My Dad and I are now 2 days into our weeklong fishing trip. The first day was spent driving from Fairfield, CT to Ann Arbor, MI, where we stopped to spend the night. We ended up grabbing a late dinner at a pizza place that wasn’t very good. Pizza should always be at the very least very good, so that was quite a disappointment – especially considering Ann Arbor is a college town with an amazing number of restaurants. Had I been smart enough to pull up Yelp.com on my phone (they have a mobile site), I would have seen that our choice of a restaurant only had 3.5 stars on 3 ratings, and that 2 of the high ratings were for convenience or low price. Lesson learned. Luckily we redeemed ourselves with an awesome brunch at a place one of my Dad’s high school buddies recommended – it has 4.5 stars and is ranked the 2nd best Ann Arbor restaurant on Yelp.

Yelp Me Find a Place to Eat

Yelp isn’t just about food, it’s about local reviews (and the people who post the reviews). As Russell Simmons (no, not that one, their CTO) says, “We built this site expecting to find all these really cool local business, and what we really found were these really cool local people.” Maybe some of Ann Arbor’s really cool local people could have helped us find a motel room that was a bit more affordable than the jacuzzi suite, as it was the “only room left in town” because of something about a NASCAR weekend – our motel choice has 2.5 stars on Yelp. Yelp could have made our stay in Ann Arbor a lot nicer, and it certainly has the ability to be a great tool in any traveler’s repertoire.

Here’s the Yelp documentary below (here’s a link). E-mail and RSS feed readers will need to click through, and if it doesn’t work, we’re sorry. This is the only format Yelp offered the video in.

Working at Yelp

Considering how fun Yelp’s product is, working for them has to be pretty cool too. They’re a growing company, and that means entry-level hiring. Yelp’s Jobs page lists these positions in their San Francisco office: Account Executive (Local Sales), Product Manager (Tools and Support Infrastructure), Software Engineer, and Desktop Support Technician. There are also looking for Marketing Assistants (aka “Scouts”) in Cincinnati, Detroit, Nashville, Raleigh-Durham or St. Louis. These are part-time, hourly jobs, but they look pretty cool – might even be a good fit for a current college student. The e-mail addresses that you should send a resume and cover letter to are different for each job, so be sure to check out Yelp’s fantastic jobs page for those details. You may also want to take a look at the Yelp Blog or Flickr account for a deeper look at what it’s like to work at Yelp.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

• Yelp.com
• Jobs at Yelp
• About Yelp
• Yelp’s Blog
• Yelp on Flickr

When could Yelp have saved you from a not so great restaurant? Tell us about it.

We've identified Yelp as having career opportunities in the following categories:

• account management
• all employers
• California
• information technology
• marketing
• Michigan
• Missouri
• North Carolina
• Ohio
• product management
• sales
• software development
• Tennessee

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