I hope you can add your own, based on your own career or from your own observations. I will be adding some along the way, too.

Enjoy.

By Nicholas Bate

How To Think Like: The Serious Start-Up

How To Think Like: The Wannabee Start-Up.

Seriously.  What does it take?  What DOES it take?

I mean, we know how to help job seekers.  Yet, ShitForBrainsJobBoards continue to “help” jobseekers by showing old jobs, out of date jobs, scam jobs, postal jobs which are jobs you have to buy application forms yeah right, duplicate jobs and the list of crappy things they do goes on and on and  on.  Your favorite ShitForBrainsJobBoard is still out promoting hard, buying ads because they need you to stop by and get frustrated.  YOU use it.  Stop using them now.

Seriously.

They don’t care about your needing a job.  They want your name.  They want to sell your name to the highest bidder.  They are database storage companies, not job helping services.

Stop using them.  If you are in HR, particularly, stop using them.  They hurt the very people you want to bring into your business.  Why pay ShitForBrains any more? It just encourages them.

Like you maybe in your own business,  we have a fantastic product that needs a breakthrough….clickwise, buzzwise, internets-wise,…you know what I mean.  We don’t have ShitForBrains’ money to buy traffic.  But you know, 10,000 at a time, LINKUP’s traffic is building and building.  Baby incremental steps, all good. But we could help so many more people, if they just knew about LINKUP.  This is your part.

What is encouraging is who LOVES LinkUp besides me and mine.  I know dozens of career coaches and counselors, God love ‘em, they tell clients ALL THE TIME about LInkUp.  So do career centers all over the frickincountry.  So do my friends in the resumewriting community.  So do thousands and thousands of job seekers who regularly use LINKUP to find jobs ONLY from company websites.  You know what it’s like?  It’s like being Zappos but no one tells anyone else because they are afraid they will run of shoes.  People!  Tell your friends about LinkUp.

But…here is something interesting…those same job seekers sortakinda hope you don’t find out about LINKUP.  They don’t want the competition for the jobs, about 70% of which on LINKUP are never advertised elsewhere.  But, no matter where you live, or what your skill, there are jobs out there for you.  We have over 20,000 companies now up on LINKUP and growing daily.  Jobs, jobs, jobs…all for you to find…before anyone else.  It’s like getting access to personal memos from inside the company who always lists ALL their job openings on their own websites FIRST.

Right now, when jobseekers send a resume to ShitForBrainsJobBoard advertisers, THEY DON”T HEAR BACK.  What is the disconnect?

Just don’t buy the ShitForBrainsJobBoards nonsense.  Use LinkUP, but even more better (sic), tell someone else….do your part to help the 10% of us who need a new job.

Pass it on.

In other words, certain techniques can be employed to help the search engines find your website more easily.  There appears to be a real seience to these techniques. Or, for the more cynical amongst us—it’s a bunch of experts who know how to “game the system” to fool Google et al to find your site.

At LINKUP, our job search engine, we have already built SEO into the product…as it should be.  No games.  All we do is search for jobs ONLY at company websites, never another job board where SImply Hired and Indeed go to get their jobs for their site.  Think about it for a second.

Where better to look for a job than the company’s own website?  Companies post jobs there first.  Most of the time, these jobs are never even posted elsewhere.  Companies more and more are refusing to pay Monster et al to list their jobs….and this is where SImply Hired and Indeed go to get their jobs. As any job seeker can tell you, saerching through a job board is hard work and generally not productive.  Read what Nick Corcodilos of AskTheHeadhunter has to say about these typical job boards and how they treat the job seeker.  And it is not just the cough-crooks-cough Ladders, either. Garbage in-garbage out.

Think of LinkUp as the only job search engine with SEO built right in…but for the job seeker.  We have optimized our site to make it easier and faster for millions of people to find their next job.

Pass it along.

That’s why Jeff Lipshultz’s blog post on How Much Is Your Resume Worth is so timely, and important.  What’s better is that some real experts have commented on his post with relevant and insightful comments…a must-read for people who need to improve their own resume.

People like Bill Vick of Employment Digest who reminded us that networking is at least as important as the resume itself.  And JobAwfulTruth showed us their own series on the resume. Then Dorothy Beach hit an important point, that job seekers need to be able to validate proof of ability. Miriam of Keppie Careers adds that job seekers need a muli-facted approach these days. (A point we try to make daily with our own job search engine Linkup, which should be one site of many to check for jobs. LinkUp only shows jobs from company websites.  Cindy Kraft exposes one of the issues confronting job seekers who try to find someone to help them with their resume…almost anyone can SAY they can help, like being an AVON rep.  Susan Joyce made the concise point that a one sized resume has not worked for years.  Good point as well from Robert Dagnall, the resume guru, who says that a cheaply done resume can, in fact, be costly in terms of lost opportunities.  Dave Opton, the CEO of Execunet, compares the resume to a good piece of sales collateral, an important piece but used in conjunction with other techniques. Organizations hire people, not paper, Dave says.  Going further, Dawn Bugni of The Write Solution justifies the actual cost of having a professional help with your resume.

Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter says a real pro offers ‘career introspection’ as well as simple resume crafting skills. There are dozens of great comments that add wisdom to this poll and discussion.

I hope you can jump over to Jeff’s blog and read all the comments. Excellent.

FIVE TIPS TO CREATE MORE CONFIDENCE AFTER A JOB LOSS

1. Make a list of your skills and be prepared to sell them. Remind yourself that these skills are always with you regardless of the reasons you lost your job. Recognizing how much you have to offer is a key ingredient to confidence.

2. Don’t assume your job loss was a result of your inadequacies. Keep in mind all of the alternative explanations due to the poor economy, such as: the business is scrambling to stay alive with a skeleton staff, more jobs have been farmed out overseas, your position has been deleted, you had the lowest seniority, your entire division was let go, or it was simply a random act of survival.

3. Don’t let your short-comings get you down. Recognize that you don’t have to be perfect to be an asset. In the context of your career, think about how important those short-comings are and, only if they are crucial, consider getting the training you need.

4. Be open-minded. There are no crystal balls. You cannot predict what new path might interest you so try one out and see where it takes you.

5. Don’t overvalue the job you are applying for. There is no one perfect job. Remember it is just one of many opportunities and if it doesn’t work out another opportunity will eventually present itself.

HELPFUL idea- Pls download LinkUp’s IPhone app, shows jobs only from company website.

Backstory: We are really excited about LinkUp and our LinkUp IPhone app is still in the top 20 free business downloads.  It is exciting because it means that people are getting the message that there are job boards and there are job search engines. To read about the differences, read Toby Dayton’s post on the differences here.

Here are the following twitter friends who helped us yesterday.  There may be more…

@NewPotato  (219 followers)

@Keppie_Careers (4,367)

@DawnBugni (3,206)

@jimsdottir (34) this is Beth, and I just now got her nickname Jim’s daughter, clever Beth.

@Hirepowerinc (110)

@veronicaludwig (3,509)

@Kristin_LD (197)

@LocumLeaders (134)

@RealSolutions22 (1,310)

@BSUCareerCenter (694)

@valueintowords (3,184

@LuckyAdam (24)

@PRcjo (43)

If I missed anyone, sorry.  (I am still experimenting with the best way to use Twitter.)  And it is never too late to help some people by referring them to LINKUP and our IPhone app.  BTW, the LINKUP facebook app CURRENT JOBS AT OUR COMPANY is a definite HR 2.0 app, as companies like Hyatt, USA Today, St Jude and others can attest.

Here is the LinkUp  IPhone information and here’s a short little video on how to use it, VO by Jake.

I used this game, and mostly the heroics of Brett Favre to write a blog post for US NEWS called “Lessons from Brett Favre.”  I was contemplating calling it WHY YOU SHOULD HIRE OLD GUYS, but thought better of it.  You can see the Five Lessons by reading here.

Luckily, Nick Corcodilos must be eating the same cheerios because his post today in his readers’ forum is a request to give better answers to the more experienced among us who find themselves unemployable or, at least, un-hireable.  Timely.

I also want to re-direct  you to Seth Godin’s guest post here on WWDS some time back which he called “Don’t Try to Get a Job.”

There is a connection in there, don’t you think?

The past six months have seen an unprecedented rise in social media adoption.  Companies are scrambling to create Facebook pages and no mainstream news medium is without a Twitter account.  Despite the state of the economy, companies are promising upwards of a 50% increase in social media spending.

It seems that no matter what the profession, a basic understanding of social media has become necessary.  While mentioning Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and Hulu to my grandmother may convince her of my fluency in another language, the same can’t be said of recruiters and potential employers who appreciate candidates abreast of the trends.

I’ve been freakishly obsessed an avid proponent of social media, especially in my job search efforts, and I’ve always encouraged my peers to turn to the unorthodox methods social media can sometimes provide.  Recently, however, I’ve begun to wonder whether social media has begun to erode my generation’s social skills, and which technique is ultimately better suited to landing that coveted job.

An article on Mashable cites a San Diego State University study which suggests that Generation Y believes that they use “social networking sites for self-promotion, narcissism and attention seeking.”  Considering the average college student in 2006 has become 30% more narcissistic than in 1982, that seems about right.

Not so fast, though!

According to the same SDSU study, 40% of those Gen Y-ers polled also believe that the “self-promotion, narcissism and attention seeking” behaviors social media provokes are necessary (what can I say, we’re a strange people).  No doubt, social media is used for self-promotion, but to use it capitalistically is to use it correctly, especially when the brand you’re promoting is yourself.

Still, as I begin another month as an unemployed college graduate, I can’t help but to wonder what my personal brand is worth and whether traditional social networking or social media is better suited to capitalize on it.  Twitter is said to eventually be valued at $1 billion, but does my generation run the risk of cementing our reputation?  How can job seekers achieve a balance between social media and remaining social?

It took us a while, but we wanted to get it exactly right. Our IPhone app is sweet.

We introduced our IPhone app today. Without question, LINKUP is already the best job search engine available today.

No other job search engine ONLY searches through company websites to find those hard to find and often un advertised jobs. Sure, Indeed, Simply Hired might have more jobs on their boards, but there are so many out of date jobs that job seekers are increasingly finding themselves frustrated with the whole process. Far better to search on LINKUP….and now, you can search on your IPhone.

Kewl.

You can download it by going here:  (FREE)  http://bit.ly/linkupiphone

and here’s the official news release:

by Kristin Davie, exclusive for WWDS. Kristin is a 2009 college graduate who is still looking for her first job. She writes about her search for all of us.

In the popular 1989 movie Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner is commanded by an unknown force to build a baseball field in his Iowa corn field because, “if you build it, he will come.”

Lately, friends and I have wondered whether the same is true regarding jobs. After facing weeks of rejection in our respective demographics, recent graduates are broadening their search. Many are turning to different states, different coasts, and even different countries, all in desperate pursuit of that first paycheck.

I’m no different. Although New York City remains at the top of my list, I’ve forced myself to apply for jobs outside of my comfort zone- and my time zone. While I once may have disregarded job advertisements in Boston or Chicago, I now purposely research positions in those and other areas.

After all, if you build it, they will come.

But should we? And do employers really want us there?

In this economy, it’s easy to understand why companies might prefer local applicants, especially when enticing relocation packages can no longer be afforded. Still, candidates are looking to expand their search, and many are willing to swallow the cost in return for a full-time position and new social opportunities (or if you happen to be Ray Liotta, a baseball field).

So should graduates bother to apply to positions that would require relocation, and if so, how do we convey our willingness to in a cover letter?

Perhaps the fault lies with the job seekers. Are we overlooking local prospects in pursuit of a more glamorous option? Are we ignorant to the potential of nearby businesses? Maybe the blame is meant to be shared. Are local organizations doing enough to attract and retain young adults?

With such a struggling economy and competitive market, should graduates focus on relocating or re-evaluating themselves?

Ed Note: The key for Kristin would be to use LINKUP, the only job search engine that presents ONLY jobs from company websites. By searching LinkUp, she can beat hundreds of job seekers to apply.