The journey to landing a job offer can be lengthy, especially in today’s market where there are more qualified candidates available than job openings. Securing an interview with an employer is a great first step and properly preparing for that interview is another major step, but what about after the interview?
One’s effort to securing a job is not over until an offer is on the table and all paperwork has been signed.  Make sure you know the essential dos and don’ts following an interview. 
Post-Interview Dos

Write a follow-up/thank you note to …

If you’ve been struggling to find work this year, you’ve got company.
The average job search lasts 33.9 weeks — more than 8 months — according to October 2010 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Times continue to be tough.
And times may stay tough for you, if you’re making one or both of the following mistakes, which plague most job seekers …
Mistake #1: “Sure, that person got a job, but my situation is different. I have too much experience/not enough experience/etc. What about an idea I can use in my …

One of the major reasons resume writers—or any writer for that matter—are in business is because it’s simply so hard to be objective in writing about ourselves or our businesses.
For this very reason, if you are writing your own resume, it may be tricky for you to try and customize your resume for the position you are going after. To make it easier, here are three tips that you can use to “tweak” your resume properly—I call this “The Mirroring Technique.”
Tip #1: Get a Focus. This is an obvious one …

Vince Wiskovitch, from Nassau County, New York, was just hired for a legal position after searching only 6 weeks for a job.
By comparison, the average job search in America now lasts 33.3 weeks.
Read on to learn the 4 things he did to get hired 27 weeks faster than average .
1.Don’t send a cover letter. Send a sales letter
The best cover letters are really sales letters — they use proven sellingtactics to convince employers to call you for an interview.
“In my cover letter, I included three or four good lines from …

What’s your strategy for finding a new job? Do you figure out exactly what you’re looking for, create a search image for that perfect job, and then look for it at the exclusion of everything else?
Sounds like a good way to crack the employment nut and guarantee that you’ll be happy with your chosen profession, doesn’t it? After all, you’ve probably been brought up to believe that you can do whatever you want. That’s the American way. As you long as you study hard, learn what you need to, and …

This may ruffle a few feathers, but your time is valuable, so I’ll be blunt: If you’ve been struggling to find a job for more than 6 months, you may be doing the wrong things to get hired.
Worse, you may have been given bad information by well-meaning folks who have steered you wrong during your search.
I am here to set things right.
And to offer three Guerrilla Job Search “truths” to get you hired faster .
Lie #1: You can’t apply to companies that have a hiring freeze.
Here’s the one-word truth that …

If you’re looking for a job in this economy, consider adding social media to your tool kit.
Specifically, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn — used correctly — can help you find work faster.
To get the latest tips, I spoke with Dan Schawbel, author of “Me 2.0, Revised and Updated Edition: 4 Steps to Building Your Future,” published in October 2010.
According to Schawbel, job hunting is now giving way to people hunting, with social media leading the way.
“Instead of submitting your resume to corporate Web sites or by email, you can use online …

After coaching literally hundreds of executive clients and hosting over 3,000 executive teleseminars, it’s easy for me to see the repeat traits of those clients who consistently rise to the top, find and win their dream jobs, and meet their career goals. Here are three distinct traits that these super-successful executives have in common:
Trait Number One: Their Mindset.
These super-successful executives seem to live in a world of their own. It’s a world where they seem to control the stimulus in a purposeful way. Being highly positive people, they seem to …

Over the past few weeks, I’ve received dozens of questions from job seekers around America.
Yes, if you’re like most people looking for work, times are tough.
So . why be like most people?
Think about it. If the things most people do to find a job don’t work, why do those things?
The best advice I can give any job seeker anywhere is simply this: Look at what most people are doing to find a job. Then consider doing the opposite.
That’s Guerrilla Job Hunting in a nutshell.
Now, having said that, here are my …

For some of you in today’s economy, your last job may have been your last job.
Literally.
You may have decided to chuck the idea of employment altogether and become your own boss.  But what if you’re not clear on what, exactly, to do as a self-employed person?
Good news: If you have a curious mind and like learning new things, you may find success working for yourself as a how-to expert.
That’s the message in a new book from marketer and author, Bob Bly, How to Write and Sell Simple Information for Fun and …

There’s an old marketing maxim I live by when advising job seekers.  It dates back to the 1930s and comes from Robert Collier, one of the best writers of sales letters who ever lived.
It goes like this:  To create successful advertising, the writer must enter the conversation already going on in the mind of the reader.
Because everybody is thinking about something. If you can tap into a person’s thoughts with your message, they will pay attention to you.
Applied to your job search, your cover letters should address concerns that are …

You hear a lot of talk these days about personal branding and how you should “brand” yourself in a job search.
But you hear very little about how you should sell yourself to employers.
Yet, I submit that, if you want to get hired as soon as possible, you should sell yourself as much as possible and let the branding take care of itself.
First, let’s define branding and sales, as they apply to a job search.
Then decide for yourself which to focus on.
In my view, your “brand” is simply your reputation — …

If you read Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland, you get a glimpse of the craziness Alice deals with running around aimlessly looking for who knows what. There’s a lot of confusion.
Along the way, she runs into Cheshire Cat.  This sarcastic and cynical feline isn’t much help to her, but he can help us see a problem common to job hunters. 
When Alice asks for directions, the cat responds:
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” Alice says, “I don’t much care where.” The cat then comments, “Then it doesn’t matter which way you walk.”
Let’s …

If you’re looking for a job in this economy, you need to stand out from the crowd to get noticed — and hired — by employers.
It’s as simple as that.
And here are three “guerrilla” ways to do it .
Tactic #1: Create a Competitive Analysis
You can make a huge impact on employers by analyzing one or more of their competitors and then sending your findings to them by Priority Mail — not email.
People assume that all companies keep up to date on their competitors, but this is rarely the case. Wrong. …

What separates successful job seekers from those who struggle to get hired?
Two things: clarity and motivation.
You must be clear about the job you seek, the results you’ve produced before, and the employers you want to work for.
And you need motivation to persist through long hours of research, networking, false hopes, and follow-up that may lie between you and your next job.
Want to know an easy, effective way to get more clarity and motivation in your job search?
It’s as easy as taking pen to paper.
In fact, that’s what it is: taking …

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 …