Add Pizazz to Your Interview

The job interview is the most anxiety-inducing part of the job search; it's incredibly frustrating to spend time, energy and effort on making a great impression without getting the position as your reward. If you find this happening to you over and over, you may need to sharpen your interview skills. Make sure the following techniques are part of your strategy.

• Use your resume as a reference point
• Present your accomplishments numerically
• Understand the company
• Let your personality come through

For the details of these points see the complete article here.

Career Change Planning

There are many reasons that people face career change. Sometimes career change can comes as the result of a long anticipated layoff while other times it can occur suddenly without warning. But don�t think you�re alone. Know that career change (not job change) happens to everyone sooner or later. The average job-seeker will change careers several times over the course of a lifetime. Whatever the reason, the key to having a successful career change is having a good plan.

See several steps you should follow in order to have successful career change here.

Why One Professional is Sending Out a Resume Full of His Failures Bad References and Non-Skills

Jeff Scardino's shockingly honest LinkedIn profile

Business Insider

By Kathleen Elkins

Anyone who's gone through the stressful job-search process knows how impossible it can seem to stand out in a pool of thousands of qualified applicants.

Jeff Scardino, senior creative at Ogilvy & Mather and mentor at the Miami Ad School in Brooklyn, poses a unique solution to this conundrum: what he calls the Relevant R�sum� - a r�sum� littered with your failures, bad references, missed honors, and non-skills.

If you take a look at his personal relevant r�sum� below, you'll learn that he has worked on several losing pitches, cannot remember names, could be more punctual, and dated a free-spirited girl at Ohio University who ruined his junior year.

Scardino has always been intrigued by the r�sum�, but this idea for an alternative, brash template emerged recently when he was helping out with his company's hiring process.

He couldn't stand to see another traditional, plain r�sum� or talk to yet another highly approving reference. He wanted to see failures and talk to the people who didn't like the candidates.

"That's more interesting to me," Scardino tells Business Insider, "and it's even more interesting if the candidate is willing to give you that information. For someone to be that transparent and that much of an open book says a lot about them and their confidence."

Scardino stripped down his own LinkedIn profile so that it features only his relevant r�sum�:

Jeff Scardino

While he chose an extreme approach, "realistically it's just a compliment to your LinkedIn profile or traditional r�sum�," Scardino explains.

It's a creative way to get your foot in the door, he believes, and once you land the interivew, you can follow up by presenting tangible skills, explaining why you chose to highlight certain failures, and what you learned from overcoming them.

The next step is putting his theory to the test. Scardino plans to conduct a social experiment, in which he will apply to several job openings using his relevant r�sum�.

He thinks he'll get a 100% response rate. "How could you not respond if someone had the guts to send you this?"      

Overcome Age in Your Resume

Older workers have an uphill battle when it comes to changing jobs. Although employers are not supposed to discriminate against older workers, some hiring managers do favor younger employees. If overcoming age bias is a concern, there are several things you should do when updating your resume.

There's no rule that you have to list every position you've ever held.  Overcome age bias early in the hiring process by listing only your most recent jobs on your resume. If you have been in the same industry for 25 years, eliminate information about jobs you held more than 15 years ago.

Click here the full article on Age and Resumes.