I am bushed….just finished resume of entrepreneurial CEO and I have deadline for a CFO tomorrow. 5 am here I come

Busy Busy Busy

(My note – While this is not going to eliminate the need for a résumé, and the résumé as we know it today is not going away anytime soon, this may well become mainstream. Additionally, this company interview takes place after the screening of traditional résumé and the normal culling out process). Marty Weitzman – Gilbert Resumes

Get ready for a closeup: your next job interview might be on webcam. Looking to save time and money, companies are turning to video-chat software as a cheap, low-hassle way to vet job candidates. That means a growing number of people looking for work are meeting their prospective new bosses not at the office but in the comfort of their own home.

Naturally, the transition from in-person to online isn’t without its hiccups. Fuzzy transmissions, dropped calls (especially on wireless networks) and unusual disruptions are all par for the course. Tip No. 1: Get your dog out of barking range before you start the interview. (We’ll return to the pointers in a bit.)

What’s the draw? Largely money. Last year, as executives at online retailer Zappos.com looked to cut expenses, they noticed how much the firm spent on travel. In HR alone, it easily cost $1,000 a pop to fly out job candidates and put them up for the night. The firm had used Skype internally, so about six months ago, recruiters started trying it for interviews.

Their opinion: a video link does a pretty good job of replacing an in-person meeting — and in a way that a phone call can’t. “If you see facial expressions and body language, you have a different sense of what a person is saying,” says recruiting manager Christa Foley. Now, instead of flying out 20 finalists for a job, the company first screens with Skype and then brings in only the best two or three candidates.

Job seekers are hopping on board too. Last spring, after Stephen Bhadran got laid off, he quickly realized there were more openings for computer programmers in Dallas, Atlanta and Los Angeles than in South Florida, where he lived. So he cast a wide net — and got a bite from the University of California, Los Angeles. The university wanted to interview him but wouldn’t pay the airfare. “I was laid off and running out of funds,” says Bhadran. “I couldn’t fly on my own dime.” He suggested interviewing by Skype. He got his request — and the job.

Things don’t always run smoothly. Bobby Fitzgerald, a restaurateur who has been interviewing job candidates by Skype since March, has had his share of amusements. For instance: the candidate who leaned forward while he spoke, giving Fitzgerald an intimate view of his nose. Another, a college senior, didn’t bother cleaning up his dorm room before the interview; the mess was painfully visible in the background.

And then there was the dog that wouldn’t stop barking. Fitzgerald cut the interview short and said he’d have to reschedule. Did the disruption influence his decision? “Well,” he says, “a big part of management is handling problems as they arise.”

Still, webcam interviews are entirely worth it, he says. Fitzgerald runs restaurants in four states and likes to hire from the nation’s top culinary and hospitality schools. It’s rare that he, the job candidate and the job are all in the same time zone. And the benefit of video-interviewing for him isn’t just saved money — it’s also saved time. “More than once, I’ve flown someone in and within an hour, I realize it’s not a fit,” he says. “But I’m stuck with that person for six more hours.”

So what should you do if you’re asked to interview by Skype — or even brave enough to suggest it yourself?

First off, realize that we perceive people differently through a camera than we do in person. Bill McGowan, a former news anchor who now trains people to go on TV, starts his list of pointers with lighting: whether you’re sitting in your kitchen or an office borrowed from a friend, make sure there’s no bright light (like from a window) behind you. That will only darken your face. When your interviewer is talking, it’s fine to look at his image on the screen, but when you answer, look at the camera. That’s how to make “eye contact.” Avoid wearing patterns and the color white, since we notice white spots on a screen first — you want your interviewer drawn to your teeth and eyes, not to your shirt. And don’t forget that what’s behind you is visible too. “It’s best to put away the Mad Men bar,” says McGowan.

Next, think about framing. Sitting flush with a plain white wall will make you look like you’re in a police lineup, so angle your knees to the corner of your computer screen, and then turn your head slightly back to look at the camera. Sit tall in your chair, but not too close to the camera: the first three buttons of your shirt should be visible, or else you risk looking like a floating head, counsels Priscilla Shanks, a coach for broadcast journalists and public speakers. Most important, do a dry run with a friend to check your color, sound and facial expressions — neutral often comes off as glum onscreen.

After all that, don’t forget that this is still a job interview. Even though you’re not meeting face to face, dress as though you are. When you “walk in,” have your résumé ready — this time, as an e-mail attachment. And don’t forget to do all the standard prep work. Are you ready to talk about your greatest weakness?

Though that’s not to say you can’t acknowledge the medium. This past summer, Deanna Reed, principal of the Marie Murphy School in suburban Chicago, started doing Skype interviews and has already considered candidates from as far away as Asia. “The time difference was so great, it was like 1 in the morning for him,” she says about a teacher in Japan. “I said, ‘Oh, you had to get on your suit in the middle of the night?’ And he said, ‘No, I have my pajamas on the bottom.’ He was fun — he had a real sense of humor.” Even over video, it’s possible to make a great first impression.   Time/Barbara Kiviat

Marty Weitzman
Gilbert Resumes
800 967 3846

Career Conference – Online Identity

Home from an energizing and enlightening career conference hosted by Career Directors International. Great seeing old friends and participating in mastermind strategy sessions with other industry leaders.

• Participated in comprehensive workshop on the necessity of knowing your online identity and techniques required to overcome negative information.

• Brainstormed on cutting edge résumé and cover letter techniques.

• Collaborated on Linkedin bio strategy and value of Linkedin as a primary job search tool.

It is clear that the job market is challenging, but with the right tools and perseverance today’s job seekers can tilt the odds in their favor and reduce the time to find a new position.

Marty Weitzman
Gilbert Resumes
800 967 3846

Career Conference – Online Identity

Home from an energizing and enlightening career conference hosted by Career Directors International. Great seeing old friends and participating in mastermind strategy sessions with other industry leaders.

• Participated in comprehensive workshop on the necessity of knowing your online identity and techniques required to overcome negative information.

• Brainstormed on cutting edge résumé and cover letter techniques.

• Collaborated on Linkedin bio strategy and value of Linkedin as a primary job search tool.

It is clear that the job market is challenging, but with the right tools and perseverance today’s job seekers can tilt the odds in their favor and reduce the time to find a new position.

Marty Weitzman
Gilbert Resumes
800 967 3846

Career Conference – Online Identity

Home from an energizing and enlightening career conference hosted by Career Directors International. Great seeing old friends and participating in mastermind strategy sessions with other industry leaders.

• Participated in comprehensive workshop on the necessity of knowing your online identity and techniques required to overcome negative information.

• Brainstormed on cutting edge résumé and cover letter techniques.

• Collaborated on Linkedin bio strategy and value of Linkedin as a primary job search tool.

It is clear that the job market is challenging, but with the right tools and perseverance today’s job seekers can tilt the odds in their favor and reduce the time to find a new position.

Marty Weitzman
Gilbert Resumes
800 967 3846

At the Career Director International career conference on Oct. 16th I had the opportunity of attending a workshop with Jason Alba, the Linkedin Guru, who was emphatic that you must be on Linkedin. After Jason’s extensive survey of recruiters and human resource professionals, it was obvious that Linkedin was a primary source of candidates for their positions.

Participating with other top resume writers from around the country we identified and collaborated on best Linkedin profile strategies and will be implementing that for our clients.

Marty Weitzman

Monday October 12, 2009

The number of job seekers competing for every job opening is at the highest since the recession began, but it’s worse than you think in many areas. The Labor Department reported 6.3 unemployed workers for every job opening. The number was 1.7 in December 2007.

It’s just an average. It’s better in some locations, and a lot worse in others. Indeed’s Unemployed Per Job Posting graph shows the average number of jobs per unemployed worker for fifty U.S. cities. If you’re in Washington, DC there is 1 job for every applicant. In Tampa there are 6 unemployed workers for every open job. Detriot is at the bottom of the list at 14 to 1.

With the “good” job cities, keep in mind that even those rankings are a bit misleading, because you have to be qualified for the job to get hired and, in some industries, there are many qualified applications for each job opening.

Indeed has other tools you can use to get the bigger picture for workers in your industry. Use Indeed’s Job Trends graph to see which industries are losing jobs and which are gaining. For September, there is only one in the plus column – Education is up 21%. Construction jobs are down 38% and Media/Newspaper and Transportation tie for second place, with job postings down 36%.

To see what’s happening with the types of jobs you’re looking for enter the keyword terms that you are using to job search to get a picture of the job market in your industry or career field.

Numbers, when it comes right down to it, are only numbers. But, what’s important about them is, first, how they impact your personal job market (what is available for you to apply to) and, secondly, how they impact the hiring process. The New York Times reported recently on how candidates are being interviewed multiples times for every job they are being considered for and how it can take months to get a job offer, if you’re lucky enough to get one.

If I can give a word of advice to those who are job seeking in these challenging times, it’s to make sure you are covering all the bases when you job search and to make sure all your communications are perfect – from the job search email you send to the image you present at a job interview.

By Alison Doyle, About.com Guide to Job Searching since 1998

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Marty Weitzman
Gilbert Resumes
800.967.3846
http://Executiveresumewriter.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/resumepro

Despite mixed economic reports, recruiters anticipate the demand for executive talent will increase during the next two quarters, according to the results of ExecuNet’s Recruiter Confidence Index (RCI) released today. “There’s a consensus among the nation’s top recruiters that the worst is over for the executive employment market,” says Mark Anderson, president and chief economist of ExecuNet. “We’re already seeing an uptick in hiring, as companies look to improve their management teams with a quality of talent that wasn’t readily available in recent years.”

According to September’s survey of 165 executive recruiters, 56 percent are confident or very confident the executive employment market will improve during the next six months — up from 49 percent last month. This also marks the RCI’s second highest reading during the past 13 months.

Recruiters’ short-term confidence reached a 12-month high in September, as 27 percent are confident or very confident the executive employment market will improve during the next three months — up from 24 percent in August. An equal number (27 percent) of recruiters are not confident the job market will improve during the next three months — down from 34 percent last month and the lowest reading since August 2008.

During the fourth quarter, 65 percent of all executive search consultants are expecting at least a 10 percent increase in search assignments received from corporate clients.

“Any increase in six-figure job growth is good news for executives, but clearly, finding these opportunities will be more challenging than it was before the recession,” added Anderson. “Companies are less likely to advertise openings in this environment given the sheer volume of talent in the market and their focus on improving existing leadership teams. This means infiltrating the hidden job market will be more important than ever before.”

Introduced in May 2003, the Recruiter Confidence Index is based on a monthly survey of executive search firms conducted by Execunet, a private network for business leaders. A leading indicator for the economy and the executive job market, a reading above 50 percent indicates recruiters expect the number of search assignments in the next six months will increase.

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Marty Weitzman
Gilbert Resumes
800.967.3846
http://Executiveresumewriter.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/resumepro

Good News and Bad News

The economy is growing, but the job market is tough!

Despite signs that the economy has resumed growing, unemployed Americans now confront a job market that is bleaker than ever in the current recession, and employment prospects are still getting worse.

Job seekers now outnumber openings six to one, the worst ratio since the government began tracking open positions in 2000. According to the Labor Department’s latest numbers, from July, only 2.4 million full-time permanent jobs were open, with 14.5 million people officially unemployed.

And even though the pace of layoffs is slowing, many companies remain anxious about growth prospects in the months ahead, making them reluctant to add to their payrolls.

“There’s too much uncertainty out there,” said Thomas A. Kochan, a labor economist at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management. “There’s not going to be an upsurge in job openings for quite a while, not until employers feel confident the economy is really growing.”

The dearth of jobs reflects the caution of many American businesses when no one knows what will emerge to propel the economy. With unemployment at 9.7 percent nationwide, the shortage of paychecks is both a cause and an effect of weak hiring.

In Milwaukee, Debbie Kransky has been without work since February, when she was laid off from a medical billing position — her second job loss in two years. She has exhausted her unemployment benefits, because her last job lasted for only a month. 

Indeed, in a perverse quirk of the unemployment system, she would have qualified for continued benefits had she stayed jobless the whole two years, rather than taking a new position this year. But since her latest unemployment claim stemmed from a job that lasted mere weeks, she recently drew her final check of $340. 

Ms. Kransky, 51, has run through her life savings of roughly $10,000. Her job search has garnered little besides anxiety.

“I’ve worked my entire life,” said Ms. Kransky, who lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment. “I’ve got October rent. After that, I don’t know. I’ve never lived month to month my entire life. I’m just so scared, I can’t even put it into words.” 

Last week, Ms. Kransky was invited to an interview for a clerical job with a health insurance company. She drove her Jeep truck downtown and waited in the lobby of an office building for nearly an hour, but no one showed. Despondent, she drove home, down $10 in gasoline.

For years, the economy has been powered by consumers, who borrowed exuberantly against real estate and tapped burgeoning stock portfolios to spend in excess of their incomes. Those sources of easy money have mostly dried up. Consumption is now tempered by saving; optimism has been eclipsed by worry.

Meanwhile, some businesses are in a holding pattern as they await the financial consequences of the health care reforms being debated in Washington.

Even after companies regain an inclination to expand, they will probably not hire aggressively anytime soon. Experts say that so many businesses have pared back working hours for people on their payrolls, while eliminating temporary workers, that many can increase output simply by increasing the workload on existing employees.

“They have tons of room to increase work without hiring a single person,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute Economist. “For people who are out of work, we do not see signs of light at the end of the tunnel.”

Even typically hard-charging companies are showing caution. 

During the technology bubble of the late 1990s and again this decade, Cisco Systems — which makes Internet equipment — expanded rapidly. As the sense takes hold that the recession has passed, Cisco is again envisioning double-digit rates of sales growth, with plans to move aggressively into new markets, like the business of operating large scale computer data servers. 

Yet even as Cisco pursues such designs, the company’s chief executive, John T. Chambers, said in an interview Friday that he anticipated “slow hiring,” given concerns about the vigor of growth ahead. “We’ll be doing it selectively,” he said.

Two recent surveys of newspaper help-wanted advertisements and of employers’ inclinations to add workers were at their lowest levels on record, noted Andrew Tilton, a Goldman Sachs economist.

Job placement companies say their customers are not yet wiling to hire large numbers of temporary workers, usually a precursor to hiring full-timers. 

“It’s going to take quite some time before we see robust job growth,” said Tig Gilliam, chief executive of Adecco North America, a major job placement and staffing company.

During the last recession, in 2001, the number of jobless people reached little more than double the number of full-time job openings, according to the Labor Department data. By the beginning of this year, job seekers outnumbered jobs four-to-one, with the ratio growing ever more lopsided in recent months. 

Though layoffs have been both severe and prominent, the greatest source of distress is a predilection against hiring by many American businesses. From the beginning of the recession in December 2007 through July of this year, job openings declined 45 percent in the West and the South, 36 percent in the Midwest and 23 percent in the Northeast. 

Shrinking job opportunities have assailed virtually every industry this year. Since the end of 2008, job openings have diminished 47 percent in manufacturing, 37 percent in construction and 22 percent in retail. Even in education and health services — faster-growing areas in which many unemployed people have trained for new careers — job openings have dropped 21 percent this year. Despite the passage of a stimulus spending package aimed at shoring up state and local coffers, government job openings have diminished 17 percent this year.

In the suburbs of Chicago, Vicki Redican, 52, has been unemployed for almost two years, since she lost her $75,000-a-year job as a sales and marketing manager at a plastics company. College-educated, Ms. Redican first sought another management job. More recently, she has tried and failed to land a cashier’s position at a local grocery store, and a barista slot at a Starbucks coffee shop. 

Substitute teaching assignments once helped her pay the bills. “Now, there are so many people substitute teaching that I can no longer get assignments,” she said. 

“I’ve learned that I can’t look to tomorrow,” she said. “Every day, I try to do the best I can. I say to myself, ‘I don’t control this process.’ That’s the only way you can look at it. Otherwise, you’d have to go up on the roof and crack your head open.”  By Peter S. Goodman Published: September 26, 2009 NY Times

Marty Weitzman
Gilbert Resumes
800.967.3846
http://Executiveresumewriter.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/resumepro

With the debate over executive compensation still fresh in our memories, recent research conducted by ExecuNet, a private, professional network for business leaders, shows that companies are cutting back on executive compensation in 2009.

The survey of 476 search firm consultants and corporate human resource professionals revealed that many of the key compensation components businesses relied on to recruit and retain top talent in recent years are being withheld from new offers.

An analysis of six different elements of compensation shows reductions across the board when compared to last year. In 2008, 80 percent of compensation packages offered a performance bonus. This year, it dropped to 71 percent. Packages with performance reviews within first six months dropped from 56 percent to 42 percent. In addition, offers including non-compete agreements dropped from 65 percent to 38 percent; guaranteed severance dropped from 44 percent to 34 percent. Packages with stock options or equity went from 51 percent to 32 percent, and the percentage offering sign-on bonuses dropped from 36 percent to 25 percent.

“Guaranteed bonuses, severance pay, and stock options have become less prevalent in executive compensation packages as companies continue to tighten their belts,” says Mark Anderson, President of ExecuNet. “However, with executive turnover poised to spike during the early stages of the recovery, which could be stronger than many expect, these compensation trends may be short-lived, as companies enhance their offers in an effort to recruit and retain top talent in a more competitive marketplace.”

A separate, simultaneous survey of 2,685 business leaders reveals that average executive compensation decreased 1.7 percent in 2008. Despite this drop and current economic conditions, employed executives would expect a 17 percent increase in total compensation if they were to make a job change in the year ahead – down from 18 percent in 2008. However, compensation expectations are much more reserved for those who are in transition or unemployed and in a job search. These professionals can anticipate a 2 percent increase in pay – down from 7 percent one year ago.   Published by Execunet

 
Marty Weitzman
Gilbert Resumes
800.967.3846
http://Executiveresumewriter.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/resumepro