job hunting

The Haiku Resume: Boiling Down Your Career into One Line

on May 2, 2011

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Think First Then Type, a column by the copywriter par excellence Daryl Lang, comes with tips and techniques to help you use language more effectively at work. After all, even the best and brightest ideas won’t catch on if you can’t get them understood.

Japanese sceneYou’ve spent hours perfecting your resume. It glows with relevant skills and accomplishments, it’s optimized for keyword-crawling job sites, and it’s been PDF’d in perfectly kerned Helvetica.

Great work. But when somebody visits your website, your resume isn’t the “front door.” Your visitors want to see a few words that describe what you do. And if the first words that greet them are a boring biography (“an award-winning whatever with X years of experience”), you’re missing an opportunity.

You are a brand in the marketplace, and the best brands say what they do in a few concise words. You can identify many companies by their taglines alone. “The ultimate driving machine.” “Good to the last drop.” “What’s in your wallet?” You need a compelling tagline too.    Read More →

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Poll Results: Which Interview Question Did You Think Was the Worst?

on April 29, 2011

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Well, it seems you’re not too shy–in this week’s poll about irritating interview questions, “So, tell me about yourself” only got 11% of the vote. Most of you evidently have no problem with its deliberately open-ended tactics.

Much less popular, and a virtual tie, were questions in which human resources either tries to get you to spill your deep, dark secrets (“What is your biggest weakness?) or speculate wildly about the future (“Where do you see yourself in five years?”). Either way, we’re sure its no weakness to see ourselves having a great weekend, and we hope the same for you.

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Miss Education: Why Does It Take So Long to Leave a Lousy Job?

on April 29, 2011

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Happy Friday! Today brings the debut of “Miss Education,” a public-school teacher in the New York area. Until she finds herself a shiny new career and can leave the blackboard jungle behind, she’ll be posting anonymously. We think her struggle to drastically remodel her work life is something that lots of us can relate to . . . .
Empty SchoolroomAfter four years teaching, I’ve had enough. In fact, I often wonder why I stuck with it for the first four days. In 2007, I graduated with a diploma in one hand, a teaching license in the other, and stars in my eyes. I had just one goal: to change the world through the power of literature and my dynamic, witty personality. I didn’t know which school would hire me, which grade I would teach, or even which city I would work in, but somewhere, my first class of middle-school students was gearing up to have the best English teacher of their lives.

Four years later, after working for the New York City Department of Education, I am also working at a second job on the sly, enhancing my resume with other marketable skills and counting down until the day I can quit teaching middle school forever and shred my license into confetti.

I think that I went into teaching for all of the right reasons. None of the perks–summers off, pensions, health benefits, a workday ending at 3:00 p.m.—meant anything to me when I began my secondary-education program at college. I cared about only two things. I wanted to spend most of my day with eager, energetic young people, and I wanted to talk about books ALL DAY LONG. Was there a better way to make a living?    Read More →

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Hired Guns Poll: (Job) Interview with a Vampire–Which Question Bites the Most?

on April 25, 2011

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We’ve all dealt with interview questions that are predictable, unclear, or difficult to answer well. But a recent comic by The Oatmeal got us thinking about which interview question deserves to be ranked as the absolute lamest.

Did we miss an interview question that really torques you off? Put it in the comments. And if you found yourself looking for “all of the above,” check out our recent roundup of advice on interviewing effectively.

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Bullet Points: Ace That Interview

on April 21, 2011

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  • Interviews with more than 70 leaders for the NYT’s Corner Office columns have shown some traits that successful executives share–they’re the same traits the execs look for when their companies are hiring. [excerpt from The Corner Office]
  • Saying that you were “”the only employee who did things right” at your last job is no way to land a new one. [FINS]
  • It’s from November, but these interview myths from “Ask Annie” remain just as useful a read. Thinking that interviewers will always be prepared and know all about you is a belief worth getting over as soon as possible.
  • We’ve all heard them, and now The Oatmeal’s drawn them: the 6 crappiest interview questions.

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Bullet Points: Career Management Musts, and Problems for Newbie Startups

on April 15, 2011

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  • Forbes uncovers three new “career management musts“. These sites will let you “score” your professional online brand, help you get a raise, and partially automate your job search by keeping track of contacts, interviews, and all other forms of contacts.
  • Kris Ruby, the head of her own PR agency, talks to Business Insider about her biggest challenge as a young entrepreneur: it’s “time management and balancing my personal and corporate brand. In your first year as a start up, you do not necessarily have the cash flow to bring on a full time staff and you are often a ‘one man show’ wearing many hats….”
  • If you haven’t voted in our “Should interns get paid?” poll, you have until noon Eastern today. A couple of the choices are running neck-and-neck…
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Bullet Points: Spring Brings Some Hopeful Job News (and Spring Cleaning)

on April 14, 2011

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  • Some good signs for those looking to make a move: there were more job postings in February than there were at any time in the past two years. And the unemployment rate, though still at an elevated 8.8%, is at a two-year low.
  • If you’re thinking that you might leave your job in the next few months, now (not later) is the perfect time to get your affairs in order. This includes building your list of contacts (for home use after you leave the job) and pulling together any portfolio samples you may need down the line. The accounting blog Going Concern has some tips on cleaning up your workplace computer, “just in case a team of nerds will be scoping out your computer and any embarrassing data contained therein” after you leave for greener pastures. “This includes your music collection, no reason to give them free MP3s.”
  • Whether or not you’re planning to leave your job, it’s always a good time to tidy up the cubicle or corner office. As this chipper article reminds us, cleanliness is next to godliness at work as well as at home. The Dumpster awaits.
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Hired Guns Poll: Should Interns Get Paid?

on April 11, 2011

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Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy:  the title of the new book by scholar (and former unpaid intern) Ross Perlin leaves no doubt where he stands. In his recent New York Times op-ed piece, Perlin highlighted how both colleges and companies are taking advantage of college kids desperate to get a foot in the door (to the extent that some colleges are actually charging students for access to the best internships) and asserted that all interns should be paid, especially at for-profit corporations and if they are doing a job that would otherwise have been done by a paid employee.  IMHO it’s yet another sign the Higher Ed bubble is doomed to break, but the question for today is whether you think interns should get paid for their work.

Poll closed! Thanks for your votes!

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Bullet Points: Don’t Let Job Boards Suck Up Your Time

on March 25, 2011

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You’re not going crazy! If your job hunt is stagnating, it might be because you’re spending way too much time applying via online job boards. Why?

According to The Aberdeen Group’s latest study, Challenges in Sourcing Six-Figure Talent, hiring managers and recruiters are just as exasperated by the ineffectiveness of job boards as you are. The boards deliver way too big a haystack of candidates, making it darn near impossible for in-house recruiters to find you–even if you are the perfect needle.

In the study, 70% of respondents said that job boards deliver too many candidates per post and 59% of indicated that they don’t have enough resources to review all applications when they do come in.

So what’s a smart Gun supposed to do? Use the job boards to figure out who’s hiring, and instead of applying into the black hole, hustle to figure out if you can find another way into the company through your personal contacts. Remember: 80% of all jobs are still landed through old-fashioned networking vs. 11% on the job boards. Networking is a learned skill; while it may be time-consuming at first, the ROI overdelivers every time. [via Breitbart]

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Bullet Points: Getting the Right Kind of Attention at Job Fairs

on March 21, 2011

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U.S. News has advice for mastering the art of standing out at a job fair. We liked this tip: talk to other job seekers, too: “By asking what they’re looking for and what their impressions have been so far, you may get valuable information about an opening they heard about, or a recruiter to avoid, or a recruiter you definitely should talk to.”

And here’s a tip from us: Wait your turn–or you’re sure to turn off a prospective employer. Nothing is worse than job seekers who are so desperate to get noticed that they cut each other off while waiting to stuff a resume into an employer’s hand at a job fair. Sure, job fairs bring every Tom, Dick, and Harry out of the woodwork, but you don’t have to be one. A great way to stand out is to not cut off Ms. Chatty, who’s taking up all of the time of the employers you most want to see. Establish eye contact, smile, and wait your turn. And if they turn to you, as if to say “SAVE ME,” you’ll have them at hello.

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