Not every interview in your job search is a job interview. Consider the informational interview. An informational interview is a chance to meet briefly with someone in your field and talk about that person’s company, her career, and the industry as a whole. It’s as simple as that. It’s also a crucial facet of a best practice job search. Unlike a job interview, the informational interview lacks a pred...

The Best Job Search Tool Isn’t an App or Spreadsheet. Are you tired of reading countless self-help blogs in the quest for landing a job? Are you crumbling under the weight of unemployment? For millions, the waking nightmare of unemployment, and even underemployment, feels like a never-ending cycle of applications, waiting and researching. Even the most qualified of job seekers find the mounting pressure of se...

Mentoring is a Core Competency That Belongs on Your Best Professional Resume. Today, mentorship still plays a vital role in today's corporate environment, but its importance is often underrated or poorly understood. Increasingly, companies value mentoring programs and realize that mentoring is a skill that can help business. A Harvard Business Review study showed that two-thirds of executives reported that they ha...

Recent College Graduates: Develop a Job Search Strategy How can you launch your job search after getting your degree? It’s hard when you continue to hear reports of how tough a new grad job search can be. Despite stagnant wage growth in the United States, there’s actually some good news for the class of 2017. Entry-level jobs are paying more on average for new grads than they ever have, 3 percent more tha...

Unless you have a personal connection to a wish-granting genie, the best job search strategy doesn’t work well as a spur-of-the-moment undertaking. If for some reason you’re wishing for career help and not for pots of gold and superpowers, a job search takes preparation. If you want to put yourself in the best position to succeed, you can start your preparation by asking yourself these four questions. Why...

One of the biggest mistakes people make in their Bay Area job search is assuming that the process hasn’t changed much. It has. On the other hand, some older job seekers also overestimate how much hiring has changed. Despite Applicant Tracking System technology and video interviews, the fact remains: it’s still people making the decision to hire people. Post-50 Bay Area Job Search Not Your Last Even if you&...

Who wrote your resume? At first glance, that may seem like an odd question for a job interviewer or recruiter to ask an executive job candidate. Even if it’s not the first item on the interview agenda, however, reports from the interviewing front indicate that it comes up often enough to be worth a few words of advice. There’s good news. The question may seem to come from left field, but handling it is str...

We’re all different. We think differently, we feel differently and we respond to the world differently. Yet there are some things almost all of us agree on. Almost all of us agree that the job market is a stressful place, and most of us think “stressful” is a bit of an understatement. Success at carrying out the best job search depends in part on how you respond. It’s not the same for everyone, o...

Mistakes in the Executive Interview In many ways, mistakes made in the executive interview continue the theme established by mistakes in the resume. The common denominator is the sense among many executives that, to put it bluntly, they’re above all this. Their accomplishments should speak for themselves. Given their successful careers, they shouldn’t have to prove themselves in the same way that junior appli...

Mistakes in the Executive Resume So, according to your resume, you’re a results-oriented professional with deep industry knowledge and exceptional leadership skills? Strangely enough, your competitors’ resumes are making the very same claims. To a Hiring Manager or any prospective employer faced with a pile of resumes, the fact that applicants are willing to make nebulous claims about impressive-soundin...