It seems like just yesterday that I reached out to Alison Green, author of the amazing Ask a Manager career advice blog, to see if she would be interested in writing an eBook to help job seekers. Today, that dream is a reality!

What it touches on

• how to stop sabotaging your job search
• how to avoid the companies that aren’t a good fit
• how to craft a resume and cover letter that will catch a hiring manager’s eye
• how to answer the most common interview questions
• how to talk about sensitive issues when you interview — firings, bad bosses, “overqualification,” and more
• the secret to handling rejection

My fave part

Even with all those cool features above, my favorite part is still the section on questions to ask your own interviewer. It’s been something I’ve always been interested in, and I love hearing the questions that a hiring manager wants to hear from job seekers.

What you need to do

Order now, even if you have a great job. Why? Well, first you’ll get it for the super low price (it goes up in just 48 hours!). And second, when you’re ready to move on to another job (there’s always another job), you’ll have this handy dandy guide to help you get through the transition.

Click here to get the How to Get a Job: Secrets of a Hiring Manager

If you’re anything like me, I bet you’ve said the following statement dozens of times in your life.

If I knew then what I know now… I’d be a killer chess player in Canada.

Okay, so maybe the last half of your sentence might be a little different, but you get the point. The idea is that you’d have extra knowledge to do more than you would otherwise have done. Today I have a free eBook titled “If I Would Have Known Just One Thing” to share with you on that very topic. Shane Mac asked me to give him a hand, and he’s just too awesome to turn down. Continue Reading »

How can I get into HR? That question has been asked untold numbers of times, and the answer isn’t always an easy one. And then there’s the sticky issue of trying to figure out what’s next when you finally do get into one of those highly coveted and treasured positions in the the human resources field. Let’s see if we can shed some light on those issues today, ‘kay?

(Note: this is a post in the HRYP (HR Young Professional) series. If you know a young HR pro, please pass this along to them. I’d appreciate it, and so will they!)

How I got into HR Continue Reading »

I have been working alongside Alison Green on her new project for job seekers, and today she is giving away a free guide on how job seekers can do a job interview well. The guide has some great tips in there that I’ve never even considered, and I’ve already told her it will be going in my job search toolbox for the next time I have a job interview. If reading’s not your thing, she has also created a twenty minute video (also free!) to give you the information you’re looking for.

Click here to get the free guide on how to prepare for a job interview

I can’t guarantee that you’ll get a job if you use this guide, but I darn well know that you can do better in the interview than you ever have before! Continue Reading »

A few months ago I had the opportunity to participate in a group eBook project run by my good friend Chris Ferdinandi. It was a really great experience and I love sharing the eBook with others. Anyway, I was asked by my buddy Rich from Corn on the Job to participate in another guide with a career focus, and I leaped at the opportunity. I did it not only because Rich asked, but because I also love talking about career concepts. My first writing gig was with a career site, after all!

Click here to get the free eBook.

Contributors Continue Reading »

AKA Who’s Driving This Freaking Thing?

(Subscribers may need to click through for the video. The transcript is below if you’re the reading type!)

I see articles every single day teaching job seekers how to use social media to get a job. On the other hand, I also see a lot of legal types doing their best to scare the pants off HR/recruiters who use social media to find candidates.

I’m sure you’ve heard that the headline sells the newspaper. Well, I was sucked into watching a recorded webinar the other day based solely on the title. How could I resist something called Blogging, Social Media, and the Workforce?

Anyway, I realized my mistake pretty quickly. I spent 75% of the webinar listening to someone ramble about laws, phones, and email. Ugh. The last few minutes dealt with what the whole webinar should have been about–blogging and social media. Just a few gems I picked up from the webinar, if I might paraphrase:

• If you go to a blog and you decide not to hire because you find out that they are of a specific race or religion, that can be a problem. Whoa, you don’t say! Wasn’t that already illegal?
• Don’t let the people who make hiring decisions be the same ones who are using social networks like Facebook. Going to these sites can provide too much information. Huh? That doesn’t even make sense!

Those quotes make me a little queasy. Thankfully I have an antidote in this great comment by Mike Haberman.

When HR people tell me they are too busy in their jobs to use social media, I tell them it should be part of their jobs to use it. The tools are just too valuable to ignore.

I agree completely. Constant growth is a big part of this profession, and putting your head in the sand isn’t exactly a strategy I’m a fan of. Think about it. If coaches and other career professionals are telling job seekers to use social media to connect with companies, and you’re hiding in the basement hoping it will blow over, where does that leave you in the long run? Yeah. Not good.

What are your thoughts?

AKA How to Move Beyond a Crappy Job

A lot of us get frustrated when we want to do work on a level of 10 (while we’re stuck doing work at a level of 1).  In this video I give you a suggestion I’ve learned from experience about how to make that level 1 work suck less.