Archive for December, 2007

Archives for Career Advice

Here are five blog posts related to finding a job that I found especially worthwhile in 2007. Of course, I will throw in one of ours, and we hope these four other favorites knock your socks off.

Why Advanced Search Doesn’t Advance Your Search - My Global Career

My colleague Jennifer Hamm, a former expat journalist, penned this post on the weakness of using advanced search to find a job.

How to Get a Job on Craigslist - Guy Kawasaki, How to Change the World

Guy is known for his brilliant advice to startup founders and VCs but much of what he writes also works well as career advice, too.  Looking a bit deeper into his archives, Guy’s blog post from 2006 about finding a job in Silicon Valley remains classic advice.

Five Ways to Flub a Job Interview - Penelope Trunk, Brazen Careerist

In her Yahoo! Finance and Boston Globe columns, Penelope Trunk offers sage advice that’s both persuasive and on target.  Her book Brazen Careerist is a good read.

Can This Job Be Saved? How to Know When It’s Time to Go - Michelle Goodman, The Anti 9-to-5 Guide

A fellow journalist, Michelle Goodman is a freelancer, author and guru to working women (and men) among others. This blog post is cribbed from a corporate assignment she penned in 2007.

Career Advice - Scott Adams, Dilbert.Blog

You may know Dilbert as a wonderfully funny cartoon strip, but I think of Scott Adam’s oeuvre as a career survival guide.  The New York Times recently profiled how Adams is navigating a moonlighting career as a restaurant owner in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Want to join me for lunch at one of “Dilbert’s” restaurants? I look forward to hearing from you about your career and how My Global Career can become even more useful to you in 2008.  

Archives for Job Boards

There’s something job boards aren’t telling you.

Have you ever thought that if you figured out the search techniques, you would be able to find your dream job?

You click on the advanced-search function, fill in the blanks and hit return. But the matches still aren’t what you’re looking for. Despite improved functionality on many leading job sites, advanced-search functions are overwhelmingly under-used.

In fact, only about five percent of job seekers use advanced search functions, says Jonathan Duarte, founder of online job board GO Jobs.

Duarte attributes the low usage of advanced-search functions to several factors, namely that they involve too many steps and that many job seekers are not trained in Boolean searching, the use of “and” and “or.”

Archives for Social Media

I wander through life empowering experts to deal with chronic problems such as product safety, cancer, poverty and Internet privacy. Like taxes and dry cleaning, I often don’t want to know the nitty gritty of how things get done.

Don’t worry, that still leaves me plenty of issues to wring my hands over, like finding a job, a new client or perfect business partners. Yet when it comes to the Net I’m hands on enough to protect my personal data - and I favor penalties for firms that exploit vulnerable people. Privacy intrusions could lead to regulations that wreck the party for all of us.

Those of us who use social networks to help manage or advance professional relationships have paid rapt attention lately to rapidly evolving privacy policies on Facebook among other social networking sites. Facebook is the wild frontier of cyberspace.

Archives for Job Testing

Globalization has expanded the opportunities of where we work and for whom we work. But how do global firms ensure that the people they hire locally are suited - from a standpoint of analytic skills, aptitude, and personality - for globally collaborative assignments?

According to hiring consultants and human-resources executives at international companies, it’s crucial for employers to hire firms that specialize in so-called psychometric testing. Only by working with those experts, who understand local cultural issues, can you devise a test that reveals an applicant’s capabilities. Maarten Van Beek, leadership and organizational effectiveness manager for international consumer-products firm Unilever in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, says, “Our competency model is used globally, but all tests are conducted locally. We need to assure that we take local or cultural differences into accordance.”

Sound simple? It’s not. Even experts disagree on the efficacy of such tests.

Archives for Social Media

There’s a thin line between mavens and evangelists.

We trust mavens to recommend movies, restaurants or even dry cleaners. We fear incurring the wrath of evangelists who contend that it’s a huge mistake (or worse) not to drive a Volkswagen, buy an iPhone or skip reading The Kite Runner. (It’s on my list of things to do, really.)

Perhaps we’re just a little wary of evangelists (and I don’t mean the religious kind). A case in point: hard-selling corporate recruiters. I can empathize with them, though, because not all jobs or companies are an easy sale.

Mavens tend to feel strongly, even passionately that their advice is ideal for their friends, readers or acquaintances. Speaking as a maven and connector, I can tell you that it’s pretty hard to switch it off. When a friend asks: “Seen any good movies?” We’re not the types who reply, “Who has time?”

Archives for Social Media

When the scientific study hit the wires recently establishing that obesity spreads virally across large “social networks,” I figured that science was simply appropriating a popular cyberspace term.

After all, if obesity could spread across Facebook, or MySpace, science would have a larger problem on its hands than excessive girth. Are my contacts on Facebook really that susceptible to my suggestions? If so, I have a get-rich-slowly scheme to sell them.

Still, it’s obvious that some news and ideas spread virally over the Net; think about how many times you have spammed your friends or associates with jokes, links to articles, blog posts or videos. Before there was e-mail there were fax machines and (lawyer) jokes made the rounds pretty quickly, too.

Archives for Relocations

Patrik Runald and his wife Susanne sold their things and left Sweden to build a global career. He and his wife, key employees of a Finnish security software firm, moved to London three years ago, resettled in Singapore and then tried Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

When the Runald’s pine for Sweden they go to the nearest Ikea store, which conveniently stocks Swedish meatballs and beverages. Whenever they want to see ice hockey, they watch games online. Whenever they miss their friends and family, they hop onto Skype or e-mail and exchange photos.

“You learn a lot about yourself when you live abroad and you learn things about your partner,” Patrik says. “Losing your safety net means you rely more on each other as a couple. It forces you to get new friends and make new connections. My relationship with my wife became stronger.”

The roundabout journey from Stockholm to a Muslim country may have puzzled some of their friends, but the Runald’s each come from a family of world-travelers. “I come from a family used to travel and living abroad,” he says. Patrik’s father lives in Singapore and Susanne’s family recently settled in Montreal. He has a sister who was born in the Philippines - fairly exotic for a Scandinavian.

Patrik has a pretty cool but demanding career: He is F-Secure’s security response manager, managing a team of experts who monitor internet based threats 24/7 and devise antidotes for viruses, spam and phishing attacks. He’s not sure where he will go next, but North America holds some appeal to him: “I have started over three times. I’m only 30 years old and I don’t feel ready to settle down.”