Should You Be a Guru or a Freeagent?

by Chris Cumo

ALL GRADUATION SPEECHES come in the same cookie-cutter mold. Every speaker, whether at Georgetown, San Diego State University, Texas A & M or Oberlin, repeats the bland mantra: commencement is not an end, but rather a beginning that opens doors to the future. However, newly-minted Ph.D.s find these doors shut or leading down endless labyrinths. Most do not land
on the tenure track, a truth that becomes ingrained only after
the Ph.D. is in hand, and must instead scramble to cobble
together a few classes at the local colleges.

While in this holding pattern they find that their real job is not teaching composition or introduction to philosophy or grading 300 essays, but finding a full-time position. They immerse themselves in The Chronicle of Higher Education and the job listings of the Modern Language Association, the American Historical Association or whatever organization is the flagship of their discipline. Those with the stamina wade through thousands of jobs on Monster.com or CareerMosaic.

Adjuncts who do not want to trade their itinerant lives for the doldrums of the 9 to 5 routine have implicitly defined themselves as free-lancers. This definition brings into focus a constellation of part-time and temporary jobs, a constellation that two new websites, Freeagent.com and Guru.com, have claimed as their celestial corners of the universe. In this cosmos, Einstein’s special relativity proves that nothing can exceed the speed of light, but this limit does not seem to bother anyone at Guru.com For Greg Terk, Manager of Corporate Communications, information about jobs are electronic pulses that surge around the world in nanoseconds.

Words such as ponderous and torpid are not in the cyberdictionary
of these folks, and yesterday has receded too far into the past to mean anything. Both sites claim 2 million hits a month and expect this number to swell as corporate America continues to find salvation in contingent labor, a lesson academe applies with all the finesse of a bulldozer weeding a garden. Two million hits a month, even if we suppose them to be the minimum, still translate into an average of nearly 67,000 hits per day assuming a 30 day month. Most hits are from surfers; the number of subscribers is more modest.

Guru.com has 70,000 subscribers estimates Mr. Terk, with
Freeagent.com not far behind, with roughly 60,000, according
to Allen Berger, its Senior Vice President of Marketing and
Chief Marketing Officer. Both hope to boost these numbers
with the lure of free subscription. Without money from subscribers, Freeagent and Guru instead rely on corporate sponsorship and fees from employers who list jobs. The charge does not deter employers, who gain quick access to temporary workers. Stuart Fine of Rubenstein Public Relations, the firm that promotes Freeagent.com, counts 733 companies that regularly post jobs on the site, and Terk estimates that some 700 visit guru at
least once a week in search of temps.

Of the two, Guru.com tries to be more trendy. “We’re speaking the language of the 21st century,” says Terk. “We’ve captured the voice of the guru at its most salient.” All this talk of gurus may lead one to expect that something grandiose is at work here, but a guru turns out to be just like us: adjuncts, but not confined to the academy. Guru.com nevertheless does its best to appear swank. It never refers to jobs, a word that has too pungent an odor of 19th-century industrial America. Instead the site lists gigs, but that word does not sound like the language of the 21st century. Jimmy Hendrix and Janice Joplin did gigs. The Rolling Stones, a fossil from the 60s, still do the occasional gig.

Guru.com has its own cyberadvice columnists in the vein of
Cosmopolitan and Mademoiselle. Subscribers can meet the columnists at mixers that Team Guru hosts three or four times a year. Free-lance writer Nina Kohl attended one last year in Seattle,
where she met her favorite columnist, Dan Pink, who moonlights
for both Guru.com and Freeagent.com “It was one of those, ‘You like such-and-such? Me too!’ kind of get-togethers,” she said. “I was surprised to find out just how much I had in common with other people using the site.”

Best of all Guru.com has its headquarters in San Francisco, home of the Pacific News Service and hub of Silicon Valley. None of Guru’s 29 workers (we can’t call them giggers, because
they are full-time permanent staff) in its group photo looks
over 30. The men don button-down shirts and slacks or jeans,
the women wear jeans, shirts or sweaters. The Freeagent.com
site looks a bit more pedestrian (though it does have a sex@work
column). One of the perks of temping, according to its columnist
Peri Muldofsky, is that you can combine work and romance.
The likelihood of the romance souring is no danger, for you
will be at another job before gossip has a chance to taint you. You can hop from job to job and from bed to bed at the same time. “You’re a free agent,” Ms. Muldofsky intones. “And the rules for free agents are different.” She makes these jobs seem so alluring that it is no wonder Freeagent.com has no need for gigs.

Of course it does not matter whether work is a job or a gig
so long as Freeagent.com and Guru.com can help you get one.
Freeagent lists some 6,000 jobs estimates Fine, whereas Guru
has around 1,800 by my count. These numbers fluctuate with
the high turnover of jobs. Old gigs are deleted every day
to make space for the more than 700 new ones that companies
post each week on Guru, notes Greg Terk. Of those I have scanned,
perhaps only one in twenty had been posted more than a month
earlier. Most were just a few days old, and once posted subscribers
quickly find them.

Ms. Kohl had a free-lance writing assignment within a week
of subscribing to both Guru.com and Freeagent.com. Jobs in
information technology lead the pack on both sites, comprising
more than half of jobs at Freeagent and more than a third
at Guru. The field is so protean that even Freeagent.com’s
VP of Marketing Allen Berger, who holds a Ph.D. in Industrial
Psychology from New York University, has trouble defining
it beyond listing what he calls “IT jobs”: e-business
consultant, web designer, database manager, and the like.
But not everyone must lie on the Procrustean bed of Information
Technology to find work on these sites.

Mr. Berger estimates that perhaps one-fifth of Freeagent’s
subscribers fit traditional corporate categories like accounting,
law, and human resources. Bob Timm, Freeagent’s Manager of
Corporate Communications, categorizes another one-third as
“knowledge workers.” They are the free-lance photographers
and writers, consultants of all stripes, and people who do
not fit neatly into any conventional occupation.

Guru.com subscriber Bruce Judson labels himself a “walking
brand,” a phrase that is a natural outgrowth of a marketplace
that defines everything and everyone as a commodity. Genevia
Fulbright, a CPA by training, calls herself a business coach
and charges $125 per hour or between $2,400 and $5,000 a session. Sameer Parekh, an Internet start-up consultant, makes as much as $3,000 a day, an amount that beats what most adjuncts make per 15 week course. Freeagent.com’s Berger estimates that
the typical Freeagent subscriber earns more than $100,000
a year.

As posh as this may sound (if all these figures are not hyperbole)
Guru.com’s Greg Terk does not believe free-lancers value income
as much as quality of life. Every day he hears from people
who loathe what Allen Berger calls “the corporate shackles.”
Freeagent and Guru users want to balance work with family
and hobbies. Sameer Parekh is a weekend deejay for what he
calls “techno parties.” Ms. Kohl had worked full-time
in public relations until she had a baby last year. “I realized how much having my child in daycare would cost me, both financially and emotionally,” she said, “and became a work-from-home mom.”

The leap from full-time work to free-lancing can be a jolt,
but both Freeagent.com and Guru.com try to soften the impact
by offering discounted health insurance and free tax advice,
services that few universities provide their adjuncts. Timm
advises adjuncts to think of themselves as part of the free-agent
market, what Pink calls “the Free Agent Nation.” But this nation may seem alien to adjuncts.

Although both sites have an amorphous education and training
category, the jobs may be a bit afield from what adjuncts
traditionally do. Guru listed one education gig for a personal
trainer and another for a webmaster instructor; Freeagent
listed a job for a “rainmaker” under its education and
training umbrella. Anyone who bothers to trudge through the
clichés in the job description learns that this rainmaker
is nothing more than a salesperson. Any Chaucer specialists
interested?

Adjuncts who covet the ivory tower will not find it on these
sites. Yet. Freeagent.com’s Allen Berger is the academic of
the bunch, not because of his Ph.D. from New York University,
but because he sounds at times like a university administrator.
He would like to enter the adjunct market by enticing colleges
to post part-time slots at Freeagent, a trend he sees as inevitable
given the erosion of tenure-track lines.

“Most adjunct work is still local work controlled by
chairs and not advertised,” says Larry Simon, medieval historian
at Western Michigan University. “Most substantial work
still goes in traditional venues.” He is right of course.
If you are wedded to academe, stick to the job postings in
The Chronicle, The Adjunct Advocate, and the trade publication
in your speciality. Guru.com and Freeagent.com are for those
zebras willing to shed their stripes.

For instance, adjuncts who want to try free-lance writing
can create an e-portfolio on either site that includes samples
of their prose. There are jobs for those with editing skills,
and large corporations, such as Daimler/Chrysler, GM and Ford,
pay top dollar for corporate trainers willing to teach employees
business writing, management and public speaking skills.

If all else fails, adjuncts may be able to find full-time work at one of the many dot-coms which offer products or services to the higher education marketplace. Greg Terk once taught advertising and marketing as an adjunct at Saint Mary’s College in Indiana. Bob Timm is an ABD in English literature, and for a few years migrated among the campuses of CUNY. Kevin Kunzelman, Guru.com’s Technology Director, spent a year on the Ph.D. track in mathematics at Cornell.

Freeagent.com’s Allen Berger speculates that the site may
well evolve into a knowledge bazaar: someone posts a question
and offers $100 for the answer; another replies that she has
the answer, but wants $300, and they split the difference.
This bazaar, Mr. Berger believes, should favor highly-educated
people like adjuncts, who will not know all the answers, but
will know how to find them. “Teaching is just one form
of free agency,” says Freeagent’s Manager of Corporate Communications Bob Timm, “and the adjunct who can adapt his skills to the free-agent market can do well in the 21st century.”