So, now that Jobyssey is up and running, its a question of getting the word out to the right people for us. We hate to do the same boring mindless stuff everyone’s seen a million times- who really needs another ballpoint pen? We’ve got a couple of fun ideas in mind, and the first one we’re planning on doing is customized fortune cookies. Fun, right? And tastier than most pens.

Looking for ideas for the messages, though, we came across a few sites that were too funny to go unblogged about:

• Bizarre Fortune Cookies
  
• Unsettling Fortune Cookies
• Fortune Cookies You Don’t Want To Get

The Catch-22 of trying to get your first job in a particular field is that everyone wants experience. It’s easy enough to understand why potential bosses would prefer someone with a background in the field, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Whether you’re looking for your first “real” job or making a career change mid stream, try the following to get some experience under your belt:

Check out our Technorati profile here:
Technorati Profile

Jobyssey.com is live!  As of this week, Jobyssey is available in a public beta version for software and IT workers and employers in the Republic of Ireland.  What this means for you:

• Looking for a new software/IT job?  If you take a few minutes to build out your profile on Jobyssey, you’ll be automatically shown jobs that fit you.  As employers add new jobs that suit you, they’ll see your anonymous profile and be able to email you an interview invite.  As always, no agencies, and your name and contact details remain hidden until you agree to interview.

• Looking for new software/IT staff?  If you’re a direct employer of technical staff, we’re setting up trial accounts to let the you see what we’re all about.  You’ll get several months of free job postings, and lots of individualized help setting up your profile.  Pop over to www.jobyssey.com/IT-employers.php and drop us an email if you’d like us to send you some further details.

We’re really excited to have the site up and going- we’ll post updates as we go through the beta process and as we roll out new modules.

Do you have an unusual skillset, a willingness to relocate, or a fairly senior job title? If finding you is a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack, potential employers may be using Google to find you. How can you make sure that your CV is easy to find through a search engine? Try the following:

1. Have an HTML copy of your CV with a SEO-friendly file name, title and meta tags- a good choice would be along the lines of mydomain.com/webPHPdevelopercv.html or similar with a useful title along the same lines. Use the meta keywords to provide several alternate job titles (”cake developer, web developer, php developer, php programmer, web team lead, CV, resume”) or your most critical skills, and the meta description to sum up what you’re looking for, including location (”PHP Developer with M.Sc. in Computer Science for lead developer role in Dublin, Cork, or elsewhere in Ireland”).
   Read More

Every once and a while, something leaps out of the daily blog read that completely reframes something and provides a whole new framework for looking at it. There’s a post on Seth’s Blog about pitching things to the small, committed fan group or the broader masses. Everybody knows there are these two groups you can aim a new product at, and we’ve spent plenty of time at Jobyssey debating this feature or that, and whether it was more important to keep things basic for wider appeal, or to add on the bells and whistles that the most dedicated users want to see. The “Aha!” moment, though is realizing that in between the small bell curve of passionate users and the much larger bell curve of mainstream users is a great, big trough. Equivocate too much, and you’ll end up with something too bland for the true believers and too quirky for the average joe. I hadn’t ever looked at it this way, but that probably explains the demise of a lot of seemingly good ideas. One to ponder.

There’s a little place in the office of every hiring manager and HR person. It is a cold and dark place. An eerie place filled with shadows. A place swarming with the ghosts and spirits of missed “dream job” opportunities. A kind of job purgatory if you will. In effect it is actually a CV graveyard, needing only 1 excuse to lure its CV prey. In applying for a job you must avoid this place with all your might, and to aid you in your quest (or odyssey!) I have outlined a few of the lures and weapons the graveyard has in its arsenal. Beware…….

1. The format trap - always save your CV as a generic and compatible file format. To be safe go with a .doc (note: avoid .docx as they are not always compatible with earlier versions of Word). The last thing you want is to submit your prized CV that you have slaved over making it perfect - only for it to be trapped by the graveyard because it is inaccessible.
   Read More

I’ve always been astounded by the number of people who apply for web-related jobs whose CV gives no hint of knowledge of the Internet that goes beyond most people’s grandmas. Vague CVs that give no indication of the technologies being used on the project (Ruby on Rails? Java? Fortran? This information might be useful to potential employers). No way to get more information about past employers. And, most dammingly, no links to any past work.

You know who you are, people. And, whether you’re a project manager, designer, developer, director, or QA specialist, if the word “web” is anywhere in your job title or description, you should do the following to your CV:

An ongoing theme throughout our start-up process has been the struggle to clearly articulate what we’re trying to do. We’re big believers in clarity, but Jobyssey has a lot of unique features that make it a challenge to spit out a phrase or two that leads to a lightbulb moment for the listener. Worse, people continually misunderstand and believe we’re a job board, or worse, a recruitment agency (this probably shouldn’t be a surprise since recruiters do spend quite a bit of time dissembling to get past gatekeepers). So, we try to explain that we’re a job and CV database, but that it’s our searching system that’s really unique, but also our attention to soft skills characteristics (especially for software jobs…), and that we have really high confidentiality standards, and no headhunters, and….suddenly everyone is nodding and smiling they way they do when Great Uncle Rufus starts in with the war stories again.

I feel like this is the critical challenge for us on the non-technical side of things, but unfortunately I haven’t had a lightbulb moment myself yet. Hopefully one day we’ll start explaining and see someone’s eyes light up right away, and we’ll know we’ve hit the nail on the head at last.

It seems as though automated testing or scripting experience is becoming mandatory for more and more software testing jobs in Dublin, particularly permanent jobs/better paying jobs/better employer jobs.  It seems as though elsewhere a division has developed between manual and automated testers, but in Ireland it seems to be a case of automated testing experience becoming a prerequisite for most QA/ software testing roles.

The implications of this are interesting as many (if not most) of the QA people we’ve seen have a manual testing background.  This seems to have become a pretty high-value skill in Dublin at the moment.