Beefing Up a Thin Resume

When you’re short on experience, play up your strengths.

The Problem: Recession or not, you’re job hunting. Trouble is, aside from some internships and a few part-time gigs, the work experience section of your resume is, well, thin. You know that you could nail a job if given the chance – but with the national unemployment rate hovering around 10%, how to get a foot in the door with so little to go on?

The Solution: A resume redo. The key is highlighting your accomplishments, regardless of how you got them. Definitely include when you graduated and whatever positions you’ve held since – employers want to see that. But, also list volunteer organizations, student clubs, sports teams, or any group in which you’ve held a leadership position or made an impact. Detail projects completed, funds raised or other positive outcomes; you want to point to anything that shows your capabilities, especially if…

How Not to Look Desperate

Desperate times can lead you to show how desperate really are to land that job. But no matter how tough a time you’ve been having—dwindling savings, unemployment running out, bills overdue—that’s the last impression you want to give a prospective employer.

Job hunting is like dating. People are attracted to confidence and turned off by the hard-up. So how can you seem self-assured while looking for work and land that job as the market heats up? Keep in mind these dos and don’ts.

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Remember that the more you have going on, the less desperate you will feel…

Sotomayor Had It Easy

A severe company-wide crisis is underway and, as a mid-level manager, you have to decide: Push forward with a risky new plan that could save jobs and bring in more revenue — if it works — or scrap your costly team now and stay the course. But wait. Now you’re a lower-level worker facing the same situation from a different perspective. How do your elegancies shift? Would you remain loyal to the company? Or stand by your fellow co-workers as part of a team?

Such role-playing games are the type of exercises Hallie Crawford, a certified career coach in Atlanta, Ga., says some of her clients are being run through in job interviews. “It’s kind of a no-win situation,” Crawford says of the above scenario, which a recent client faced. Side with upper management and you’re a yes man; side with co-workers and you‘re disloyal.

Think this week’s vetting process for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor was tough? Try sitting through just about any mid-level job interview these days …

Signs of the Recession: The Two-Word Resume

The feds say that 7 million people have lost their jobs in the recession—which means a hell of a lot of people cussing under their breath as they wrestle with their resumes. Should it be one page? Two? Chronological? Functional? Serif or sans serif?

The 5 Questions You Should Ask an Interviewer

Trust me: it’s different now. In this economy, where unemployment is high and you have many more job seekers than jobs, you can’t afford to improvise on the interview. So yes, if you got called in to talk about a position, be psyched. But then knuckle down and do some prep work.

Find out as much as you can about the position you’re interviewing for, how the process will go, and who will be interviewing you. Research the people you’ll be talking to (use Google, LinkedIn, Facebook and real-life contacts) so you have common ground to discuss, and check out the company and the competition.

Wait, you’re not done yet. You still have to ace the interview. These five questions will pull you ahead of the pack:…

Graduation to Nowhere

I’ve spent no small amount of time thinking about how my life could have been different if I had graduated in another year.

From the first day of senior year in the fall of 2007, (like all seniors) we avoided mentioning the “G word” and cringed when anyone asked what our plans were for the next year. We were still safely ensconced inside the safe, dependable collegiate bubble. The outside world, where concerns over subprime mortgages were slowly mounting, hardly penetrated. Besides, people we knew had graduated and gone to get jobs. Just as we expected we would.

When I did finally graduate in May 2008, Bear Stearns had already collapsed, but I couldn’t see how my experience could fold in on me: I was a double major, graduated magna cum laude, had put in my time as an unpaid intern, and was an editor of a campus magazine at Syracuse University. I expected success and moved to New York so I would be here to interview at a moment’s notice. I signed a one-year lease on an apartment and waited for the interviews and offers to roll in…

Socialize Your Resume Experience

Looking for a job can be as time-consuming as a full-time job, but luckily, these days you can also be social about it. Mashable featured a great list of “Social Sites for Resume Building” from Me 2.0 author Dan Schawbel.

Some of them are literally for building your resume — Razume.com and ResumeSocial are two that let you create yours online and the community will give you feedback — while others…