Looking for a Job? How To Make A Parachute

In the early 1980’s when I had returned from a year in Mexico I needed to find a way to plug in to the job market. A book that was exceedingly helpful to me that year was Richard Nelson Bolles’ What Color Is Your Parachute? Peter Drucker praised it and so do I. The sub-title is A Practical Manual for Job Hunters & Career Changers.

Now when I discovered this book, the advice I was urged to follow was this: skip the book and do the exercises in the appendix. Sure enough, this was superb advice at the time because those exercises helped shape and affirm a strong sense of self-concept that proved to be the real key in my career success.

Like the Oracle at Delphi, whereupon the wise counsel “Know Thyself” was inscribed, Bolles directs us to the only valid start-point in a career. Who am I and what can I contribute? Without clarity here, the whole process of interviews, resumes, applications gets pretty grainy.

A recent BusinessWeek story (April 30, 2009) stated that there are 3 million job vacancies in the U.S. right now. This is fairly significant mismatch, in part due to some unusual factors. The housing crisis has made it challenging for many people to sell their homes and move to where the jobs are. Another problem is that a lot of today’s unemployed are untrained in areas where there are needs. Experts in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are not easily found amongst the ranks of the hammer-and-nail construction layoffs.

The advice that follows may not apply to everyone, but it is something that worked for at least one fellow in the tech sector, formerly employed by Yahoo!, named Jeff Scott. What do tech people do for fun? They go to places like Mashup Camp and play hacker games, among other things. Networking, learning new skills, new tools…

Mashup Camp is a production of Techweb’s Aleternative Events Group which aims to bring Internet developers and attendees into close proximity in an unconference-style event. The first Mashup Camp took place in February 2006. The highlight is a competition to see who can develop the best mashups. (A mashup is a web application that combines data from multiple sources.)

Jeff Scott not only won a Dell E248WFP 24-inch Widescreen Black Flat Panel LCD Monitor, he landed himself a job by means of a mashup he created titled I NEED A JOB. Using Mozenda data harvesting technology Scott essentially sewed his own parachute. The net result: Scott is now publisher and editor of 148Apps.com, an iPhone App News and Review blog launched in 2008.

A PRWeb story explained. Scott designed his Mashup to help people who are now or soon will be out of a job. The mashup takes the text from your resume or a URL pointing to your resume or Linked In profile and processes the text through Yahoo! Text Extraction to get key terms about you, your skills and job experience. Then it processes over 50,000 Craigslist.org listings all scraped from the Craigslist site by Mozenda looking for the best matches for your skills. It then ranks, by city, the best places for you to look for a new job possibly giving you some options you wouldn't have considered previously.

According to Scott the speed with which one can get set up setup for creating, testing and scraping templates with Mozenda was most impressive. “The quick setup and testing is the killer feature,” said Scott. “What Mozenda does isn't unique, it's the way they do it that rocks.”

As they used to say in the old days, there's more than one way to skin a cat. I don't know if they skin cats anywhere these days, but for sure there are a lot of people in need of good parachutes. I wonder if there's money to be made in writing mashups for job hunters. Or maybe those Mozenda folks can help you write your own. Nowadays parachute makers weave code instead of fabric. The goal, in either case, is a soft landing.