An Impractical Exercise The Job Search Alphabet

An Impractical Exercise The Job Search Alphabet 123 A dose of job search self-help and inspiration. This is a guest post by Kate Baggott. If you’d also like to guest post here on JobMob, follow these guest post guidelines. I’m a freelance writer, I teach on a freelance basis and I consult as a freelancer. There are times when I have too much work and times when I have almost none. The insecurity of it all is worst when life’s disasters strike. I’ve recently been ill and unable to work consistently for almost three months. I hope it won’t be a financial disaster in the long term.eval The Practical Exercises While I was in the hospital, I was in a hurry to get home. Unfortunately, after days of improvement, the infection values in my blood work suddenly worsened. It looked like I would have to stay in hospital for several more days.eval I was worried, but I did a few practical things: I told my roommates on the ward that I needed more rest so they would be quieter. I drank as much water and herbal tea as I could tolerate and I asked for a sleeping pill to force my nervous mind to sleep longer. The Impractical Exercise I did one completely impractical exercise. I soothed my poor, infected pancreas with compliments. I used an entire alphabet of adjectives to get the organ I’d never been aware of to do its job and heal. “Adorable pancreas, beautiful pancreas, cute pancreas….” You get the idea. The infection values did go down the next day and I could go home to my children and continue to get better with them. Now, in addition to all the practical stuff, I am trying the same exercise to heal my career. This is what I came up with: The Job Search Alphabet A is for attraction, but not necessarily “law of.” For me, attraction means being able to see how good chance looks rather than just seeing the danger of risk. It’s a skill that applies to everything there is in life, not what we just wish upon ourselves. B is for brink. In Canadian English we talk about being “on the brink.” It means you are leaning over the edge, peering into the freefall of making a decision to go one way, or the other. The brink is an exciting place to get scared, build courage and jump into a new life. C is for challenge. As in, all the stuff we need to find new ways to do. D is for dedication. All of us who are looking to heal ourselves and our careers need to take the medicine and do what we say we are going to do…no matter how difficult the pill is to swallow. E is for ease. Not everything in this process is difficult. I will appreciate the parts of this journey that come easily so my energies will be there when difficulties to arise. F is for friction. Staring down the loss of control has meant rubbing up against the parts of my personality that I like least. Inner conflict is good for resolving old issues before starting something new. G is for goal. This is a good time to set a new one. H is for history. A good time to sort it out, summarize lessons learned and to define what must be learned to prepare for the future. I is for instinct. There is no better time to learn how to listen to the gut information that keeps us all safe. J is for jealousy and calling it out. There is no point wasting energy on envying those we *think* might have easier or better lives. K is for kindness. Chances are there is someone worse off who needs a little help, a little compassion and a little extra time we can all afford to give. L is for love and the reminder that we are not in this struggle alone. M is for making money and the dignity of work. N is for no and remembering to say it when necessary. O is for opportunity and learning to see it. P is for the permission we give ourselves to try something new, different and unexpected. Q is for questions and the courage to ask them no matter how difficult they may be to answer. R is for rehearsals that prepare us for interviews and introductions. S is for searching. To search implies all the romance of the quest, the adventure, discovery and the examination of all that is revealed. It’s an exciting word. T is for time and learning to appreciate where each moment takes us. U is for umbrella. Really. It’s the metaphor for all the tools and talents you loop over your wrist in the morning to prepare for anything that might happen. It is the instant shelter of good preparation. V is for variety. There is always an option to try something different. W is for wishful thinking and learning how to stay in the realm of “positive thinking” and personal integrity without heading into the dream world of wishing for lottery wins and impossible rescues. X is for Xi. Pronounced Chi. It’s the Chinese word for the life force that flows through and around all of us all the time whether we are sick or healthy, working or unemployed. It’s a constant we can rely on. Y is for the yield sign that provides a chance to slow down, look around and ensure safety without slamming on the breaks. Z is for zeal. It’s not just a word for the Scrabble board. It means to act with enthusiasm, which is exactly what we all need to maintain. I’ll let you know if the job search alphabet helps heal my career as well as the adjective alphabet helped heal my pancreas. At least, I know it can’t hurt! About the Author Kate Baggott is a Canadian writer, teacher and consultant who lives in Europe. Her writing ranges from technology journalism to creative nonfiction and from experimental fiction to chick lit. Links to examples of her published work can be found at www.katebaggott.com. This article is part of the 4th Annual JobMob Guest Blogging Contest, which was made possible thanks in large part to our Gold Sponsor, Jason Alba of JibberJobber. If you want Kate Baggott to win, share this article with your friends.

How You Should Buy a Car for Your Business

How You Should Buy a Car for Your Business If you’re only looking to buy a car for business use, then there are a number of tax breaks that you can get, depending on how you buy the vehicle. As such, how you buy your car is important. There are a number of ways that you can buy a car for your business. Here, we look at the top three. Buying the Car Outright Sadly, the easiest way of buying a car for a business is usually the least accessible for most: buying it outright with cash. If you own a business with large sums of money in its account, then buying the car outright is probably the best option, as it means that you’ll only be paying the sticker price, with no extra fees and charges. Plus, by buying outright, you’ll probably be able to negotiate a discount; especially if you’re not part-exchanging. However, if we’re being realistic, very few SMEs have tens of thousands of pounds in the bank. As a result, many choose one of two other options: leasing or financing. Let’s take a look at both of these options in more detail. Lease Leasing is like renting a house. You don’t own the item in question, but you effectively rent it for the long term and then give it back at the end of an agreed period. With leasing, you typically pay a small fee upfront (this is generally around three months of the contract), plus a monthly fee. Due to the fact that you don’t own the vehicle at the end of the contract, these monthly payments are traditionally low because you don’t own the vehicle, and this means that more expensive cars come into your price range as a result. However, there are downsides, too. For example, you can be tied into the agreement for a lengthy term, and you’re also usually tied into a certain mileage, which can be problematic if you need to use the car more frequently. You can add additional miles to your contract, but this is usually expensive. Finance If you’d like to own the vehicle outright but don’t have the cash to buy it, then car finance is a great option. With car finance, you pay a deposit of your choosing with the garage and then split the rest of the payment over a duration of your choosing, too. This generally ranges between one year and five years. As you’d expect, because you pay in manageable monthly payments rather than upfront, you are charged interest, making it more expensive than buying outright. However, you do own the car at the end of it. To conclude, there are a number of great options if you’re looking to buy a car for your business, so consider all of the above carefully before taking the plunge. Image Source; Image Source; Image Source

9 Ways to think about linking in a blog post

9 Ways to think about linking in a blog post Theres a blogger I like a lot, but she never links. I asked her why, and she said, It takes too long. Its true that linking does take a long time. But its one of my favorite parts of blogging. Sometimes I spend a couple of hours on the links an hour reading the relevant conversations online and figuring out what to link to, and an hour arranging links in the post. I think all the time about why I am linking, and where I should link, and what should be underneath the link. Here are the types of links that I think about: 1. The respect-gains-respect link The Internet is very democratic about authority. Authority is up for grabs, and you get authority if you say something smart and interesting. To this end, whenever I am presenting a controversial opinion, I link to as many of my sources as possible. I want people to be able to look at the research that I am looking at and decide for themselves if my conclusion is right. Also, I have found that doing this makes conversation in the comments section more interesting. 2. Easter egg link When my brother was guest blogging for me, every link he had was a joke. I have a background in user interface design, and at first I told him it was a bad way to link because people should know what theyre getting before they click. But then I realized that it is actually just a style of linking, and people came to expect his links to be fun. I started referring to these as Easter egg links, after the practice programmers have of adding secret messages behind the code. (For example you used to be able to type zzzz into a Microsoft Word document and spellchecker suggested sex.) 3. Here-are-my-friends links Guy Kawasaki is the king of this. When Guy links, it is usually to one of his friends, or a friend of a friend. So Guys links serve to remind us of how well-connected he is. This is no small peanuts since he is, in fact, very well connected offline especially for someone who is willing to commit to blogging regularly. Reading Guys blog is sometimes like the smart-mans Page Six of Silicon Valley. 4. True-love link Sometimes Ill fall in love with a link and structure a whole post around it. Like this one. And sometimes Ill save a link for a year before I use it. Usually my links are very serious to back up some point Im making. So I think of it as a treat for me and the reader when I throw one in just for fun. Like this one, about how to recharge and iPod using an onion and Gatorade. 5. Self-referential link Most bloggers have pet topics they go back to time and again. So its helpful to a reader if the blogger links to a few of the other posts on that topic to give the current discussion context. I do this a lot, but I learned to do it from the team of writers at Techdirt. Those guys are great at linking to other stories theyve written on the same topic. I dont read Techdirt every day, so if I happen to be reading, I can get a history of a given topic by reading their links. 6. Hat-tip link Sometimes, a blogger finds a very obscure piece of information, and links to it. Then, a blogger who regularly reads that blog also links to the obscure piece of information. Its pretty clear that the second blogger got the information from the first blogger. And in this case, a nice little hat-tip is a courtesy to say that actually, the stellar Internet research comes from someone else, not me. I do this often. For example, when I read this womans post because she blogged about me, and then I blogged about a link in her post. Heres an example of someone railing against a blogger who did not follow the etiquette. 7. Link-bait link When I first started blogging, people told me to link to bloggers who are bigger than I am. I didnt really believe it would do anything for me, but thats because I didnt understand how much traffic a big blogger can send. So, I followed advice, even though I was skeptical. Heres the post and it changed my life as a blogger. Literally. I linked to Lifehacker and they linked back, and for a year, that was the most popular post on my blog. Lifehackers audience is breathtakingly huge, and to get linked to from them is a big day for almost any blogger. 8. The friendly link Blogging is a conversation, and it is much more fun if you are part of it, instead of just talking at people. One of the great pleasures of blogging is linking to someone who I dont think knows that I read their blog. A link to someone is like saying, I really like what youre writing and in fact, I want to share it with everyone I know. A blogger trades on ideas, so recognizing another bloggers ideas with a link is a big deal. And its so easy to do, considering how nice it makes people feel. So do it. 9. The poetic link If I write a list, and I have links to two out of three list items, I find a link to the third. I think the symmetry is important. Not like anyone will be upset if I dont link, but I think that good rhythm to links is like good rhythm to sentences. It makes reading so much nicer. I do this in paragraphs as well try to keep the linking structure rhythmic as the reader scrolls down the post. I dont need to do that for meaning, I do it simply for pleasure.

Online Applications ONLY A Lose-Lose Proposition for All! - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

‘Online Applications ONLY’ A ‘Lose-Lose’ Proposition for All! - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career In last week’s posting (Corporate America: Your Hiring Processes are Branded as “Broken”!) I pointed out the tremendous disconnect that exists today between job seekers and the companies that seek to hire them because of certain current hiring processes in corporate America. In this week’s posting I am going to examine one of those processes that contributes mightily to this disconnectâ€"the “online applications ONLY” job application requirement imposed by some hiring companies. It’s a process that usually results in a “lose-lose” proposition for both hiring companies and job candidates. Most hiring companies today have done an exceptional job of convincing virtually every job seeker that the only way to apply for an open position is to respond to one of the company’s online job postings. “Only applications received online will be accepted,” they specify. “Unsolicited résumés will be rejected.” “No phone calls accepted.” A pretty bleak, stifling situation for a job seeker today. As I pointed out in last week’s blog, this is one of the major reasons that many job seekers who are classified as “semi-passive” (55% of all potential candidates) will not even attempt to investigate career opportunities with companies that actually want to attractâ€"and hire!â€"“good” people, in order to effectively compete in today’s extremely competitive global marketplace. Unless they are particularly masochistic, these potential candidates aren’t at all likely to subject themselves to the hassle, the rejection and, oftentimes, the humiliation that is sometimes involved in the entire “online application only” process. Clearly, then, neither the hiring company nor the potential candidate wins in this situation. To be fair about it, I can easily understandâ€"as I am sure most of you reading this blog can as wellâ€"why hiring companies today are putting up barriers such as the “online applications only” requirement for job seekers. With so many people, both employed and unemployed, seeking new jobs, virtually any position posted by a hiring company canâ€"and usually does!â€"result in a literal avalanche of applications, many from job seekers who are in no way qualified for the positions. The flip side of that coin, however, is that, while the hiring companies are “protecting” themselves from this oftentimes huge number of non-qualified candidates, they are also considering only 17% of the TOTAL job candidate pool, i.e., those who are classified as “active” (usually, the unemployed who are looking for any type of job) and/or “semi-active” (usually, employed people seeking better opportunities)! Then, these same companies lament the fact that they can’t attract “good” peop le for the positions they need to fill! How, then, can hiring companies continue to protect themselves from a potential avalanche of unqualified applicants and still engage and tap into the huge pool of fully qualified top talent who will usually never be encountered through the “online application only” process?  There are essentially only two viable methods: Set up an in-house recruiting team that will proactively reach out to these candidates and have career conversations with them. Until a candidate actually declares they want to proceed with the opportunity, there is no legal requirement for them to apply online. If legal concerns abound, or if you afraid of being accused of “poaching” by your competitors, or if an “in house” recruit team (that actually recruits) is not cost effective then . . . Engage the professional services of a good “headhunter” who specializes in recruiting top talent for your company’s particular market niche(s). (Buyer Beware: Some “headhunters” and recruiters are really nothing more than glorified résumé screeners who tap into the same 17% of the candidate pool that hiring companies do. What a hiring company should look for is a recruiting firm that conducts “cold-call” direct recruiting into the competition to locate and engage talent “buried in excellence” at their current position but still open to other genuine career opportunities.) Obviously, as I’ve already stated, it certainly is not only the hiring companies that stand to lose in the current “online applications only” environment. Many highly qualified potential job candidates merely assume that they are essentially powerless in such an environment and remain in place, in their current jobs, no matter how distasteful those jobs may have become. In fact, nothing could actually be further from the truth, particularly for those candidates who brand themselves as being unique, creative, persistent and proactive, as someone who clearly stands out from the crowd. (Check out, for example, how one enterprising young woman completely circumvented the “online applications only” game and won her dream job at this link: How Hannah Landed Her Dream Job!) Another unique, very effective approach to landing a new job in today’s extremely challenging job market involves the candidate launching a direct mail campaign, in conjunction with other job searching activities. Learn all about this tactic at this link: Frustrated by “Post and Hope” Job Hunting? Try This Instead! Even though the latest jobs report suggest that there may beâ€"at last!â€"“light at the end of the tunnel,” make no mistake about it: The job market remains brutally competitive and quite challenging. I honestly don’t see that changing much for the next couple of years, at least. But that still doesn’t mean that you, as a job seeker, have to continue walking in “lock step” and totally acquiesce to the “online applications only” hiring process in place at so many companies today. If you truly are an exceptional candidate, if you have truly branded yourself as new, different and better from your competition, i.e., other job seekers, don’t fall for the “online applications only” game. You do have other options to seekingâ€"and landingâ€"your dream job! Make sure you utilize these other options to the maximum! And, hiring companies: If you truly seek top talent for your open positions, continue to utilize the “online applications only” approach merely to filter and handle the majority of applicants, but also institute steps in your hiring process to go after and hire the top talent that you so badly need to compete in today’s global marketplace. That way, EVERYONE wins! Author: Skip Freeman is the author of “Headhunter” Hiring Secrets: The Rules of the Hiring Game Have Changed . . . Forever! and is the President and Chief Executive Officer of The HTW Group (Hire to Win), an Atlanta, GA, Metropolitan Area Executive Search Firm. Specializing in the placement of sales, engineering, manufacturing and RD professionals, he has developed powerful techniques that help companies hire the best and help the best get hired.

The Physical Dangers Of A Desk Job - CareerMetis.com

The Physical Dangers Of A Desk Job You go to work and do your best every day. While your desk job supports a family or helps secure your future, it could be putting your health at risk.Spending much of your day sitting can lead to the development of poor habits, increased stress, weight gain, disease and more.However, you can make small choices each day to be more active at the office, and lower the possibility of obesity and illness. Let’s look at the physical dangers of a desk job. 1) Bad backevalSitting for extended periods of time can promote poor posture. We crane our neck toward a keyboard, shrug our shoulders to see a screen, and slouch Take a break from sitting every 30 minutes â€" walk to the water fountain, take a stroll around the building or simply stand and stretch.If you have a laptop, stand at a high counter or table â€"or try a standing desk. Request walking meetings with co-workers instead of gathering in a conference room. Set a timer and re-adjust your posture every hour.Try to hold a straight bac k and neck for 30 seconds.Use desk exercise equipment such as an exercise ball or under desk bicycle.evalGrab your cubicle mate and engage in desk exercises to stretch hip flexors or desk yoga to elongate your back. In short, keep moving for a long, healthy life and career.

Why Im secretly rooting for Kate Gosselin on DWTS - Sterling Career Concepts

Why Im secretly rooting for Kate Gosselin on DWTS Why Im secretly rooting for Kate Gosselin on DWTS My loyal readers may think theyve received an erroneous new blog entry today!   No, its not April Fools Day, but give me a chance, and Ill explain how Kate Gosselins trying her best  on DWTS relates to your job search. Theres  much chatter on Twitter   about why people are  voting to keep Kate on the show, and how its her turn to go home next, but you know, after last weeks show ended and I saw how she was satisfied with her performance and how she was proud of what the judges called a mini-breakthrough, I gave her my own  Attagirl!   Kates doing what many of us need to be able to do when we are at a crossroads in our life. Shes trying new things, reaching out, pushing her limits, trying  things she would not have normally attempted, and shes growing and learning about herself in the process.   When youre faced unexpectedly with unemployment, its easy to figuratively crawl into a ball and cry why me?   but the situation is better served by making lemonade out of lemons. Learn about   yourself.  Determine what career options are possible for you.   Decide how youd like to spend your day and the direction youd like your career to take, and then start making things happen. For many people, the career theyve known  will no longer serve them best going  forward. They need to rethink their future. So let Kates courage and determination be your inspiration to step out of your comfort zone and take that first step out onto the dance floor.

How Photoshop Resume Templates Can Help Your Career

How Photoshop Resume Templates Can Help Your CareerIf you have a poor resume you can easily use Photoshop resume templates to make it look professional. However, if you are lucky enough to be skilled in a particular area, then you can write your own resume using the same template. This is how the design of the resume template can influence your future job hunt.There are several different layouts that you can use and this can include a basic one, or a very customized one. These can also be color coded depending on what exactly you want to convey.A simple resume is usually done in standard font sizes and in a straight forward manner. However, this will not show your skill to the fullest because the skills are hidden under a generic feel. These types of resumes are ideal for those who are beginning a career and they are easy to create.However, if you need a better resume, then you need to be more creative and come up with professional resumes. These can be made by drawing on paper first and then turn them into a layout resume. The difference between a standard resume and a professional one is that a professional one will have enough details to give employers an idea of your character and personality. For example, if you had a successful business after finishing a degree in accounting, then your resume will show the results of your hard work and desire to learn new things.You should consider the kind of experience you have had when making your resume templates. If you have been working for years then your resume will have a lot of details and be a bit outdated, but it will at least provide information that will make you stand out from the crowd.The layout of a professional resume is really important because it can tell the employer a lot about you. For example, if you had been running a small travel agency or a cafe, then the resume will show you have experience of working as a manager in a restaurant or a shop. You can also have experience of working at a company that gives good services or is highly regarded in your field.Photoshop resume templates are becoming more popular as a result of their affordability. Many people are outsourcing their jobs and starting their own businesses and making it in the real world. This is why they need to have a resume which is professional but also inexpensive.A professional resume looks professional and will impress the employer if it is done correctly. If you can make a customized version of your resume that fits your skill set and company then it will show your individuality and attitude towards the field. Using a professional template is ideal because they give the impression that you are qualified for the job and that your knowledge will help the company.