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By SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN

More companies are tweeting for hires.

As online job boards have grown crowded amid the recession, many big companies, including Microsoft Corp.,

Verizon Communications Inc.,

Raytheon Corp.

and Viacom Inc.’s

MTV Networks, now list job openings on the Twitter microblogging site.

For employers, Twitter—where users post updates, or “tweets,” of no more than 140 characters—offers one more way to find and attract candidates, and a cheaper alternative to big online job boards. It also helps companies target social-media-savvy job hunters and convey an innovative image. For job seekers, Twitter offers the chance to interact one-on-one with companies’ recruiters and can be more convenient than job boards.

Job hunters can sign up to follow a company’s listings on Twitter or receive tweets about jobs through a third-party service. They usually need to click a link in the tweet to access the listing online, where they can submit their résumé or application. They can also reply to the tweet with a question or comment; sometimes, employers tweet back.

With so many people looking for jobs now, some employers say they like that Twitter yields just enough job leads—but not too many. Job boards have “become saturated,” says Mike Rickheim, vice president of global talent acquisition for Newell Rubbermaid Inc.,

a global manufacturer based in Atlanta.

“With Twitter, we don’t have to go through that huge pile of résumés.” Mr. Rickheim says the company uses Twitter to fill positions that tend to attract tons of applicants on job boards, such as administrative roles, as well as to share company news.

(Of course, recruiters note, the more popular Twitter gets, the more applicants it will likely attract.)

People who respond to job tweets typically have social-media skills, and some employers say they use the service to target them. In March, MediaSource Inc., a video-production and publicity firm in Columbus, Ohio, advertised a media-relations specialist job only on Twitter, LinkedIn and two niche job boards, says Lisa Arledge Powell, MediaSource’s president.

“We needed someone that understood social media, so we thought, ‘Why not go to where these people go?’ ” she says.

Andrea Slesinski, who was following the company’s Twitter feed, saw the job listing and quickly tweeted her interest. She got an interview request within a week and was hired.

Image is a big part of Twitter’s appeal to employers, as using it to engage with job seekers can suggest they’re cutting-edge. “Verizon is a technology company so we need to be out there,” says Asif Zulfiqar, a talent-management specialist at the New York-based telecommunications firm, which began listing jobs on Twitter in March.

But the image issue cuts both ways, he notes, and job seekers don’t always pay enough attention to how they appear to employers on Twitter. Recently a follower of Verizon’s jobs feed tweeted to the company something along the lines of, “Hey dude, you got any jobs in California?” says Mr. Zulfiqar.

The writer’s casual tone made a poor impression, he says. “I want to see something more professional,” he says. “You want to put your best foot forward.”

Indeed, people trolling for jobs on Twitter need to tweet with care—not just when they’re interacting with employers, says Cynthia Shapiro, a former human-resources executive and career coach in Woodland Hills, Calif. Hiring managers could use information they find on Twitter, just as on Facebook, to form opinions about an applicant’s employability. People sometimes disclose personal things over Twitter, like work-family challenges, that an employer couldn’t ask about in an interview but which might color their impression if they knew. For example, if an employer sees on Twitter that a candidate is going through a messy divorce, they might “assume you’re going to be distracted,” Ms. Shapiro says.

Job seekers can do their own sleuthing on Twitter to research prospective employers. In June, Rob Totaro landed an interview for an account-manager job at Potratz Partners Advertising, a small agency in Schenectady, N.Y., after learning about the position on Twitter. In the meeting, he joked that he wasn’t sure he could work for a firm that supports the Red Sox, which he had discovered from reading tweets the company posted about a recent employee outing to a ballgame. “It was a great ice breaker,” says Mr. Totaro. He got the job.

Twitter users say the service can be more convenient than online job boards, allowing users to follow feeds that list jobs from a variety of companies rather than trolling through thousands of job-board listings. “It’s an efficient way to get a general idea of what type of jobs are out there,” says Ryan Kellett, a senior at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vt.

He subscribes to about a half-dozen job feeds on Twitter. “It’s a little bit more of a chore to go on [job boards] on a daily basis,” he says. “You don’t know if there’s new content on there.”

Twitter’s interactivity also can provide a new source of advice for candidates. Subscribers to Google Inc.’s jobs feed, which went live on June 29, can pose employment questions to recruiters at the Mountain View, Calif., company, says a spokeswoman. Recently someone posted a tweet asking what job candidates should wear to interviews at Google.

A little over an hour later, a recruiter tweeted back: “We care more about your mind than your clothes,” the spokeswoman says.

Cost is a main draw for employers, many of which post jobs on their own Twitter feeds free. Some services distribute job listings for employers on Twitter for a fee, but they are generally less than the cost of posting on a big job board.

U.K.-based InterContinental Hotels Group

PLC, which has U.S. headquarters in Atlanta, began listing jobs on Twitter in July through a distribution service called TweetMyJobs, which charges 99 cents to promote one position for a day. The service also offers volume discounts. Francene Taylor, a talent-acquisition technology manager for InterContinental, says the service is more affordable than most job boards and she expects it to help the hospitality company save money as more job seekers turn to the company’s Twitter feed to look for postings.

“We will see a decline in a need to use the major job boards and that will mean we won’t have to spend quite as much,” she says.

Ms. Taylor says the quality of the candidates, for all positions including room attendant and housekeeper supervisor, is the same as what comes through job boards.

But sometimes, Twitter produces enough leads that InterContinental doesn’t need to advertise the jobs elsewhere. During the last week of August, she says, 4,622 people clicked through to the company’s job-listings section from Twitter.

Write to
Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com

By JOE WALKER

Willi Wong

Omar Wasow knew that the transition from Internet executive to graduate student at the age of 35 would be a dramatic one, and so in a symbolic break from his old life, he lopped off the two feet of dreadlocks he had been growing since he was a teenager.

That was 2005, when Mr. Wasow was the executive director of BlackPlanet.com, a social networking site that he founded seven years earlier and turned into the most popular African-American Web site at the time. Previously, he had developed Web sites for the New Yorker and Consumer Reports magazines.

His hair, good looks and penchant for Italian suits helped him stand out in the New York’s Silicon Alley from the late 1990s until he left in 2005. He appeared frequently on television as a technology pundit, most famously on the Oprah Winfrey Show when he taught the talk-show host how to use the Internet in 2000. That same year, People magazine named him the “Sexiest Internet Executive.” Mr. Wasow’s business acumen and ability to translate complex ideas to a general audience earned him quasi-celebrity status and an annual six-figure income.

So it surprised many in the technology world when he decided to resign his leadership position at Community Connect Inc., BlackPlanet’s parent company (which was later sold for $38 million in 2008), and move to Cambridge, Mass., to pursue a Ph.D. in African-American studies and government at Harvard University.

His transformation began on the drive to the airport after delivering a speech at a technology conference. “I realized that just giving speeches wasn’t enough,” Mr. Wasow says. “I wanted to write prose, not just PowerPoint. I wanted to be held accountable for my ideas, not just applauded. I wanted to develop a level of mastery over some body of knowledge rather than just be a mile-wide and an inch-deep.”

Until his mid-30s, Mr. Wasow, whose father, uncle and grandfather were all professors, had rebelled against the idea of teaching and instead aimed to be a socially conscious entrepreneur.

His heroes were businesspeople with a mission, like filmmaker Spike Lee and Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop. The university was a fate to be avoided, Mr. Wasow recalls. “I knew that academics were disconnected to real-world problems,” he says. “It was this rebellious nature of, ‘I’m not in the ivory tower; I’m an activist and an entrepreneur.’”

Eventually, though, Mr. Wasow found the problems he was most concerned with—the academic-achievement gap between black and white children and the disproportionately high incarceration rate for black men—couldn’t be adequately addressed through his role as a businessman and public speaker. “The questions he wanted to answer required real research,” says Keith Darden, Mr. Wasow’s undergraduate roommate at Stanford, now a professor of political science at Yale University.

Still, going back to school was a frightening prospect. He worried that leaving his well-paid job running BlackPlanet would mean a “vow of poverty.” He hadn’t taken calculus in over a decade. The former wunderkind also didn’t look forward to being the oldest pupil in class. The biggest obstacle, though, would be finishing his bachelor’s degree. He had several incompletes when he left Stanford University and had to hand in five term papers to make up for them before he could matriculate at Harvard.

“The decision to go to grad school became a very powerful motivation to clean up this mess that I had left” at Stanford, he says.

Now in his fifth year as a doctoral candidate finishing his dissertation, Mr. Wasow, 39, has integrated into the world of academia. He has a 3.8 GPA and has received fellowships to fund his academic research from the National Science Foundation and the Institute for Humane Studies. He earns money from consulting and speaking engagements, and still occasionally appears on television and radio to discuss the impact of new devices, like the iPad—and increasingly, race and politics.

Even if he lands a professorship at an elite research university, Mr. Wasow expects his income to be halved from his Internet days, but he says he isn’t in it for the money.

“Very few people…have penetrating insights and then share them in an articulate, accessible, thoughtful manner, and Omar is one of those people,” says Henry Louis Gates Jr., Mr. Wasow’s adviser and mentor at Harvard. “His future is as bright as any graduate student I’ve ever met. He could be a public intellectual on the level of Cornel West.” 

Courtesy Rizzoli

Recently the sunburst mirror has gone mainstream, with chains offering modest-priced replicas of vintage designs.

With bleak winter days upon us, a mirror will refract each precious ray of sunlight—and the sunburst mirror seems to stand in for the sun itself.

No wonder, then, the newly married couple painted by Jan van Eyck in 1434 invested in a bulls-eye convex mirror, living as they did in the sun-deprived city of Bruges. Fast-forward to the 17th century when Louis XIV established the first glass and mirror factory in Northern Europe at St. Gobain, France. In doing so, he broke the Venetian Republic’s monopoly on the making of these precious commodities, and, in the process, raised the aesthetic and technological bar by making mirrors bigger and clearer than ever before.

Despite Louis XIV’s affinity for mirrors and for the sunburst motif—the personal emblem of the self-styled “Sun King” was a head of Apollo surrounded by rays of light—the sunburst mirror didn’t make an appearance during his reign.

According to Louis Bofferding, a Manhattan antiques dealer, we probably have the French Revolution to thank for the sunburst mirror’s debut. “The revolutionaries stormed, shuttered, even destroyed monasteries, convents and churches. Among the loot of the rabble were the gilded aureoles of celestial rays that had haloed representations of the Holy Family and saints on altars,” Mr. Bofferding said. “It didn’t take long for enterprising antiques dealers and collectors to buy those vacant sunbursts for a song, slip mirrors into the cavities and launch what would become a vogue in the 20th century.”

By 1940, the great French metalworker Gilbert Poillerat forged and gilded sunburst mirrors that smacked more of café society than the celestial realm. Soon, Parisian artisan Line Vautrin made sunburst mirror frames out of plastic—a technological innovation of her own day—never imagining that they would become an auction-world juggernaut at the turn of the 21st century.

And when bidders at Sotheby’s and Christie’s go wild for something, you know Crate & Barrel, Target and Pier 1 Imports can’t be far behind. Victoria Hagan, New York decorator to uptown clients, said she finds “sunburst mirrors add a happy touch, a sparkle, to any space, from the tiniest of powder rooms to the grandest of living rooms. I use them in unexpected ways, hanging them over another mirror, or above a piece of art in a small space, like a vestibule.” Meanwhile, downtown decorator Miles Redd, who caters to the haute bohème set, said, “They can dress up a boring space. They bring a sense of architecture and reflective surface to a room. I love them hanging above a headboard on a canopy bed.”

Said interior designer Thom Filicia, “I’ve hung them over fireplaces, where they pick up and play with the flames.”

The sunburst mirror has always fallen somewhere between decoration and art: from midcentury decorator Tony Duquette’s readymade-like versions created with automobile hubcaps to a recent Jonathan Adler design that used vintage Barbie dolls to create the sunburst motif. And so, it would seem, whether old or new, expensive or cheap, high- or low-brow, the sunburst mirror, in one form or another, will always be with us.

—Steve GarbarinoPrinted in The Wall Street Journal, page D5

By MARIAN MCEVOY

Christopher Baker

LOTS OF GREEN | Deborah Nevins designed mounds of dense green to contrast with a pale gray gravel path

PLANNING A GARDEN is like orchestrating a party: You need a sense of timing, an ability to mix participants and a pretty firm grip on your site, space and budget. Even more important are your own preferences. There’s never been a successful party or outdoor space that hasn’t been driven by someone’s personal idea about how things should be done.

Are you a romantic? A classicist? Low-key? High-voltage? A minimalist, or a “pile-it-all-on-thick” type? These traits should be upfront and center when it comes to choosing colors (or a lack thereof) for your garden.

National Trust Images/Jonathan Buckley

The revered White Garden at Sissinghurst in England

When I began planning my outdoor spaces, using unabashedly colorful flowering plants was tantamount to life and death. I wanted red, red and more red—everywhere. It was a lamentable, klutzy decision. My land is anchored on a calm body of water and low hills covered in a mantle of many greens. Choosing such a competitive, distracting and blaring “color scheme” was like serving a steaming pot-au-feu at an August lunch. I didn’t have a clue about the most important principles of designing and coloring an outdoor place: Does it fit in with its natural surroundings? Does it complement or effectively contrast with the house it surrounds? Is the planting smart and abundant enough to make a point?

Alamy Images

A sculptural green-on-green knot garden by Rosemary Verey

In general, I think of gardens that incorporate more than one color as painterly; green-only landscapes are sculptural. Neither is a slam-dunk strategy. Take it from someone who sits firmly on the top of the fence season after season. The first mostly green garden I swooned over was impossibly grandiose and French: Versailles, designed by Le Nôtre, is inspirational, but it’s hard to emulate an outdoor space the size of Manhattan.

I saw it during a cold, flowerless winter, and those groomed, clipped parterres, box hedges and magnificently controlled trees and shrubs were astounding in their symmetry and homogeneity. I loved the handsome, no-nonsense orderliness. My second all-green revelation was just as inapplicable: The Creeks, a large Hamptons estate currently owned by Ronald Perelman, was originally designed by the eccentric painter Alfonso Ossorio.

Every single growing element was an evergreen—not necessarily my favorite category of plant—but it sure looked great in all four seasons. Finally, 15 years or so ago, I discovered legendary decorator Albert Hadley’s compact green-on-green backyard in Southport, Conn. It was so un-silly—so disciplined, smart and doable—that I vowed one day to copy it.

“I think of gardens that incorporate more than one color as painterly; green-only landscapes are sculptural.”

If exclusively green gardens are architectural, somewhat intellectual and constructed of contrasting proportions, shapes and leaf textures, then colorful gardens are decidedly festive, emotional and difficult to pull off. A garden with many colors all smashed in together can have the effect of a psychedelic album cover from the 1960s: riveting, chaotic and a bit cornball. The beauty of a lavender rosebush is sure to be KO’d by a patch of orange nasturtiums and scarlet cannas showboating nearby. Throw in a couple of hot-pink sweet pea vines and a clump of sunflowers, and you’ve exhausted the color wheel for good.

Madison Cox

POPS OF COLOR | Red-stained concrete paths lead to delight after delight at the Majorelle Gardens in Morocco

If real colors are your thing, but colored flowers aren’t, consider the possibilities of adding tone through garden fixtures like benches, chairs, planters, pots, arches, tents, paths, gazebos and pavilions. Stained or painted in almost any shade, non-plant garden features and accessories add surprising zest to otherwise color-neutral landscapes.

One good American example is Madoo, the bold, highly contrasted gardens created by artist Robert Dash on Long Island. In Morocco, the Majorelle Gardens, artfully maintained and expanded by Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Bergé and Madison Cox, is a zenith of outdoor color excitement: rich red-stained concrete paths lead to vistas incorporating electric blue, yellow, mango and jade-green buildings, banquettes, fountains, pavilions and legions of big terracotta pots packed with succulents, bougainvillea, moonflowers and geraniums.

Gardens based on a one-color-only scheme are chic and straightforward, but I find them just a tad bit quiet and predictable. (Am I the only one who gets bored by endless clumps of Nikko Blue hydrangeas ringing every other house?) An undeniably simple and pretty garden is a pleasure, but is there enough passion in a landscape composed of a single tone?

One obvious, hugely gorgeous exception is Vita Sackville-West’s revered Sissinghurst gardens in England: The most copied, memorable section is planted exclusively with green and white flowers. It’s not at all discreet, nor obvious. “Brave” and “sophisticated” come to mind. I think those two words define all good gardens.

PLANTING IDEAS FOR EVERY SHADE OF GARDEN

All Green

Box: For filling big pots and planters, forming hedges and clipping and shaping into natural sculptures. From Le Nôtre to the biggest landscape talents of our time, it never fails to please.

Ivy: Streaking up walls, mounding over fences or planted as a thick parterre or ground cover, this hardy, evergreen staple starts slow and matures splendidly. It’s a “sleep, leap and creep” plant.

Grapevines: Great for covering trellises and arches; in winter, their busy skeletons are attractive. Fall fruit is the bonus. (Birds nest in them.)

Grasses: Hard to beat the allure of a smooth carpet of lawn, or a thick clump of three-foot-tall wild grasses growing next to something flat.

Color on Color

Red and orange poppies: Plant them by the dozens or hundreds, and you’ve got a breathtaking spectacle that re-emerges every year. Yves Saint Laurent’s grounds in the South of France are literally blanketed in them.

Romantic roses: The fluffier the better. A perennial favorite of the world’s most amateur and most experienced gardeners.

Almost wild roses: Bushy, naive and five-petaled, they add a homespun prettiness.

Lilac: Best planted in groups, their droopy glamour and strong scent are knockouts.

Wild iris: Spiky, bushy and topped with deep, clear purple flowers, they’re a simpler, chic alternative to their flamboyant “old fashioned” shaggy cousins.

Yellow bougainvillea: So much more interesting than the hot pink variety. In climates with real winters, they have to be potted.

Giant dahlias: They look like a birthday party!

All White

Viburnum: There’s dozens upon dozens of varieties: All of them produce perky white multi-blossoms in early spring.

Turtlehead: The flowers are plume-shaped, and they bloom late summer/early fall, just when you need another blast of white.

Climbing hydrangea: It takes about four years to get them to flower, but this ivy-like plant is sturdy and has bright, shiny green leaves. Decorator Stephen Sills covered several miles of stone walls in them.

White buddleia: Hard to beat a festive white butterfly bush that grows rapidly year after year.

White allium: Get the variety with the biggest globe. Plant it in groups of five or so.

White salvia: A touch of the rustic for an all-white garden. It has a feathery look.

Hellebore: The darling of the sophisticated gardener set—the blooms start out green and progress gracefully into white.

Trillium: Best in woodsy or partly shaded areas, this little flower is elegant and understated.

A version of this article appeared April 28, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: HowGreenIsYourGarden?.