ExitBuddy

Original Post: August 6, 2009 by Rich DeMatteo Being shy can be a networking asset, you just need to know how to use it.  Remember, the world craves balance.  If networking events were made up of entirely extroverts, they would drive themselves crazy.  Here are COTJ's 5 networking tips for shy or introverted people: 1. Utilize Social Media – Begin networking first on Linkedin, Facebook, Myspace, or any web 2.0 destination that connects you to people with similar interests.  Start building up your contacts/friends list, and build up your relationship with these people.  Once you feel comfortable, invite them to join a networking event with you.  This may help the lessen any intimidation you may feel of going it alone.   2 . Use being shy to your advantage -  People absolutely love carrying on about themselves, so provide an ear for them to let loose on, and you'll make a friend in the process.  Don't be intimidated by louder, extroverted net workers.  They need you, and ...

Original Post: What it Feels Like to Get Fired : "Today I got fired from my summer internship. Okay, so that’s a lie . I wasn’t fired. It was the last day of my internship, and I wasn’t offered a full-time job after graduation—which feels like getting fired when it was “my offer to lose.” I think I said that I was fired so I could feel like Heather Armstrong , a now-famous blogger who got fired for blogging about work . Alas, I didn’t get fired for writing about work—although that is definitely not okay—at least not while you are still working there. I got fired for a lot of other things—like being late to meetings a lot, not listening well, and being “too aggressive.” When responding to the feedback I received, my voice shook like I would cry, but I didn’t, and I’m proud of that. Still haven’t cried. Don’t plan on it. I’ve never been fired actually. I’ve come quite close several times. When I worked at the movie theater and grocery store in high school, my till would come up ...

Original Post: Read Your Résumé from the Bottom Up to Reduce Errors [Resume] : " Getting a job in this tight economy necessitates making a great first impression, which leaves little-to-no room for typos and other résumé mistakes. The Washington Post details some ways to help outline your credentials more accurately. Photo by kafka4prez . While most of their suggestions aren't revolutionary (see: printing out your résumé), one of their tips seems like an interesting way to help avoid glaring errors. According to the post, prospective employees should review their résumés from the bottom up. The writer contends that this backwards approach will more fully ensure that you don't skip over sections, as opposed to reading from the top down, which may lead to skimming more readily than working your way up. In interviews with 150 senior executives from the nation's 1,000 largest companies, 40 percent of the respondents said that just one typo on a résumé would kick a job ca...

What Not To Do Original Post: Are You Hiring? Look Out For Fake Job Reference Agencies [Employment] : " Are you looking for a job? Do you need positive references, but don't have anyone left from your old employer who would say nice things about you after the incident with the office bagel tray, shaving cream, and a box of gerbils? Don't worry. You can take care of that with a few hundred dollars. Yes, Alibi HQ, a company better known for providing fake invitations, conference programs, and phone screening to give people plausible cover stories, also provides employment services. They provide fake references and employment verification services. From their page: If you're in need of Fake Job Reference services, we'll provide a local or toll free number for your previous employer or employers. We'll answer all incoming calls as the fictitious company and confirm your dates of employment, indicate that you are eligible to be rehired. The reader who shared t...

Original post: http://blog.brand-yourself.com/2009/phone-interview-tips/ Bethany Stringer posted an article on 9 phone interview blunders. 1. Do not stammer or use excessive slang . Uh, um, and like are horrible fillers in speech. It is better to pause momentarily to collect thoughts than it is to explain that you were the, uh, like, uh head, uh cashier. Practice answering potential questions with a friend or family member to help weed out these unnecessary (and unprofessional) words. 2. Do not reply in all yes’s and no’s . Answer with some personal experiences that are relevant to the job in question. Yes/no answers do not help sell your personal brand to the interviewer. 3. Do not lose focu s. Remember this is an interview, not an exposé. Keep answers pithy and to the point. Go to an area where there will be limited distractions and both people can hear each other clearly. 4. Do not volunteer informatio n. This is hopefully a preliminary interview, so there’s no need to commit...

from Lifehacker by MainStreet.com Avoiding pricey credit card fees isn't the only reason to opt for cash over credit (although it's a good one). Nowadays, using cash over credit has some additional post-recession benefits. After all, with consumer demand low, some businesses, including auto dealers and electronics retailers, are offering better deals for cash-carrying customers. Other service providers may cut you a deal, too. So why pay cash over credit? Let us count the ways: Flee the Fee-Fest : With new credit regulations coming down the pike next year, card carriers are rushing to add new fees and charges to card holders before the hammer comes down next February. Some of the new fees, like fees for paying bills over the phone via credit card or higher fees for tardy payments, may drive cardholders over the edge, and have them leave their plastic at home and more cash in their wallet. Use Cash, Cut a Better Deal : Retailers are beginning to rebel against the automa...

Tim Tyrell-Smith wrote that there are 5 leaks in your job search strategy. You can find the original article here . Tim wrote this for [ JobMob ] 5 typical job search problems Hole #1 leaks Time: Inefficient Strategy If you wake up every morning, hop on the computer and search for jobs (via Monster or AllJobs) for hours, there’s a hole in your bucket. You are losing valuable time every day. Time that could be spent meeting with real people, completing informational interviews , and using Linkedin, Plaxo or Xing to find contacts at your target companies. Since you cannot and should not search for work 12 hours a day, focus your key search hours on the right efforts . Hole #2 leaks Opportunity: Uninspired Elevator or Introductory Speech So you stand up at the big networking event when it is your turn to speak in front of 50 other people, some of whom might be able to influence your job search. You speak too softly, don’t make eye contact, don’t deliver a compelling message and ...

Hiring Consultant Warns: "No Connection Between Credit History And Job Performance" [Discrimination] : " Almost half of all employers use credit reports to judge job applicants, even though credit histories have no relation to job performance . Personal finance goofs are only relevant for jobs that deal directly with money—cashiers, account managers, and the like. For everyone else, negative credit reports keep otherwise capable people from securing a job to help avoid further financial problems. So why do so many companies still ask for credit reports? Hiring consultant Nancy Schuman explains: Some companies believe they can deduce how a person will handle their job responsibilities based on how they handle their personal finances. Others use the information to gauge how long a person might stay in a position if their debt load is higher than a position pays. It is also used to verify employment history and a social security number. There is no clear connection b...

Why Resisting Change is Boring : " In recent posts ( here and here ), I’ve been sharing about some of the powerful life skills and lessons I’ve been gleaning from impro story-telling. Impro is a form of theatre where the story is made up by the team of actors as they act it out. Nobody knows where the story will go, because they’re creating it together on the spot, often in collaboration with the audience. The context of uncertainty that’s created within the impro games and story-telling sessions is in many ways similar to the fast-paced, high-change, unpredictable environments that many of us are living and working in these days, so I’ve found a lot of the impro perspectives and skills are highly relevant to thriving in this era - particularly the perspectives on embracing, rather than resisting, uncertainty and change. Why we resist change You’ve probably realized this yourself: on a deep level, we guard ourselves against change. From a survival point of view, our bodies ar...

Original Post: The Future of Work: Future-proof Your Career With Scenario Planning : " Rounding off our week of features on the Future of Work , I thought it appropriate to consider methods of exploring the future, in particular ways to help you think about your career trajectory. Perhaps one of the most well-known and used mechanisms for understanding possible futures is scenario planning . Scenario planning essentially helps construct “storylines” that draw together factors from various overlapping domains — politics, technology, culture, demographics — into narratives that can sometimes yield surprising, serendipitous insights. Scenario planning has a long history of use as a predictive tool in the military and large organizations, but it’s also surprisingly applicable to individuals who wish to model, simulate and explore their own personal future. A recent piece in Wired outlines a method for personal scenario planning to help workers consider and imagine their career fut...

UpMo.com Offers Uber Personalized Job Searches And Counseling : " With unemployment rates still high, the competition among online job boards is heating up. One startup is hoping to take a piece of the pie by offering a highly-personalized job search feature. UpMo.com has launched the Intelligent Job Hunt, a tool that determines a job hunter’s ideal career path and job opportunities based on an algorithm. Intelligent Job Hunt’s algorithm identifies and prioritizes job matches based upon certain aspects of a user’s career, including past, present and future jobs, network (i.e. LinkedIn) connections, professionals they’d like to emulate and personality attributes. UpMo also attempts to pinpoints the activities you should be doing and the specific job opportunities you should be pursuing to increase your chances of getting the job you want. Of course, the bells and whistles that accompany UpMo’s job search platform aren’t free. UpMo’s membership fee is $6.99 per month, whereas Car...

7 Quick Rules for Networking To Your Next Job : " Network your way to your next job by following these rules. This a guest post by Yvette Francino. 1) Become familiar with the social networking tools like LinkedIn, FaceBook, and Twitter Networking has always been the most important strategy in finding a job. Before we had social networking tools, we dug out our list of contacts and blindly went out trying to find people that might be able to help us with our job search. There are “leads meetings” where people exchange business cards and give their elevator pitches. These methods are still useful ways to network. However, by using tools such as LinkedIn , FaceBook , and Twitter we are able to be much more intelligent with how we network. Social media tools allow us an easy way for keeping in touch and expanding our networks, finding mutually beneficial relationships . These tools, particularly LinkedIn, are absolutely essential in the modern day job search. There are also many ...

Jul 29th, 2009 by Nut If your answer is "one," then you're missing out. Having one resume means that you're most likely to apply to just one type of job, and going to limit how many open jobs you apply to. Which means you probably won't find a job as quickly as someone who has four or five. The reason is obvious: you'll have more options if you have several different types of skills so you can apply to different types of jobs. So can you just fire up a word processor and create five different versions of your existing resume? Nope, that would be pointless. Instead, try to get more experience at your current work. Freelance on the side. Blog. Get "another job" in the sense that you're still with your current company but you wear different hats and see what you're good at. You'll make yourself a more valuable employee and you'll get the experience...

from Lifehacker by Adam Pash In this economy, many of us are looking for a little extra cash wherever we can get it, which means your income may vary greatly from one month to the next. So how do you budget accordingly? Personal finance weblog Get Rich Slowly tackles the sometimes complicated subject of budgeting for an irregular income. The post is written from the perspective of a professional blogger, but it applies just as well to most anyone who's self-employed or does freelance work. In a nutshell, the author suggests projecting your cash flow as best you can and then building your budget with a couple of different bank accounts. The first is your "business" account (without quotes for those of you who actually own businesses), which is where you deposit all of your income. My business account is a high-yield savings account with ING Direct . (You might use FNBO Direct or some other bank. Just choose something with a high interest rate.) The second is your ...

Indeed Now Gets The Most Pageviews For Job Searches In The U.S. : " With the unemployment rate still above 9 percent, a lot of people are hitting the job boards. One set of companies that are growing under these conditions, at least in terms of Website traffic, are the job search engines. But the one that seems to be growing the fastest is Indeed . In July, Monster’s job search engine was up 33 percent in U.S. pageviews, CareerBuilders’ was up 56 percent, and Indeed’s was up 90 percent (comScore). Not only is Indeed the fastest growing job search engine it is also now the largest in terms of pageviews. In July, it passed CareerBuilder , with 171 million pageviews in the U.S. versus 159 million for CareerBuilder. Yahoo’s HotJobs had 96 million (which Yahoo is reportedly abandoning ), Monster had 73 million, and SimplyHired trailed far behind with 26 million. In terms of unique visitors, CareerBuilder is still larger with 10.1 million in July versus 8.7 million for Indeed, w...

Real World Example: The Logic Recruiters Use To Find Candidates : " Knowing how recruiters reason can help improve your chances of being chosen as a candidate. This is a guest post by executive recruiter Todd Porter. The following is a unique micro-perspective on the recruiting process as it applies to one specific search I’m currently working on (August 2009). The classic recruitment problem Hiring managers and job seekers often feel like they are being shortchanged in the recruiting process. Hiring Managers see too many candidates that don’t fit what they are looking for, whereas… Job seekers often feel that they are perfect and don’t understand why they aren’t being considered. Have realistic expectations Here is an e-mail I sent to one of our Israeli customers in Houston.  It explains why I had not been successful in filling a controller position. This exercise had these goals as objectives: Explain the points we thought were important in the search Make sure the compensation ...

Indeed Ranks the Most Crowded Job Markets [Job Search] : " Indeed , a Hive Five winner for best online job search site , posts a ranked list of U.S. cities, showing off the ratio of unemployed folks in a city to the job listings Indeed can find for it. It's far from scientific, as both Indeed is not the absolute standard for job finding, and not every unemployed person is hunting for jobs in that city. But it is intriguing data porn—and thoroughly disheartening for those living in California or, like certain Lifehacker editors, upstate New York. If you're hunting for a job, this list won't preclude you from landing a great gig in any of these cities, but it might help you prioritize where you spend your energies. Best and Worst Job Markets [Indeed.com via TechCrunch ]

This post was written by Daniel Bowen and originally appeared on his blog Young And Frugal , a site dedicated to Business and Personal Finance for Generation Y. If you like what you see here, be sure to check out Young And Frugal . Original article here NEWSFLASH: No one cares about your resume. What's that you say? You've spent hours perfectly crafting every word in order to make yourself look fantastic on paper? You even read my advice on resume building?  That's very kind of you, but I repeat, no one cares, and here are 5 reasons why. Resumes are boring . No one wants to read them, not even recruiters. It's a chore that takes time, and realistically the last time you did read one (instead of glance at it) was when you were writing your own. People are lying to protect your feelings . When was the last time you or someone you know told a friend you wouldn't forward their resume on because it was crap? When was the last time you asked for resume advice an...

from getpickd This post is part two in a series on common mistakes made by job applicants and easy fixes for addressing those mistakes. Warning: Arriving early to an interview may adversely affect your chances of being hired. It is important to show up on time for an interview. This is a rule of thumb that won't come as a surprise for most readers of this post. Incorrectly, most job applicants believe it is important to simply not arrive late to an interview. However, it is nearly as important to not show up more than five minutes early either. With many employers, arriving too early for an interview is only a slightly lesser offense than arriving late. Why is arriving too early a blow to your chances of winning the job? The answer is quite simple. One of the primary goals of the interview process is to determine a prospective candidate's understanding of, and ability to operate within, the norms of a professional environment. One of those norms is an understanding of how you...

Common mistakes. Easy fixes. (part one) This post is part one in a series on common mistakes made by job applicants and easy fixes for addressing those mistakes. "What would you describe as your greatest strengths and weaknesses?" This is one of the more frustrating (and most common) questions that a potential employer might ask you during an interview. It is also a question that most applicants respond to incorrectly . Let's start with the worst possible (and most common) r esponse to this question: "My greatest strength is also my greatest weakness." This is generally followed by a discussion about how the applicant tends to work too hard, or that they pay too much attention to detail, or some variation of this. As an employer, I'm not a big fan of this question, but I do ask it, specifically to see if the applicant will respond in this manner. Even if you are being honest, this response will come across as completely phon...

from LifeDev by glen Photo by the half-blood prince There's a Chinese restaurant called the Panda Garden that my family used to frequent every Sunday. I recently read in a paper that it had been voted one of the best Chinese restaurants in Lawrence annually . That's pretty impressive, considering there are a slew of Chinese restaurants in the college town. The annual award might be because of the cuisine, but I have a different theory. I believe the Panda Garden is consistently voted best Chinese restaurant because of the owner. The owner is one of the most personable people you'll ever meet. Without fail every day, you can see the owner walking around and chatting with every single table, asking how the food is and getting to know her customers. She isn't friendly because she believes she'll get more business from repeat customers (which she does). You can tell from the moment the owner approaches the table that she's truly interested in how the food...

Close an account and remove your profile from LinkedIn by completing the following steps: Log into the account you wish to close. Click on 'Account & Settings' found at the top of the home page. Click on 'Close Your Account' under Personal Information. Select a reason for closing your account. Click on 'Continue'.

from Consumerist by Carey Almost half of all employers use credit reports to judge job applicants, even though credit histories have no relation to job performance . Personal finance goofs are only relevant for jobs that deal directly with money—cashiers, account managers, and the like. For everyone else, negative credit reports keep otherwise capable people from securing a job to help avoid further financial problems. So why do so many companies still ask for credit reports? Hiring consultant Nancy Schuman explains: Some companies believe they can deduce how a person will handle their job responsibilities based on how they handle their personal finances. Others use the information to gauge how long a person might stay in a position if their debt load is higher than a position pays. It is also used to verify employment history and a social security number. There is no clear connection between a credit history and job performance, and many job seekers consider it to be an unfai...

from WebWorkerDaily by Charles Hamilton image via webdesignblog.com In the current economy, business networking is more important than ever — we need to use lots of different techniques for finding clients. Social networks can be a great addition to our marketing toolboxes. Since I started actively using social networks (only a year and a half ago!), I've reconnected with old friends, and have gotten quite of bit of business that can be directly attributed to connections that were facilitated through these networks. But social networks can also be great time-wasters, too. However, If you focus on the marketing aspects of the networks, the time spent using them can consist of, as Meryl says, " zero-guilt activities ." Here are some tips for using social networks as effective marketing tools. Join the active networks. There are literally thousands of social networks to choose from ( digFoot lists over 3,700). But most are small, not very active, or of interest only...

by Beth Harris Having an enjoyable job (or, if you are like me, a job that isn't so bad) is not just about what you do. After working in different corporate settings, and being as free spirited as I am, I realize that as long as I work with my mind and not my hands, I will define what I do as moving paper (as one person told me, in the "corporate" world, we move paper from one side of our desks to the other). The secret to enjoying your job is enjoying the personal dynamics that you create. Having friends at work isn't the only thing that matters. Liking the people you work with, or at the very least respecting them and seeing them as competent, is just as important. A few years ago, a job hunting website ran a commercial to advertise their services. The premise involved a person was working for a room full of monkeys. At the time I thought: how could it ever be that bad. And then I worked for a job where it seemed that everyone was literally flying by the seat ...

from Brazen Careerist by bpovlins Within any business there are two different types of employees.  There's no difference between a huge corporation and a small business in this aspect - there are still going to be employees that fit these two types. Type 1 - These employees have an agenda.  They may want to rise up to a higher position, or make themselves more marketable for future opportunities.  They start new initiatives.  They mention their ideas to management about how to improve the company.  They form relationships with coworkers they might not normally interact with.  They lead projects.  They raise their hands in meetings and say "I'll figure it out and get it taken care of."  They make things happen. Type 2 - These employees literally watch the clock.  They do what their told and then waste the rest of their time sitting around and doing nothing.  They complain to coworkers.  The standard response when asked to do something new is "That's not ...