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By CAREEREALISM-Approved Expert, Andy Robinson Balancing "highly focused work effort" with adequate rest and recovery is invaluable in any performance venue - work, athletics, sports, hobbies, etc. Without adequate recovery time, we overstress our bodies physically, emotionally and mentally. Energy levels suffer and peak performance is impacted. With regard to work ...[Read Entry]

It's important to manage your job search and keep track of the job leads you find, the jobs you've applied to, the resumes and cover letters you have submitted, and the networking contacts you're outreaching to. If it sounds like a lot, it is. There are ways to get (and keep) your job search under control though.

Spending time managing your job search, keeping it organized, focused, and on the fast track will help you find a job faster than if you don't have a plan in place. Even though you're going to spend some extra time getting organized, it will save you time in the long run. It will also save you from being in the awkward position that someone I heard from the other day was in. She got a call for an interview, but had no clue what the job was that she had applied for.

Rather than hitting, and maybe missing, your job search targets, or not being able to properly prepare for an interview because you're clueless about the opportunity, you'll be spending your time job searching in an effective manner if you take it one step at a time - and stay on top of managing the job search process. Here's how to get your job search on the fast track, along with free tools and tips to help expedite a job search.

Have a tip for getting your job search organized? Share your job search tip or comment (below).

More: Manage Your Job Search | Online Job Search Guide

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How to Manage Your Job Search originally appeared on About.com Job Searching on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 06:15:36.

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The following post is courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap: From: David McGillivray Human Resource Management is about achieving the best from your workforce. Achieving high levels of motivation, engagement and productivity is impossible when employees are unsatisfied or actively looking...[Read Entry]

Should I send a thank you note after a job interview and should I send it by snail mail or email? How often should I call to check on my status after the interview? Is there anything I shouldn't say to a future employer? What characteristics or behaviors will make me stand out during the job interview process? These are some of the questions you may have about job interviews. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) asked human resources managers to answer them in a poll the professional organization conducted. Some answers came as a bit of a surprise to me. For example, 43% of respondents said job candidates should call once a week to check on the status of a job opening. I would have thought calling one time, in total, would be enough. Other answers were less surprising â€" 56% said that "Skills Directly Related to the Job" made a candidate stand out the most. See all the questions and answers: Interviewing Do's and Don'ts for Job Seekers SHRM Poll.

An Inside Look at Job Interviewing originally appeared on About.com Career Planning on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 15:05:43.

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I have a few questions that I am hoping to join some knowledge from fellow Recruiters.....

Has anyone used PeopleSoft as an ATS systsem in Retail (my company has over 51,000 employees)??

What is the best ATS system out there?  I used Vurv in the past, however I know that Taleo brought them.... I do not know if Taleo is suitable for Retail.

Any help would be great!!!  You can Blog or e-mail me at nicoleegger@winn-dixie.com

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I have found that the best way to manage myself is by asking for a lot of help. The question is, how do you know who to take advice from? The answer is not always intuitive. For example, you'd think that if Bill Gates wants to give you career advice, you should take it, right? I [...][Read Entry]

If you've heard me speak in the last year, chances are you've heard me talk about email signatures.  I recently saw a signature that POPPED OUT â€" let me share it with you: I totally missed the middle name until I saw the hyperlink with the tagline. I LOVE THIS. I clicked on the hyperlink and guess where [...][Read Entry]

My brother is a marathon runner who recently had his best time ever in the New York City Marathon. He's got a hectic full-time job and he's middle aged, so it was a really big accomplishment. He spends a lot of time training and staying in shape.

Talking to John about the race and what led up to it was a good reminder that a job search isn't a one shot deal. It's a marathon, not a sprint, and everything you do leading up to winning the job search competition, and it is a competition for each and every job, and getting a job offer matters.

Every part of what you do when you job search, including looking for job postings, online job searching, writing cover letters, dressing for an interview, sending a thank you note, job searching (or not) from work, and using social media can make - or break - your job search.

These top job search tips include tips for resume writing, cover letters, curriculum vitae, interviewing, phone interviews, working at home, online job searching, using your network, finding work at home jobs, and more advice to help you find a new job fast.

Related: Top 10 Job Search Tips | Online Job Searching

_{Image Copyright Lisa Gagne}

Winning the Job Search Competition originally appeared on About.com Job Searching on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 06:00:13.

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I've been using job specifications for years; I just never called them that. Recent searches by readers on my site indicate that a lot of people work with job specifications and I decided to research best practices. As a result of my research, I came up with my own definition for job specification. Then, I tried my hand at two sample job specifications.

Job specifications serve a number of important roles. They allow recruiters and hiring managers to zero in on the most important requirements for the best candidate for your jobs in ways that more detailed job descriptions cannot. In this capacity, a recruiter can use the job specification to write job postings and recruit through employees and social media such as LinkedIn. This posting is much more defined than a job description for the short time spans that colleagues can invest in your recruiting.

Next, the HR recruiter or the hiring manager can use the job specification to review the resumes and applications you receive to select the most qualified candidates for telephone screens and interviews. The job specification is refined at the recruiting planning meeting so all employees involved are clear and agree about the qualifications of your eventually chosen employee. And, the employees who will participate in interviewing prospective employees receive a clear picture of the employee the organization seeks.

Here's a sample Human Resources Director job specification and a sample Marketing Manager job specification.

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Not Sexy, But Handy: Use Job Specifications originally appeared on About.com Human Resources on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 03:42:49.

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The Social Recruiting Summit is being held today here in New York.

Fred Wilson, who is keynoting, posted his presentation and requested comments. What a fantastic way to improve your thinking on any topic, by the way. When this type of behavior gets "into the bones" of up-and-coming scientists, entrepreneurs, and thinkers, imagine how much more quickly we will cycle through all the wrong answers and get to the good ones. Kudos to Fred for pioneering in this regard.

I posted my thoughts in Fred's comments but I thought I would share them here as well for the broader HR community...

Lots of great thinking in this deck, and the exciting part of the internet and recruiting is that we are really just getting started. The newspapers are only now dying, and the Web 1.0 job boards "just" replicated their model. Cool ideas -- GlassDoor, Tracked, and of course, Twitter, LinkedIn, Meetup (at TheLadders, we've sponsored Meetups to very good effect for our recruiting) etc., -- are going to make the next decade even more exciting.

A few points that I think go along thematically with what you are saying but bear emphasis:

1. Social media are fantastic information and communications tools. A question we should be asking is: how do we use these tools wisely and well?

Commenter Melih notes: "I didn't really see you emphasize that while talent is valuable, the real value, to me, of the social hire is vouching for the integrity and the character of the person much more so than their skill set. I think it's fair to say that you wouldn't recommend a friend or colleague who you didn't think was strong enough, but would you recommend a friend who you knew would constantly butt heads with the VP of Engineering?"

As tools, we are using social media very well to find candidates, and to find people who worked with the people who worked with our candidates. But to really close the deal, we need to find a way to make social media better at making the art of referencing better. Because I'm not sure we really have. The cold call out of the blue from the nice person in HR at a company looking to hiring Jeremiah, who saw that you worked with him from 2003 to 2005, is not immediately, to my mind, somebody with whom you should exercise your complete and utmost candor. Legal and social consequences loom. We're finding the information, but we're not generating the right type of communication.

2. And I wonder if you should mention Uber community on the web -- Craigslist. Despite its enormous size today, it started as "social media" -- Craig sending out his favorite events to his email buddies, and somehow that DNA remains at the core of what Craigslist is all about. Especially with recruiting designers and college graduates, we find it invaluable. I think we all sometimes forget to put Craig in this bucket.

3. I agree blog posts and tweets are a great way to get people who are already engaged with your brand. This is the virtual equivalent of the "Help Wanted; Inquire Within" sign: to attract somebody, they need to already be attracted. Which is fantastic. But it's not going to scale for all the needs of a young company. How are we going to use social media to expand our message, not just repeat it in an echo chamber?

4. And, finally, I think it bears repeating: "0" is the number of people you've hired in or invested in without meeting them face-to-face. (Even more interesting if the answer isn't zero -- would love to hear that story!) The internet, social media, tweets and updates can not replace the value of sitting across from a human and learning their story directly from them. That's what we're all about - we are *social* creatures, and the *media* is there to serve us.

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This response comes from a question posted the other day regarding the differences between Creative Sourcing and Deep Sourcing. This is a great topic to talk about and really defines the strategy in which you find yourself implementing. Well I hope this helps. Feel free to comment and post your thoughts as well.

Question: What is your definition of Creative Sourcing vs. Deep Sourcing? Creative Sourcing is the baseline or fundamental approach a recruiter will take in developing their map to recruit from. Creative sourcing falls under the umbrella of information gathering.

You'll find thousands of answers out there to this age old question, but if you were to speak with true "sourcers” in the industry you will find that they are researchers at heart. At the world conference this question came up a lot in discussions and I tell most people the same thing; we are in the information gathering business.

Recruiting, sales, deep sourcing, workforce planning and virtually anything we will do in our jobs require us to gather information. Without this we cannot be successful. So when we talk about building talent communities or talent gateways and social media etc. these are all forms of creative sourcing.

The question to ask is "How do we create interest and engage those talent gateways once they are created?” Without getting real tactical for this explanation it would be our goal to create chatter and a sense of community within these hubs. By chatter I mean conversation regarding industry topics, eventually with the "experts” naturally rising to the top of conversations. Most call this cultivating the group. I call this deep sourcing.

So to make things a little simpler:

Creative sourcing: The process of development/branding for workforce planning. I.e. Information gathering; tactical planning; channel development; creation and development of talent communities.

Deep Sourcing: Micro managing these talent communities to maximize their potential. Making individual contact with and introducing the prospects to the specific organization we are working with.

Thoughts?

Be sure to check more postings and video tutorials at: CruiterTalk.com

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I'd like to expand our collection of cover letters, resumes, CVs, and other employment-related letters. If you have a cover letter, resignation letter, thank you letter or other job search related letter, resume or curriculum vitae that you're proud of, I'd like to consider adding it to our samples.

Simply send it to me via email, along with the form giving us permission to use it. I'm looking for samples that reflect all levels of job seekers - from students to experienced professionals. If you'd like credit for your letter, let me know or, if you're concerned about privacy, let me know that, too, and I'll edit or remove your personal information. Thanks in advance for your help!

Also, if you have a cover letter writing tip to share, add it to our list. In a tough job market, a little advice can make a big difference.

If you're looking for samples to review, take a look at these sample resumes, cover letters, curriculum vitae, resignation letters, thank you letters, letters to accept, or decline a new job, and more career-related letters you can use for your job search correspondence.

More: Cover Letter Examples | Cover Letter Tips

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Do You Have a Great Cover Letter? originally appeared on About.com Job Searching on Sunday, November 15th, 2009 at 06:00:07.

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How well does your organization select and integrate talent for internal promotion? If you are like many organizations we've seen â€" not very well. When promoting from within, do you select the person who is doing the best job in their current role? Do you promote the person you like the most, the person who has [...][Read Entry]

Dear J.T. & Dale: I'd like to take your advice and do more networking, but I don't have much to work with. I haven't kept up with former co-workers, and among my friends and family, no one knows anything about my work or that I'm now unemployed. I believe in ...[Read Entry]

Starting up a company is a lot different than working for somebody else for a living. When you're in the business of "that hasn't been done before", there are a lot of mistakes to make. And in some senses, growing a start-up is all about learning how your business will work, by figuring out what won't work. The hard way. By screwing it up the first time.

And that's why a short memory and a long time-horizon is what makes an entrepreneur.

A business that is already up and running has standard procedures for dealing with the world. A way to service customers, and a means to acquire new ones. A system for purchasing goods, and back-ups in case one falls through. A way to finance the business, and a plan to make returns for its shareholders.

Through time and prudence, established companies have found their way to a set of policies, plans, procedures and programs that make its businesses work well.

For a start-up, just the opposite is true. Nothing is determined, nothing is time-tested, nothing has been molded by trial and error into a workable trade-off.

The result is pain. Lots of it. In repeated, persistent, capricious doses.

There's the marketing hire who gets away. The customer that signs up and then has a change of heart. The contact you've been buttering up for months at your potentially biggest game-changing partner who gets canned the week before the final meeting. The vaporware that the 800-pound gorilla announces to a gullible press that sucks the air out of your momentum and buzz. The thousand of ways that things can go wrong, big and small (usually both), that distract, depress, and discourage the mere mortal at the heart of the entrepreneurial venture.

I know they say that success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan; but then whoever is siring the little bastard is one promiscuous fella, because start-ups do nothing but create failure after failure.

Succeeding at a start-up is not, then, about being prescient enough, smart enough, and experienced enough to never make mistakes, but rather it is about learning why it went wrong -- both the symptom and the ultimate cause -- and rebuilding your business to be stronger in light of it. And the faster you make your mistakes, the quicker you'll take your lessons from them. That's how you learn.

So an important part of being an entrepreneur is forgetting.

They say that women's bodies produce a drug to forget the pain of pregnancy after they give birth, and maybe the entrepreneur's experience parrots that.

There are so many painful experiences in the course of a start-up's life that it's a wonder anybody voluntarily does it at all. The odds are bad, the pay is atrocious, the chances for advancement dubious, and the world is dead-set against you when it isn't ignoring you.

A typical person on a typical day would consider any one of these indignities worthy of surrender.

And that's why a short memory -- forgetting yesterday's pain while remembering the lesson that came with it -- is what makes for a successful entrepreneur. Because dwelling on the embarrassments, humiliations, and failures that happened before today's sunrise will do nothing to make you more successful by today's sunset.

Yep, a start-up is all about let-down and heartbreaks. And getting to success requires a mind that always forgets.

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I'm excited to announce a brand new podcast series I'm creating for MyPath.com, a new online career management website guided by Manpower, one of the global leaders in employment services. MyPath provides you with a variety of tools and services to help you plot and plan your career journey. As MyPath's "College to Career” blogger, I'll [...][Read Entry]

I don't know about your workplace, but ours has seen a lot of absenteeism this year. I'm not sure how much of it is related to H1N1 because we don't ask employees to account for why they are using their PTO. But, several of my family members and friends have reported flu-like symptoms and several have had doctors confirm swine flu. Fortunately, their cases were only mildly debilitating.

Continuing to make news, H1N1 (swine flu) is a major workplace issue. People spend a lot of time at work in close quarters with potentially ill coworkers. Employees all use the same door handles, shake candidates' hands, push elevator buttons, and just in general, put themselves in harm's way.

I've written several times about how employers can prepare their workplaces for any contagious illness including H1N1. Today, I'll share several additional resources about H1N1 Swine Flu.

SHRM in Conjunction With the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP)

With contractual financial support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), today released a new toolkit, Doing Business During an Influenza Pandemic: Human Resource Policies, Protocols, Templates, Tools, & Tips

"We're beyond theory and onto execution. The pandemic is here. And we need every business to recognize the impact it can have. It's not too late, but time is of the essence," said Michael T. Osterholm, Ph.D., M.P.H., an international authority on pandemic influenza and business preparedness and CIDRAP director.

The toolkit, designed for organizations of all sizes, is intended to:

• Help HR professionals new to pandemic planning come up to speed quickly on high-priority HR issues related to operating during an influenza pandemic.
• Provide concrete ways that organizations can implement federal guidance.
• Offer new ideas that can be used to improve existing plans.
• Serve as a reference for benchmarking.

The H1N1 toolkit is available free of charge as a PDF document from CIDRAP or from SHRM.

Swine Flu on About.com

• Vince Ianelli, M.D., the About.com Guide to Pediatrics, has created a comprehensive resource for parents and families: Swine Flu Symptoms. Swine Flu News.
• Kristina Duda, R.N., the About.com Guide to Colds and Flu, presents an outstanding guide to swine flu H1N1 including day-to-day symptoms, resources, and more.
• Trisha Torrey, the About.com Guide to Patient Empowerment, offers frequently asked questions about H1N1 Swine Flu.

Preparis.com

Asks whether your workplace is prepared for an outbreak of swine flu and hazards the guess that, if you are like most employers, you are not. Here is a comprehensive guide to preparing for H1N1 in your workplace.

H1N1 isn't going away anytime soon, so check out these fine resources and make sure your workplace is prepared.

_{Image Copyright Randy Plett Photographs}

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Is Your Workplace Prepared for H1N1? originally appeared on About.com Human Resources on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 00:01:42.

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The Conference Board is predicting that the monthly job losses that have hammered U.S. workers since January 2008 will end early next year. The Board's Employment Trends Index rose for the second consecutive month in October, and is now at 89.3, up 0.7 percent from the revised September figure. It's still down significantly from a year [...][Read Entry]

We've just finished back-to-back years of employee referrals accounting for 75% or more of all external hires.  This has caused me to do a little reflection on our progress, where we are and where we are going with this powerful recruiting strategy.    

The background: AmTrust Bank grew its program from 28% of hires in 2006 to 78% in 2008 and continued the success by sourcing 75% of our hires through employee referrals in fiscal 2009.  We increased our reliance on this source over time as we continued to validate that employee referrals stay longer and cost less than hires from other sources.  Although, as we planned sourcing strategies for fiscal 2009 we knew the year was going to be a tough one.  

The bad news: as we started the fiscal year in October 2008 the economy was a mess, the employed were not inclined to change jobs during such uncertain times and candidates were increasingly wary of joining the struggling financial industry.  Not an easy time to be a recruiter.    

The good news: we had a strong corporate culture, an engaged workforce and the momentum of our employee referral program.  Our internal employee communications team did a great job of sharing positive stories, which our employees could easily incorporate into conversation with family, friends and others in the community.  The employment brand, as facilitated every day by our employees, confirmed that this was a great place to work!     

The reality: we would have to keep the program moving forward without the overt in-your-face internal marketing and generous budget we utilized in the past.  We suspended our monthly participation prizes and annual $5000 grand prize and toned down the "fun" aspects of the program.  Without all of this, we needed a new approach.   

The new marketing approach: a no-nonsense-no-fluff-micro-level strategy.  No more asking employees for all the referrals they could find.  We featured intranet articles describing specific jobs we were recruiting for and only asked for referrals for those jobs.  We directly solicited top performers and recent hires from targeted companies to ask for referrals and encouraged employees to utilize linkedin, facebook and twitter as a means to reach out to top talent in their networks.  The focus became one of business necessity: we need great people, we need your help, and sourcing talent this way has proven results for the organization!  In retrospect, without the strength of our employee driven employment branding and the momentum of our employee referral program, we would not have been able to offset the bad news and fill open positions as easily.   

The future: we know we cannot rest on our past success and that we will need to be even more creative with our program to keep it fresh, relevant, and impactful.  We must continue to upgrade our message and means of encouraging employee participation, as well as find new ways to recognize/reward employees for their efforts.  We continue to listen to and learn from industry experts and other companies about their program success and have significant program upgrades planned for fiscal 2010.  We do expect similar results in the future and are excited about proving that this level of program success is sustainable for years to come.

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Last Friday, the Department of Labor issued its monthly jobs report for October and reported that the U.S. economy lost another 190,000 jobs in October (a number that will certainly be revised up or down in future months). October's losses represent the 22nd straight month of monthly job losses, and unemployment rose from 9.8% to [...][Read Entry]