plus 1, Rehabbing Irish QB expects to compete for job - Chicago Tribune

Rehabbing Irish QB expects to compete for job - Chicago Tribune

Posted: 18 Dec 2010 07:29 PM PST

9:34 p.m. CST, December 18, 2010

ct-spt-1219-nd-brite--20101218

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Yes, Dayne Crist has a plan — just not an escape plan.

Notre Dame's erstwhile starting quarterback will rehab his torn left patellar tendon, then hope to do some throwing in spring and reclaim his gig for 2011.

But if he doesn't, and if he never starts another game, it won't chase him away.

"Well, then, I wouldn't be the best man for the job," Crist said Saturday, speaking to reporters for the first time since suffering the injury Oct. 30.

"But I'm confident in my abilities, and I'm going to compete. If that happens, so be it. But I'm going to do everything in my power to not let that happen. It's pretty much as simple as that."

Crist has been told it's possible he could throw with receivers and get timing back in spring practice. Coach Brian Kelly refusing to confirm that it's Crist's job to lose is no curveball.

"You can't go out for the remainder of the season and come back and everything is all peachy," Crist said. "You have to come back and compete. I expect that. That's what I want, really. I want to earn it. I don't want to be given anything."

— Brian Hamilton

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured site: So, Why is Wikileaks a Good Thing Again?.

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

New ways to find jobs: cash bounties, texting - San Francisco Gate

Posted: 19 Dec 2010 07:04 AM PST

Fernando Elizalde has tried the traditional ways of gaining employment.

He asks his family and friends for leads. He attends networking events. He sends out resumes constantly.

But after more than a year of looking for a job in private equity, and despite a master's in business administration from UCLA, the 28-year-old finds himself with few leads and a growing sense of frustration.

So Elizalde took a different tack: He recently posted a bounty - $10,000 to the person who lands him a job.

Elizalde is one of the first job seekers to try Career Element, a Palo Alto startup that allows users to post a bounty for anyone who can help them get their job of choice. That person could be a recruiter or someone at the job hunter's dream company who has inside knowledge on a position opening up.

"I feel like it provides a huge benefit during really hard times," said Elizalde, who emigrated from Argentina a decade ago and lives in Los Angeles. "It provides more networking opportunities. Yeah, it's artificial, because in some ways you're buying those connections. But at the same time, when networking is so important, I don't see why not."

With California unemployment at 12.4 percent and the national rate at 9.8 percent, some Bay Area startups are taking novel approaches to helping people find work.

Career Element aims to be the "Priceline for jobs," allowing high-end job hunters to offer thousands of dollars to the person who lands them a job. For more blue-collar workers, San Francisco's Job Rooster is developing a service that helps users find jobs using nothing more than text messages.

Some career coaches scoff at their methods, and a professor of business ethics says that offering bounties could corrupt the hiring process. But the founders of both companies say that in a tough market, job hunters should consider new approaches to finding work.

"In today's economy, you have so many qualified candidates," said Paul Campbell, founder of Career Element. "How do you separate the best ones?"

Campbell started Career Element after realizing he wanted a job at Facebook so much that he would pay for it.

Campbell, a 26-year-old Palo Alto native, was a graduate student at Stanford when he decided he would pay up to $7,000 to anyone who could help him get a job at the social networking giant.

Rather than pursue the job, he decided to turn his idea into a business. He launched Career Element in March 2009, and the site became active in October.

Career Element offers some traditional job-hunting services, allowing users to post profiles and network with one another. The site also stages regular career fairs in Silicon Valley.

But Career Element is drawing attention for its dream job feature, which allows people like Elizalde to name the price they are willing to pay to land a high-quality position.

If an "agent" helps Elizalde get a job, his $10,000 bounty will be released - 87.5 percent to the agent, and 12.5 percent to Career Element.

"The best way to get a job is through networking," Campbell said. "But if you don't know people, this is a great way to get their attention."

Campbell expects that most people who use his site will be looking for jobs that pay more than $100,000 a year, noting that for every week they're unemployed, they're losing $2,000 or more. With the average person on unemployment taking 33.8 weeks to find a new job, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, those candidates have a strong financial incentive to accelerate their search.

Ethical questions

Still, using Career Element raises ethical questions. Managers who have a direct role in the hiring process shouldn't accept a bounty for hiring candidates, said David Vogel, the Solomon P. Lee Chair in Business Ethics at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

"That would be a violation of the person's responsibility to the firm," Vogel said.

And Campbell said employees who plan to seek bounties should check with their hiring managers to make sure it is allowed.

But a bounty system could be a useful incentive for workers to help others in the labor market find jobs, Vogel said.