Now for a healthy outlook on your career path, I recommend you…

1. Accept Change. To open a door to a new career jobseekers must focus on accepting change as reality. So look at the ways you have learned and enjoy learning. Express this in achievements and keywords in your resume and career marketing materials. Be ready to respond swiftly to the needs of corporations by offering different aspects of your background. No longer are resume just dry ways to demonstrate your employment during high school, college, through internships, military or other experiences. You must give line and verse about what you have done and how it applies to the position you are going for next. That means get ready to edit your resume for each position you apply for online or offline. Change happens abruptly in business. It happens abruptly throughout many a career path. What’s in our control? You control your actions and your attitudes; that may be about all you can control. Control the content within your resume. Develop your volunteer experiences, key class projects, athletic or other achievements. Everything must be looked at, developed and considered. Some new graduates think they have nothing to offer. You do if you market it properly. 

2. Look Beyond the Surface. According to career authors and other representatives from the major search engines, something less than 5% of leads are advertised on the big job boards. So where does the typical jobseeker or the typical new graduate spend their time looking for jobs? I would argue they spend 95% of their energy focused on Internet job boards. This is a good starting point. In fact, sites like Craig’s List offer opportunities and danger too. As a new graduate you need to search and find your target audience. Recruiters don’t just look on the major sites for resumes. They are working the social networking sites like Facebook and the more professional networking sites like LinkedIn. Those are not the only ones either! So if you information isn’t loaded there and you don’t know why you need to campaign in that way then you are out of date. You are not savvy or sophisticated. Weddle’s Guides and Peter Weddle himself an Internet guru stated personally to me that there are dozens of sites for niche industries being developed weekly. In fact, he suggested that recruiters are more interested in finding you doing something they might want to hire you for than downloading your CV from the big sites. So where could you go and what could you do to be seen as someone serious? Remember you must think this way even if you are in a path toward law school, med school or are not sure what you want to be when you grow up. 

3. Go for Your Mission not Just a Job. Take an entrepreneurial approach to your future. How do I want my life to be in 10 years and what career path may be the best vehicle to that path? What do I want my reputation to be in five years? What is my Worklife Mission? Everything you do should be geared toward these goals and aspirations. If you are looking for a job and not a career a lot of this advice might not matter. If you are just trying to pay bills then who cares what you do or who you do it for. But if you can compose more than your 30–second commercial - develop a Worklife Mission statement. Pick career opportunities that may advance you toward who and what you want to be in five or more years. Current Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers suggest that 65% of people don’t like their jobs. But what do they do about this dissatisfaction? Where do they go to take proactive, positive action on finding their professional calling, their next steps? To properly research new ideas you can use the big job boards like Monster.com or CareerBuilder.com. Other sources of information may come as easy as finding articles and information from a variety of sources: industry journals, company websites, blogs, volunteer organization sites, DOT, OOH, ONET and other resources. In a competitive job market, it’s hard enough for job seekers on a steady career path to get their resumes noticed. If you are pursuing a new direction, it’s all that much more difficult to convince hiring managers to take a chance on you. Study and read. Utilize insiders to help you network. Pick jobs that will give you part of what you want to be in 10 years. Move toward something specific. Also, please stop looking for a job and start looking for opportunities. Employers want people who want opportunities. If you want to stand out then take the attitude that you want an opportunity. 

4. Lastly, start dealing with the gaps and mistakes you made during college. So you didn’t get that internship that you wanted? You didn’t really have that great of summer jobs? You didn’t do all those volunteer things you thought you would do? Well then start doing them now. Start volunteering. Ask for the experiences you need and give away your time and expertise for free. No, don’t wait. Do it right now. In the meantime you may have to get two jobs, three jobs or even put up with being underemployed until you make up this lost ground. Mistakes that new graduates make usually means that they want to utilize the same poor decisions they made during school as they attempt to compete in the marketplace. That just simply won’t work. As professionals, many of my clients need a makeover and to understand they must self-study in order to research, define and emphasize key qualifications for these new goals and objectives. If you have not earned them start earning them now. With that attitude you will probably be hired into a position you want. 

5. Your Resume Must Be Outstanding. What do the potential hiring managers want to see in a resume? Here’s a tip - they want to see what you can do for them now and how you will drive revenue and reduce cost for them now. What do they want to see in you if you ran a construction operation but now want to consider selling industrial products? Hire a professional to interview you and market you. Good writing, proper use of keywords and a marketing oriented resume sells in person and online. You need to ask yourself tough questions to come up with original documents. In a behavioral interview for major account management, how will you relate your transferable skills or the experiences you gained to date? What if you were in the military and you want to be in a federal job? That may make sense. But how do you relate your class experiences, jobs, internships, military experiences and whatever you have into a corporate assignment in finance, sales or operations? The list goes and could go on forever. They don’t need to know dry work history or a listless listing of dates, times and responsibilities but they do need to understand the transferable skills, keywords and strategy you intend to take with them in communicating your specific and immediate value. Any savvy jobseeker and especially a career changer may need to clearly write down, analyze and synthesize raw data to feature why they are marketable and why they should be interviewed. A great resume or personal marketing material must brand you across many platforms - online, offline, personal, professional. 

Congratulations on earning your degree. You must look for an opportunity not a handout. You want to earn your future. Now go out and fight with passion for your career life and your all important worklife mission. And get out of the basement room at your parents house!

Read Part One.

Stand out by writing and living your Work Life mission and learn the new rules for careers. It also might help your parents if you moved out of your old room or the basement. 

Start with a new paradigm, a new mindset. Find organizations that support your worklife mission and fight to join them. Generations ago it was your parents and even grandparents that thought they would be in one career path and maybe with one company. That was the dream of dreams. Then you could settle down in life.

Well, forget that mindset. If that’s the lottery you want to hit you will probably have lottery odds to get into one career path, climb the corporate ladder and retire that way. Who checks time with a watch anyway? It’s on your IPhone or PDA or whatever. In many ways, you need grasp the idea that you will have some major career shifts and, most likely, change careers during your career. A career must be viewed as a sequence of jobs and probably a sequence of career paths.

How can I make this claim?

All industries change and as the industry changes then you must change with it. It’s Internet warp speed. No industry remains stagnant and if a business that serves that industry does not change then that business faces changes of its own. Look at the way the construction business or housing industry has changed in the last year. Look at the technology and software industries. Have they changed? How about the music and entertainment industry? Any changes you noticed? They change daily. How about the oil business, the airlines and others? Okay, you have the point. Either the business, technology, people and economies change or something shifts. For those shifts any jobseeker or person who intends to have a long career must embrace change.  

The following article was written by Kimberly Schneiderman of City Career Services… 

Working with recruiters often feels like a guessing game. It is nerve-wracking for job seekers to learn the process as they go. They wonder how to make time to scout, screen and interview recruiters during the workday. Perhaps you can relate. Sometimes it seems like your search is at a stand still - even with so many moving pieces. Maybe you have other roadblocks that freeze your progress - trying to sell yourself, remembering ‘everything’ you have ever done in your career, explaining a bad situation and why you left, or writing a simple thank you note that hits the right points.

Well, it is time to take a deep breath. While we cannot change the time required for an effective job search, there are some tips for working with recruiters to get the most out of your time. This article will provide some insights from recruiters points of view. How they look at the whole process, what they really think when you ask for a 7 a.m. interview and what you can do to make your partnership successful.

Taking the Screening Call

When actively searching, the first rule of thumb is to avoid answering your cell phone unless you are in the perfect position to talk. As many job seekers have figured out, answering your phone while walking past your manager’s desk does not work well. You end up sounding disorganized and unprepared to the recruiter - and your manager.

Take advantage of caller ID and let calls from unknown people go to voice mail. Only return calls to recruiters when you are in a position to speak freely. Lynn Diegel, Executive Vice President of a market research firm and former hiring manager, says, “Don’t go to Starbucks. That constantly running blender in the background is a distraction.” She suggests calling from your car (your parked car!) or finding another quiet place to return her call. And, don’t worry about calling back within five minutes - simply getting back to the recruiter by the end of the next business day is perfectly acceptable.

Scheduling the Interview

Every recruiter interviewed for this story gave the same piece of advice: give the recruiter blocks of time when you will be available to interview. John Ferrel, a recruiter at The Heiden Group, advises “My job is to drive the interview process. The candidate needs to give me windows of time that work for them to schedule these meetings. When someone can offer consistent blocks of available time from week to week, it makes my job easier.” And those early morning hours? No problem - recruiters agree that whenever possible they will work with your availability, whether it be 7 a.m. or 6 p.m.

What if you have a lot of freedom and can interview anytime? “Don’t be too available - it doesn’t give me any structure in trying to set up an interview,” says Ferrel. “Stick to offering blocks.”

Travel a lot? Not to worry. “I’ll wait for someone to return from a business trip without an issue, especially if their resume is interesting,” says Bernie Siegel, a former recruiter and current President of the International Coach Federation of New York City. Lynn Diegel agrees wholeheartedly, but on the flip-side advises that candidates should not claim to be in ‘all-day meetings’ constantly. She wants the potential employee to be low-maintenance. Scheduling multiple managers and candidates is already difficult enough without having to battle the unavailable job seeker.

Whatever your entry point, you need to be realistic and respectful of employers’ and recruiters’ time. Knowing the demand level for your particular skill set and expertise can also help you. Professionals in mid-level positions with widely-available skills can expect less flexibility, but those coming from senior-level positions and specialty fields may experience a bit more freedom. Based on that, you can gauge employers’ potential flexibility and willingness to accommodate your needs in the interview process.

Selling Yourself

Just because a recruiter has contacted you does not mean you should stop marketing yourself. “Help me sell you to the employer; help me build a best-case scenario for your candidacy,” requests Ferrel. “Articulate why the position is a good fit for you. Pull out a story about your sales experience, your best engineering qualifications, or the projects you have managed.”

Tony Shea of The Heiden Group advises, “Sales candidates should be able to discuss their statistical achievements. Performance, quotas, numbers, commissions.” In general, candidates need to be ready and willing to discuss their resumes in a succinct, concise manner.

Putting together several pertinent S.T.A.R. stories will help you communicate your accomplishments and selling points to a recruiter. S.T.A.R. is a story-telling strategy which stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result. The strategy helps you stay on track when describing an accomplishment and drives you from the beginning to end of a story. For example: “[Situation] At XYZ Company we had a line of widgets to market in a new territory. [Task] These same widgets were very well received in other territories, so our job was to educate buyers in the market and show the value of placing these widgets on their store shelves. [Action] I went store-to-store with samples of the widgets and requested meetings with the store buyers. Since my product was easy to demonstrate, I was often able to meet with the buyer right away. [Result] Results were impressive. Buyers liked the product and would place orders immediately. Ultimately, I achieved 85% integration into the market and reached $650,000 in sales in just three months.”

Take time to re-familiarize yourself with your career. Put together S.T.A.R. stories for each position and be able to talk about your value and your takeaways from each job over the years. If you have maintained a strong network, you can reach out to your former co-workers and managers to discuss past projects and company successes.

Discussing Personal Roadblocks

Some candidates feel very open when working with recruiting firms - as if they can divulge things to the recruiter that they would not in an employer-candidate interview scenario. There is some flexibility and openness in the recruiter-candidate relationship, but do not assume you can discuss anything.

Shea and Ferrel have been told about candidates’ divorce struggles, potential cross-country moves, and other deeply personal issues. “It’s an interview process, not a personal declaration. Keep the information you present pertinent to the job - focus on the job skills.” Shea says. However, divulging something personal that affects a job requirement is essential. For example, if driving is a requirement of a position (like outside sales in a suburban market) and you do not have a drivers’ license, you need to tell the recruiter upfront. This said, you do not have to go into the reasons behind that fact.

Sending Thank You Notes and Email Etiquette

“Yes, thank you notes are required,” expresses Diegel. “Simply make a few connections between your experience and my needs. And, don’t assume I’ll remember you - a quick reminder of when you interviewed and something we discussed is great to jog my memory.”

Thank you notes should be sent within 24 hours of the interview. Remember to collect business cards from each person you meet so you can send individual notes to everyone. Your note does not have to be long - just acknowledge your appreciation of their time and point out a skill, talent, or experience that makes you the ideal candidate for the position. While recruiters and employers will always have their personal preferences, both email and regular mail are widely accepted for thank you notes.

One thing that does not waiver from the employer’s point of view is your professional presentation, especially with email. Follow appropriate grammar rules and do not get creative with spelling or punctuation. It is not a text message - make a good impression in every note you send throughout the job search process. And, always include your phone number with your full name on your signature line.

Following each of the above tips can help you in the interview process. Recruiters and employers actually want you to be right candidate for a job - it means they can stop their search - but you need to do your part to get in front of them and market yourself. Good luck! 

**This was written by Kimberly Schneiderman of City Career Services.  Read more of her job search tips at www.citycareerservices.com.

It is great to be punctual, have fresh breath, and a list of questions. However, that effort could be in vain if your appearance is less than satisfactory.

Don’t let this happen to you! 

 Have fun…MyTalkingStain.com