When a company creates a position that's one of the first of its kind, say, in the Internet technology sector, the only people that know what that job entails are, well, the company itself.
As southeast Michigan shifts away from the rusted nuts and bolts of its manufacturing past toward a bright, shiny high-tech future, the pool of job applicants with extensive experience in pay-per-click advertising or online market research is really more of a puddle.
So, how do you prepare a resume for a job you've never heard of? With the right kind of mind, that's a small concern. For the trio of cutting edge Metro Detroit companies below, the answers may surprise you.
ForeSee Results: Satisfaction Research Analyst
"I'd rather hire someone with character," says Cia McCaffrey, director of staff at ForeSee Results, an Ann Arbor-based group that measures online customer satisfaction. "The biggest thing (for us), we need people who can contribute, who want to think outside of the box. I can train them on skills; I can't train them to play well in the sandbox."
Online market research is still in its adolescence, but five-year-old ForeSee has become one of the field's better-known companies, thanks to its use of the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Created by University of Michigan professor Claes Fornell, ACSI measures online customer satisfaction through customer surveys and econometric modeling. The actual formulae and matrices through which analysts route the gathered data, however, is something ForeSee would like to keep to itself.
"That's kind of the secret in the black box," McCaffrey says.
Other research groups and universities in different countries have adopted ACSI methods to evaluate customer satisfaction for their own markets or national economies. ForeSee's distinctiveness lies in the fact that they do all of the work with customers' websites.
Thus, ForeSee's research analyst position is a bit different than those at more traditional research groups. In searching for potential research analysts, McCaffrey says she needs someone that can comb through data and follow through on long-term projects. They must have a certain amount of business acumen, but also the people skills to deal with a big ForeSee client, such as the executive of Best Buy or Kohler.
"[Research analysts] are analysts with a business background; I'm looking for data analysts with great personalities, which is hard to find sometimes," she chuckles. "The big component [in a potential new employee] is being innovative … that's not on resumes."
Pure Visibility: Alchemists and Mad Scientists
There's another local business in the technology sector that's more than happy to see Google AdWords move into Ann Arbor — though its goal is actually to crack its neighbor's search result secrets.
"We develop Internet marketing strategies so our clients can actually own page one (of a search engine's results)," said Linda Girrard, co-founder of Pure Visibility. For its 20 or so clients --including regional software company InfoTronics and Iowa's TaxAct-- Pure Visibility works to break Google. Or to be more specific, Pure Visibility's analysts and search-engine optimization group members, employees that Girrard calls "alchemists and mad scientists," respectively.
Links and title tags alone will not bring a web site up to the coveted page-one position. "Today it's more about usability [of web sites,]" Girrard says. "Information architecture is so important to visibility."
The alchemists look at a web site's statistics to "understand what kind of story it tells," Girrard says.
Employees with another laboratory nickname — "the mad scientists" — examine a web site's log files for a client, reviewing the programming and assessing where traffic is coming from and where it's going. Afterwards, Pure Visibility will correct coding for a client (or the client's web team can do it itself), and tell them what they can do to improve the website so that it can be more easily accessed by searchers.
If these job descriptions sound like they require proof of math and computer degrees on your resume, you might think again.
"We just hired someone with a Ph.D in biology — she's our project manager," Girrard says.
When hiring Girrard doesn't just look at where applicants have worked in the past, but even things they've considered doing, she says. She references Facebook.com and Linked-In, too.
Girrard emphasizes that Pure Visibility will welcome future employees with any kind of background. "We pick out people's strengths rather than weaknesses," she says. "We want people that are passionate about something."
Critical Moves: Clean Up Artist
The title brings to mind visions of Quentin Tarrantino's Mr. Wolf in Pulp Fiction, rather than the programmers who create video games about mafia hitmen. But then again, you'd be hard pressed to find people like Mr. Wolf with degrees in animation and digital media from Detroit's College of Creative Studies.
At the Detroit-based motion-capture company Critical Moves, capturing the facial expressions and body movements of actors then digitizing them for film, video and game production is the company's bread and butter. When their high-end camera accidentally misses a sensor (adhered methodically an actor then "captured") or covers up a marker, clean-up artists step in to "accommodate for the resulting occlusions."
"Clean-up artists take motion capture data and go through and look for gaps and fill them in," says Jeremy Strackbein, animation director at Critical Moves.
Usually, what they do is run the 2D data collected by the camera through a computer algorithm and create full motion 3D images.
"Each section of your limb has three markers," Strackbein explains. "If you cover up one of the markers on the section you can find the third … since the computer knows where those markers are on the body. They can use the others to find the missing one."
Cleaning up information "gaps" is only one part of the motion-capture process. Members of the Critical Moves team must master very specific and constantly evolving computer/video skills. Trackers, real-time editors and motion editors work to translate an actor jumping around in front of the green-screen into a realistic video game character.
"Pretty much everybody here at the studio can do all of [the jobs]," Strackbein says. "Larger studios will typically have a team that only captures, a team that only fills gaps in the data, then they'll have a retargeting team that only retargets. Right now our team does each process instead of splitting it up."
Kimberly Chou is a freelance writer living in Ann Arbor and frequent contributor to metromode. Her previous article was Foragers Guide To Employee Perks.
Photos:
Computer information and technology companies will lead Michigan's new economy (courtesy of istock)
Online customer satisfaction illustration (courtesy of istock)
Building web page tags (courtesy of istock)
Critical Moves motion capture studio (courtesy of Critical Moves)