Jim Carson

To trim expenses, I consolidated my web and email providers this week. My web provider has been good to work with, but the virtual dedicated server is much more than I need (and can afford) right now. The email provider's been somewhat disappointing, but the account had been prepaid through Wednesday.

While I was waiting for the DNS entries to propagate, I noticed someone had sent a trackback ping to the Soy Ginger Mayo recipe on the old site. Twice.

My site's traffic is deterministic enough that any spike in activity piques my interest. That anyone on the planet would be interested in mayonnaise is a even weirder. You can imagine my surprise that the ping came from a Microsoft recruiter blog entry referring to my tongue-in-cheek post about Ted's former blog on the Amazon recruiting site.

The short summary:

1. Amazon experimented with but discontinued using a blog as a recruiting tool.
2. If you google Ted and Amazon and blog, you'll end up with Amazon's recruiting page. Why? Well, Google's page ranking system is based on the number of people linking to a site. More people link to Amazon than link to Ted. This will change when Ted has nearly $4B in revenues. Amazon's also surreptitiously redirecting people linking to this page to its real recruiting page.
3. Ted is human, and has admitted to such.

The tech recruiter blogs are a strange mix of restrained advice and advertising, with some of the commenters (*cough* Jeremy Wright *cough*) laying it on too thick. So far the advice is along the lines of "make our job easier." For example:

• Format your resume in text -- Before resumes gets tossed into a database, they're converted. All that fancy formatting or arcane use of Wingdings in the Word and Acrobat files can result in discombobulation, that is, a visually dispelling read for a recruiter who's going to spend 3.14 seconds scanning your resume from the thousands in the queue, and this will be a deterrent.
• Use the right keywords -- The volume of resumes means they just search by keyword. It's going to be interesting what they say regarding keyword optimization. Once the algorithm is understood, it's easy to game the system.
• Publish or perish. They mentioned Eliyon as a search tool. Specifically, they're looking for people who have patents, papers, or mentions on corporate web sites. (Don't worry, you won't find me in the database. ) I'd wonder know how frequently other sources such as Classmates, Orkut, Friendster or LinkedIn or even just plain old Google are utilized.