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