I grew up hungry to do something creative, to set myself apart. I also believed creativity was magical and genetically encoded. As early as the age of 8, I began sampling the arts, one after another, to see if I’d inherited some gift.

Eventually, I became a journalist. For many years, I told other people’s stories. I was successful, but I rarely felt truly creative.

The first hint I might have sold myself short came in the mid-1990s. In the course of writing a book called What Really Matters, Searching for Wisdom in America, I took a five-day seminar on how to draw, led by Betty Edwards, author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

When Edwards peered down at the self-portrait I had drawn on the first day, she smiled. My artistic development, she told me gently, seemed to have been arrested somewhere around the age of six. This was, she hastened to add, no evidence of lack of ability, but rather of training.

Read the full article on hbr.org!

In a perfect world, friendships, relationships, and business contacts would all develop naturally and blossom exactly how you’d like, but that’s not the world we live in. In reality, we’re all busy people, and relationships take work—work that sometimes slips our mind. Rather than leave it all to chance, here are a few things that can help you leave a great first impression, and form that into a lasting relationship.

How First Impressions Work

People often say “you never get a second chance to make a first impression”, and that’s actually quite true—which is why it’s so important to start on the right foot. In fact, one popular study showed that those impressions can form in just a few seconds:

Read the full article on lifehacker.com!

Have you heard about personal branding? It’s the idea that in the 21st Century, you are responsible for the degree to which you are known; that you are responsible for your own marketing.

The theory goes that you are a brand and your success depends on that brand being widely visible. So, you need to have sexy visuals, lots of recommendations on LinkedIn, Search Engine Optimization of your profile and resume (this is a trick that makes your profile appear higher in search results).

You need a personal coach, a visual resume, video clips and a hundred other services. Then, people will easily find you and yours will be a life of leisure.

Read the full article on glassdoor.com!

I hate wearing pants. They’re uncomfortable and restrictive, the waist too snug, the legs too itchy. And they deny people their inalienable right to see my calves, which I consider two of my best features.

Yet here I sit. In an office. In pants.

It’s the noncozy fate of the American worker in today’s notoriously pro-pants business environment. But, fellow shorts enthusiasts, there is a way out: telecommuting.

I’ve received several questions on the subject of working from home, from people who want to do it and bosses who wonder whether it’s a good idea. So I recently rolled up my pants legs and did some reporting.

Read the full article on chicagotribune.com!

Whether you are a new middle manager or a new President-elect, the common wisdom is that you have three months to make an impact in your new role. And yet when preparing for job interviews, candidates make the mistake of believing that most questions will be about their past experience, not what they plan to do once hired.

New hires have to impress their bosses, peers, and employees in less time than it takes some of us to arrange a meeting. So if you’re interviewing for a job, plan to be asked the question: “What do you hope to achieve in your first three months?”

First, approach this question — and indeed, every interview question — as an audition. Imagine your interviewers running a movie in their heads where you are sitting working with their team, presenting to their boss, talking to customers or shareholders.

Read the full article on hbr.org!

Halloween is the best holiday of the year. There are no family obligations, no special meals with complicated instruction and lots and lots of candy. And also, Zombies. So, it’s highly possible that your Human Resources department has been taken over by these Zombies. (For some reason, I feel that Zombies should be capitalized.  I think this is because I don’t want to offend them.)

Here are 10 signs that your HR department has been taken over by Zombies:

Check the rest out on bnet.com!

Question: Do I need to date myself?

Karl Lohrmann prefers not to answer questions about his age. But it’s hard to avoid revealing it, sometimes indirectly.

“I’m filling out a lot of applications online. I don’t know anyone who fills out an application on paper anymore,” said Lohrmann, 62, of Chicago. “Most of these forms ask for my college-graduation date. You can’t leave the question blank; you can’t submit an incomplete form. How can I fill out this form without dating myself?

Answer: There are ways to get around the question, but almost all of them draw attention to the issue, said Janine Yancey, president of emTRAiN of Sacramento, Calif., an employment law training company that educates managers on do’s and don’ts of workplace. “By not answering, you are calling attention to the matter,” she said. “You can put in vague date ranges; for example, you can write, ‘Graduated in the 1980s.’ ”

If the inquiry comes up during an interview, “the best thing you can do is reframe the question,” Yancey advised. “Tell the interviewer how many years you’ve been in the workforce. As a candidate, you could say, ‘If you are asking me how many years I’ve spent in this particular industry, I’ve been working for X years.’ You’re talking about relevant years of experience: it’s smooth, seamless, not confrontational.”

Read the full article on theladders.com!

Everybody’s heard the complaints about recruiting lately.

Even with unemployment hovering around 9%, companies are grousing that they can’t find skilled workers, and filling a job can take months of hunting.

Employers are quick to lay blame. Schools aren’t giving kids the right kind of training. The government isn’t letting in enough high-skill immigrants. The list goes on and on.

But I believe that the real culprits are the employers themselves.

With an abundance of workers to choose from, employers are demanding more of job candidates than ever before. They want prospective workers to be able to fill a role right away, without any training or ramp-up time.

Read the full article on wsj.com!

It’s such a common job search refrain:

“I’ve sent my resume out hundreds of times and I’ve heard nothing back!”

9 times out of 10 though, there’s a simple reason. Want to know what it is? Well, you’ve got to go a bit into the psychology of the hiring manager.

In this job market, when an employer posts a job, she’s likely to get dozens – nay – hundreds of resumes for that posted position. So if you’re that person doing the hiring, you’re looking for any reason to cut that stack of resumes down to size. I mean, realistically, you’re only going to call 3-4 or 10-15 people for interviews, right? So when that stack of resumes hits your desk or your inbox, you’re looking for the quickest and simplest reasons to cul the herd, right?

Read the full article on thejobbored.com!

Leaders are often challenged to connect with and motivate team members outside of their own generation. I’d like to think that those of us in the creative field are a little bit better at this, specifically with younger generations as us creatives are “hip” and potentially more technically savvy than leaders in other functions. But reality would quickly set in when a Generation Y team member would talk to me about foursquare (which I had to look up to make sure I correctly represented the name), and they weren’t talking about the game with the red rubber ball—of which they knew nothing about.

I recently read an excerpt[1] of an interview with Dr. Gustavo Grodnitzky[2] that explained the four generations currently working and motivating factors for those generations. Dr Grodnitzky describes those generations as such:

1. The Silent Generation/Traditionalist, born 1925–1945. These workers are traditionally motivated by their desire to leave behind a legacy and are extremely loyal. Typically these folks worked for the same employer for most of their career and rarely took risks—they accepted what was served up to them.
2. Baby Boomers, born 1946–1964. These workers work hard (and long hours) to achieve success. They measure success by the things they acquire, thus compensation is extremely important to this group.
3. Generation X, born 1965 to 1981. These are the children of Baby Boomers who saw their parents work extremely hard and long and are rejecting that way of working.  In fact, this generation prides itself on how productive they are within their day without need to work excessive overtime. The practice of work/life balance is extremely important to this generation, and they want to be measured by their output, not the number of hours they sit at their desk.
4. Generation Y/The Millennials, born 1982-2000. These workers live a “blended life”—technology/being connected is not a choice, but a way of life. Responding to a work email while watching prime time television—they were already on their iPhone/Droid posting to Facebook, whereas other generations are more likely to needed to boot up their computer or, at the very least, go find their phone. These folks are motivated by their peers—they want to work with people they like.

Read the full article on creativeexecs.com!

You’ve got meetings to attend. Deadlines to meet. Errands to run. It’s hard to grow your career and expand your abilities in the midst of your daily grind, but if you don’t take the initiative, no one’s going to do it for you. Whether you feel like your career development is lagging or you’re chugging along nicely but want to give yourself that extra edge, here are a few steps you can take to make sure your career continues on the path to greatness.

Find a Career Coach, Mentor, or Buddy

Aside from the kind of coach who wears the eponymous short shorts, coaches of other sorts get kind of a bum rap. You’ve graduated from high school/college/grad school. You have a job. Maybe you’re even the boss now, or at least expert enough in what you do that you don’t need anyone telling you what to do most of the time. Most of us consider ourselves beyond the need for coaching.

Read the full article on lifehacker.com!

While I felt like I was extremely prepared to go up to bat for the salary negotiation (even if it could be just for an extra dollar or two per hour), I was taken off guard a little bit when the HR Business Partner immediately went into how my salary would be paid some percentile or another (I don’t remember what percentile it was exactly-I want to say that it was in the 90th percentile). She didn’t even miss a beat to get that in there.

At the time, I didn’t even really know what that meant that their offering was in such and such percentile. The HR Business Partner didn’t say it in so many words, but I remember she worded it in a way that made it sound like they wouldn’t negotiate because I was getting paid in X percentile. I accepted their initial offer because they matched my salary from the company that I used to work for as a contractor, so I was happy with it, plus all the other perks that came with the job.

So I guess my reason for writing you is to find out what your advice might be for a situation like that? Obviously, I could have just opened my mouth and asked, but at the same time I never really went up to bat for the salary negotiation before either, so I feel like I may have rolled over too soon. Maybe this could be a good learning opportunity for some of your other readers that may not know what it means to be paid in a certain “percentile”. Do you have any general salary negotiation tips you think are good to share?

Find out the answer on bnet.com!

Got a job that’s totally boring but pays the bills? Hold onto it. But don’t use it as an excuse NOT to go after your dream of being self-employed doing something you love.

A common misconception about successful independent workers is that one day, in dramatic fashion, they quit their dayjob, hung a shingle, and lived happily ever after. The truth is, most freelancers start off moonlighting, volunteering, interning, and doing client work at night and on weekends in addition to a nine-to-five gig. If you fantasize about living the freelancer life, you can do the same—even in a recession, starting now. Let’s turn some of your free time into a new career without giving up the steady paycheck.

Read the full article on lifehacker.com!

For many employees, lunch at work is typically about chowing down on last night’s leftovers or heading out to a nearby deli to grab an overpriced sandwich. For some, however, breakfast, lunch and dinner are just a few steps away from their cubicles, and come courtesy of their employers – even during this struggling economy.

So what are the companies where employees rave about food at work the most? The Glassdoor data team sifted through more than 375,000 company reviews to find out. In our latest report, we shine a light on the top 10 companies where employees love the food¹.  Plus, the report highlights what employee morale is like at each of the companies.

Read the full article on glassdoor.com

Reading through recent emails, I was struck by the number of questions from readers about how entrepreneurs can better manage their own time as they manage their complex businesses.

As a successful business matures and expands, bureaucracy usually starts to take hold and members of the senior management team find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer number of meetings and volume of correspondence. At this stage, an entrepreneur faces the challenge of how to effectively manage this new structure — a transition that has been the undoing of many enterprises.

First, let’s look at how to manage your own time. I receive 300 to 400 messages a day, so time management is an issue for me. I’m aware some senior executives simply delete all emails from people they don’t know personally, arguing that most of the messages just create distraction. To them, it is not worth the effort of weeding through the emails to find those that contain useful information. But I find this approach impolite and bad for business.

Read the full article on entrepreneur.com!

It’s no secret that working with a headhunter or recruiter can be an effective way to advance your career.

 Headhunters often have access to jobs that are not advertised elsewhere and can speed up the hiring process between an employer and potential candidate.

The trick, however, is understanding how a headhunter operates.

“As a career management coach, it is always surprising to me that even senior level job seekers often don’t know that ‘headhunters’ work for the companies, not the candidates,”

Read the full article on businessinsider.com!

Like many people, Evan Cunningham spends time on Facebook and Twitter while at the office. He sends out party invitations or chats about beer.

But unlike most people, he gets paid for it. And he gets a title.

Cunningham’s job is one of the newest in corporate America: social media manager. It’s also known, depending on the company, as social media wizard, social media ninja, social media diva or just plain online communities manager.

No matter what they’re called, experts in marketing a company’s name and wares on social network sites — such as Facebook, Twitter and special interest forums — are in demand.

Read the full article on chicagotribune.com!

In the last few years, executive resume writer Mary Elizabeth Bradford has noticed more of her clients seeking a career switch, even after having built successful careers in another field.

Nowadays, mid-level career changers — such as software developers who now work in finance or entrepreneurs who come back into corporate life — make up more than 45% of her practice. Many struggle to create an attention-grabbing resume, she says.

“The ability to objectively match up relevant skills to the position of choice is invaluable,” Bradford says.

Eager to switch careers? Here are 10 ways to improve your resume:

Read the full article on fins.com!

Technology is rewiring our brains, our culture and our habits.

Social media networks are disrupting industries including marketing, sales and knowledge industries. The job search market is also being reinvented as social media platforms provide the tools and information that HR managers had only dreamed about 5 years ago.

LinkedIn provides more than 100 million people with a platform that essentially is an on-line CV with additional networking benefits. Recruiters spend hours a day on LinkedIn researching and finding candidates for their clients.

Read the full article on jeffbullas.com!

You’re a smart, productive person capable of amazing things, but every so often you’re your own worst enemy. You’ll often convince yourself you’re going to fail, put off important tasks that need to get done, make choices based on pride rather than logic, and potentially end up making your work life miserable. Here’s a look at the stupid things you do all day at the office and how you can fix them.

Read the full article on lifehacker.com!