JOBS MAN
The recession has propelled Andrew Hudson’s little list into a must-read for Baby Boomers.
By Nancy Clark
On the surface, it would seem that Andrew Hudson has an uncanny knack for always landing in precisely the right place. Like on Thursdays, when he’s plucking bass at El Chapultepec, the jazz haunt in Lodo at the core of Denver that’s so cool it purposely doesn’t have a website—separating those in-the-know from those who don’t know stuff yet. Hudson’s gig at The Pec isn’t about a disjointed career track. Quite the opposite; Hudson’s improv is, yes, about the band, about the show, about his passion for music in general and bass in particular. But moreover, improv is Hudson’s style—every day is peppered with it.
Hudson is 43; his weekly e-newsletter “Andrew Hudson’s Jobs List” has been distributed to subscribers for the last eight years maturing into a fulltime gig in 2009. It’s the antithesis of www.monster.com in that the jobs posted in it and the resumes for viewing are largely of Front Range folks. The open rate for Andrew Hudson’s Jobs List is a phenomenal 200,000 page visits per month with an 85% click-through rate, testimony to readability at an underlying level—it’s the closest thing to a Colorado employment census…only you don’t have to wait decades in between data.
Hudson got his first taste of the frustrations inherent in a job when he was looking for his first real job, after moving back from Washington, D.C. to his hometown of Denver following a stint as Press Secretary with Sen. Tim Wirth in 1992 “At the time, your main source jobs was in the newspaper classifieds,” he explained. “But there were a lot of good jobs that went unadvertised, and it took a lot of looking and networking to find those positions.”
“I thought, even back then, that it would be great to have a centralized resource for job seekers to find the best jobs in their career sector in the City they were living.”
Landing in then-Mayor Wellington Webb’s office, Hudson was enamored of email. It had replaced the Multi-Fax and his intern-level function of coding in the requisite fax numbers. Suddenly Hudson could communicate with hundreds, even thousands of people.
“We were pushing out information…a lot of unheralded things about the city…things that city employees hadn’t previously been recognized for, things the city had to offer like the fact that we owned Red Rocks, news going out to reporters, chamber officials, elected officials.” By the time Webb was term-limited, the list had grown to 3,000 recipients. That’s when people started asking Hudson to distribute job ads on the list.
Monster.com had arrived on the scene in 1999 and Hudson recalls, “From a database perspective, where you could search for jobs by city and by job title, it was great, but it quickly became quite literally, a monster! I hear it time and time again: the large job boards are intimidating for job seekers and they are inefficient for employers who must sift through the hundreds, sometimes thousands of applicants from around the country.”
In 2003 Hudson had landed at Frontier Airlines heading up the advertising, marketing and communications departments and the e-newsletter consumed every waking hour outside of work. Steve Miller and Carol Miller (son and daughter-in-law of The Gabby Gourmet) volunteered their services through their company, www.netnewsdesk.com, to create a website and orchestrate the weekly e-newsletter release and over the next four years the subscriber list continued to multiply. One year ago, Hudson monetized the website taking paid job postings from employers. On average, Hudson lists more than 300 jobs per-month
By 1st quarter 2009, Hudson had segued into the full-time publisher of his Jobs List. He couldn’t help but see the potential in conjoining his Facebook and Twitter accounts and was tweeting with the adeptness of Ashton Kutcher (nom de Twitter, aplusk). Today, 6,000+ followers want what Hudson has to say in 140 characters or less several times a day.
Andrew Hudson’s Jobs List has a solid following of “passive job seekers,” a term Hudson coined for this valuable demographic. Currently holding down jobs, they’re a group interested in keeping their keyboard fingers on the pulse of local employment. The younger set reads the e-newsletter with their eyes on what they want to be doing five years down the line. That’s not the case with Boomers.
Job hunting has morphed significantly with the advent of the Internet and many in this demographic (ages 45 – 64) haven’t had to compete in tracking systems previously, says Hudson. “If you haven’t looked for a job in a long while, you wouldn’t know that filling out the fields in an online application would have the impact it does. The answers input into the fields need to match up with the job posting or the application won’t surface as a contender.”
Idiosyncrasies of the Internet are just one of the topics covered in Hudson’s Employment Boot Camps held in his Sloan’s Lake home and limited to 10 participants, an effective size, according to Hudson. “Being laid off or down-sized out of a job has left a lot of people with the sense they did something wrong. It can be a huge hit to one’s pride and self esteem,” Hudson digs into the tertiary emotions of his typical Boot Camp attendee. The session is focused on building resumes that get noticed, resumes that capture the applicant’s contribution to their past employment in ways the applicant never considered previously. With a resume being the first touch an applicant has with a prospective employer, that resume has to sing the applicant’s virtues. It’s a tough proposition for some.
“We have a sense in our society that we have to be modest,” Hudson concedes. “Yet, you have to be able to brand yourself if you’re going to be noticed and market the accomplishments, the experiences, the promotions, the expertise and the differentiators you possess that set you above your competition Many people are afraid they will come off as arrogant if they ‘brag’ too much; others think they appear desperate if they underplay their qualities. The is that sweet spot you are aiming for that exists between arrogance and desperation called red-hot, indestructible confidence.”
“Many job seekers also sabotage their job hunt by not recognizing their tangible skills,” Hudson says. “For example, a senior marketing professional might be an expert at marketing, but they might also possess management skills, analytical skills, budget management skills and a variety of other skills an employer finds valuable.”Hudson walks camp participants through a Job Skills Audit, directing them to look back over their career, make a list of accomplishments and skills and prioritize the findings. “Before you know it, they own some very tangible and obvious assets they didn’t recognize before that becomes part of their brand..”
Next up for Hudson…well, he’d like to grow his list into other communities and cities across the country retaining the individual locality, the feature he contends makes his list more valuable than Monster.com. And he’s looking at getting into holding webinars, especially with the Internet dominating the jobs sector as it does today. No two days in his schedule are alike, no dittos. The only constant is Thurdays…at The Pec.
It’s improv and it sounds as good as it works.
Read Andrew Hudson’s Jobs List www.andrewhudsonsjobslist.com
