The rule of the day relates to how your life is based on a true story and is probably better and more believable than a lot of fiction.

Some people think they’ve never accomplished anything interesting in their life or career and feel like they need to embellish their resume to make things sounds better.

Other than the fact that lying usually gets caught one way or the other, the truth is that you’ve probably accomplished a number of interesting things that can help to illustrate your experience, skills and talents and make you stand out from other candidates who are applying for the same jobs you are.

When I think of things I’ve done or experienced in my career, I’ll bet that some people reading this might have accomplished or experienced something similar and I’ll bet at least some of those things would be an interesting talking point in an interview.

Below is a list of some things that I’ve experienced in my career that I think are worth noting.

Among other things, I:

• Know what it’s like to work internationally, having worked overseas (in New Zealand) for 4 years.
• Have survived several corporate downsizings while many of my colleagues were being laid off.
• Have experienced being laid off twice myself during corporate downsizings.
• Know what it’s like to be self-employed.
• Have helped many people find better jobs.
• Have observed people lose jobs at every step of the job search process and most of the time they didn’t even know where they’d lost the job until I told them.
• Have written numerous online articles on job searching and career management.
• Wrote an ebook for career-minded individuals called Recruiter Secrets Revealed that can be bought and downloaded online.

I think at least some of those things are interesting and in each instance I can tell you a few things that I learned or experienced with each point that made me a better person.

During an interview a few years ago, I was asked numerous times about the fact that I’d started up a few websites on my own and the interviewer was very interested to not only hear about how I did it, but about other entrepreneurial endeavors I’d been part of.

Moral of the story: Think about things you’ve done, places you’ve visited, people you’ve met, experiences you’ve had. Chances are you have plenty of interesting things to weave into your resume or into a conversation that while not necessarily related to a job might give the person you’re speaking with an indication that you’re more just what is written on your resume.

The rule of the day relates to how sarcasm should have its own font just so it’s perfectly clear that the person writing the sarcasm is actually being sarcastic.

Have you ever read an email (or a newspaper article, Internet article, magazine article, etc) and wondered if the person writing it was being serious or sarcastic?

I’ve read plenty of emails from people who I don’t yet know very well who try for some reason to make a joke and sometimes I can’t tell whether or not they’re actually joking or serious. Sarcasm only works when it’s obvious and when it’s applicable to the situation.

Sometimes it’s difficult to convey sarcasm unless you put an annoying smiley face after every incident just to make it patently obvious to readers that sarcasm was intended.

Moral of the story: Watch what you write and how you write it whether in a work setting or when applying for jobs. Sometimes people try to get a bit too cute and make a joke and might not realize that the person at the other end actually reading it might not get the joke.

Or worse, they take the comment the wrong way and you pay for it as a result.

The rule of the day relates to how companies acknowledge that they have received your resume. “We’ll keep your resume on file” (or words to that effect) is something that you tend to hear from an employer immediately after emailing your resume to them or sending your profile to them using their online application process.

Exactly what this means to you is another story.

In the old days before the Internet, it wasn’t uncommon to mail your resume to a company and two weeks later get a postcard or letter mailed back acknowledging that your resume had been received.

As email, instant messages and the like took over and began to replace actual hard copy correspondence – and as it became easier and cheaper for us to fire off hundreds of resumes by email rather than by mail – it became more difficult for companies to treat each submission individually.

So auto responder emails were created that would automatically trigger a generic response to the generally generic job submissions that many people send to various hiring managers around the world.

“We’ll keep your resume on file” is a polite way of saying that the recipient hasn’t yet gotten to reading your email given the hundreds or thousands of other emails that they have received for the same job you applied for and they don’t guarantee that they’ll actually get to reading your resume anytime in the near future.

Instead they will put it in their database for a period not to exceed 3, 6, 9 or 12 months or whatever their policy is and if you’re lucky, one of their HR reps might conduct a keyword search during that time that causes your resume to pop up on their screen most likely with hundreds or thousands of other candidates, too.

Bottom line, once your resume hits the company’s database, it’s sitting there with upwards of hundreds of thousands of other resumes and whether or not it gets read at a time when you’re actually looking for a new job or are in a position to consider one, is debatable.

The rule of the day relocates to relocating for a job and how it isn’t a small issue that many people make it out to be.

In general terms, a hiring manager will prefer a qualified local candidate over a qualified candidate who would have to relocate to take the job. Even if the hiring company won’t pick up any of the relocation costs, it’s still easier to pick the local candidate.

The local candidate can most likely attend an interview(s) on short notice without several days or even several weeks notice.

The local candidate won’t call the employer the morning they’re supposed to start the job and let them know they have changed their mind about moving and no longer want the job as a result.

The fact is that hiring the local candidate is the easy answer for a hiring manager, even more so if the candidate that has to relocate has to relocate from another country and might have work visa issues on top of the ones mentioned above.

These days, people think about casting a wider net with regards to their job search and decide to search for jobs outside their home area and this is often a good idea.

But unless you are actually living there at the time, the farther away the job is from your home base, the better the chances that the hiring manager will take this into consideration when it comes to actually hiring someone.

The rule of the day relates to the various job search and career scams that abound. Some of them are variations on old ones and they continue to exist even though they are a waste of time, effort, money and the hope that you waste that it might actually work and help you.

Today I read yet another career service-related website trumpeting a mass resume sending service that will fax your resume to a thousand companies and spoke highly about the service. The article tried to justify and promote the service with numbers, stating that if you fax out to 1000 (!) hiring managers, you should get 10-50 “quality responses” (their words) and maybe 5 interviews. They also suggested that a job search is “based on a numbers game” which couldn’t be further from truth.

The article went on to say (and this is the real lie) that using this service would enable you to have “nearly ZERO competition” (again, their words and their capitalization) from other job searchers.

The absurdity about this service is that you just need to think about the logistics alone to realize it won’t work. Unless you are the only person using this service – you might very well be actually – the only thing it guarantees is that the 1000 hiring managers receiving these faxes will probably run out of toner ink once they start receiving the faxes from the other people who also use this service.

In other words, all you’re doing is mass emailing your resume to a groups of nameless, faceless companies who may or may not have a suitable job and who may or may not actually get around to reading your resume.

Maybe your current employer is among the companies getting the fax. That would be ironic! You’d probably have some explaining to do to your manager I’d think.

The rule of the day relates to the scent that you can give off during a job interview which can help play a role in determining the impression that you leave once you depart.

I recall a few interviews I’ve done with people where the moment they walk into the office, I can smell the cigarette smoke that followed them in.

With other people, they might wear (a bit too much) cologne or perfume and the strong smell follows them everywhere they go that day.

Whether you forgot to shower or wear deodorant or ate a spicy lunch or one with a lot of garlic immediately before attending an interview, these sorts of scents can leave an interviewer with an impression about you and not necessarily a good one.

This is especially true if you’re interviewing for a client-facing role like a sales position or one where you’d in front of customers regularly.

I used to work with a guy who was a heavy smoker and the whole day, any time you walked near him you could smell the smoke on his clothes. Some of the others in the office used to mention it so I wasn’t the only person who noticed. He worked in sales too and I can’t believe his customers didn’t notice too especially if they were non-smokers.

When it comes to foods, this is also a consideration given how strong and spicy certain foods are that hours after eating them can continue to give off pungent smells that you might not be aware of.

Remember to take these sorts of things in consideration before attending an interview or being in front of someone who can influence your job search or career.

The rule of the day relates to contact information that you offer to potential employers and recruiters.

How much contact information do you put on your resume so that hiring managers and recruiters can contact you?

As a recruiter, I sometimes get frustrated when I need to contact someone urgently – contract jobs for example often get filled quickly so I sometimes need to get on the phone with someone asap – and only find an email address for someone or a phone number that just rings and rings when I call it or it’s shut off and has no voice mail.

These days of course, you also find people through LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace or through a Google search so while it’s sometimes easier to find people than before, it can be difficult to actually get them on the phone sometimes.

When it comes to contact information, offering a phone number (ideally a cellphone) with voice mail and an active, professional sounding email address (nothing silly like 2hot4u@isp.com or anything like that) is the best way to go I think.

These days with the rise in identity theft and so on, some people are worried about including a home address in an online profile that could get viewed by thousands of people they don’t know. Personally, I like when a person has their address on their resume because that’s how I find out if they’re applying for jobs in their home area or if they’re dreaming and are applying for a job that is a 1 hour commute away.

Having said that, when you post your resume to major online job boards you can always mention just the city you live in (rather than your complete address) and can probably also mention somewhere the specific geographic area you want to work in.

Bottom line: the easier you make it for people to find you, the easier it will be for them to find you which when you’re looking for a new job, is usually what you want.

The rule of the day relates to a good idea that can help you network more successfully either when you are employed or unemployed.

Creating your own business cards for your personal use – a business card with your name and contact information and perhaps a few skills or your area of expertise shown – can be a great way to quickly exchange information with other people you are networking with or who you meet during the course of a day.

We’re not talking about getting 2,000 cheap looking, flimsy thin cards that you can buy for $10 from an Internet ad or anything like that, we’re talking professional looking cards on the same stock paper you’d expect an employer to print business cards on.

Having business cards for your personal use can help you remain top of mind after you’ve met someone who can positively influence your job search. You could also use them to hand to recruiters or other hiring authorities that you meet during an interview.

I can think of a few times that a job candidate came to interview with me and handed me a cheap looking business card where the text was a bit smudgy and it looked like they had printed the cards out on a home computer. This didn’t help their cause.

I also recall a few cases where the person handed me a personal but professional looking business card that included their name, contact info, university degree (ie. BSc Computer Science, MBA, etc) and a few bullet points regarding their skillset. I remember those people in a good way.

The rule of the day relates to how people talk about you after you’ve left an interview whether with a recruiter or with a hiring manager.

The question is what have you done or said during the interview that they could talk about and is the talk good or bad? What sort of impression did you leave them with?

In my experience as a recruiter, there are a few questions that tend to get discussed after someone has left an interview:

How well do they communicate? In other words, how well do you speak? How well do you comprehend questions that are asked of you and how well do you deliver your answers? This can be a contentious issue when it comes to people whose first language isn’t English (for those of us who live in English-speaking countries) because some people will discriminate against people with accents. Having said that, if your English isn’t very good, it will probably cost you in some interviews when the job requires (or when the company demands) a strong communicator.

How well do they present? Do you “look” professional and like someone that the company would want to put in front of customers or do you not portray the image that the company and job requires? Presentation skills and how a person presents themselves – their dress, their mannerisms, their professionalism – are always being critiqued during the interview process.

How do they compare with other people being considered for the job? In other words, how do you compare with your competition, with the other people who are being considered for the same job? They’ll probably compare how you stack up against the other candidates in terms of how about much money you’re looking for, where you live (ie. is your commute to the job longer/shorter than other people. If you live far away it can be a negative), why you’re looking for a new job, when you can start a new job, and things of that nature.

Given what I’ve mentioned above, what sort of impression do you give to people when you attend an interview?

The rule of the day relates to no showing an interview, showing up late, and excuses that people give to justify it.

I was kidnapped by aliens.

My car tires were flat, too.

Then I missed the bus.

The dog ate my homework, too.

Fortunately, I haven’t heard any of these excuses for not showing up at an interview (no showing) or being late for one – and I’ve never had to use one myself – but if the excuses given above sounds pretty unbelievable when you read them, remember that they sound even more unbelievable when you try to use them or ones like them and think that someone will believe it.

We already talked about timeliness and not being late but we know that sometimes it does happen and we can’t do anything about it. The question is what do you do about it?

This morning, I was 30 minutes late for a doctor’s appointment but I didn’t care because he’s never on time and I knew it wouldn’t matter. Sure enough, the doc was 35 minutes late so he actually got to the office after I did.

But in an interview – whether with a recruiter or hiring manager – showing up late or not at all just doesn’t cut it.

I’ve only had a small number of cases where a person no shows an interview with me and I can only recall one case where a candidate of mine no showed an interview with one of my clients – although he did have a good excuse and the client was ok to reschedule it.

But I do know of recruiters who have had people simply not show up at a job interview and they never hear from the person again. Weird. Talk about unprofessional.

Bottom line: Plan ahead and show up on time. In the case where you can’t make it on time and know you’re going to be late, make sure you’ve planned ahead. Have your cellphone handy and charged up, and bring the phone number of the person you meeting with so you can call them and let me know before you’re late.

When a person no shows an interview with no legitimate reason, I stop working with them. If they show up late and don’t seem to care, I don’t care either and won’t work with them. If they call ahead and let me know they’re running late, at least I know they’re trying.

It’s not as good as being on time, but it’s better than nothing.