Think you need capital to become a venture capitalist? Not at Battery Ventures. There, you just need a working knowledge of how Google works. "Google arguably is at the center of the online advertising ecosystem," Battery Ventures partner Roger Lee told the New York Times. "If you understand how Google works and how associated business models work, it gives you a great lens to understand other advertising companies," Lee said, explaining why he recruited former Google advertising exec Satya Patel to the firm. Sounds good. When does Scoble start?

Anyone can program, but can they dance? Vint Cerf, Google VP and Internet evangelist, says that when applying for a job, it helps if you have a special ability like "being member of an ice skating group, or having gone through vocals training, or having an interest in animals." In other words, trying to get a job at Google is just like applying to college.

It's hard to recruit the software engineers of tomorrow when your corporate image elicits visions of pocket protectors and blue screens of death, not rooftop foam parties and drunken nights aboard a corporate jet. To stop trendy Web 2.0 startups from stealing its best minds, Microsoft is pretending its the hip company we all know it's not. Its Hey-Genius campaign, awash with hipster kitsch and perpetual MIDI noise generation, invites young geeks to tour "the-not-so-little startup company up here in the great Northwest."

Peter Thiel has a butler, and we're not the only ones who are jealous. The former PayPal CEO turned venture capitalist has, it seems, inspired his colleagues at the Founders Fund to get a bit more household help. Ken Howery, one of Thiel's partners at the fund, is seeking a personal assistant. You won't find the job listing on the fund's website — he's circulating this help-wanted by email. The assistant will help Howery and a colleague pay bills, keep house, go shopping, and do research. Want to be a gofer for San Francisco's hot VC firm of the moment? Drop Howery a line at first initial last name at foundersfund dot com. Oh, the firm's also hiring a CFO, controller, and associate. The personal-assistant job description, after the jump.

Ulitzer claims it will be the leading content source on the Internet even before it launches sometime next year. Now they're hiring the "best software architect alive!" Do you qualify for this dream job? Despite being a completely unknown startup, Ulitzer claims: "By 2010, three out of five books will be published at Ulitzer.com. Time, The New York Times, and Scientific American will be replaced by Ulitzer in the next five years." True, traditional media is struggling to sustain its fat profit margins, but if you're foolish enough to think it's about to disappear, you might be a perfect match for Ulitzer. The only problem: Ulitzer's laughable hiring criteria are likely to screen out anyone with the requisite capacity for self-delusion. After the jump, Ulitzer's job listing.

Unaware of what you want to do in life, but know that you want a director-level job with a splashy company that serves free food? Have we found the spot for you! Google is looking for a "Director of Other" on its corporate job listing page, and the description of the post is just as vague as their flacks' conversations with reporters.

Jeff Bezos, sitting in an office in Seattle, is basking in the credit for Amazon.com's new Kindle e-reader. But who really deserves credit for it? Lab126, an Amazon subsidiary in the heart of Silicon Valley — Cupertino, Calif., Apple's hometown. With former Apple and Palm employees running the quasi-startup, some have speculated that Lab126 might be coming up with an MP3 player or handheld computer. Instead? The Kindle, which many have dinged for a design that hardly matches the iPod or Treo. ("The Pontiac Aztek of e-readers," says a friend of blogger Jason Kottke.) The good news: Lab126, which now openly takes credit for the Kindle, is hiring two more designers. If you want to do something about the Kindle's design, now's your chance.

Kleiner Perkins partner Randy Komisar freaked you out a little when he said the firm was done with Web 2.0, didn't he? ""We have absolutely no interest in funding Web 2.0 companies," he told Silicon Valley Watcher. Well, don't worry. Kleiner Perkins, which backed Amazon.com, Google, AOL, and, um, Friendster, remains in the game.

Someone call a hostage negotiator. German network administrator Sebastian Klein is squatting on eight Web domains containing the names of Google products, including adwordsgoogle.de and docsgoogle.de. And Klein says he's won't let them go until Google meets his demands. But he doesn't want money. Klein wants a job. "I would not like to keep these domains, earn also no money with it. I return it to you immediately free of charge. All I seek for is a job at Google," he writes on a letter he's uploaded to each of the domains. We blame Google's recruiters for this state of affairs.

MySpace plans to double its workforce over then next year to add features, expand and compete with Facebook. The company also wants to expand to 30 countries from the 23 it's in. "We'll run out of people in the U.S. Our goal is to be No. 1 in every market and the biggest Web site in the world,'' says MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe. With Google hiring continuing unabated and Facebook wanting to double its workforce as well, where are all the employees going to come from? Sergey, Chris and Zuck: I will blog for options.

Videogame players are becoming a hot commodity for government recruiters. First, the American armed forces started a campaign with appropriately themed videogame America's Army. Now Government Communications Headquarters — a British spy force — is hoping to recruit snoops with an in-game advertising campaign. Its theory: Plastering ads all over espionage-themed game worlds will entice quick thinking, computer-savvy individuals into listening posts. But somehow we can't envision Bond, James Bond, sitting on his butt in a dark living room.

It really doesn't matter that Yahoo's "interim" CEO Jerry Yang doesn't have a 100-day plan. Even if he had a plan to execute, he can't attract the engineers to build it. Why? Google simply pays more, and engineers follow the money. According to MyDanwei, a salary-tracking site, the average Google software engineer makes $107,275 a year. Yahoo engineers take in $92,833 — almost 15 percent less. Wresting market share out from Google's grip faces any number of obstacles, but at some level it comes down to technology and the people that build it. Yahoo simply can't compete. That is, if MyDanwei can be trusted. After all, they still list Terry Semel as Yahoo's CEO. (Average salary calculated using listings under the title "Software Engineer" posted in 2007. An earlier math error in Google's pay has been updated.)

Looks like AOL is using Facebook's poaching tactics to recuit from Yahoo. Check out this adfrom Facebook's network for Yahoo employees.

This is from an ex-Googler who remains in Facebook's Google network. When he logged onto Facebook, guess what popped up? It's not as high-profile as, say, Microsoft's poaching suit against Google two years ago, but it's interesting to note that all the big Valley companies are feeling free to steal each other's employees.

Spook recruiters are no doubt thrilled by the news last week that Facebook would expand its offerings of targeted ads. The Central Intelligence Agency has already employed Facebook as a "peer-to-peer marketing tool" to advertise openings. Facebook's new direct marketing allows advertisers to target specific interest groups and eventually, based on historical trends and the behavior of similar users — think of those Amazon.com or Netflix recommendations — Facebook says it will be able to predict products its users will be interested in. Now the CIA and other government agencies will be able to recruit fresh candidates before they even realize they want to be a spy.

An article in Ad Age purports to expose something that every Valley reporter has long known, but never come out and said: Apple's PR department is the biggest group of slackers to grace the tech world. What, exactly, do they do all day long? It's a mystery. For the uninitiated reporter looking to get a quote, the list of Apple PR contacts, complete with direct-dial numbers, seems heaven-sent. But don't get too excited. Every call goes straight to voicemail, like the entire PR department paid its credit card bill late and is now ducking the collection agency. If you leave a voicemail, reporters say, it more often than not disappears into the ether, never to be returned.

The market for help in squirreling your folks away in some dingy nursing home is alive and kicking. A Place For Mom is a Web-based resource that helps you find a place to plunk unwanted elders. But the company that raised $9.5 million from Battery Ventures earlier this year apparently cares less for its employees than it does for senior citizens. Former and current A Place For Mom employees have bombarded a Seattle Post-Intelligencer blog entry about the service with complaints of poor pay. You'd think they worked in, say, a nursing home.

A D.C. metro-area job listing on 37signals:

Second Life hosted its first interactive job fair, organized by recruiting firm TMP Media, this week. "You get to know a candidate better," says Polly Pearson, a VP at storage-hardware maker EMC. "You see what they chose to wear, you see what they laugh at or what they interact with." This includes dressing as teddy bears and handing out beer. [NPR]

Be careful what you ask for, especially when reporters are involved. PayScale, the go-to database for salary comparisons, syndicates articles alongside its compensation reports — the kind of filler that offers the gleam of respectability to run-of-the-mill career websites. To write those articles, PayScale is currently looking for a freelance writer "to alter 10-12 evergreen articles for syndication." Along with concocting a new introduction, conclusion and headline, writers are asked to "change stories as little as possible while making them exclusive to the syndication partner by providing just enough difference between the original and new versions." This will surely be welcome news to the "high-traffic websites" PayScale is charging a pretty penny for supposedly exclusive content.