I got a nice email from an NYU student about being an entreprenuer. I thought I would share since they were great questions.

Q. I’m toying with the idea of quitting grad-school and going full-time on my 4 month old startup..what is your philosophy on the value of education in school vs education via building a business?

A. Building a business is always a better learning experience than grad school in my opinion. I guess it depends on how much longer you have to attend. If you are close, might as well finish it. Looking back I am glad i went to grad school because it motivated me to start allcountyjobs. But if you still have a few years left it might not be worth it.

Q. Do you think it’s possible to build a meaningful business in this modern age of automation without hiring anyone?

A. Yes I do think its possible. Lean startups are awesome. If you are building a SAAS model you can certainly make a living off it. It will probably be just a lifestyle business in terms of sales. Employees can be a pain to manage but you can do a lot with just 2-3 people these days. Look what Instagram built with just 10 people!

Q. What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done as an entrepreneur?

A. the hardest thing I had to do was probabaly building up my business again after the financial crisis of 2008. I lost half my revenue and it took almost 4 years to get it back to previous levels. But i did it and was able to sell for a good price.

Its time for another one of those posts. Yes every year you see it in the blogs and twittersphere saying that job boards are dead.

Phooey!

Job boards are alive and well, especially the niche ones. Just look at this recent source of hire study from ATS vendor SilkRoad. For external hires, job boards lead the pack.

The fact is if you have a niche audience you can monetize with a job board. Just look at two of the leading tech blogs…Techcrunch & Mashable. Both of them have job boards!

Craigslist is a job board and I dont hear anyone saying they are dying.

Dont believe all the hype you hear. Job boards aren’t going anywhere, but what is happening is that there are more tools than ever for recruiters to recruit with. In the beginning there was just newspapers, then we added job boards, then we added social media & referral programs and now sourcing from sites like Linkedin are all the rage. So your job board is just one of SEVERAL ways to get talent.

All this means is you need better marketing to reach potential employers. You need to rise above the noise of everything else.

Job seekers are trained to use job boards. Thats not changing anytime soon.

Check out my interview from earlier today on the HR Examiner Radio show with John Sumser. In it you can hear me talk about social, mobile and of course job boards.

If you are serious about your job board this year I suggest you attend one of two events happening in the industry. The first is the IAEWS Congress being held in Vegas in April alongside the SHRM Staffing event.

Then the Job Board Summit sponsored by JobG8 is being held in Chicago in June. Details here.

I dont think I’m attending either one since Im busy with my new startup but I strongly encourage you to get involved in your industry. If you ever want to SELL your job board, its most likely to be bought by someone who KNOWS YOU. So go and meet people in the industry, make connections. It will serve you well in the long run.

99events.com is my first foray into something other than jobs. Its an event search engine. Kind of like an ‘indeed for events’. I came up with the idea in November, hired a freelance developer and built and launched it in December. It took about four weeks to do it. It works off the API’s of the major event sites like Meetup & Eventbrite.

I built because because I wanted to maximize my networking opportunities. As someone who likes to attend networking events I realized that most of them were either through Meetup or Eventbrite. So I said to myself why cant I search these sites all at once? I found some other sites to tap into as well such as Eventful, Ticketleap and even Facebook events.

So check it out and spread the word. Just enter your city/st to see whats happening around you. There’s even a ‘career’ category on the left to see career events in your region. The site only has an Adsense revenue model but i plan on adding some premium features.

And actually it does have a use for job seekers. You can search for things like career events in New York City.

It was long overdue but I finally had a WordPress developer create a mobile friendly version of Job Board Secrets.

the mobile friendly version is here!

I was recently interviewed on one of the top HR podcasts in the land, Drive Thru HR. Here’s the ear candy.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/drivethruhr/2013/01/25/chris-russell-at-lunch-with-drivethruhr

I ran into this interview with the founders of a site called Jobzle. In it, they detail how they crashed and burned with that site. You’ll hear some valuable lessons about starting an online recruiting business.

Not really I say.

I get questions from people thinking about starting some kind of video resume site or ways to apply via video. But just adding some kind of video component to your job site wont really add much value to the seeker or employer.

Employer/recruiters are BUSY people. And I cant stress that enough. They dont have time to sift through multiple video applications.

Video resume sites never really took off, the main reason being most people suck at creating them. Most people dont want to be on camera.

But video in the recruitment process does make sense in one area. Interviewing a small group of candidates. Thats why companies like Hirevue and Taketheinterview.com are getting traction.

It works in this case because it saves peoples time from actually having to walk into a building to interview.

So if you are a job board just use video to do career advice stuff. 5 or 10 years from now perhaps more job boards will have a ‘video apply’ as an option but thats a long way off.

The job market is ever changing. Social media is the newest tool in the job seeker and recruiter toolbox. It is so much of a trend that it enticed me to build CareerCloud.com.

The mission of CareerCloud is to build social and mobile apps that help job seekers connect with employers.

Our first two products are geared towards the candidate side. First is our innovaive social resume system. It allows a job seeker (or anyone with multiple social media accounts) to combine all that data onto a single page…a “social resume”. The user can then use that page which is available via a unique URL to promote themself. We even created badges to share it online. Here’s mine:

The second product is a mobile app called “Hidden Jobs App”. I built in almost 2 years ago, just released version 2 a few months ago and now its a service of CareerCloud. We’ll be making more stand alone apps like this in the future. Get it for 99 cents in the app store.

Now some of you may be thinking that I no longer like the job board industry. Not true. I still own a small number of niche sites like JobsinSolarPower.com. Its just that social recruiting is here and its real and I want a piece of it!

CareerCloud is going to be a launching pad for all my new social tools and mobile apps. So stay tuned and get your free social resume today.

As an entrepreneur you always have to stay on top of your industry in order to take advantage of the trends shaping it. I have always been forward thinking when it come to online recruiting technology. Its a fun business and I’m good at it.

So my advice to you is keep experimenting and launching new products. You cant win if you dont play.