Matt Baril » Jobs

Do You Work in a Zoo or in The Wild?

Matt Baril — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:02:01 +0000

Last Friday, I had a beer with Peter, a friend of mine who teaches at SFU and started his own company called Octothorpe Software which makes software to help anyone from individuals to Fortune 500 make better decisions. We were talking career path when Peter asked me: "If you had the choice, would you rather work in a zoo or in the wild?" Now, that got me thinking. Every time you meet Peter, you can be sure to be intellectually challenged and learn… a lot.

The Zoo

The zoo, on one hand, is this place where you're fed, pet, washed, and treated well just for being there. You're not asked to do much except for being there and doing that one show every day to impress the visitors. You're not asked to make any decisions or take any risks and will not be put down unless you do something absolutely stupid like biting the hand that feeds you… The staff in the zoo expects loyalty and will, in return, make sure you have all you possibly need.

The Wild

The wild, on the other hand, is a different story. Living from one kill to another, being emaciated during the hard months, feasting during the good ones. You can get killed at any time, but developing and relying on your peers and making up your own pride will increase your odds of you surviving. You enjoy your freedom and the fact that you don't report to anyone, but yourself. You also know you have to stay on top of the game, always keep a sharp eye open and plan for the next day. Having cubs to feed increases the consequences of your potential failure and keeps you up at night.

As Peter pointed out, there is nothing wrong in working in a zoo and it actually fulfills many people's aspirations. The only thing I would warn you against though, is to be careful not to be let loose after many years in a zoo. Your chances of surviving in the wild are decreased, a lot. You'll be fat, your reflexes slow, your natural instinct vanished, and your enthusiasm to run after big games dead. Even more important, you won't have anyone to rely upon to come to your help. It must feel quite lonely out there in such conditions. If you can have a plan, or multiple backup plans to ensure you do not end up in the wild after many years in a zoo, then you're safe. Otherwise, if you're like the rest of us and don't have a bulletproof position in a zoo, make sure you keep your eyesight clear, your instinct alert, your body fit, your claws and your fangs sharp and most importantly, keep your passion unaltered. Retiring in a zoo as opposed to starting your adult life in a zoo might also help you develop the necessary skills to survive in the wild and then enjoy the zoo.

So, do you work in a zoo or in the wild?

I found Peter's analogy very inspiring and thought I had to blog about it. If you like this, make sure you send a message to Peter to say thanks.

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Be a Sexy Job Seeker and Increase your Odds of Getting the Perfect Job

Matt Baril — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 05:51:25 +0000

All my life, I've been extremely lucky in my job hunts and career opportunities. Unfortunately, I have many friends who are not so lucky and are currently looking for a job, it actually seems like most of my friends are looking for jobs in the Vancouver area right now. Luck, determination and hard work have been the main factors of my career opportunities, but I think everybody works hard and is determined, but there are ways to put odds on your side and increase your luck. I thought I would share resources and tricks that have helped me and some of my friends to put odds on our side.

1. Be resourceful. There are some really nice tools out there that can keep you on top of things really easily without much effort. Use them! The first thing you need is a good way to know about the relevant jobs available in your area, and in 2010 there are 3 websites you cannot leave without for job hunting:

These 3 websites are what we call aggregators (read this post to understand why you should love them) and a search will fetch and provide you with results from many different websites. If you're looking for tech jobs in Vancouver for example, they will go on many job boards in Vancouver and do a search based on the keywords and the area you entered. That means you don't have to do and redo all these searches on all these website everyday. You can also save your searches and subscribe to the RSS feed, so you don't even have to go back on the website at all, the job postings are just delivered to your RSS feed reader. If you don't have an RSS feed reader, I would recommend Google Reader. You can even make the RSS feeds to be emailed to you on a regular basis with free services such as feedmyinbox. For instance, you could get up in the morning, open up your email client and apply on all the relevant jobs posted within the last 24 hours while having your breakfast. Cool eh?

If you're more into technology, you can use Yahoo! Pipes. That's like the Lamborghini of all the tools you can possibly have. It lets you make your own feed instead of using on of the web sites mentioned above. You can aggregate your own feeds, search, filter, sort, etc. That’s the tool I use for my job posting on this blog which displays the 150 most recent tech jobs in Vancouver in real-time. Yahoo! Pipes is free.

2. 2. Use LinkedIn. LinkedIn is just the most awesome social networking tool for jobs. I know many people who complain about it, but I think they just don't know how to use it. I've had 3 job offers since January through LinkedIn. Jobs I did not ask for, the companies came forward and offered me a job or an interview. There are also a lot of jobs available on LinkedIn (you can find them through simplyhired.ca as well) and now you can follow companies (brand new of a few days). So if you're interested by one company you can follow them, and when they open a position or when someone leaves, you can apply on the job even before the company advertises for the job. Having a complete profile on LinkedIn also adds credibility to your application, especially if you can get a few recommendations. Anyways, my point is that LinkedIn is just great! If you decide to join, add me: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/mattbaril.

3. 3. Own and use your dot com. This might be pushing it a bit, but having a website helps as well. My website is a blog and there is quite a bit of content, which means that potential employers can surf through it and read bits and pieces to see my English proficiency, my capacity to write, think and how disciplined I am to keep the blog up-to-date. It helps in two ways: an employer can find you through your blog, but it can also add credibility to your application. In my interview at Elastic Path, a company I worked for during the Olympics, the HR person kept talking about my blog and she asked me only one interview question, the rest of the 45 minutes were spent talking about my blog which she pulled up on her screen. But, a personal blog is a lot of work and I know people who have used their website differently and have had some success as well. I went to school with this guy called Cody Watson and I like what he has done with his dot com. It's pretty simple, it takes few hours to put together, but it looks really professional and helps for the first impression.

4. 4. Always apply on all jobs, even those you’re not too fond of. This is probably the most important mistake people make, not applying on all kind of jobs. Don’t be picky, you don’t have a job for god sake, just apply on everything you think is related to your area even though it’s not the dream job. There are many reasons to do so:

You can practice your interview skills and will not have the pressure you would usually have if you really wanted the job.
You will have feedback on your resume and the experience you have that is most appreciated by employers. If you don’t get the job you can even ask why and know where you’re falling short.
And most importantly, you’re much sexier when you have a job. People are people and hiring someone who doesn’t have a job seems like a risk. If that person was that great he or she would have a job right? Right… so get a job to make yourself more attractive. It also shows you are motivated, ambitious and driven. Once you have a job, you can say things such as: “I love working for company ABC, they have provided me with XYZ kind of experience and treat their employees very well. However, I feel that with my background and experience I could add more value and be more useful to a company like yours by doing ABC. As you can see from my resume I have already worked on projects similar in scope and have had great success.” Well now you are lot sexier than by saying: “I’ve been spending the last 2 months looking for a job, but couldn’t find the right fit.”

5. 5. Spend 8 hours a day looking for jobs. Finding a full time job is a full time job. You should set targets for yourself such as sending 10 resumes a day. Once you have the right tools set up for you, you can easily get 100 jobs per day into your inbox or RSS feed reader. Pick the 10 most interesting and apply. Make a couple of cover letters for different kind of roles you are interested in and tweak them to make it sound personal. It will take you less than 10 minutes to apply on a job with a “personal” cover letter. Count about 3 hours to do so and applying on 50 jobs per week should get you anywhere between 1 and 5 interviews per week. You can then spend the next 5 hours of your day for sharpening your interview skills (free job centre resources), having real interviews, tweaking your website, making new connections on LinkedIn, joining new groups on LinkedIn, networking at different events, blogging, volunteering, taking courses/classes/certifications. Every single hour should be an investment in your career and a step forward, something that will lead you to a job or will enrich your resume.

There is definitely a big part of chance in the process, but you can improve your odds of finding a great job if you do the above. You will also need someone to support you, a wife, a husband, a friend, a parent for the times when everything goes wrong. The week you will have sent 50 resumes and went to 3 interviews and get nothing in return will be a tough week, but it’s not the end of it. Keep working at it and you’re putting the odds in your favor and sharpening the saw.

What are your tricks and tips to become a sexy job seeker and increase your odds of getting the perfect jobs? What do you think doesn't work versus what really works?

Good luck all!

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February 7th – Business Idea #7

Matt Baril — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 17:35:23 +0000

Idea #7 Cross between yelp! and ratemyprofessor.com to rate how good your employer is for job seekers

As a job seeker, sometimes it's difficult to know what kind of employer a given company is. Is it a modern sweatshop for workaholics, a lousy organization who's happy being average, or an awesome place that offers work balance and great benefits? Usually you find the answers to these questions after you've started working for that employer, and sometimes you find out many months later. Here the idea is to have a website similar to rate my professor, but for businesses. There would be some criteria, for instance wages, benefits, work life balance, management, etc. and employees would get to vote on a scale. That website should host and fetch job postings for different companies in order to give a full picture to the job seeker. Money could be made with the many job postings and premium accounts for job seekers. A platform to enable discussion between current employees and would-be employees such as a forum would definitely be a big help as well. There could be some control over who gets to rate a company based on their email address, so if you have a company email you get to rate the company you work for (that would be defined by the person who first adds the company to the website). All ratings would however been kept anonymous in a way that the link between comments/ratings and the people cannot be made.

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One More Tool to Find Jobs

Matt Baril — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:27:55 +0000

I have just added a tool that allows you to search for jobs in indeed.ca from this website. Indeed.ca fetches jobs across many job boards and is one of the best tools out there and I highly recommend it. If you want to test it out you can click here.

Good luck on your job hunt!

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More Job Results in the Vancouver Tech Jobs Section!

Matt Baril — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 09:13:39 +0000

Following a comment from Bill, a visitor on this blog, I decided to include indeed.com to the Vancouver Tech Jobs listing. The website is an aggregate of different job boards and company websites and does what my simple job posting page is attempting to do, only on a larger scale. My aggregate includes more local jobs, more local sources and has 15 different search criteria for indeed.com alone and is therefore better targeted for the Vancouver tech sector. I would however strongly recommend you have a look at indeed.com since it's a very powerful tool and it gives you the opportunity to customize your research and even receive an email digest on a daily basis. According to the company's website, indeed.com has been around for almost 6 years now and I'm not sure why I never came across it before, but it's probably one of the best resources out there and you should definitely give it a shot.

There is only one downside to adding indeed.com to the current aggregate and it's the fact that there might be some overlap and jobs showing up twice on the job listing. That's because indeed.com fetches job postings on sites I fetch job postings too. I'll try to delete and eliminate the repetitive sources as we go.

So, how has the job listing helped you so far? Has anyone found a job following the use of this website? (I did, more to come!) Is there any other sites I'm missing?

Have a great weekend folks!

If you're new to this blog, you can click here to access the job listing.

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Top 150 Most Recent Tech Jobs in Vancouver

Matt Baril — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 01:11:24 +0000

As I just completed my BBA, I'm officially a job seeker. Good times! Fortunately, people living in Vancouver have access to many resources online, most of them for free. However, their number makes it difficult to keep up with all of them and I ended up spending most of my time surfing all these websites in search for new postings.

I got tired of manually looking for new jobs and decided to use RSS feeds to make one big feed of all the tech jobs in Vancouver. I used Yahoo! Pipes to aggreagte, sort, and trunk the many RSS feeds and feedburner to display the feed on my website. I was quite impress by Yahoo! pipes easiness to use and its power, definitely worth a look at.

These jobs are taken from websites such as symplyhired.ca (which already aggregates all major job boards e.g. monster, CareerBuilder, etc.), techjobsvancouver.com, craigslist.com and google search. All the jobs are filtered in order to be targeted for Tech people living in Vancouver, BC and are sorted from most recent to least recent. Clicking on the job title will bring you to the website that has originally published the job post.

Working with RSS feeds means that everything is done automatically and I do not host these job postings, it's merely a collection of links. As such, I cannot delete a job post that is irrelevant and I cannot be held responsible for the content.

Lastly, you can subscribe to the master RSS feed if you want to save yourself the hassle of visiting the same page all the time. Click here and add the feed to your favorite RSS reader. I also invite you to share your favorite job boards so I can include them!

Hope you'll like it and good luck!

Top 150 Most Recent Jobs in Vancouver

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