the false conception of the Marxian labor theory of value got us here, but why are we staying here?

Dr. Wendell Williams rightly critiques the present state of recruiting:

Picture this: A candidate applies for a job; he or she presents a resume, more than half of which, Sullivan says, contain lies; you have a few hours to ask questions about past job experience (which will probably be exaggerated); you may call a list of pre-screened references (who will probably lie to you); give a test borrowed from a training class (that has no proven link to job performance but people seem to like); get together with hiring managers to argue about whether a candidate is job-qualified (where everyone seems to have a different opinion); and, tentatively ask managers six months later whether they made a good decision to spend wisely tens of thousands of organizational dollars (expecting them to be honest). Sound familiar?

The disconnect seems bizarre:
1. We know that superior people drive superior performance.
2. Leaders like Jack Welch openly and loudly let us in on this “secret.”
3. Lip service is paid; “people are our most important asset” goes right up there with “buy low, sell high” as a business maxim
and yet… and yet…. to judge by our actions…

We do not make, follow, or believe in practices intended to let human beings do their best.

*** My weekly e-mail to TheLadders.com subsribers…
I’m in my hometown of Fredonia, NY, writing this on a bright crisp Sunday morning. With Thanksgiving coming up, I’ve gone upstate to visit the relatives.
I had a great chat last night with my Aunt Pat & Uncle Bob, they’re eighty-somethings who have lived in Western New York their whole lives. We got to talking about the old days. No, not before the real estate bust. And, no, not the first dot-com boom or the Reagan years. And no, not the ’70s, the ’60s, or the ’50s either.
We were chatting about World War II, and graduating high school, and buying your first Ford, and everything that went with being young in the middle of the last century.
We talked about being a high-schooler graduating in the mid-’40s. The Great Depression grinding on, and the guy across the street never finding a job; crying in the arms of your best girlfriend in the high-school hallway because your older brothers were shipping out to “The War” that day;ration stamps for meat and sugar and butter and gas (ration stamps! in the United States of America!) along with the inevitable black market in fake stamps that you’d buy from somebody’s cousin’s friend; and the sense that your whole life had been under one darkening cloud after another, tempered only by the family bonds and friendships that had always been more important than material goods.
And so I suppose if I am going to give thanks this week, it is going to be for those family ties that got us through tough times, and our country, which has grown rich, rich, rich in the seventy years passed. We’ve grown into the greatest (best educated, healthiest, happiest, most-productive) nation in the history of the earth within the lifetime of my aunt and uncle, we conquered scarcity and more than a few bad guys in that time, and we do indeed have an enormous amount to be thankful for.
Of course the kids don’t get it. Our kids think deprivation is waiting (a *whole* year) for the next appalling release of Grand Theft Auto, or not having WiFi in the hotel room so they can surf the web while they’re watching Movies on Demand.
And maybe that’s progress — just maybe progress is the shrinking of the fears of our offspring from the existential to the trivial?
So this Thanksgiving week, I am saying thank you for the country and the times I’ve been born in, the immense great fortune that goes along with it, and the chance to do the work I love so very much — helping this country’s top talent get into their next role in life.
So here’s a thanks to all of you who have made TheLadders.co the nation’s best place to find professional talent. To celebrate your successes this week, I wanted to share of the stories of your fellow subscribers that we can be thankful for this Thanksgiving Week. …

Married to Your Professional Network
We all know the best professional connections are people who work for your ideal company already. But what we forget is that they may not be
strangers. One thing job seekers overlook is the connections they already have. Craig Bodkin, a director of Information Technology, in
Green Bay, Wis., initially overlooked an ideal insider: his wife.

After 20 Years, Salesman Relocates to His Hometown
H.C. Alexander had made eight corporate moves during his career as a sales manager, traveling across Georgia and Louisiana, north to Chicago, and
west to Dallas. After nearly 30 years, the SalesLadder member was living in Houston; working for an information management company; and thinking he
had one last move in him – if it was the right move. At the age of 59, he said, there was only one place he wanted to go.

Sales Manager Trades Flex Time for Family Time
Matthew Marshall had well-defined criteria for his next job.
The sales manager wanted to move into procurement, and he wanted to work for a global company, somewhere he could use the multiple languages he speaks
and the experiences he had living in Germany, Mexico and the U.K.
He also wanted to work in an office again, but without a long commute. After years of telecommuting from Reading, Pa., to his company/s California
headquarters and two-week-long trips every month, Marshall wanted a way to be part of the team everyday, without missing his family for weeks at a
time. It also needed to match his salary or come close. He wanted the best of all worlds, and he had little hope he could find what he was looking
for near his home.

VP of Retail Operations Works Both Sides of Network
Elaine Clarke’s job search was a model of give-and-take networking. In the 10 months she spent searching for work, Clarke landed 10 successful job offers –
but only two were for herself. Clarke, a global operations executive from Salem, N.H., forwarded job leads to eight friends and colleagues in her
professional network who successfully landed job offers.
The strategy to pass along job leads may feel unnatural to some, but the practice of helping first, asking second ingratiated Clarke with individuals
in her network who returned the favor. They sent her leads on open positions, made introductions, and called in favors with former bosses and
decision makers. It landed Clarke two leads that ultimately generated job offers and a bidding war for her services.

After a 30-Year Career, CFO Scales Back
John Renner knew he needed a change. He had been working 24/7 for nearly three years on one project and wanted to scale back the intensity of his
work. In his seven-year tenure as the CFO for a large Cincinnati hospital he invested an enormous amount of energy into his recent project: transitioning
it from part of a seven-hospital system to independent status. Now, he was looking for another opportunity.
So, he negotiated his severance in November 2008, looking forward to a little time off but also knowing that consulting work would be a phone call
away.
His consulting work was keeping him quite busy, in fact. While he could have skipped the job search altogether, at least for a while, Renner said he
never doubted that he wanted to get back to a full-time job.

Sales Manager Finds a Job Close to Home
Donald Wroble has had a lot of practice selling himself the past several years. That’s why, when the SalesLadder member started looking for a new job in
January, he was ready to attack the job search with confidence.
“I would say, as a professional marketer, the best thing you can do for yourself is to stay on top of what is happening in your field, and find out what unique
skills you can market,” he said. “That way, you’re ready when you have to find a new job.”
In 2005, Wroble had left his position as a sales manager for BASF, a global chemical company, when the company went through a number of restructurings. In the next four years, he worked for two other
companies that also went through reorganizations, each time finding another position through TheLadders.

After 1,000 Applications, Director Finds Focus
David Goldstein knew he was doing the wrong thing: sending a resume for any job for which he thought he was remotely qualified after he lost his job as a
vice president for information technology at Aetna. “I knew it was wrong,” he said. “All the advice says to be selective about who you send resumes to. But it
kept me busy.
“Each time I sent a resume, I was refreshing my mind about my skill set. I was remembering things that didn’t necessarily come to me the first time around. And
it reminded me of something I could add to my resume,” the TechnologyLadder member said.
Happy Turkey Day, Readers!