Here are some articles from other sources that I’ve come across that I hope will be of some benefit to you in your job search:
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Help! My Job Search is Taking Years!
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10 Signs Your Interview Went Well
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5 Things You Need to Tell Hiring Managers
Competition in the job market is fierce, and if you hope to land a new position, you must stand out from the crowd — but for the right reasons. You want to provide hiring managers with a positive impression, so here are a few messages you should get across right from the start.
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Take Note! Don’t Forget to Say “Thanks”
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What Makes You Different From the Other Job Seekers?
You’re special.
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It’s Been 10 Years Since My Last Job Search…
Dealing with the ‘Overqualified’ Label
Working for $10 an hour as a Starbucks barista is not exactly where Teresa Fritschi, 48, pictured herself at this stage of her career. Especially not after working as an award-winning communications specialist and earning more than $300,000 per year.
After being unemployed for almost three years before taking on the position at Starbucks as a fallback, Fritschi says that although her lifestyle has changed dramatically, she feels blessed to have a job at all.
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15 Jobs the Stimulus Plan May Boost
The 10 Biggest Minutes of Your Interview
You’ve heard it said often: “First impressions are the most important.”
When it comes to the job interview, here’s recent proof that bears this out:
“Hiring managers often know whether they might hire someone soon after the opening handshake and small talk,” a new survey suggests. Executives polled said it takes them just 10 minutes to form an opinion of job seekers, despite meeting with staff-level applicants for 55 minutes and management-level candidates for 86 minutes, on average. Executives were asked, “How long does it typically take you to form either a positive or negative opinion of a job candidate during an initial interview?” The mean response was 10 minutes.*
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Job seekers with no ties to any particular location often seek jobs in big cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or San Francisco. But are these the places where they’re most likely to find a job?
Are You Employable?
Excerpted from “Career Building: Your Total Handbook for Finding a Job and Making It Work”
Here’s the bottom line: You have to get a job, you have to go to work and someday, you’ll probably have to change jobs. “CAREER BUILDING: Your Total Handbook for Finding a Job and Making It Work” (Collins Business) is a one-stop guide for navigating all those times in your career.
For some people, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is a guiding principle. And if you’ve found one job, you can certainly find another. You know all you need to know about job hunting, right?
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Could You Survive on Minimum Wage?
When someone — radio talk-show hosts, political pundits, your angry relative waving a dinner roll at you on Thanksgiving — discusses state and federal rights, it’s usually about something rather controversial. The topics are usually left out of polite conversation for fear of enraging the opposing side.
Lost in the shuffle of touchy subjects is the issue of minimum wage. Plenty of dust has been raised over the issue, but most people just accept the fact that there is a federal minimum wage and a state one (or at least the option for a state one). Regardless of whether you think all employers in all states should be held to the same wage or you believe it’s a case-by-case choice, you’d be surprised to see how much wages vary across the country.
Laid-off workers need to keep skills sharp
Losing a job can mean losing more than just a paycheck. Without some planning, an extended layoff can cause job skills to fade and make someone less attractive to potential employers.
And it’s not just the unemployed 8.1 percent of the workforce that has to worry about a personal brain drain. Add in those working part time or who have given up looking for a job, and the Labor Department says 14.8 percent of the U.S. work force is “underutilized.”
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Why wasn’t I hired: Dealing with rejection
There’s nothing more frustrating than putting the time and energy into a face-to-face interview, only to get little to no information on why you didn’t get a job. Unfortunately, this is becoming commonplace throughout the work world, as more and more hiring managers opt to ditch civility and do little to follow-up with desperate job applicants.
There’s a host of reasons why.
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How to Ace a Job Interview: Preparing for Those Common Job Interview Questions
Dress nice. Be on time. Remember to breathe. While these are all great tips for your job interview, there’s so much more to know. You need to be prepared if you really want that new position. Whether you’re new to the workforce or are switching jobs after many years, it’s time to brush up on your job interview skills. Plus: Do you make a good first impression?
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Hundreds of Applications and Still No Job?
Here’s how every job seeker secretly hopes his or her search will go:
8:00 a.m. You see an ad for the job of your dreams: close to home, makes use of your skills, offers the right pay.
8:05 a.m. You apply for the job.
8:07 a.m. The hiring manager, out of breath, calls you. “We must have you. The CEO said to pay whatever you ask for — we need you on our team ASAP!”
8:10 a.m. After you give your demands (a high salary and access to the company jet), you’re faxed the job offer.
8:15 a.m. You head out the door to your first day of work.
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The Full-Time Job of Finding a Job
If you find yourself unemployed, very often the silver lining is that you have the time to do all those things you never could while working. But as many job seekers soon discover, lack of income and the need for a new job can hinder your recreational activities. After all, do you want to spend your savings on a trip to Europe if you don’t have a job lined up?
If you’re a job seeker, you can find yourself struggling to balance the demands of finding a new job and being tempted by your newfound free time. When you’re checking job postings earlier than you ever showed up to the office, it dawns on you that a job search is its own full-time gig.
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Want That Job? 6 Body Language Tips
Reading and understanding body language is critical to your success in a job interview. Nonverbal communication equips you to understand what interviewers are thinking, helping you tweak your body language to get them to like you … and offer you the job!
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Job Search No Place for Emoticons and Texting
“Job hunters seem to be more casual now than in the past … we all know we get better information from someone if we put them at ease,” she says. “But, this opens the door to the inevitable too much information.”
Hiring managers and recruiters like Cote agree that things like emoticons, text message lingo, instant message abbreviations, and even social networking friend requests are all part of a growing trend among job seekers: extremely lax communication.
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10 Résumé Missteps that Hurt Your Job Search
Job hunting is a process that has always evolved with the times. Over the last decade we’ve seen it change radically as job seekers took their hunts online. As a result, many of the rules have been tweaked for this digital age.
Still, one component of the process that hasn’t gone anywhere is the résumé. That one document can still be the make-or-break for your new job. Some of the same pitfalls that existed 50 years ago exist today; others are a little different. To help you land that coveted position, here are 10 missteps to avoid when you’re writing your résumé.
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25 Jobs that Pay $25-an-Hour
If you work a salaried position, the numbers you’re most familiar with are probably the ones that show up in your bank account. When you’re used to getting paid a certain amount of money every year, it’s unlikely that you’ve boiled your compensation down to what you’re earning per hour.
The national mean average salary is $42,504, according to the National Compensation Survey. That boils down to $3,269.54 per month and $817.38 per week*. Divide that by the standard 40-hour workweek and you’re making $20.43 per hour. Not too shabby, eh?
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What You Need to Know About Job Scams
Scenario: Imagine searching online for jobs one day, applying to a handful of them and hearing back from one of the employers. After an e-mail interview process, you are told that your new job as a finance manager requires you to transfer money deposits made to your personal bank account to a new account. You sign the contract and send it off via e-mail.
You receive your first assignment: Transfer money overseas. Upon going to the bank to make the transfer, you are arrested on the spot and charged with grand felony theft because the money you were about to forward was stolen. You are indicted by a grand jury for the theft and now, you’re awaiting trial and facing prison time if convicted.
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Awesome Job or Devious Scam?
Make $4,000 a Week from Home — No Sales!
No experience necessary!
Earn $35,000 – $50,000 a year working part-time!
Sounds great, right? Well, like most things in life, if it seems too good to be true, it usually is. From envelope-stuffing schemes to mystery shopper promotions, the world of scam ads is wide and complex. The problem with many work-at-home schemes is that they require the worker to spend their own money to get started, and once they do, there’s often no return on investment. In many cases, you will have to foot the bill for supplies, starter kits, training and more. Other situations that claim to be “easy money with no sales” often do involve a great deal of sales work in challenging environments. ============================================================================
Keeping Your Online Job Search Safe
The most common scams involving online job searching are obvious to most people. Check-cashing scams involve requests to “process payments,” usually for international companies that claim they can’t process their client’s payments themselves. These are often accompanied by legitimate looking contracts, false documents bearing company letterhead and even false letters of credit, payment schedules and bank drafts. ============================================================================
25 Ways to Sabotage Your Job Search
The first steps:
1. Not keeping track of your accomplishments
When you’re happy with your job, it’s easy to forget about possible future job hunts. You never know when you’ll end up looking for new work, and if you don’t keep a running list of awards, promotions and accomplishments, you might not remember them when it’s time to update your résumé.
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15 Worst States to Find Work
The largest numerical decrease in employment since November 2008 was in California, which lost 78,200 jobs, followed by Michigan, New York, Illinois, Indiana and North Carolina, respectively. Idaho saw the largest percentage cut in employment since December 2008 (1.6 percent), followed by Michigan, Hawaii and Indiana.
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25 Low-Stress Jobs
“A workplace challenge puts a demand on you that temporarily goes beyond the routine level for your job,” writes Laurence Shatkin in his book, “150 Best Low-Stress Jobs.” Being more creative, paying extra attention to details or speeding up to meet a certain deadline are all examples of how a challenge might stress you out. You meet challenges willingly, however, because you know you have a reasonable chance of meeting the demand, he says.
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5 Salaries You Thought Would Be Higher
“You can relax afterward, knowing that a similar demand won’t arise for a while. Even if you don’t meet the challenge, you still have the feeling that you might be able to tackle a similar demand in the future,” Shatkin says. “Such challenges are the exception rather than the norm for your job.”
To keep you from breaking into your neighbor’s home to take a peek at his or her checkbook, we’ve put together a list of occupations and the salaries that just might surprise you because they don’t earn as much as you’d expect. It’s not that these salaries are low; it’s that when you take into account what these people go through, you’d probably expect to see bigger numbers on their pay stubs.
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Where the Work Is
Wyoming recorded the lowest unemployment rate, 3.4 percent, followed closely by North Dakota, at 3.5 percent. Total employment increased in only one state, Louisiana, and the District of Columbia. Louisiana improved by 3,700 and employment in the District of Columbia increased by 100.
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The Most and Least Popular Jobs in Each State
Since December 2007, employment has risen in eight states and the District of Columbia. Wyoming had the largest increase in employment over the year (2.2 percent), followed by Texas, Oklahoma, Alaska and South Dakota.
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5 Ways to Battle Job Search Rejection
As we grow older, we’re still curious about popularity, but not everyone takes the same attitude toward it. For some, popularity equals fitting in; for others, it means lacking originality. And for others, they don’t care, they just like to see what the masses are (and aren’t) into these days.
With that in mind, we’ve put together a list of the most and least popular jobs in each state (and Washington, D.C.) based on the number of employed workers.
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Out of Work? It’s Time to Get Connected
Success in a job search is easy to deal with; a job offer feels good, validates us and allows us to move forward in life. We all want it and strive for it. Nevertheless, for most job seekers, our successes are infrequent. They’re sandwiched between boatloads of indifference, rejection and apparent failure. If you’ve been hunting for a job very long, you know what I’m talking about. Job search is one big exercise in rejection until you win that job you’ve been pursuing.
So, what can you do when you get rejected?
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13 Companies Hiring in the New Year
LinkedIn and Facebook, the two biggest, are seeing membership rise as those out of work stampede to the Internet to find jobs. (Unique visits to both LinkedIn and Facebook are up more than 100 percent this past year, according to Nielsen.)
“The rush online to these sites started in the spring, when the economy started to look bad, but after the financial collapse we saw a huge rush,” says Matthew Fraser, a senior research fellow at the international business school INSEAD and co-author of forthcoming book “Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom: How Online Social Networking Will Transform Your Life, Work and World.” “People are trying to build social capital online as a hedge towards uncertainty.”
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America’s Low-Paying Jobs
“This is a difficult economy, no doubt,” says Andrea Hough, vice president of talent acquisition for ServiceMaster, a lawn care and landscape maintenance company. “However, I would caution job seekers to be thoughtful about whom they are going to work for and not act out of desperation. There are some very strong companies with solid ethics in need of employees eager to be a part of a thriving organization.”
Many low-paying jobs are perfect fits for students who want to earn a little cash or for anyone who wants a second job. Often, these jobs have flexible or unconventional hours, so you’re not stuck in a cubicle from 8 to 5 every day. Perhaps more importantly, these jobs allow you to get a taste of a company or industry so that you can begin building your career.
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Tips for Working Multiple Jobs
Start Some Engines and Watch Your Hobby Turn Into Cash
A lot of people are automotive enthusiasts, but if you have more than admiration and can actually turn the hunk of parts in your garage into something amazing, you may want to polish your skills by doing some detail work for other motorists. From vintage Vespas to classic cars, there are a lot of people out there who could use your knowledge on auto repair or where to find the best parts at the best price. Anyone who uses a motorized vehicle could use a trustworthy person who knows what they are doing and won’t rip them off. If you create enough recognition for yourself, your labors of love could turn into a secondary income and offer you a break from the office.
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Damage Control for Your Job Search
“Things don’t always go as planned in the job search. People may encounter all kinds of worst-case scenarios throughout the process. The key to maintaining your momentum in the job hunt is to know how to handle problems and recover from your mistakes,” says Molly Fletcher, a top female sports agent, author of “Your Dream Job Game Plan” (JIST © 2009), and president of client representation at Career Sports and Entertainment.
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Dirty Jobs (And the Workers Who Take Them On)
But there are hundreds of tough blue-collar jobs available, too. Many of them have been immortalized in a slew of reality television shows like “Deadliest Catch,” which depicts crab fishermen battling the Bering Sea; “Dirty Jobs,” which portrays workers who earn a living doing unspeakable tasks; “America’s Toughest Jobs,” which reveals some of the most dangerous jobs on Earth, and “Ice Road Truckers,” which features truck drivers transporting heavy loads across frozen bodies of water.
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