about this project

This is a movement.

Place Yourself Project is a movement and a labor of love fueled by my personal commitment to help my fellow humankind find jobs and find employees. Given my many days as a job seeker combined with many other days trying to recruit great people, I suffered through the painful realization that the only Tools for us to find each other not only are only designed to gouge money from us all, but even to make it even more difficult for us to connect so that the Tools can make yet even more money. Please understand I’m all for successful businesses making all the money they can but not at a cost of more harm than good.

This difficulty is holding us all hostage from each other and I believe it takes a toll on our economy.

Here is a contribution, a collaboration requiring participation by me, you and everyone you know.

Place Yourself Project is 100% about people. People wanting to work, and people looking to fill jobs. Place Yourself in front of your next employer. Place Yourself into your next job. If the middleman is in your way, work your way around… and Place Yourself!

So very many (oodles and oodles) small and micro sized companies are hiring but oh wow the costs they are affronted with are absurd. (Thank you craigslist for providing a wonderful outlet for these companies to have a chance at posting ads and finding people.) Outside of that, running an ad in a local paper or on a major site is a barrier for hiring given the high costs.

There should be no difficulty for a person to give his or her resume to a company but there certainly is now. Once people have uploaded their resumes at some sites, they should be easily accessed by prospective employers. Instead, all too often those resumes become the assets of the site where they are posted and extremely high costs are then imposed to get to those resumes. Place Yourself puts the job-seeking people back in the driver’s seat.

Companies will be allowed to access resumes only after they register a simple user account and I have the opportunity to approve their registration. Companies will be guaranteed that their email address is not being added to a mailing list. (Of course everyone will have the opportunity to subscribe to my awesome newsletter when it becomes available… )

I believe we are all good people even though some of us choose a less savory path at times. The rest of us can make this work, and I know that we will.

I will start by adding a link to this project to all my blog sites and my email signatures. I am contacting businesses (local first then working through family and friends to get other towns and cities) to let them know they can post their jobs for free for now. You can start your contribution right now by uploading your resume, with as much or as little contact information as you wish. There is an anonymous emailing option if you don’t want to post any of your name or contacts details. There is no fee for employers to find or read your resume if they are a registered employer who has posted a job opening that has been validated by me.

The goal is to cost, in most cases nothing, and in other cases as little as possible. If I could rely on the Honor System like my granpa and granma used at their little golf course in south Georgia 30 years ago, I would and it would be free for all. However, there will be some cases where businesses will need to pay a (very small) fee to post a job. This is similar to how craigslist had to charge a nominal fee for job postings in some major cities to aid in reducing the scammers and spammers. There is also a donation opportunity for anyone who cares to assist, as I am personally funding this project with both time and money.

People and companies will never be charged for additional categories. This is especially important for the little companies because they are my passion and I know full well that the office manager may also be the finance department. Job postings will be allowed in as many categories as are actually necessary and will be validated by me to ensure no abuse of categories.

We’re going to start out with job postings for free. Yup, free. The catch is that I will personally review and approve these in every effort to avoid scammers and spammers. When I implement the modest fee system, employer ads will still be reviewed and approved. Once an employer has been a legit member of this community for a short period of time, they will continue to receive free job postings.

This is for the people!!

I chose the following tools and resources for this project because:

I chose Fat Cow hosting because they have reasonable pricing and proper technical stuff and beyond that they use wind energy to power much of their business.

I chose WordPress to blog because it doesn’t hurt my brain too much when I need to figure out something.

I chose Job Roller from AppThemes for Word Press because I didn’t want to delay getting this project going and I don’t know how to do any better yet – although if I can learn how maybe I can make my own custom for this project. Or perhaps someone will volunteer.

This is my contribution to making the world a better place. There is much to be said for “pay it forward” and “gifting.”

One of my fave quotes is Ghandi’s “be the change you want to see in the world.”

Here we go.