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DOI: 10.1145/1941487.1941492
Scott E. Delman

Let aCm help You find
Your next Job ‘online’

According to a Harris Interactive Poll of over 2,400 hiring managers and human resource professionals conducted in late 2010, recruiting in the information technology and technology sectors is expected to increase 26% and 19% over 2010 respectively. This is not only good news for the economy in general, but excellent news for our industry and ACM’s membership specifically. But even though hiring and recruiting are on an upswing, finding the right position and the perfect match between candidates and employers is not an easy task.

There are literally hundreds of online resources posting jobs in the technology sector and academia with hundreds of thousands of candidates competing for those positions worldwide. However, for the most coveted jobs and for those organizations looking to hire the most experienced and talented employees, faculty, managers, and executives few online resources are more valuable than ACM’s own Career and Job Center ( http://jobs.acm.org), which is the engine driving the Careers section of Communications Web site.

This site provides basic, but well-organized career-oriented resources, such as the ability to post your résumé or vitae, the ability to search an active database of hundreds of open positions, and the ability to set up alerts and feeds of positions that fit your personalized criteria. Over the past three years, 1,500+ employers have posted more than 1,782 jobs on ACM’s Job Board, nearly 14,000 ACM members have signed up to use the free service, and over 4,800 ACM members have posted their résumés in the secure database made available to employers. The site is among the most heavily trafficked of all ACM Web sites with over 72,000 unique visitors from over 181 countries using the site over the past year generating nearly 150,000 visits and 550,000 page views. Our users spend on average over three minutes on the site during each visit and the site attracts a significant amount of repeat business from many of the most respected employers from both academia and industry around the world. If you haven’t already visited the site at http://jobs.acm.org, check it out! This is one of the most valuable benefits you have as an ACM member, and it just may prove a key resource as you take the next step in your career.

JuDIth s. oLson nameD 2011–2012 athena LeCtuReR

In an age of telecommuting, distributed work teams, and social media, getting coworkers who are geographi-
cally dispersed to work well
together has never been more
important. as a leader in
computer science and
psychology, Judith s. olson, the
Donald Bren Professor of
Information and Computer
sciences at the University of
California, Irvine, has greatly
improved society’s understand-
ing of the factors that make
some geographically dispersed
teams succeed while others fail
miserably. In recognition of her
fundamental contributions to
computer science, aCM’s
Council on Women in Comput-
ing has named olson the
2011–2012 athena Lecturer.
trained as a cognitive
psychologist, she entered the
new field of informatics in 1983
to learn how people could better
use emerging technologies
like personal computers and
videoconferencing. through lab
and field experiments, olson
found that, despite increasingly
collaborative technology,
it is still difficult for a team
separated by distance to work
as well as a team that shares a
common space. some of the
biggest issues: building trust and
understanding among teams.
In one instance, she found
that instant messaging builds
trust better than exchanging
curriculum vitae or other work-
related documents. “the level
of trust was much higher with
online chat and conversation
than it was by just seeing
someone’s background,” says
olson. “It’s humanizing, and
you react to each other and build
on each other. the interaction
turns out to be very important.
It’s like a digital water cooler.”
olson has created a checklist
of 25 items, which will be
part of a Web service to be
launched later this year, to help
telecommuting groups evaluate
and improve their long-distance
working relationships.
— Graeme Stemp-Morlock