Lessones learned from managing 8 volunteers

In the past four weeks, I have been moonlighting as a general manager for a production company that is producing two events in the upcoming weeks. Although my title is "Marketing Manager", I am doing everything from recruiting, sponsorships, project management, the works. I have a couple takeaways from this, and they are as follows.

• Making the best out of what you have: As a former consultant with a type A personality, I push myself to produce my best. I have beat myself up for things out of my control. Since I am managing seven volunteers across two continents, there are things I just have to do what I can given my resources
  
  
• Bucking up: Because of the exposure of this position, I am having to work with clients, teammates, you name it, most of whom I don't know. This allowed me to be bold in calling up cold contacts for my job search efforts, which I was dancing around with before
  
  

Since I am working with a team of 8 volunteers, I spend more time than I normally would in a professional environment in getting them to deliver. There are two things that are essential in making this relationship work: commitment, and communication. Everything else is icing on the cake. I am happy to support you, as long as you are committed to the production. And I will work with you to make you successful, even though you may be new to this game. For instance, one of our sponsorship team members scored an advertising deal, thanks to the prospect materials we put together, might I say, I am a newbie too.

I will be passing on the torch in two weeks, but, am definitely grateful for this experience.

Helpful, and the Not So Much Job Search Features

Since I am hunting for jobs, I come across many so-called job sites. What was interesting to me was that not one site had all the most user-friendly features to job seekers. What do I mean by that? Some might ask. Well, a feature that would help the job seeker in economizing his time, and provide helpful info. Below is a list that I whipped up, along with the site that provides it.


THE GOOD

• Aggregated job search results: Most of you have more than one job agent set up with one job site. But, Monster is the only one that combines all your results, broken down by different search criteria, in ONE single email
  
  
• Sneak peek at competition: Careerbuilder shows you how much competition do you have per suggested job requisition graphically, along with its interpretation of how good of a fit is it between you and this position. Its an awesome way to gauge your chances for the position
  
  
• De-duped results: Although aggregator sites are great, its even better when they hide similar job titles as the ones shown... meaning you don't have comb through 300 job listings, only to find out that half of them are the same. For that reason, SimplyHired is a step up from the rest
  
  
• Full job details included: I also set up job agents with the companies that I am interested in working for. Its great when I get announcements of new job postings fitting my search criteria, that the full job req is included. Kaiser Permanente is great at doing that
  

THE BAD (For obvious reasons, I have omitted the job site names)

• Magnifying glasses required: I have gotten some job notification emails that are not readable to the human eye. The fonts sizes are tiny, or that the entire job posting is one long run-on sentence. Although I understand that's helpful to the web spiders, its not helpful to us humans
  
  
• A song and dance without a "skip" option: I like a good video when I want to be entertained, but I am not looking to be entertained while applying for jobs. Yes, this means that I prefer to bypass your video, and just get to the good stuff... the jobs themselves
  
  
• A fragile search feature: I like a site that I can slice and dice the jobs to my heart's content, within reason of course. That means that I have useful filters, i.e. dates, job sources, etc. within my command. A note of suggestion, it will be great if I can filter out specific job sources

That's all for now. Hope this helps.