TheJobBored

The above title came to mind this weekend when I was talking to a friend who was looking for a new job.

I gave him the advice that we career pros are always repeating: The quickest way to find a new job is through networking.

His response was instructive:

“If I knew someone who would hire me,” he said, “I wouldn’t be looking for a job, would I?”

There seems to be a lot of confusion out there about what “networking” in the job search sense actually means. Sure, a lot of it is who you know. Your friends can open doors for you. But I would venture that a large part of it is who you don’t know… but could reach out to if you just play your cards right.

So, a simple analogy is to compare job search networking to dating. [Read more →]

Happy to have you here, and happy for our association with the Baltimore Sun.

If you’re looking for a job (and even if you aren’t) take some time to tool around our archives. You’ll find plenty of good career advice herein.

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Monday’s post about the interview questions Microsoft and Google will hit you with sort of caught my fancy. Just for fun, I started investigating the process of getting hired at high tech companies. I figured, companies like these are on the cutting edge, and they can basically pick and chose who they hire. The workers come to them.

So, I thought that learning a bit more about their processes might help me learn more about where hiring processes are headed in the 21st century. Might have a post on this soon.

For now, though, there’s one thing I can say definitively: in the 21st century, progressive companies are very open about their hiring processes. Want to get a job at Microsoft? Shoot, they have entire websites and page after page posted to give you info on the process. If you have the interest and the time, you can browse around the web and learn just about anything you could want to know about working for Mr. Balmer.

And this is a roundabout way of getting to the point of this post.

On the Microsoft JobsBlog, I found an interesting post about GPAs on resumes. This is obviously a big deal for recent grads and students.

In short: should you put your GPA on your resume? Do GPAs even matter, or is the degree the only important thing? And perhaps most important: can a bad GPA hurt your chances of getting hired?

The post has 3 good rules of thumb that I’ll summarize here: [Read more →]

Via SavvySugar,

CareerBuilder also polled the managers to find out the words they most commonly search for when filtering résumés. Many use electronic scanners to select résumés that contain the qualifications they’re seeking. As long as you’re not lying so that you can incorporate some of these search words, try and include them in your updated résumé for a better shot at making it through the scanning process. Here are the most common search terms along with the percentage of hiring managers who mentioned them.

Click here to read the most common terms. Are they in your resume?

The New York Times had an article today on salary transparency that has gotten a fair bit of attention in the blogosphere. The thesis of the article is that in this internet age, knowing what your co-workers make will become commonplace. The move toward an open workplace, the article posits, might be inevitable.

Openness about company ledgers “will become the norm,” Ms. Fenton predicts, “even if people come to it reluctantly. If people are paid what they are worth, there is no reason for people to feel uncomfortable about sharing salary information.”

Color me not so sure.

I certainly acknowledge that there are plenty more ways to get an idea of what you should be paid. Salary.com has always been one such tool. But Salary’s next-generation competitors like PayScale, GlassDoor and SalaryScout, are taking things even further. It’s now possible to find out what a specific position probably (or used to; or most likely) pays based on anonymous feedback.

But I don’t think you’ll ever see true and complete salary transparency. Not because, as the article suggests, middle class mores make salary disclosure taboo. No, the thing that the article doesn’t mention is the real reason why salaries are kept secret.

As my friend Matt pointed out, it’s in the best interest of management to keep salaries under wraps. If every worker knows what every other worker makes, then they will demand at the very least strict and complete equality in pay. But if no one really knows for sure… if the salary waters are a bit murky… then management can get away with paying some people way less than they otherwise would have to.

In short, it’s in management’s best interest to keep salaries secret so that they can keep labor costs down. Your boss might pay Bob 10k more than he pays you for the exact same job. It’s not your bosses fault. If, for whatever reason, you agreed to work for less, then hey: it’s a free market!

Sorry if I sound a bit Marxist in my analysis, but I think that’s the overriding reason for the tradition we have of keeping salaries on the down low. It’s a fact of business life, and the article kind of misses it in my estimation.

But that leads me to one of my favorite all-time bits of advice for anyone in the workforce: [Read more →]

Google and Microsoft have long been famous (notorious?) for their rigorous interview process. For years we’ve heard legendary 2nd-hand stories about the Rube Goldberg interview questions and the GMAT-like testing gauntlet that applicants have to endure.

The Royal Pingdom blog has scraped together some interview questions that applicants claim they have been asked by Microsoft and Google hiring managers. What does it teach us?

Well, it teaches me that I’d never stand a chance.

Some of the questions are the sort of “if a train leaves from Boston going 70mph…” type of math questions that I can never quite wrap my mind around. For example, this one from Microsoft:

Imagine an analog clock set to 12 o’clock. Note that the hour and minute hands overlap. How many times each day do both the hour and minute hands overlap? How would you determine the exact times of the day that this occurs?

Well, I suppose that is something I could figure out given enough time. Or, at least, I can imagine that a reasonably educated person could figure that sort of question out.

But some of the questions from Google seem downright otherworldly. A question like this one requires… I dunno… knowledge of super-hero physics?:

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

And then there are the downright geekish questions, like this one:

Describe a chicken using a programming language.

That one might be fun to answer, come to think of it.

P.S., click through to the link to see a funny example of a potential Ikea interview session. It’s the cartoon at the bottom.

If you have career or job search question you would like answered on this blog, click here to Ask Brian.

Alison asks:

I’ve actually got two questions and it is probably relevant that I’m looking into non-profit/arts work and that my questions pertain to those positions at small offices with only a handful of employees and no real HR department, i.e. an independent movie theater with five employees.

First, I read where you felt that mailing a resume makes one stand out, would you say the same applies to hand-delivering the resume directly to the company? What if I already sent it via email, would sending it again via snail mail or taking it there myself, thus applying twice I suppose, be worthwhile or just make me look desperate/stupid?

Second, as this is my first job hunt, I’m on the boards daily and applying shortly after postings go up. I’ve received several “We’ve received your application, will review your materials, and if interested will contact after Date X/in a couple of weeks” emails, the timeline usually corresponding with the apply by date. I’m wont to think that emails like this are just “leave us alone, we’ll call you, but not really cause we would just do so if we really wanted to interview you” responses. I guess what I’m asking is how legitimate are apply by dates, do companies really wait until they pass to contact people for interviews, and should I wait a certain amount of time after a posting goes up before submitting my materials?

Brian answers after the jump. [Read more →]

One thing I’ve noticed about younger job seekers is that they’re big on finding jobs at non-profits, charities, foundations and the like.

Sorta renews your faith in humanity to realize that trying to have a meaningful career that “makes a difference” is a hip thing to do.

If you haven’t considered non-profits in your job search, maybe you should. Non-profits are not recession proof by any means (during slow economic times, people have less money to give and so non-profits see their income suffer) but they’re also not just working at soup kitchens. A lot of non-profits are multi-national operations with billion dollar budgets and thousands of workers. And you don’t need any specialized type of degree or background to work at a non-profit. Non-profits need lawyers and accountants and HR and IT people just like any other organization.

On the blog, SchizoFrenetic, I found a great list of online resources for a non-profit job search. [Read more →]

I was speaking with a friend this weekend who works for an auto-related company. I asked him if he was nervous about his own job and the prospects for his own company. Indeed, he was:

“We have meetings all the time now. Almost every day. Tons of meetings are a bad sign for any company.”

We talked about it some and I agreed that he was right. A rash of meetings is bad news.

“It’s a sign management is flailing,” my friend said. “They’re out of ideas. And they’re out of ideas for finding new ideas. So they keep calling meeting after meeting in the hope that a good idea will magically show up.”

We got to talking more and came up with this list of additional signs your company is struggling and your job might not be safe from layoffs:

• They bring in the consultants. Never a good sign. A swarm of consultants descending on your operations is another admission by management that they’re out of ideas.
• The bigwigs above you start to lose their jobs. I mentioned I had written a post about that just this week.
• Your company moves to new, smaller office space. Cost cutting starts here. The next step is eliminating positions. [Read more →]