We don’t use Monster, Dice or CareerBuilder to find our next employee. Instead we are big fans of Craigslist and highly focused community sites. For instance, when we are looking for CSS Expert we’ll target CSS Beauty.

Any job posting usually nets 20 resumes a day for at least 1 week after the posting. Experience ranges widely across any of the resumes we receive. We’ve seen everything from individuals who think they are a God’s gift to us; to people who have amazing web skills but send resumes loaded with typos and broken links.

We don’t read every line in a resume. We don’t have time for that, instead we believe in the “Blink Test“. We are looking at each resume for “it”, whatever “it” is. This means that each resume is scanned and decided on in less then 20 seconds. If we find a resume which takes longer then 20 seconds to evaluate we move it to the “maybe” pile and it’s passed onto the office for evaluation. If the majority of the office is intrigued then we move the resume to the “strong” pile where we proceed to the interview process.

So what is “it”?
There is consistency to our approach. I believe there is a set of 4 characteristics that the “maybe” and “strong” piles have in common.

• Simplicity: We look at the candidate’s ability to communicate their skills in the most concise way possible. This extends into code and design, not just written communication.
• Honesty: Yes, everyone believes they are hardworking, dedicated and organized. However, let us call references to figure that out for ourselves.
• Show Us: We are not looking a monster list of applications used, but instead we are looking for examples of how the tools were used to solve problems.
• Writing Skills: It’s tough to hide the inability to write. If the resume is fraught with poor grammar, typos and sentence structure then it will lead to ineffective email communication or poor internal documentation. (This one personally is my biggest challenge.)

So, if you know anyone who has these characteristics and is looking for an job, send them our way.

Incase is apparently not just about making sexy and functional cases for devices but they also have great design sense when it comes to their online checkout process. The instant you add an item to your cart the process begins with lightboxed cart contents. This focuses the user specifically on the checkout process, rather then distracting them with items like navigation, banners or other sorts of graphics.

Add to Cart

The Checkout screen makes full use of the display area rather then asking the user to enter each piece of customer data on a separate page. They don’t beat you down to create an account but they make it easy in case you’d like to come back again. Shipping and tax is updated on the fly and you are given the chance to review the total cost before you submit your order.

Checkout is SO NICE!

There are other items about the Incase Web site which I like, but I think it’s important to give them respect for thinking about the user and not following the typical flow of most product driven ecommerce site.

Being a small business owner and a supporter of Barack Obama I really want clarification on Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher’s two-hundred and fifty-thousand dollar question.

In the video Joe tells Obama that he is “getting ready to buy a company which makes between $250 to $280 thousand dollars a year.” OK… stop right there, is this gross or net?

As a small business owner you are taxed on your NET profits, not your GROSS. Let’s just make some guesstimates here, say Joe has 2 other employees. If Joe’s business is pulling in $250k a year and you minus expenses, say $45k per plumber, plus the cost of the trucks, gas, health insurance and various other expenses, then Joe might be left with under $100k in taxable salary.

Under Obama’s plan Joe will pay less taxes. This isn’t rocket science and I’m not sure why the difference hasn’t been asked. I blame Obama for not asking the right follow-up questions to Joe.

If Joe is REALLY pulling in NET profits of $260k then I’m going to start learning how to lay pipe!

On a daily basis I spend anywhere from five minutes to three hours cursing and wishing ill will upon Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. Sometimes I do this silently under my breath and sometimes, to the dismay of my coworkers, I do it quite vocally. The reason? Internet Explorer 6 is an: insecure, slow, outdated, and non-standards compliant browser.

Let me illustrate this a bit further. If browsers were cars — IE6 would be an El Camino truck that’s been sitting outside in the rain for 20 years. Underpowered, ugly, basically useless in every scenario, and ready to explode and kill you at any moment.

Development of a website that supports IE6 adds about 15 to 20% of additional time to a project. And further, IE6 doesn’t support the everyday commonplace technologies of all other modern browsers. Meaning websites simply don’t function or look as good as they do in today’s browsers.

So here’s the question.

If today’s modern browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, IE7) are easy to get, run faster and safer than IE6, and are free. Why are some company IT departments still forcing users to browse on IE6? In general it seems to boil down to three big reasons.

1. The company has internal software that was built specifically to run on Internet Explorer.
2. The company manages a ton of machines and the workload/headache of upgrading them all to a newer version is too much.
3. The company and users feel comfortable on IE6 because they “know it”.

Here’s the problem. When we as an industry don’t embrace new enhancements in development it’s the client’s viewers and the client’s brand that suffers. We’re still building phenomenal web sites. But the straight truth of the matter is they’re not as good as they should be. The web has soooo much potential but it’s not being utilized. Why? Because we’re still supporting a legacy browser* that was released in 2001.

As I’ve said before. In order for things to get better sometimes you just have to make the jump. Other companies are already doing this. Apple, 37Signals, and Comedy Central just to name a few. Notice anything about those first two? They dramatically care about their user’s experience. So much so that they’re willing to sacrifice incompatibility for some users to benefit the rest of them**. Cheers to that, I hope we see it more.

^{* As long as companies ask us to support IE6 we will. We’re not afraid to share our thoughts on the browser landscape but we also recognize the need to compromise.
** I understand that some users don’t have control over what browser they use. For these poor souls I cry (really, I’m tearing up as write this).}

During my bus commute to work every day I spend a large amount of time listening to podcasts on my iPhone. And while video podcasts can be great, sometimes I just don’t have the stomach to hold my iPhone to my face for 40 minutes on the bus.

The thing is that a lot of my video podcasts (diggnation, TED Talks, Wine Library TV) are great to listen to with just audio. And in fact I find the extra battery life saved can be a welcome benefit. Well, about two weeks ago I figured out how to listen to audio from video’s on the iPhone with the phone locked. Here’s how:

1. Start your video from the iPhone iPod app
2. Lock the phone. At this point your video and audio will stop
3. Double tap your home button to bring up iPod controls in locked mode
4. Select play and the audio from your video will start playing while the phone is locked

I’m not sure if this tip is published but it’s been super useful for me. Hope it helps you all out too.

Update: Just realized these steps also work if you want to listen to audio only with the phone unlocked. Simply do the above and then unlock your phone, wala!