Blog Your Way to a New Job: How to Use a Personal Blog as a Career Stepping Stone - Careers Articles

There are as many ways to find your next job by blogging as there are blogs. So when it comes to blogging your way to a new job, the tried-and-true rules apply: write what you know about, follow your bliss and make honest connections.

Some personal bloggers publish posts that give details about their job search. And with the clever use of search engine optimization, links and tags, these bloggers gain the attention of hiring managers in their field.

Other bloggers create their own jobs.

In Brooklyn, New York, for example, a borough wide group of bloggers calling themselves the Brooklyn Blogade joins together on a regular basis to share their ideas on what topics to cover, how to write a good blog post, blog technology, techniques for driving Web traffic to a blog such as RSS feeds, ways to monetize a blog and the use of marketing, branding and promotion tools.

One blogger, for example, Louise Crawford of Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn, has successfully promoted her blog by writing meaningful, newsy content. In addition, she frequently hosts neighborhood blogging events and has become known all over New York as a blogging expert. Early in 2010, she moved a step up the professional blogging ladder by moving her site to a new ad-friendly platform.

Another well-known (not to say notorious) New York blogger, Jake Dobkin, the publisher and co-founder of local news blog Gothamist, runs a site that covers the metro area so broadly and so well that he and his partner Jen Chung have hired a team of 15 editors and advertisers are coming to them, asking for ad space on the site.

"There's no secret to running a successful blog," Dobkin said at a recent Brooklyn blog event known as Blogfest. "You just create a lot of content, day after day, year after year."

Finally, David Leite's James Beard Award-winning food site, Leite's Culinaria, started out as a blog and has gone on to become an amazingly "sticky" website full of reviews, recipes, videos, podcasts and articles written by a large stable of writers.

"When you write a blog, you need to know what your brand is," Leite recently told a classroom full of aspiring food writers. "Mine is witty, sassy, welcoming and personal. Write a tagline for yourself. Decide what your brand is, what you represent and who you stand for. And once you find your niche, you have to stay there."

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Posted via email from AndyWergedal

Improve Your Interviews by 1,000,000%

Improve Your Interviews by 1,000,000%

July 9th, 2010

So I came up with this arbitrary percentage… I don’t know if you’ll improve by 100% or a gazillion percent… but I bet you will improve SIGNIFICANTLY (that’s a term we used in the MBA program that meant “enough to care about”).

How?  Should you:

• Study common questions and prepare answers ahead of time?
• Make sure you dress right and floss your teeth?
• Have a strong first impression (great handshake, flashy smile, etc.)?
• Tell stories?
• Relate to the interviewers?

Perhaps all of those, and more, will help you improve your job search interviews.  Here’s my one piece of advice to help you improve your interviews a ton:

Record yourself in a mock interview.

It is wierd.  You might feel silly and uncomfortable.  But when you review the recording, with some peers, you will uncover a lot of things and find yourself saying “wow, I didn’t know I did that with my hands,” or “why do I keep looking around the room, I look too nervous,” or “why can’t I just give my response smoothly,” or “I didn’t realize I said UM 40 times in that one response,” etc.

I don’t care how good you think you are…. record yourself, and have some others record themselves in a mock interview, and then sit down and critique the recordings.

You will find big and small things you can improve on.

I double-dog-dare you to do this.

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Posted via email from AndyWergedal

Twitter Users “More Likely To Get Job Interviews”

By Martin Bryant on July 1st, 2010

If we had £1 for every press release we receive that’s based around a survey we’d be extremely rich indeed. That said, this one is actually of interest. Apparently, Twitter users write better CVs and are more likely to be shortlisted for job interviews than the average jobhunter.

A report out today indicates that using Twitter trains people to be succinct in their writing, leading to interesting, eyecatching and short CVs which appeal to recruiters.

Professor Cary Cooper CBE, Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at Lancaster University Management School agrees with the study, which was carried out by analysing 500 UK CVs.  He said: “When reviewing CVs for the first time, employers may only ever see candidates’ short summaries, so a jobseeker with a standard, dull or uninteresting personal synopsis is less likely to be shortlisted.”

Is it Twitter use that trains people to write more succinctly, or does Twitter actually attract better writers in the first place? Professor Cooper seems to think the latter is true.

“Candidates who are innovative and novel in their use of language and identify themselves in a non-formulaic way are more likely to be people who use Twitter, or have their own blog. (Their) CV summary is more likely to be snappy, interesting and, ultimately, attention-grabbing.

“Twitter users more readily think about, and use, clever key words and they’re probably more expressive in an abridged style – the art of ‘getting to the point’ is not lost on people who Tweet.”

If you’re a jobhunter who uses Twitter, consider this story an ego boost. MyJobGroup.co.uk, the company that conducted the study is currently running a competition running to write your entire CV in the space of a tweet.

About the Author Martin Bryant is based in Manchester, UK. A co-founder of the city's monthly Social Media Cafe events and award-winning blogger, he is Digital Content Editor for Marketing Manchester. His main interests are developments in the social web that relate to the mobile and music industries. Twitter, Personal site

Sources and Links Thumbnail image: ImageIsBetter

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College Job or Stepping Stone? | CareerAlley

“A stepping-stone can be a stumbling block if we can’t see it until after we have tripped over it.” – Cullen Hightower

When we discuss the process of looking for your first job out of college, what we usually mean is looking for your first real job out of college. Most college grads have actually been in the working world for a while in one way or another, even if it’s just what many consider “unskilled” work in fast food, waitressing, bartending, working a register, lifeguarding or dog-walking.

It’s important that you view your current job—as well as your past college jobs—as stepping stones toward your future career. When filling out job applications, many people do not include some of their college jobs because they believe it might make them look bad (wearing a chicken costume for a fast food restaurant?) or that the job experience gained is not relevant to the job you are applying for (how does working a cash register relate to the entry-level accounting job you’re applying for?). But you may want to rethink these ideas.

Why? First of all, because employers like to see that you remained consistently employed for a long period of time. If you leave out that infamous chicken suit job from your resume, the person looking over your resume may wonder why you were not working during the blank time period. Secondly, there are ways you can make even the most embarrassing work look golden on a resume. Instead of writing “I wore a chicken suit for six hours a day,” you can write, “I creatively promoted and raised awareness for my company, helping to boost sales.” That doesn’t sound so bad now, does it?

While the chicken suit may be an extreme example, the important thing to remember is to look over every single college job you’ve had, scouring it for the job skills you acquired that a future employer would find valuable. For instance, the employer at the accounting job you’re applying for may not care that you worked a cash register, but they do care that you have experience handling money and that you helped train new cashiers (that shows leadership skills).

Your education and college job experience together is a powerful combo. In the education section of your resume, you can emphasize courses you took in communication and professional writing, for instance. In the job experience section, you can write that you “demonstrated excellent communication and conflict management skills” while waitressing or working with customers in another capacity. After all, didn’t you get quite adept back in the day at pacifying even the crankiest of customers?

The point to remember in all of this is that it is far better to list your college jobs than to strip your resume bare when applying for your first real job out of college. Sure, extracurricular activities, volunteering and GPA may look good on a college application, but they won’t do you too much good all by themselves on a job application.

Be creative in the way you include your college job experience, and think long and hard about the skills you’ve gained because of them. Good luck!

By-line:

This guest post is contributed by Kate Cunningham, who writes on the topics of online university rankings.  She welcomes your questions and comments at her email Id: cn.kate1@gmail.com. 

Good luck in your search.

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Posted via email from AndyWergedal

How You Give Away Power - Part 2 | Career Rocketeer - Career Search and Personal Branding Blog

Last week, we looked at the concept of giving away power in the interviewing process, why and how that happens, and a few ways to retain it instead, If you haven't read it, check out How You Give Away Power - Part 1. Now let’s look at additional reasons and ways to counter them.

When you haven’t identified what you want in your next job, what you want is….a job. Each interview becomes a hurdle you feel you need to clear. Rejections become a reason to double your effort to win over every hiring authority. Combined, both of them result in your giving away more power, not less.

Candidates unconsciously fear that they’ll be judged and found wanting. It automatically puts them on the defensive, eager to please. From innocuous things such as getting a tickle in your throat to being fired, they often fear these situations will be seen as egregious faults worthy of not making the cut. As if interviewers don’t sneeze without tissues? Or get laid off? Or worse?

Getting fired without cause is no reason to lose sleep over how to handle it. When you worry so much about its effect on your interview that you over explain, it actually costs you the job. As Shakespeare said, “Methinks you doth protest too much.” Rather than clearing the air, you’re suffusing it with increased doubt.

Instead of creating a concern for the interviewer, find a way to turn the anticipated concern into a positive and then introduce it into the conversation. When you understand how to do this in a manner that impacts the company, rather than you, then you’ve planted a positive thought before any negative has time to develop.

When you don’t know what you want – except the job – you try too hard. It comes through in your tone of voice, your body language, and your choice of words, however subtle that may be. The interviewer may not consciously pick it up, but he’ll react to it nonetheless. Interviewers are inclined to ferret out problems, go with preconceptions and stick with cookie cutter patterns under the impression that will result in a better hiring decision. Sometimes they’re actually looking for ways to eliminate you, whether you, and they, know it or not. Why help them find a problem? In fact, why give it to them on a silver platter?

If you don’t have a degree and that’s a “concern,” your answer should be, “I understand why you feel that’s important. Some of my employers have initially felt that way too. But as you can see from my resume, I’ve been very successful in this field and in my roles, and the lack of degree hasn’t impeded my ability to impact my employer positively.”

Notice you didn’t argue, nor did you deflate with despair, causing the interview to spiral further downward and cementing every negative you feared might take place. Instead, you’ve supported his opinion, acknowledged that it’s not the first time you’ve encountered it, and shown him – with an objective piece of paper – that it hasn’t made any difference in your performance, and you’ve brought it back to benefiting his company.

He’s challenging you to tell him why he should hire you when you lack what he wants. And you need to tell him, subtly, why his view is inaccurate and, at the same time, present him with the solution. In this example, it’s that equating a degree with success is a fallacy.

Know what you want. Present yourself in a positive manner that provides a solution rather than succumbing to their attempts to keep things cookie cutter safe. Learn how to read the signals and understand what’s going on below the surface, so that you hear what is really being said. And know how to ask questions to find out if it’s a company worth pursuing. Interviewing involves selling. It also involves gathering information. And it has to be done concurrently. That’s the way you keep your power.

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Guest Expert:

Judi Perkins, the How-To Career Coach, was a recruiter for 22 years, consulting with hundreds of hiring authorities throughout the hiring process. She’s seen over 500,000 resumes, knows how hiring authorities think and how they hire. As a result she understands and teaches what other coaches don’t: why the typical strategies in finding a job so often fail, what to do instead, and why. She’s been on PBS’s Frontline, will be in the May issue of Smart Money magazine, and has been quoted frequently in numerous articles for CareerBuilder, MSN Careers, Yahoo Hot Jobs, and the New York Times, among others. She’s also been featured as an expert in numerous career books. Sign up for her free newsletter at http://www.findtheperfectjob.com/

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Unemployment: 5 Things You Should Know This Week (July 5) - Careers Articles

By Lisa Johnson Mandell

There's a bit of good news this week involving the number of new people filing for unemployment benefits. Only 454,000 people made new claims last week, which may sound like a lot, but it's 21,000 fewer than the previous week's 475,000. The 4-week average was 466,000, a decrease of 1,250 from the previous week's revised average of 467,250.

Most experts agree that the weekly numbers must decline to below 400,000 new claims per week for any real progress to be made, but still, any decrease at all is good news. Here are five important unemployment facts derived from the most recently released numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

1. Fewer total on unemployment: The number of people participating in insured unemployment programs during the week ending June 26 was 4,413,000, a decrease of 224,000 from the preceding week's 4,637,000.

Who gets extended benefits: Extended benefits were still available in Alaska, Connecticut, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington at the end of last week.

States with fewer claims: The largest decreases in initial claims for the week ending June 26 were in Pennsylvania (-2,841), Tennessee (-1,375), Illinois (-1,346), Iowa (-1,230), and Alabama (-869). Those numbers are attributed to fewer layoffs in the manufacturing, trade, service, transportation, and transportation equipment industries.

States with more claims: The states with the largest increases in initial claims last week were New Jersey (+7,951), Massachusetts (+4,681), New York (+3,473), Florida (+2,838), and Connecticut (+2,560). Those increases in unemployment were mostly caused by more school closings, as well as layoffs in the service, manufacturing, construction, transportation, warehousing, and public administration industries.

States with most unemployment: The highest insured unemployment rates in the week ending June 19 were in Puerto Rico (6.7 percent), Oregon (4.9), Alaska (4.8), Pennsylvania (4.7), Nevada (4.5), California (4.3), Wisconsin (4.2), Connecticut (4.0), North Carolina (3.9), and South Carolina (3.9).

A bit of disheartening news came from the number of newly discharged veterans filing for unemployment last week, up 305 to 2,286, from 2,381 the previous week. Still, with the unemployment rate dipping to 9.5 and the overall number of people filing for new unemployment benefits decreasing, all in all, the numbers for the last full week of June are encouraging.

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Will Congress Extend Unemployment? - Careers Articles

By Lauren A. Fairbanks

There was an outcry over the fact that Congress once again held up passing a vote to extend unemployment benefits for an estimated 2 million jobless Americans.

According to new unemployment statistics that came out last Friday, there is an increase in the unemployment rate (to 9.5%) with 125,000 jobs lost. A bill to extend unemployment benefits to unemployed workers has stood stalled in Congress for a month as the GOP has so far blocked any attempts to extend unemployment benefits, even as unemployment rates still rise and there is no current major increase in hiring. The Republican move, stemming from a stance to stop government spending, has effectively cut off unemployment benefits for millions of unemployed workers who need those small stipends to cover their living expenses while looking for work.

After a refusal on the Democrat's side to move previously earmarked stimulus funds over to cover the unemployment extension, the bill was once again stalled last week - right before Congress took their vacation for the July Fourth holiday.

On top of the question of where the money to extend unemployment will come from, there's also a notion being thrown around that unemployed workers collecting unemployment are spending less time looking for a job, and instead treating their unemployment period as an extended vacation. "There is an economic argument that the longer you extend unemployment benefits, the longer people are unemployed. And after a while it adds to the problem rather than solves the problem," said Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga. And Senator Jon Kyl created a frenzy over his Senate floor speech last week stating that extending unemployment "doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work." However, with the majority of unemployed Americans receiving only $293 per week, that seems laughable.

The bill to extend unemployment could not come at a more important time, as Maurice Emsellem, a National Employment Law policy co-director told CNN last week, "There's only one job available for every five unemployed workers." Even economist Paul Krugman stated that we may be headed straight for a third depression, the fault of which he believes will be shouldered on a government unwilling to take action. "And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world...governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending."

Congress will reassemble next week to make a final decision on whether or not to extend unemployment benefits from the standard 26 weeks to 99 weeks for the millions of workers desperate to find jobs.

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