One Day, One Job » Nevada

Slickdeals

Willy Franzen — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:43:02 +0000

We all learn at an early age that we can’t have our cake and eat it too. Everything has a trade off. You can have money or you can have stuff. You can’t have both. Right? Wrong. Since 1999 Las Vegas based Slickdeals has been proving that you can have your cake and eat it too. Or as they put it, “Slickdeals.net is a free, user-driven deal sharing site with a mission to provide consumers an avenue to collaborate and share information in order to make the best shopping decisions.” That’s a fancy way of saying that they are a community of people who help each other find the best deals, so you can buy stuff and have some money left over. In fact, a lot of Slickdeals users find deals so good that they get paid to buy something (after rebate). Seriously. It’s all about free and open sharing of information, and it’s amazingly powerful. The amount of money that people have saved through Slickdeals has to be staggering.

Are You Slick Enough?

Slickdeals doesn’t have a monopoly on “community driven bargain hunting,” but their “thousands of free discounts, promo codes, reviews and price comparisons” have resulted in an insanely successful website and business. From what I can tell, most of Slickdeals’ revenue comes through advertising and affiliate links. They’ve found that giving away a lot of high quality free content can be very profitable. Maybe newspapers could learn a thing or two from Slickdeals. Even though Slickdeals is all about being cheap and frugal, they appear to be willing to spend some of their profits on hiring top talent. Their Jobs page shows a number of listings that include potential entry level positions like Creative Web Developer, Community Relations Manager, Business Development Manager, and Blog Columnist. The application instructions vary, so be sure to check out the specific postings for all of the details. And be sure to enjoy the “employee discount” that is being allowed to read Slickdeals at work.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

Have you used Slickdeals beore?

Lucky Brand

Willy Franzen — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:49:56 +0000

Next March I’m going to regret not saving this one for my St. Patrick’s Day holiday themed post, but today we’re going to take a look at Lucky Brand. They’re a clothing manufacturer and retailer that is “rooted in rock ‘n ‘roll with a signature sense of humor.” Their About page will tell you that they stand for “independent thinking, individual style and a feeling as authentic as love” and that they’re known for “great-fitting, vintage-inspired jeans;” however, I think it’s much simpler than that. One of their founders came up with the idea to put the phrase “Lucky You” behind the flies of every pair of pants that they made. It was an instant point of differentiation, and I think that it has a lot to do with why Lucky Brand is going strong 19 years after they started. It really is pure, politically incorrect genius. Lucky you…

Get Lucky

The best way to get a feel for Lucky Brand is to check out their clothes online or visit one of their retail stores. If you don’t get what the brand is about, you’re not going to get a job with them. I think that’s true of any brand, but it’s especially pertinent in industries like apparel where brand is everything. So, what about jobs at Lucky Brand? They have a ton of Store Management opportunities at their retail stores. This may not be exactly what you had in mind post-graduation (or maybe it is), but it kind of offers the opportunity to run your own business—at least that’s what the job description makes it sound like. They have openings for Retail Management in Ala Moana, HI; Miami, FL; Monterey, CA; Pittsburgh, PA; Tampa, FL; San Jose, CA; San Francisco, CA; Austin, TX; Waikiki, HI; Westlake, OH; Los Angeles, CA; Manhattan, NY; Las Vegas, NV; El Paso, TX; Aurora, IL; Chicago, IL; Pleasant Prairie; WI; Washington, DC; Philadelphia, PA; Bridgewater, NJ; Elizabeth, NJ; Seattle, WA; Wrentham, MA; Peabody, MA; Boston, MA; Houston, TX; Studio City, CA; St. Louis, MO; and quite a few more locations (although those jobs were posted in March and earlier). You can find all of those job postings on Lucky Brand’s Jobs site.

You also have the option of submitting a résumé for general consideration for corporate jobs in Vernon, CA. I think that this might be worthwhile because of what Lucky Brand has to say about their Internship Program:

The Lucky Brand Fall 2009 Internship Program is intended to help acclimate Junior and Senior level university/college students to our company culture, build on their creativity, and allow them the best opportunity to get to know Lucky Brand. This program is designed to identify, develop and potentially hire top entry level talent.

If they’re looking to hire top entry level talent, then why don’t they have any entry level jobs posted outside of retail? Maybe it’s just a season thing, or maybe they mostly like hiring past interns, but it’s worth investigating. Lucky Brand offers internships in Design, Human Resources, Wholesale Sales & Planning, Accessory Jewelry Design, Accessory Design, eCommerce, and Marketing, so those are areas where they might also have entry level jobs.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

Do you consider yourself lucky?

Charlie Trotter’s

Willy Franzen — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:56:16 +0000

When I moved to Chicago last year, just days before my 24th birthday, my parents decided that they wanted to treat me to a truly amazing Chicago experience to start off my life in the city right. They took me and my girlfriend to a dinner at Charlie Trotter’s, one of the finest restaurants in Chicago and the world. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the name, Trotter’s is usually found somewhere on Restaurant Magazine’s list of the Top 50 Restaurants in the World (although they seem to have dropped off the list this year).

When I dined at Charlie Trotter’s I chose the Grand Menu, which is an 8-course tasting menu. Although the menu is constantly changing, I had the pleasure of enjoying: Prince Edward Island Oysters with Sea Water & Pickled Daikon; Chilled Snow Lake Trout with Roe, Watercress & California Crayfish; Four Story Hill Farm Quail with Spring Onions, Chanterelle Mushrooms & Chorizo; Grilled Nantucket Bay Scallop with Boudin, Pig’s Tail & Fennel; Forty Eight Hour Braised Short Rib with Lobster Mushrooms & Fermented Black Garlic; Concord Grape Sorbet with Grape Leaf & Parsnip; Honey Crisp Apples with Cider Granite & Ginger Jelly; and Black Mission Figs with Shaved Fruit Cake, Marcona Almonds & Pedro Ximenez. It was an amazing meal that took food to a level that I didn’t know it could reach.

Trot Out Your Best

Yes, Charlie Trotter’s is obscenely expensive if you look at it as just a dinner, but there’s so much more to the experience than just eating. What you have to understand about Charlie Trotter’s is that everything is perfect. Your food will never be cooked improperly. If you tell them that you don’t like cheese, they will prepare you something without cheese. Your water glass will never be empty. You are experiencing something at its highest level. It’s like Albert Pujols’ swing, Yo-Yo Ma’s music, or my fly fishing (just kidding)—Charlie Trotter is one of the best at what he does. And that’s why you should consider a job with him. If you are able to land a job at Charlie Trotter’s—and it won’t be easy—you will be a part of something that is pure excellence. Even if your future isn’t in hospitality, you will gain an appreciation for performing to the highest expectations. That will translate to any job, just like working at the best consulting firm, investment bank, or ad agency. And if you want to stay in the culinary field, then there’s obviously no better place to start than Charlie Trotter’s.

Just ask Grant Achatz, the chef at 10th ranked Alinea (also in Chicago). He got his butt kicked during his try-out at Charlie Trotter’s, but he’s clearly better for it. This isn’t some company that you can just send your résumé to and hope that they take you, but if you meet the below criteria, you should give it a shot:

No matter what level of education or job experience you may have, we are always seeking to meet individuals who have a great attitude, are willing to commit themselves to learning, are passionate about food and wine and have a great work ethic. All of these attributes are of equal importance to us during the application process at Charlie Trotter’s.

You can submit your résumé to Matt Merges at Matthias@charlietrotters.com for culinary positions and to Christian Giles at Christian@charlietrotters.com for service positions. Just make sure that you bring “your A game.”

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

Have you ever dined at Charlie Trotter’s?

Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises

Willy Franzen — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:18:30 +0000

Waiting tables isn’t what most new college grads want to do with the degree they (or their parents) just spent 5 to 6 figures on. In most cases that makes sense, but with the Chicago based Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises even jobs waiting tables can lead towards a career in restaurant management. LEYE is a restaurant empire – they have over 70 restaurants and somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 employees. Restaurant management is tough when you have one location to watch over, but somehow founder and CEO Richard Melman has been able to repeatedly launch and then manage successful restaurants.

I’m Uncoordinated and Would Drop the Food

It’s ok if waiting tables isn’t something that you can or want to do, Lettuce Entertain You has other job opportunities for new grads too. LEYE has jobs in Management, Corporate, and, of course, in their restaurants. Despite your lack of coordination, let’s look at the restaurant jobs first. LEYE’s restaurants include Antico Posto, Hub 51, Reel Club, Ben Pao, Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab, R.J. Grunts, Big Bowl, L2O, Scoozi!, Brasserie Jo, L. Woods, Shaw’s Crab House, Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba!, Maggiano’s, stripburger at Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba!, Chi. Flat Sammies, The Magic Pan Crepe Stand, Tru, Di Pescara, Mity Nice Grill, Tucci Benucch, Don & Charlie’s, Mon Ami Gabi, Twin City Grill, Eiffel Tower, Nacional 27, Vong’s Thai Kitchen, Everest, Osteria Via Stato, Wildfire, foodlife, Petterino’s, Wow Bao, Frankie’s 5th Floor Pizzeria, and Pizzeria via Stato. They all offer hourly positions, which you can search by job title on their website. These jobs include just about anything that you could do in a restaurant.

LEYE also has a fantastic internship program. They hire a significant number of their new managers through this program, so it seems possible that a new college grad from a hospitality management program (and who interned at another restaurant) could also have a shot at being a manager in a Lettuce Entertain You restaurant. Finally, LEYE also has corporate positions. Right now they have jobs in HR and Graphic Design that require some experience, but nothing that goes beyond what you would expect for an entry-level hire. Usually companies with strong internship programs do significant entry-level hiring, so it should be possible for you to find a great first job with Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

Have you dined at an LEYE restaurant? What’d you think?

Zappos.com

Willy Franzen — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:21:35 +0000

Most people like shoes. They protect your feet, offer support, and keep you warm. Some people love shoes – love them to the point that their loved ones (not the shoes) are likely worried about them. Oddly enough, the people who deeply love shoes often seem most interested in shoes that barely protect their feet, offer little support, and provide little or no warmth. We don’t really get that. Zappos.com puts these people to shame. As a company they have a shoe obsession that is far worse than that of the most Sex and the City addicted, Daily Candy reading, New York City fashionista. Why do we say that? Because Zappos.com is obsessed with everything shoes, not just the shoes of some designer whose name you’re supposed to know.

A Shoe-in for Best Customer Service

If you asked someone at Zappos what they love more, shoes or customer service, they’d probably have a hard time coming up with an answer. That’s because the Zappos equation is something like Amazing Selection of Shoes + Unparalleled Customer Service = Profit. It seems to be working, as they’re on their way to selling $1 billion in shoes this year. That’s only 2.5% of the US shoe market, but they’ve done it in 9 years. Their growth rate is excellent, and that’s why they’re doing a ton of hiring, as you’ll soon see.

The fact that customers have a year to return any shoes that they purchased from Zappos (and get the shipping paid for) is impressive, but what really knocks our socks off is the way that Zappos trains their employees. Every new hire, no matter what they were hired for, spends 4 weeks in intense Customer Loyalty training answering phones in the Zappos call center. About a week into the training period Zappos offers their new hires an incentive – a $1,000 incentive – to quit. Yes, they bribe their newly recruited people to take their first week’s salary plus a cool $1,000 and run (hat tip to What Would Dad Say although it seems like he got a few things wrong judging from the Harvard Business Review article on Zappos’ HR practices that he linked to as the original source). Zappos figures that if someone values $1,000 now more than a future career at Zappos, they’re not the right type of person for the job. It may sound like an expensive proposition, but it’s a lot less expensive than hiring someone who is not fully committed to the company’s customer service principles.

Working at Zappos: Deal or No Deal?

Considering many people choose not to take the deal and stay with Zappos after the first week, it’s obvious that the company is offering a unique and exciting work experience. If you still need more convincing, you can read employee perspectives in the Inside Zappos Blog, look at photos and videos from Zappos’ Halloween 2007, watch Zappos YouTube videos, keep up with Zappos Employee Tweets on Twitter, follow the Zappos CEO’s Twitter account, or just look at cute pictures of the pets of Zappos customers.

Now that you’re totally convinced (if you’re not, the links at the end of the post will give you even more opportunities to research Zappos), here are the jobs at Zappos that we think might be considered entry-level or appropriate for a new college grad. In Henderson, NV you could get offered $1,000 to quit being a Financial Analytics Manager, Editing Assistant (labeled as Intern, but looks to be an entry-level job from the description), Front-End Developer, User Interface Designer, Web Content Strategist, Web Designer, Recruiting Assistant, Merchandise Planning Analyst, Merchandise Planning Coordinator, Merchandising Assistant – Clothing and Toys, Merchandising Assistant – Performance Bags, Merchandising Assistant – Private Label, Merchandising Assistant, Designer Footwear, Project Manager, Performance QA Engineer, QA Engineer, or a Software Engineer. In Shepherdsville, KY they’ll offer you $1,000 to quit being a Recruiting Assistant, Photographer Assistant, or Software Engineer. You can find more detailed information about each of these positions on Zappos’ Jobs page. Although their site is a bit cluttered looking, they do a great job of getting across information about each job. Our only complaint is that some of the items in the descriptions are a bit redundant, which can be confusing – especially in terms of what experience is required for each job.

Now go get researching so that you can say, “I turned down $1,000 to quit my new job after a week.”

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

Zappos.com
Jobs at Zappos
About Zappos
Zappos Blogs
Zappos on Twitter
Zappos’ Core Values
Zappos on YouTube

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ShoeMoney Media Group

Willy Franzen — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:35:21 +0000

Jeremy Schoemaker is ShoeMoney. ShoeMoney is probably best known for his picture of the check. Using AdSense, Google’s advertising platform for web publishers, he made $132,994.97 in one month. Since then, he’s had amazing success with marketing ringtones through affiliate deals and a project called AuctionAds, which allows web publishers to market eBay auctions on their sites. There are a lot of web startups that seem glamorous because of their big ideas, but they often lack profitability and end up in the deadpool. ShoeMoney Media Group ignores the glitz and goes where the money is. They follow 3 core principles: embrace new trends and look for opportunities to exploit them; focus on what you know; and small changes can equal big revenue. There is an absolutely insane amount of information about ShoeMoney on the web, so get researching. Google ShoeMoney, visit ShoeMoney’s blog, and read his hilarious, but honest post about his 10 worst money making ideas. There’s also a short BusinessWeek article about ShoeMoney that you should read. It focuses on how he makes money online teaching other people how to make money online.

ShoeMoney is Hiring

Score another one for Twitter! That’s where we first heard about today’s job opportunities. Yesterday, ShoeMoney announced on Twitter and later on his blog that he is hiring for a few different positions. Today we’re writing about it. We’ve been following ShoeMoney for a long time, because he is one of the best minds in the online marketing world. We have no interest in ever selling ringtones here on One Day, One Job, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn a lot from how ShoeMoney Media Group operates. They’re a very small company in terms of head count, but they’re bringing in serious revenue. They just signed a new lease on a 2,000 sq foot office that has 7 offices, 1 bathroom, and 1 kitchen, so you won’t be sitting in some guy’s basement or anything like that. Still, this isn’t your typical entry-level opportunity, but if we always wrote about those, we’d be boring.

Right now, ShoeMoney is looking for a LAMPP (Linux/Apache/MySql/PHP/Perl) Programmer and a Web/Graphic Designer. He’s not overly concerned about education or work experience, he just wants someone with the right attitude and the right skills. On Twitter Shoemoney said the following about the jobs:

“We are looking for very passionate people that have no life. We can find people with talent who work 9-5 anywhere.”
“We offer hands on experience with some very cool web projects and from a financial standpoint nobody has ever asked me for a raise in 4 yrs.”
“People who do well are extremely well compensated some have made over 7 figures.”
“Everyone who has become a full time employee is still with us.”

The jobs with ShoeMoney Media Group are located in Lincoln, Nebraska, and it’s essential that you be able to live there. You can apply by sending a cover letter and resume to jobs@shoemoney.com. Odds are that the competition for the positions will be fierce, so you need to blow ShoeMoeny away with your first impression.

In addition Shoemoney is hiring Freelance Contributors for his most recent project, Fighters.com, which is a Mixed Martial Arts site. The work requires a presence in Las Vegas, NV and is paid per contribution. You can apply by sending a cover letter and resume to jobs@fighters.com.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

What do you think of ShoeMoney and the jobs he’s offering? Let us know in the comments.

Mina Group

Willy Franzen — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:33:20 +0000

Most CEOs have resumes that include business school, many of years of experience, and boring lists of financial accomplishments. How would you like to work for a company where the CEO’s proudest accomplishments are his being named Bon Appetit Chef of the Year and International Food and Beverage Forum Restauranteur of the Year? Michael Mina of the Mina Group is just that CEO – Chef Executive Officer (sorry, that is a horrible pun). Making deals, like any CEO should, Mina formed a partnership with Andre Agassi, the tennis star, in 2002 that has resulted in the launch of a line of high end concept restaurants.

Say Goodbye to Ramen (at Least Cooking It)

The Mina Group manages restaurants in California, Nevada, New Jersey, Florida, Michigan, and Arizona. Here’s a full list of the restaurants with menus, photo galleries, chef profiles, and reservation information. We do know that they participate in on-campus recruiting at at least one school with a Hospitality Management program. Beyond that, their About page says that they are always looking to hire restaurant managers, chefs, line-cooks, sommeliers, servers, bartenders, hosts, and any other people who are seeking employment in a restaurant related position.

Individual positions are not listed on the Mina Group website, or anywhere else on the web (there’s one or two exceptions), so the best way to go about finding a job is to ask for one. Send an e-mail to hr@minagroup.net with a cover letter describing your qualifications and what type of position you’re looking for and a resume.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

Do you know what positions are best for new college grads who want to work at the Mina Group? Leave a comment and let us know.