In case you missed this week’s articles, here is a summary:
The Weekender: Another Job Seeker Special Edition – Five previous articles posted on this site specifically target to the job seeker community. There are new posts in this series every Friday.
Taming the Time-Suck – RSS Readers and More – If you are still fumbling around by manually crawling through sites looking for the information you need, I’m begging you to get out of the dark ages and get some help compiling your data. Almost every browser in use today and most email clients have some form of functional capability or add-on that gathers information from the web and organizes it for us. RSS feeds (Rich Site Summary, sometimes called Really Simple Syndication) is such an aggregator that is actually family of web feed formats that allow news headlines, blogs, web sites, and videos to be compiled in a summarized format.
Tech Wars: Difficulties Beyond Our Control – We interrupt this blog due to technical difficulties beyond our control… or anybody’s control for that matter. If your internet provider is Comcast you could not see my website yesterday. I’m not sure exactly when this problem began because most Mondays are a blur of activity for me. It could have actually started over the weekend. I noticed that there was some kind of glitch mid-morning when I was trying to upload a new blog post and do a little maintenance. This budgeted time out of the day suddenly mushroomed into a nightmare.
Working in HR Does Not Make You a Leader - Human Resources as a profession has come a long way from the days that carved out a “personnel†function to do the grunt work for managers that were too often insensitive to the people needs of a company. In a mad search for improved productivity, business leaders and academics arrived at similar conclusions that workers are not slaves to their masters’ every whim, but are indeed a valuable “resource†along with other components of success.
All Recruiting is Social – I’ve never really appreciated the writing style that starts with a dictionary definition of a term or a speaker who starts by saying, “According to Webster…“ and then states the obvious. I usually resist the temptation to use the dictionary as a reference for anything other than to confirm that my stupid spell-checker was programmed by an illiterate high school dropout. Exceptions to this rule happen only when there is a thought so puzzling in my mind that my muse sends me there to focus on a new slant for a topic. This is one of those points.
Stretch Your Resume, Not the Truth - Answering the age old question about tailoring a resume to the job sounds good in theory until you try to do it. Obviously, hiring managers are looking for the right person for the job based on a variety of criteria and these change from company to company. Rather than be faced with an infinite number of varieties of job-matching resumes, most people will resort to the one-size-fits-all version. This is probably a pendulum swing toward one end of the spectrum, but a worse direction is to force fit the resume into each job without regard for a true match of qualifications.
