Eve Tahmincioglu, the excellent career columnist for MSNBC (and blogger at CareerDiva), includes some tips from RiseSmart in her most recent story, headlined “How older workers can rebound from a job loss.”
Here’s a summary of our tips for workers aged 55 and up:
1. Don’t wait to be laid off to look for a new job.
2. If you have been laid off, do a little soul-searching before deciding your next move.
3. “Dumb down” your resume.
4. Put personal networking first.
5. Target companies where the leadership skews older.
6. Be patient.
Read the full tips here (scroll down to the sidebar.)
RiseSmart was fortunate to be mentioned in USA Today again today, this time as part of Del Jones’ highly entertaining article talking with CEOs about their jobs as teenagers. Here’s the relevant excerpt:
USA TODAY reached out to dozens of executives who now run or once ran major corporations. Thirty-two responded, and although their ages range and they grew up diversely in big cities and rural towns, all worked as teens, eight of them before age 11. At USA TODAY’s request, RiseSmart, an Internet site for jobs that pay $100,000 and up, surveyed CEOs and former CEOs of smaller companies.
Among the 37 who responded, 32 said their summer jobs were good experience. Only four said their first jobs were awful, and one said it was just a job, neither beneficial nor traumatic. Almost all earned $3 an hour or less.
We got a lot of great anecdotes from RiseSmart members for Del’s piece. We’ll plan to do a future blog post featuring quotes from some of our members that were not included in the USA Today story.
Thanks to all RiseSmart members who participated!
I’ve always wanted to commission a survey that USA Today deemed worthy of one of its famous Snapshots — those stats-based graphics on the corner of the newspaper’s section fronts. And guess what? It’s happened!
We recently conducted a survey asking jobseekers how much time they spend searching online for work. As the USA Today chart headlined “Searching for jobs online” reported, 47 percent said they spent between one and three hours daily online, and 10 percent said they spent even more time than that.
This poll data validates the reason we started RiseSmart in the first place — to free jobseekers from being chained to their PCs when they could be polishing up their resumes, networking within their profession, and focusing on other, more time-efficient aspects of their search.
The Snapshot can be found online here, in the Money section. (It may not be posted till late Thursday night.)
We haven’t released the full results of our survey yet — although Time Magazine’s Work in Progress blog has reported on it as well.
Stay tuned!
I was honored to be included in Joann Lublin’s “Managing Your Career” column in the Wall Street Journal this morning. The column, headined “For Job Hunters, The Big Interview Is Getting Bigger,” offers advice on acing a committee interview. Here’s an excerpt:
A man vying for a vice presidency at a financial-services concern last year did a thorough Internet search about its four-member screening committee. He learned one member wrote a newspaper column about martial arts.
He broke the ice at his interview by declaring that he was going to “break a stack of boards over his head in the executive’s honor,” recalls Sanjay Sathe, a friend and head of RiseSmart, an online job-search service for senior professionals and managers. “It showed the committee that this candidate had done his homework.”…
You should intersperse colorful anecdotes about your experience with perceptive queries about the vacancy. The tactic “puts you on conversational terms with your interviewers, and also gives you a much-needed breather between the questions thrown your way,” Mr. Sathe suggests.
Read Joann’s column here.
