Executive Resumes & Personal Branding by Steve Brady
You have nothing to lose!
Six in 10 unemployed Americans say the next job they get is not likely to be one they want; instead, they'll have to settle for one they don't really want. Four in 10 underemployed adults have similar expectations about a full-time job.
Despite today's nearly double-digit unemployment rate, 4 in 10 unemployed Americans expect to get a job in the next four weeks and one in three underemployed have the same expectations with respect to obtaining a full-time job.
With this in mind I have written an expanded explanation on the true cost of a resume over on the services page.The length of the average search is a good reason not to be average. The typical job search is full of inefficiencies. One example: Do NOT expect your friends or contacts to find you a job. Most people waste weeks or months waiting for their friends to present them with opportunities, but the truth is most people can help you only when you help them do so. Spending a lot of time asking, "Do you know of any openings?" is not nearly as effective as making a target list of companies and asking your contacts if they know anyone in those companies.
Just because we are living in the age of social media doesn't mean you do not have to brush up on those people skills. In fact, while many doors are initially opened career wise through social media, it is the face-to-face time that comes next that seals the deal- or doesn't.
Reuters: Support groups for the unemployed are getting creative as the jobless rate stays stubbornly high, trying approaches from using Weight Watchers-style accountability to encouraging people to work for free.Support networks have previously popped up after large-scale layoffs. But with nearly one in 10 Americans now out of work, they are becoming more widespread and accepted, said career consultant Alison Doyle.
"The stigma attached to being unemployed that was there in the past isn't as prevalent now," Doyle said.
The August Group, which hosts networking events in the former manufacturing hub of Rochester, New York, holds members accountable for sticking to their job search goals.... read more
has helps millions of job seekers and career planners over the years. Now Richard Bolles has updated it for the (post?) recession year 2011.
“How many jobs are out there, in this economy?”
“Where do I go from here with my life?”
These are some of the questions at the forefront of the modern job-searcher’s mind. And they are thoroughly and thoughtfully answered with all-new chapters in the 2011 edition of What Color Is Your Parachute?, the best-selling job-hunting book in the world for more than three decades--in good times and bad. A longtime fixture on best-seller lists, What Color Is Your Parachute? features life-saving information that is updated each year to cater to the specific requirements of today’s job market.
Career guru Richard N. Bolles leads job-searchers to find meaningful work. He asks, WHAT skills do you most love to use? WHERE--in what field--would you most love to use them? And HOW do you find such jobs without depending on agencies, ads, and online postings?
The résumés that go nowhere. The five-minute job interviews that feel so perfunctory. And finally, the despairing decision to stop trying anymore to find a job.
Paradoxically, experts say these are among the factors that drove the country’s unemployment rate down in December. The figures released Friday showed a national jobless rate of 9.4 percent, down from 9.8 percent in November.
That report, encouraging on its face, also reflects the deep discouragement that afflicts America’s jobless, because people who have given up looking for work are no longer counted as unemployed....read more
For two long years, the best that career experts could say about the prospects for job growth and career advancement was that they felt “cautiously optimistic.” Suddenly, there are growing signs of a much clearer and brighter picture ahead, especially at the executive level.
“We are definitely much busier than we were even a few months ago,” says executive recruiter Richard Wajs, president and chief executive officer of TWC International Executive Search Ltd. in Toronto. “There is definitely a mood among decision-makers, who had been waiting to see whether the recovery was real, that they are ready to commit to new hires.”
