When you’re searching for a new job, have you ever approached trusted friends and former colleagues to refer you to a manager within their company to discuss a job opportunity with them?

I’ve had occasions where people I know were looking for a new job and I offered to refer them to a manager I worked with to see if there was something available for that person within the company.

So ideally you’d get referred to a person by having the opportunity offered to you and where you didn’t have to ask someone to refer someone else to you. Some people may not feel comfortable referring you to someone within their company especially if they don’t know you that well or to be frank, if you’re not that good at what you do.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend everyone I’ve ever worked with or know. But one of the hardest parts of the job search – as you’ve probably already found out – is getting your foot in the door. Sometimes, convincing someone to interview you is the hardest part of the process especially if they have dozens or hundreds of other people that they could interview instead of you. If you have someone in your corner who already works for the company and they are willing to vouch for you, it can help to make your job search a bit easier or at least help to improve your odds.

How can you improve the chances that people would voluntarily refer you to people who they know who can positively influence your job search and thus your career? For starters you should:

1. Let people know you’re looking for a new job. Let people in your life know you’re looking for a new job and let them know that you’d appreciate them letting you know of anyone who they’d suggest speaking with regarding your job search. Your not asking your friend to find you a job, you’re simply asking them to point you in the direction of someone they know who might be interested to speak with you.

2. Make sure you’re someone who people would actually want to refer to others. The only people I’d refer to others are those who are good at what they do, have a good, positive personality, are skilled, likable and would fit the company I’d refer them to. Basically someone who wouldn’t embarrass me and make me look bad if they ended up getting hired by the company! Are you that kind of person?

3. Be the type of person who would do the same for others. This isn’t so much a quid pro quo situation where “you help me and I’ll help you” but are you the kind of person who other people would like to help? Are you the type of person who also helps others or are you a selfish person who generally only takes care of themselves? I won’t help that kind of person and I suspect many others would say the same thing.

On my other career website, my most popular page and topic related to the career objective. On this page, people can submit their career objective and get it critiqued by me and can read over the hundreds (and counting) of career objectives already submitted by other visitors.

Amazingly I can count on one hand the number of submissions I’ve received that I’d say would pique my interest enough to think about interviewing the person who wrote it if I was a hiring manager.

Most of the time, I’ll get a very generic submission that goes something like this:

Looking for a position with a dynamic company that offers me opportunities to move up within the company and utilize my strong communication skills and who believes in continuing education and training.

Basically it’s a statement that tells me virtually nothing about the person who wrote it and why the reader should interview them (which is the whole point of the career objective) and instead focuses on everything the person wants from the company.

I delete many of the submissions without posting them or critiquing them because are simply lazy attempts by people and aren’t worth reading. But many are ones that I’m sure are ones that are actually used in the person’s resume…and are ones that add nothing to their candidacy for a job.

Do you write your resume and your career objective in particular with your reader (ie. hiring manager) in mind or do you write it with no regard as to who is reading it or why?

I’m convinced that many people simply go through the motions with their resume and just write it because they have to and don’t pay a lot of attention to the purpose of the document ie. to convince the reader that they should interview them.

It also goes a long way I think to explain why people apply for job they aren’t qualified for, don’t manage their references properly, don’t prepare for interviews, etc. People are often lazy and go for quantity-over-quality and think that if they throw enough stuff against the wall something is bound to stick.

When you write your resume, review each statement and ask yourself “so what” until you can’t ask it anymore. Pretend you’re the hiring manager reading what you’ve written and ask yourself if you care about what you’ve just written.

Remember who your audience is (ie. who are you writing for) and remember that the people who tend to read your resume are those who can positively or negatively influence your job search and are typically searching to address a need or problem that they have ie. they need a new staff member.

How are you helping to address that need with what you’ve written?

Something that I’ve found people often don’t do properly during their career is follow through with things to completion. One specific area is with referrals. I can think of numerous times where someone will ask me for help referring them to someone – which I’ll typically do – and then a few months later when I suddenly remember that they never told me how the referral went, they mention that they never bothered to follow up with the person I’d referred them to. They forget, they were too busy, the usual excuses.

Networking is a great way to meet new people who can positively influence your career as it is, but when you have the opportunity to meet someone that was referred to you and you don’t bother, I just can’t figure that one out. Yet I’ve seen cases including one a few months ago where I referred someone to two recruiters I used to work with after this person asked me for this help and they never bothered to contact either recruiter. You try to help people but they won’t even bother to help themselves.

I’ve seen this with reference checking too. Not letting people know that you’re using them as a reference is pretty stupid but I’ve witnesses it firsthand. A few years back I got a call out of the blue at work from a guy who told me he was calling for a reference check for a woman I’d worked with several years earlier for several months. I hadn’t spoken with her for months and yet she’d decided to use me as a reference…but hadn’t told me! It was a surprise getting the call regarding a job I didn’t know she had applied to for a reference I didn’t realize I was needed for. It took me a few minutes into the reference before I even knew what to say.

I never did find out if she got the job either. She forgot to follow up with me on that too.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve received a number of emails regarding fake job offers and other job search scams that abound on the Internet these days.

Several guys from India emailed me regarding emails they’d received – independently of each other – where a company they’d never applied to had offered them a job or interview and they weren’t sure what to do about it.

Certainly, getting an unsolicited email from a company you’ve never applied to seems to good to be true (and it usually is) but when you’re looking for a job, sometimes any news is good news and perhaps their heart was telling them to go for it even if their head was telling them to delete the email and forget about it.

The thing that these fake job offers all had in common was that they were all sent to people in one country offering them a job in another country. Certainly if you’re in another country it can be difficult to quickly determine if a particular foreign country really exists or not.

Having said that there are many resources on the Internet alone that can help. Doing a quick Google search on the name of the company that was offering the alleged job quickly told me it was a scam so I passed this info onto the disappointed guys who’d emailed me regarding the company.

How can you tell which emails and correspondence is real and fake these days?

First off, common sense has to prevail. Companies you’ve never applied to don’t suddenly email you with a job offer or interview! It simply doesn’t work that way in life.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself to avoid getting sucked in by a scam:

1. Is the company contacting you asking for money for any reason? This is a simple, first sign of a scam. If they’re asking for money, bank account info, etc this is obviously a scam.

2. Does the company have a website and legitimate contact info? Or do they simply send you an email with no contact info and a PO box instead of a real address? They probably won’t include a phone number otherwise you could call them and see if anyone answers. Mind you even if someone does answer and pretends to be from the company in question, it still doesn’t mean it isn’t a scam!

3. When you Google search the company name, what do you find? Often, this will immediately give you the answer you’re looking for. In the case of the company that I was asked about above by the Indian job searchers, when I Googled the company name, the first search result was a Yahoo! Answers result where someone who had also been contacted by this company asked “is this a real job” and a poster from the UK where the company was allegedly located said “no, it’s a popular scam in the UK.”

Life is hard enough without convincing yourself that nameless, faceless people are going to email you out of the blue offering you a job you’ve never applied for. Putting your faith, time, effort and money into situations like this will only serve to waste your time and money and lead to disappointment.

Favoritism in the workplace is one of the most popular career topics on the Internet based on what I’ve seen. On my other career website, it’s one of the most popular pages I’ve written so I’ve written several of them!

In my experience, the favoritism people are experiencing – the fact that they’re feeling like they are being treated less fairly than other individuals – often goes back to a few different common factors:

1. Owners and managers who become friendly with certain staff.

2. Family-owned businesses where the family members come first.

3. Businesses where the management hire their friends and then give them preferential treatment.

In some businesses it’s very easy to see how favoritism in the workplace towards some staff – to the detriment of others – can be a problem. Imagine you’re working in a sales environment where the best leads or business is given to certain staff and you’re one of the select few.

Another example relates to scheduling shifts (ie. restaurants and bars) where certain desirable shifts are given to some staff and not others.

These are a few of the common complaints I’ve heard from people. The question of course becomes “what can I do about it?”

At the end of the day, your specific situation will usually determine what recourse if any you have. So does your options of course….

In other words, what other options do you have in terms of employment? Is it really a job worth fighting for? Certainly you don’t want to run and quit every job that causes you some grief but alternatively you also have to weigh your options and figure out if you really want to fight for your right or simply move somewhere better, if such a place exists.

To read more about favoritism in the workplace, check out this earlier post.

The Internet provides a false sense of security to job searchers as it allows us to think we’re accomplishing something by hiding behind our keyboard and firing off resumes, tweets, Facebook friend requests and using other online tools ad nauseum…and making us feel like we’ve accomplished something.

Firing off dozens of resumes to hiring managers in response to jobs they’ve advertised on major job boards is great…until you realize that it’s just as easy for hundreds or thousands of other people to the same thing!

Tweeting and adding people as friends and thinking that this qualifies as networking is great too…until you realize that of the hundreds or thousands of people you follow and are friends with, you really only pay attention to a small handful of them. How many of those people are ignoring you too?

The easiest way to get in touch with someone and make an impression is in person. In sales, you can reach many more people by calling them on the phone or emailing them but meeting them in person often results in much better results. Having that face to face contact just adds something that a phone call or email can’t.

What do you think is better? Emailing 100 resumes to 100 nameless, faceless email addresses or meeting 10 hiring manager in person?

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, then this certainly applies to the job search process too. Doing the same thing over and over again and padding your Internet stats with more friends and followers is great, but if it’s not getting you closer to a better job or career, what’s the point?

How can you tell how well the job interview is going? There are many bad interview signs…but unfortunately some of them don’t become obvious until the interview is well over!

Sometimes it can also be difficult to tell if the interview is going well because often the interviewer doesn’t give any verbal or other cues to let you know how you’re doing.

Here are some bad interview signs that hiring managers tend to tell me concerns them the most about people they interview and are things that you should try to avoid:

1. You talk too much: If you’re spending more time answering questions than you should be (ie. it takes you 2 minutes to answer a yes or no question) this is going to be noticed by the interviewer. Listen to the question and answer it in the most concise way possible.

2. You don’t come prepared with any relevant questions: Hiring manager usually want to know what you know about their company and the job ie. why do you want the job? You need to know this on the way in, in case it comes up during the interview.

3. You talk, but don’t answer the question that was asked: Talking a lot but avoiding the question is something that happens quite often in job interviews. Interviewers do notice when you evade the question or don’t answer the question they asked.

4. You seem money-motivated: Certainly if you’re interviewing for a sales role and tell the interviewer you want to earn a lot of money, that’s not a bad thing! But when you keep asking about salary and when the benefits kick in (I’ve heard of this happening…) it can literally ruin your chances at the job.

5. You talk in generalities: I’ve heard this one from hiring managers so many times, I’ve lost count. They ask the person to give a specific example of something important to the job they’re interviewing for, and the person can only respond with generalities or in theory ie. “what I’d do is…” In this case, interviewers don’t want to know what you’d do, they want to know what you’ve done.

6. You don’t appear to know much about the company and/or job: This happens more than you might think. People often think they can wing it and just show up and ace the interview. Not knowing about the job and company you’re applying for really shouldn’t happen. Most companies have a website and information regarding them is almost always easily available for anyone to find.

If – as you’re about to wrap up the interview – you get the sense that you said something in the interview you could have answered better, or perhaps feel that you didn’t answer a question properly, one way to try to rescue the situation can be to ask the interviewer “do you have any doubt of my abilities to do the job?” Alternatively, you could ask “is there anything I can clarify related to the question you’ve asked and my responses to them?”

I can’t recall how many times a hiring manager has told me following an interview with one of my candidates that there was one particular part of the person’s skillset that they aren’t quite sure about…and then decide to pass on the candidate and not offer them the job as a result.

Giving the interviewer the chance to ask you to clarify something might at least off you the opportunity to save the interview and perhaps take away any doubt they might have about your candidacy to do the job.

Two weeks notice is probably the most common amount of notice that a person has to give when leaving a job. Three weeks or longer is also common especially for more senior positions.

Conversely, the company you’re working for typically agrees to pay you for the same amount of time if they decide they no longer want you to work for them (ie. due to a layoff or downsizing for example) and let you go. So in this instance, they can pay you to not work for them for a few weeks or longer if they terminate your employment without cause.

We already discussed quitting a job with little or no notice given and why you want to avoid this for various but something I didn’t cover in that post was the legal reason(s).

Depending on your job, your company and your personal situation, leaving a company without giving proper notice could become a legal issue if your (former) employer decides that they want to hold you to giving whatever notice is specified in your work contract.

Granted, most companies aren’t going to take former employees to court to enforce the notice period but I have heard of specific situations where this has happened. I’ve also heard of situations where a company enforces the non-compete part of a work agreement when one of their employees decides to leave voluntarily and takes a job with a competitor.

Depending on your job, your leaving the company without giving the required notice might cause the company to be hurt monetarily or otherwise and in this case, they could decide to take you to court to make you pay – literally – for injuring them.

The easy way to avoid this is to give proper notice when quitting and ensuring that you abide by the terms of your work agreement. Sometimes in practice this can be difficult if (for example) a job pops up and they want you start earlier than your notice period will allow. In this case your best bet might be to speak with your current employer and see if you can get a shorter notice period and see what happens. It could be a lot better than simply quitting early and hoping or expecting that nothing further will happen.

Sometimes being overqualified for a position (or at least being told that you’re over qualified…you might think you’re not but the employer does!) is an issue you’ll deal with when applying for jobs.

You might think the job fits your skills and experience but the employer feels you’re too qualified and decides either not to hire you or perhaps not even interview you.

As an IT recruiter, I have faced this many times, where I either had a candidate who I had to convince was too senior for a job they wanted to apply for, or where I was told by the hiring manager for a particular position that the person I’d sent over for consideration for the job was overqualified.

Often, we’ll see candidates who are overqualified with experience where the employer simply feels that the job will bore this person and they’ll probably quit within a few months if they were hired.

In other cases, it’s the level of education that scares an employer away. I’ve seen PhD-level candidates who scare off hiring managers because the manager thinks the person is too heavily tilted on the scholastic side and is over educated for the position. As in the first example where the person has too much experience in the eyes of the employer, in this case the bottom line is usually that the employer figures the person would get bored by the job and the last thing an employer wants is a bored employee who is likely to quit and find a more suitable job.

What should you do if you’re being told that you’re overqualified for positions you’re applying to?

Some recruiter and perhaps your friends will tell you to dumb down your resume and/or lie during interviews. This isn’t a good idea because typically you’ll either end up with a less-than-suitable job that you’ll be bored in (see comments above) and/or you’ll get caught in your lie(s).

The best thing you can do is ensure you’re only applying for jobs that interest you and that you are actually qualified for. That is, jobs that you are not under qualified for nor overqualified for.

For an earlier post on being overqualified, please click here.

I’ve been laid off twice in my career. The first time was when I was working with a company that went bankrupt. I was coming into the office one morning and found our manager taping a note on the door that said “All classes are canceled today.” We were a computer training company, hence the reference to classes.

As we made eye contact, I could tell she wasn’t very happy so I just said “should I bother unpacking my lunch?” to which she replied “I’ll be making an announcement shortly.”

I didn’t bother unpacking my lunch that day. About 30 minutes after I arrived and the other staff had as well, the owner of the company appeared (he lived out of state) along with a bankruptcy agent who informed us that the company was filing for bankruptcy and that effective immediately, we were all out of work. He kindly asked us to pack up our stuff and asked that we leave the office within the next 30 minutes, so that’s what we did.

I recall the sight of us all leaving the office at about 9:45am that day, boxes and bags in hand. I remember thinking that everyone that saw me probably knew I’d been laid off since I was carrying all my stuff with me. It reminded me of the movies where you see someone losing their job and then seeing them leave the office with all their belongings in paper banking boxes.

I knew business had been slow but I figured that things would pick up and that owner would keep pumping in money until that day came.

Obviously that’s not what happened.

I got back to my condo and wondered what I was going to do next. Then I started wondering how I was going to even figure out what to do next.

The second time I got laid off, I was part of a bigger downsizing along with other staff. At the time I was working for an Internet-based company and the reality was that we were becoming a staff-heavy company competing with a lot of mom and pop shops being run out of their basement with little to no overhead.

In both cases, the circumstances were different but the result was the same.

Getting laid off can be a really demotivating, upsetting, devastating experience. That’s especially true when the economy is tough and jobs are scarce as they are these days in many industries and regions.

To read some past entries on firings, layoffs and downsizings, click here.