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6 safety tips for online job seekers

With a click of your mouse you can post your resume for millions to see. You can store five different cover letters at once and send out different versions without printing a single page. You can apply to hundreds of employers without ever getting in a car or picking up the phone.

Online job hunting
Here are six simple ways to protect your personal
data from thieving eyes.

Safety tips
1. Know what scammers want.
2. Find a job board you trust.
3. Sniff ads for phishiness.
4. Apply to a handful of employers.
5. Depersonalize your resume.
6. Protect your computer.

You can also expose yourself to scammers.

There’s no doubt about it — if you want to join the online job search bandwagon, there are plenty of places to park your resume. Some attact quite a crowd: Careerbuilder.com, for instance, says it has more than 1 million jobs and 15 million resumes on its site.
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Rules rule when job hunting

You only get one chance to make a first impression, the saying goes, and that’s never so true as when you’re interviewing for a new job.

And while it’s not easy to standout in this Uber-competitive world, employment experts suggest one way jobseekers can do just that is by creating their own “brand.”

“Wait a minute,” you’re thinking, “I have to go to Martha Stewart-like lengths just to land a good job these days?”

Well, not exactly, but it doesn’t hurt to send that potential new employer a clear message about what it is that you — and you alone — can bring to the workplace.

Think of it this way: If you, say, excel at being organized, make that your brand. Then carry that message over into your résumé by including that organizational theme in each of your accomplishments.
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How to work the Web to find work

Companies use software to weed out candidates, but here are five strategies that help job-seekers get noticed.
By Gregory M. Lamb | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
In recent years, some tough new bouncers have begun to stand watch outside the door to corporate personnel offices. If you want to get your résumé into the hands of a recruiter, you have to get it by them first.

These guardians are sophisticated computer programs that use “conceptual matching” and other artificial intelligence to weed out candidates who don’t fit the job profile. While they usually leave the final hiring decision to a human, these programs can whittle down hundreds of applications to just a handful that will be seen by human eyes.

These tireless assistants are needed as the Internet revs up the other side of the equation: Internet job banks and company websites that make submitting résumés faster and easier than ever.

Millions of résumés are now floating around on the Net, experts say. “Résumés today are basically a commodity on the Internet. There are so many of them,” says Brad Fredericks, cofounder of RésuméDoctor.com, a South Burlington, Vt., company that helps job seekers prepare effective résumés.
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Top Job Interview Questions

The job interview is a powerful factor in the employee selection process. You can use behavioral-based job interview questions to help you select superior candidates. Ask interview questions that help you identify whether the candidate has the behaviors, skills, and experience needed for the job you are filling.

Ask legal interview questions that illuminate the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses to determine job fit. Avoid illegal interview questions and interview practices that could make your company the target of a U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) lawsuit.
Illegal Job Interview Questions

Illegal interview questions include any interview questions that are related to a candidate’s:

* Age
* Race, ethnicity, or color
* Gender or sex
* Country of national origin or birth place
* Religion
* Disability
* Marital or family status or pregnancy
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Labor market changes detailed

The United States is in the midst of a global economic war, and many Americans may not know it.

Even fewer realize we may be falling behind.

That’s the opinion of John Twomey, executive director of the New York Association of Training and Employment Professionals, an Albany-based advocacy group, who yesterday offered the Finger Lakes Workforce Investment Board a look at the changing face of American employment.

“We’re in a global struggle to get the U.S. work force ready to compete, yet we are spending only 11.7 percent of what we invested 28 years ago,” Twomey told a gathering of local board members, employers, educators and government officials at the Ramada Inn Geneva Lakefront.
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The NEW Networking

Networking: You may call it contact-development, relationship-building or career investment. Certainly it touches on all those things - and if you’re doing it, you know it can eat up time, which few of us have to spare.

Still, even as technology has connected us 24/7 to work, it has also opened all kinds of bridges and bypasses that bring new efficiencies to the notion of identifying, meeting and staying in touch - whether it’s with those who might end up doing business with us, advancing our careers or helping us find solutions to work-related problems.

But the new networking isn’t just a product of technological advances: Some people are simply inventive, and as they see a need for a new way to address common career concerns, they create networking groups to focus on them.

Here’s a look at some of the approaches that may help bring efficiencies to your search for contacts and efforts to stay in touch with the people and businesses you’ve identified as valuable.
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When the pitch is imperfect

While a resume is the first tool with which you make your sales pitch, it may be saying all the wrong things about you. Kenneth Kwama writes about common mistakes executives make in their CVs.

Getting to the interview stage of a job hunt can be difficult. With the competition high and thousands of job-hunters literally going after the same jobs, getting into the interview room could just be as important as landing the job. Generally, HR specialists agree that it is impossible to land a good job without proper CV. (Unless you’re being headhunted by people who have worked with you or know you by reputation).
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When your job can be like a date

For Caroline Holley, taking a job after meeting the boss once makes about as much sense as agreeing to an arranged marriage.

“It seems kind of insane, but that’s the way most decisions are made,” said Holley, a New Yorker in her 30s who was a temporary worker before accepting a job as education and training administrator at the American National Standards Institute in New York last year.

“Temp to perm” or “temp to hire” are industry terms for employees like Holley who work on a temporary status before becoming permanent employees.

“It’s a much better chance to get to know each other,” Holley said, noting that her temporary status offered her the opportunity to size up the office culture before making a commitment to work there.
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What to Do When You’re ‘in Transition’

Recently I wrote an article in this space entitled What to Do in the First Hundred Days, which described how you should approach a new job. Some of the feedback I received indicated that I missed an important point in that article: “What did you do before you got hired?” Here are some tips I picked up “on the job.”

In Transition
For one reason or another you’ve decided to leave your current employer without having another job. You already know this isn’t a good idea but then sometimes it is the only choice. So, you are now unemployed or, as we unemployed like to say, “in transition” (the English language makes harsh things sound so much better). As nice as transition sounds, this really is an ugly place for most of us. The market today is better than it was during the dotcom bust as there are more jobs available, but as you will soon see it is just as hard to find one for yourself. With all the available talent in the market, hiring managers are being very specific about their “must- have requirements,” if you don’t have one or two of the nine requisite skills in most cases your paperwork won’t get to the hiring manager. By the way, rejected is another one of those harsh words, so some recruiters will just ignore you so they can avoid using it.
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Bosses find mentoring isn’t worth the time, risks

Since he became chief executive officer of Irvine, Calif.-based Freedom Communications in January, Scott Flanders has been crisscrossing the country to meet and talk with employees at dozens of locations. But Flanders has also told his managers that they can’t afford to constantly offer advice and guidance to their staffs.

“In this flatter world, where most managers have a broader span of control, there aren’t enough hours in the day to double-check everything employees do,” he says. “We can’t tolerate mediocrity, but we have to presume the competence of employees - and then, when we’re disappointed, spend time coaching and training,” or weed out failures.

This new model of management - teaching by example and offering employees intermittent feedback rather than meticulously reviewing everything they do - is being adopted formally and informally at many companies. It’s a change many managers have to make. Their staffs are larger because of restructurings that have cut layers of managers, and increasingly they are expected to produce work themselves while supervising employees’ output.
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