Yes, we’re hiring a Design Researcher. It’s a full-time position at our office in Pacifica, CA, one block from the ocean and 15 minutes from San Francisco.

The job
First, as a researcher, you’ll work on consulting engagements (sometimes a few at a time) where we are gathering new insights about people to help inform the product and service decisions our clients are making. That means planning the details of a study, finding participants, developing fieldwork methodology, interviewing people, analyzing data, synthesizing findings, preparing presentations, and delivering results to teams.

Second, as a member of the Portigal team, you’ll be sharing your expertise and point of view through blogging, speaking at conferences, and writing articles.

Requirements
You have at least 3 years of professional experience in all aspects of user research work. On your own you can do any of the tasks a project requires, such as writing a screener, preparing a field guide, leading an interview, analyzing and synthesizing data, preparing and delivering a presentation.

You can write clearly for a professional audience.

We’re especially interested if
You have experience as a consultant and are familiar with working in a professional services environment.

You have a history in thought-leadership, sharing your professional expertise and perspective through blogs, articles, conferences, etc. You may even have a set of topics that you are especially focused on.

About Portigal Consulting
Founded in 2001, Portigal Consulting is a bite-sized agency that helps organizations to discover and act on new insights about their customers and themselves. We are a small business but we work for very large businesses, giving us some of the best of both worlds. We have the good fortune to be hired by passionate individuals at top firms in consumer electronics, software, finance and other industries. Critical to our success is the strong relationships we’ve built with clients, containing a nutritious mix of leadership, talent, good customer service, and collaboration. We’d expect that you share our enthusiasm for establishing and maintaining those relationships.

To apply
Send an email to jobs AT portigal DOT com with your resume and

1. Why you want to work at Portigal
2. An overview of your user research skills (include examples if possible)
3. A writing sample that might fit at http://www.portigal.com/blog
4. The topics you’d like to explore, as a thought leader, at Portigal
5. If available, links to your blog, conference presentations, publications, or other examples of your thought-leadership
6. In This Week @ Portigal, we talk about what we’re consuming. What are you consuming?

Please and thank you
No phone calls. And we’re only able to consider people who have legal permission to work in the USA.
 
 

Brody takes a break from the action at Portigal

The Unemployed Worker’s New Friend: Outsourcers [WSJ] – As consumers are exposed to automation, bots, telemarketer scripts, recommendation engines, semi-personalized banner ads, and other intermediaries, is it any wonder that they will begin to harness those tools for their own ends? And perhaps tolerate misfires on their own behalf? The exploration of what can’t be outsourced continues.

For a $10 monthly fee ($40 for the first month) an automated service called MyJobHunter.com sent out more than 500 job applications in five months on Mr. Moomjean’s behalf. Within a day after a job opening hit the Web, the service scanned it for certain keywords. In Mr. Moomjean’s case, the words included “sales” and “retail.” If the listing was a match, the service would fire off a résumé to the employer without so much as showing it to the applicant. MyJobHunter is unique in its reliance on software. Customers of JobConcierge.com pay $30 a week to have their job applications sent out by workers based across the U.S. and abroad.

At JobSerf.com, candidates pay up to $98 a week for one of a team of workers in Visakhapatnam, India, to find openings and apply for jobs. Many of JobSerf’s workers join the company because their English is too rudimentary for them to work in a call center, says CEO Jay Martin. So language difficulties do crop up. When JobSerf six years ago first tested its service with a few U.S. executive clients, its Indian workers applied on their behalf to a number of adult-entertainment companies.

The shotgun approach to applications has other drawbacks: When recruiters call candidates about a job, they often don’t realize that it is something they have applied for. A district manager for a Krispy Kreme doughnut franchise was taken aback when she called Mr. Moomjean about his application only to learn he had no idea what she was calling about. “He didn’t know who I was or where I got his application,” recalled Melissa Surby-Curtin, the franchise group’s district manager. “I thought ‘Oh, this isn’t a good start.’”

In a span of 240 hours over three months last summer, JobSerf’s staff applied to 711 jobs on behalf of IT manager Colin Campbell, 34, of Cincinnati. Mr. Campbell said he got dozens of calls from potential employers. But he didn’t get his current job that way; he got it through a personal connection. On a single day last summer, Greg Moffitt, 47, of Houston, sent out more than 100 applications via MyJobHunter. An irritated recruiter, who got his résumé three times, eventually called to ask him to stop.

click to enlarge

Tracked down a resume from the mid-80s when I was in high school. Check out that education and work experience! I liked to write computer programs and play video games!

If you’re sending someone a resume, make sure you turn off track changes in Word.

Seeing that Award winning right brained/left brained marketer was changed to Award winning right brained/left brained marketer and business developer is perhaps more information than this person wanted me to know. There’s all sorts of evil hidden goo left behind in Word documents; to be extra sure, MSFT offers a plugin that creates a clean copy, or just make a PDF. Maybe this person doesn’t even use track changes and didn’t see the same view of the doc that I do. Pretty horrifying for them, as well. Makes me wonder what I’ve done like this myself.

More trouble for the poor guy in his cover letter, that was pasted into email from a text editor where many of the characters didn’t come through correctly on my end.

I’m a global leader of strategy with strong expertise in how to
tackle new markets and clients. Some highlights included:
· Developed strategy, leadership, innovation for Fortune 500
companies that resulted adding hundreds of millions of dollars in new
sales revenue, plus decreased operational expenses by 27%.

A cautionary tale for all of us!

Signs o’ the times at last weekend’s Conference on Designing for User eXperience (DUX)