Are you unemployed? Or currently employed but still hunting for that better job? If so, career advising blogs could be a great place to start your search.  www.OnlineDegrees.org offers  help connecting you with the Top 100 Career Advice Blogs. Form this well put list, you can mix and match until you find  your favorite advice-flavored career blog(s).
Out of the extensive list, the top 3 (Career Realism,  WebWorkerDaily, and Position Ignition) offer some interesting and not so usual information for the current job seeker.
Career Realism’s founder, J.T. O’Donnell, who has been …

One of the key areas you may be struggling with as a job seeker is a feeling of rejection. This can cause a real slowdown in your job search activity. This downward spiral can happen for a variety of reasons including:

A poor response from companies and/or jobs for which you have submitted your resume.
Stopping your job search once you get one or two job interviews (to see how they pan out).
Hinging everything on one hopeful offer.
Only using one method to perform your job search (like responding to Internet job postings).

If …

If you’re job hunting in this tough economy, take heart from the following three stories of people who found work in three to four months — about half as long as the average job search, which takes nearly 8 months (31.2 weeks) as of March 2010.
How did they do it?
By using Guerrilla Resumes (explained below), LinkedIn, and smart networking, among other tactics.
Read on to learn more from the Q&A I did with each of them …
Case Study #1: Brad Viles, from suburban Madison, WI.
Time to hire: about four months (hired …

I’ve been following a stream of articles written by Michael Woodward (a.k.a. Dr. Woody) and he delivers so solid advice for job hunters of all ages.  He draws from the information from his recently published book  ”The YOU Plan: A 5-Step Guide to Taking Charge of Your Career in the New Economy.”  I’ve met Dr. Woody several times as part of my Miami networking  and even commented about his interview on Fox News in my article Dr. Woody’s Job Hunt Advice for College Grads several months back.
In these two articles called:

Keeping Passion in Tough …

How do you find a job quickly, in this rotten economy?
Hunt like a Guerrilla.
That was the experience of Mark Thomas, a systems administrator from Mesa, Ariz., who started a new job on March 8, 2010, after a search of only 6 weeks.
According to Thomas, he would have been hired sooner, but “the entire executive team was gone at a conference for a week.”
Thomas succeeded after using three unconventional job-search tactics:
1. The Job Shopping List
2. The Guerrilla Resume
3. The Coffee Cup Caper
Read on to learn how he did it …
1. The …

I am always surprised when I am talking to an executive in the midst of an interview…and they share with me how they approached the money topic.
Here are two very common things I hear:
“They asked me how much I needed and I said at least $250k.”
“I asked them what they had in mind for their salary package.”
What most people don’t realize is that these two statements put ALL the power in the hands of the employer! So, to alleviate these negative events from happening and successfully negotiate the maximum salary …

Can Twitter help you find a job?
Yes.
But only if you use it right.
It can be a huge challenge sorting the wheat from the chaff on Twitter, where millions of updates appear daily, only a few of which contain useful job-search information.
Let’s start at the beginning, then explore two case studies.
Twitter is the micro-blogging service that lets users send updates (“tweets”) of 140 characters or less to people in their network. You can follow the updates of any other Twitter member with one click.
When it comes to meeting hiring managers, Twitter …

I run into this topic over and over again when I meet with job hunters.  “How do I land next job?”  they ask.   I’ve repeated this over and over again right back:

“Network, Network, Network.”

 There you have it.  The three ways, but they are actually one thing that you need to do three, four, five as many times as possible.
You have to get your message out to as many people as possible in a clear, concise and memorable way.  This is similar to what a salesperson does.  They package their message in the form of …

Let’s face it—sometimes a job search can be a tiring and depressing process!
It’s one of the most challenging things we do as professionals, so it makes a lot of sense to invest in your career through gaining knowledge about how to do a “job search right”.
So, what is “right”? Well it’s a job search that does the following things:

Has a crystal clear plan (so you always know where you are going—which helps you to know what opportunities to take full advantage of and which ones to let go).
Gets you multiple …

This week, I’ll address two common job-search frustrations found in the Hundreds of emails I’ve received this year from people across America
Do either of these apply to you?
Frustration #1: There just aren’t enough jobs out there to apply for.
Solution: Let’s analyze this one …
When I speak to job hunters, in seminars, by phone, or via email, I ask the same question: “How are you looking for jobs?” Almost invariably, the answer is: “I look online or in the paper.”
So the actual frustration here is this: There aren’t enough advertised jobs …

A fellow salesman recommended Keith Ferrazzi’s Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time to me several years back.  We both attended a lead sharing group and he couldn’t help but recommend it to the rest of us.
Ferrazzi vividly describes how his father enabled him to break with his blue collar background by networking throughout his community. It led to Ferrazzi:

 attending a prep school well beyond his parents means,
gaining the benefits that come by knowing the well off parents of his peers (he became a caddy) …

 I’ve read a ton of books on job hunting as part of my work these past years and I forced myself to pick the three top ones you should have to optimize your job hunt.  You can take a look at the set of books I’ve already reviewed at Career Jockey’s Book Review topic but the ones I’ve listed below are the ones you need on your bookshelf.
Book #1 – What Color Is Your Parachute? 2010: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers by Richard Nelson Bolles
I wrote my What Color Is Your Parachute …

You think it’s tough to find a job now?
It’s been tougher.
Like in the Great Depression of the 1930s, for example.
Try to imagine a world without Twitter or Facebook, when the unemployment rate ranged from 14.3% to 24.9% (1931 to 1938).
Would you be interested in learning two ways to find that worked back then — and still work now?
Here they are …
1) Appeal to the self-interest of the employer
In the book, “Pick Your Job And Land It!” published in 1938, the authors, S.W. and M.G. Edlund, share the story of one …

I thought I’d share with you this article written by Bill Leonard of the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM).  There’s a lot of news about the extention of unemployment benefits to the jobless, but seems like there’s a lot of confusion on the specifics.
If any of you readers have specific experience with what’s going on and your experience on applying for the payments retroactively, please chime in so the rest of us can benefit from your experience.

 Looking for a job?
Raise your hand if you love networking.
I thought so.
And why don’t you get a thrill out of talking to friends and family about your job search?
For many folks, it’s a problem of how to start. There’s really no way to ask, “Know anyone who’s hiring?” without feeling awkward.
To fix that, here are two ways to open your next networking conversation that are proven to produce job leads — and won’t make you feel self-conscious .
1) Use Me as an Excuse to Call
Over the past year, I’ve quietly …

I recently reviewed several hundred emails from job seekers across the country. As you might imagine, many things are bugging many job seekers in this economy.
But I boiled their frustrations down to four common ones.
Here they are, with suggested solutions. Which of them apply to you?
Frustration #1: “I submit my resume for a posted job and never hear back
from employers. Did they even read my resume?”
Solution: Here are three ways to make sure your resume is received and read.
1) Call the employer after applying.
Obviously, you can’t do this if you’re …

I got an email recently from a man that read: “I followed all your advice but I have not gotten any job interviews. Do you have any other suggestions?”
I took a look at his LinkedIn profile and found that he hasn’t followed all of the advice I gave him.
In fact, as near as I can tell, he’s not doing anything I suggested.
And, yet, he wants more ideas from me.
So, here’s my advice to him and anyone else struggling to find a job: To get hired in this economy, you must …

As a rule, simple is good.
The iPad interface, Google, popsicles — they’re all simple things that achieve great results.
Applied to your job search, simplicity can achieve great results, too.
Example: What if you identified the people you wanted to work for, then advertised directly to them, asking for an interview?
Do you think something that simple might get you a job?
Well, it worked for one man, Alec Brownstein, an advertising copywriter from New York City.
Here’s what Brownstein did: He created Google AdWords for the names of people he wanted to work for. When each person Googled …

 If you’re job hunting in this tough economy, take heart from the following three stories of people who found work in three to four months — about half as long as the average job search, which takes nearly 8 months (31.2 weeks) as of March 2010.
How did they do it?
By using Guerrilla Resumes (explained below), LinkedIn, and smart networking, among other tactics.
Read on to learn more from the Q&A I did with each of them …
 Case Study #1:
Brad Viles, from suburban Madison, WI. 
Time to hire: about four months (hired on March 8, 2010) 
Tactics used: …

I love my assistant. She is incredibly sweet, supportive, intelligent, organized and experienced in all the technical areas that I know nothing about. I enjoy talking with her, reading her emails, I trust her and just working with her in general is an enjoyable experience.
This was one of my goals when I first knew I needed to hire an assistant – I wanted our working relationship to be easy, fun and productive. Being a sensitive person, I knew myself well enough to know that any other type of relationship in …