LinkedIn
Facebook
Twitter

Here’s what I faced: I had about 3 weeks to hire 6 to 9 people to work as City Editors for the CultureMob blog. They were going to be located in 7 different metro areas and we could only pay them a small monthly stipend. Like many start-ups, we had no money and even less time to waste.

Given enough time, I’m certain I could have found people one by one, but there was simply no time to do so. Instead of Dinner Impossible, this was Hiring Impossible.

Robert Irvine of Dinner Impossible

I turned to low-cost and free tools online to find people, interview them, and get them signed to a contract. I started on April 23 and got the last contract signed on May 13. Here’s how I did it:

1. Craigslist. Duh! We had done some adverstising for writers last year and I knew that Craigslist was a good place to find people. But given that I was nearly asking people to work for free this time, I wasn’t sure how good it would be. Craigslist is so simple to use and extremely cheap at $25 per job. And with all the space to write that I wanted, I could make a good pitch about why these were good gigs. Plus, the right kind of people just hang out there. How well did it pull? I got nearly 250 resumes across 5 cities. (I found our Seattle person online and emailed her directly.)

2. Google Mail. All 250 resumes dropped into my Google mail inbox, auto-filtered to the appropriate city’s label based on the unique ID in the Craigslist anonymous email system. I discovered a small flaw in my system here: those who replied with the same subject in the same city would sometimes get rolled up together by Gmail’s threading. Not a huge deal, but I did lose track of a couple of people this way.

3. Microsoft Excel. Excel is still the workhorse of corporate America. All these years and it’s still the go-to application for keeping lists. Kept track of every applicant along every step of the way. I sent personal notes to everyone who applied at least once, and used sorting and auto-filter features to keep track of each city and who the top applicants were.

4. Genbook.com. I did Seattle and Washington, D.C. first to work out any issues before doing the other cities. Good thing. That’s when I found out that phone interviews were going to be tough. Yes, I wanted to talk to people directly, but scheduling them all via email would have been a nightmare when doing 6 cities in 4 different time zones at once. I found Genbook.com via Google in 5 minutes and within 15 had my phone interview reservation slots set up waiting for people to fill them on their own. This tool has a freemium model, and the free version worked great for me. Over three days I would check my schedule and call the applicant at the time they had selected. Only 2 out of 25 got the time difference wrong, and I didn’t hire them.

5. Comcast Digital Phone. Long distance charges a thing of the past. Glad my wife talked me out of giving up our land line, cause it came in handy here.

6. Echosign.com. The freemium model for Echosign is not as good with Genbook, but this application is so good, and so bullet proof that it was worth the extra $15 to easily get e-signatures on the contracts. It’s clear that this application could handle everything from a small business to a massive one.

Total out-of-pocket expenses? $165 to find some incredible, talented people to fill these roles for us. The added benefits were finding another site to partner up with us on content, a few people who will work as unpaid contributors, and 2o or 30 others who I could call on again if needed. I made sure that I communicated clearly with everyone about where they stood, and respected the opportunity they had given me to consider them.

All of those that were hired are already blogging, writing about great local events, venues and artists in their metro areas.

Recent news about artists and promoters cashing in on faux secondary ticket market sales shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Neil Diamond apparently saw what everyone else knew as well: secondary market ticket sales are booming and there’s probably no turning back.

The mechanics of the secondary market have been evolving for more than a decade, and it’s astonishing how much trust there is among buyers and sellers. I have no clue when the first eBay ticket transaction took place, but I do know that I auctioned off my pair of 1999 Ryder Cup tickets for $3,000 to a ticket broker who was then going to resell them to someone else. I had never sold anything at all on eBay before then, and yet the buyer overnighted a cashier’s check to me without fear.

My son was 11 in 1999 and remembers that transaction mostly because he didn’t get to go to the Ryder Cup. But he also learned two important lessons that day that artists like Neil Diamond have been learning as well:

1. The Internet is very, very efficient at putting buyers and sellers together, increasing the chances that prices will reach their true value
2. You can profit off ticket market information if you act earlier than others and accept some risk

So it seemed perfectly natural to me to watch this scenario unfold:

1. A Portland man purchased two ticket strips for the NCAA regional basketball tournament for $340 back when they went on sale in March 2008. There are 3 tickets in each strip: two first round games on Thursday and a second round session on Saturday.
2. My son, a UW student, purchased those tickets from him a week ago on eBay for $425 before the UW Huskies had even been formally selected for a slot in Portland. The seller had zero eBay feedback and my son sent him the money by PayPal with the expectation that they would arrive by mail, which they did 2 days later.
3. As soon as the brackets were announced and game times decided, he listed the tickets for the other first round session (that includes Gonzaga) on Craigslist. Within 30 minutes he had a guy in Portland willing to PayPal him $300 for those tickets, plus $17 to overnight them back to Portland. So he gets to see the Huskies play in the other Thursday round, plus the second round, for less than the original face value.

Did you follow that? The NCAA (via Ticketmaster), eBay, craigslist, Paypal. The U.S. postal service in the middle three different times, first sending the tickets to Oregon, then to Washington, then back to Oregon. What’s remarkable about it all is the ease at which all this commerce happened, the online systems that enabled it, and the trust between strangers required to complete it. And yet similar scenarios happen thousands of times a day, with billions of dollars at stake.

So should it be a surprise to us when big-name artists like Neil Diamond, Bon Jovi and Elton John get caught up in the game? Proabably not. Supply and demand is a force that’s difficult to contain.

Ever hear of a Tramontina Dutch oven? If you’re a reader of Cook’s Illustrated there is no doubt you have.

Cook’s Illustrated is a popular cooking magazine with about 1 million subscribers who pore over detailed recipes, taste tests and highly respected equipment tests. Read the Wikipedia article for more details on this success story. The magazine has a companion PBS cooking show, America’s Test Kitchen, and a series of books that sell so well you would have had difficulty this past Christmas finding the exact one you wanted in stock at your local bookstore (especially if you waited until Christmas Eve like I did).

What I doubt you know is how much reach and influence Cook’s Illustrated can have. Consider the Tramontina Dutch oven. When Cook’s Illustrated first evaluated Dutch ovens (note: article requires subscription), the choices were expensive:

When we tested Dutch ovens in 1998, the top performers were pots made by All-Clad and Le Creuset. Nearly a decade later, the only flaw we might find in these workhorses is their hefty price—roughly $250.

Yeah, most home cooks would find $250 to be a little steep for a pot that’s not used every day. So they looked at the category again in January 2007 and found out that, what do ya know, there were some cheaper options that were just as good. They made Chefmate’s “Round Enameled Cast Iron Casserole” their Best Buy and then watched it sell out almost immediately:

We were impressed by the significantly cheaper Round Enameled Cast Iron Casserole with Lid by Chefmate for Target ($39.99). Just as our article was published, however, Target’s website sold out of this test kitchen Best Buy.

Hmmmm. Coincidence? Maybe. Now fast forward to January 2008 and another update to its Dutch oven overview:

Shelling out hundreds of dollars for a Dutch oven is less necessary than ever. We put two new low-cost models, one from Tramontina ($39.86) and another from Lodge ($49.86), to the test and liked what we found….We recommend the Tramontina as an inexpensive alternative to our favorite 71/4-quart Dutch oven by Le Creuset ($229.95).

My sister-in-law passed on this information to my wife a few weeks ago, and she began to talk about the product with the same look I’m sure I get when I talk about some electronic or computer gadget that will change my life. Let’s buy it on Amazon, I said. Oops, not found. Okay, let’s Google it. Looks like Wal-Mart has it. Oops, out of stock.

Besides the lack of online inventory, it was out of stock at every Wal-Mart location within 100 miles. WTF? Can it be this difficult to buy this product? Tramontina USA has a Web site, but it has no product information or “where to buy” details. Does the company even know that one of its products has reached cult status?

What have others found?

Fuzzykitty: As soon as I discovered this I went to Walmart’s website to order the Tramontina but it was not available so I ordered the Lodge. Also, both were out of stock in any nearby store according to their website.

Mission be less poor: They say you can pick it up for about $40 – but I can barely find it, much less for $40….So, I made a resolution of heart to get up early this Saturday morning (as it was after payday) and suck it up to drive the 18 miles to this fabled Wal-Mart, largely to reward myself for all the no-spending I’ve done in the past 2 weeks. All this work for a dumb pot.

You get the idea.

In the end we gave up and bought the Lodge, which seems like a perfectly fine product. Cook’s Illustrated had downgraded the Lodge because it was a little more expensive and was slightly smaller than the Tramontina. Good enough, and it was just a Dutch oven after all. Keeping the paradox of choice in mind, I’ll try not to be disappointed.