Chris Russell is the founder of Career Cloud.com
Chris is a digital recruiting consultant, recruiting blogger and HR Tech Advisor has been connecting job seekers to employers since 1999.
His experiments in the online recruiting space which earned him the moniker of the mad scientist of online recruiting.
Chris has founded several recruiting tech startups, and various job boards, including a very successful local job board network, called AllCountyJobs.com which he sold in 2012.
When he’s not running Career Cloud you can find him on his kayak or biking on the local trails in Connecticut.
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CHRIS RUSSELL’S CAREER JOURNEY
If you look at Chris’ studies in college you wouldn’t necessarily peg him being in the recruiting space.
Like so many of the guests before Chris became interested in the careers/recruiting space by helping his college friends write their resumes.
This led him to moonlighting as a resume writer. While he was writing resumes on the side Chris was attending college where he received his masters degree in information systems.
As it happened at the same time Chris had just gone through a job search himself mainly using the “new” technology of the day, job boards.
The job he found was with a web design firm where he was actively writing code and serving as a project manager.
As luck would have it, one of his projects was to build a site for a recruiting company that wanted the ability to post jobs on the site.
Chris realized the need for this type of site and decided to build his own job board to service his local community. As a result, AllCountyJobs.com was born.
CHRIS RUSSELL CAREER CLOUD
Chris ran AllCountyJobs.com as a side hustle for the first couple of years but like so many others during this time, Chris was laid off from his full-time position during the Dot Com bust.
At this point, Chris had been grown AllCountyJobs.com into a self-sustaining business. This allowed him to easily step into and run the business full-time.
For next twelve years, Chris ran AllCountyJobs.com with a focus on connecting people to jobs through technology.
You didn’t let too much grass grow under you since you founded Career cloud just a few months later.
Being an entrepreneur, Chris continued to experiment and tinker with technology in the online recruiting space, building 50 to 100 recruiting or job board type sites.
It was during this time he was dubbed the mad scientist of online recruiting.
One of the sites he built during this time was CareerCloud.com
Career Cloud is online career content site that combines apps, tools, and advice for the modern-day job seeker including his podcast, Career Cloud Radio.
MODERN DAY JOB HUNTING
Chris tells us the job hunting today is a very complex process with a lot of moving parts. Most people, unfortunately, don’t do it correctly.
Career Cloud is Chris’ way of helping teach job seekers how to find work properly one post, one app at a time.
Realizing the growing importance of our online activities as they relate to our careers, the initial thrust of Career Cloud was to help job seekers compile in one place their social resume.
The first thing a recruiter does, the good ones anyway, after the receive your resume is Google you. Why? Because they want to see what you’re like.
Social media gives each of us a glimpse into other’s personalities.
USING SOCIAL MEDIA FOR YOUR JOB SEARCH
We can very quickly discover what they like, what they read, what they write and all of these online activities serve as signals to a recruiter who will use them to determine if they’re going to give you a call.
The savvy job seekers, like the ones who follow Career Cloud, can leverage this by taking advantage of the various social media applications to build their brands rather than post an endless stream of selfies.
Because the web is your resume, Chris suggests candidates consider creating an online hub for themselves where they can link all of their online activities together.
Like Katrina and Audra, Chris views social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook as giant talent pools in disguise.
This means if you’re not online, you are a huge disadvantage.
The quickest way for you to establish an online presence is to use LinkedIn. Chris tells us that 97% of recruiters are on the platform.
So guess where you should be?
If you’re not online and you’ve been in your job for a while now or maybe you haven’t needed to look for a job in a while for whatever reason, I encourage you to listen to my interview with Taylor Pearson to learn about silent risk and the life of a turkey.
CHRIS RUSSELL THE MAD SCIENTIST OF ONLINE RECRUITING
True to his moniker, Chris has released several apps in the app store over the last few years. All of the apps are designed to help you find available jobs.
His app JobMaster, for example, acts as an aggregator for numerous job boards. As an example, there are 30 job boards shown for the United States alone.
Job Master allows you to search all of the job boards from one place.
While we’ve discussed job boards on several previous shows, Chris reminds that companies will always have a need for job boards. They need a place to post their openings.
What has changed is the role job boards play in a company’s recruiting efforts.
He suggests taking advantage of the email alerts function on the job board in order to have jobs sent directly to you vs. you continually searching for them.
The Job Master app allows you to do this from over 1,000 job boards from across the world. He even includes niche job boards such as ones for dentistry.
CHRIS RUSSELL CAREER CLOUD RADIO
Chris has been podcasting since 2007. From them till now, he has accumulated over five million downloads which is pretty incredible.
In the podcast, Chris speaks with recruiters, career coaches and resumes writers about how to job hunt. The podcast is Chris’ way of giving back to job seekers.
Here are the best ways to get in touch with Chris.
Website: CareerCloud.com
Twitter: @ChrisRussell
Podcast: CareerCloud Radio
