Michael VanDervort told me he was sending a guy my way who wanted to discuss onboarding. A few tweets and emails later and we were on the phone. It was G.L. Hoffman, a serial entrepreneur and venture investor/operator/incubator/mentor. Two of his companies have traveled the entire success path from the garage to IPO. Currently, he is chairman of JobDig, and his blog can be found at WhatWouldDadSay.com or at JobDig.com. You’ll also find his thoughts all over U.S. News and World Report, Forbes, FastCompany, the Wall Street Journal and other business publications and newspapers.

Of note is his project LinkUp, a job search engine with a twist. What makes LinkUp better than other job websites like Monster or CareerBuilder?

The most significant difference between LinkUp and other job sites on the web is that we only list jobs from company websites. Companies interested in getting their jobs on LinkUp must send us the URL of their company website so we can link to them. This allows us to maintain a much higher quality database of jobs than you will find on any other job search site on the web today. There are no outdated jobs that have already been filled, no ads posted by recruiters and headhunters, and no identity thefts or work-at-home scams. Linkup will always generate the highest quality jobs available.

G.L. is quite personable and friendly. He travels a lot and is a never ending fountain of ideas which he has most recently taken to documenting in the form of Gruzzles from his command post in Minneapolis. He wanted to talk about the application of Gruzzles in the onboarding process. That morphed into many other topics of discussion. I had a suspicion Gruzzles might be ruling his life and that he was obsessively viewing everything concentrically.

When did you create the first one? What was it? What inspired you?

GL: I was exploring a new way of presenting a new business plan using simple graphs and language.  I was trying to take the executive summary idea to a new simpler level.  The task was to find if I could explain a new business with circles, with the connections being the differentators of the business.  The Gruzzle came out of this experience.

Are Gruzzles just a fad until you latch onto a new concept or are you completely obsessed with creating them as a lens to explore our existence?

GL: I am a bit obsessed on them now, just like I am when I get involved in a new company.  I think there is a commercial product and I am trying to figure out how to do it.  That is the fun part. What I am really obsessed about is our new job search engine called LINKUP.COM…it is the only place where someone can go to find jobs ONLY from company websites.

How do you take complex situations and questions and simplify them into a few intersecting circles?

GL: I am not sure to be perfectly honest.  I do know that trying to make connections amongst three disparate elements stimulates my own creativity, so I thought it might do the same for others.

Do you keep a notebook with you at all times or do you grab napkins in restaurants?

GL: I have notebooks all over.  Some I can do in five minutes, but most take a lot longer, days even.

Can you define Gruzzles into categories?

GL: A publisher contacted me and tried to tell me that there was a series like CHICKEN SOUP or DUMMIES in them.  I think there might be a place for a Gruzzles for Babyboomers, Golfers, Enrepreneurs and so forth.  Although I am finding much harder to create the narrow topics.

How do you think Gruzzles can help mankind?

GL: I don’t think they are going to cure cancer, but they might be a new way to communicate in a different, faster, funnier way.

How do you pick your next project? Or, do they pick you?

GL: Good question.  I am always receptive to new ideas, new concepts, new projects.  The challenge is in picking which one to spend the time on.  I am getting better at prioritizing, and knowing where and how to spend my time.

What will you be doing 6 months from now?

GL: Not ice fishing.

I also asked G.L. if Gruzzles keep him up at night. He said no but I’m not completely convinced. I see him up at all hours on Twitter.

What uses do you envision for Gruzzles? Inquiring minds want to know.

]]> http://karlaporter.com/interviews/what-gruzzles-you/feed/ 4 http://karlaporter.com/interviews/an-interview-with-steven-rothberg/ http://karlaporter.com/interviews/an-interview-with-steven-rothberg/#comments Sun, 20 Sep 2009 15:01:29 +0000 Karla http://karlaporter.com/?p=396 When you visit CollegeRecruiter.com it’s kind of hard to leave, especially if you are a Recruiter and interested in recent college graduates and interns. The content is dynamic, encyclopedic and well archived. I first connected with Steven Rothberg, President and Founder of the company, through Facebook.  My work locally with colleges and universities in workforce development really sparked my interest in the site and in Steven’s work.

Career paths can be amazing journeys and I wanted to know how a law school graduate ends up with the dream of having the the premier information source for college students, grads and recent graduates who are seeking employment, continuing education and business opportunities. He graciously agreed to an interview..

SR: I was a law clerk for a year with a trial court and had been hired for an appellate court clerkship the second year but I decided to accelerate my plans by going into business a lot sooner than five to seven years after graduation. I had figured that I’d practice law for the experience and then either start my own business or join someone else’s but I didn’t like what the practice of law was doing to some of my friends and I was a lot more excited about the world of business than the world of law so I let the appellate court judge know that I wasn’t going to show up, he hired a replacement, and I started my business part-time while I was completing my trial court clerkship.

I wondered what type of internship experience he had in college and what he thought of it looking back.

SR: I had a number of career-related positions but virtually no one had “internships.” It just wasn’t a term that was used that much back in the 1980’s. One of the best jobs that I had was after my sophomore year when I spent four months working as a highly paid temp in London. It was my job to help a national retailer that had virtually no computers figure out how to computerize its management compensation review system. They wanted to formalize the process to make it more fair and figured that it was the logical time to computerize that portion of their business so I created a Lotus 1–2-3 database with loads of easy-to-use macros so their secretaries could keep it up-to-date and I trained them on how to do that.

Working so closely with institutions of higher education that are concerned about placement for their students, I asked Steven his thoughts on how the average career services office on campus meets the needs of students seeking meaningful internships.

SR: Unfortunately, the average career services office does not come close to meeting the needs of the vast majority of its students because the vast majority of students never give the office a chance. Nationwide, only about 15 percent of students even step foot into their career service office and I’ve heard estimates that fewer than five percent actually find internships or jobs upon graduation through their career service office. The problem is much more with the students than the offices as the offices tend to be staffed with dedicated, well trained, and professional people but they’re fighting a losing battle in trying to lead that horse to water and make it drink.

Living and breathing the transition from college to career, I wanted Steven’s opinion of what they could do better.

SR: I would like to see career service offices return to becoming placement offices. If they don’t, I suspect that within a decade many colleges will outsource that function to outplacement agencies like Lee Hecht Harrison. It will be cheaper and I think that the students will be more likely to use a service like that in part because their parents will recognize the value better.

From law school to career development and transition, there had to be a path that led Steven to collegerecruiter.com. It turns out that his entrepreneurial spirit developed early on, as a student.

SR: I created a small business in college that published a map for my school. I generated the revenues through the sale of advertising around the borders. I then resurrected that business after graduating from law school. To diversify revenues, I added an employment magazine in four major markets across the country in 1995 and then the Internet came along so we added a web site in 1996. That gradually took over the business so by 2000 we had stopped publishing the maps and magazines.

After 14 years in the business, 9 of them exclusively internet based, I was curious to know the impact CollegeRecruiter.com has on college students and recent graduates from Steven’s perspective.

SR: CollegeRecruiter.com is one of the valuable tools available to college students searching for internships and recent graduates searching for entry-level jobs and other career opportunities. We help hundreds of thousands of students and grads each month better prepare themselves for the job hunting process and their careers as well as help match them up with leading employers.

Finally, I really wanted to know the vision for the future of the company and its product. Could the leading job board for college students hunting for internships and recent graduates looking for entry level jobs and other career opportunities continue to innovate and evolve?

SR: I would like to see CollegeRecruiter.com be widely recognized by those in college recruiting as the dominant college job board and I believe that we will get there within a few years because we focus on the needs and wants of our candidate and employer users AND we’re continually adding and improving the tools we make available to both groups. Most job boards are stuck in this rut of selling job postings and resume searching and very little else. We sell job postings but it is far from our biggest product by revenue and we stopped selling resume searching 1.5 years ago to protect the candidates using our site from identity theft and other such issues.

Just for fun I wanted to see how Steven would craft his career into a Twitter resume… just for the heck of it.

SR: Founder of CollegeRecruiter.com, the leading job board for college students and recent grads.

Many thanks to Steven for sharing his interesting career path and vision for the future.