From Fistful of Talent: Cell Phones and Interviews Just Don’t Mix…
“Cell phones actually have NO place in a job interview. Period. End of story. It’s inappropriate, un-necessary and down-right rude. ”

Wally’s Comment: What can I say? I agree. Turn it off. Leave it in the car. Better yet, bury it in the backyard, at least until the interview is over.

From Alexandra Levit’s Water Cooler Wisdom: Next Level Networking
“I’m going to the SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin this week, and a lot of high-profile people whom I’ve wanted to meet for a long time will be there. I’ve talked to some other attendees, and we all have the same goal. But if everyone has the same goal, how can we make the most of the little time we might get with the big shots, and how can we encourage them to remember us?”

Wally’s Comment: Alexandra Levit tackles a topic no one ever talks about. How do you get a wee bit of face time with that guru you’ve always wanted to talk to, since you’re both at some giant convention? Even better, how do you wring some value out of the encounter if it happens?

From NW Jobs: Why a handful of mentors is better than one
“To me, the idea of the grizzled older professional bestowing all their hard-won wisdom upon a junior colleague week in and week out seems so very twentieth century. Outside academic settings and rigidly structured corporate or volunteer mentorship programs, it’s unusual to find one person who has the time, energy, and inclination to take you under their wing and dole out hour after hour of career advice.”

Wally’s Comment: The mentoring described in the opening line quoted above is not how it happened. What happened was that you went to work for someone who took an interest in you. Most of the advice came while you worked together. If you were lucky it continued later, too. Even back in the Pleistocene Era, when I came up, most people had several mentors. And people who should know, like Jack Welch, have been recommending multiple mentors for years.

From the NY Times: In Hard Times, Lured Into Trade School and Debt
“One fast-growing American industry has become a conspicuous beneficiary of the recession: for-profit colleges and trade schools. At institutions that train students for careers in areas like health care, computers and food service, enrollments are soaring as people anxious about weak job prospects borrow aggressively to pay tuition that can exceed $30,000 a year. But the profits have come at substantial taxpayer expense while often delivering dubious benefits to students, according to academics and advocates for greater oversight of financial aid. Critics say many schools exaggerate the value of their degree programs, selling young people on dreams of middle-class wages while setting them up for default on untenable debts, low-wage work and a struggle to avoid poverty. And the schools are harvesting growing federal student aid dollars, including Pell grants awarded to low-income students.”

Wally’s Comment: Let’s take a line from Hill Street Blues: “Be careful out there.” You need to do your due diligence on any education/training opportunity, especially if you’re looking to change career paths.

From Alison Doyle: Niche Job Search Engines
“A niche job search engine, rather than searching across the Internet for jobs, searches for jobs based on a more specialized criteria – just green jobs from green job boards, for example, or just retail jobs.”

Wally’s Comment: If there’s a niche search engine that meets your needs, it’s probably your best source of quality leads. Check out this post to see if Alison Doyle has found a search engine for you.

But Spiller decided to stay at Clemson for his senior year. Lots of people, including his mother, thought he was crazy. Today newspapers like The State are running stories with titles like “Smart move: Spiller’s draft stock on the rise.” Here’s a key paragraph.

“Today, however, he looks pretty smart. He has a sociology degree because he came back to finish school. But he also has a better career opportunity lined up after a spectacular season has vaulted him up the rankings before April’s NFL draft.”

That’s how it looks today. But if you want to learn something from Spiller’s decision, today doesn’t count. Think about how it looked a year ago.

Laid out logically, at the time, things looked like this. Spiller could enter the draft and become an instant millionaire. Or he could return to Clemson for his senior year, with the risk that those millions might be gone forever if he suffered a career-ending injury.

Why take that risk? You could find the answer if you were at Clemson last December 19. It was graduation day and one of the 1080 graduates was CJ Spiller. He had earned his degree in sociology at one of America’s top public universities and he did it in three and a half years.

After the ceremony among family and friends and members of his local church who had made the day-long drive to Clemson, Spiller cleared up any doubt. “This is the No. 1 reason I came back,” he said.

If you’re facing a big decision, take a lesson from CJ Spiller, Nr. 28. Know what the most important thing to you is and make it the most important part of your decision process.

Today there are all kinds of articles and blogs speculating on where Spiller and others will be chosen on NFL Draft Day. Spiller doesn’t pay attention to them.

“If you get caught up in that stuff,” he says, “It’ll get you off-track.” Staying on track is important, but you have to choose which track is most important.

From the Wall Street Journal: Standout Letters to Cover Your Bases
“It’s something job seekers often wonder: Do you really need to submit a cover letter with your résumé?”

Wally’s Comment: Some hiring managers simply don’t read cover letters. So why put effort into your cover letter? Simple. You don’t know if you’re contacting one of the non-readers or a hiring manager who thinks cover letters are important. This article gives you advice on what to do to make your cover letter a potential competitive advantage.

From HR Bartender: Performance Metrics: Beyond the Numbers
“Peter Drucker once said, “What gets measured gets managed.”  It’s very true.  Tracking the numbers is essential to running your business.  But it’s also important to not just calculate numbers. You need to have a good understanding of what they mean.”

Wally’s Comment: With spreadsheets and calculators, anyone can generate performance numbers. But which are the important ones? Why?

From Dorothy Dalton: Changing sectors or function? You need to walk the talk!
“50 % of my coaching clients aspire to move out of their existing sectors,   some perhaps that have been hard hit by the recession (automotive, logistics, manufacturing, financial services) and into hot predicted growth areas   for 2010 such as Clean Tech, IT renewable energy, healthcare, personal development education and re-cycling.

Wally’s Comment: Dorothy doesn’t say it, but some candidates seem to think that hiring managers are psychic. They expect the manager to look at a resume that lists only experience as a keypunch operator and see the potential for a marketing vice president’s position. OK, so maybe I exaggerated a little. But, if you want to change the kind of work you do or the industry you do it in, you’re going to have to bear the burden of communication.

From Cube Rules: How to build a broad business network
“Research consistently shows that your business network is the best way to find a job. Then, there is the best of the best: getting a recommendation from an employee in your network that is inside your target company. This makes sense: a person already in the organization knows the potential candidate and will put their reputation on the line saying this person (you!) will do great in the job. This means your best opportunity to find a job is to have a business network where people are in as many different targeted companies as possible. But how can you start to build that kind of network? Let’s check out some different tactics to get you there.”

Wally’s Comment: I selected this article because it’s about building a broad business network. The idea is not to have the most friends, twitter followers, or contacts. It is to have the most contacts that can help your career.

From Katheryn Rivas writing at All Things Workplace: Ten Online Resources for Job Seekers
“The Internet can be a very useful tool when it comes to finding work. However, you may have to search hard and long for quality websites, since, as with most things online, there’s a lot of junk. The following are ten online resources with job search engines and other websites to help you find work fast.”

Wally’s Comment: This is about the perfect length for a resource list. It covers a number of areas and offers a limited number of recommendations in each.

Jack’s retired now, after a long, successful career at a Fortune 200 company. That’s where he developed a reputation for hiring great people.

I chased him for months to get him to sit down talk about what he looked for when he was hiring. Jack was reluctant. It seemed like bragging to him and that’s something Jack hates. Besides, there were rounds of golf to be played and new countries to be visited.

A couple of weeks ago, Jack slowed down long enough to talk with me. He said that he and other managers looked for “all the usual things.”

But he found three things that he thought were the identifying marks of someone who would do well at his company. I call them “Jack’s Big Three.”

Jack looked for people who had dealt with failure or disappointment. He believes that you can’t have a career without several setbacks. What matters is whether you figure out what went wrong and what to do differently in the future.

Think about times in your life when things haven’t turned out the way you wanted. How did you deal with it? What did you learn? Can you describe those lessons and how they made you a better person and candidate?

Jack looked for people who would enjoy the work of their first job with the company. He reasoned that if you didn’t enjoy the work, you probably wouldn’t be passionate about it and put in the effort to do it well.

Think about the jobs you’ve applied for. Do you know what you’ll be doing every day?

Jack looked for people shared the values of the people in his company. He said that when someone has different values than the organization, it’s like they’re playing the game using a different rulebook.

Think about the companies where you want to work. Do you know what their values are? How do they compare with your own?

What struck me about Jack’s Big Three is that they weren’t about basic qualifications, what he called “all the usual things.” They’re about fit and ethics and work ethic, the things that drive success in a particular job or company.

From MSNBC: Revamping your job-search strategy
“If you’re not landing interviews, it’s time to try something new”

Wally’s Comment: The test of a strategy is in the results. If your strategy isn’t getting results you need to try something else.

From the Wall Street Journal: Social Networks Work
“When you’re making a career change, social-media networking is better than traditional networking for several reasons.”

Wally’s Comment: Alexandra Levit doesn’t make any wild promises here. So if you’re looking for a magic trick, this is not the article for you. She reviews the ways in which social-media networking is more effective than traditional networking with suggestions about how you can leverage those differences to your advantage.

From the New York Times: Writing a Resume That Shouts ‘Hire Me’
“IT’S tempting to think of a résumé as a low-maintenance aspect of your job search. Just list where you worked, what you did and where you went to school, attach that to each application and press the button. In fact, though, you have considerable flexibility in how you structure your résumé. The decisions you make about what it says and how it looks can affect whether you get the job you really want, or get a job at all.”

Wally’s Comment: Your resume is a marketing document that you use to land the right job. This article covers strategy, structure, and tips to help your resume help you to a better future.

From Forbes: How To Give Great Interview
“Show that you have the skills and would fit in, but above all make it clear how much you want the job.”

Wally’s Comment: If you think of your search strategy as marketing and your resume as a marketing document, then this article will fit right it. It treats the interview as something like a sales call with tips for prep and follow-up as well as for how you should act during the interview itself.

From Terry Starbucker: The Secret To A Lifetime Of Productivity – And Five Ways To Find It
“The secret to a lifetime of productivity is simply this:  Making the best selection of WHAT to do at any given moment.”

Wally’s Comment: This post is about easy ways to make a good decision about what you should do right now. Terry’s five tips are general enough to work in most situations and specific enough to be really helpful.

The woman whose body we buried didn’t have one of those lives that are significant in the view of most of the world. She was a wife and mother and grandmother and great-grandmother and great-great grandmother. She had a lot of friends. She had family who loved her.

She got the nickname “Picnic” because she would put together a picnic at the drop of a hint. Her picnic basket is the treasured possession of a grand-daughter.

“Picnic” was a living example of what psychologists mean when they talk about “social support.” She had friends and family that mattered. She was an active member of her church. And those relationships made her life rich.

There is a bottom line here. Being connected is important. Study after study comes up with findings that people who have a rich social networks and relationships love longer, happier, and more productive lives.

On blogs like this one we spend a lot of time on career success. Sometimes we discuss “work/life balance.” But developing your social support doesn’t get much attention. To remedy that, here are some suggestions.

Make time for social connections. If you’re busy with your career, it’s easy to do just a little more work instead of spending time with your spouse or friends. Make the time.

Do nice things for others. Kindnesses develop your social support net while they help you feel good about yourself.

Tell people that they matter. Tell them you appreciate them, admire them, and love them.

Do those things consistently. That’s how you develop a “Picnic” kind of life, one that’s rich in people and relationships.

From Career Diva: Wussy networkers don’t get the job
“From what I hear from job seekers lately, networking is the primary way they end up getting jobs they enjoy, but you all still spend most of your time posting your resumes on job boards. Time for some networking tough love.”

Wally’s Comment: Yep. That networking thing is necessary, even if you don’t like it.

From Anita Bruzzese: How to Hang on to a New Job
“You may think that once you land a job you don’t have to sell yourself to others anymore, that your days of trying to establish connections with strangers is over and you can finally just settle down to doing a job and earning a paycheck. Wrong, wrong and wrong.”

Wally’s Comment: More bad news if you hate networking. You’re not done with it once you land that job. Guess you better learn to do it well.

From HR Bartender: Something to Say: When and How to Say It
“We should all develop opinions and thoughts about ourselves and our businesses in order to help achieve good things.  But that prompts the question, when and how do you present what you have to say?”

Wally’s Comment: Everybody tells you to speak up and say your piece so that you impress the boss and live on in memory when promotion time comes. But no one tells you how to decide when the time is right and how to get that communication job done. Well, almost no one. That’s what this post is about.

From the Wall Street Journal: Get Yourself Noticed
“When you’re reinventing yourself, establishing yourself as an expert achieves two purposes. It promotes your visibility in the new field, and it forces you to become more knowledgeable about current trends and more skilled in relevant areas. Most people who seek to become experts do so out of a desire to help others and foster new business relationships. Once others begin to trust their advice, sales for their products and services usually increase.”

Wally’s Comment: If you follow HR Bartender’s advice, you’ll get the best mileage if your comments help establish your expertise. This post is about building both your expertise and your reputation for it.

From Forbes: Why Job-Seeking Is Just Like Dating
“A veteran career counselor says a 15-year-old dating manual offers surprisingly good advice for the job hunt.”

Wally’s Comment: Most of the posts and articles I’ve seen comparing dating and job-hunting are entertaining. This one is, too. It’s also helpful.

“A panel of 900 CEOs organized by USA Today participated in an online 60-second color personality test, and the results were striking: The bosses don’t like yellow or red, but they’re big fans of magenta – at least compared to the rest of the population.”

My first reaction was, “So what?” If a selection of CEOs like magenta instead of yellow, what could that possibly mean for me or for you?

But there’s a less than subtle implication that taking this quick color test online will help you make a wise career choice. That’s why it pays to do a little analysis.

My first big problem came with the following claim. The “color choices paint a picture of the typical CEO as sensitive, cooperative, and not a perfectionist.” It’s the phrase “typical CEO” that gets me.

I’ve never met or read about one of those. Is a typical CEO more like Bill Gates or Bill George? Steve Jobs or Steve Ballmer? What about Indra Nooyi, Herb Kelleher, or Richard Branson?

Well, maybe that’s just the article. What about the test itself? I took it online in less than five minutes. That’s a little scary right there.

My first reaction was that the descriptions were a lot like those astrological profiles. All the words are positive and they cover a broad range. In other words, you’ll find it easy to say “yes” to something in any profile.

But some words in mine didn’t fit. One was “impulsive.” I asked my wife. She just shook her head and muttered something about “Mr. Plan the Work and Work the Plan.” I called a daughter and asked her. She just laughed. No one but the color test seems to think “impulsive” is me.

“Suggested careers” for me included librarian, attorney, and web designer. That’s a pretty interesting mix. There was also a note that, “if you love to type, data entry operator might be listed as well, even though you want to be a fiction writer.” I have no idea what to make of that.

I’m for anything that gets you thinking about and talking about what you love to do and are good at. If this test, or others like it, do that for you, rock on. Just don’t lose sight of the silliness and preposterousness of it all, even if the silliness is painted over with some purported science.

From Jason Seiden: Practical Inspiration: Burst Your Own Bubble
“To guard against walling yourself off from change when it comes knocking on your door, start reaching outside your industry or profession. Now. Today. Talk to others about what you do every day and ask them how they would handle it.”

Wally’s Comment: Even if you’re not facing change in your company or industry, bursting your own bubble is a smart move. Best practices come from inside the bubble, but breakthrough ideas come from outside.

From Career Rocketeer: Too Long or Too Short?
“One discussion that arises often is regarding an appropriate length of a resume… always one page? Two pages? Are 3, 5, or more pages ever appropriate? I believe there’s a definitive answer to that question: “It depends!””

Wally’s Comment: No there is no magic length for a resume. But there is good advice about how long your resume should be.

From Dorothy Dalton: Motherhood and the CV Gap
“One of the most frequently asked questions  that I am ever asked,  both as a recruiter and as a career coach,  is  about handling gaps in a CV caused by taking time out to raise a family. ”

Wally’s Comment: Even with men taking paternity leave, women face a career challenge that few if any men will ever face. This one of those situations where there are no easy answers, only intelligent choices. Dorothy Dalton lays them out for you in what is the very best post I have ever seen on this topic.

From the Harvard Business Review: Four Ways to Attack the Castle — and Get a Job, Get Ahead, Make Change
“A wise mentor once explained his strategy for getting things done when faced with an impregnable organizational fortress. He likened it to a medieval castle that doesn’t want you inside and doesn’t want change.”

Wally’s Comment: Rosabeth Moss Kanter struggles with the castle analogy at the beginning, so if that bothers you, just keep reading. There’s plenty of good stuff here. And the principle she refers to, forgoing the frontal assault for a more indirect approach is the most common finding of the “secrets” of successful battlefield commanders.

From Great Leadership: Career Advice Part 5: The Best Career Advice Ever You Will Ever Get
“This is the final part of a 5 part career advice series. The others were: 1. Don’t Settle; 2. Never Stop Learning; 3. Lateral Moves; 4. You Have to Ask. Throughout this series, I’ve tried to incorporate advice that I’ve received and used from a variety of sources including former managers and mentors, with a little best practice research sprinkled in.”

Wally’s Comment:  It doesn’t get better than this. I’m pointing you to the fifth of Dan McCarthy’s five-part series. This post includes links to all the others. Read them. Bookmark them. Read them again.

For most of the day I’ve been thinking about Leonard and what I learned from him. Partly as therapy for me and partly as a tribute to Leonard I decided to share some of those lessons.

Dream big. Leonard always had a big dream going and it was one of the things that pulled him forward. That’s because big dreams have an emotional energy that no plan can match. And having a dream gives you a framework that helps you spot opportunities.

Be flexible. You won’t get everything you go after. Neither did Leonard. When that happens, let it go. There are always other opportunities, but you won’t see them if you’re focused on the one you missed.

There will be hard times. Deal with it. Starting a business is hard enough. For Leonard, as an African-American, starting a business after he came back from World War II, it was even harder. Later he fought other battles, including one with the publisher of a local paper. You may not have hard times like that, but you will have your own.

Think about what you can do, not how awful things are or might become. Whatever happened, Leonard concentrated on what he needed to do to make things better.

People matter. Leonard gave people opportunities when no one else would. He helped people who needed it, without making a fuss or making it public. Whatever you do in life, it will be the people who matter most. It will be people who remember you

I am not the only person who will miss him or be thankful to have known him. Mwenzaremembers him as “a tough man with a rough exterior but with a really good heart.” That’s as fine a eulogy as you will ever hear.