The I Need a Freakin Job Movement

In another sign of the times, the brand new I Need a Freakin Job grass roots movement is gaining steam and therefore an increased ability to advocate for the millions of Americans and American families affected by the unemployment crisis.
A group of unemployed Buffalo residents created a INAFJ.org web site, Facebook Fan Page, and put up the above billboard for President Obama, who was in Buffalo a few days ago to talk about creating jobs. The President’s motorcade passed by the billboard and if he looked out the window at the correct time, he was sure to understand the message: Buffalo needs jobs.

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Is Your Manager Hands-off Or Does He Just Think He Is?

Twitter List for Attendees of LinkUp’s Tweet-Up at the ERE #SocialRecruiting Summit

Whether you’re able to attend next Monday’s ERE Social Recruiting Summit at the Best Buy world headquarters in suburban Minneapolis, the LinkUp-sponsored Tweet-Up social hour (actually, three hours) the evening before, or none of it, you should follow all of the attendees if you’re a user of Twitter or, as some would say, a Twit.
About 100 people have RSVP’d yes so far to the Tweet-Up and provided their Twitter handles. Rather than having to follow each of them individually, I set up a TweetML list yesterday evening to make it easy to follow them all with just a couple of clicks. Feel free to piggy back on my minor contribution to the events and I hope to see you there!

Biggest High School Graduating Class in History Becomes Biggest College Freshman Class in History

There’s no doubt that the recession has had a big role to play in the situation but regardless of the causes, the U.S. Department of Labor recently confirmed that the graduating high school class of 2009 — the largest in history — has also become the largest college freshman in history with a whopping 70.1 percent of the 2.9 million enrolling in college.
Source: The Wall Street Journal

Interview Tips for Job Seekers

SMS Marketing Must Be Opt-in Even Though Email Need Not Be

Reasonable people can differ on the effect the federal anti-spam legislation, CAN-SPAM, has had on the world of email marketing. On the one hand, it has probably increased the amount of commercial, bulk email that we all receive because Congress gave direct marketers a set of rules to follow and they’re legally protected from lawsuits provided they follow those rules. On the one hand, those rules protect consumers because they prohibit misleading subject lines and require automated opt-out links or other such mechanisms. On the other hand, marketers can send their emails to anyone as consumers need not have opted in to receive the emails.
Compare that last component to the world of cell phone text messaging (SMS) marketing, where there is no legislation such as CAN-SPAM and it is becoming increasingly obvious that consumers must have opted in. Simon & Schuster may learn that lesson the hard way if they end up on the losing end of a $90 million class action lawsuit even though their vendor, Nextone, required consumers to opt-in to receive texts from its “affiliates,” a word commonly used in the direct marketing world to mean partners, customers, or vendors. In other words, if you do any type of business with any entity, that entity is your affiliate. So when Nextone required its visitors to opt-in to receive texts from affiliates of Nextone, just about everyone in the industry would have interpreted that to mean that Nextone could legally and ethically deliver the text message on behalf of its customer/affiliate, Simon & Schuster.

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What it is like to attend the University of Maine

One of New England’s premier universities, the University of Maine opened in 1868 and was named one of the best colleges in the United States for three consecutive years by the Princeton Review. U Maine is located in Orono, Maine, about 15 minutes from Bangor, the state’s third largest city. The 600 acre campus is centrally located in a beautiful, rural setting on the banks of the Stillwater River; it is close to the ocean and the mountains, yet provides access to urban amenities. There are also 88 bachelor’s degree programs, a nationally top ranked library, and U Maine has one of the oldest and most prestigious honors college programs. The school enrolls about 12,000 students from 48 states and 66 countries, and undergraduate enrollment is just under 10,000 students.

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What it is like to attend Macon State College

Macon State College is a four year, public, non-residential, metropolitan college, located in Macon, Georgia. It features three campuses, which serve a seven county area in central Georgia; the university is 90 minutes from downtown Atlanta and three hours from Savannah. The 168 acre main campus is surrounded by botanical gardens and features a centralized lake, which is a backdrop for outdoor activities, picnics, studying, and even geese watching. MSC’s enrollment is approaching 7,000 students and is diverse, with minorities representing about 45% of the population.

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How College Students Should Use Job Boards

The biggest mistake the first time job seekers make when it comes to using job-search websites such as Monster, Careerbuilder, Dice, CollegeRecruiter.com, or any of the other 100,000 is relying too much on them.
Job boards by conservative measure account for about 12 percent of new hires and by industry measure for about a third of new hires. The share of new hires derived from job boards is increasing regardless of which camp you listen to, so this issue is becoming more and more important despite the increased attention paid to social media sites.

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HIRE Act More About Politics Than Economics

There are a lot of signs that the economy continues to emerge — slowly — from the worst recession since the Depression of the 1930′s. Consumer confidence is up. Stocks are up. Hiring is up. Houses are selling again.
The turnaround has and will continue to benefit areas and individuals to different degrees. If your stocks are up, you sold your house, and you found a new job, the economic recovery is going to look pretty good to you. But if your stocks are still in the tank, your home is in foreclosure, and you’re unemployed, the recession is still very real to you.

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