CareerBuilder.com Doesn’t Get It

Hello CareerBuilder. I applied for a job and you nicely sent me an email with the name of the company, the job title, date, and a link to the job description. When the hiring company gets around to calling me, the link will be outdated. I won’t know the details of the job; and worse yet, I won’t know exactly how I customized my resume to fit the job description. I almost forgot. You didn’t sent a copy of the cover letter so I would have it handy when they call.

I understand you can sit back and take care of your advertisers and job posters; but would it have killed you to have included in the confirmation email all the info concerning this job application? While you were at it you could have tagged the email for easy search and filtering.

Sure, I could have stored the files on my computer with all this information. After all it is my job search. That would be the human answer; but you’re software.

Storing the information on your site would require a lot of space and bandwidth. I mean, with all those users returning to your site over and over again increasing the ad impressions; you would have to invest in more equipment.

You started out with the right idea in your logging feature: jobs applied to on other sites. Nice little catalog; but here again, I have to do all the work.

Don’t feel insulted. Your competitors and rivals miss the same easy step in making a service that stands out and anticipates the user’s wants.

Talking with Your Spouse During a Job Search

While searching for a job, what to tell your spouse can be more exasperating than not getting an interview for two months. For starters, if the two of you didn’t talk before you lost your job, how in the heck are you going to start communications under this kind of stress? You better have a plan.

Does your spouse require the details of a story or just the out come? You would know this if you paid attention to your other conversations.

The absolute best advice is to talk about your conversations. Ask your spouse, “how much detail do you want to know?” I find they come in two main classifications.

Don’t Get My Hopes Up

This spouse doesn’t want to get teased or threatened with a relocation if all you have is a lead on a job.  Hearing the details at the pre-phone interview, may be to stressful for this spouse.  Wait until you have a bird in the hand to start talking about how it could effect your life. That said you still have to leave clues that you are not just playing computer games all day. Make sure you leave lists lying about, with job search tasks scratched out so there is a reassurance the effort is being put forth.

I’m in it With You

This spouse wants to hear the possibilities every day. That reassurance of hope is needed in daily doses, so be prepared at the dinner table to give a positive outlook on your efforts that day. Don’t set up false hopes; but highlight the opportunities as they present themselves. Play up your networking. It gives you an opportunity to add substance to the conversation by bringing your spouse up to date with what is going on in your former colleagues lives. Watch out for a sudden change from tell me the details to I don’t want to get excited about possibilities that always fall apart. As unemployment drags on over six months, a spouse can get gun shy after having their hopes are dashed time and again.

Keeping your spouse encouraged about the prospects and your efforts will pay you back double when you get the job search blues. How have you handled your spouse? And what about the kids?

7 Reasons NOT to LION

You do know what [LION] after a person’s name on LinkedIn means don’t you?  It stands for I will add you as a contact no matter who you are. LION stands for LinkedIn Open Network.  They have a club and everything.  Their not bad people.  But the fact that you have connections with them just to get your LinkedIn contact count up higher doesn’t say anything good for your reputation.  What are you saying here?  “I’ll be friends with anyone, just to get a higher count?”  Perhaps you’re saying “I take the easy road, so hire me.”

If you are considering becoming a LION and looking for a job, check out these 7 reasons to NOT.

• The LION status is not an achievement. It is a self designation.
• If you want to distinguish your name, add a certification.
• If you are looking for a contact in a particular company, one of your LION minions may have a connection; but you will still have to spend the same amount of effort personalizing your relationship so that you can use the contact to help in your search.
• Doing anything to excess can be considered a point against you.
• Evaluating invitations is a distraction from your mission to find a job.
• Joining selected LinkedIn GROUPs is a more effective communication multi-directional tool.
• Many assume being a LION increases your search-ability juice resulting in more views of your profile.  The open networking distinction is not what contributes to more views.  A large network, key words, and participating in discussions will get your profile noticed on LinkedIn

The Art of Choosing – Not a How To Book

Social Psychologist and a professor of business at Columbia University, Sheena has written not your typical how to book in her “The Art of Choosing”.  She takes you on an in depth treatise of how we make choices.  Each of her premises are based in fact with research to back it up.  A refreshing release from the typical business book that boasts successful CEOs experiences into fact without analyzing the surrounding factors or mitigating circumstances.  

I particularly enjoyed the difference between “freedom to” and “freedom from”.  Two distinctive choices.  In America she explains we have freedom from; while many other countries have freedom to.  She sites Emerson’s views on self reliance as a beginning for the American view on freedom.   The explanations and facts are  well presented, and I will leave those to her.  Read the book.  Included with each premise is a simple scenario to help you visualize and make the book interesting.

This is a must read for international companies and marketers.  People in other societies just don’t make choices the same.  She demonstrates how developing a standard operating procedure for a bank deposit should take a completely different approach from the US to Japan.  Japaneese, and much of the world, like to be told exactly what is expected and how to do it.  Where as the American would rather be told just what is expected.  Don’t over simplify my comments thinking this is a book about the cultural differences between the East and West.  How we choose is much more complex than a simple cultural difference.

In the chapter on nursing home choice experiments, she discusses how the ability to control aspects of our lives through choice drives happiness.  One chapter brings out the difference in perceived choice.  Six types of bottled soda and one type of bottled juice equates to how many choices?  Some would say the host is offering many choices.  Seven choices in fact are offered.  The non-soda fan will say that there are two choices offered.

If you enjoyed the works of Malcom Gladwell, you will like the sophisticated factual content of Iyengar’s discussions on choice.  But don’t pick it up expecting it to be a typical how to book.  Sheena lays out the facts, explains the conclusions, and lets you apply them to your situations.  First you have to understand how you got to where you are through your choices, before you can choose where you are going.

The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar:  Hachette book Group  March 2010

A Glass Door Job Seekers Should Look Through

[tweetmeme]  I enjoy surfing through the information on  glassdoor.com. It’s much more than job postings and the same old rehash articles on the 5 things every job seeker should know.  Recently I  read a guest blogger, Hank Stringer, CEO of Stringer Executive Search and Chief Strategist to Novotus – a professional recruiting agency.  He talks about the simple pleasures in life that can turn into a job opportunity.  The list of contributing authors makes reading here better than spending twenty bucks on a “how to book” where they take 200 pages of large type to make their one new point.

Look around the site and find reviews on companies small and large by people who actually worked there.  I find most of these reviews to be candid and absent of malice.  Occasionally I read the spiteful comment.  These people usually tell you why they are no longer working at the place and why they didn’t fit in.  Their curse comments identify them as the kind of person no one wants to work with anyway. One commented “Clean house. Have a big layoff which is done by merit rather than by tenure or old-boy ties.”  Wonder if they would be one of those that should go?  So who cares what they had to say about anything.  By all means, before you sign on with a company, read the reviews to get a very good picture of the atmosphere.  Really great is when you can figure out from these reviews, what insightful questions you should be asking in your interview.  Don’t be a bozo and ask in your job interview why a certain person was so unhappy.  Look for trends that you can turn into a good question for when the interviewer asks “any questions?”.  Unlike the “whine lines” of other company bashing sites, this one provides an excellent balance of reviews.

Readers of the site anonymously enter their

job title and compensation.  This is searchable by job title and company.  How cool is that?  You can get clues on how to answer that threatening screening question “What are your salary requirements?”

Yes, you do have to participate to get full advantage of the site.  That means you have to help another job seeker by sharing your experiences.

Winners and Losers in the Job Race

[tweetmeme] Indeed.com studies the jobless rate and the number of jobs posted in 50 metropolitan areas.  This data has been updated as of July 2010.  Miami and Detroit remains the worst with a ratio of 1 job for each 8 unemployed individuals.  New York comes in at the best with a ratio of 1:1, along with it’s neighbors: DC and Baltimore.  Now if we could match those seekers and jobs perfectly our job would be done.  Big loosers on the list are Rochester NY and New Orleans.

To see the complete list of 50 metropolitan areas, click here.

To see the job postings per capita as calculated by indeed.com check it out.

Tired of searching for relevant job news?  Do you keep getting articles about New Zealand when you run a search?  How articles about a coach taking a new job?  We scan hundreds of articles and blog posts, creating a list on our site for you. Job Interview Practice Services. Save Time.

Should Over Qualified Go Into the Reject Pile?

[tweetmeme]  Over qualified is an easy reason to put a candidate into the reject pile. Resume screeners seem to assume the candidate who applies for a lesser position will not work out because…

• if a higher position becomes available, the candidate will jump at it.  I have plenty of clients who have been there and done that.  They chased the big office, got it and now want to focus on what is brings the most satisfaction.  One client made so much money in the high paid positions, he can afford to focus his passions.  He wants to keep working; but not at the 500 mile an hour pace and doesn’t want to be a Walmart greeter.  Even if they do jump, the time you had a high quality working on staff provides more benefit than turning over under qualified workers.
• will be overbearing and try to take control above their pay grade.  If you like their personality and style, a good manager can use this wisdom to their advantage.
• they will get board and thus be demoralized.  Not if they are chasing their passion.  Career paths require people to take on duties they don’t really care for, but do because it is part of the job.  At a certain point people want to shed the undesirable assignments.
• there must be something wrong with them.  Perhaps they got thrown out of the top jobs because of some grave error.  Perhaps so, and perhaps they are best qualified for the position they are applying for.

What do you get for hiring the overqualified?

Wisdom, Maturity, Dedication, Experience, Knowledge, History and all for a bargain price.

HR people, why  do you put the “over qualified” into the reject pile?  Lack of vision?  Worried the hiring manager will think ill of you?  Confident the candidate will want more money than the position pays and turn the job down in the end?

Do You Buzz – What’s it All About?

[tweetmeme]  Another place to publicly post your resume has surfaced.  Doyoubuzz.com has an easy user interface that allows you to post a colorful resume in about twenty minutes.  This is about the same time it takes to complete most online job applications.  The great thing about this site is it creates your own url, which means your resume will appear in searches for your name, similar to the way your LinkedIn account will display in searches.

Why should you put the effort into this site? It provides another exposure opportunity for your online personal brand and resume.  Additionally, you control the content.  Thus, if any undesirable content about you is on page one of the Google search, you can force it off page one by flooding the internet with positive content you control.

• The basic posting is free.  You can upgrade your posting for a reasonable price.  For the upgrade you get access to  more resume templates.
• You can import your LinkedIn profile information and export your resume to Facebook.
• You can add a portfolio which is a great advantage if you are an artist or have other materials to display.
• The site also allows for uploading of video.  I caution you to consider including a video advertisement of yourself in a detailed blog posting.
• You can post multiple resumes, where sites like LinkedIn only allows one.  I am still not sure how job seeker’s interested in multiple fields are to manage this duplicate personality on the internet.  If you post two resumes, each emphasizing a different industry or skill set, you may be sending a confusing message to hiring managers.
• Your resume can be downloaded in PDF or a Word document.
• The home page that you log into provides statistics on number of page views and visits to your page.

What this site doesn’t do and someone needs to, is make it easy to complete the individual company online applications easily.  Most of the individual company forms are powered by a handful of human resources systems such as Ceridian.  These have an import feature that will decipher your basic information and load it into their format.  But no one that I know of has an information reservoir that you can load into it the answers to questions not commonly found on a resume.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could answer that you are over 18 and a US citizen one time and the information populate application fields automatically.  This would leave you time to focus on customizing your message to the company.  Hopefully one day some one will make this possible and secure.

DoYouBuzz is not to be confused with Google’s BUZZ social media service.

When Does the Interview Start?

[tweetmeme] A colleague of mine was driving back from lunch in no particular hurry.  She had an appointment with a sales rep for a surgical laser.  He would wait if she was late.  After all,  he needed her recommendation to the capital purchases committee.  He on the other hand, had to be on time.  Being late was not acceptable to his client or to his own company’s standards. As he cut in and out of traffic on the busy highway, he floated in a rhythm just ahead of the flow.  Then he happened upon a nonchalant driver moving at the speed limit,

if you can believe that.  She broke his beautiful dash from the left lane to the right lane and back again as he almost clipped her bumper.   She hit the horn with a furry at his dangerous driving behavior. He in turn raised his hand in a distinctive, arrogant one finger solute as he sped off.  His confidence in the sale froze when he was ushered into the Director of Surgery’s office ten minutes after his arrival.  Standing to greet him, was the nonchalant driver with a look of superiority on her face.  It wasn’t until well into the conversation that she brought up the traffic incident, further eroding the sales rep’s confidence.

The moral of the story is don’t get caught burning abridge before you even get a chance to cross it.

Know of any similar stories?  Please add as comments.

PS. for more advice on interviewing visit Job Interview Practice Services

Some other posts you might enjoy.

No Weakness – Really?

HARO – The Job Seeking Long-shot that Works!

Why Hire an Interview Coach.

Beating the Topgrader Interviewer at Their Own Game.

Bucket List

[tweetmeme] It all started when you lost your job.  The reason for being out of work doesn’t matter.  It happened.  The question is “what are you doing with your free time?”

Free time? A job search doesn’t require 40 hours of work, thus free time.  If you are not careful, people will fill up your free time with chores you can do for them.  Spouses are always inclined to have you pick up more of the family responsibility, and that’s OK.  They are pulling in a salary and you are not.  But when the neighbors start asking you to run their kids to soccer practice; your free time is suddenly gone.  Have your children been volunteering you for activities?  They want to keep you from depression.  Whatever the reason, your free time is slipping away; because you let it.

Don’t let any one manage your time for you.  What do you want to do with your free time?   Most job searches can be conducted via computer and the phone; which means a search can be done from anywhere for a short while.  Got a”bucket list“?  Its that list of things you want to do before you kick the bucket.  When you are no longer unemployed, you can be satisfied that while on sabbatical, you accomplished something.  Not everything has to be expensive.  Is write a book on the list?  Create a piece of art?  Run a marathon a wish?  Research your family genealogy? Making a difference in someone’s life.  Getting the idea?

Comment on what’s on your list and what you have accomplished while searching?