Confessions of an Executive Restaurant Recruiter » Random Stuff

Welcome to the nanny states of America.

Chief Executive Restaurant Recruiter — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 12:57:27 +0000

Hey FTC surprise, fast food restaurants try to sell food to kids. In a a move that seems completely motivated by the meddlesome, nanny-wannabe attitude of our government officials, the FTC decides that they should investigate the marketing practices of 5 restaurant company giants. The two largest restaurant companies, the number 2 and 3 hamburger chains and Chuck E. Cheese Pizza are now forced to submit ALL of the marketing plans and programs and explain how they ‘target’ kids and adolescents.

I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of the government telling me "what’s best for me" and trying to legislate my "perfect life." What in the heck are they thinking up there? We don’t know that kids love ‘Happy Meals’, mice that sing, or toys with the french fries? Come on. Can we not find better things to do with our tax dollars than fund ridiculous investigations of the fast food industry and whether or not they are trying to sell more hamburgers to kids. If it were me, as CEO of one of the big chains, I’d say "Yep you caught us, we are trying, really hard to sell more hamburgers to kids! So now what are you going to do?" Wasn’t our country built on capitalism and the free enterprise system? Last time we tried communism here, wasn’t it William Bradford who discovered that it just doesn’t work.

Come on Washington, enough already. How ’bout spending your energy on something important like figuring out how to win the war on terror.

You can read more about this story and other restaurant related news at the Restaurant Industry News pages on our website.

Article courtesy of Carl Chapman - Founder CEC Search, LLC
© Copyright 2009 CEC Search, LLC | All rights reserved

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Got Milk? or Not the kind of meal that one expects in a restaurant

Chief Executive Restaurant Recruiter — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 12:42:59 +0000

I read an interesting blurb that I thought I would ask for opinions on. A woman has sued a restaurant chain over being asked to leave because she was breast feeding her child in public view. What are your thoughts?

By the way, you can read breaking restaurant news and stories on our corporate website on our restaurant news page or find additional interesting stories in our news archives.

Article courtesy of Carl Chapman - Founder CEC Search, LLC
© Copyright 2009 CEC Search, LLC | All rights reserved

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Great deal for you… Any golfers out there?

Chief Executive Restaurant Recruiter — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:51:23 +0000

I hope so. I just placed an item up for bid on EBay. A fantastic golf outing for 6 at Fripp Island Resort. If you love golf this could be a great trip for you and some of your golfing buddies.

Sadly, I can’t use the trip myself because of Roscoe and Doobie [see their puppycam on Fridays at Recruiting-USA.com]. I spoke to the folks who run the resort and they say that the rounds of golf can be combined, so if you wanted to do three golfers and three non-golfers, the golfers could play 2 rounds per day for a total of 6 each.

If you are a golfer, or know a golfer who might like to take advantage of this trip, send them a link to this post, or to the golf outing on EBAY.

Article courtesy of Carl Chapman - Founder CEC Search, LLC
© Copyright 2009 CEC Search, LLC | All rights reserved

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I get by with a little help from my friends

Chief Executive Restaurant Recruiter — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:06:27 +0000

Last week I discovered something that I had to fix. Not long ago I created a PDF of a popular series of posts that I had done here. Pat Lefler (who has a very good blog called "Intrepid ideas…and other musings") had made the suggestion that I make the series "10 Ways to Make Recruiters Love You" into a PDF so that people could download it and use it as an offline resource. To be honest, I hadn’t considered that it might be good enough for people to refer to on a regular basis. I would have understood if it was titled "10 Ways to Make Love to Recruiters"… but that would have to be posted on another site perhaps with a domain suffix of XXX and would have had BIG coverage by Dave Mendoza on his blog Six Degrees from Dave, oh well I digress.

Having judged the suggestion worthwhile, I went about looking for a suitable method of turning the document into a PDF. What I found was an online PDF document translator that worked with tons of different formats. So I spent about an hour working on the production of the PDF using the free online resource at PDFOnline. I posted the PDF as a gift to my readers and, judging by the links to it from other sites including Shally Steckerl of Job Machine on his CyberSleuthing blog, it was pretty popular.

However, it wasn’t until last week that I discovered that the online PDF creator didn’t preserve the hyperlinks in my article. I was sorely disappointed by that. I also had noticed that one of my pals, Kent Blumberg, had posted on his blog about a PDF tool that he uses, easyPDF Printer 4.3 from BCL Technologies [while not free, very reasonable at around $15], preserves the links in documents when it creates the PDF. So I thought to myself, this is the solution. On Thursday [I think it was Thursday, busy days have a habit of running together] I went to the site to download and purchase easyPDF Printer, and to my utter disappointment, discovered that they don’t yet support Windows Vista [another reason to just say no to Vista]. Now I have a problem that I dearly want to fix, but don’t have the ability to do it. So, I call on my friend Kent and ask a favor of him. I didn’t expect how wonderfully he would reply. I asked Kent if he would make a quick run through of my original document turning it into a PDF using his copy of easyPDF Printer so that I could have active hyperlinks in it and repost it. Kent said that he would be glad to and told me he could get it done by the weekend. I responded that would be great.

Well, Kent got it done much faster than that. In fact he built a TOC with active links, reformatted it for better flow, and made it look like a Million bucks [well much better than I had originally done it anyway, we have to consider the source material. ] So I’m going to make a permanent link to the document so that people can get to it very easily. I also want to express my deepest gratitude for Kent’s help. Kent knows something about helping others as it is a foundation of great leadership. Read Kent’s blog – Kent Blumberg – Leadership, strategy, and performance and find out more about his leadership style and thoughts.

Finally, I would like to refer my friend the Recruiting Animal, author of The Recruiting Animal blog, RecruitingBloggers, and Recruiting Pundits to the last sentence in my opening paragraph. I think that qualifies as humor Animal… now where is your "monetization"?

Link to 10 Ways to Make Recruiters Love You PDF.

Article courtesy of Carl Chapman - Founder CEC Search, LLC
© Copyright 2009 CEC Search, LLC | All rights reserved

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Gunfight at OK Corral or RAW Smackdown? You decide…

Chief Executive Restaurant Recruiter — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 20:34:26 +0000

My friend the Recruiting Animal has challenged me to a duel, and he did it right out in the open, in front of all my peers. OK, I’m not sure that any of them want to be considered my peers, but heck he includes a bunch of noted Internet personalities along with me.

Just to bring you up to speed, The Animal is convinced that the recruiting bloggers have no influence. To that I say balderdash. Not only am I influencing the candidates and clients within the restaurant industry, but the influence of this blog has spread to at least two other industries (that I know of.) My article on customer service “What can broken eyeglasses teach us about customer service?” was made required reading by the manager of a call center (who just happens to be a resident of BC, a fellow countryman of the Animals’ and therefore a sterling source of evidence) that employs over 250 agents. And recently I found out that my article was featured in a prominent blog in the funeral industry – Final Embrace. So Animal, I can ask them for a discount for you after our grudge match on Wednesday.

For those of you who are interested, the radio show will air at 12 PM EST on Wednesday March 7th.

The Segment ID is 14974 and the call in number is (646) 652-2754.

I’m not sure when the pay-per-view will be scheduled, but I’ve heard that Animal is in discussions with DirectTV and OnDemand. Hope to see you there!

Article courtesy of Carl Chapman - Founder CEC Search, LLC
© Copyright 2009 CEC Search, LLC | All rights reserved

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“Influence” peddling – is it a crime?

Chief Executive Restaurant Recruiter — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 17:39:12 +0000

Funny thing happened this morning…. it’s a long an involved story so it may take some time for me to weave the tale and have it make sense for you…. but here goes.

There is an ongoing buzz in the recruiting blogopshere which I think was started by Dave Mendoza with his series of articles on the Influence of Bloggers on the Recruitment Industry…. Quite a few folks have commented on the premise both on their own blogs and on recruiting.com: Harry Joiner, who write Marketing Headhunter.com, says that no blog equals no sale. Matt Martone of Job | Searchmarketing writes The night the lights went out; an experiment in blogger influence, Martin Snyder of Main Sequence dukes it out with Animal, Jim Durbin of Stlrecruiting.com has give and take on a number of blogs on this topic, Recruiting Animal who has blogs Recruiting Animal and Recruiting Bloggers, seems to make the claim that our community is too small to have much influence. Seems like there is an argument about how our 300 (plus or minus) recruiting focused blogs don’t have much influence in the industry. Heck, there is some question about whether or not my blog even counts as a blog in the recruiting industry, as Recruiting Animal and I have had some tongue-in-cheek dialogue about that in comments on recruiting.com.

Now here is where it gets somewhat interesting. I got an email from one of my readers, we’ll call him "Mike." Mike sent me a note complimenting me on my blog and asking if I knew of any restaurant chains for sale. Mike just happens to be a big wheel at a group that invests in and buys restaurants and restaurant chains [among other things.] In fact their main office is in New York near Wall St. and they have hundreds of restaurant properties world wide.

After sending him an initial email response and getting a note back from him detailing sort of what his group is looking for, I had an idea. In between my first note and his return email I had read an article on Jason Alba’s (no relation to Jessica) JibberJobber Blog about "Chicken Lists" and it got me to thinking. See I don’t really have a chicken list. After starting in my very first recruiting role with MRI, I had spoken to and recruited about 20 CEO’s of various sized companies. In fact when we added up potential fees for their placement, my boss got the idea that restaurant recruiting might just be lucrative… but I digress. Anyway, I decided that since I wasn’t afraid to call Mike that I might just as well do it… now! So I did just that. Mike and I had a great conversation and I gave him an idea for investment into a chain of restaurant properties not far from his office. Both Mike and I were happy to make the other’s acquaintance and I’m sure that we will be doing business in the future.

Now, if that isn’t influence, then I’m not sure what is. How would I measure it? Well that’s a different matter altogether. But It would say it is significant just from a relationship standpoint.

Article courtesy of Carl Chapman - Founder CEC Search, LLC
© Copyright 2009 CEC Search, LLC | All rights reserved

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Moving your office an be hazardous to your health!

Chief Executive Restaurant Recruiter — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 15:53:27 +0000

…and your business.

Who would have thought that the simple task of moving one’s office could cause almost 4 days of down time. Sorry for not being around to make comments or posts on my regular blogs (Jibber Jobber, Recruiting.com, Recruiting-USA, Recruiting Animal, ItzBigBlog, etc.) but I really had no idea that just changing from the upstairs office to my new digs downstairs was going to be such a hassle.

Actually, the hassle was caused by a couple of things whose orbits into the dark nether world of "I gotcha" coincided with my timing for the office move. Jules an I have a new puppy that is coming on March 4th (or the 3rd maybe) and in getting ready for Roscoe’s arrival, we decided that my office would be better located on the first floor in a room that has plenty of space for my stuff, the puppy, and Jules’ desk. Since Jules’ computer has been really slow lately and mine has been acting like it was going to give up the ghost any minute, I decided that moving the office should include a new (and of course more powerful) computer for me. And since I was getting a new computer, I might as well get the new Windows Vista operating system and check it out.

In the interest of saving time (let alone my fingers from way too much typing) I will save you the 15 minute stand up routine that I shared with NewsPaperGirl (Janet Meiners) and just say these few things in a bulleted list:

Windows Vista isn’t ready for prime time
Easy Windows Transfer isn’t easy
Don’t move your office and buy a new computer all at the same time
$900 in savings seems like a lot, but if it makes you miss a day of productive work, it really isn’t

Now I’m back. The office is set up (well almost completely) and the computer is working (well most of the programs work… still having to run the old one to access QuickBooks, but that is a story for another time.) Luckily, while I wasn’t able to do my SEO work, or any recruiting to speak of, my team was out there knocking down plenty of placements for restaurant managers. It’s nice to be re-settled and I’ll see y’all more often than I did this past week.

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Changes on the executive restaurant recruiters blog

Chief Executive Restaurant Recruiter — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 16:35:48 +0000

Just wanted to give folks notice that I’m going to be making a slight change and I hope that there isn’t a negative effect. I’m changing to a different plugin to handle comments. I’ve not liked the one that I have been using because it doesn’t point to the URL of the person who posts, just to the comment here. To me that just doesn’t help enocourage interaction and visitation of commentors own blogs. So I’m changing to one that I am using over on my recruiters web services site [Recruiting-USA] which I like much better. Why I am telling y’all this? Just in case the recent comments get blown away and have to start from scratch, I thought I’d let the contributors know ahead of time, that it wasn’t my intention, just collateral damage.

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Seems like not much is going on, kinda of in a funk

Chief Executive Restaurant Recruiter — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 17:11:15 +0000

You know, sometimes you just don’t know how to put your finger on the issue. I have that problem right now.

I’ve been working my tail off. Launched a new site recently [check out Recruiting-USA that is a portal and a web services site for recruiters], working on a big development project with some off shore programmers [can't tell you much about it, but I will say that Dave Mendoza mention it in his story on me back in November.]

I have interviews with some pretty cool people set up. Hired another new recruiter. I have several clients that are going over quotes. And with all of that, it just seems that nothing exciting is happening. I’ve been reading all my favorite blogs [JibberJobber, Recruiting.com, The Recruiting Animal, my boy Stevie Levy, B'ling B'ling and more] but somehow I’m not finding anything thought provoking enough to even make even decent comments. Heck, I’m even picking up my puppy the first weekend of March. Jules birthday is 3 days away. Valentine’s Day is tomorrow. And my 22nd anniversary is almost only 2 weeks away. So what is the deal?!?!!?

Hey what do you guys do when you have a blue funk going on? How do you get out of it? What is it that gets your blood pumping when nothing else seems to be exciting?

Search the latest diversity careers at DiversityJobs.com.

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I like Snap Preview Anyhwere

Chief Executive Restaurant Recruiter — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 22:12:25 +0000

I like Snap Preview Anywhere and Team Snap sent me an email about an intriguing new feature – so I’m installing it on my site. If you don’t like it, you should be able to simply disable it (based upon a cookie for your particular browser) by clicking here. I’m also going to add a quick little link on my sidebar so that it is there to help you turn it off after this post is long gone. Look for that link sometime next week.

In my opinion the visual link preview really helps folks decide if the mentioned site is quality and worth visiting. Heck if it’s good enough for TechCrunch, WordPress, and TypePad; it should be good enough for my little blog. I have only heard one negative comment (from one person who shall remain nameless) and I figure if I can give people that ability to turn it off if they want, well that’s just about as good as it gets! Enjoy, and feel free to comment whether you like it or don’t. Have a great weekend!

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