LinkedIn and Twitter recently announced a partnership that will enable users to simultaneously update their status on both platforms. Doing so can help amplify your message to your followers and real-time search engines. LinkedIn and Twitter have billed the new interface as two great tastes that taste great together. And I think this move is a sweet deal for job seekers as well. By using both platforms on a regular basis, j...

I don’t think about my age too much. People often tell me that I look younger than I am so I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to look older, not younger. But recently, four events occurred within the same day that forced me to think about age and the perception that age can create. • I saw a lead that a major magazine was offering a job search makeover for women between 25 and 45 years old…I did the math and realize...

I sat in on a fascinating presentation called “The Risks and Rewards of Online Social Networking in the Workplace” hosted by the Human Resources Association of New York. The presentation was geared towards HR professionals and focused on creating social media policies in the workplace to protect employees and employers.It’s clear that companies are becoming more proactive in their management of social media in the workplace...

When I was in high school I assumed everyone went to college. My brothers were both away at Ivy League schools at the time and just about all of my friends were busy prepping for the SATs and visiting college campuses. But one good friend at the time told me he didn’t think he was going to go to college and I was shocked. I managed to convince him to go which in retrospect was not a great idea because he hated the experienc...

Over the past few weeks I’ve been culling information from various compensation surveys, HR Magazine, and presentations by Mercer Consulting and ORC Worldwide to investigate compensation benchmarks for 2009 and trends for 2010. Here’s what I have learned and what I believe to be the implications for job seekers.2009/2010: Compensation Data: What’s Up?According to research conducted by ORC Worldwide, hiring is up in certai...

I recently saw Sam Horn, author of “Create the Perfect Pitch, Title, and Tagline for Anything” at the NRWA conference. Sam talked about the power of words when presenting ideas and discussed what she called “words to lose” and “words to use.” I started thinking about the importance of dropping “losing” words from salary negotiation conversations and replacing them with winning words to preserve the relationship the job seek...

I know I’ve ranted about this before but I’m continuously amused by all the articles popping up about how social media is destroying real relationships. In my opinion, nothing could be further from the truth.The biggest pet peeve is that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are flooded with people talking about nothing...as if before social media, people who spoke always had something profound to say. People will al...

My teenage son has been allergic to milk products his entire life. His reaction is pretty intense...immediate vomiting, drop in blood pressure, turning white as a ghost...all from a thimble-full of milk or a bite of cheese. He is part of an allergy research study group and every year he spends a day in the hospital ingesting tiny amounts of milk and being observed, poked, and prodded for hours. And every year after a very o...

Recently I had to deliver some bad news. It was one of those situations where I could always come up with a reason to delay the conversation. It never seemed to be the right time; there was always something to consider that would make the information more difficult to bear. So I put it off and then I put it off some more. Because maybe somehow I would magically come up with a better way to deliver the bad news. Maybe the re...

I recently sat down with Jennifer Loftus, National Director for Astron Solutions. Jennifer develops, designs, and implements base pay compensation systems and she is an active member of SHRM’s Total Rewards Special Expertise panel. I asked her some of the questions job seekers often have about compensation and her responses should be required reading for anyone looking to better manage the salary negotiation conversation wi...