bullet points

Bullet Points: Freelance Success

The Hired Guns on May 14, 2012

GigaOm ponders the rise of the “stealth freelancers.”
Tax Tips for the First-Time Freelancer [BI]
6 reasons freelancers should rent an office [CBS]
How can you go on vacation if you’re the boss? Adelaide Lancaster of The Big Enough Company says it’s possible to get out of Dodge and still be sure that everything will still be there once you get back. [Forbes]
Madison Avenue is learning to loves its new ranks of freelancing advertising talent. [AdAge]

Are you thinking about taking the freelance plunge yourself? Or are you already freelancing, and looking for strategies to grow the number of your clients — and your bank account? Our Hired Gun Coach, the digital strategist Beth Temple, will be teaching a class this Wednesday, May 16, for freelancers at all stages of their career: Freelance Success: Independence, Not Insecurity.

Previous freelancing tips from Beth:

Bullet Points: The Rise of the Supertemp

The Hired Guns on April 23, 2012

Meet the supertemps: highly trained and highly paid, these are “top managers and professionals” whose “project-based careers” aren’t tied to any single major firm. [HBR]
If there’s been a big uptick in freelancing, and lots of experts think there has been, how come numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics don’t seem to bear that out? It might be because a hefty percentage of freelancers are moonlighting at the moment, with full-time jobs already. [GigaOM]
FoundersCard is a $495-a-year loyalty card that doles out discounts, upgrades, networking opportunities, and bragging rights to entrepreneurs, such as the heads of startups. So far there are 5,000 members. [CNN]
Is Stanford University too chummy with Silicon Valley? [The New Yorker]

The Questions to Ask at Your Next Job Interview

The Hired Guns on April 17, 2012

Alison Green of Ask a Manager heads to U.S.News to cover the questions that applicants should be asking at their job interviews (but often don’t). They’re questions that move the conversation forward, and their answers can actually help you know what the job’s going to be like, rather than just serving to butter up the interviewer. Things like “How would you describe the culture here?” and “What would a successful first year in the position look like?”

Maybe the most important thing to remember is to ask SOMETHING during the interview: “… if you don’t have any questions, you’re signaling that you’re not very interested in the job or you just haven’t thought much about it.”

Best Questions To Ask In Your Job Interview [Forbes]
Ask This Question At the Beginning of Your Next Job Interview [Lifehacker]

[Photo: Milos Milosevic/Flickr]

Bullet Points: Why Narcissists Get Hired

The Hired Guns on April 4, 2012

According to a study in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, narcissists have a big advantage during job interviews. “When feeling challenged, they tend to double down,” says one co-author of the work. “It’s as if they say ‘Oh, you’re going to challenge me? Then I’m not just great, I’m fantastic.’ And in this setting, it tended to work.” [Science Daily]
“9 Common Interview Questions That Are Actually Illegal.“ [Business Insider]
Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to spam all 900 applicants for a job at a startup with 42 bullet points of advice: “Here’s How to Condescend to 900 Job Applicants With a 3,000-Word Rejection Letter.” Cue the hate mail. [Gawker; Salon]
On the other hand, a lot of that advice made sense, especially if you weren’t the direct recipient: “Want to get hired? Toughen up.” [Forbes]

Bullet Points: Your Resume Has Six Seconds to Impress

The Hired Guns on March 26, 2012

The Ladders turned on the eye tracking for a study of recruiter behavior [PDF]. Turns out recruiters spend an average of just six seconds looking at a resume before deciding whether or not a candidate is potentially a good fit for a job. [MSNBC]
Some employers have gone on record as only wanting people who already have a job — or who at least haven’t been unemployed for long. And some states think it’s time to write laws outlawing the practice. [NPR]
Some good tips from the Boston Globe’s Job Doc about figuring out what to wear to a job interview — it can be important to mirror the company’s culture, after all.

Bullet Points: No Ideas No Problem for One VC Fund’s Startups

The Hired Guns on March 19, 2012

The venture capital firm Y Combinator is willing to fund startups that have no idea what they’re doing — literally: “If you apply for this batch and you seem like you’d make good founders, we’ll accept you with no idea and then help you come up with one.”
From now through the end of April, Inc. magazine is taking submissions for its annual Inc. 500/5000 list of the fastest-growing privately held companies. To make the list, companies need to have made at least $2 million in revenue last year and at least $100,000 in revenue in 2008.
Scott Belsky of Behance covers “Reactionary Work” and the four other kinds of work that fill our day. As you might expect, it’s the essential but hard-to-schedule Planning Work that usually gets short shrift. [The 99 Percent]
And David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done, has some ideas on how to fight back when technology keeps you from being as productive as you’d like to be. Spoiler: there’s no quick fix. [NYT]
The clothing chain Uniqlo pays its workers a lot more than its competitors, and so far that strategy has paid off in equally high profits. James Surowiecki looks at the “false economy” of scrimping on payroll. [The New Yorker]

Bullet Points: Where the Recruiters Are

The Hired Guns on March 15, 2012

For a recent study, the social-recruiting company Bullhorn Reach analyzed the way the 35,000 recruiters on its network use the “big three” of social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook). It’s probably no surprise that LinkedIn is the runaway favorite, used by 98% of the recruiters who have connected their Bullhorn account with any social-media account at all. Twitter and Facebook are used by only 42% and 33% of the recruiters, respectively. Whether or not this means that recruiters are hunting in the wrong place remains to be seen, but we bet that you’ll see more and more recruiters at least trying to prospect more on Facebook and Twitter in the future.
The Daily Herald of Everett, WA, considers a job interview on Skype a real downer: “Because of the awkward nature of the on-screen interaction and lack of flow in the conversation, Skype is a good tool for employers who want a cost-saving way to rule out candidates. However, the job candidate is almost always at a disadvantage.”
“There is only one thing you need to measure when it comes to being a perm or search recruiter… How many of your candidates are sitting opposite your clients.” [Greg Savage]
Ex-Goldman man Greg Smith may have made “muppets” famous, but the New York Times points out that lots of businesses have less-than-kind terms for their customers.

Bullet Points: Avoiding Bias When Hiring

The Hired Guns on March 1, 2012

Why do married men earn more than bachelors? [Jason Collins]
“Businesspeople have long joked that meetings make them brain-dead, so it is nice to find a group of scientists in white coats telling us that it is actually so.” [FT]
“How do you deal with potential bias you’re not even aware of if you use your gut instinct in hiring?” [HR Capitalist]
To mark the end of his tenure, the creative director of BBDO NY posted a video of himself riding his bike through the halls, complete with a schmaltzy soundtrack.
LinkedIn gets evaluated by the Motley Fool for its long-term investment prospects.

Bullet Points: Embrace the Fail

The Hired Guns on February 22, 2012

Should we be trying to learn from freshly shut-down companies the same way we try to learn from shiny new startups? [Washington Post]
It’s “practically a religion” in lots and lots of offices, but does brainstorming even work? [The New Yorker]
Leonardo da Vinci, failure. [Boxes and Arrows]
Social media has had lots of successes, but that doesn’t mean that any of them came without spending real money. Writing in Inc., Hollis Thomases tallies up social marketing’s likely costs, using everyone’s favorite viral, that Old Spice guy, as an example.
Why is the talent pool in IT, entertainment, and management so shallow, and why are the wages so high? Maybe it’s not that the raw talent’s so rare — it’s that it’s just really, really hard to identify it, and to train it once you do. [Marginal Revolution]

Bullet Points: Keeping Counteroffers Off the Table

The Hired Guns on February 16, 2012

Everyone in HR knows that between “67% and 80% of those employees who accept a counteroffer leave in the next 6 months.” But that doesn’t mean these sometimes desperate-seeming tactics aren’t also super-common. Here’s what recruiters need to do to counter those counteroffers effectively. [Recruiting Blogs]
If This Isn’t How You Recruit, You’re Doing It Wrong. [Inc.]
“So, I’m sitting here wondering why all these talent/HR Pros have jumped on the Pinterest bandwagon? I keep waiting for the great HR blog posts on how Pinterest is the next evolution of Performance Management, or how you can use the Pinterest platform to recruit top talent. And I wait… You see, Pinterest has nothing to offer HR or Talent Pros,” says Fistful of Talent’s Tim Sackett. Some great comments.
Italy is coming to terms with a time when it will no longer be usual for workers to hold the same job until they retire. “The problem is actually getting a job, not being fired from one,” says an under-30 spokesman for the National Youth Council, a lobbying group.

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Bullet Points: Freelance Success

Bullet Points: The Rise of the Supertemp

The Questions to Ask at Your Next Job Interview

Bullet Points: Why Narcissists Get Hired

Bullet Points: Your Resume Has Six Seconds to Impress

Bullet Points: No Ideas No Problem for One VC Fund’s Startups

Bullet Points: Where the Recruiters Are

Bullet Points: Avoiding Bias When Hiring

Bullet Points: Embrace the Fail

Bullet Points: Keeping Counteroffers Off the Table

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Bullet Points: Freelance Success
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