Category: cover letters

Top 10 Job Seeker Resolutions For 2012

Ah yes, the end of the year.  Now is the time year when almost anyone with an audience looks back on the past twelve months to reflect on the best of this, and most important of that.  Brief perspectives such as the “top ten list” can be very handy in providing a close-up view of…

Prospecting

There was a time not too long ago when job seekers routinely sent out their job search documents to unknown recipients. More times than not job announcements instructed job seekers to send their resumes and cover letters to blind addresses – Post Office boxes or routing numbers in care of the newspaper that ran the…

Submission!

Questions about the best way to submit your resume and application documents are as common today as they have always been.  Despite all the ways technology has provided for submitting these necessary documents, is there a single best way to make sure the right person sees and considers your materials?  The answer is, “It depends!”…

Listen And Repeat

Listen and repeat! For many years, high school students had that phrase drilled into their heads when they were learning a foreign language.  Regardless of the foreign language being studied, the prerecorded voice of the instructors in the widely used ALM series preceded each expression with “Listen and repeat.”  In those days, students learned key…

Do You Want Fries With That?

The concept of up-selling (trying to sell the customer more than just what they asked for), has been around for a long while.  Whether it’s the waitress asking, “Do you want fries with that?”, or the appliance vendor asking if you want the matching stand for the plasma TV, offering more to the customer than…

Above The Crowd

Recently I attended a very large, and very crowded free outdoor 3-day music festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.  Moving between six stages of exceptional talent proved to be an arduous and exhausting experience; that thankfully wouldn’t diminish the inspiration and invigoration fueled by the great music. But I was thinking that it might…

Membership Has Its Privileges

Throughout the country, state-provided resources for job seekers are drying up.  Staff shortages, mandatory layoffs and furlough days that close facilities all impact the employment offices’ ability to provide comprehensive one-on-one services.  It wasn’t that long ago that if you were out of work, you could have gone to your local unemployment office, talked to…

Hurdles – Fear Of Rejection and Failure

There are an awful lot of things that get in the way of our success, whether the objective is looking for and finding work, or any other personally important endeavor.  Fear of rejection and failure in the job search are among the most cited concerns voiced by job seekers.  “What if I don’t get the…

Go Your Own Way

In school, were you the one who always had a better/different way of doing things?  When the teacher was explaining that 2 + 2 = 4, were you the one who said the same result could be achieved by adding 3 +1?  Or by subtracting 1 from 5? If you’re still looking at things a…

The Object(ive) Of Your Affection

An Objective statement on your resume, and reiterated in your cover letter is a concise way for you to communicate your career goals.  Too often Objective statements are written as flowery batches of verbiage that convey little or nothing about the job seeker’s real aspirations.  Once upon a time it was OK to use a…

Don't Take It Personally!

With the unemployment rate rising, it is apparent that more people are completing for fewer jobs.  And as employers are receiving more resumes than they have positions to fill, they can’t always spend the time coding, classifying and filing all the resumes they receive – electronic or paper – for present or future consideration. Even…

Nice n Soft – Conveying Your Soft Skills

There’s no question that one’s skills, experience and qualifications should be the primary consideration by an employer when selecting a candidate for hiring.  But one of the most important skill sets any applicant can bring to a job is far less recognizable from interviewing alone.  The qualities one brings for being able to deal with…