All the 28 Days to a New Job Links In One Place
Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve received a boatload of requests for a post with all the 28 Days links in one place. Ask and ye shall receive, friends. Here they are! Read More →
Topics
- 28 Days to a New Job
- Career management
- community news
- Community Profiles
- entrepreneurship
- Finding Success
- freelancing
- future of work
- gunsworthy
- human resources
- innovation
- Interviewing
- job hunting
- leadership
- marketing
- networking
- Number Crunching
- personal branding
- Product Management
- Reader Poll
- Salary Negotiation
- What We're Reading
- work politics
- work/life balance
- workplace mental health
28 Days Q+A | How Much Back-Channeling is Too Much?
Our inboxes have been overflowing since we launched 28 Days to a New Job. We’ve gotten tons of great questions, and we want to make sure we address as many possible. So without further ado, here’s our first question from a fellow who calls himself Beantown Product Guy:
If you find a great opportunity on LinkedIn or another job board, how much “back-channel” networking is appropriate? What’s acceptable? What’s crossing the line?
That’s a very, very common question, and the answer may not be as straightforward as you think. Read More →
Day 14 | The New Rules: How To Network Using LinkedIn
Back on Day 5, we talked about how you can amp up your LinkedIn Profile. Today, we’re going to talk about actually putting that bright shiny new profile to work. Since 80% of your job hunting time needs to be devoted to networking, think about using LinkedIn as the place where you do your up-front work in the networking process. Then, as fast as you can, turn those online interactions into meaningful offline ones. Lord knows you don’t want to become the Manti T’eo of job hunting. Read More →
Day 11 | Do Some Digging: How to Research a Company Before Applying
Congratulations! All that work you’ve done on your resume and cover letter has finally paid off. At long last, your application has made it onto someone’s desk.
Good news: now there’s a human reading your resume. Bad news: they’ve read a hundred other resumes before they got to yours. They’re tired. They’re stressed. They’re maybe a little hungover. All they want is one qualified candidate who sounds like they know what they’re talking about. Unfortunately, the entire morning has been a thankless slog through waist-deep job board dreck. Few if any applicants have addressed the key points in the job ad. Not even one person has bothered addressing the company’s buzzworthy new product. All hope is lost, and it’s not even lunchtime.
And then it’s your turn. Read More →
Day 10 | Empathy for the Devil: Move to the Top of the Pile with Smart Keywords
As a modern job hunter, you need to not only be smarter than the Average Joe applying for a job — you literally have to put yourself into the recruiter’s shoes. This requires doing the very thing that most people won’t have the guts to do: being empathetic.
You read that right: having “Sympathy for the Devil” or that Evil HR lady who, on a whim, can decide if you move on to the interview process, is one way you can get ahead. That’s because the HR lady isn’t actually evil. She’s just slammed. Read More →
Day 5 | How to be an All-Star: Rocking Your LinkedIn Profile
You need a great LinkedIn profile. There’s no getting around that in 2013. It’s not just another social networking outlet. It’s not “professional Facebook.” It’s the digital face of your job search, and that alone makes it an absolutely necessary component in your job search toolkit. There are 200 million professionals and 2.6 million companies on LinkedIn. Over 5 billion professionally-oriented searches were conducted there in 2012. If you’re not maximizing your profile’s effectiveness, you’re missing out on one of the best – and one of the easiest – ways to up your job search game. Read More →
Day 3 | Preparing Your Job Search Toolkit
So you’re almost ready to get started applying. You’ve combed the job boards and reached out to your network. You’re finding a number of promising opportunities from both venues, but there’s just one thing: you need stuff. You need a resume. And a cover letter. And a LinkedIn profile. And references.
You forgot about the references, didn’t you?
Every year, some pundit makes a grand, sweeping statement like “Resumes Are Dead” or “Why The Cover Letter is Extinct.” These sorts of headlines are great as cynical clickbait, but they’re dangerously misleading and just plain wrong. The hard truth is that you need all four of the aforementioned tools in order to run an effective job search campaign, and it’s best to get them all squared away before you start applying in earnest. Read More →
LinkedIn’s Recruiting Revenues May Soon Eclipse Monster’s
It’s been a banner year so far for LinkedIn, with its stock up an amazing 46% since January 1 — a big jump in its revenue accounts for much of this new sexiness to investors.
For the Forbes contributor Josh Bersin, though, the “real story” is the fact that LinkedIn is now the “fastest growing public provider of corporate recruiting solutions.” So if there’s anyone out there who still thinks that LinkedIn is just a more-boring Facebook for suits, it’s time to get with the program. Read More →
Bullet Points: Office Propaganda; Hiring Social Media Savvy; Actually Fun Corporate Retreats
- LinkedIn launches a button that lets you apply to jobs directly using just your profile rather than a resume or a cover letter. It’s dead easy, but will it get you hired? [OSM]
Steve Thomas’s “office propaganda” posters, which we saw on The Collared Sheep, beat the pants off most “motivational” workplace trinkets.- The founder of the online invoicing company Freshbooks runs corporate retreats for his employees that are very low on formal team-building exercises and very high on unstructured chillaxing. This is the metric he uses: “On Monday morning, are people burned out from all the fun and sun? If so, that’s success.” [Globe and Mail]
- Social Steve has three tips for social-media candidates and the employers who are looking to hire them.
- The weather has cooled down in most of the midwest and the northeast, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late to find out what it takes to get a person to boil. It’s harder than you think! NPR is on the case.
Bullet Points: Ways of Thinking That Sink Startups; No Tech Bubble (This Time)
- “This bubble talk is about everybody being unbelievably psychologically scarred from 10 years ago.” Mark Andreessen puts us all on the couch to explain why there’s no tech bubble. [NYT]
- Goldman Sachs Won’t Let Its Employee Work At Dealbreaker Without Taking 60 (Paid) Days Off First [Business Insider]
- Why are people using LinkedIn? A survey of 500 users gets the pretty-infographic treatment . . . [Lab42, via Mashable]
- What makes a great company name? Inc. magazine finds some common threads.
- At Businessweek, Karen E. Klein looks at the tech incubator Idealab and the “thinking traps” the company tries to avoid.
Bullet Points: LinkedIn Goes on Defense, and Who Owns All Your Online Job Contacts Anyway?
- Sometimes the most important step to moving ahead is just making sure to show up. [Food Jobs, via Gastropoda]
- If Mark Zuckerberg asks you to go for a walk with him down a wooded trail, you’d best say yes. [NYMag]
- LinkedIn cuts off access to the competition. [Fistful of Talent]
- What’s More Boring Than A BeKnown, LinkedIn, BranchOut War? [The Cynical Girl]
- Who owns your online contacts, you or the company you’re about to leave? This is probably the biggest deal for recruiters, but it could affect many other kinds of workers….
Poll Results: Don’t Count the Resume Out
So it looks as if you are as unsure of the future as we are. When asked if LinkedIn was going to kill off the resume within five years, a (very slight) majority of you concluded that resumes weren’t going anywhere in that timeframe.
Despite the prediction, few people in the comments or on our Twitter feed seemed upset with the idea of having the resume disappear: as Chris Palle put it, “Personally, it’d be great to have seen the resume go the way of the dodo, yesterday.”
Bullet Points: Nerd History; Startup Founders Speak; Getting Hired at GOOG
- Kuriositas compiles a short illustrated history of the nerd. [via PFSK]
- So fill that profile out already: Fast Company pulls together tips to help you be a LinkedIn ninja.
- It’s a marriage, not just a wedding: The founders of Webshots, TripUp, GrandCentral, Mediabistro, SideStep, Pageflakes, Farecast, Socialthing, and Going.com look back on what happened when their startups were bought. A mixed bag. [37signals]
- How to land a job at Google [Mashable]
- Are startups dying? [The Vault]
- A comprehensive post on SEO from Office Buddha.
The Hired Guns Poll: Is LinkedIn Killing Off the Resume?
LinkedIn’s stock price may be going through some turbulence after its IPO last month, but the site continues to expand its base of over 100 million users, and its perceived importance is on the rise, too.
That got us wondering—is LinkedIn going to be so ubiquitous in a few years that its profiles will actually replace the traditional do-it-yourself resume? After all, most people seem to be better at keeping their profiles up-to-date than they are at keeping their resumes current . . . .
Bullet Points: TwitPic Wants to License Photos; Intern Flubs; Great Job Ads
- Popular photo site TwitPic has an expansive user agreement that gives it and “affiliated sites” the right to use or distribute content that people have uploaded. Now TwitPic has signed up a photo agency to do just that.
- The Vault has 6 ways to make your internship count; taking a darker view, eFinancialCareers gives you a “full list of the fatal errors” that investment-banking interns make. A lot of the mistakes would apply to any competitive, high-pressure internship…
- Poynter recently held a live chat about the ways that LinkIn can be used both for reporting and for looking for a job in the first place–they are highly related skills, after all. Here’s the transcript.
- If you really want to make sure you get the most out of the financial investment that you (or someone close to you) may be making in college, then petroleum engineering and pharmaceutical science are the majors to go for. [WSJ]
- Writing a job description must be hard: there are so many vague or otherwise less-than-great examples out there. Erica Swallow of Mashable has some tips on writing a description that will bring in the best candidates possible.
Bullet Points: the Resume Funnel; “Encore” Careers; A Baby Named “Like”
- You might think that Facebook or maybe Twitter is the main driver for links, but there’s one ancient (but fast-loading!) site that handily beats them both. According to a recent study, “Facebook accounted for 3.3 percent of the referrals to news sites, but that’s less than half as many as generated by Drudge Report. David Carr of the New York Times has more on Drudge’s amazing longevity.
- Most of us are likely to be working past the traditional retirement age of 65. NPR looks at the financial pressures causing this as well as how some baby boomers are going for what’s being called “encore” careers.
- A batty Facebook-worshipping couple in Israel named their daughter “Like.” It’s better than “Unfollow,” we suppose.
- CNN looks at the modern hiring process, using Siemens as an example. Hiring managers are looking for reasons to eliminate resumes from consideration, and modern technology helps with that: “[Using LinkedIn, we] can go from 100 million to 100 or 10 [candidates] fairly quickly,” said Mike Brown, Siemens’ senior director for talent acquisition.
Bullet Points: Get LinkedIn on Your Side
- As LinkedIn reaches 100 million members and we all prepare for its inevitable IPO, it seemed as if the time was right to revisit the ways in which you can make the most use of Facebook’s more straitlaced cousin. Here’s some of the handier advice we’ve seen:
- Eight Tips to Building a Better LinkedIn Profile [onwallstreet]
- Rock Your LinkedIn (And What Not to Do) and More Ways To Rock Your LinkedIn [Mediabistro]
- 10 Top LinkedIn Open Networkers and Connectors to Follow in 2011 [WindMill Marketing]
- Seven Essential LinkedIn Connections [The advice is from SocialCPAs, but the advice is good even if you've never even opened Excel.]
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Gunsworthy
