The Weekender: Another Job Seeker Special Edition – Archives v.2

 

 

 

 

 

 

Corporate Compensation Guide for the Job Seeker – A popular topic of discussion among job seekers is how to negotiate salary when the day comes that an offer is forthcoming. It is also a popular topic on websites, blog posts, Twitter chats and around Starbucks…just about anywhere that is a forum for such a conversation. Family and friends will help with advice along with the professionals, but the result is a confusing array of conflicting ideas. Some advice is just blatantly bad. A lot of information from those who should know is based on their personal experience and there is probably nobody who has seen it all.

 

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Job Seeker Crap Filters – t is hard being a job seeker in today’s economy. With all of the technological advantages we have today one would assume that nobody could get lost. We should be able to turn on some sort of cyber-jobs-GPS, plug in our destination and watch our career unfold on a high-resolution flat-screen display. However, the exact opposite is true. There is so much information available online it can be difficult to wade through it all. To make matters worse, there is so much misinformation that every job seeker has to develop a keen sense of what is real and what is not. In his book Net Smart Howard Rheingold talks about the literacy of “critical consumption of information,” aka, Crap Detection. I love this term because it is not enough to be literate in how to use media, but it is also critical to figure out just how much is a meaningless waste of some very inconvenienced electrons.

 

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Objective Overruled! – A book written about resume writing won’t sell if it is like every other book that has ever been written about resume writing. I’m convinced that is the reason for the existence of so many different types of resumes in vogue today. All of them are justifiable based on some unusual perspective or special circumstances and some are different just to be different. Recruiters will budget their time to sift through possibly hundreds of resumes every day, but this is made more difficult since there is no such thing as a standard format. For the most part their expectation is that they will see a chronologically formatted presentation of education, experience, skills and accomplishments.

 

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Job Search and Self Discipline -  Discipline implies enforcing rules. Self discipline begins with determining an individual measure of the rules of right and wrong. If there is such a thing as a values inventory within a person, this must be considered the standard. Obeying these guidelines means that a person is able to resist the temptation for fleeting emotions, self gratification and pleasure. It will not work unless there is a commitment to overrule emotions with logical thought and action. Circumstances do not change the standards of self discipline.

 

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Interview Question: Why Do You Work? – In a discussion with a hiring manager about her decision to choose tricky interview questions not even remotely related to job specs I was told that one question was not negotiable. “I always ask a candidate why they go to work every day.” I agreed with her that this one was probably OK even though I didn’t immediately see how it would be measurable or allow candidates to be compared to each other for evaluation.  It was more of a weak compromise move on my part to keep peace and at least be able to get some yardstick questions into her interviews that would differentiate between candidates. I later thought about that conversation and realized that even though I had never asked that question it was exactly the type of information I wanted to hear.

 

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