Happy Spring! It’s time to spring into action and add some news strategies to your job search campaign. Here are a few things to try.1. Go around the gatekeeper. If you find an open position through a job board or company website, don’t only submit your resume to human resources—they’re often gatekeepers who don’t have much control over who ends up getting hired. Instead, go around the gatekeeper and do some Internet resear...

Some people have managed to leverage the challenges of the most recent recession into a lucrative business for themselves to earn a legitimate living. Unfortunately, others are preying on uninformed and sometimes desperate job seekers to illegitimately turn a buck and ruin people’s credit or drain their bank accounts. Identity theft expert and Director of Operations at Kroll Fraud Solutions, Jeremy Miller, relates a typi...

I bet many of you out there are wearing green today in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. I decided to do something different this year and blog green instead. I’ve been a big fan of Carol McClelland’s Green Career Central site for over a year and I was thrilled to hear that she recently published a book on the topic of green careers called Green Careers for Dummies. She stopped by the Career Solvers blog to give readers the insid...

I put up a picture on Facebook yesterday of me as a kid sitting in my living room. I love this picture because it reminds me what my house looked like as a child and it’s a window into what trends influenced how homes were decorated at the time. My mother had a penchant for plastic slipcovers and she put them on everything in the living room, including the lampshades. Plastic slipccovers made their debut in the mid 50s and...

Last week I attended the first of many college planning meetings at my daughter’s school. Jammed into the school auditorium with 200+ other neurotic parents of high school juniors, I listened to details about student entrance exam test dates, transcripts, and application deadlines. Parents who are going through this process for the second time offered advice to the newbies and shared anecdotal stories about oscillating betw...

Last year I went on multiple interviews for six different consulting assignments. It’s kind of strange to go on interviews when your profession revolves around teaching others how to interview. It’s often a humbling experience and sometimes I don’t even take my own advice. I thought I was perfect for each of these roles. But my definition of perfect didn’t always jive with the hiring manager’s. My skills were never in quest...

Everyone’s starting to talk about their New Year’s resolutions…lose weight, exercise more, quit smoking, get out of debt, and find a new job are the ones I hear most frequently. And while I think that New Year’s resolutions are a great idea in theory, I think that a lot of people fail to keep their New Year’s resolutions because often the only criteria motivating the person to make the resolution is the time of year.This ye...

My son just recently celebrated his birthday. It is a tradition in our family to tell our kids the story of the day they were born each year on their birthday. And while I’ve been telling my son this story for the past 13 years, it has always been somewhat sanitized. You see, my son’s birth was particularly hairy and what seemed like a routine delivery quickly turned into an emergency. For awhile, the doctors didn’t know if...

I recently attended a workshop on story telling facilitated by a company called Narativ. During the workshop, I learned how to tell a better story and be a better listener.One of the most memorable exercises of the day was when each person in the group was asked to tell a story about one of their grandparents, told through the voice of that grandparent. It was somewhat challenging at first...having to piece together memorie...

I’m having a piano delivered to my house. Arranging for a piano delivery is no small feat. Besides making arrangements with the showroom, I had to coordinate the insurance with my apartment building’s managing agent and figure out if the piano would fit in my elevator. Delivering a baby seemed to be much easier than this ordeal.The delivery was scheduled for tomorrow, yet the piano showed up at my house today. It seems that...