When you’ve been laid off, you quickly find that job hunting can be a job in itself — only often with even more stress. Staying positive and knowing how to find the right job for you can be difficult. Following a few simple rules can make the difference between the unemployment line and working full time.

1. Establish a routine. Don’t sleep in! Set the alarm, eat breakfast, get dressed and get moving. Set up at least one interview or other scheduled activity each day if possible; this way you always have something to look forward to.
2. Treat job hunting as a job. Put down the remote and leave the video games alone. Don’t sit around the house waiting for employers to call you back, go out and get the job you want.
3. Take a class. Going back to school is a great way to catch up on what’s happening now in the work force and can help you make connections that lead to a job in your field.
4. Attend networking meetings. Connections can be the key to finding the job you want and by meeting with others in your area of expertise, you can help increase your chances of finding a job. Community colleges, your local town hall and churches are super places to start.
5. Update your resume. Working with charities, learning a new skill or completing a class are all resume worthy and can make you more desirable as an employee.
6. Acquire a new skill, specifically in computers. Becoming proficient in creating spreadsheets and any other computer programs can make or break your chances of getting hired and looks great on a resume.

[Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She often can be found blogging about education and scholarships for college.]

The BranchOut logo suggests the networking potential for Facebook users.

Social media is now a permanent part of the job market, there’s no getting around it. But for the majority of people in the workforce, there continues to be a disconnect between the two worlds that’s puzzling.

After writing about the subject a few times this year, I came up with a fairly simple theory: LinkedIn remains the best social media platform for business, but its doesn’t integrate into most user’s lives all that well. Meanwhile, Facebook has found a way to connect to millions of users’ daily lives, but most people still resist using it for their career pursuits.

Thus, people’s working lives and personal lives have become two separate worlds in the social media realm, with Facebook obviously towering over the competition. There are scores of social media users who are willing to spend hours posting pictures of themselves on Facebook, but still haven’t considered posting their resume online.

So when I saw the headline on TechCrunch, “BranchOut Unlocks the LinkedIn in Facebook,” I immediately took notice. Michael Arrington explains the basics of how BranchOut works:

The application unlocks massive amounts of career data about my friends and friends of friends that was just impossible to get to before. Search on a company name and see which of your Facebook friends work there (or used to). If those friends have installed the app, you can also see how many of their friends have worked at that company. You can then reach out to them for an introduction if you like. My network of 5,000 friends have worked at 4,664 unique companies. My 20,607 friends of friends have worked at 17,901 unique companies. Basically, someone I know or someone that they know works at any place I want access to. BranchOut tells me that 5 of my friends worked at Sun. 68 worked at Microsoft, and 53 worked at Google. I also have three friends who were in the Navy, apparently.

To me, BranchOut could be that missing piece that finally unites personal and working life in social media, and allows who knows how many people to finally make the leap to 21st century career networking. As Joe Grimm said about it at Poynter Online:

BranchOut is worth a look. I know you may have privacy concerns, but employment information seems to be relatively benign. The big take-away, though, should be that another company has built a tool that employers are using to look for help. Isn’t it time you got serious about how social media sites can help your career?

Indeed. I gave BranchOut a test drive. It’s not perfect, and its functionality is still somewhat limited, but there is an incredible amount of potential there.

Basically, it sends you to your Facebook account, and then gets to a page that will spook a lot of people, especially with all the furor over Facebook privacy. It asks for access to your profile and friends info, as well as access to your Wall, your email and “any information I’ve shared with everyone.”

It also wants to access that data at any time, even when you’re not on Facebook yourself. None of these things is particularly invasive, but it does look a little sinister all crammed into one list, and my guess is many people will chicken out, at least in the early going.

But they shouldn’t, as far as I can tell. What opens up is an extremely user-friendly, and potentially very valuable list of companies where all of your friends work (provided they have made that information public, of course). You can also invite your friends to join BranchOut, which allows you to see where their friends work. Lastly, there’s a job board to browse.

BranchOut may not be the be-all, end-all for career networking on Facebook. But it’s a big step.

Fast food used to be a sure-bet industry for teenagers, but the recession has made summer jobs scarce.

Few images of the up-and-comer are as classic as the lemonade stand. It’s a symbol of young entrepreneurial spirit, that first little step on what will hopefully be a towering career ladder. Maybe there’s just something pure about the lessons a little lemon juice, water and sugar can teach about profit margins, supply and demand and all sort of other business concepts—for that shining moment, any kid can be his or her own boss.

After that, it gets tricky. And now, it’s trickier than ever, according to this story from The Press of Atlantic City, headlined “Many Teens Shut Out In Summer Job Market As Unemployed Adults and Immigrants Grab Up Jobs.”

Few teens get to be their own bosses when they enter the workplace—they start at the bottom, hoping to get a foot in the door. As most of us remember, it doesn’t have to be in a particular field; we’re talking about a demographic that usually hasn’t decided on a career. But the teenage summer job is a rite of passage, or at least it used to be. Currently, unemployment for teenagers ages 16 to 19 is 27 percent—triple that of the American work force overall. The Press reports that unemployment among young people ages 16 to 24 jumped from 12 percent at the start of the recession in December of 2009 to 19 percent in September of 2009, and remained at that level into this year:

Chris Kazmarck, co-manager of the Surf Mall along the Ocean City Boardwalk, said he has received more than 200 applications this summer, twice what he normally sees, to fill about 25 positions. “They’re coming by the droves and they’re desperate,” said Kazmarck, a Linwood resident. He estimated that half of the applicants were teenagers, while the other half was divided among older unemployed adults and foreign young people who come to the shore seeking summer jobs.

So if you’ve got a teen who needs a job, or you are one yourself, what can you do to land the ones that exist? There are lots of resources online, including job boards specifically for teens; there’s so many, in fact, that’s it’s easiest to check out the “teen” section of a site like jobboardreviews.com that rates the different options.

But as for tips for teens, there are some good ones in gotajob.com’s article “How to Get the Most Popular Teen Jobs.” The first and maybe most important? “Defy stereotypes”:

Many managers almost expect teen job seekers to be less professional-and even less respectful-than older applicants. Show them you’re different. Arrive on time to the interview. Shake hands firmly. A suit’s appropriate for an interview at an office job; for more casual jobs, an ironed shirt and a nice skirt or pants are fine.

Other tips include “Be what the company’s looking for” and “Don’t be scared to talk about money.” It’s pretty adult stuff, especially for young people just entering the workplace, and likely pretty nervous about it. But since it’s clear that teens are now competing with more adult workers than ever for these summer jobs, they may have to grow up fast.

Health care is among the fields offering transition job opportunities around the world.

Is the “transition” job a worthwhile move for someone established in his or her career? It’s been considered preferable, traditionally, to hold out for something in one’s own field rather than take an unrelated job simply to pay the bills. But as with so many other things in this recession, conventional wisdom is not what it used to be.

One of the reasons many unemployed workers do volunteer work today is to fill their resumes between jobs. In support of transition jobs, Denene Brox argues that they fulfill the same purpose — while offering a salary to boot:

In addition to providing you an income, transition jobs put you back into the ranks of the employed, the group most attractive to potential employers. “Transition jobs help you avoid those large gaps of unemployment on your resume, which is a concern in this economy,” says Nancy DeCrescenzo, director of career services at Eastern Connecticut State University.

The experts quoted by Brox also seem to think that one of the main reasons transition jobs became stigmatized no longer applies:

“I don’t think taking a transition job will hurt your resume, because the number-one thing that recruiters and employers ask is what you’ve been doing with your time. So you’re better off doing something than nothing. It shows that you’re a go-getter — that you’re out there working hard, doing whatever it takes to pay your bills,” says career coach Deborah Brown-Volkman.

Keri Coffman-Thiede on JobDig goes one step further — to her, a transition job is something that should be looked on as a positive opportunity. She relates her own experience as an example:

A transition job is work that is easy, you CAN’T take it home with you, and your career aspirations are in no way tied to it. For example, I used to be a recruiter. I called myself “a recruiter.” I felt loyal to the organization and incredibly responsible for filling their / my open positions. My ego and sense of self was wrapped up in this work — work that stressed me out and I didn’t find personally satisfying. Then, I took a customer service position in the same organization and life changed.

Coffman-Thiede discusses both the difficulties and rewards of her choice:

This “transition” job was a drop in status, responsibility, stress and pay AND allowed me the space for the work I DID want to come into my life. I literally could feel my muscles relax more and more as each month passed in this new, easy job. By about the fourth month, I had new energy and was interested in exploring what I would really like to do for work. Eight months into this transition job, the answer hit me as clearly as if it were written in the sky…I’m a coach! The great thing about this transition job is it also allowed me the time and energy to then pursue my dream job. I spent the next 2 years in this transition job while I got my training and certification in coaching and starting my own practice.

If you think a transition job might be for you, Patricia Soldati has a fantastic column on how to succeed in getting one by explaining to potential employers why you are motivated and qualified to make such a leap:

Career-changers have an additional challenge: How do you convey why you spent 10 or 20 years doing one thing and are now intent on doing another? In other words, what is your ‘transition story’ — that makes good sense AND emotionally grabs the hiring manager? The situation requires you to prepare a story that is rational, succinct, compelling and totally positive. You must be able to share it in a couple of minutes. And, there must be an emotional component that captures the imagination of the interviewer.

Soldati provides great guidelines for doing just that. I recommend reading the article in its entirety, but here are her three basic steps: 1) explain what you’ve done, (2) explain why you’re changing, (3) explain what value you bring to the new field.

It looks like we’ve hit a turning point for the transition job — whether for financial, strategic or other reasons, it’s no longer taboo to take one.

Volunteering for groups such as the Red Cross has become a resume-builder for many in the recession.

Once upon a time, conventional wisdom was that someone who already had a job was around six times more likely to find a new job than someone who was out of work. Unfortunately for the unemployed, things just got worse. A lot worse.

Last week, CNN Money reported that many companies and recruiters are no longer considering unemployed applicants:

Employment experts say they believe companies are increasingly interested only in applicants who already have a job. “I think it is more prevalent than it used to be,” said Rich Thompson, vice president of learning and performance for Adecco Group North America, the world’s largest staffing firm. “I don’t have hard numbers, but three out of the last four conversations I’ve had about openings, this requirement was brought up.”

Whether or not employers can legally advertise that they will only accept candidates who are already employed — by, for instance, stating it in a job listing — has become a murky gray area. Some companies have removed such language from their job materials, including one South Carolina recruiter who did so after being asked about it by a CNN reporter working on the story!

But whether or not it’s explicitly expressed, what’s obvious is that even those who have been laid off for reasons that have nothing to do with their performance have a lot to overcome.

So…where to start? Many people who haven’t been able to find a job are finding other ways to boost their resumes, as this article explains:

They are tour guides, airport greeters, hospital helpers, fund-raisers and more. They provide hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work for free. They are volunteers. And, neither the struggling economy nor summer doldrums have taken a lasting toll on their numbers or hours of service. But they aren’t always easy to find: Some area organizations have worried about finding enough help this year. Yet help has come from a strange place: the ranks of the unemployed. Many people who have lost their jobs are volunteering to stay busy and fill gaps on their resumes.

What’s most interesting to me about the article is that it tracks how attitudes towards the recession and unemployment have shifted. Initially, many people faced with job insecurity or job loss dropped everything else to focus on finances. But that has shifted yet again, sometimes for the very reasons laid out in the CNN Money report:

When the local economy hit the skids, “we initially lost volunteers - about 200,” Baugher said of the volunteer corps of nearly 2,000 people today. Then, as Lee County’s unemployment soared — to a peak of 14.2 percent in January — “we got droves of people coming in to volunteer: people who’d lost their jobs. … Quite a few got jobs through volunteering.”

In fact, entrepreneur and author of The Brazen Careerist Penelope Trunk thinks that job-hunting is the last thing you should do when you’re unemployed. She’s got five other things you should be doing, which all at their core are basically ways to prepare for your next job.

The one that makes the most sense to me is number five, “practice talking about yourself with everyone.” Rarely do people acknowledge that interviewing is a skill that takes practice, and many people — particularly those laid-off after years with the same employer — are decidedly out of practice:

High performers practice for interviews. So now you know what you’re aiming for, but you need to talk about it with everyone – parties, at the gym, on the phone with friends. When they ask how you’re doing, talk about what you’re doing like you are in the job interview. And the good news is that the better you get at talking like that, the more you will actually believe your story, the story that being unemployed is lucky because you have learning opportunities.

However, eventually most people will be back to the job search, and news like the CNN Money report can be discouraging. But it’s important to remember job-search-steps.com’s assessment of the unemployed jobseeker’s secret weapon: “Actually, you have one big advantage from a job search standpoint when you are unemployed: time.”

Are you ready to get extreme with your job search?

Stories abound in this recession about stacks of resumes unread by employers as applicants pile on to job openings. It’s not enough anymore to be qualified for a position. Sometimes it’s not even enough to make a resume that stands out. So what can you do to have a better chance of getting an interview, and of ultimately landing that dream job — or, indeed, simply a job you might like?

Here are five extreme measures for extreme times:

1. Make a list of what you will and won’t do.

Laurie Ruettlmann at Punk Rock HR argues that even when people have been out of work for a while, and start to say things like “I’ll do anything for a job,” they don’t really mean anything. She suggests making three lists: “things I would never do for work, “things I might do for work,” and “things I really want to do for work — whether I have the skills right now or not.”

My point is simple: you have to do the work and figure out the psychology behind your unemployment before you post your resume everywhere and pray that someone calls you for an interview. That’s now how life works, anymore. An honest list that outlines standards and expectations will help you to redirect and redefine your job search.

2. Put together a marketing plan for yourself.

The days of just spamming employers with blind emails whenever a new opening appears online are over. Even tailoring your resume to individual employers, though often a good idea, isn’t a guarantee. Take a cue from some of the leaps and bounds in 21st century marketing. Modern companies work hard to sell their brand, what can you do to sell your own brand better?

Jerome Young at Forbes.com has some solid ideas. He points out that everything you use to brand yourself — resume, cover letter, online profile and interview remarks — must have a consistent message. But his central theme, in a nutshell, is showing what you’ve done, rather than just telling:

Have you increased revenue or profit? Have you decreased costs or minimized risk? Tell concise success stories of how you met these goals, and you’ll make yourself an exceptional candidate. To identify those success stories, you must understand how your position and your accomplishments clearly helped the bottom line of the business. That allows you to explain the value you’ve provided in the past and can offer in the future…

Examples of what you’ve done are far more effective that just talking about what you’ve done. Websites, pictures of products, and actual products themselves grab an employer’s attention and generate interest. I have offered employers a slide show with pictures of me working, just so they can visualize me effectively laboring on their behalf.

3. Establish your credentials.

Dan Burns of Career Rocketeer reiterates that the typical application package is no longer enough to establish your brand with employers. He suggests what he calls a “credentials package” that includes a customized cover letter, customized resume and a references summary, along with two additional pieces that he calls a “summary of qualifications” and “personal profile.” The summary of qualifications, he says, can be particularly good for snaring the interview:

After you pique the hiring manager’s interest with your cover letter, you save him/her the time of going through the details of your résumé by providing qualitative, objective, and definitive reasons why you are the best person for the job. If done correctly, often the Summary of Qualifications is sometimes all that the hiring manager has to read to select you for the interview.

4. Pay close attention to even the smallest of details.

Careless mistakes, all-too-common in this era where applicants can point and click to respond as quickly as possible, can ruin an otherwise promising bid for a great job. Maria Hanson at LiveCareer has collected some ironic and painful examples of real-world carelessness on resumes, comments like “speak, read, and wright English/Spanish.” And “I’m very detale oriented”:

“Making errors on your resume just screams, ‘I’m careless, I don’t care to double-check my work or have a friend look it over, and that’s exactly the same sloppy, lazy effort I’ll give you as my employer,’” says Tony Katsulos, who keeps a file of the worst resume bloopers he’s received as head of Jetstream Public Relations.

That’s one stack of resumes you don’t want to be in.

5. No matter what, don’t get desperate.

Thinking outside the box can also go horribly, horribly wrong. Laurie Buhl at Yahoo! HotJobs has a long list of things to avoid, such as coming off like a social media stalker and standing on the corner with a sign. And don’t forget that it’s possible to make your personal branding too unique:

Executive recruiter Kim Bishop has seen a variety of wacky queries, including one large package containing the message “Will work for food,” and resumes comparing themselves to Broadway shows and to NCAA tournaments. “One person asked whether he should send an employer confetti in an envelope. I said, ‘Think about it: would you want confetti all over your desk?’”

"Join me, and together we can rule the company bandwidth."

I’ve written this year already about the ongoing social media controversies in the workplace, but the questions seem to get trickier and trickier rather than easier. Should companies ban employee use of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like at work? Should they have a policy in place detailing appropriate and inappropriate uses of those sites? Should they do the complete opposite and just trust their employees to do the right thing?

There’s no definitive answer. One study finds that employees perform better when they’re allowed access to whatever sites they want. That argument goes like this:

People who do surf the internet for fun at work–within a reasonable limit of less than 20 per cent of their total time in the office–are more productive by about nine per cent than those who don’t…. People need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration. Think back to when you were in class listening to a lecture - after about 20 minutes your concentration probably went right down, yet after a break your concentration was restored. It’s the same in the workplace. Short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a day’s work, and as a result, increased productivity.

Then the next study finds that social media sites decrease productivity:

Companies that allow users to access Facebook in the workplace lose an average of 1.5% in total employee productivity, according to a new report from Nucleus Research…Of those using Facebook at work, 87% said they had no clear business reason for using the site.

It’s enough to confuse both employers and employees. Increasingly, many companies are either banning Facebook entirely or drawing up specific policies addressing the use of social media sites.

But what should those policies look like?

The HR Capitalist addresses this question and provides a sample draft of such a policy. I like how Kris Dunn lays out employers’ options on this topic: a company can go “Darth Vader” and micromanage social-media use, or take a more common-sense approach.

Of course, either could backfire — no one wants to end with a Rebel Alliance undermining their policy, but then again, “common sense” can be defined differently by everybody when it comes to social media. In the article, Kris recommends keeping it simple, with something like this:

“<Insert your company name here> encourages team members to be active in social media as a representative of our company.  Only three rules – be real, add value and don’t say anything that would embarrass your mom.  If your mom has low standards, then don’t say anything you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of USA Today.  Simple enough.”

It’s kind of genius, you have to admit. But for those who want to get into the nitty-gritty details, you might check out this article on 10 “must-haves” for a social media policy; it includes an excellent sample policy as well.

One good thing about a single-page resume is you can fit it on a t-shirt.

Let’s face it, the one-page resume never seemed fair. After working years to build interesting, solid careers, job seekers were suddenly told to boil it all down to what would fit on a single, generously spaced 8 x 10 page. Resume writers often have to spend far more time figure out how to cut out their experience to fit than they do crafting useful descriptions of everything they’ve done.

Once, not so long ago, it was acceptable to document one’s career with two, three, even four pages. The idea wasn’t so much that a human resource staffer would necessarily read all of it, but if someone responsible for hiring a position was interested in a particular candidate and wanted to read a little deeper into his or her particulars, the information was there.

Somehow, that got replaced by the notion that no one in their right mind would read more than one page about any one person, even if that person was being considered for an important position. Once an important tool for providing an in-depth look at the history of a job candidate—and a useful reference point for interviewers—the resume has since become basically a quick and crude means of weeding out unqualified candidates.

But in 2010, the art of the resume is at a crossroads. Joe Grimm at Poynter Online does an excellent job of laying out some reasons that the one-page resume may be a thing of the past. Two important ones:

(1) People are doing more. The best are simply winning more awards, having more opportunities, changing jobs more frequently and earning more degrees than used to be the case. They can sustain quality into a second page. (2) Look on LinkedIn. It’s hard to tell which resumes are one-pagers and which are longer. And when I see your digital resume on my computer screen, can’t I blow up the type? The same thing happens when you e-mail me a resume. I can blow it up. Digital resumes are making the concept of “page” a little arcane.

Unfortunately, though, Grimm doesn’t think breaking the one-page convention is a safe bet—yet:

I have thought for a long time that the one-page rule should be dead. However, a lot of the people that like them are still alive. So, it is wisest to stick to one page. While I will not ditch a resume just because I have to turn to a second page, some of the recruiters I respect insist on the conciseness of one page. So, I have a one-page resume and you probably should, too.

Louise Kursmark at careerthoughtleaders.com says the one-pager isn’t going anywhere. In fact, she says, resumes will only continue to get shorter.

Resumes for people at all levels are by necessity becoming crisper and more to the point. Factors influencing this trend include the proliferation of smart phones and other hand-held devices with minuscule screens; the explosion of the social media site Twitter that condenses all messages to 140 characters; and the bombardment of multimedia messages and advertisements that constantly entertain, distract, and shift focus. Readers quickly lose interest in wordy resumes that don’t get right to the point.

It’s interesting that Kursmark thinks resumes will continue to get shorter for the same reason that Grimm thinks they will get longer: technology has taken away the boundaries of the printed page. Certainly Kursmark’s points about screen-size are legitimate, but as the iPad has shown us, smaller is not necessarily the wave of the future.

Almost one-quarter of employers around the globe say they can't fill crucial positions.

From our Problems We Didn’t Expect to See in 2010 Department comes news that despite continuing layoffs, economic crashes and exorbitant unemployment numbers, there is still a huge talent shortage among employers worldwide. In fact, it’s only gotten worse.

Last week, Manpower released their 2010 Talent Shortage Survey, a study of more than 35,000 companies in 36 countries. In all, 31 percent of employers said they were having trouble filling critical positions in their company, up one percent from last year. The ten countries hardest hit were Japan (76%), Brazil (64%), Argentina (53%), Singapore (53%), Poland (51%), Australia (45%), Hong Kong (44%), Mexico (43%), Peru (42%) and Taiwan (41%), although China was right behind that with 40%. In the U.S., 14 percent of employers reported trouble filling positions.

So how exactly can there be a talent shortage when unemployment rates are so high around the globe? Manpower calls it a talent “mismatch”; in other words, job seekers aren’t well-suited for the available jobs.

The list of top unfillable jobs looks nearly identical to last year’s: 1. skilled trades; 2. sales representatives; 3. technicians; 4. engineers; 5. accounting and finance staff; 6. production operators; 7. administrative assistants and production assistants; 8. managers and executives; 9. drivers; 10. laborers.

“As the global economy slowly recovers, employers will remain focused on maintaining financial flexibility and doing more with less,” said Jeffrey A. Joerres, Manpower Inc. Chairman and CEO. “Applying the same mindset to their workforce, employers have gotten more specific about the combination of skill sets that they are looking for, not only seeking technical capabilities in a job match, but holding out for the person that possesses the additional qualities above and beyond that will help drive their organization forward. This conundrum is upsetting to the ubiquitous job seeker, who will need to take more responsibility for his/her skills development in order to find ways to remain relevant to the market.”

However, some believe that the whole idea of the talent shortfall is a myth. Kevin Wheeler of the recruiting site ere.net writes:

Even in this recession, everyone I speak with is moaning about not being able to find the quality candidates they think they need. Maybe they have caused their own problem by narrowly defining jobs, by using yesterday’s criteria to solve today’s problems, and by a lack of imagination. We (hiring managers, executives, HR folks, and recruiters) set up expectations and define jobs based on what is traditional. We work from habit and past experience. This is not necessarily bad, but may not match our current needs or the available supply.

Wheeler believes there are two keys to correcting the “mismatch”: better training that will allow employers to mold the skill sets of their employees better, and expansion of the pool of candidates, which he sees as widening job expectations and definitions. Recruitment and outplacement services are another resource for “matching up” talent with openings.

Wheeler’s main point is that whether or not there is a talent shortage in 2010, there doesn’t have to be one; whatever mismatches exist, they can be fixed. That’s the best thing for both employers and employees, and his conclusion—while admittedly idealistic—is a reassuring thought: “There are no labor shortages or surpluses — there are just shortages of imagination and an unwillingness to accept responsibility for filling our own needs.”

For anyone who thought anonymous reviews on Yelp didn’t have enough potential for abuse comes the Internet’s creepiest new idea: Unvarnished. Now in beta testing at getunvarnished.com, the site allows users to rate co-workers, managers and subordinates in an anonymous forum that has virtually no controls on fairness, accuracy or accountability.

For instance, one company’s employee could log into Unvarnished and write of a co-worker, “Has no ability to finish projects—incompetent,” and this review would shadow that employee for the rest of his career, easily accessible to future employers who can then not hire said person based on information that has no proven veracity, and may be written for any number of malicious reasons unrelated to anyone’s actual performance. Mad at your boss for not giving you that raise? Just don’t like the way a certain employee looks at you? Unvarnished could be your revenge.

The gimmick is that in order to defend yourself, Unvarnished wants you to come to the site, take ownership of the fact that the person being slandered is you, and defend yourself with a response. In a cringeworthy moment that revealed creator Peter Kazanjy knows exactly how terrible and wrongheaded this idea is, he was asked by TechCrunch’s Evelyn Rusli if there are any circumstances under which a user could take down their own profile. “No,” he replied, “because if we did that, everyone would take their profile down.”

Exactly, and therein lies the insidious truth about this site: there is basically no upside. Yelp, which works under a similar system, has thrived on the fact that users want to be seen as “in the know” about the best places to eat or otherwise do business; thus, they have an incentive to share their experiences fairly honestly and praise spots they love. Even so, the abuses on Yelp are legendary. Fake reviews both positive and negative, planted by companies or their rivals, are widespread. Personal vendettas are commonplace. Try to find a business owner who doesn’t have a complaint about the site.

Now that same concept is being shoehorned into a forum where there is no real reason for users to write anything positive, unless they are personal friends. Meanwhile, the possibility for malicious abuse is exponentially higher even than a Yelp. It would seem then, that both positive write-ups and negative write-ups would have to be considered so potentially biased so as to be worthless.

Of course, the new site has all kinds of workplace watchers and cultural critics up in arms, though many of them seem to have taken a “wait and see” attitude. Rusli does not, as when she tries to give the site the benefit of a doubt:

Let’s look at the few, real safeguards on Unvarnished: if a user has a dummy Facebook account (recently opened, no friends) and writes a negative review that post is automatically blocked. In addition, the community votes on how helpful a review is and positive ratings improve the trustworthy rank of the reviewer— a modest incentive to be fair. The truly vile and illegal trash– like false allegations of homicide– will be flagged and immediately removed. But let’s remember: there’s a wide spectrum between downright illegal and ambiguously negative. You could raise serious doubts about a person’s ethics and competency without proof and — let’s be honest here— without even believing your fabrications.

Other sites, as she points out, have tried a similar idea—jerk.com has “jerks” and “saints,” but has so much trouble attracting interest it’s resorted to paying money for user interaction. On the other hand, glassdoor.com seems to be doing okay with a higher-minded and more even-handed approach to feedback on the workplace. It’ll be interesting to see how users respond to this new opportunity to libel online.

In her “Molly Rants” column, CNET’s Molly Wood sums it up well:

To me, the biggest barrier remains the fact that the reviews, however closely monitored, are presented to the public as being anonymous–sure, there’s a real person back there who’s slightly more accountable than your average troll. But they can still speak without fear of being identified. And anonymous commenting is actually one of the things about the Web we like the least. That’s not a forum that should have the potential to affect people’s livelihoods.