We know it is a competitive environment for today’s job-seekers. But it was competitive just to get into the career fair. Picture yourself in that line. A lot of qualified people out there. The person standing in front of you, they have an MBA. The person behind you, great job experience. The guy behind that guy–great cover letter.

So. Mr. or Ms. Job-Seeker, how can you make yourself stand out in a saturated market? That is the 7 billion dollar question. You need to figure out a way to climb to the top of the highest mountain and scream to the world that unlike most people, YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES.

If this current economic crisis has taught us anything, it is that there can be no better investment than investing in yourself. Let me say that again, there is no better investment than investing in yourself. Things like extra education, night classes, investing in things to make you a better candidate — should not be thought of as expenses. Instead, they are investments in yourself, investments that pay way higher returns than some stock or bond you know nothing about.

Investing in things we don’t understand is what created this mess in the first place. And you know nothing in the world better than yourself. Do you think I can figure out another way to use “yourself” or “investing in yourself” a few more times in this paragraph.?

Have any ideas on how to stand out? Don’t hesitate to share it with us. We’d love to here how you are weathering the economic storm and what you are doing to distinguish yourself from the guy next to you. In fact, next time your in NYC, Shake Shack is on us.*

Disclaimer- Shake Shack closes for the season soon.

We spent the morning at CNET’s “The 404″ Show and it was awesome. These guys are funny, smart, and get exactly what’s going on in technology. Since we spend 20 hours a day in the office it was nice to get out and have some fun with their crew. We talk technology all day here but it was even better doing it outside the office and with other smart humans. Justin from the 404 had a good explanation of BeenVerified on the 404 Blog.

Best part of the morning was getting live feedback from the 404 listeners while we were on the show. Most of their listeners are developers, freelancers, and tech people so they were right on with their feedback of our site, design, layouts and more. UStream.tv, which they use to video stream the show, works great for live video and they have live chat too which worked out nicely.

Thanks for having us on Jeff, Wilson, and Justin…

Check out the video of the show below!

Our research found that a large amount of small and medium business were being underserved by the existing traditional background screening industry.  Additionally, for us, the existing way of ordering, paying for, and verifying a background check just didn’t really fit with how a large portion of small and medium businesses go about hiring people. One of the things that was most important to us was that we made this service as easy and affordable as possible for businesses of all sizes. Also, BeenVerified is the FIRST company to give candidates control over their personal information and have a say over what is found during the background checking process. Not only does that benefit the candidate but keeps employers on the right side of the law and reduces their legal liability.

The launch of InSight is our first approach at solving some of the existing problems.  The beta testers who have used InSight have given us positive feedback and also ideas of what we should be implementing next. Some of them have even been built already but we held back to roll them out slowly. The current feature list includes:

Insightful Data- Get detailed information into the organizations your candidate was previously affiliated with.

Share a Candidate- You can share candidate info with other people involved in the hiring process. (Built for Recruiters!)

Tagging- We make it easy to search and find candidates with various skills and for different positions

Save Money- Purchase only the verifications that are important to your business. NO minimums

Readable Reports-One of the biggest complaints we often hear is not being able to understand a background check report. Look below, nice and pretty no?

What Background Checks 2.0 looks like!

Candidate Tracking View from InSight

However, there is more to a successful business than just not spending money and this type of solution seems to be the fundamental problem with startups, businesses, and our economy in general. Everyone is just used to spending lots of money, so surely their thoughts on how to MAKE money or become successful is to just spend less.

Unfortunately, I have not seen one post about focusing on where money (actual revenue) will be made. So the thinking looks like this “jeez, we may not be able to raise another $6 million when this funding dries up, let’s spend less.” However, what everyone needs to be looking at is “WHERE AND HOW DO WE MAKE MONEY?”. [Disclosure: In 1999, I was a nineteen year old CEO who burned through $1.2 million in VC money. I too am guilty, and learned the hard way.]

In light of all this, the following are the companies and industries we expect to be successful in the coming years. We often get asked career advice and looking within the right industries is always a great start. Also, internally these are the categories in which we are looking to explore joint ventures with the market leaders. The short version goes like this:

The Internet companies that will be successful over the next two years will:
a) Help people/businesses make money
b) Help people/businesses save money
c) Help people/businesses access money

That’s it, there is no more to it than that. Please note, money also =time or =improved efficiency because in most cases there is a net dollar value to that time or efficiency.

The long term trend we are banking on is what 37signals called the Fortune 5 million, what we call the Fortune 25 million, and Freshbooks has now upped the ante to the Fortune 50 million. Basically, that small to medium enterprises will become the new force in the global economy. Regardless of the title, the new revolution will be based on smaller, tighter organizations solving micro problems. There are massive forces at play here which we will discuss at a later date but for now, our big bet is that the trend is going to be towards more people working for themselves. Seth Godin said it back in 2005 that “small is the new big” and Albert Wengner commented that “Small (500 employees) is the new large”.

The Facebook widgets, online video social networking, and blah, blah, blah, will all be put on hold to solve the more immediate need of recognizing that the only thing that can be profitable is to provide ACTUAL value to our economy and to invidiuals. We heard it first on a conference call with Executive Director of OpenID Bill Washburn (on our board of advisers) who hit the nail on the head when he said the next phase of the Internet will be based on being able to facilitate “high level transactions”. John Battelle calls it “Web meets world” and Hank Williams started saying the exact same thing calling it the “money making web”.

If you are not working at a company that provides one of the three mentioned services above, you should leave and find one that does. If you ARE working at a company that helps people/businesses make, save, or access money we want to talk to you.

Here’s a more detailed outline about which specific sites (and trends) to look out for:

1)Companies that help people/businesses make money
Obviously the biggest way to help people make money is to find them a job. Overall, the online job market works but it’s like saying the credit market worked. The job sites that exist are going to have to find better ways to pinpoint talent. While in the past all they had to do was to throw as many people at each other and see what sticks, we believe there will be a flight to quality. Businesses will not be looking to waste time interviewing and talking with every candidate and there will be A LOT of candidates for most positions.

Even more important than traditional job finding sites are going to be the ones that think outside the box and match talent anywhere in the world with the businesses who need them most. This is not a new notion but one that is simply going to explode over the next few years and I’m not talking about low-wage, low-talent outsourcing to India. I’m talking about a guy in Fort Wayne, Indiana who is a great coder and wants to work for a company in NYC (as @jerry does for us!) but likes his lifestyle, working from home, and being able to read to his kids while we are still at the office.

Websites like odesk.com, elance.com, topcoder.com all need to think about how to take advantage of the extreme need for matching up talent with businesses that need to be more efficient in their hiring and projects. The core problem with these sites to date though has been the inability to really trust those that you are hiring and making sure projects hit their targets. It will be interesting to see how they overcome that. In the past, some of these freelance sites have been a free for all.

Additionally, websites and tools like Freshbooks, Basecamp (37signals), Google Sites, etc. are going to be the lifeblood of this new economy. This new workforce is going to need low cost tools to manage their work and is not going to pay enterprise type dollars to do so.

2)Companies that help people/businesses save money
If your business can help people save money on something that they are already purchasing, you should be well off. I’ll give you a great example. Our new favorite website, CrowdSpring.com. We spent about a month after raising our funding meeting with branding companies all of whom wanted somewhere between 25K-100K to work on our branding. We found Crowdspring and for $600, we had 150 logo and branding submissions, none of which we had to pay for until we chose the exact logo we wanted. Talk about a steal! The expensive branding companies will have their time and place for us, but for now that is a huge savings. Websites like Crowdspring that help people make money and also businesses save money are EXACTLY the new, innovative models, that are going to be home runs in the next two years.

Then there are websites like Mint.com (congratulations to Aaron Patzer and his team who just keep killing it) and Wesabe.com (have to mention our NYC brethren) which are no brainers for helping people to get a handle on their finances. In fact, we even use these tools ourselves to get a good picture on where we are spending our money as a company.

One business I would love to see is one that could streamline (aka save money on) the lead generation/conversion process. There just has to be a better way than using Google Adwords to generate sales online. The leads that Adwords generate are junk and we’ve already started to write it out of our acquisition strategy. Would love to see some companies who have a refreshing view on matching buyers and sellers of services. Naturally, they would have to help businesses lower their CPA (Cost per acquisition) or improve ROI (Return on Investment) at the same time. Looks like I’m not the only one interested in this, but we wouldn’t spend $495 for a “report” :).

3)Companies that help people/businesses access money

Of all the three, if I was not on the BeenVerified team and was thinking of a new startup, helping people/businesses access money would be the number one theme I would be working on. Through partnerships, we believe BeenVerified (or something like it) is a key ingredient in the next phase of money lending, but I would want to get my hands even deeper into the process.

The last two weeks have created a TRUE paradigm shift when it comes to lending and receiving capital. This is one of the oldest and most profitable industries of all-time and lending capital will not simply end. People and businesses will always need money and when there is interest to be charged, capital will find a way to be lent out. Right now is the time to POUNCE on new business models and new mechanisms for thinking about how capital is efficiently distributed. The old model is not just broken but has officially BLOWN UP and will never be seen again. This is one of the greatest times in history for entrepreneurs positioned to take advantage of opportunities that haven’t been seen in years. The Internet (really, technology though) has the potential to truly change the face of capital distribution.

Last week we met with our friends from Vidoop, who like BeenVerified are a security ingredient in these new processes and who were in town for a conference called Finovate. Finovate is a conference built for companies to present interesting solutions to a wide range of finance problems. Peer to Peer lending companies such as Prosper.com, Zopa.com, LendingClub.com (currently on hiatus) and many others may be one way to solve the credit crisis. The question is, as always “Will this scale”?, but I believe there is a massive opportunity here for P2P lending or even other approaches that have not even been thought of yet. Maybe it’s something more like OnDeckCapital.com, who knows? But it will be something.  The current crises will tip our hands to forcing us to find new solutions and to be honest, although it might not seem so right now…it will be for the BETTER.

If you are working on solutions to any of the above problems, keep your head down and keep working hard. As I type this, my girlfriend is watching an Oprah special (Tivo’d) on managing and saving money. While politicians are going to be making things worse and spending MORE money to solve the wrong problems, take comfort in the fact that long after this “crisis” has passed and the economy rebounds, it will be rebounding specifically because of the innovations that YOU are working on and the vision of the future that you helped shape.

Never before have we had an opportunity to truly redefine each and every single industry. The status quo has been so far knocked down that this is the opening we wait our whole lives for. Forget “exit strategy” and think “profit, profit, profit”. Be relentless in your pursuit of profit (although not in that dangerous subprime mortgage type of way).

This is exactly the type of opportunity that entrepreneurs salivate over. Now go kick some ass and call us if you want us to join you.

As you can see, Janet uses LinkedIn to leverage her Harvard Business School network. Can you blame her? The fact that several of Janet’s LinkedIn “connections” are also Harvard alum ensures us Janet is for real, right? That logic, also known as “peer-based verification” (for lack of a better term at the moment) is what LinkedIn does to ensure the integrity of its network. It is also why companies pay expensive dollars to target ads to this community.

Guess what? I am the real CMO of BeenVerified and I am not Janet Jones. I am Danny Canarick and I am actually an Indiana University alum.

Janet Jones does not exist. In fact, Janet Jones is the star of BeenVerified’s marketing efforts. She is a rock star!

BeenVerified loves LinkedIn and we are not singling them out. It is just as easy to create fake information and build a reputation on LinkedIn as it is on ANY website. In fact, our entire team benefits from its terrific service. And we understand that there are many cases where “peer-based verification” provides enough authority to facilitate communication. But we also know of certain situations where it simply falls short. If we ever want the web to move to HIGHER level transactions, this type of verification will not be enough to get us there. 

We simply want people to have the option to request people verify their credentials by a third-party. Users should have the right to decide for themselves if they would be more comfortable if they knew the TRUE identity and credentials of the people they are communicating with online, especially when you are talking about hiring and employment.

Furthermore, we know LinkedIn does more than just rely on their “peer-based verifications” to protect their community. However, Janet Jones clearly demonstrated that in many cases, BeenVerified’s solution is desperately needed.

BeenVerified is simply asking LinkedIn and other online communities to give users the ability to share their verified profiles with the rest of the community. Not only because it helps advance our business, which of course it does :), but because there is SO MUCH more that these networks could do if members could TRULY TRUST each other.  Any community who is interested in learning how we can seamlessly integrate into their community, we encourage you to get in touch.

Ironically, “Janet” seemed to be very effective at communicating positive messages about Exxon through this increasingly important medium. None the less, when Exxon Mobil got word, they insisted “Janet” was an impostor.

Exxon’s story, along with countless others like it, demonstrates the need for organizations to PROACTIVELY protect the integrity of their organizations. Exxon needs a system that identifies who actually represents their company. Therefore, when people like “Janet” pop up on Twitter without official online “identification,” everyone will know she is an impostor.

Our company, BeenVerified, naturally provides a solution for any institution looking to protect its integrity. As an example, we can easily integrate our technology to allow employers from Exxon to verify they truly work there and then give them the tools to be able to share that information with other people online. The same goes true for universities, where anyone can say they graduated from Harvard.

We’d like to talk more with companies that are interested in protected the integrity of their organization and most importantly, the reputation of the individuals within it. As always, feel free to contact us to learn more.

The event was held for the nextNY community, which is a close-knit yet wide ranging group of people helping each other succeed in the NYC tech scene. We had free beer, wine, and most importantly Shack Burgers.  Could not have been a better night to kick back and relax before the busyness of the next few days. The Shack is like our second home since our office is across the street. Nothing is better than seeing everyone have a good time in your own backyard.

Other great companies joined us, including  Chi.mp (still in private beta but looks great!), AngelSoft (for anyone looking to raise money, there is no better first stop), and MyJambi amongst hundreds of other people representing their company and themselves. Great showing last night and reminded us why we’re proud to represent the East Coast. With the financial companies falling apart, someone is going to have to make some money over here!

Some quick shots we took of the party…Yup, those are BV condoms. A cheap marketing ploy that we just could not resist!

Highlight of the day for us is in about 1 hour when we hear David Heinemeier Hansson speak.

Also, last nights event at Shake Shack was fantastic and we met some great people. Will have a blog post later today about the event.

While these times are not fun for anyone, HR professionals are often left to manage the difficult transition of former employees. Additionally, it is often the HR  personnel who have built up the greatest rapport with their candidates and it’s a tough time for everyone involved. BeenVerified would like these professionals to know that we are willing to work with you to implement a program that will benefit the people you care about most. We can easily create a system where employees can have their work experience confirmed automatically upon exiting and given to them as a marketing tool for future job searches. Also, if you preemptively verify the employee’s experience, you will have to deal with less calls from future companies looking to verify employment. Most importantly though, you will be giving your employees a tool that can help them get their next job as soon as possible.  We invite anyone who wants to learn more to get in touch.

BeenVerified is honored to have been selected to present at the Internet Safety Task Force to Identify and Develop Online Safety Tools at Harvard University’s Berkman Center to be held on September 23rd and 24th. The Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF) Open Meeting will be held on Harvard’s campus in Cambridge. The meeting is open for the public to attend and hear presentations from us and some major social networks (Myspace, Facebook, and Loopt) about what each party is doing to help build safer online meetings between individuals.

We look forward to collaborating with some of the most influential thought-leaders on Internet Safety. The well represented Task Force includes AOL, AT&T, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Symantec, Verizon and Yahoo, amongst others! This specific forum will focus on strategies for protecting the youth online. As our world becomes ever more connected through technology, this is clearly one of the most pressing issues we face. BeenVerified looks forward to presenting to this group and we will be blogging live from the event so stay tuned.

About The Internet Safety Task Force: (from the Berkman Center website)

“The Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF) is a group of Internet businesses, non-profit organizations, academics, and technology companies that have joined together to identify effective tools and technologies to create a safer environment on the Internet for youth. It was created in February 2008 in accordance with the Joint Statement on Key Principles of Social Networking Safety announced by the Attorneys General Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking and MySpace in January 2008. The scope of the ISTTF’s inquiry is to consider those technologies that industry and end users can utilize to keep children and youth safe on the Internet, with a focus on preventing harmful contact with adults and with other minors.”