Instigator Blog

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.

I’ve been way too quiet here lately which is a combination of going to ERE Expo, getting sick and being insanely busy. But I did want to make this quick announcement as an update to what’s going on with Standout Jobs.

Standout Jobs has been selected by CIX (Canadian Innovation Exchange) as one of Canada’s Hottest 20 Startups.

You can read my official announcement on the Standout Jobs blog.

CIX is an event being held on April 29th-30th in Toronto - where a mix of VCs, angel investors and entrepreneurs from across Canada (and North America) get together and network. Standout Jobs will be presenting there to the audience — it’s an 8-minute pitch (with a couple minutes for questions.)

So now I’m knee-deep in PowerPoint and having the time of my life! (*chuckle*) This presentation will be a bit different than others I’ve put on and should be interesting.

I’m looking forward to going to Toronto, connecting with tons of people and having some fun. If you’re in Toronto and want to connect, just get in touch!

On Thursday, March 20th @ 12pm EDT I’m hosting the second Social Media Recruiting Radio Show with Chris Russell.

The goal of the 1-hour show is to talk about social media recruiting — what it is, how you can use social media for recruiting, the benefits, pitfalls, success stories and more.

For Thursday’s show we’ve got a guest — Dennis Smith from WirelessJobs.com and we’ll be talking about the use of blogging for recruiting.

We run the show on BlogTalkRadio which is very cool. There are phone numbers to call-in and ask questions, or you can sit back, relax and enjoy. It’s a great opportunity to dip a toe into social media recruiting and see what you might be able to do - very easily - to improve your recruiting efforts.

The first show ran a couple weeks ago — here it is for you to enjoy:

Quick recap:

• What: Social Media Recruiting Radio Show
• When: March 20th @ 12pm EDT
• Why: Cause it’s cool

Are you interested in social media recruiting? Do you want to understand how to leverage social media & social networks to reach a higher quality, targeted candidate? Are you curious about how to leverage marketing and sales principles to hire top-talent?

If so, come listen to me and colleague, Chris Russell speak on Thursday, March 6th @ 12pm EST on BlogTalk Radio. It will be our inaugural Social Media Recruiting Show.

You can just listen in, or participate by asking questions.

The show will go for an hour. We’ll start by each talking about a couple different items of interest, and then hopefully, we’ll have enough people calling in with questions. It should be fun, and I encourage you to come listen in and get a feel for social media recruiting.

The latest addition to the Standout Jobs team was Alain Wong, who joined us late last year for the big push to DEMO 08. I knew Alain was a world-class dancer, but I didn’t realize he was a hardcore biker as well. Turns out he isn’t…but he will be biking from Vancouver to Tijuana, Mexico for a great cause.

Alain is joining the folks at Agents of Change for the 3,000km bike trip to raise money for the AOC’s micro-credit fund.

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