Take a Rest from Your Job Search
By Marilyn Albert

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and the beginning a very long Holiday Season if you are still in a job search. This is for those who have been job seeking throughout this year and still have not found a job. When you are working the Holidays are synonymous with gift giving, spending time with family and friends. It’s time to rush around and find the perfect gift and once you do, smiling with the sheer joy of giving it away. It’s full of feel good stuff: food, smells, and laughter.

When you’re unemployed it absolute disaster, the very sights and sounds that made you happy, now remind you of all your misfortune.

The message I want to give to all job seekers is BRAVO! You have worked hard. You have applied for jobs you were eager about; as well as, those jobs you thought you would never apply for. You politely said thank you for the opportunity to interview when the rejection came.

To families here are 3 things you can do for the job seeker:
1. Thank them for all the hard work they have done and how they have stuck to the job search!
2. Let the job seeker know how proud you are of them for never giving up!
3. Listen, listen and listen some more. It doesn’t matter if you have heard the same story a dozen times. Listen, again.

Three gifts for the unemployed:
1. Massage certificate
2. Department store certificate
3. Movie passes and concession-stand certificate

Most importantly, here is my advice for the job seeker during the Holiday season.
1. Take a break from your job search. You have worked hard the past few months (even the year). Beginning Nov 27 through Jan 1, 2010, don’t worry about your job search. You have the greatest gift of all—time to spend with your family and friends. Take advantage of this, it may not happen again.
2. Clear off your desk and desktop. Clean up your work area. Clean up your “head.”
3. Organized your job search (get rid of outdated job postings and failed resumes)
4. Have your resume reviewed by a professional and revise it. Don’t start the year with a resume that didn’t get you very far last year.
5. Set some new job search goals to begin on January 2, 2010 (ask about the two below)
a. LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/
b. Start a blog https://www.blogger.com/start

Using LinkedIn for Your Job Search: Who, What How

by Marilyn Albert

Who: LinkedIn is a free professional social media network with over 50 million members in over 140 industries. Most of members are employed or job seeking adults. The people are very serious about their reputations and professional standing in the business community. Executives from all the Fortune 500 companies are on LinkedIn. Most have disclosed what they do, where they work now, and where they’ve worked in the past.

The purpose of LinkedIn is to maintain a list of contact details of people you know and trust in business. Unlike other social media networks, this one focuses only on your professional life, not your personal life. You have control of the content and the ability to keep it absolutely professionally, pristine.

According to Kevin Eyres, the London based Managing Director of LinkedIn’s European operation, it’s all about professionals now “taking more responsibility for their own careers.” Getting into LinkedIn is being proactive about your own networks, rebuilding an interrupted career, and reorganizing one’s reputation. (Telegraph.co.uk).

Think of LinkedIn as leveling the socio-economic playing field. Whether you are currently employed or job seeking it is extremely useful to establishing and maintaining a professional network. If you aren’t developing your network on a professional social media network, you are missing out on future networking opportunities and job search information that can change your life.


What: Think of LinkedIn as a Gated Approach
1. Connections:
a) Your direct connections with other professionals which eventually establishes second-degree and third-degree connections (people you know, who now people).
b) Can use connections to find jobs, people and business opportunities—all recommended by your trusted contact network.
c) Employers can list jobs and search for potential candidates.
d) Job seekers can review profiles of hiring managers and discover which of their existing contact can introduce them.

2. Research: Using the “search box” type in the company name, statistics about the company are provided. Look for percentage of most common titles/position held within the company, list of present and former employees.

3. LinkedIn Answers: Simple to Google Answers or Yahoo! Answers. You can ask questions for the community to answer. This free service provides more business focused answers, and both the identity of the people asking and answering questions.

4. LinkedIn Groups: You can establish new relationships by joining alumni, industry or professional and other related groups. You can create a large number of primary and secondary connections by following a group you join or was once a member of.

5. Mobile version and embedded applications are also included: link to Twitter, etc.

How to Make Connections
Build your network, everyday: LinkedIn is for everyone. Whether you are happy with your current employment situation; or, working at a dead end job, underemployed, or unemployed you should be spending time building your LinkedIn network. For LinkedIn to work you need at least 20 connections. Start with co-workers, supervisors and colleagues at other jobs. When others ask you to connect, check them out and connect. Just get started. It’s not who you know, it who knows you.

What social media networking has done for us is level the playing field in the area of schmoozing. There was once a time when schmoozing only occurred face to face by well-outspoken individuals. Online, even the shyest person can reach out to express their ideals. It’s part of the unspoken language of the social media networking landscape: The electronic schmoozer’s are eager to help reach out and help. They are more inclined to think, “What can I do for this person?” They are not thinking “What can this person do for me?

Get the Word Out: Tell your network you are looking for a job. Everyone acknowledges it is smart move to use this resource when job searching. The negative stigma is gone. Status updates provides your connections with your status on a regular basis.

Get Recommendations from your manager, supervisors and colleagues in your field. Ask people you supervise for recommendations. All recommendations are legitimate. I received status updates from a former colleague of mine who I had not seen in years. Curious, I looked at her site. She was looking for a new job. Although, she originally did not ask me to write for her, I was happy do so since I knew and respected our previous professional relationship.

Using Keywords, find where people with your back ground are working. Find companies that employ people like you by doing an advanced search for people who have your skills in the same zip code as you. You can be that specific.

Look at “company profiles” to find career paths of people before and after they worked for a given company. What kind of jobs did they have before? What skills did they develop? This could help you define your own career aspirations. Company profiles also can tell you where people go after leaving a company or business sector. For example, if you want to work Epic having experience as a technical writer is helpful.

Get the Inside Scoop: Company pages include a section called “new hires” a list of people who have recently joined a company. Take a look at the backgrounds of the new hires to examine their background to see what may have lead to their success at getting hired. This also works for current employees. Look at profiles of the people who work at the company to get an idea of their backgrounds and important skills.

Degrees of Separation: You can search for any job you want, but pay attention to those people who have a direct or one degree of separation. These people can offer key inside information or even walk a resume over to the right person inside a company. Most hiring managers will look at resume given to them by a current employee.

Look for Start-Ups: Want to be your own boss, own your own company, but aren’t certain who, what, and how to get started? Use the advanced search using “startup” or “stealth” in the keyword for company field.


Helpful Links:

LinkedIn overview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV_7yAPnkFw&feature=related

How the network can be used: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzT3JVUGUzM

LinkedInTutorials: http://www.interactiveinsightsgroup.com/blog1/linkedin-superguidetutorials-tips-and-tool/