• July 1st is Canada Day.
  
• Three days later is U.S. Independence Day.
  
• This is about the only week in the year when there's virtually no risk of snow here in Minnesota.
  

Jason Davis -- founder of Recruiting.com, later founder of RecruitingBlogs.com, owner of dozens of great recruiting domain names, and master poker player.

Dave Mendoza -- quite simply one of the most masterful networkers the planet has ever known and one of the very few people I know who talks-the-talk and more importantly walks-the-walk that networking is all about what you can do for others, not what they can do for you.

So what's up with the wedding? Well, Jason recently extended an offer to Dave that Dave graciously accepted. A few joyous tears may have been shed and calls to the family made, but the union was one of business for Dave has joined RecruitingBlogs.com as a partner.

Apart, these two were dynamite. Together, they will move mountains.

Eric just launched JobBoardBlogs.com, which provides readers with a quick overview of blog entries posted by various job boards, including CollegeRecruiter.com.

Great idea, Eric!

Unlike the big general boards, our niche board has for years generated most of its revenue from non-traditional job board products such as targeted email campaigns and targeted cell phone text messaging (SMS) campaigns. I know that we do a great job for the vast majority of our clients and occasionally fall flat on our faces. But as frustrating as it can be when we can't drive the right traffic to our client's web site, it is even more frustrating when we've driven the right traffic yet they're not seeing it. More often than not, the problem is with the web traffic tracking software they're using or how they're using it.

We just added a short Frequently Asked Questions section to our Contact Us page. Now rather than the candidates having to wait hours or perhaps even a day or two to get an answer back about some issue, they will normally be able to have their question answered even before they ask it of us. That's better for us and better for them.

Run your resume, job posting ad, or any other document through word cloud (a/k/a tag cloud) software. The software extracts unique words from the document and increases the size of each word the more often it is used. So the most frequently used words appear as the largest clouds while the least frequently used words appear as the smallest clouds.

I didn't go to the sessions and I don't know how many attendees SHRM had for the two conferences. I spent all of my time in the exhibition area so that I could get some great face time with clients, vendors, and partners. As wonderful as email and the phone are, nothing beats looking someone in the eye and figuring out how to better help each other.

So what was bigger about Vegas? The number of exhibitors. It took me 1.5 days last year to walk through the exhibit hall. This year it took about half that time. I'm in much better physical shape this year than I was last year but that's not it. I bet there were 30 to 40 percent fewer booths this year and some of the booths had nothing to do with human resources, such as one for Sleep Number beds and another for Mercedes cars.

Is SHRM hurting because of the economy? Or did the exhibitors expect Chicago to draw fewer attendees than Vegas? Or something else?

As you'll see in the video, we had two primary reasons for continuing to allow candidates to post their resumes to CollegeRecruiter.com but not making those resumes searchable by recruiters, employers, and others.

One of the changes that wasn't as obvious to a casual observer was the rapid expansion of the other sites in our network of career sites. When an employer posts a job to CollegeRecruiter.com, that job runs on our site as well as on the thousands of other career sites in our network. We recently updated the page listing those sites to reflect the 2,707 four-year colleges, two-year colleges, and technical schools which run our postings.

The obvious and not-so-obvious changes to our site have proven to be a huge success. Rather than about 10 percent of candidates who view a job applying to it, about 50 percent now do. We've received a lot of very positive feedback from our clients about the quantity and quality of those applicants. More changes are in store. Hopefully they will add additional value to the employers and candidates who connect with each other through CollegeRecruiter.com.

But those of us who use Firefox know that Mozilla is a global community of thousands who believe in the power of technology to enrich people's lives. It is a public benefit organization dedicated not to making money but to improving the way people everywhere experience the Internet. And it is an open source software project whose code has been used as a platform for some of the Internet's most innovative projects.

But not everything about the behavior of a helicopter parent is negative. In an article published through the free recruiting content exchange service, Recruiting Blogswap, Marcia Robinson of Bullseye Resumes argues that parental involvement at the college level could enhance rather than hinder college student graduation rates.

The IAEWS has a strong, engaged membership base comprised of virtually every major job board and dozens of small niche players as well. The Association has been hosting two Member Congresses a year but some of the feedback that Peter has been receiving from members is that they'd like to participate but aren't always able to attend. In short, can the IAEWS find a way to bring the Member Congresses to the offices of its members in a virtual manner? Peter, always looking for ways to say yes rather than ways to say no, figured out that an attendee could blog about each session in real-time and solicit feedback from those who are attending virtually.

But this blog entry isn't so much about Hasek as what we can learn from him and his decision to retire.

1. Illegitimate organizations, most of which were international, using the resume data for illegitimate purposes such as identity theft. Most job boards have done of good job of preventing that by manually verifying their clients.
   
2. Legitimate organizations, most of which are domestic, using the resume data for illegitimate purposes such as pitching credit cards and other financial products to high income earners or those who have the potential to be high income earners, such as the college students and recent graduates who are the primary users of CollegeRecruiter.com.
   

One employer was quoted in the article as saying that if their background checking company spots students who are depicted as partiers then their applications are rejected. The company, a chemical engineering firm, doesn't want to hire people who party in college. Huh? Are they trying to say that none of their Gen X or Baby Boomer employees partied in college or just that they weren't photographed partying? Or are they really saying that the technology didn't exist 20, 30, or 40 years ago to take a photo of your friend while they're at a party and instantaneously upload it to a social networking Internet site?