BRUCE COXHEAD

President and COO, Zero Waste Energy Systems

I’m in full support of Riipen.com’s efforts to connect potential employees with employers. But focusing on getting past human resources gatekeepers can be a bureaucratic nightmare unless the firm has had success with co-op students in the past.

I understand how beneficial these project trials can be, as I came from the University of Waterloo’s co-op program. When I was at Husky Injection Molding Systems, I brought on engineers on limited time projects — co-ops. I expanded this program to bring in co-op students for accounting, purchasing and human resources. At my firm, Zero Waste Energy Systems, we have gone to Queen’s University and the University of Waterloo for project-related work. We work in the United States now and we know that firms such as Milacron LLC approach colleges the same way to find potential employees: putting students on projects, then work terms, and then hiring them full time if there is a good fit.

But HR is a tough nut to crack. I’d suggest Riipen focus its recruiting efforts on firms and institutions that have capital andresource constraints. For example, startups and growing firms are often short-staffed and glad to have help, even if it is temporary. Riipen is already doing this. But medium-sized and large firms face headcount constraints as well: There may be a limit from a project funding standpoint on how many full-time resources are assigned to a team. There would be an opportunity for Riipen to offer to augment these teams with students. I’m sure the team leaders would have no problem being the “internal champion” and bringing the idea up to HR.

Specifically, Riipen can start by using the contacts it already has by contacting companies that are donors to the University of Victoria, University of British Columbia, University of Northern British Columbia and other B.C. colleges and universities. Start with your own network and then broaden your scope. Riipen.comis working on a couple of fronts to hasten the adoption of its platform. “First, our technical team of Braden Simpson and Jordan Ell are working to better automate our platform for early adopters and many startups and tech firms are already comfortable using Riipen.com without our input,” CEORichard Tuck said. Concurrently, the company is building a network of internal champions at larger firms. “We believe the benefits outweigh the costs and this is the best way for us to gain traction,” he said. “We are careful how we present ourselves to the gatekeepers, meaning that we reserve the option of working directly with managers to implement our solution.” And Tuck was also preparing three working papers for upcoming HRconferences. “It doesn’t hurt for us to get ourselves in front of HRprofessionals. It gives us an opportunity to speak to clients, and it introduces our services to them.”

microblogging platform has a huge audience — some 271 million monthly active users — but just 11% of Canadian small businesses use it, says a recent Bank of Montreal survey. Restaurants and retailers can use it to promote daily specials and sales, Haffie-Emslie says, but if your business doesn’t have anything specific to say on Twitter, it’s not worth it.

photo and video sharing platform, which has 200 million monthly active users, best suits visually interesting businesses, such as retailers, restaurants or even advertising agencies to showoff their work, or to engage and encourage customers to post their own pictures. Service-based businesses such as contractors, meanwhile, can post 15-second instructional videos that are informative and showcase the company.

The bulletin-boardstyle photo and link sharing program also works best for