Sampling is allowed in rap music, but that’s about it.

What makes a cover letter stand out from the hundreds that can inundate a hiring manager for even the lowest-paying entry-level positions? Some say a compelling first paragraph or an original way of expressing an idea can cut through the clutter.

But four recent applicants for a receptionist position at a Manhattan photography studio were noticed for an entirely different reason. All four, who live in different parts of New York City, used identical language in a portion of their e-mailed cover letters, said Mary Catanzaro, the employee who reviewed and screened the applications.

“What my r

The Self-Saboteur. Is That You?

“The Self-Saboteur… Is That You?”
by Susan Dunn, MA, The EQ Coach

There’s a joke circling the Internet right now about a priest, a drunk and an engineer who are facing the guillotine. Each one is asked in turn how he wants to die, face up or face down. The priest is first, and he says “face up” so he can be looking at heaven. Down comes the blade, there’s a hitch and it stops 6″ from his neck. Considering it divine intervention, they free him.

Same thing happens with the drunk, who decides to go with a winner and choose what the priest chose. Six inches from his neck it stops, and he’s allowed to go free as well.

Then it’s the engineer’s turn. He’s smart enough to go with a winning strategy as well. As he lies there watching the blade descend, he gets an “ah hah” moment. “I think I know what’s wrong with it,” he cries out in delight. “The cable’s binding right here.”

This joke happens to be a classic illustration of the kind of self-sabotaging we do when we have high IQ, but low EQ (emotional intelligence). EQ, you see, isn’t just about emotions, it’s the interface between emotions and thinking. It’s the kind of skills we have that allow us to make good decisions, have good relationships, and succeed. It may well matter more in life than IQ, as this joke points out so graphically. Here is this brilliant engineer, used to problem-solving mechanical things, who proceeds to use his intellect without really thinking, and gets himself killed you know, shoots himself in the foot.

Self-sabotage is what we do when we aren’t able to manage the emotions around a situation, or don’t stop and think about the possible consequences of our actions (and actions include words). Like the person who gets reprimanded by the boss and forgets himself and takes a punch.

Who else sabotages themselves?

• The employee who gets lulled around the water cooler at the job and forgets that self-deprecating remarks can and will be used against her.
• The salesman who has the order in his pocket, but can’t quit talking, and proceeds to grab defeat from the jaws of victory.
• The man who’s so nervous on the job interview he giggles, babbles, and spills his coffee all over the interviewer’s desk.
• The impulsive married man who is sexually attracted to
  someone at work and has an affair with them, and then, to make himself feel better, confesses to his spouse and boss.
• The athlete who lets his temper get the best of him on the court.
• The manager who has the knack of intimidating the employee who needs sensitivity, and placating the employee who needs firmness.
• The student who learns all the material and then clutches when it’s exam time.
• The individual who lets setbacks, rejections and losses send them into a downward spiral of negativity, depression and pessimism.
• The actress who gets stage fright and freezes in fear in front of an audience.
• The worker who sets goals but is too scattered, emotional, and disorganized to carry them out.
• The coach who misreads his athletes, expects too much or too little of them, and tries to motivate by intellect or intimidation alone.

Success in all the important things in life requires a high degree of emotional intelligence. The person who knows how to get along, can plan ahead, manage their emotions and those of others, generate options, act with intent, maintain the appropriate degree of sensitivity to their environment, and remain optimistic enough to persevere, will always have the edge. Whether it’s leadership, a better marriage, a promotion, or respect you’re after, the key can be developing your EQ.

The good news is that it can be learned. Just as you continually increase your expertise and academic learning, you can work with a coach or mentor who can explain the competencies to you, help you gain the necessary self-awareness, and give you exercises and feedback. Many people I’ve coached in EQ call it “the missing piece.” However, it’s not something you can just read about. It’s not like memorizing the chemical elements, or listening to a beautiful piece of music and appreciating it, or taking notes at a one-day seminar. It requires identifying the skills, understanding what they look like in use, and then practicing them in real-life situations, with constructive feedback, and practice.

Becoming mindful, and have many choices in your mental, physical, mental and behavioral repertoire will give you the edge. If you find you often turn left when you should’ve turned right, or feel or have been called “clueless,” or you seem stuck and are unable to move forward, why not give it a try? It’s a lot better to be a self-enhancer than a self-saboteur.

CollegeRecruiter.com Helps Job Seekers Recharge Their Mental Energy with New Online Gaming Section (May 24, 2005 Press Release)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT INFO:
CollegeRecruiter.com
Steven Rothberg
3109 W 50 St Ste 121
Minneapolis, MN 55410-2102
USA
Phone: 800-835-4989
Fax: 702-537-2227
Steven@CollegeRecruiter.com
http://www.CollegeRecruiter.com

Minneapolis, Minnesota — May 24, 2005 — For most people, looking for a new job isn’t much fun. In fact, the prospect of looking for a new job is so daunting that they often refuse to do so until laid off. That isn’t healthy or wise, according to experts at CollegeRecruiter.com (http://www.collegerecruiter.com), the highest traffic career site used by job hunting students and recent graduates and the employers who want to hire them.

To add a measure of entertainment to the site’s extensive job postings and employment resources, CollegeRecruiter.com has launched a new gaming section. The goal is to attract potential candidates to the site and build their awareness of job sites before an employment crisis strikes.

“Since going live in 1996, we’ve tried to design our site to be fast and easy-to-use with as many relevant job postings as possible and more employment-related articles and other content than most candidates could hope for,” explained Steven Rothberg, President and Founder of CollegeRecruiter.com. “But we’ve always struggled with how to make it more . . . well, fun. Today, we’ve taken a big step toward that goal with the release of our new On-line Games section at www.CollegeRecruiter.com/games.”

CollegeRecruiter.com currently features three games:

• Stumbling Distance Game – Can you get the sleepy college student home before he falls over?

• Puzzle Game – Flip and sort out the pieces to the photo, or upload a photo of your own and do the same!

• Snowboard Game – Experience all the jumps and acrobatics you’ve dreamed of being able to complete, but without the frostbite!

“Early feedback about the games is overwhelmingly positive,” added Rothberg, “except for the handful of people who half-jokingly threatened us with lawsuits after they started playing the games at work and ended up getting chewed out by their supervisors. Seriously, we were thrilled that they enjoyed the games as much as we enjoyed creating them.”

About CollegeRecruiter.com

CollegeRecruiter.com is the highest traffic career site used by job hunting students and recent graduates and the employers who want to hire them. The CollegeRecruiter.com network of career sites is used by 5,000,000 visitors per month to find part-time positions, summer jobs, internships and career opportunities. CollegeRecruiter.com features tens of thousands of job openings and over 1,300 pages of employment-related articles and Ask the Experts questions and answers. Further information about CollegeRecruiter.com is available at http://www.CollegeRecruiter.com/pages/press-room.php.

How to protect and serve in cyberspace…

“There’s a new breed of crime-fighter prowling cyberspace: the hacker hunters. Spurred by big profits, professional cyber-criminals have replaced amateur thrill-seeking hackers as the biggest threat on the Web. Software defenses are improving rapidly, but law enforcement and security companies understand they can no longer rely on technology alone to deal with the plague of virus attacks, computer break-ins, and online scams. Instead, they’re marshaling their forces and using gumshoe tactics to fight back — infiltrating hacker groups, monitoring their chatter on underground networks, and when they can, busting the baddies before they do any more damage. ‘The wave of the future is getting inside these groups, developing intelligence, and taking them down,’ says Christopher M.E. Painter, deputy chief of the Computer Crime section of the Justice Dept., who will help prosecute ShadowCrew members at a trial scheduled for October.”

Read: Hacker Hunters:

HOW TO: Add keywords to your resume (and be slick about it!)

Star Wars: Science fiction vs science fact

“Star Wars” never did let scientific facts get in the way of a good story: Fans just accept that X-wing fighters fly through outer space as if they were jets in an atmosphere, that huge spaceships could float on antigravity drives or zoom faster than light, and that lightsabers cut through virtually everything except another lightsaber (why don’t they just make the darn things longer?).

But in the 28 years since the first “Star Wars” movie came out, science and technology have gone in directions that reflect some aspects of that galaxy long ago and far away: Particularly when it comes to space weaponry, robotics and communications, there are increasing parallels between “Star Wars” science fiction and science fact.

That doesn’t mean engineers looked to the movies to figure out how to design a modern-day Death Star. Rather, the visions reflected in the movies had an impact on how real-life technologies were presented. The concept for a national missile defense system, which was nicknamed “Star Wars” during the Reagan administration, serves as a prime example. READ: Science facts catch up with movie sci-fi

Can we hurry this up? I have things to do…

Before a big interview, a smart job seeker carefully chooses his or her outfit, researches the company and prepares smooth answers to questions the interviewer might ask.

But not everyone is a smart job seeker.

When CareerBuilder.com recently surveyed more than 850 hiring managers, nearly 70 percent reported they had witnessed a bizarre behavior from a job applicant during an interview. Here are some of the gross, mind-bogglingly bizarre, and all-too-true ways real people blew their chances at scoring the job.

Not putting in the face time

You can’t get the job if you don’t show up for the interview. Several employers reported having job seekers blow off the interview completely, but that pales in comparison to some of the not-so-graceful ways some candidates made early exits. Many bored candidates were spotted continually checking their watches, and one interviewee asked the hiring manager to speed things up so he could catch a bus. Another job seeker booked it out of the interview upon hearing about the drug test. But the weirdest story came from a hiring manager who said, “One applicant said the company had a black aura and left.”

Read: Weirdest Interview Behavior

But, I’m sleepy…

The traffic jam ended hours ago, the parking lot is nearly empty and fluorescent lights are dimmed at PortalPlayer Inc., where the nightly brainstorming session is about to begin.

Instead of gathering the few remaining souls from their cubicles, three managers move into a conference room to dial India, where engineers 12 1/2 time zones ahead are just arriving in Hyderabad.

As colleagues on opposite sides of the globe discuss circuit board configurations and debugging strategies for a project code-named

Let’s all support “The Job Seeker Manifesto!”

Here is a snippet of a recent article on recruiting…

Army Recruiting Halts for a Day in May

The Army will halt its recruiting efforts for one day this month to allow commanders to emphasize proper conduct following apparent excesses, Army officials said Wednesday.

The stand-down will take place May 20, said Douglas Smith, an Army spokesman. Army officials said it would affect almost all 7,500 recruiters at 1,700 stations around the United States.

In at least two instances, recruiters are facing disciplinary action for their dealings with potential recruits.

In Houston, a recruiter allegedly threatened to have a wavering would-be recruit arrested if he backed out, according to Army officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. The recruiter has no such authority.

Officials confirmed a second inquiry in Colorado, pointing to news reports about recruiters who allegedly offered information on fake diplomas and ways to get around drug tests and physical fitness requirements.

Click here to read the entire story.

Okay, so the article is citing morally-challenged military recruiters striving to meet their quota. The article goes on to say how a mandatory re-training will be instituted to guard against such happenning again; at least in the near future. When I read this article, I was struck by the similarites in recruiting organizations irregardless of the supported field. At its core, recruiting is a sales position with a very visible quota. The recruiter must sell to a candidate the notion that the company and job he (or she) represents is the best possible fit for said candidate. Secondly, the recruiter must convince his client that the candidate she (or he) has found is the best fit for the client’s role. Finally, the recruiter must resolve issues that would keep either party from signing an offer letter.

Speaking as a recruiter I have to tell you, its a tightwire act and all too often the job seeker is regarded as expendable. This is especially true when dealing with searchfirms who do not get paid until a hire is made (Contingency recruiters), or searchfirms who have been paid a fee up front and are pressured to produce within a reasonable amount of time (Retained recruiters). When quotas are unmet and the clients starts barking, recruiters tend to get into survival mode. Some of these “survivalist recruiters” may get into Monster, grab all the emails of candidates they can find and spam a proposition until they get lucky. In these cases, recruiters are focusing on keywords in your resume moreso than your entire work history. (Just in case you ever wondered why you were approached about jobs you were obviously unqualified for.)

Survivalist recruiters might also hound you by telephone, get a message from their client that the position is now closed (or changed) and neglect to call you back. Additionally, they might contact you and basically tell you what you want to hear. For example, you might clearly state on your resume that you are not open to relocation for any reason. The survivalist recruiter would ignore that entirely hoping that a conversation with their client might persuade you otherwise; thus, wasting everyone’s time.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture. I tell you, the job seeker, this because I want you to be informed of what goes on at the other end of the “submit resume” button. I also tell you this as a means of explaining why I have written a manifesto addressing these issues. Recruiters are not faceless robots for unfeeling corporations, nor are they ruthless used car salesmen seeking their own ends. In my 8 years of recruiting, I have seen recruiters good and bad; as it is with any profession. My feeling is that the vast majority of recruiters (of every discipline) are good people trying to do their job and on occassion they need help. They need to be reminded that you, the job seeker, are just as human and deserving of the same amount of respect.

Towards that end, I have written a manifesto calling recruiters to accountability. Please read, download and circulate to job seekers (and recruiters) everywhere.

Oh my, Elvi!!!

Okay, so its not something I would do, but its honest work. If you’re a fan of “The King” and excel in karoake, you might want to check out: Hire An Elvis Impersonator, Elvis Tribute Artist, Elvis Impersonators