I snapped this crappy pic because I thought it was cool that Instagram, Twitter and GetSatisfaction (social CRM on the rise ) all did their first work here.

The space has “weird BD voodoo” as One Block Off The Grid’s CEO Dave Llorens told me.  I’m pretty sure he meant “weird-good.”

The new company occupying the space above is a secret. Shhh.

Everyone has seen job postings looking for great multitaskers. If you are below the age of 35, you will probably happily admit that you multitask better than most, and much better than those of your parents’ generation.

Author Brian Kerr is a San Francisco-based sales marketing professional who recently quit his job and teaches tennis in his spare time.

The problem is that you don’t. A study conducted by Stanford’s Professor Clifford Nass says otherwise. His study showed that people who multitask actually do things slower, think slower, and perform worse.

But more importantly, he found that those who claim to be “Great Multitaskers” actually performed worse when juggling tasks, and those that claimed to be “Bad Multitaskers” actually performed better.

A 2-Minute Exercise For Multitasking

If you think you are an exception, try the following 2 minute exercise.

Admitting the Problem: You are not good at multitasking

The Proof:

Get a stopwatch, or any watch with a second hand, or use the OnlineClock.net below (which amazingly gets 127,000 uniques per month — for an online clock!):

Step 1: See how long it takes you to write two simple strings of characters: “multitask” “123456789.”

Step 2: Once you have done that, time how many seconds it takes to write the same thing, but this time your job is to alternate between the two. Write ‘M’ then ‘1’. Write ‘U’ then ‘2’. Then write ‘L’ then ‘3’. So you will get “M1 U2 L3 T4 I5 T6 A7 S8 K9”

Which took longer for you? In my experience people can do all of step 1 in around 8-10 seconds.

For people to complete step 2, typically takes between 12-20 seconds. That’s over 40% longer.

When did you complete writing the word “Multitask” in Step 1?(3-5 seconds?) What about Step 2?

Now this demonstrates that even with the simplest of tasks, multitasking has a significant impact on how long something takes, and it extends the completion time of everything being multitasked between.

Even worse, if you did the exercise, I am sure you felt it was much harder and more stressful to do Step 2.

What Does Multitasking Have to Do With Landing a Job?

Multitasking while searching for a job is like cancer, it hurts a little a first and then, overtime, the small pain becomes something deadly.

I am going to go out on a limb, and say that right at this moment you have multiple web browser tabs open and you probably have your cell phone right next to you as you read this, and that the next time it buzzes you will stop what you are doing and check it.

Email, Facebook, instant messenger, iTunes, television… the list of distractions can go on and on.

Looking to get a job fast? Well, if something as simple as writing two words takes 40% longer from multitasking, imagine the impact on more complex things that require much more brain-power–like finding a job! If you reduce multitasking, you will be amazed at how much more you will get done.

Months of job searching will be accomplished in weeks, and weeks of job searching will get done in a few days once you are consistently devoting a solid chunk of time, uninterrupted, to job hunting.

Steps For Getting That Job Faster

Step 1: Realize the job search is a full-time job in itself. Set a time, everyday that is dedicated to job hunting.

Step 2: Turn off your cell phone, Facebook, Twitter & iTunes

Finding a job is your job, so turn off your cell phone, close the nonsense web browser tabs (especially gmail), close your iTunes, and truly spend that time looking at job postings, writing your resume, and applying for jobs.

When it comes time to send those emails, open gmail, send them, and then close it. Don’t be tempted by the ever-revolving door of new emails and gchat.

Step 3: That’s It. Stop multitasking and land that job.

Conventional wisdom says that a picture is worth 1,000 words. But is that really true? And what bearing does that have on your search for great talent or your desire to land an awesome gig?

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples to see if we can shed a little light on these questions.The first example concerns the current constellation of satellites orbiting planet Earth. I could describe it, or I could just show you. Below is a partial list of satellites from wikipedia:

Now, quickly, tell me who has the most satellites in reverse order by country.

Now, try the same thing using this visual:

You have clearly experienced the power of the visual image seeing the same data, represented in different ways. While the answers were accessible in the tabular format, they were not instantly meaningful as they are in the visual representation.

So we have part of the answer, we don’t know how many words a picture is worth, but we can demonstrate that a visual representation is more effective at conveying meaning quickly than data represented as words.

The second example is GapMinder World – it’s one of my favorites and has been around for about 6 years. This project visualizes UN Data that has been collected since 1948 (and often times longer where reliable sources are available.)

Now, before GapMinder existed, if you wanted to answer a question like “What is the impact of AIDS on life expectancy in Botswana?” you were free to query a text-based database which would spew out tables for you to interpret.

The simple fact that this data was available and that one COULD even answer the question is fantastic. But the expertise required and the commitment needed made the ability to find the answer available to a narrow segment of the population.

Take a look at the chart above, using the GapMinder World visualization, simply by selecting Botswana and pressing “play” you can clearly see the impact of AIDS on life expectancy in Botswana. And it’s grim, but 2001 was the nadir, things are improving marginally since then (see for yourself using the tool.)

The GapMinder example demonstrates two aspects of what is now possible in a connected, near real-time world with plain old data. One is that it is possible to take data and make it meaningful and accessible to a broad set of viewers.

The second aspect relates to the interactive nature of the tool, encouraging exploration and making it likely that a viewer will leave with more insight than a simple answer.

A New Crop Of Tools To Help Visualize Jobs & Professionals

Let’s bring this back to the specific question about finding talent or a gig. There are a new crop of tools and services popping up that take the power of the visual (and sometimes audio) but always more than just text to help represent and convey more completely the aspects of a gig or the skills and personality of a person.

Ongig is a great example of how this is emerging to match opportunities and people.

My startup re.vu, is another example (see below) of creating a GapMinder World view of a person to complement the traditional text resume.

A screenshot of the author's visual resume.

It’s an exciting time to see how technology is shifting and creating a whole new market segment where it’s now possible to escape the “flat Stanley” view of the world and represent a complex person, situation, and/or object more accurately and in a multi-dimensional way.

Today’s the day, start to explore these new tools and use them to your benefit, you won’t be sorry!

click Traffic Cop Dancing Like Michael Jackson] if you can’t see the embedded video in this post

Wouldn’t it be awesome if everyone in business were this happy at their job!?

He shows 3 different sets of everyday products and what they look like without any name on them:

Simple yet creative!

Maybe in the future he can show products with bad names (my first vote is Qwikster from Netflix!).

Anthony has the best blog I know — Operative Words — on the topic of naming things. If you take the time to read the couple of dozen of articles on his blog, you will gain Jedi-strength on naming things!

Alleged YouTube recruiting video for Anonymous attack on the Vatican.

The New York Times then broke the story that the target of that unsuccessful attack was the Vatican which hired Imperva to block and hault the attack.

Adding to the intrigue is that the Times story was co-written by journalist John Markoff of Kevin Mitnick fame (Markoff wrote a series of articles and a book on the takedown of Mitnick the hacker).

Markoff knows the hacker world quite well.

A full read of the Impervis report is recommended, though we found these nuggets about recruiting most interesting:

Two Types Of Volunteers

• Skilled Hackers — No more than 10 to 15 people who are “quite savvy” with “genuine hacking experience.”
• Laypeople —  Anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred volunteers who are directed by the Skilled Hackers.

The ratio of Laypeople to Skilled Hackers is usually about 10 to 1.

18 Days Of Recruiting Volunteers Through Social Media

In the alleged attack on the Vatican, Anonymous:

1) Created a Web site rationalizing the attack

2) Twitter and Facebook were used to to drive traffic.

3) YouTube videos were used to further rationalize the attack.

Big Brother Google?

The Wall Street Journal made a troubling discovery that Google had hacked together a way to bypass the security measures built into Apple’s Safari browser, allowing them to track user actions for people who had explicitly restricted such tracking within their browser.  The upside to this is obvious.  Google is a data driven company and the more they understand an individual’s habits, the better they can present search results and advertisements back to that user.

The move was of course driven by competition.  Google is competing against all of the aforementioned companies across a variety of business verticals, and this type of tracking could potentially give them an advantage over their competitors.

Apple playing fast and loose with user data

Apple also made headlines for allowing apps running on the iOS platform to access a user’s contact information without explicitly asking for permission.  For anyone who has ever used an iOS app, you are most likely familiar with the app requesting access to your location information or permission to send you push notifications.

The privacy concerns around location are very straight forward.  An app that knows where you are in real time can send you suggestions about where to go, what to buy, etc.  However, knowing who the user communicates with seems just as fraught with privacy issues.  This glaring oversight on the part of Apple drew the eye of Congress, which is now beginning an investigation into this privacy hole in the software.

Here at Ongig, one of our core values is that, with all of the various social sources on the web, a person’s identity can be more closely derived from these sources than it can from the traditional resume.  Our most recent blog post details the most common lies people put on their resume.  Social sources, on the other hand, are much more authentic.  For example, if you are a marketer or business strategist, your social reach through channels like Facebook and Twitter could be paramount in importance.

You better be authentic because many eyeballs will see and vet your online identity.  Former employers can see your career information on LinkedIn and if it false, you could be in for some trouble.  If you are a coder, GitHub can show people what your code looks like and what your strengths and weaknesses are.  The social aspect of all of this makes it incredibly risky to include falsified information in your online profiles.

The problem with all of this is that if the gatekeeper’s of the online information are being duplicitous, then people will not be comfortable putting their identity online and we are back to having to rely on the traditional paper resume.  We think this would be an enormous step in the wrong direction.

These companies have have a responsibility above all else to protect our privacy.  This is not a trivial responsibility.  They are established companies who will be able to weather the storm of these controversies and hopefully make the right moves to regain the confidence of their users.  If we at Ongig, a much smaller operation, played loose with a user’s LinkedIn profile (our authoritative identity), we would not have the same luxury.

That is why we protect the user at all costs.  We will not post to your wall or in any way compromise your activities on the site by alerting your current employer or other interested parties that you might be looking for another job.  Looking for a new job is a highly personal and private activity, and while we will lean on social sources to derive our user’s identities instead of a traditional paper resume, our highest priority is to protect the user in this pursuit.

ADP once did 2.6 Million background checks and found that 44% lied about work histories, 41% lied about education and 23% falsified credentials or licenses.

There’s even a Web page dedicated to The Résumé Liar’s Club, a list of many dozens of professionals who were publicly outed for misrepresenting their background.

Woh!

We perused the Web and below are the 12 most common categories of lies we found in résumés:

1) Stretching Dates Of Employment

This is mostly candidates trying to hide employment gaps.

They don’t want it known that they were unemployed for 6 months so they add a couple of months to the end of one job and then begin the next job a couple of months early and, voila, they were only job hunting for 2 months!

2) Inflating Compensation

The most common form of this is when an applicant combines their salary and bonus/commissions from their last job and says that # was their salary.

3) Claiming “Self-Employment” When It Was Really “Unemployment”

I’ve seen a bunch of this lately. People calling themselves “Consultant” or “Self-Employed” when they were really just plain out of a job.

4) Embellishment Of Accomplishments

This usually consists of claiming higher metrics than were actually achieved or inflating the number of people they manage.

5) Lopping Off Early/Older Experience To Mask One’s Age

This is not as common in startups, but in more mature companies it happens all the time.

Some folks are worried about showing their first jobs because it then shows their age. Some employers consider such an omission a lie.

 6) Raising Grade Point Averages

Candidates think: “What are the chances an employer will really check out my old grades?”

7) Enhancing Job Titles & Responsibilities

Some applicants beef up their previous jobs’ titles and responsibilities to cater to the new job opportunity they’re applying for.

8) Omitting Past Employment

CEO Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap reportedly omitted two early jobs in which he was fired (this would have been useful for Sunbeam (a company that eventually fired Mr. Dunlap as their CEO) to know).

9) Faking Credentials

23% of applicants falsified licenses/credentials/certifications on their résumés, according to ADP.

10) Fraudulent References

Some people put friends down as fake references or even a made-up name with their own personal phone number.

11) Bogus College Degrees

Tetra Tech’s stock got walloped when news hit that its president Same Wesley Box inflated his résumé with an engineering degree he didn’t earn.

12) Not Quite “Founder” Status

Early employees of companies sometimes falsely claim that they were a founder of the company when they were really just an early employee.

Stats are amazing:

• 27,000+ people put in $15+ for $400,000+
• 17,000+ people put in $30+ for $520,000+
• 3,600+ people put in $100+ for $360,000+
• 900+ people put in $250+ for $225,000+
• 10 people put in $5,000+ for $50,000
• 1 person put in $10,000+ for $10,000+

Total funding so far is $1,729,306…and growing!

Most amazing is that Double Fine is not giving up any equity. They are giving away prizes and exclusive access to the game and also making a documentary about the whole process.

Brilliant.

It’ll be interesting to see if other small businesses raise money this way, bypassing middlmen such as game publishers as well as angel investors and venture capitalists.

Here’s the video of what they’re doing:

And here’s an IGN video review for a previous Kinect game of theirs: Happy Action Trailer:

It was the start of October and I was stuck commuting to work in traffic for 1 hour both ways. Oh yes, and I was working 8am to 6pm…this meant I woke up at 6am and got home at 7pm if I was lucky.

Lucky meant that I got to leave work on-time and traffic was not exceptionally bad that day (from the uncoordinated masses of Apple cultists and Googlers flooding the South Bay highways at their scheduled migration times).

It was one day, while in stop-and-go traffic, enraged by a stressful day of PCB sales to irate electrical engineers… in the midst of listening to Brian Tracy… I decided it was time for me to do better.

Forcing “Job Serendipity”

That night, I set out to force job serendipity upon myself. I crafted an excellent resume and made my LinkedIn up-to-date and active. I spent a good four hours seeing what people where in my networks and seeing if any careers/companies looked promising.

The problem was, everything was promising, because I had already decided I wanted nothing more with the prototype PCB world. So I took a step back and asked… “What do I want?”

I started off by admitting I wanted to do BizDev/Sales. I wanted to travel…everywhere if possible.. in planes.

I wanted to do business with the biggest names in industry and have relationships with top CEOs because I know I will need those to support where I want to be in my far-off distant future.

Rule 1: Align what you are looking for with your personal ambitions.

Then details got harder… “What do I want?” I asked myself again. Ok… it was time for Manta.

I use Manta every time I want to build a list of companies to work for. I search for companies under 100 employees, with revenue greater than $500,000 per employee.

Think about it… if a company has 100 employees and their revenue for the year is 5 million. Sure 5 million is a lot… but per employee, that is only 50k revenue, and that does not even consider the operation costs.

In my experience $500,000 per employee is the sweet spot. This essentially means, you will be treated well there.

Rule 2: Place yourself where there is more than enough to go around

I expanded the list of what I wanted, farther and farther, and farther. I got tired and promptly passed out to go to work the next day. After a long day at work, I went home and continued right where I left off.

Rule 3: Follow through until there is change.

This is where I was ready. The image of the perfect job was in my head, I knew what I wanted and what I did not want. No commute. No traffic. No early mornings. No pseudo-account manager sales job, but a real sales job.

With everything clear… it was time to finish forcing job serendipity upon myself.

I signed-up, made profiles, and posted resumes on every job site I could find. I posted twitter/facebook/LinkedIn Updates. I made sure to browse job postings and reply immediately to those I was interested in at least two times a day, morning and night.

Besides your typically Craigslist and LinkedIn job walls, try:

• Startupers
• Startuply
• VentureLoop
• YCombinator Jobs

…and of course, Monster, Indeed, etc — readyforce is also good, and of course OnGig!

Also when reaching out to your networks, be sure to put status updates of relevant stuff to the field you are looking to go into. I have gotten interviews from LinkedIn updates.

Make sure in passing when speaking with your friends to mention what you are looking for… even if they have no connections to the business world, they could meet just the person who can help you the next day at a bar or bus stop. You never know.

I Was Getting Daily Calls From Recruiters After Just 2 Weeks

Shortly after I did all this, I started getting recruiters calling me as they discovered my resume all over the internet. After two weeks, I didn’t have a single day without a recruiter calling me.

I held strong to what I wanted. I passed up a lot of interviews that didn’t match with the core of what I was looking for. (that is the hardest part)

Late November, I was called by a consulting company I had never heard of, but the recruiter explained the role they were looking to fill, and it matched exactly what I had been looking for… except the stock options are delayed by a year… oh well.

Interviews are interviews. I won’t talk about mine. Long-story short, I leveraged my personality and tech background to get the job over a Sr. Sales guy.

Play the Junior Card if you can (cheaper for them, even though you will get paid more).

So it was a win-win. I got a position essentially as a Sales Executive typically requiring about 5-7 years more experience than what I had, and it came with better pay.

After all the people I called and messaged about jobs, and all the ones I interviewed with, they all ultimately lost to a single recruiter finding my resume on some obscure job site and giving me a call.

Remember, landing a job may be chance, but there are thousands of ways to make those chances in your favor.