5 work-from-home companies you need to know about

Young woman on the phone working from home. Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

Working from home is a popular pursuit, according to research by the Telework Research Network. The research group reports that one in five employed Americans work from home at least one day a week, and about 3 million workers never set foot into an office outside home. That number is expected to increase 63 percent in the next five years, thanks in part to greenhouse gas reduction and company savings. Continue Reading

10 Lame Excuses When Calling In Sick

Playing hooky isn’t just for Ferris Bueller. In the past year, 30 percent of workers have called in sick when not actually ill, keeping on par with previous years. Sick days, legitimate or otherwise, also become more frequent around the winter holidays, with nearly one-third of employers reporting more employees call in sick during the holiday season.

The study was conducted online by Harris Interactive^© from August 13 to September 6, 2012 and included 2,494 hiring managers and human resource professionals and 3,976 workers across industries and company sizes. Continue Reading

5 Tips for Securing Your Work Laptop and Mobile Devices

How secure is your information at work? Of the 26 percent of workers who reported having office laptops, 61 percent said they have critical, sensitive information stored on them. According to CareerBuilder’s latest nationwide study, a significant number of workers may be putting their company or themselves at risk by failing to secure their laptop, sharing passwords or clicking on links from unknown sources. The study was conducted online by Harris Interactive© from May 14 to June 4, 2012 and included more than 3,800 workers nationwide.

What type of proprietary information is stored on laptops?

In addition to office-related data and documents, a notable percentage of workers said their laptops currently house a variety of personal files. When asked to identify the type of sensitive information that can be found on their office computers, workers with laptops pointed to: Continue Reading

Queen of the Random Job

Most adults of a certain age believe they’ve had some colorful jobs. Chances are likely, however, that Bethany Mooradian has them beat.

Bethany Mooradian

“I began finding random jobs after receiving my degree in puppetry because I realized that most puppeteers don’t make that much money,” says Mooradian, author of I Got Scammed So You Don’t Have To, a how-to book for finding legit work in an economy of scammers. “At one point, I was even Ronald McDonald’s bodyguard.”

Beginning in 1999, in order to make ends meet while pursuing her artistic passions, she looked for odd jobs. It wasn’t long before the search for and execution of odd jobs became a lifestyle. She gave so much advice to her friends on how not to be scammed, that she decided to write a book about it. Continue Reading

4 Ways to Spot a Recruiting Scam

For the unemployed, job scams are like a kick in the shins when you’re already down. Unfortunately, with thousands of resumes posted on job boards, chances are that scammers will get a hold of your information from time to time. It’s bound to happen — but don’t let it get you down.

At one time or another, every unemployed job seeker will suffer from that terribly disappointing feeling of their heart dropping when they realize that the opportunity of lifetime is too good to be true. Continue Reading

How Do Online Job Scammers Sleep at Night?

CollegeRecruiter.com uses the corporate version of Gmail — Google Apps for Business — for email in large part because it does an incredible job of filtering out virtually all spam without incorrectly identifying legitimate emails as spam. It is quite rare when we have false negatives or positives, but one snuck through today. Continue Reading

Expansion of .jobs Charter Walks and Talks Like a Duck Even While Claiming It Isn’t a Duck

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m opposed to the proposed expansion of the .jobs charter from what is currently allowed to what would be allowed. What is currently allowed is for Employ Media, the registrar, to help an employer such as Toyota funnel job seeker traffic to its career web site by registering and promoting Toyota.jobs. What Employ Media wants to do is expand that so that it may use secret criteria which may or may not change and may or many not be applied uniformly to create tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or perhaps even a million new geographic, occupational field, and other such domains such as NewYork.jobs, engineer.jobs, and diversity.jobs. In essence, Employ Media would be given the right to create the sandbox and decide who gets to play in it, for how long, and at what price. Those who are friends may get to play for longer and at a lower cost. Those who aren’t friends may be treated quite differently. And Employ Media may retain whichever domains it wishes for itself. In effect, Employ Media becomes both the registrar and the competitor.

One of the key complaints against the proposed expansion of the .jobs charter is that Employ Media would create perhaps a million new job boards. A White Paper on Dot Jobs just published by Direct Employers Association executive director Bill Warren — one of the key driving forces behind the proposed expansion — addresses this concern in what I can only describe as double speak:

[T]his is not a million job boards but rather one dynamic jobs platform, it will provide a single interface for posting jobs to niche, targeted locations. Automated job feeds and single postings will only be accepted from vetted employers and, when the .jobs TLD build‐out is complete, all jobs will automatically appear in the appropriate city, state, country, and occupational .jobs URLs. Job seekers will be able to enter a desired city, state, geographic region, country, or occupation plus .jobs (Atlanta.jobs, Georgia.jobs, etc.) in their browser for immediate access to relevant jobs.

So if I understand Bill properly, they’re not creating a million job boards but one and that one job board will be accessible by perhaps a million different domain names such as NewYork.jobs, engineer.jobs, and diversity.jobs and each of those domain names will have different content which is targeted to its users so NewYork.jobs will contain only information about jobs in New York, engineer.jobs will contain information only about engineering jobs, and diversity.jobs will contain information only about jobs for diverse candidates. I’m sorry, but how is that not a million job boards? Oh, because underlying each of them is a common platform. In other words, one database and common software will drive all of them. Does anyone really think that 99 percent of the visitors to these sites will understand that? If there are a million domains with different content, that’s a million job boards regardless of any double speak to the contrary.

Whether the underlying software is shared or unique to each board, they’ll function to the individual users as separate boards. And if they function as separate boards, then they are separate boards. Ever hear the expression that if something walks like a duck and talks like a duck then it must be a duck? Well folks, Employ Media and Direct Employers Association can call it what they wish, but this is a duck.

Employ Media Publishes Evaluation Criteria for .Jobs Domains

I received an email earlier this afternoon from Ray Fassett of Employ Media to announce that they are now accepting proposals from organizations and people who wish to own a non-company name .jobs domain. The link to the Request for Proposal (RFP) form did not work for me so I replied back to Ray to tell him so and ask him to email the PDF to me. He replied back within minutes with a note saying the links on their web site worked for him and he included a link for me that worked.

The domains which Employ Media is now marketing include geographic names (i.e., NewYork.jobs), occupational field names (i.e., engineering.jobs), and dictionary words (i.e., diversity.jobs). One of the key objections that I’ve had to this entire process has been the lack of openness and transparency by Employ Media and the other driving forces behind this expansion of the dot jobs charter: Direct Employers Association and Society for Human Resource Management. I’m disappointed but not terribly surprised to read in the PDF application form that the RFP process will be anything but open and transparent. Keep in mind that if you buy a .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, or just about any other type of domain you just head over to GoDaddy, Network Solutions, or any of thousands of other registrar sites, pull out your credit card, and buy the domain name. Anyone can buy any domain name and the process is completely open, transparent, and honest. Compare that to the evaluation process that Employ Media just announced:

6.7.1 Employ Media reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to alter the schedule of proposal evaluation as it deems necessary or appropriate. Dates listed may be changed by posting on Employ Media’s Website without notice to any Applicant or prospective Applicant.

6.7.2 Employ Media will assess Proposals by applicable criteria, including but not limited to the following criteria
(i): quantity of Domains of Interest;
(ii) community value, impact and investment;
(iii) enhancement of the .JOBS brand;
(iv) business plan, capability and sustainability;
(v) technical and financial capabilities;
(vi) general company (or team) information;
(vii) compliance with the .JOBS Charter;
(viii) compliance with any and all applicable policies, practices and business rules which govern .JOBS;
(ix) compliance with all applicable ICANN requirements;
(x) quality, innovation, choice and differentiation;
(xi) the nature and strength of the applicant and/or any named partners, including historical business practices and further including historical activities and actions as such have related to the .JOBS sTLD, Employ Media, SHRM, ICANN, the Community and this request for proposal process, including Employ Media/ICANN contractual amendments and Employ Media/SHRM Policy Development Process amendments;
(xii) the effect, if any, on the Society for Human Resource Management (“SHRM”);
(xiii) the ability of the proposal to deliver as set forth, including business and technical capabilities of any relevant parties,
(xiv) willingness to work cooperatively with other applicants and third parties; and
(xv) compliance with the terms of this request for proposals. Individual criteria may be given varying weight depending upon the nature of any given Proposal.

In any given instance, one or more of the criteria listed above may be dispositive in terms of Employ Media’s evaluation of a Proposal, but need not be so. Employ Media may, in its sole discretion, choose to ignore or decrease in importance, or increase in importance, one or more of the criteria listed above, and Employ Media may do so on a proposal-by-proposal basis.

You also must agree to negotiate with them, they can reject your application for any reason, they can for any reason pull the domain from you after you go live even if you’ve managed to build it into something valuable, you must indemnify them if they’re sued for anything related to your domain, and they can do whatever they want with any information they collect from you including publish on the Internet the financial statements and business plan that they’re requiring you to provide.

Okay, so let’s say you can live with all of that and you still decide to proceed. What’s the cost? Who knows? Your application will cost you $250 and that’s non-refundable. They don’t even have to consider it. They can just pocket your money and tell you to buzz off. But let’s say they do cash your check (no credit cards!!) and give you the positive news that they are willing to temporarily lend to you one of the domains (remember they can pull it back whenever they want). How much will the domain cost? Who knows? You need to tell them how much you’re willing to pay. Maybe that’s where revenue share comes into play. If you have big plans and they are convinced that you can properly execute, it seems to me that they’re going to be far more likely to approve your proposal if you promise to pay them even one percent of your revenues than if someone with a plan which is equally as good and is equally as likely to executive promises to pay them dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of dollars.

Wow. What chutzpah! (defined: Yiddish for unbelievable gall; insolence; audacity)

CollegeRecruiter.com Adds Language Filters

It has been an interesting and education process this past month as we continue to make the move from a Web 1.0 platform where virtually all communication was from our staff and our employer clients to the job seekers over to our Web 2.0 platform where far more communication is user generated. We knew going into this, for example, that we’d inevitably have some users who wouldn’t post appropriate content and that some of that content may end up offending other users. When I outlined my vision for what we were and where I wanted to take us, I got a lot of “are you crazy” looks and remarks back from friends, family, employees, contractors, clients, and other stakeholders. One of their biggest concerns was how would we deal with the inevitable person who didn’t just accidentally step over the line but deliberately leaped over the line by posting porn or other such content which would be very offensive and potentially harmful to our business.

Fortunately, we’ve had only one real problem in the month but I’m realistic enough to know that we’ll have more and probably more frequent. We’ve been able to minimize the number of incidents by being proactive and responsive. On the proactive side, only members can post content and all members must verify they’re for real by registering at our site, receiving an email to the email address they provide, clicking on a link within that email, completing their profile, and answering a math question to help verify that they’re actually human rather than a “bot” (computer program). Are those hoops fool proof? Of course not, but neither is the lock on your front door but locking your house makes it far less likely that you’ll be robbed so you lock it even though you know that a very determined burglar will smash down your door, break a window, whatever.

So what do we do to prevent illicit content once the member is registered? We moderate all blog, video, photo, and other such content. Unless you’re one of the administrators, if you post a blog article then that blog article does not go live until we’ve reviewed and approved it. There are a handful of blog contributors who post frequently and their content is always top notch so we don’t even have to read their blogs. We just approve them. But if we don’t know you well, we’re going to read your blog article to make sure that it isn’t objectionable. It may not be beautiful prose, but we’ll approve it if it isn’t terribly objectionable.

Over time, I anticipate that we’ll see more and more blogs, videos, and other such content posted to our site and we’ll welcome that. So the review process will become more and more of a burden. How will we minimize the burden on our staff time while still doing what we can to minimize the illicit content? One way is our new language filter. This administrative feature enables us to filter out offensive or otherwise prohibited words from content on CollegeRecruiter.com which will help us more efficiently moderate the user generated content, as well as increase the value of your site traffic to the rest of our members and clients. The language filter is sort of a 2010 version of George Carlin’s “seven words you can’t say on the radio” skit where he said aloud seven of the most popular swear words. Maybe it is a reflection on society, but our filter has a lot more than seven words in it. In fact, it has dozens upon dozens.

So what happens if you post a blog article with one of the words in it? Chances are that you’re a “real” person and that you just stepped over the line. Maybe you did so accidentally and maybe you did so deliberately but if your blog article is good other than a four letter word that you included, we’ll want to publish your blog article but not with the swear word. So the language filter automatically edits the swear word so only the first letter of the swear word is shown and the rest are replaced with (*). So if “swear” was a banned word and you entered “swear” in your blog article, the word will will show up in your blog article as “s****” (without the quotes). Words are filtered when the page is being prepared for display to the user.

Neat, huh?

Fighting Blog Spam

We re-launched CollegeRecruiter.com a month ago with an entirely new job search engine, content management system, and blog software. The blog software we’re now using is the open source WordPress and we’ve been very happy with it.

Perhaps the biggest problem we’ve had to-date with the WordPress installation was the huge amount of blog spam. People, and I hesitate to describe some out there as “people” because they’re such scum, have created programs that post bogus comments to blogs in the hopes that some of those comments will either go live automatically because the blogger foolish lets all comments publish or the comment will go live because the spammer has managed the trick the blogger into thinking that the comment is legitimate. Within days of launching with the WordPress blog, we were receiving hundreds of these spam comments a day with most of them being either a “your blog be very nicest” comment or a longer description of some product or service that the spammer was peddling. The products and services being pitched in either case tended to be porn, illegal pharmaceuticals, or just traffic generating links to site that made their money by serving banner ads.

So spam became an issue and we were confronted a decision as to how to tackle it. One option commonly employed is the captcha form which requires the user to read squiggly letters and type them into a form correctly. If they do, the web site infers that they’re human and not an automated comment spam generating program so their comment would be automatically approved or at least make it through the filter so the blog owner would be asked to approve it the next time she logged in. Another option is similar but just asks the user to answer a math problem. We took the latter road. It isn’t as secure as we’ll need to frequently change the math problem or at least change it if we see spam comments increasing because spammers could look at the question and program their system to answer the question correctly. Realistically, I think it is like locking your door at night. Burglars can still break in and there really isn’t a foolproof way of preventing that kind of a crime but the vast majority of break-ins are prevented with the use of a simple deadbolt lock and there’s no need to lay mine fields in your front yard or position snipers on the roof. Well, maybe if you’re the President of the United States but not for us common folk.

So we added the math question and tested it out. So far, so good. No spam comments all day. I’ve got my fingers crossed. Will you do the same?