"Normally (non-governmental organizations) organizations import foreign labor into Haiti due to the difficulty of finding local talent -- a problem we are trying to combat."

A Resume for the Developing World

Here's how it works.

1. A displaced, unemployed Haitian calls the toll-free number (courtesy of Digicel): 5656 in Haiti, or +509 37031042 from abroad
2. Creole (Haitian French) speakers, in Haiti and abroad, call in and translate those messages into English and other languages
3. NGOs search the database for local laborers who can fill their open positions

Those phoning in are prompted to tell stories that illustrate their experiences. The prompts have been recorded by Haitian radio personality Bob Lemoine and the tool is being advertised with PSAs on Haitian radio, said Zinman.

"We have structured the interaction to help people tell what we think are relevant stories from their life that translate into employable skills. We first start by asking the basics--name, gender, education level (to proxy for literacy), can you work at night, and are you physically strong and healthy. Then we ask about their experiences with a wide range of skills. We frame the skill questions with examples to cue them and disambiguate. We ask about first-aid, construction, languages, child care, laundry, sewing, cleaning, repair, and transportation."

For those approaching the site, either as a job seeker, translator or NGO, it is simple and straightforward, as well as graphically arresting. For the NGOs, it helps them minimize labor costs, also a benefit for donors. For those effected by a crisis, not only does it help the NGO serving them to become more efficient, but it gives them extra access to the means to keep themselves and their family safe and fed, work.

The Chicken and the Egg

Konbit spent a good portion of last year approaching NGOs with the help of consultant Angela Dean at D&A Development Solutions.

"We spoke to the UN Development Program, Clinton Foundation, Partners-In-Health, Peace Dividend Trust, at the State Department, and more. Everyone was the same--they thought the project sounded great and to let them know when it was deployed. We wanted more concrete feedback on how to cater the system to their interests, but they were so overloaded already and they didn't know if this was pure vaporware considering the timing. So we discovered the answer to the chicken & egg is egg."

Now, after beta-testing the system in Miami, the egg has hatched in Haiti.

To hear some of the phoned-in audio resumes, click here and select Haitian Creole as the language. If you speak it, here's where you can also contribute to the translation effort.

The project is open source and the code is available on Konbit's Bitbucket page. The hope is that this process can be rolled out to each new crisis requiring in-country labor.

First, however, the chick will have to grow into a hen and lay eggs of its own. To facilitate that, the Konbit folks intend to approach the NGOs who were skeptical the first time out again in January. If the NGOs see the power of the system, it may wind up materially adding to the list of things a competent NGO can do when they've got the people they're supposed to be serving helping them do so.

UI is working to replace two pipelines leading from Lake Tansa to Mumbai. This is an important water source for this immense city. In order to make the project happen, Unity must employ a very large number of contract employees. If any significant number of these employees fail to show, it could effect the timeline and that could result in steep fines for the company; not to mention Unity will have to pay the employment companies providing the workers unless they can prove they were absent.

Since most of the workers employed on the project are day-laborers, the information on each worker's tag will be matched to the information in the database each evening as they line up to be paid. Only a combination of RFID evidence and physical presence can elicit an employee's daily payment.

Mumbai skyline photo by Bluesmoon

And no, the headline is not as misleading as you think - engineers from Facebook actually helped SimplyHired build this feature in the hopes that it will showcase the power of the social network's new Open Graph platform and the usefulness it can provide when properly implemented.

On the updated SimplyHired.com, you can log in with Facebook for a new twist on job discovery that offers a more personalized view of the job marketplace. In addition to searching by work titles, keywords, location and other such filters, you can now search for jobs at the companies where your friends work, too. Once you opt-in to this feature, you'll see a Facebook box popup at the top of a search results page after performing any search on the site. From here, you're one click away from exploring the various companies where your friends work and the possible job opportunities there.

Also, when performing a narrower search, like one by company name for example, you're shown which of your friends also work at that same company.

As anyone facing today's tough job market knows, getting a job isn't as easy as responding to a newspaper ad anymore. Every advantage you have comes into play, and none is more powerful than a personal referral. With SimplyHired's new feature, you can maximize the opportunities for that "foot in the door" connection by discovering, with ease, who works where. There's even a feature for sending a private Facebook message to your friend after you find a job you're interested in.

And for those performing job searches on the sly, SimplyHired assures that nothing is ever posted to your Facebook Wall and News Feed.

What About LinkedIn?

SimplyHired is partnered with LinkedIn and similar on-site integration is already available via that professional network. The company sees the new Facebook integration as complementary to LinkedIn, noting only that younger job seekers (like those fresh out of college, for example) are more likely to be on Facebook while older job seekers may be on both LinkedIn and Facebook or just LinkedIn.

That may be true, but Facebook connects you with the people in your life you're actually close to - your good friends and family: the very people who are willing to do you a favor in a time of need. This was the promise of LinkedIn, too, and while some still use it that way, many have been attempting to game its system instead.

As anyone who regularly uses the LinkedIn network knows, a good many of your connection requests are from people who you've never met. These are LinkedIn's own version of spammers - those trying to get around the network's limitations that force you to pay for credits for connections to people you don't know. Why not just friend everyone?, these people think, then it's free.

The "friend everyone" model eventually failed on MySpace, and it's doomed on LinkedIn too. Do your connections actually know the people they say they're connected to? So often, these days, the answer is "no." People looking for a personal recommendation are more likely to find success among their real friends, like those on their Facebook network.

A Great Example of Facebook's Open Graph in Action

There has been a lot of talk about Facebook privacy issues lately, after the launch of updated privacy controls, which pushed people towards more open settings, and Facebook's new Open Graph, a platform with tools for developers and publishers. One of the more startling initiatives, which caught the eye of regulators and U.S. senators alike, is the "instant personalization" program that immediately adds a social element to a website without your prior authorization. Because the program is opt-out not opt-in, many have felt this is a violation of privacy.

But while instant personalization is still experimental and could eventually be shut down, similar personalization is already possible by simply allowing a site permission to access your data and the public data belonging to your friends.

In SimplyHired's case, the integration of the two services, job seeking and social networking, is a promising example of the possibilities which Facebook's Open Graph can offer.

SimplyHired's new Facebook integration is live now in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia and India.

Employees that are wasting their time on social networking sites today were gossiping at the water cooler in yesteryear, and the solution is the same: thoughtful policy implementation and vigilant managerial oversight.

While there are clearly some updates to how we manage the workplace, in context I don't think it is as revolutionary as many doomsayers would have us believe. The implications of social networking fall into three categories: pre-employment, during employment, and post-employment. Below is what I see as the key considerations.

Pre-Employment

I recommend against using social media to screen applicants because of the risk of inadvertently obtaining information that cannot lawfully be taken into consideration in the hiring process. However, if you are using social media to screen applicants, consider these steps:

• Do so consistently, rather than pick and choose who to screen.
• Have a low-level, non-decision maker screen first to filter out any protected class information that is inappropriate for decision makers to consider. Then have them report out only what can be lawfully considered.
• Don't friend applicants on Facebook to access non-public information.

During Employment

Consider adding new language to existing policies, such as your technology policy, code of conduct, harassment and discrimination policy, and confidentiality policy. The types of specific modifications to consider include:

• an unequivocal policy statement that abuse of social media can be grounds for discipline, up to and including termination.
• an express prohibition on disclosure of confidential and proprietary information and trade secrets.
• a directive that employees should keep company logos or trademarks off their blogs or profiles, and a request that employees not mention the company in commentary unless for business purposes (and then only with prior approval of the company).
• a prohibition on employees posting or blogging during business hours, unless for business purposes pre-authorized by the company.
• a request that employees bring work-related complaints to HR before blogging or posting about such issues.
• a prohibition on posting false information about the company, its employees, customers, affiliates, or business partners.
• a general instruction that employees use good judgment and take responsibility, personally and professionally, for what they publish online.
• a requirement that all employees who identify the company in their blog include a disclaimer that the views expressed are those of the blogger, not the employer.

Post-Employment

I suggest this not because I thrill at the Big Brother quality of it, but because of the risk of defamation claims for references that go wrong, and the fact that manager statements - even statements not on company letterhead or made through a formal corporate communication - are attributable to the company and may be inconsistent with legal positions confidentially being taken by the employer.

With the addition of some of these common sense updates to existing policies, your company can feel confident that the "revolution" of social networking won't have nearly the devastating impact predicted by most commentators.

Photo by Jason Pratt.

iShare will allow users to upload any file up to 100 MB and post it for download on their account. The Twitter app will allow a user to post their Tweet automatically on their Viadeo page. The Google Presentation function will allow them to convert Powerpoint presentations to Google and share them.

The question remains, however, not which business-focused social networks have the most features, or the most users, but the most utility. In that respect, I fear they are neck and neck. After years on the service, and over a year on unemployment, all I got, even with an old supervisor firing me job ads via LinkedIn, was a quick phone interview that went nowhere. That's a guy with some experience, at some high-profile companies, actively searching, with friends on the look-out.

ReadWriteWeb has theorized before that part of the limitations of LinkedIn, in particular, is the fact that it's a walled system. If its API opened up, it would benefit the social web as a whole, perhaps. But would it help the job seeker? The hiring manager? The sales or biz dev person looking for contacts? I am not sure.

But one person's experience could be anomalous. So let me ask you, the ReadWriteWeb reader: What difference has your membership in a business-oriented social network like LinkedIn, Xing or Viadeo made in your career in the last year?

Editors Note: This post is part of a series ReadWriteWeb is producing in partnership with Tableau Software, where we examine interesting data sets relevant to technology trends today. You can use Tableau Public to create interactive visualizations like this and publish them to your own blog or website or anywhere online. This is the last week to enter Tableau's User Generated Graph Contest. Winner will receive a free trip to Web 2.0 and $500. Sign up before March 26.

Play With the Data

The top graph shows what kind of education will be required for the fastest-growing jobs. The bottom graph puts employment growth into a wider perspective. You can play with the data yourself by choosing different education levels or job types. You can also download the data and create your own visualizations.

Data source: Employment Projections Program, U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Photo by Mark Puplava.

How TweetMyJOBS Works

The TweetMyJOBS service lets job seekers receive instant notifications on their phone when new jobs are posted online via the popular micro-messaging service Twitter. The company aggregates the Twitter-based job postings from over 7000 companies and maintains over 8250 specific job channels within those companies, all of which are searchable via their website.

However, it's the job matching service that makes TweetMyJOBS worth using for those in need of work. Instead of having to follow potentially hundreds of Twitter accounts belonging to companies, the service will match a Twitter user's interests with the available jobs posted to Twitter. Users can also specify a particular geographic region where they prefer to work. They can even use the service to post their resume to Twitter. When a job seeker and a job listing match up, the user is alerted via a text message sent to their phone via Twitter.

For job posters, there are fees involved for adding listings just like there are with any other job board. At present, it costs $4000 to list 500 jobs and $8000 for unlimited job postings. Single posts are $1.99. In return, companies are able to directly connect with qualified candidates while also tracking the clicks on the jobs they list.

Sears Holdings: 7000 Jobs Now, Hundreds of Thousands to Come

At launch time, Sears Holdings has posted 7000 jobs to TweetMyJOBS. The lineup includes everything from cashiers to vice presidents, a company representative tells us. And this is just the beginning. Over the course of the year, the company will continue adding all their available jobs to the service. Since, as noted above, the company posts hundreds of thousands of jobs per year, they will soon have thousands more to post to TweetMyJOBS.

In today's tough, competitive hiring market, a service like this can give motivated job seekers an edge. Since it allows for instant notification when a job is made available online, users of TweetMyJOBS can be among the first to apply to available positions. They can also rest assured that the jobs sourced are from reputable companies assures Rich Trombetta, TweetMyJOBS co-founder. Unlike on many job boards today, filled with questionable get-rich-quick schemes, work from home offers and other spam, only legitimate jobs are made available on his service. "We are very careful about the types of jobs we list on the site," Trombetta recently told the Chicago Tribune. "We eliminate the spam."

Interested job seekers can sign up for the service here at TweetMyJOBS.com.

Effective at 12:00 p.m. today, Friday June 19, 2009, the City of Bozeman permanently ceased the practice of requesting candidates selected for City positions under a provisional job offer to provide user names and passwords for the candidate's internet sites.

In addition, until further notice, the City will suspend its practice of reviewing candidate's password protected internet information until the City conducts a more comprehensive evaluation of the practice.

The form (PDF) is a standard waiver that allows the city to perform a background check, which is obviously a routine procedure, but in addition, the city asks prospective employees to "please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc." The form provides three lines for entering this information.

A local Montana TV station picked this story up after receiving an anonymous tip about this requirement. We can see why the City would be interested in this information, but obviously, this raises serious privacy concerns. According to city attorney Greg Sullivan, who was interviewed by the local TV news station, the city has "positions ranging from fire and police, which require people of high integrity for those positions, all the way down to the lifeguards and the folks that work in city hall here. So we do those types of investigations to make sure the people that we hire have the highest moral character and are a good fit for the City."

According to Sullivan, the City won't look at "the things that the federal constitution lists as protected things," but we find it hard to believe that somebody with full access to a user's profile would be able to completely overlook all the information in those profiles, including ethnicity and religious affiliation, that simply shouldn't play a role in the hiring process but could easily influence a hiring manager.

Sullivan also states that nobody ever removed his or her name because of this requirement, but we wonder how many applicants just decided not to apply for these positions because they preferred not to disclose this information.

Do you think the City has the right to ask for this information? Would you give it to them if you wanted to apply for a job there? Or have you seen a similar requirement when you applied for a job? Feel free to let us know what you think in the comments.

We would like to thank our reader Diego L. Bejarano for alerting us to this story. Diego used our handy new bookmarklet to forward this tip to us.

Wouldn't it be great if you could keep an eye on your other Google apps - like Calendar and Docs - without having to open multiple tabs or traverse from window to window? Now, thanks to the latest feature releases from Google Labs, you can. Introducing Google Labs Calendar and Doc gadgets for Gmail.

While the real estate is constrained, the view manages to provide just enough detail, giving you access to upcoming meetings and appointments and a glimpse of the latest documents on file.

But you can do more than just view the contents. The Docs gadget allows you to search your documents, and both gadgets enable you to create new items on the fly. The Calendar gadget also gives you the option to have a "mini calendar" present for reference.

To test drive these gadgets for yourself, simply head over to Labs and enable the Calendar gadget and the Docs gadget. Save your new settings and switch back to your Gmail interface. Now, you'll see two new collapsible areas below Labels that give you a view into your Calendar and your Docs.

Labs Holds the Key to Future Gmail Features

The rate of innovation coming out of Labs seems to be on the upswing. Lately, we've seen a steady stream of Google Labs features for Gmail, like Labels enhancements, Mail Goggles, and Canned Responses. And they're beginning to answer very real workflow issues - okay maybe not with Goggles - that enhance the functionality of Gmail and make it a more competitive platform.

It will be interesting to see what users choose to install and adopt from Labs - and equally interesting what they choose to ignore - because that will determine what Google decides to bake into future features of Gmail, itself.

I think it's safe to assume that these two latest gadgets from Labs are leading candidates for core Gmail functionality, especially given how simply and effectively they combine access to the most popular Google apps in the place where most users live and breathe - their inbox.