January Winter Blues
Wednesday January 28, 2009
Typically January and February are the hottest hiring months according to what several recruiting professionals have told me personally. Being a professional job seeker, my own experience is a living indicator of the temperature of the job market. And, it is cold!
How To Fill In Resume Gaps
Like lots of people, you may have been without a job for 2 months, or like one guy I met, for 2 years! From a personal marketing standpoint, it means time gaps in your resume. Why should you care? And, how do you fill in those resume gaps?
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Inauguration Week
Monday January 19, 2009
US stock markets are closed for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. It is a very slow recruiter day – just 1 phone call and 1 email by 2:30pm.
Tomorrow the 44th US President will be sworn into office. I expect it to be a pretty quiet recruiting day also.
Then on Wednesday it might pick up. The stock market will react in ways rational or not, and company boards and executives will react to that, and hiring managers and HR recruiters and consulting companies and their recruiters will react as well. Chain reaction with a crack-the-whip end result, that will have a counter reaction the next day, etc… Basically, business as usual in the never-ending unpredictable cycle of authorize a project, start a project, support a project, suspend a project, kill a project; then do it again.
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2009 Week 2
Monday January 12, 2009
Slow as molasses in January.
- Logged into Monster to refresh my resume. I see that they have recently changed their layout and design, thereby making it even more user-unfriendly. Now I can’t find how to ‘renew”.
- Logged into Dice to refresh my resume. I see how my 30 day average of 211 views has dropped to 177 in the past few days. A year ago it stayed at 300 and way above. A little sign of the times I’d say.
- Long have I disliked Monster’s usability as a job seeker. Today my dislike is reinforced ever again. I was able to refresh the update date on my resume by stumbling into the edit mode, then saving. But I had to manually refresh the browser page because the “lasted updated” date did not dynamically update.
- Lite day: only 6 incoming recruiter contacts.
Tuesday January 13, 2009
I’ll admit that yesterday found me in a rare state – that being just a little depressed over job hunting, the economy, winter weather, and being a Monday. But, today I am feeling a little more on top of it all.
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Outsourcing, Offshoring, and What Does It Mean To Me?
As a professional writer, I can be pretty particular about word choices and their meanings. And, as an IT consultant, I am pretty conscious of staffing models. So, when the word “outsource” is used, the proper definition would mean simply farming the job out to an outside provider. However, the word has been abused and misused to mean “offshoring” all too often. Actually, offshoring in the US means exactly what it sounds like: receiving or implementing a solution from beyond our borders. Easy.
