recruiters

Microsoft is expected to announce layoffs soon. Google is laying off 100 of its recruiters as it slows hiring. (In case you're looking for a date, apparently Google's recruiting team is, ahem, well-favored in the aesthetics department.) Even Apple, as CNET's headline reads, is planning for life "without Jobs."

OK, so the "Jobs" in question is Steve Jobs, and he's scheduled to return to his day job in six months, but you get the picture.

The downturn is hitting open source, too. Despite earlier prognostications to the contrary, I'm hearing news … Read more

Ever since June, when Ed Boyajian left his post as Red Hat vice president of North America sales to become CEO of EnterpriseDB, Red Hat has been operating without an equivalent sales executive in North America.

Regional executives Ian Knight, Sean Doherty, and others have delivered the numbers under the guidance of Alex Pinchev, Red Hat's executive vice president of global sales. But the company needed to replace Boyajian.

Red Hat on Monday announced the appointment of Greg Symon as vice president and general manager of North American sales. Symon comes to Red Hat from Intel, where he has … Read more

The U.S. Army has spent $12 million on a new facility in Philadelphia that abandons the use of recruiters selling the Army life in favor of video games and loud rock music, according to a Reuters report.

Dubbed the U.S. Army Experience Center, the facility at the Franklin Mills shopping mall in Philadelphia sports 60 computers preloaded with military video games, 19 Xbox 360 controllers, and video displays that "describe military bases and career options in great detail," Reuters reports.

Visitors to the center can play games that allow them to fire on enemy combatants from a Humvee or engage in helicopter missions where the player is firing on the enemy from an Apache or Black Hawk helicopter.

The center first opened in August as the first step in what is a two-year experiment on the part of the Army to recruit more service people. So far, the experiment has proven successful: Reuters reports that 33 full-time soldiers and 5 reservists have have joined the U.S. Army since its inception. More importantly, that recruitment tally bests the five "traditional" recruiting centers it replaced.

For its part, the Army says it's not necessarily trying to recruit young soldiers. Instead, it says the Experience Center is being used as a way to inform the public.

"What we are doing here is reaching out to Americans, giving them the opportunity to understand their Army," Maj. Gen. Thomas P. Bostick, head of the U.S. Army Recruiting Command, said in a statement. "Oftentimes, people have a negative perception of the Army, but the negatives are a very small part. Our soldiers are well-trained, well-equipped, and serving a great mission."

That's an interesting take, but one that deserves some more contemplation. Is the U.S. Army Experience Center really just a place to teach people about the "real" Army? Or is it a place to coax people into joining through video games?… Read more

TechNewsWorld suggests that the technology industry may be relatively insulated from job losses in the recession. Yes, technology has its share of job cuts, and any cut is painful if you're on the receiving end, but there are bright spots in the economy.

Open source is one of them.

While the article points to a few different areas of technology that should comparatively thrive in a downturn, as I note in the article, open source is particularly well-suited to a troubled economy:

In a recession, headcount looks like a cost center, but open source can turn employees into profit … Read more

VMware, perhaps recognizing its exposure from open-source virtualization solutions, is looking for an open-source expert to help with a range of things, including help to create "a test framework for a custom Linux distribution." VMware is seeking a "Senior Software Reliability Engineer," as noted on an open-source group on LinkedIn, but perhaps it should be looking for an open-source savvy IP attorney?

Why? Well, VMware is on the hot seat about a possible violation of the GPL related to its use of Linux, and given its public disclosures of the significant amount of open source it uses in its products.… Read more

Matt Cohler, employee No. 5 at Facebook, will leave the high-flying social network this fall to join venture firm Benchmark Capital as its youngest general partner at 31 years old.

Cohler, whose job description, as written on Facebook, is "ensuring that Zuck (Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg) never makes it back to Harvard," has been the company's technical adviser, recruiter, and business strategist since 2005, roughly a year after the company started from a dorm room at Harvard University. Cohler said he will remain a special adviser to "Zuck" and the executive team at Facebook even … Read more

Alfresco is hiring for a few positions here in the United States (Enterprise and mid-market sales executives, plus a consultant), and I'm always surprised by how much work it is to find good people for good jobs. We're doing extraordinarily well - people should be beating down the doors to work here.

Or take Ringside Networks. Shaun Connolly and I exchanged emails today about its search for a vice president of Business Development. Cool company with a great team. Why wouldn't people be beating a path to the Ringside door, so that Ringside wouldn't have to … Read more

Much has been written about Google's intensive hiring process (including its mind-vaporizing interview questions), and how it manages to land the cream of the engineering crop. But yesterday some friends of mine got to see it firsthand.

I was in downtown San Jose for a company event and was waiting for some colleagues over at the Marriott. They were a bit late and apologized, indicating that they would have been on time but had run into a swarm of beautiful young girls pouring out of the Fairmont Hotel. My CEO asked what they were doing and were told,

Teens may have a better understanding of privacy issues than the adults around them. Unfortunately, when you are a high school student, your personal judgment can still be challenged by an unsympathetic principal.

The Raleigh News & Observer reports that at Cedar Ridge High School in Hillsborough North Carolina, more than 300 juniors were given the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB). The military provides and administers the tests without charge, and in return the scores and students' contact information are sent to military branch recruiters and the school.

Cedar Ridge Principal Gary Thornburg was willing to sign on to this deal to get access to what he views as a valuable career assessment tool. There is supposed to be an opt-out procedure, but three students who refused to take the test were sent to the in-school suspension room to take it--not as discipline, according to Thornburg, but because the in-school suspension teacher was available to supervise them while other students were taking the test. Sounds like a blatantly disingenuous answer to me. In my experience as a student and teacher, when you send students to in-school suspension, it is going to feel like a punishment and be perceived that way by others. Surely their well-equipped media center could have handled three students for independent study.… Read more