If you're unemployed you're heard of all the networking support meetings available to job searchers. Ever ask yourself, "Why do I want to spend my gas driving XX miles to meet with other unemployed people?" Feel like it's a waste of your time to meet with other unemployed individuals when you could be spending that time marketing yourself to prospective employers?  Why spend time talking about missed interview opportunities when you could be smoozing with the pros?   As a sponsor to a group of unemployed workers, I've seen unemployed support groups shrink. When I first attended this group two years ago as a resume writer, the group was 30-40 people strong. The last meeting included me, the group president and two unemployed … [Read more...]

Like the prospectors of the '49er Gold Rush, job searchers leave most of the gold unmined at a job fair.  Lately, I've heard many job searchers tell me job fairs are a waste of time and they find nothing that appeals to them. What they don't realize is that a job fair is a gold mine of job opportunities, but like the quest for the Mother Lode job fair employment requires exploration and prospecting. It's easy to spot obvious jobs.  Like placer gold, they lay atop the surface, easy to spot and stake a claim.  But the richest veins of golden job opportunities must be explored and discovered. Knowing how and where to find these rich job opportunities is the key to using job fairs to market your skills and strike it … [Read more...]

At a recent networking meeting I met an employer who had been gun-ho to hire professionals with 30-years experience. She owned a frame shop and had just revived it through a website, growing social media presence, and online marketing that drove traffic to her website and her front brick and mortar store. To add to her excitement, she'd just hired a mature sales and marketing professional with 30-years exemplary experience.  She figured she'd found gold. But the gold mine lost its luster quickly. Within a month, she saw sales begin to slide. Within two months, they were lower, and by three months she'd lost 75% of what she'd held at the beginning of the quarter.  The problem? Her 30-year veteran had poisoned a once productive staff … [Read more...]

A new scam is circulating through free email carriers these days. With unemployment rates as high as 14% in some states, the out of work professional becomes perfect bait for a new identity theft scheme that becomes the perfect nightmare. As one economic consultant stated in a recent article, Despite a national unemployment rate of 8.9%, more people are out of work today than at this time in 2010. This sets a stage for scam artists to con people out of personal information when they are think they are getting a job rather than becoming a victim of identity theft or a phishing scam.   Recently, I received three scams and out of curiosity allowed myself to interview for a position, to see what it was. Within the first few … [Read more...]

Recently, Lifetime channel broadcast "Home by Christmas," a film starring Linda Hamilton, (she makes it nice to know what my name would look like in lights) about a woman who loses her job, she's evicted, her husband leaves her then cleans out her finances, and soon finds herself on the street.  An ugly situation with overwhelming circumstances. Yet with today's economy and job market, it may reflect similarities to many lives. But the movie shows the true resourcefulness each person has in facing and overcoming circumstances by keeping one's wits and thinking outside the box. It is a movie of self-discovery that each person can experience.  What most impressed me was that regardless of circumstances you have the inner ability to think … [Read more...]