2011 September

Job Hunting? Get Ready for Q4 and the Hiring Bump It’s Bringing

Allison Hemming on September 29, 2011

The gloom and doom about the state of the job market, the economy, and the political sphere are enough to send even the most optimistic job hunter over the edge these days. Well, friends, I am here to tell you to get back on track and to tune into what’s happening in your field. Today in Digital, hiring is what’s happening. Now that Q4 is here, it’s going to get a little nutty. Why?

The great standoff in Washington basically slowed the hiring process in August and much of September to a standstill. Our politicians are to blame, not the companies. Businesses did what they needed to do to survive — they were cautious, putting roles on hold and taking a wait-and-see attitude. But jobs are slowly getting reapproved, and we see conditions improving all around.
Read More →

Where Are All the Mid-level UX Designers?

Jeff Gothelf on September 29, 2011

I became a user experience designer in 1999. Now, with over 12 years of experience, I consider myself a senior practitioner. I know many other designers with similar levels of experience. As a hiring manager, I see many resumes and meet a large number of designers in person. The overwhelming majority of them have less than five years’ experience. With business’s ever-increasing demand for user experience designers, the growing understanding and appreciation for the benefits of UX design, and the fact that the discipline is in its prime, why are there so few mid-level designers?

I define mid-level as someone with five to ten years of actual work experience. They are designers on the cusp of becoming managers or team leaders. They are designers who have explored several domains (commerce, social and financial services to name just three) and who have worked in a variety of environments. They are the designers you can bring on to a team and who can hit the ground running, asking mostly process and politics questions while delivering top-notch work. They are also, in most major cities, incredibly difficult to find. Read More →

Bullet Points: Demystifying Design; Are Robots After Your Job?

The Hired Guns on September 27, 2011

Our own Jeff Gothelf on why keeping design a “mystery” can actually hold its practitioners back. [A List Apart]
The pain of job interviews: An employee’s perspective [Smart Company]
Computer programs are getting better and better at writing for the web. But as Farhad Manjoo points out in a new series at Slate, very few jobs are safe from the robots these days.
The IRS continues to clamp down on deciding which workers can be declared independent contractors as opposed to employees.
An infographic from Careerbuilder on how to work from home without wasting time. The survey claims that “30% of telecommuters tend to work in pajamas” — get dressed, people!
Hallmark targets a new audience for its cards: those who recently lost their job.

To Stay Creative, Let “Preciousness” Go

Noah Scalin on September 26, 2011

Next Monday, October 3, Noah Scalin will teach a Hired Guns Academy class on ways to stay creatively productive.

Are you a perfectionist like me? If you aren’t, I can almost guarantee your company or boss would like you to be one. This is a shame, because perfectionism is probably the biggest roadblock to innovation that you will ever encounter. In fact, letting go of perfectionism, or as I like to call it, preciousness, is the key to unlocking your creative potential.

Over the years we’ve been taught that it’s unacceptable to try out new things that could potentially fail because they will:
A. Waste Time
B. Waste Money
C. Get You Fired
D. All of The Above

So we’ve gotten into the habit of working safely within our comfort zones in order to avoid creating anything that’s less than perfect. This is fine for just getting by, but terrible for moving forward. Read More →

Stand Out from the Crowd with a Visual Bio or Resume

Todd Cherches on September 23, 2011

We’d like to welcome Todd Cherches to the blog. As a co-founder of the BigBlueGumball training firm, he has a lot to say about ways to help your career through the power of visual thinking and learning. In his first post, he shows a simple tool you can create to help your job application break through the sea of text that floods hiring managers’ and recruiters’ in-boxes.

As we all know, the traditional resume is an important and essential part of the job search process — a way to efficiently tell your career history on a sheet of paper or two.

But after a hiring manager has sorted through thousands of resumes and interviewed hundreds of candidates, your text-based black and white resume can easily get lost in the crowd and buried in the pile (“I forget… who’s the guy who used to work for Disney and CBS?”).

This is why I recommend that you consider creating a visual bio or visual resume, a colorful, image-based version of your text resume. It’s a personal branding and marketing piece that you can take along on your interview, use as a visual roadmap to tell your story, and then leave behind. It will give you an opportunity to demonstrate your creativity and help you stand out from the crowd. Read More →

Check Out What The Hired Guns Academy Has in Store for Fall

The Hired Guns on September 22, 2011

Summer’s over — it’s time to hit the books.

We have a full roster of classes planned for the fall semester at The Hired Guns Academy. Take a glance at the list below and choose the ones you need to get inspired; learn new, highly marketable skills; or shake up your career and take it in a new direction:

Monday, October 3
Get “Unstuck”: How to Get (And Keep) Your Creativity Flowing
Noah Scalin, the author of Unstuck and 365: A Daily Creativity Journal, will show you how you can keep your creativity going fast and furious.

Thursday, October 27
What’s Your Story? Master the Art of the Elevator Pitch and Harness the Power of Short-Storytelling
Larry Smith, of Smith Magazine and Six-Word Memoirs fame, reveals how telling your story in a concentrated, well thought-out burst can help you stand out from your (much more tongue-tied) peers. You’ll never ever need to break out in a sweat when someone asks you, “So, what do you do?” again.

Wednesday, November 9
Digital Reinvention for Journalists: Transfer the Skills You Already Have to a Career in Digital
Charlie Rogers, who has launched many a publication and website, gives guidance on the traditional skills that translate most easily into digital—as well as the new skills you’ll need to turn yourself into Journalist 2.0 (or 3.0).

Wednesday, November 30
Nail That Presentation! Adding Strength to Your Professional Talks, Appearances, and Job Interviews
This high-energy class by the speech and presentation master Joel Schwartzberg is what you need to make your speeches, presentations, and interviews of all sorts be the powerful, persuasive tools they should be.

Wednesday, December 7
Get Your Blog On: Increase Your Visibility Through Online Publishing
Blogging veteran Bill Brazell gives the lowdown on what it takes to make a new blog succeed rather than flounder.

Bullet Points: “Negative Selling,” and the Dangers of Being Too Picky When Hiring

The Hired Guns on September 22, 2011

Negative selling—talking down rival companies who might steal away potential talent—has always been something that a few law-firm recruiters engaged in, but how effective can it be? [Above the Law]
A study finds that the median male worker earned less in 2010 than he would have in 1973, once wages are adjusted for inflation. [NPR]
“Sometimes you make the mesh so fine, nothing gets through.” Yes, it’s possible to be too picky when hiring. “Don’t take it upon yourself to reject candidates for ridiculous reasons, even if you think it will make you look better. Don’t consider only cookie-cutter candidates with cookie-cutter qualifications.” [HR Reporter]
CFOs have reason to worry about social media, with pitfalls that include employees oversharing in public forums, the loss of confidential info, and increased exposure should an issue go into litigation. [Big Fat Finance Blog]
Hewlett-Packard’s CEO, Léo Apotheker, who is likely to be let go after less than a year on the job, was hired without ever having met most of the members of its 12-member board. There’s more in the Wall Street Journal. [NYT]

Getting Unstuck and Keeping Your Creativity Flowing

Noah Scalin on September 21, 2011

On Monday, October 3, Noah Scalin will teach a Hired Guns Academy class on ways to stay creatively productive.

“In every creative person’s life, we arrive occasionally at a place where creativity stops flowing. For a while we’re happily riding a creative wave and then out of the blue—nothing. For a terrifying few hours (or days, or weeks), we think the next idea will never come. We become afraid that our ideas are not good enough and probably never really were good enough. At worst, some of us just give up completely.”–designer Peleg Top from the preface to my book, Unstuck: 52 Ways to Get (and Keep) Your Creativity Flowing

Does that sound familiar? It’s definitely a place I have found myself many times over the course of my 17 years as a creative professional. And while I always managed to find the way back to my creative path eventually, it took the unusual commitment of making a skull every day for a year to finally figure out some practical (and reproducible), ways for generating creative energy at a moment’s notice.

Since I can’t put you in a time machine and have you do your own yearlong project, I’ve created the Get Unstuck class as the next best thing. We’ll cover The Big Seven, a set of basic tools for stretching your creative muscles, which I learned during my own creative journey. And then we’ll put those tools into practice, with a hands-on exercise that will get your creative fires stoked and give you some experiences that you can apply to your own work right away.

There’s no need to wait for the muse of inspiration to show up once you learn to turn on your own creative tap. And this is the class that will give you the tools to you get (and keep) your creativity flowing.

To register for “How to Get (And Keep) Your Creativity Flowing,” click here.

Bullet Points: Working from “Anywhere”

The Hired Guns on September 19, 2011

Thinking of getting one of those trendy standing desks to avoid dying while in the saddle at work? It’s probably just as healthy to move around more. [Lifehacker]
It’s fun to talk about visual vs. auditory vs. movement-based learning styles, but now at least one psychologist has pointed out that evidence for such distinctions is thin on the ground.
Lots of rhetoric paints small businesses as places that effortlessly bubble over with new ideas and lots of growth, but few small businesses are really that innovative, says a new study from the University of Chicago: they “start small and stay small.” [Slate]
Entrepreneur and author John Warrilow comes up with seven tools he uses to work from “anywhere”—although most of the applications listed will only be truly useful in locations with a speedy internet connection.
Check out this animation that a student made using a year’s worth of his homework:

[via HuffPo]

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Job Hunting? Get Ready for Q4 and the Hiring Bump It’s Bringing

Where Are All the Mid-level UX Designers?

Bullet Points: Demystifying Design; Are Robots After Your Job?

To Stay Creative, Let “Preciousness” Go

Stand Out from the Crowd with a Visual Bio or Resume

Check Out What The Hired Guns Academy Has in Store for Fall

Bullet Points: “Negative Selling,” and the Dangers of Being Too Picky When Hiring

Getting Unstuck and Keeping Your Creativity Flowing

Bullet Points: Working from “Anywhere”

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