I get by with a little help from my friends

Last week I discovered something that I had to fix. Not long ago I created a PDF of a popular series of posts that I had done here. Pat Lefler (who has a very good blog called "Intrepid ideas…and other musings") had made the suggestion that I make the series "10 Ways to Make Recruiters Love You" into a PDF so that people could download it and use it as an offline resource. To be honest, I hadn’t considered that it might be good enough for people to refer to on a regular basis. I would have understood if it was titled "10 Ways to Make Love to Recruiters"… but that would have to be posted on another site perhaps with a domain suffix of XXX and would have had BIG coverage by Dave Mendoza on his blog Six Degrees from Dave, oh well I digress.

Having judged the suggestion worthwhile, I went about looking for a suitable method of turning the document into a PDF. What I found was an online PDF document translator that worked with tons of different formats. So I spent about an hour working on the production of the PDF using the free online resource at PDFOnline. I posted the PDF as a gift to my readers and, judging by the links to it from other sites including Shally Steckerl of Job Machine on his CyberSleuthing blog, it was pretty popular.

However, it wasn’t until last week that I discovered that the online PDF creator didn’t preserve the hyperlinks in my article. I was sorely disappointed by that. I also had noticed that one of my pals, Kent Blumberg, had posted on his blog about a PDF tool that he uses, easyPDF Printer 4.3 from BCL Technologies [while not free, very reasonable at around $15], preserves the links in documents when it creates the PDF. So I thought to myself, this is the solution. On Thursday [I think it was Thursday, busy days have a habit of running together] I went to the site to download and purchase easyPDF Printer, and to my utter disappointment, discovered that they don’t yet support Windows Vista [another reason to just say no to Vista]. Now I have a problem that I dearly want to fix, but don’t have the ability to do it. So, I call on my friend Kent and ask a favor of him. I didn’t expect how wonderfully he would reply. I asked Kent if he would make a quick run through of my original document turning it into a PDF using his copy of easyPDF Printer so that I could have active hyperlinks in it and repost it. Kent said that he would be glad to and told me he could get it done by the weekend. I responded that would be great.

Well, Kent got it done much faster than that. In fact he built a TOC with active links, reformatted it for better flow, and made it look like a Million bucks [well much better than I had originally done it anyway, we have to consider the source material. 😉 ] So I’m going to make a permanent link to the document so that people can get to it very easily. I also want to express my deepest gratitude for Kent’s help. Kent knows something about helping others as it is a foundation of great leadership. Read Kent’s blog – Kent Blumberg – Leadership, strategy, and performance and find out more about his leadership style and thoughts.

Finally, I would like to refer my friend the Recruiting Animal, author of The Recruiting Animal blog, RecruitingBloggers, and Recruiting Pundits to the last sentence in my opening paragraph. I think that qualifies as humor Animal… now where is your "monetization"? 🙂

Link to 10 Ways to Make Recruiters Love You PDF.