I would like to invite you to visit the all new Facebook page for Workosaur.com. If you do decide to pay it a visit, then ‘become a fan’ and you would then receive all announcements about Workosaur on your Facebook news feed. Also, I am going to make a conscious effort to put in some interesting information about the site on this page. To start with, do check the Photos section to see the different logos that were considered before finalizing on the current one.

Note for Marketeers:
The Official Facebook Pages Product Guide indicates that Facebook is soon going to enable several Apps for Pages. That will surely allow businesses to add more firepower to their Facebook page. It’s time for marketeers to start treating Facebook with more seriousness.

The Manpower Employment Outlook Survey is conducted quarterly to measure employers’ intentions to increase or decrease the number of employees in their workforce during the next quarter.

In a nutshell, the report has this to say:

Indian employers predict steady headcount growth during Quarter 2 2009. With 25% predicting an increase in headcount, 6% forecasting a decrease and 64% anticipating no change, the resulting Net Employment Outlook stands at a favorable +19%.

Read the entire report below:

Unlike other job sites, Workosaur still hasn’t attracted the wrath of the sys admins. As a result, the patterns on Workosaur are an accurate reflection of the behaviour of job-seeking senior professionals.

Here’s a peek in to some patterns obtained from the Analytics package installed on Workosaur:

Some observations:

• Senior professionals search and apply for jobs more during the weekdays. This clearly indicates that they are searching for jobs from their offices and not their homes.
• Wednesdays and Thursdays seem to be the most popular days for a job search. One can infer that’s the time of the week when office-goers are bored with work the most. Hence, they are prone to thinking about a shift in workplace during this period of boredom.
• The time slot from 11 AM to 3 PM is the most popular time for a job search. People seem to be making the most of their lunch breaks by searching for jobs.

If you lay your hands on today’s Mint newspaper, turn to Page 20. It carries a near full-page article featuring Workosaur.com. The essence of the article is that instead of lying low and waiting for the recession to pass by, one must build on their skill sets and consider moving to other sunrise industries such as Energy and Infrastructure.

You can also read the article online under the Careers section on LiveMint.com. The online edition also carries a Podcast on the same issue. Click here to read.

Cheers to Aruna Viswanatha at Mint for the coverage.

Yash does a special linkfest for those who have lost their job in the current downturn.
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These are some turbulent times, and all of know someone who has lost his/her job, sometimes we are that ’someone’. Even the best qualified, experienced and most competent of us have lost jobs in this economy. It is important to realize that most layoffs in such times are more about corporate survival and less about individual performance. Therefore the best thing to do is get your emotions and finances in place and get cracking. There are jobs out, find your niche and market yourself.

We have scouted the Net for the best advice we can find. Each link tips and tricks that can help in various ways, from dealing with the emotions, making the best of use of the time you have and most importantly landing another job.

Read them all, you have the time and more importantly you would not want to miss a trick.

Find answers for tough questions: In India there is an unnecessary amount of social stigma attached to layoffs. People often hide their situation and miss out asking the right questions and getting the right answers.

Time Magazine has a brilliantly practical article titled “What to Do When You Get Laid Off“. The FAQs format provides answers to questions some people are to afraid or ashamed to ask. “How honest can you be with prospective employers?” and “What to you tell the wife and kids?” are some of them.

A daily plan for job hunters, even job hunters need a plan and the Career Building Tips blogs has one in great detail. A useful read.

Keep your emotions in check. It is no secret that a job loss can be an emotionally scarring experience, Susan McMillin over at ezine.com has 3 posts to help you deal with stay positive, develop coping skills and surviving the job loss (and the depression) with a smile.

Rohit Bhargava also has 5 posts he put up last week where as part of his Career Survival Week. All of them are must reads,
1. What to do when you lose your job deals with the first steps to take when you lose your job, including accepting the situation, looking at it an opportunity to change gears and direction and of course use social networks, indentify influencers and get noticed.
2. Job Seeking 2.0 delivers exactly that what it promises, shows you ho to get noticed and has great advice including apply for non-existent jobs and answer user generated challenges. I don’t think the resume is dead for the Indian market so keep that handy as well.
3. How to rock an interview – well great advice including and most importantly, make the hirer look smarter.
4. And finally find the inner entrepreneur, the freedom can be liberating and if you have identified an opportunity, go ahead and give it shot.

You absolutely should not miss the posts from HBR’s blogs including Four Ways to Bounce Back From a Setback and Are You About to Snap? Snap Out of It!

Mashable (not necessarily a careers advice blog) has a great list of posts written over the last few months including:
• 30 websites to visit when you are laid off, most of them are US specific but they start off with great advice how to cope when you get laid off and about.com’s job searching guide. Some good advice also comes in the form of don’t stop dating and most importantly Mashable’s career tool box, 1000 places to find jobs.
• Also Mashable recommends Telonu’s Layoff Talk section, if you want to anonymously tell your layoff story.
• Its Mashabale so there has to be some great advice on how you can use social networks to land a job. Twitter tactics and Ten Ning networks you must visit.

Robert Scoble also has some great advice on how to use social networks to get yourself noticed, including “remove all friends from your facebook and twitter accounts that will embarrass you. We do look” and “remove any hint that you hated your old job.”

Hope you found these useful, add more helpful links to our comments box.

Kaustubh Mishra, an IIM Lucknow alumnus, has started The White Collar Company – an organization that imparts management training through biking journeys. This unique outdoor training program has been successfully conducted for 20+ organizations in different parts of the country. So all you Roadies fans, ask your HR Managers to get in touch with Kaustubh on +91-9909015463 and he’ll customize a program for your team/organization.

Spawned by the military, developed by academic research, driven by pornography, and used by shoppers – what can one say about the ubiquitous net that has not already been said? Its fantastic, its the future, it’s the way to go; its better than the telephone, a magazine a directory, all rolled into one; its great for shy people, for old folks, the housebound, the disabled, teenagers, business sharks, voyeurs, pornographers, pedophiles and web builders. From a designer’s view it’s a challenging mixture of disciplines – graphics, typography, images, illustrations, animation, titling, photography, computing, video – working in various combinations, spread over duration, and limited by an ever changing technology and user capability. So challenging that we haven’t really got a clue. But we are men not mice, and we reckon that for starters most websites are too busy – information overload – hard to read, or assess order, hence make selections, or too design conscious, too pretty for their own good, and do not use clicks and space (separate pages) enough, and are not planned elegantly nor efficiently. That’s what we think. Not that we know shit, as you can tell from our meagre web output. But hold on, from little cyberacorns grow big cyberoaks, then grow cyberwoods from which we can make cyber fibre heh!

(via StormThorgerson.com)

Answer: Buy out Blurb and integrate it. Or work with Blurb to create plugins and apps.

Why?

Blurb puts a professional press and global distribution in the hands of every blogger, marketer, traveler, chef, photographer, consultant, family historian, online community – in fact, everyone.

So if Facebook could integrate Blurb, they could allow you to print different kinds of books of your life – a yearbook of what you’ve been upto, your lifestream, your photos, your conversation threads with a set of friends or absolutely anything. Wouldn’t it be great to capture all of this and see your life in print (unless you’ve !@#$ed up your life and would see none of it)

Now imagine if Twitter could integrate a Blurb-like system as well. I’d love to capture the Twitter feeds of @davewiner, @garyvee, @guykawasaki, @loic, @scobleizer, @ssethi, @steverubel, @timoreilly and print these as monthly magazines. Or for that matter, I could print the journey of a band like @swarathma.

If Typepad/WordPress would integrate Blurb, then I’d like to print all of Seth Godin’s posts in to a book.

I guess you get my point. This could be done by Flickr, Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo or a Wikipedia.

You could argue that all of this can be done even now. Users could pull out stuff and print it using Blurb. That’s true. But the Internet has made us lazy. You could put Skins on GMail a long while ago by tweaking your browser but widespread adoption happened only when themes became part of the GMail offering. You need to put a solution out there for the user to know what they can do with it. My gut tells me that if everyone could print portions the Internet, they would. Especially, when you let them be the author and/or editor.

Another argument against such a solution would be that a lot of the content online is in the form of links, videos, MP3s, and it is difficult to capture all of it in a book. Well, just leave it out. Every solution need not be perfect and the Internet has taught us this. Even otherwise, the books could be supplemented with a DVD that grabs all of this content.

Or even better, allow people to create these books so that they could be loaded on to the Kindle and they need not be printed. (since we could all do with more trees)

(I have been thinking about this since I followed DEMO 2005. I was following the conference because I was excited about Munjal Shah’s Riya. However, what really got my attention then was Blurb. While I do not think Blurb is the only option, the idea is to allow users to publish what they wish.)

A friend of mine, Prashanth, just got a pup home and baptized her Princess Leia (Star Wars character). Having read up some trivia while creating the Workosaur Quiz section a few months back, I had learnt that Leia is one of the few (if not only) fictional characters who has an associated emoticon. She is represented as @-_-@ thanks to her trademark doughnut hairstyle. Obviously, Prashanth was thrilled to know about it and every time we chat online, we always discuss @-_-@ (his pup).

The Milk Moustache
Back in 2007, a dairy industry promotional group called MilkPEP started a campaign to evoke its distinctive milk moustache TV/Print ads (featuring Beyonce and her mother) through the medium of text messaging by adding a milk moustache to the smiley emoticon :-{) and trademarking the emoticon. While a trademark gives MilkPEP the right to exclusive use, am sure they’d like more people to use this in their text messages and emails.