Companies really do hire employees between Thanksgiving and mid-January. There are a number of reasons why November, December, or January could be luckiest months in the job search for you. You should not pause your job search during the holiday months. Use the holiday season to improve your job search. The notion that job search gets harder this time of year is a myth. Job search websites such as monster.com have someti...

There is a theory out there that postulates that traditional job interviews don’t give hiring managers or recruiters an accurate read on a candidate’s likely performance in a certain role, largely because interviews can be too brief, formulaic, formal, or riddled with bias. Some organizations are taking a scientific approach to interviewing in which they control for obvious variables. For example, some orchestra...

Are you giving off the wrong signals and unknowingly decreasing your chances for landing the job? Despite the booming economy some candidates have trouble getting in the door. Why is that? Perhaps because they seem too risky to hire. Hiring managers are looking for qualified candidates who can add value. As much as possible, they want to avoid those who cause problems, and who can blame them? Releasing a troublemaker is...

Many of my clients ask what to do about age discrimination during the job search. The plain truth is if you’re waiting for ageism to disappear from the job market, one thing is certain: However old you are, you’ll grow much older waiting. Age-based discrimination may be illegal, but it remains pervasive despite its illegality. In any event, the law isn’t the recourse you need. “Failure to Hire&rdq...

Ninety-five percent of Fortune 500 companies use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or talent management system to organize and track résumés. Companies readily admit that many qualified candidates, as many as 70%, are screened out before their résumés are reviewed by a human. When you submit your résumé online, it is screened by a bot, if it can’t read the inform...

If job postings are windows into the working world, maybe somebody needs to clean the glass, because it can be awfully hard to know what you’re really seeing! That’s why the first letter in REAL stands for “Read between the lines” when you read job postings. In this post I’ll tell you how to do that, as well as how to Evaluate the fit, Apply with an advantage and Learn from the experience so...

For many years during my 18-year corporate career, I remained in a number of roles I disliked, and a few of them were a terrible fit. Now I see that there were some critical factors that influenced my strong resistance to make the changes I needed to, including worries about money, self-esteem issues, confusion as to what I really wanted, reluctance to start over in a new job, and just plain fear. Now, after two reinvent...

The resume black hole. The abyss. The void. The applicant tracking system (ATS) creates all kinds of stress and irritation for job seekers. Candidates almost universally loathe the experience. The ATS requires them to copy and paste sections from their resume into tiny boxes and answer questions that could be easily discussed in a quick phone call, adding to what is already a user-unfriendly, often tedious experience. While...

Failing to commit has sometimes been recognized as a West Coast issue, but I haven’t seen hard statistics about it. I don’t really know if this trend is limited to one area or not, but from what I observe, the reluctance to commit to just about anything is an increasing phenomenon in the Pacific Northwest. There’s a huge difference between evaluating and weighing out options to see what works best and j...

The essentials of the job hunt don’t really change according to your employment status, but employed searchers do have to consider a number of special issues that don’t affect their unemployed counterparts. 10 RULES OF THE ROAD Rule 1: Mum’s the Word The first rule of the searching-while-employed club is: You do not talk about searching while employed. The one exception applies when, and only w...