There is no doubt that this is a time of transition. Whether it’s corporate staffing, geographical location, or the value of the investment portfolio, everything is changing. Car companies are obviously among the biggest newsmakers these days, which is a recent topic of discussion for Deb Owen at 8 Hours & A Lunch. Also check out Deb’s links to her layoff series on topics like managing change and putting a plan into action.

Steve Roesler at All Things Workplace has started a terrific discussion on the correlation between transition and transparency. “People can handle the truth. What they don’t handle well is finding out later that they only heard part of the truth,” Roesler writes.  He emphasizes honest, emotional language to help employees through difficult times. Another consideration: obvious lying during times of transition will create trust issues that will resound negatively throughout the organization, hurting employee morale even after the recession is over.

Lastly, HR Morning has a bit of unbelievable news from France on how some French factory workers dealt with news that they would be targeted in impending layoffs. The bottom line this week: Think hard about how you handle the announcement, preparation, execution and overall management of the mass layoff process. The effects will be felt in your organization and company reputation for years.

With the use of Web 2.0 technology, Transition Concierge can help displaced employees find their next opportunity faster. It boosts the morale of employees left behind and also boosts your image in the minds of departing employees. In essence, relevant and highly effective outplacement services is a way for employers to provide continued leadership - even in times of transition and even for displaced employees.

How critical is your business card to your career success?

I don’t think anyone would argue that the appearance of your card is not important at all. It is.

But is it this important?

How about THIS important?

I came across these two videos yesterday and they really hammered home a point for me.

So many of us in our work lives are perfectionists. Because of this, it’s very easy to become overly focused on one thing that we’ve honed in on as the “key” to our success.

But there is no one “key.” There are many keys, and particularly today, it is important to broaden, rather than narrow, our focus.

When you’re in the midst of a job search, it’s easy to find ways to waste your time. I don’t mean spending your afternoons watching Oprah. I mean finding ways to feel productive without really accomplishing very much. For example, many jobseekers spend hours every day poring over different job boards, job-board aggregators, corporate HR pages, and other sites in hopes of finding that needle in a haystack — the perfect job!

When you’re out of work, searching job boards can become obsessive. We commissioned research last year that showed that most workers searching for jobs online are spending an average of 50 hours per month searching Internet job listings — and some jobseekers are spending twice that amount of time! That’s way too much time.

At RiseSmart, we try to help you broaden your focus.

We accomplish this by helping you with the most laborious part of your job search — specifically, searching online job listings on your behalf — so you can branch out and spend more time at networking events, building relationships through social media, applying and interviewing for positions, and generally broadening your jobseeking efforts.

Isn’t it time you became a more well-rounded jobseeker? Try our free trial today and find out for yourself.

While the global economy is in its current downturn, there is much talk about getting your career house in order for the resurgence. To be in peak form when the economy rebounds and consumer spending picks up pace, assessment is the name of the game. And not just assessing, but taking action accordingly.

This week’s roundup focuses on just that. The crew over at Talented Apps wrote about giving your boss a performance review. Bosses can learn from feedback, too, whether it improves their management of you specifically or even their overall management ability. Talented Apps points out that one-on-one performance reviews are a good time to broach this topic - after your supervisor has finished reviewing your performance, of course.

Managers can also do their own self-assessment, using as a guide the 25 “moon shots” for management, developed a year ago by 35 management scholars and practitioners. Check out Dan McCarthy’s Great Leadership blog for the full list. It is equally important for managers to assess their teams and even “detox” the team, if necessary. Art Petty at Management Excellence dissects the why and how of this process.

Self-assessment is essential during this time not only for managers, but for all workers. It should be a continual process during all seasons, but a demonstrated will to improve yourself can help make your career a little more airtight during a recession. Guatam Ghosh has a terrific list of ideas for developing yourself and your career. The list could benefit from one addition: mentoring is a key personal and career development resource for both the mentee and the mentor.

Lastly, Rowan Manahan at Fortify Your Oasis shares a hilarious story and illustrates very simple ways to develop yourself as a stronger job candidate. It’s a timely and insightful post worth a read, for a chuckle at the very least, even if the post isn’t applicable to you personally.

Society is enduring a difficult time right now, with ethics seeming to take a back seat in some corporate and even government circles. Every day seems to bring new reports of layoffs, and what was once certain no longer feels like a guarantee. It is hard to know who and what to trust in anymore.

It’s little wonder that 62% of people are reportedly less trusting of businesses now than a year ago, according to a recent Edelman survey across 20 countries.

Several business blogs have examined this theme lately, discussing what exactly goes into building and maintaining trust, both internally and externally. Chris Morgan at Learn 2 Develop points to employee engagement, fueled by internal transparency and open communications.

John G. Agno at Coaching Tip points out that trust and a good reputation in the marketplace is most aided by a “strong, stable strategy.” Agno highlights his point with the example of Southwest Airlines, a company with the same business strategy for nearly four decades, and one that has managed to largely avoid the blows dealt to other airlines in recent years.

Likewise, Mary Jo Asmus at Intentional Leadership cited the example of Southwest Airlines in discussing the concepts of servant leadership and sharing of power. This is another way to build trust within an organization, which generally has an indirect effect of building trust in the marketplace.

Despite these strategies, it is a tough challenge to build trust internally when the organization is facing mass layoffs and fighting for its very survival. Believe it or not, even this ordeal can be a trust-building exercise. After all, the fact that the organization is going through this trial matters less than how the organization goes through it. As Wally Bock at Three Star Leadership put it, “Adversity doesn’t build character. It reveals it.”

Jack and Suzy Welch of The Welch Way put it even more pointedly, with a suggested memo to the HR department:

“Layoffs are your moment of truth, when your company must show departing employees the same kind of attentiveness and dignity that was showered upon them when they entered. Layoffs are when HR proves its mettle and its worth, demonstrating whether a company really cares about its people.”

Ultimately, the way an organization handles layoffs will directly affect its reputation in the industry and possibly even the entire marketplace when good times resurface. Invest the time and resources into taking care of the people who have brought so much to the table for so many years.

You don’t have to spend a fortune to hold their hand and help them cross the bridge to their next opportunity with real-time, hands-on, individualized attention. That’s the approach of RiseSmart’s Transition Concierge, because how well your laid-off employees fare is a strong indicator of how much trust will be placed in your organization in the future.

Twitter is one of the most remarkable tools to emerge on the social networking scene in the past couple of years. When it launched, many people scoffed at a service based on the premise of asking people, “What are you doing?” at any given moment of the day, and having them answer in a 140-character burst.

Do we really want to know that our friends, let alone total strangers, are “going to the dentist” or “hitting Starbucks” or — one of my personal favorite tweets — “staring at people through the prongs of a fork and pretending they’re in jail”?

The truth is, there’s some appeal to that kind of idle chatter — but such tweets aren’t the reason Twitter has become such a phenomenon. One of the biggest reasons for Twitter’s success is its many applications for business — including the job search.

As Miriam Salpeter describes the phenomenon:

Statistics show that job search networking is much more effective when you make “loose” connections - touching base with people beyond your immediate circle whose networks and contacts are much different from your own. With over 3 million users, Twitter offers an unparalleled opportunity to create an extended network.

Guess what? Miriam wrote that in November and since then Twitter has already grown to 6 million users. Now that’s a networking opportunity — if you know how to use it.

Here are some tips on –

1. Getting started on Twitter.
2. Building your Twitter network with hiring managers and other folks who can help you.
3. Creating a Twitter elevator pitch for your job search.

All of these tips are designed to help you use Twitter for networking. As we’ve said often on this blog, consistent and enthusiastic networking is the biggest key to a successful job search, which is why we advocate spending more time networking (online and in person) and less time poring over the hundreds of thousands of job listings on Monster, CareerBuilder, TheLadders, et al.

That’s why we created a service — RiseSmart Job Concierge — to conduct your online job search for you. RiseSmart’s staff — yes, real people — search nearly a million jobs across the Web on your behalf, then hand-pick the ones that match your specific criteria. That’s what makes our service special.

It’s also what makes RiseSmart’s service a perfect companion to Twitter. Building a network on Twitter — while certainly worthwhile — can also be very time-consuming. But if you can cut out the time you currently spend on Monster and let RiseSmart handle that part of your search for you, that gives you the time you need to squeeze the most value out of Twitter, as well as other networking tools.

(Now, I should add that in addition to facilitating networking, Twitter is also beginning to inspire new job boards, too. And isn’t that just what you needed — another job board to search?)