Microsoft
Your Employees Presence on Social Media Can Benefit You
What do the CIA and Microsoft have in common? They both take advantage of their employee’s presence on social 
media sites as a way to leverage their recruitment process. With the help of social media and your employee’s networks, you as an employer can do the same. Here are some ways to build your own personal recruitment army through the use of social media and your employees.
- Have employees contribute to company specific Blogs that gives potential hires a look at what it is like to work at your company, or how the hiring process works
An example of this is Microsoft’s Jobs Blog. Recruiters from Microsoft created this Blog for potential employees to get a behind-the-scenes look at Microsoft’s hiring process and careers. It is also a place to check out the best tips and tricks for job hunting, resume writing, interviewing and working at Microsoft.
- Create a company Facebook page or group and have employees point potential candidates to those sites
Oracle has a company Facebook page for their company recruiting needs. On this page they list company information, videos, hiring needs, events and talks about the Oracle campus.
- Create a company Twitter account with your employee feeds feeding into it, or encourage your employees with Twitter accounts to post updates about company information and news updates
Zappos.com is a perfect example of a company that uses Twitter in its recruitment process. They have a dedicated page on Twitter where 198 of the Twittering Zappos employees’ most recent messages are fed. Employees tweet about what they are doing at work and about interesting resources dealing with Zappos.com.
- Encourage employees to use employer rating sites like Glassdoor.com, Vault.com or Jobvent.com
Here is a post from AskBINC.com listing 10 of the commonly used employer ranking sites. These sites provide an inside look into various companies by allowing those companies current and ex-employees to anonymously post ratings and reviews about life inside the doors of their workplaces.
- Create alumni groups on social networking sites
Yahoo has set up the Yahoo Alumni group on Facebook with over 2,946 members who currently work for or have worked for Yahoo. It’s a place for alumni to reconnect, network and share stories. It is also a great place to let the members of the group know when your company is hiring.
- Get employees to advertise the job on their LinkedIn profile by creating a status update when a new position open up or setup a Custom Company Profile on LinkedIn
This new feature on LinkedIn allows brands to set up their own profile page, which provides an overview of the business, as well as insight from current employees and recruitment agencies. It also allows companies to add a tab for careers.
- Create a Youtube channel and allow employees to post videos about their experiences working there. Add videos about your interview and on boarding process
Google does a great job at this with their Google Youtube Channel, where they post videos like this one An Inside Look At Google – Working at Google.
- Make a recruitment video or upload photos to a company career site and ask employees to share it with their networks
Intel does this in their recruitment efforts. On their career site they have a new interactive portion where visitors can see a short virtual representation of what the Intuit offices are like along with pop-up videos and photos
On Adobe’s career site, they feature a professionally produced video showing a day in the life of several Adobe employees. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, one of the videos shows a designer in San Francisco beginning his day surfing in the ocean at 6 a.m. and then follows him through his work day.
- Ask employees to include an RSS feed of your open jobs on their personal blogs and networking sites or add the Facebook Come Work With Me Application to their profile
The Facebook Come Work With Me application is for employee referrals and job searching. This application is for organizations that use the PageUp People as a recruitment management solution. This application allows users to display jobs on their profile page for all their friends to view and apply to.
- Offer a bonus to employees who refer potential candidates
- Use your Blog as a job board and when a new job gets posted ask employees to push the link out to their Twitter network
You Too Can Be Like Bing
Last week we introduced The 5 B’s of Career Branding, with the first being “Be Visible”. I was trying to think of popular brands that have seen success because of the brand visibility they created for themselves. The first company that came to mind was Microsoft.
On June 3rd, 2009 Microsoft officially launched their Bing Search product, and since that day they have successfully implemented an in your face branding strategy. With a marketing budget of 100 million dollars, Microsoft set out to let the world know what Bing was. Between the radio commercials, TV commercials and roadside billboards, I can’t get away from the name Bing Search. Even though I feel it’s a bit overkill, the visibility they created for Bing Search helped increase Microsoft’s share of the search market. Just like Bing, you too can take a stand in your marketplace by increasing the visibility of your career brand. Here’s how:
1. Join professional communities –
Be an active member on any and all online communities and forums that deal with your interests and niche. The more people you actively network with, the more your name will be known. Befriend key players in your industry and remember to comment on their postings.
Facebook and LinkedIn have a feature called groups. Find a group that interests you and join it. Be active in the group by answering questions posted by other group members, posting interesting stories that you found on the internet and offering advice to other group members.
2. Create professional profiles –
If you are not on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter get your account immediately. Those sites are the most popular networking tools out right now, and building a name for yourself using them will increase your visibility. You should also think about creating a Google profile, which will make it easier for people to find your name and your professional information on Google. To view other social networking sites, Mashable has a list of over 350 Social Networking Sites, take a look at them and decide what sites would work best for you.
3. Show it through writing–
Writing a blog keeps your mind open and moving and challenges you to get your thoughts out in the open. By writing a blog you are creating a voice for yourself and establishing credibility within your industry. The most important thing about a blog is that is connects you on a daily basis with your peers, peers you might not have been able to reach out to otherwise. If keeping up a blog is too much for you, try writing guest post for popular blogs or write technical articles to be published in industry specific publications.
Another way to be visible is to update Wikipedia and online Encyclopedias. This shows your knowledge of a particular subject and increases you visibility to a specific community.
4. Attend events –
Go to every business and career networking event you can attend. You are opening the doors to new career paths, will be able to find out what skills are currently marketable and are getting the opportunity to keep up to date with industry news. These websites list upcoming networking events in your area: LaidOffCamp, GarysGuide, Upcoming, Meetup. You can also find some popular networking events in a recent article we posted on AskBINC.
5. Update often –
This is an easy and effective way to stay in people’s hearts and minds. The easiest place to do this is through Twitter. If you follow the Twitter Diet, you will grow your personal and professional brand, set yourself apart from others by showing you know what you are talking about, firmly plant yourself in the minds of potential employers and stay in the loop about open positions and company information.
Oh Where of Where Will the Talent Go?
It’s about time, after years of rumors and negotiation Microsoft and Yahoo have finally struck a deal. According to an
article on Yahoo News:
“Microsoft Corp. has finally roped Yahoo Inc. into an Internet search partnership, capping a convoluted pursuit that dragged on for years and finally setting the stage for them to make a joint assault against the dominance of Google Inc.”
The two tech giants entered into a 10 year search deal that will take some time to be fully implemented. The doors to
this deal aren’t expected to be closed until the beginning of 2010 and then it could take up to two years to put all the puzzle pieces together. Yahoo won’t be left out in the cold though.
”In return for turning over the keys to its search engine to Bing and promoting it, Yahoo will get to keep 88 percent of the revenue from all ads that run alongside search requests on its site for the first five years of the deal. Yahoo also will have the right to sell ads on some Microsoft sites.”
Microsoft recently released their new and improved Bing search engine, and many analysts believe that it is because of Bing that Yahoo made the deal. In the press release found on Mashable here are some of the details to the merger:
- Microsoft’s Bing will now be the search engine on all Yahoo sites.
- Yahoo will provide the relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.
- Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business.
- Self-serve advertising for both companies will go through Microsoft’s AdCenter platform.
- Microsoft will compensate Yahoo through a revenue sharing agreement on traffic generated on Yahoo’s network.
- The term of the agreement is 10 years.
“This agreement comes with boatloads of value for Yahoo!, our users, and the industry, and I believe it establishes the foundation for a new era of Internet innovation and development,” said Yahoo! Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz. “Users will continue to experience search as a vital part of their Yahoo! experiences and will enjoy increased innovation thanks to the scale and resources this deal provides. Advertisers will also benefit from scale and enjoy greater ease of use and efficiencies working with a single platform and sales team for premium advertisers. Finally, this deal will help us increase our investments in priority areas in winning audience properties, display advertising capabilities and mobile experiences.”
My question is what is going to happen to all the talent over at Yahoo, now that they aren’t working on a search engine? Will they merge with the Bing team, or will they be laid off? If you want to keep up to date with all that is going on in the merger process, check out the site that Yahoo and Microsoft put together ChoiceValueInnovation.com.
Senior Software Development Engineer – Commerce
JobID: BE178854
Location: Washington
JobTitle: Senior Software Development Engineer – Commerce
Salary: $80,000 – 100,000
Job Description:
(Job ID BE178854) Our client seeks to hire a senior software engineer for its downtown Seattle office, where they are developing the industry’s most powerful application for buying and selling homes.
Their commerce team is led by engineers from Amazon and Microsoft working on a system that will process billions of dollars in real estate transactions. Because the self-service technology can drive customer satisfaction at better margins, it is fundamental to how they make real estate better.
Responsibilities:
- will work across all three layers of their system from the user interface to the application logic and the database. They use AJAX client technologies, Java, Apache, Hibernate and Postgres.
- will get the chance to build a user experience from the ground up
- will have the support and resources to learn always
- will work with a young, brilliant team with which to collaborate
Qualifications:
- must have a strong academic background in computer science or a related technical field
- must have a history of driving ambitious projects to completion, preferably at a startup
- must have lots of ideas
- must have an instinct for building customer-driven applications, and a curious, analytical mind: so you can work with product management to fix problems that discourage would-be customers or hamper agent productivity
- must have the intellectual range to be able build an application from the database schema up to the user interface, with knowledge of Java and SQL as well as JavaScript, CSS, MVC, HTML and JSP
Company Culture:
- well funded (12-mil Round C Funding) web 2.0 startup
- located in downtown Seattle
- huge passion for technology and Real Estate
Please send your resume to jobs at bincsearch dot com and reference the Job ID Number
Web Madness Tournament – Round One
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March Madness has hit the entire country and although there is the BIG Dance, there are many other dances taking place these days including one within our very own web/software marketplace. Working in the high profile world of web companies, we’re seeing the market swing on a quarterly basis with last years high-fliers beginning to plateau (Slide, Yelp, Ning), landmark companies going radio silent (Microsoft, Google) and new Cinderellas emerging on a daily basis (too many to mention – call us we’ll tell you).
We thought now couldn’t be a better time to let people duke it out and decide who is the hottest company to be working for in 2009. So we put together our own BIG Dance comprised of 16 web/software companies all vying for the top talent and overall market dominance. And we’re going to give you our opinions and let you decide the winner of our very own Web Madness Tourney.
Voting for this round will go until Friday March 27th at 5pm – results will be posted Monday March 30th
Are You Ready For Your Dream Job?
Every year Fortune puts out a list of the top companies to work for in the upcoming year. This year’s list of 100 puts companies in the medical, food supply and technology fields in their top 20. Technology companies such as Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Accenture and Booz Allen Hamilton all topped the list.
If it has always been a dream of yours to work for some of the companies mentioned above or any of the companies on the list, what is holding you back? Below we have listed some things to think about before pursuing your dream job, which will hopefully get you closer to landing the job and scoring the role you have always wanted.
Click to continue reading “Are You Ready For Your Dream Job?”
2009 Predictions for the Software Market
At the beginning of each year the BINC team gets together and creates a list of predictions for the year to come. It was interesting to see how many of our 2008 predictions actually came true. Here are our predictions for 2009; it will be intriguing to see how many of these actually prove to be true:
Mel Condos
1. Sales people will be in high demand
2. Wii games will proliferate the market
3. Top engineers and PM’s will always be in demand
4. Mobile and remote working apps will grow
5. VOIP will grow
Grant Neckermann
1. Yahoo sells in chunks
2. AOL returns to consumer spotlight
3. Wii gets 1st major competitor
4. Venture Funding Falls 60%
5. No major IPO’s in web
Eli Arzhevskiy
1. THQ will be bought
2. Activision will continue to dominate
3. EA will start to make a come back
4. National Gaming will be a good practice
5. My market will dominate yours… 
Boris Epstein
1. Microsoft will buy Facebook
2. Yahoo will reemerge as market player
3. Enterprise 2.0 and mobile will dominate
4. Facebook will figure out how to make money
Iditta Yuchourellu
1. Web 3.0 will take over web 2.0
2. Many new start ups with launch
3. Many of those will fail after launch
4. Yahoo will do extremely well compared to 2008
Tawny Labrum
1. Social Networks like Twitter will be the #1 source for news
2. Steve Jobs will retire due to sickness
3. Techcrunch will go under
4. Cell phone applications will be the hottest thing in the industry
5. Amazon Kindle will flop
Georgina Paolino
1. Enterprise 2.0 will be bigger than web
2. Apple will come out with a touch screen monitor
3. Yahoo will get bought out
4. Vista will be replaced by Windows 7
5. Google will buy Facebook
Brian Harold
1. Two larger social networks will merge (possibly Twitter/Facebook, etc)
2. Mobile gaming will become a big deal for a much wider audience.
3. A company will find a way to successfully appeal to the population with an Internet/TV combination of some kind.
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BINC TV on Gaming Companies, Twitter and 2009 Software Companies
This week they guys from BINC TV talked about three different subjects. The first part went into the gaming industry and even though the economy is in a recession the gaming industry seems to be doing well. In the second part they spoke about that the upcoming trends in software will be in 2009, and finally the third part was spent talking about the most recent Yahoo layoffs and how social networking and micro blogging sites like Twitter helped the public stay on top of who got laid off and what was going on inside the closed doors of Yahoo. Hope you enjoy.
Part 1
There have been many articles lately stating that the video game industry is recession proof, but there have also been mass layoffs at certain game companies. For the month of November video game sales reached a high of over 3 million dollars. This success is due to the Christmas season and the popularity if the Nintendo Wii. What will companies like EA, Activision and THQ do to keep up with the competition?
Part 2
2008 didn’t end to well for software companies, but 2009 is still to come. There is some talk about nearing the bottom of the software market recession. Once we are out of the recession what companies will lead the way out of the recession. Companies like Microsoft and Google have the proven business model to hold strong and have been around for a while. Will newer companies like Facebook and Twitter pull out strong? Or will Yahoo resurface?
Part 3
Twitter has proven itself to be right on the lines of breaking news. This was found true during the recent Yahoo! layoffs. As employees were getting handed their pink slips, they would twitter the details of their departure from Yahoo! on their Twitter account. Twitter readers would be up to date on the layoffs before the news channels had time to set up shop outside the Yahoo! headquarters.
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What’s Next for Yahoo??
Who else out there is not surprised by the resignation of Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang? With all the bad press and deals gone south while Yang was in power, I was surprised to see it take this long for him to get the boot. So what’s next for Yahoo, the once powerful internet search leader? In the week’s BINC TV episode the team talk’s about the rein of Jerry Yang and what Yahoo should do to turn the tables back to a positive company.
With Yang now gone, will it open up the doors again for talks of a buyout from Microsoft? It will be pretty hard for a new CEO to come in and repair all the damage that has recently been done to the Yahoo image. Yahoo’s best bet is to allow itself to be bought out by another company, that way all the innovation and technology inside the walls of Yahoo wont go to waste. I think that people have lost respect in Yahoo’s decision making, and the only way for them to gain it back would be to allow another respectable company come in and take over. That is just my opinion though, to see what the BINC TV team thinks watch the videos below:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
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Take a Look into Our Crystal Ball
The Washington Technology Industry Association holds an annual Tech predictions dinner. At this dinner a panel of experts put their two-cents in on what they foresee happening in the Tech Industry for the year to come.
This year TechFlash’s John Cook moderated the panel which included Mark Anderson of Strategic News Service, Ben Elowitz of Wetpaint, Matt McIlwain of Madrona Venture Group and Kelly Smith of Curious Office. In addition to the panels thoughts, BINC TV decided to add on to these predictions. Below are the questions that were asked and everyones take on what is to come for 2009.
Who will be Obama’s choice for CTO?
- Anderson: Eric Schmidt, Meg Whitman.
- Elowitz: “I threw my name in the hat and so far I haven’t heard back yet.”
- Smith: Bill Gates, Jonathan Schwartz. “I think what both of these guys share is they understand how to think about technology on a massive scale.”
- McIlwain: John Stanton, Jonathan Schwartz. “Schwartz would be an inspired choice because Sun (Microsystems) might be one of the next ones asking for a government bailout.”
- BINC TV
What are the most important tech issues facing the country in 2009?
- Anderson: Energy, Broadband. “We have no policy whatsoever for bandwidth…. It is the enabling characteristic for economic development.”
- Elowitz: Economy. “The No. 1 thing on the agenda for every single tech company is the broader economy.”
- McIlwain: Education/Talent. “If we can’t … educate people in our country to have absolutely the best opportunities… to be contributors to the innovation economy, it is going to be very hard for us to continue to be the market leader in technology-driven innovation.”
- Smith: Education, taxes, batteries. “One thing McCain said that I agreed with … He wanted to have an X-prize of sorts for battery development. It is absolutely brilliant. It is absolutely necessary…. If you can get batteries to last longer on half the power consumption at half the price, that is kind of a big deal.”
- BINC TV
What will Google’s stock price at end of 2009?
- McIlwain: $450 per share.
- Smith: $400 per share. “In general, people are predicting a relatively flat-to-down year in online advertising.”
- Elowitz: $500 per share. “I like to say that flat is the new up. Google is absolutely, without question, dominating performance advertising. They are the one and only dominant force in that market. And performance advertising… is the critical segment in the next year and it will absolutely do the best.”
- Anderson: $275 per share. “I figure things are going south from here and people are not giving enough credit to the general going-south nature of our economy.”
- BINC TV
Who will buy Yahoo?
- McIlwain: “Nobody probably should.” (Laughs) “I actually think the most logical buyer is Disney. And the rationale is that Yahoo for the last six to eight years has focused hard on being a content company and a manager and leverager of content assets.”
- Smith: Viacom, CBS or Microsoft. “Microsoft has been very adamant that think they have figured this out and they don’t need Yahoo. I am not so sure. I think at $33 they didn’t need Yahoo. At $10, it gets interesting. Remember, when stock prices start to fall, people’s mentalities start to change.”
- Elowitz: Microsoft. “Price is a great negotiating tactic for Steve Ballmer right now, but at some point he is not stupid and it is a good-enough bargain to help them meet a strategic objective in a marketplace that they absolutely are dying to win.”
- BINC TV
What tech company is best positioned to thrive in this economic climate?
- Anderson: Microsoft.
- Elowitz: Microsoft. “They have an ungodly amount of cash.”
- McIlwain: Amazon.com. “When you have fat and happy gross margins like Microsoft does, you don’t have it within your DNA to run a cost-efficient business. And, in a downturn, you need to be able to do that
- Smith: Microsoft. “Microsoft can go bargain hunting for other companies that are now half price … and buy monopolies at half price. For example, what is a monopoly in the tech sector? Adobe…. Microsoft could, basically, take out animation on the Internet, graphic design, Web page development without even blinking an eye.”
- BINC TV
What tech company will get taken out in 2009?
- Anderson: “I am pretty clear that there will not be a Nortel when we next get together.”
- Elowitz: “I know Yahoo can’t stick around as an independent company.”
- McIlwain: Sun Microsystems.
- BINC TV
How many iPhone applications will be downloaded by the end of 2009?
- Smith: “The app store does well. It is, frankly, the definitive example of doing e-commerce with mobile applications right now. It is going to double, at least. Maybe triple.”
- BINC TV
Will Sprint, led by Dan Hesse, remain a standalone company?
- McIlwain: “You have seen the (Sprint TV) ads. Not too many CEOs put themselves on the ads and that probably says that there is probably a big self-confidence issue there. So, I would guess that they remain independent even though maybe they shouldn’t.”
- BINC TV
Will Steve Ballmer remain CEO of Microsoft through 2009?
- All panelists agreed that he would keep his job.
- McIlwain: “In a down economy, when you are good at winning ground wars and have lots of cash, comparatively speaking it is going to be a good year for Microsoft. Secondly, there is no immediately obvious … successor.”
- BINC TV
What will be the big tech trends for 2009?
- Anderson: The integration of biology and chips. “Software and hardware integrating with animals at first, and then with human beings…. It will fit our growing knowledge of how the brain actually works and how nerves actually work.”
- Smith: Cloud computing and virtualization. “It is not an exciting answer I understand.”
- McIlwain: Tax shelters. (Laughs)
- Elowitz: Measuring online advertising. “2009 is not going to be a sexy year. It is not going to be a year of hype and buzz. It is going to be a year of basics. And the basics are around ROI, that is what is on everyone’s mind.”
- BINC TV
Who is best positioned to win the battle in the cloud computing area?
- Elowitz: “It is super early stages, but so far the one I am most impressed with is Amazon.”
- Anderson: “I think there is going to be tension between the corporate clouds and these remote clouds for rent.”
- McIlwain: “What Google is doing, what Amazon is doing, what Microsoft is doing, each and everyone of those is very different from each other. All of them are proprietary frameworks. All of them want you to build, host, run your software on their operating system in the cloud. To the extent you are willing to do that as a company, as a developer, as an enterprise they are going to be really happy because they are going to win the battle of the cloud (operating systems.)…I am not even sure we know how to frame this question yet, but going back to the Amazon model, it is going to be important to be a low-cost, on-per-unit-basis delivery provider.”
- Smith: “At the end of the day, Microsoft wants you to launch their applications from their cloud. They don’t want you to launch any word-processing application from their cloud. That is different from what Amazon wants, so their interests and their desires are totally different.”
- BINC TV
What company would you buy in 2009 if you could take it in any direction?
- Elowitz: Blue Nile. “I would love to take it private and to make that an investment for the future. I think there are number of opportunities like that where you could eliminate those public company costs, invest for the long term, bear out the economic cycle and come out in a much, much stronger position.” (Elowitz co-founder Blue Nile)
- Smith: RealNetworks. “It is a great brand, trading at the value of money they have in the bank account. (That) just tells me that some new exciting innovations, some sort of new direction and the market might respond favorably to that. I don’t know exactly what I would do there, but you have a company trading publicly at the amount of cash it has in the bank.” (Smith used to work at RealNetworks)
- McIlwain: EMC. “I would maybe divest some of the software acquisitions and focus hard on the cloud if I took over EMC.”
- BINC TV
To view the full BINC TV Episode and other BINC predictions, click on the following links Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
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