How would you know if your resume did or didn’t reach the appropriate decision maker? You can truly never know for certain. However, there are steps you can take to ensure that your resume does not get “auto-disqualified”, or provide obvious reasons not to be hired.

There are several “mistakes” commonly made in resumes that give immediate reasons why you will not be offered the opportunity to go to the next step in the hiring process. Continue reading →

Sometimes missing a critical meeting just can’t be helped. Despite the advance planning, you just cannot make it to the meeting. Before you get out the guilt stick and beat yourself up about how stupid that was or how bad it’s going to be for your career, take a step back and examine how to overcome your absence. Continue reading →

Do you feel like one in a million at work ? and not in a good way? When you run into your boss in the hallway, do you get the impression she isn’t sure who you are? Are the juicy projects always going to someone else?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you need to raise your work profile. Here are some tips to get you started. Continue reading →

Our lives are tranquil and smooth so seldom, it seems. We have our ups-and-downs, our good days and bad days, our sunny moods and black moods. The less we swing in opposite directions, the happier we tend to be. The biology of our bodies craves balance and consistency — changes in our thought patterns and emotions interrupt the regularity of our nerve pathways leading to chemical inbalance and internal disturbances. Continue reading →

No one should be fired and be surprised about it. There are always warning signs. The trick is in learning how to recognize the signs and to have a plan of action. Many time subtle hints are given that allude to the ax falling. Continue reading →

Let me ask you a question: are you tired ofusing job sites only to find scam after scam? I bet you’re noddingyour head in agreement to that question. I know that I was sickand tired of spending all my time online searching fortelecommuting jobs only to find scams. Any type of free job siteis going to have a few scams, but some sites have more legitimatejobs than others, and some are easier to use than others. Continue reading →

I recently was “unhired” by my former employer. Unhired is a softer term than “fired” but it means the same. With no warning and an immediate departure, I found myself at home enjoying the provisions of a severance package but curious about the next steps.

Like most recently unhired people, I went through a range of emotions–shock, anger, grief, rebellion, self-reliant indignation, and so forth. Yet, after a few weeks I found myself wondering what day it was. For me, everyday was Saturday. Continue reading →

As an employer I receive many job applications each week. Some cover letters are so well written that I am compelled to review the attached resume even if our company is not currently hiring. I don’t want to miss an opportunity to contact an outstanding individual. Other cover letters are sufficiently interesting that I will file them away and review them later in the week, while others simply beg to be deleted immediately. Continue reading →

America may be the Land of Opportunity, but this is also the land of the Big Trade-Off. Sure, you can have that nice house, but you’re going to have to become a mortgage slave to keep it. You can drive that fancy sports car, but you’ll have to fork over an insurance premium as hefty as the GNP of some Third World nations. In the Bible it says, in life, if you want honey, you get bees with stingers. For anything worth having, there’s price to pay. Continue reading →

The US Government has just released last month’s job creation figures. It was the lowest number in two years. This is a revealing and disturbing snapshot of what is actually happening in the real economy, not the one artificially created for the headlines. Our US GNP or Gross National Product, is based upon manufactured durable goods. Unfortunately, the manufacturing economy in the US has not yet recovered from the devastating collapse it saw commence in the spring of 2000. The recent improvements in jobs and growth are substantially confined to the service sector. Manufacturing is what drives the US economy and it is suffering. Continue reading →