A phone’s never landed you a job, a promotion, a raise, or a new customer, yet you might allocate more of your day to kissing up to your device — updating apps, clearing calendars, jumping at every new email alert — than to building up relationships with your peers.

And that’s a problem.

You need to ask yourself if your awesome technology knowledge is getting in the way of your getting ahead. Here are three reminders:

Talk to people.

If you only interact with your fellow human beings through technology, you’re really missing out. Real people have a great “user interface” — they smile, laugh, frown, generate unique and sometimes surprising insights, and can give you instantaneous feedback on their reactions.

Real people can also solve problems, agree to quit being a complete hassle, slip you the critical bit of info you were missing, or be spontaneously impressed by your fantastic-ness. Ya never know.

If you insist on texting-emailing-facebooking as the only way you’ll connect with others, you’ll miss out on a good part of your career (and life’s great enjoyments, too).

So more often than you’re comfortable with — put down the phone, close the laptop, and go talk to people and see if that doesn’t work out better for you.

Stop optimizing.

Setting up your voicemail to email you the text of your latest messages is a neato trick.

Downloading the app that pings you every time your Google alert mentions your name within 100 words of “technology-savvy” is spiffy.

And connecting your printer to your phone to your iPad to your desktop so that you can wirelessly print your resume from the beach house is awesome.

But all your optimizing is really just goofing off, procrastinating, and avoiding dealing with the pain of going through your real “to do” list.

Quit kidding yourself. Tickling your tech toys is high-tech half-gassing it. Put the gadgets down and put yourself back to productive work.

See the real world.

Reading industry blogs, watching focus groups on your laptop, and making killer pie charts of industry trends can give you a command of the industry heights.

But you’ll be missing out on the devil. He’s in the details, it’s known.

And you can’t get a feel for the details if your face is grinding a screen all day.

“Management by walking around” became a popular catchphrase to get comfy desk-dwelling Mad Men out of their chairs to mingle with the plebs.

Today, let’s call it, “experience by closing down”… power down the iPhone, close the lid on the laptop, and put away the Kindle.

When you actually let go of the technology intermediary, what do you observe about how people use your product, talk about industry problems, or collaborate to achieve goals? Just watching people, and chatting with them about what they’re really hoping to achieve, can be eye-opening.

Most professionals find a world of difference between their personal observations and conclusions based on digitally digesting industry ephemera.

Turn off the power and turn on your insight.

You’ll be better for it.

Good luck in the search this week…

I’ll be rooting for you!

Why do the top hiring professionals in the country — like the forty listed below — choose to work with TheLadders? That’s easy:

1. It’s free. It’s always free to post your jobs and search the resume database here at TheLadders.

2. We’re a membership-based community. And that means we’re much better behaved than the average internet hangout. No spam invitations or weird requests to get in the way of their hiring you.

3. It’s divided by pay-grade. Applicants can’t apply to jobs inappropriately, so there’s no big pile of spam applications for hiring managers or recruiters to go through. In fact, the typical job at TheLadders gets just twenty-one well-focused applicants.

And that’s why the best corporate recruitment professionals and executive recruiters in the country use TheLadders for their hiring needs.

Each quarter, our CEO Alex Douzet publishes our list of the “The Top Recruitment Professionals In America”. This list represents the savviest, most supportive and most successful hiring professionals in the USA, and we are very pleased to have them be a part of the extended TheLadders family.

Without further ado, here is TheLadders’ List of Top Recruitment Professionals in America for Spring 2013:

Top Corporate Recruitment Professionals:

Nathan Washington Benefit Professor Corp Diabetes Educator, San Diego, CA Diabetes Educator, San Francisco, CA Diabetes Educator, Seattle, WA

Vignesh Vigs AurionPro Inc Sr. Systems Engineer, New York City, NY QA Test Lead, Voorhees, NJ

Darren Stewart Guidance Software Inc. Pre-sales Engineer – Solutions Consultant, Southwest; Virtual / Travel Account Executive, Phoenix, AZ Account Executive, Denver, CO

Vicky Bouras-Boudouris Avanade Inc. SharePoint Architect Manager, Houston, TX SharePoint Architect Manager, New York City, NY

Margaret Amodio Gartner, Inc. Sr. Account Executive – US Army, Arlington, VA Sr. Acct Executive – Intelligence Community, Arlington, VA

Ed Nathanson Rapid7 Senior Software Development Engineer, Test(SDET), Austin, TX Director of People Strategy Programs, Boston, MA

Joshua Sangster WorldPay Project Analyst III, Atlanta, GA Relationship Manager – PCI / DSS Compliance, Atlanta, GA Commissions Analyst, Atlanta, GA

Deepa Desai IBM Transfer Managing / Sr. Managing, Chicago, IL Organizational Change Strategist – Managing / Senior Manager, New York, NY

VeraAnn Bilardi The Leverage Group Staff Accountant, Accounting, Old Greenwich, CT VP – Flow Risk Developer, New York City, NY Senior C / C++ Open Source Developer, New York City, NY

Jordan Kachmarik DHL Express Outside Sales Executive, Allentown, PA Outside Sales Executive, Indianapolis, IN

Robert Misner Hewlett Packard Autonomy Promote Solutions Architect, Virtual / Travel Business Strategy Manager, Plano, TX

Luke Murray Waste Management Territory Manager, Orlando, FL Sr Public Sector Sales Rep, Pompano Beach, FL

Alexis Richardson CVENT Manager of Internal Systems Integration & Automation, McLean, VA VP / Director of Marketing, Consumer Events, McLean, VA

Carl Guse AST Corporation Sr. Oracle Financials Functional Consultants, Chicago, IL Sr. Oracle Identity / Access Management Consultant, Chicago, IL Oracle Hyperion Planning Consultants, Naperville, IL

Erin Maddox Brummell Ricoh Commercial Imaging Sales Consultant, Little Rock, AR Strategic Sales Executive – Managed Services, Dallas, TX Managed Services Sales Specialist, Houston, TX

Dianna Reader Verizon Principal Sales Consultant – Cloud Solutions, Boston, MA Sr. Account Acquisition Executive, Newton, MA

Sherry Topper Level 3 Senior Account Manager – 16317, San Diego, CA Mgr, Sales(Hunter) – 13343, Tustin, CA Account Director II – 16385, Los Angeles, CA

Bill Fink Quadnet System Solutions, Inc Business Systems Analyst, Minneapolis, MN Senior Systems Developer, Minneapolis, MN Software Design Engineer, Minneapolis, MN

Keesha Moore SONOCO Corporate Recruiter, Hartsville, SC Product Planner, Social Circle, GA Supply Chain Analyst II, Hartsville, SC

Angela Fowler Cigna Systems Analyst, Bloomfield, CT Accounting Manager – Policy & Research, Bloomfield, CT Client Svcs Support Lead/Acct Implementation Supervisor, Saint Louis, MO

Top Executive Recruiters:

Vicki Russell TechPros Recruiting Supervisor Controls Systems Engineering, IA Senior Operations Supervisor – Generating Stations, Hartford, CT Reliability & Compliance Manager – Electro-Mechanical, Boston, MA

Ulmer Miller USA Recruiting Experts Electrical Design Engineer, Columbus, OH Network Security Associate, TN

Morgan Macdonell iPRO Staffing Project Manager, Raleigh, NC Test Scripts Writer, Raleigh, NC

Jim McGregor Job Search Managers, LLC Account Manager, Big Memory Data Management, San Francisco, CA Client Partner / Sales, Chicago, IL Client Partner / Sales, Minneapolis, MN

Scott Leishman bizjobz Deposition / Court Reporting Sales, New York, NY Cyber Software Engineer TS/SCI, Hampton, VA

Darren Frank Recruitment Trends, Inc. Manager, Marketing Analysis: Ecommerce / Merchandising, New York, NY Quality Assurance Analyst- Automated Testing, New York, NY Software Developer – Risk & Analytics, New York, NY

Zina Brown Core Techs Direct LLC Director of Systems Engineering, Santa Clara, CA Director of System Architecture, Mountain View, CA

John Myers StepBeyond Magnetic Component Design Engineer, Gardena, CA Lean Six Sigma Champion, WI Packaging Engineer, Houston, TX

Shree Kumar Max Populi, LLC SD – SAP Analyst, Memphis, TN FICO – SAP Analyst, Memphis, TN Systems Manager, Seattle, WA

Jack Kelly Compliance Search Group Anti-Money Laundering Compliance Associate, New York, NY Hedge Fund Compliance – Chinese Wall / Insider Trading, New York, NY Monitoring, Surveillance and Investigations – Securities, New York, NY

Brian Gill Intelligent Staffing Sr Software Engineer – Server Side Java, San Mateo, CA Python Engineer, Boston, MA

Mike Land Wasatch Recruiting Client Services Director, Boston, MA Client Services Director, Chicago, IL

Jeremy Gnozzo Search Solution Group Corporate Controller & Treasury, Charlotte, NC HR Director, Anderson, SC Financial Analyst -( Healthcare ), Greenville, NC

Ashley McKelvey TalentTrust CPS Black Belt(Lean Six Sigma Black Belt), Dallas, TX Financial Systems Analyst, Dallas, TX Manager of Global Consolidation, Dallas, TX

Robert Hawthorne Hawthorne Executive Search Sr. Controller, Dallas, TX Operations Specialist, TQM, Lean, Six Sigma, TOC, N.O., New Orleans, LA Marketing Manager / Director, Online, Atlanta, GA

Kathe Yamagata Purple Squirrel Enterprises Corporate and Business Development Executive, Arlington, VA Quality Assurance Engineer, Arlington, VA Software Implementation Engineer, San Antonio, TX

Gary Zelamsky Executive Alliance VP of Sales – Healthcare, CA Director of Revenue Cycle Operations, NM Senior Vice President, Credit & Collections, TX

Shari Munro Techpros Hands on QA Leader, Boston, MA Sr Software Engineer / .NET, Boston, MA VP of Engineering / Mobile Apps, Boston, MA

Phillip Marquart Pinstripe Talent, INC Trading Desk Strategy Director, Chicago, IL Lead Project Manager, Des Plaines, IL Sr Process Design Engineer, Houston, TX

Kathryn Ostermeier Top Talent Central Physicist, Princeton, NJ Staff Auditor, Houston, TX Accounts Manager, Katy, TX

Good luck in your search this week!

The Wall Street Journal dropped by the other day to have a look at our research on making job ads easier for you to read and understand.

Reporter Lauren Weber has been following our research for quite a while now, and was very intrigued last year with our study that showed recruiters spend about 6 seconds looking at the typical resume. Our head of product and user experience, Selena Hadzibabic, shared studies we’ve done with some very cool eye-tracking technology to watch users like you surf job ads in their search.

Selena Hadzibabic makes your job search easier at TheLadders

The key insight she shared was:

“Even when subjects determined that an opening was appropriate for them, reviewing the actual requirements for the job appeared to be a low priority — results showed they spent only 14.6 seconds, on average, in that section. Applicants spent the most time reading the job description (25.9 seconds) and the company description (23 seconds). In addition, participants’ eyes tended to skim the job description rather than read it closely, and often skipped the bottom section of the description entirely.”

We use computer eye-tracking technology in our labs to study how you read job ads

You can read Ms. Weber’s article “How We Really Read Job Ads” over at the Wall Street Journal.

We’re very pleased to have our research highlighted by the Wall Street Journal, and see the great work that Selena and her team and colleagues do here at TheLadders get kudos and nationwide recognition.

And we’ll keep trying to making your job search shorter, easier, more successful and less painful.

Have a great week in the job search…

We’ll be rooting for you!

I’ve been tweeting about the dramatic increase we’ve seen in hiring numbers over the past several weeks in our system. More people today are telling us that they’ve been hired through TheLadders than ever before. We’re also hearing more generally about success in the marketplace for professionals like you, so this could be (fingers crossed) the beginning of a broad-based recovery in professional hiring.

Either way, we’d love to see you in your next great gig.

So whichever of our friends you want to land with — whether it’s Apple, Ernst & Young, IBM, eBay, or any of the thirty I’ve listed below — have a good look at the list, their HR folks, and the jobs they have posted with us, and get cracking on your next new job…

Good luck in your search this week!

I’m rooting for you!

“Oh, I’m looking for anything,” you might tell well-meaning friends who ask.

It’s a problem.

Because in today’s economy, no employer is looking for a “VP, Anything”, or a “Director of Whatever Needs to Be Done.” They’re looking for an experienced professional who can solve specific problems.

When you’re thinking about moving jobs, you need to have a brief, pithy assertion of who you are and what you’re qualified to do. It’s important that you be able to explain to an old colleague, or a new connection, in 30 seconds or less, what it is that you’re looking for.

That’s called an “elevator pitch” — a concise statement of your abilities and goals that can be shared in the time it takes an elevator to go to the top floor.

Vague and general aren’t helpful:
“I’m a saleswoman”, or…
“I’m in logistics”, or…
“I’m a finance guy”, don’t work because they don’t explain succinctly what you need and how your audience can help.

No, in the 21st century you need to be more precise and more concrete. You need to describe what you’ve done and what you’re looking to do… specifically.

So it’s not “I’m a saleswoman” but rather…

“I’m a sales management professional looking to lead a 100+ person sales organization, and am particularly interested in opportunities leading sales teams going through the transactional-to-relationship-selling transition.”

It’s not “I’m in logistics” but rather…

“I’m a logistics team leader who specializes in driving efficiency improvements in established groups, bringing down the cost of production year after year.”

And it’s not “I’m a finance guy” but rather…

“I’m a finance guy who enjoys rationalizing finance teams in multi-unit businesses and creating metrics and operating procedures that partner with the business to drive understanding of the underlying levers of growth.”

You need to be specific and concise in your description of your ambitions, so that your network contacts, your future boss, or an HR recruiter can understand how and where you’ll add value and improve the business.

So please, avoid the easy temptation to say that you’re looking for anything, and be specific in your job search. It’s the best way to let people know how to help you, and to let companies know how you’ll help them.

I’m rooting for you.

Live! from New York, it’s…

…my colleague Amanda on the TODAY Show!:

Amanda Augustine, known to many of you as @JobSearchAmanda, helps you make the most of your job search.

I’ve been working with Amanda for a decade now, and was awfully proud to see the young woman who started here right out of college get the spotlight she deserves on national TV last Wednesday morning.

For all of her advice, whether it’s overcoming interview jitters, using mobile to land a gig, or navigating the strange shores of social media, her AskAmanda columns are a fantastic, practical insight into the modern job search.

When I have a tough job search question I can’t answer, I turn to Amanda. You should too.

You can see the whole TODAY show segment here on YouTube.

Have a great week in the search!

We have over thirty thousand employers looking for new employees on TheLadders, and we could use your help.

If you, or your friends or colleagues, could fit the bill for one of the below-listed jobs, please let us know by clicking through and applying. The month of March ended up being quite strong for employer demand, and we expect more in April, so if you could help out, we’d appreciate it!

Steve Kohn President at Affinity Executive Search Senior Mechanical Design Engineer, FL Senior SharePoint Developer, FL Plant Manager – Director of Operations, FL

	Joe Doyle Recruiter at iPRO Staffing Patent Counsel – Prep & Pros, San Diego, CA Sr. Product Manager, Analytics, San Jose, CA IT Technology Partner, Oakland, CA

	Frank Merritt CRMS, Senior Recruiter at Harvard Risk Management Corporation Professional Benefits Sales Consultant, Dallas, TX Professional Benefits Sales Consultant, Nampa, ID Risk Management, B2B Benefits Sales Consultant, Minneapolis, MN

	Shari Munro Vice President at Techpros Sr. Software Engineer – Geometry, Burlington, MA Sr. QA Engineer – Java, Lexington, MA Software Engineer – Java or Ruby Hacker!, Cambridge, MA

	Richard Bryant President at Bryant Associates Technology Sales Rep , Chicago, IL BPO Business Development Director, CHICAGO, IL Purchasing Manager, IN

	Brittany Bland Dishcrawl at Dishcrawl Account Executive, San Mateo, CA Sales and Marketing Foodie, Atlanta, GA Sales and Marketing Foodie Hilton Head Island, Hilton Head Island, SC

	Jack Kelly Managing Director and Executive Recruiter at Compliance Search Group Compliance Quality Assurance Testing – Investment Bank, New York, NY Anti Money Laundering Compliance , NJ Compliance Officer, New York, NY

	Next Step Systems Recruiter President at Next Step Systems Software Engineer / Global Rates, CHICAGO, IL Realtime Software Engineer, Chicago, IL Trading Systems Data Analyst, Chicago, IL

	Jim Porter Senior Recruiter at The Porter Group Major Account Executive/2958642, Baltimore, MD Sales Rep / -8540460, Baltimore, MD Sales Rep / -1403009, Baltimore, MD

	Craig Kennedy Founder/President at Kennedy Unlimited Inc Professional Staffing Manager Spray Foam Construction, Houston, TX PCT Control Systems Design Engineer, Houston, TX Drilling Engineer Mining, Houston, TX

Good luck on your search!

I’m rooting for you,

Marc Cenedella, Founder

It’s not just an April Fool’s joke when the pink slip arrives as you’re looking over the latest job openings for you.

Sometimes that bad news comes in the prettiest packages. One of the most common I’ve seen in the careers business is the generous severance payout. What seems like a gift from the highest graces too often turns out to be bad tidings in disguise.

The “severance vacation” – that fool’s gold of “time off” that turns a few well-deserved weeks into several empty seasons – has led too many professionals, executives, and high-performers to mistakenly act against their own best interests.

How can it be that something as seemingly non-controversial as a full year’s “money for nothing” can end up hurting you?

First off, the severance vacation can lead you into a false sense of security. “I’ve got enough cash put away so that I don’t have to worry for a while” or “I’m in good shape so I don’t need to look right away” are how we hear it from our clients here at TheLadders. This phony freedom from fear lulls you into believing that the future is far away. Instead of your sixth sense flashing warning signals and blaring the alarm siren, your pleasant-enough living situation inhibits you from securing your future cash flows and career prospects.

That serene sense of calm is harmful. When urgency is low, and the bank account is flush, it seems there’s always a good reason to spend another day contemplating instead of cold-calling. And more time spent on the sidelines leads to ever-worse habits and rustiness. You forget the more obscure industry buzzwords. All that sun leaves you a little slow on the uptake when it comes to the tough interviews. You get softer, you get happier, you get lazier.

That’s because the alternative – the job search – welcomes avoidance. The job search involves rejection, rejection involves pain, and pain is something most of us want to experience at the gym and not carry through our waking day.

The pain of the job search is the result of how unusual the job search is relative to the rest of our lives. A job search occurs perhaps twice a decade and involves meeting a lot of strangers so that they can assess you. That the assessment is in regards to your professional ability to meet their specific, narrow, corporate need, does nothing to alleviate your feeling of being a-foot-and-a-half short of puberty and still in braces at the junior high dance. It’s embarrassing.

It’s true, the job search is the most unusual, unnatural, unenjoyable part of our lives that is, nonetheless, unavoidable. (And avoid it, we try! If Dr. Seuss were still about, he could write a book about the job search entitled “Oh, the excuses you’ll make!”)

So how to handle the bad news that you got a year’s severance?

First, a layoff notice is actually an acceptance letter for your new job – and that job is at “Your Job Search, LLC” with you as the President and Chief Search Officer.

You’ll need to negotiate a start date. Give yourself an enjoyable, but manageable, severance vacation: one week if you’re antsy, two weeks if you’re bold, three weeks if you want to follow a flight of fancy.

Having a tight schedule for your severance vacation will make those days of leisure sweeter for their scarcity, and allow you to tough it out in a better class of airline, hotel, or amusement park. You need to take the break you deserve and recharge your batteries.

Because once you come back, your new job is full-time. You’ll need to approach it with a seriousness of purpose and dedication to success befitting a professional. And your new job has just one goal – getting yourself into a new seat at a new company getting paid in dollars, not promises or favors.

So don’t let good fortune ruin your luck. When the breaks go your way, bank your plenty rather than fritter it away, and make a timely transition into your new job-finding job.

It’s the best way to ensure that you’ll be collecting a year’s pay, and not a year of empty wandering.

Good luck with the job search this week!

I’ll be rooting for you.

You know, almost half of searches done here at TheLadders are done without a keyword. That’s great because you get to see all the great jobs in your city. But sometimes that can return more jobs than you have time to review in a morning. So when you’re seeing too many jobs, you should also consider using keywords, such as job title, to target your search:

Or use radius to limit, or expand, your search:

Each of these searches ought to return a couple dozen jobs for you to review; and by combining keywords and radius, or adding additional keywords such as “Fortune 500″, “startup” or “green”, you’ll see jobs that are more interesting to you.

We’re making your job search easier so you can get back to March Madness, or tonight’s premiere of ‘The Voice’, the best show on television (hey, I do advice and encouragement for a living, of course it’s my favorite show!)

Good luck with the search this week!

p.s. Follow me on Twitter: @cenedella and let me know who you think’s going to go all the way this season.

Here’s an easy way to turn dreaded employment networking into deadly effective bonding:

When you’re networking, ask for a reference, not a job.

Whether you’re doing catch-up drinks or grabbing lunch to reconnect, your primary need is to get an ally, not a tally of job listings. Recruiting a helping hand to your search is your goal.

So don’t ask your college buddy if he knows of any jobs for people like you. How would he?

And don’t ask your boss from two jobs ago if she has the names of any people who are currently looking to hire somebody like you. It puts her on the spot. Uncomfortably.

No, instead, ask for a reference. Mention that you’re going to be moving on, or you’re already looking, or that you’re actively out on the street. Let them know the type of positions you are and are not suited for, and what you’re hoping to achieve in your next opportunity.

And then ask them if – when it gets to that happy place in your search – it would be OK to use them as a reference.

By not putting them on the spot about specific job openings, you reduce the awkwardness inherent in the networking conversation.

And by letting them know that you hold them in high enough esteem to potentially use them as a reference, you’re actually paying them a compliment.

You’re also making it easier for them to say “yes”, and to feel good about themselves for being a good friend and helping you out with a little favor.

All of which means that you have a new buddy in your search – one who’s going to be thinking about keeping an eye out for new opportunities and an ear open for fresh possibilities for their reference-able friend: you.

It’s wins and grins all around.

Now, this doesn’t work for just any old person you meet on the street. There’s probably a pretty good match between people you’d take to lunch and those you could ask to be a reference. So my advice would be to stick to asking those you know well enough.

Being realistic, the widely offered and deeply wrong advice from the past decade that you should try to extract favors, concessions, names, jobs, and career assistance from people you’ve only met over the phone is not only useless, it can be counterproductive to your aims by antagonizing your broader network.

By making your networking about compliments, you’ll find it pays dividends.

Good luck in the search this week!