UPDATE September 12:  I received an email last night from Mike Stearns regarding my blog posts about him and his site. Needless to say he wasn't best pleased with some of my comments.  But as I've said before on several occasions, I think a more open dialogue between recruiters and candidates - with recruiters providing more constructive feedback - would deliver benefits to everyone involved.  So I've invited Mike to post his comments here in response to my blog.  I hope he does...

ORIGINAL POST:

Regular readers will recall my blog post of July 31 about Mike Stearns, the unemployed MBA grad who was having such a frustrating time with his job search that his wife launched a website called MyHusbandNeedsAJob.com.  It was a creative idea and it generated quite a bit of media attention for Mike - but 5 months later he was still unemployed, which begged the question:  Are stunts and gimmicks really, in the end, the best way to get a job?  

Thanks to the paparazzi culture of the past 5 or 10 years, many of us think there's no such thing as bad PR:  If you're getting on Oprah or a page in People, success (and money!) are sure to follow (heck, there are still plenty of people happy to pay Jon and/or Kate Gosselin $25k to show up at a launch party for some new product, even though every time either one of them open their mouths, they reveal themselves to be just as vapid, unkind, and greedy as any Hilton/Kardashian/Jenner in the market).

But when you're looking for a 'serious' job in a 'serious' industry - like Mike, who, with his MBA, probably hoped to get some kind of analyst position at a Big 5 consulting firm - telling Oprah's 11 million viewers that you were so desperate to find a job (and so incapable of finding it yourself) that your wife had to take matters into her own hands, isn't really going to get the attention of serious recruiters at serious companies.  Every recruiter I talked to about MyHusbandNeedsAJob.com said, "There must be something wrong with him as a candidate.  Otherwise he'd have found a job by now."

So what's wrong with Mike?

Well, here we are in mid-September, and according to Mike's blog (last updated August 19th), he's still unemployed.  Only now he's talking about job boards and turning MyHusbandNeedsAJob.com into some kind of website for job-seekers, like a "...sweet spot in there between Craigslist and LinkedIn."

Except...

That blog post tells me everything I need to know about why Mike doesn't have a job yet:  He acknowledges up-front that job boards don't work, yet he thinks he'd like to set one up; he recognizes that LinkedIn helps to connect you with people, but obviously hasn't used it to build a proper network, because if he had, he wouldn't still be submitting resumes "into the black hole of corporate HR".  He'd be expanding his network (he only has 198 connections - I checked); participating in groups and discussions; and raising his profile so that "corporate HR" would find him, not the other way around.

It also tells me that he hasn't used the past 6+ months to build relationships with recruiters, because if he had, they'd have told him that the world needs another job board/social networking site like a hole in the head, and that it's virtually impossible to monetize a site like that within the first 5 years, even if it does take off.

For me, though, the most telling thing is how infrequently he's updating the site or posting blogs.  If you were out of work, but had a website that was getting a fair amount of traction and which had given you the beginnings of a personal brand, wouldn't you be on there every single day, blogging about job-hunting, resume tips, resources for job-seekers, the employment market, and amusing anecdotes about your own job search and interview process?  Wouldn't you add a 'comments' section to your blog so that you could engage in dialogue with other job-seekers or even potential employers who came to visit your site?

I don't know why I've got such a bee in my bonnet about this - I mean, did I really need to write two blog posts about this guy?  Did you really need to read two blog posts about him?

I think it's bugging me because, as an entrepreneur (RetiredWorker.ca) and consultant, I know the value of national exposure on an Oprah-like scale - I know that it can transform your business and your life, if only you're able to grab the opportunity and run with it.  So I guess it's hard for me to see someone receive the golden ticket, but then just sort of put it in his pocket and wander away....