Instigator Blog

Standout Jobs (my startup) is hiring a CSS & Web Designer.

This is a full-time position in Montreal.

Please take a look at the full job listing on the Standout Jobs blog.

To apply, we’ll need to see a portfolio, and you can email us at csswebjob@standoutjobs.com.

The job market is hot. This is especially true in Silicon Valley where every company - big and small - is looking to hire top talent.

How do they do it?

Fred Ngo, co-Founder of Standout Jobs acted as roving reporter at the TechCrunch 9 Party asking people for their best hiring stories and biggest challenges in recruiting top talent.

The results are quite interesting…

My favorite stories come from Emmett Shear at Justin.tv and Dick Hardt, Founder of Sxip.

Tomorrow morning I board a plane at 8:30am for San Francisco. It’s my first visit there.

I missed the TechCrunch Party but my Standout Jobs co-Founders made it.

And it looks like Fred and Austin had a great time.

Fred was on Ustream.tv, but apparently the sound wasn’t very good. Oh well!

I’ll be in San Francisco until Thursday morning. I’ve got a few meetings and events I’m attending, including Loic Le Meur’s and Hugh MacLeod’s dinner tomorrow night and a dinner hosted by Mohr Davidow Ventures on Wednesday.

I’m looking forward to meeting a slew of great people, and if you’re in San Francisco and want to get-together, send me an email or reach me through Twitter or Facebook.

See you there!

MyBlogLog is an extremely popular tool amongst bloggers. It allows you to see who is visiting your site through a simple widget that most people include in their blog’s sidebar. The MyBlogLog mission is all about making the blogosphere more personal.

People can become community members of your blog, and MyBlogLog serves as a communication hub for bloggers. I’ve enjoyed MyBlogLog a great deal and developed some worthwhile business relationships through it. Remember: Social networks aren’t just personal, they’re professional too.

I had the opportunity to meet Robyn Tippins, Community Manager at MyBlogLog in May at SOBCon 07. She’s an amazing person; a great communicator and connector. So when I saw that MyBlogLog was hiring, I knew I could help.

Working with Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson, the founders of MyBlogLog, and Robyn, we’ve put together a video job ad for them.

MyBlogLog is looking for software engineers. Lots of them.

The video tells a great story. Eric and Todd knew each other as kids, they started MyBlogLog almost on a whim, and with the help of Scott Rafer turned it into the success you see today. In a few short months after launching the networking aspect of it (originally it was focused more on stat tracking) they were purchased by Yahoo! Pretty darn cool… (For more on their story, check out this video from TechStars.)

MyBlogLog has been on a recent tear adding new features. And to help them with that, and manage the growth, they’re hiring programmers. Check out the job listing at Standout Jobs.

Standout Jobs has some interesting jobs listed - each one with a fun, interesting video for your viewing pleasure. Video is just a tool, but a powerful one at showing you a company’s culture, vision and what they’re really looking for in new hires.

I’ve added some of the latest job openings to the Instigator Blog sidebar on the right.

Plank Multimedia is a great web design shop in Montreal. I’ve known them for years. I consider the team and their work top-notch. They’re looking for a project manager, which should be a very cool job. You might even get a chance to work with Michael Moore.

TSOT is a Toronto-based company that runs three social networks: fraternity live, sorority live and faculty live. TSOT is hiring a Ruby Rockstar, and what you’ll see immediately from their video is that they care and believe strongly in Ruby on Rails.

EmptyTray is looking for bookkeepers and virtual assistants. Although based in Toronto, EmptyTray will bring people on from all over. They help small business owners run their businesses more efficiently.

Band of Coders is a group of programmers in Guelph and Toronto looking to hire Senior .NET Architects. Band of Coders works with people across North and South America. You can see their personality coming through very strongly from their website (which is rare for corporate sites.)

Many of our current job postings are for companies based in Toronto and Montreal. And there will be plenty more from those cities in the near future, including job openings at some of the hottest startups. But stay tuned as we broaden our horizons into other cities as well. Standout Jobs isn’t focused exclusively on the Canadian market…far from it.