Bullet Points: Freelance Success

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 Questions to Ask at Your Next Job Interview

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.”

Related:

[Photo: Milos Milosevic/Flickr]

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

  • 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

  • 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

Bullet Points: Embrace the Fail

Bullet Points: Keeping Counteroffers Off the Table

  • 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.

Product Management, User Experience, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Usability Testing

Project Management, Program Management, Production, Content Production

Animation, Art Direction, Creative Direction, Corporate Identity, Flash Design/Dev, Graphic Design, Web Design

Content Strategy, Editorial, Copywriting, Copy Editing, Research, Blog Outreach

Brand Management, Business Development, Sales, Product Marketing, Event/Conference Planning, Promotions, Marcomms, Corporate Comms, Direct Marketing, E-Marketing, Public Relations, Market Research

Account Management, Account/Brand Planning, Media Strategy, Communications Planning, Media Planning/Buying, Social Media, Search (SEM, SEO), Web Metrics & Analytics

Web Development, Front End Development

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