Personal Branding and the Job Market

If you don’t think personal branding is important, you’re flat out nuts.

Nowadays it’s so much easier to brand yourself online – through blogging, social media, networking – and then leverage that effectively offline as well. Bringing your online branding efforts offline is key; because you can’t live exclusively online. And this is especially true in the job market.

There are plenty of places online to look for jobs, and we know that Gen Y and Gen X do almost all of their job searching online. It makes completely sense. And now we’re seeing tools to help companies and candidates brand themselves more effectively online. But ultimately, hiring people is about one-on-one connections and meeting people face-to-face to see if there’s a fit. The online job market helps bring people together, and it’s getting better at it, but you still need to bring your online brand with you when you meet potential employers for interviews, etc.

Dan Schawbel gets personal branding.

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Data: A Startup’s Secret Money-Making Asset

matrix

The pervading approach to launching a startup is to do it quickly, iterate constantly and make as much noise as possible throughout the process. It’s not a bad way of doing things, and given the lower cost of startup operations, and the nature of consumer web startups in particular, and it’s completely doable. But be careful if you’re not a data hog.

Getting your startup launched as quickly as possible is fine – you need to get it in front of people to understand what’s working (and not), and get as much feedback as possible – but you should also spend a good chunk of time preparing to collect data. That means building the necessary infrastructure into your system to collect, review and analyze the data generated by users.

What Data Should You Collect?

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Kudos to Marc-Andre Cournoyer: Speaking at MeshU

Marc-Andre Cournoyer was the first employee we ever hired at Standout Jobs. Since then he’s done a lot of cool things (for us) and on his own, including the fastest Ruby web server, Thin.

Now Marc-Andre has been invited to speak at MeshU – a 1-day conference on development, design and business. Marc’s doing a workshop on using Thin and Rack to solve performance issues and have fun.

Other speakers at MeshU include: Leah Culver (Pownce), Daniel Burka (Digg), John Resig (Mozilla), Avi Bryant (DabbleDB) and more.

MeshU will be held in Toronto on May 20th. It coincides with the Mesh conference.

If you’re interested in development and/or design you should check it out. Marc-Andre is a great speaker (as are the other speakers), and it looks like it’ll be a jam-packed day.


About Ben Yoskovitz
I recently joined GoInstant as VP Product. GoInstant changes how we use the web, making it shareable like never before.

I'm also a Founding Partner at Year One Labs, an early stage accelerator in Montreal. Previously I founded Standout Jobs (and sold it). I'm a hands-on startup guy, helping companies grow successfully from the idea forward. You can reach me at byosko at gmail dot com.

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The opinions and commentary on this site are mine and mine alone. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of my employer, GoInstant.