Why is the first day on the job often the worst?

New employees tend to be greeted with stacks of benefits paperwork, technology hassles and dull presentations about company culture.

But some companies—hoping to create a first impression that really counts—are turning to orientations that seem more collegiate than corporate, complete with co-worker networking sessions, time for new employees to tout their skills and even officewide scavenger hunts.

It is the latest attempt by firms to make onboarding—the process of absorbing new hires and getting them up to speed—more effective.

A bad or underwhelming start in a new role may lead to higher rates of quitting because many workers decide whether to leave or stick with a company in the early months, studies show. The first few weeks on the job are “the first time the employee has the ability to look at a job from the inside,” says David Earle, chief executive of Staffing.org, a workforce research and advisory company.

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Are you’re constantly overlooked for a promotion that never comes? Do you grind away at the job you think you have to do instead of DOING the job you want to do? Do you think your work life will get better if your boss would just [insert any of the following]: notice, retire, relax, focus, get it together, give you some help, get fired?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, conventional wisdom says to push through and try harder, but that is probably the worst career advice you’ll ever get. When you’re in a career plateau — a place where hard work stops working – you are battling one of the most powerful forces of nature: The Plateau Effect. And you’re not alone. The Plateau Effect is woven into the fabric of the universe. It’s why we get diminishing returns for our efforts, but with some battle-tested techniques you can break free. We’ve spent the past few years mining the fields of behavioral psychology, mathematics, sports, leadership and even culinary arts to find out how some of the most successful people and companies in the world have gone from stuck to success. Call your frustration a plateau, and you are bound to come up with many more constructive solutions. Here are three:

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Suppose you want to design the best company on earth to work for. What would it be like? For three years we’ve been investigating this question by asking hundreds of executives in surveys and in seminars all over the world to describe their ideal organization. This mission arose from our research into the relationship between authenticity and effective leadership. Simply put, people will not follow a leader they feel is inauthentic. But the executives we questioned made it clear that to be authentic, they needed to work for an authentic organization.

What did they mean? Many of their answers were highly specific, of course. But underlying the differences of circumstance, industry, and individual ambition we found six common imperatives. Together they describe an organization that operates at its fullest potential by allowing people to do their best work.

We call this “the organization of your dreams.” In a nutshell, it’s a company where individual differences are nurtured; information is not suppressed or spun; the company adds value to employees, rather than merely extracting it from them; the organization stands for something meaningful; the work itself is intrinsically rewarding; and there are no stupid rules.

Read the rest on hbr.org!

One of the most common pieces of job-seeker advice we give on The Work Buzz blog is to personalize application materials as much as possible. This includes the addressing of your cover letter. There may be cases where it’s impossible to find a contact associated with the position, but that doesn’t mean “To whom it may concern” is the only option. With such easy access to information through social media and websites such as LinkedIn, don’t give up on cover-letter customization just because the job description doesn’t list a contact.

“You should never use [To whom it may concern] when sending a cover letter,” says Jodi R. R. Smith, president of etiquette consulting firm Mannersmith. “Instead, with a few keystrokes on your computer, you can research who the proper person for the salutation of the letter is. Having a name on the cover letter shows that you really want the job, that you took the extra time to personalize the letter and that you are able to work independently to get a job done.”

Here, experts weigh in on five alternative ways to address a cover letter:

Check out the rest on msn.careerbuilder.com!

A woman works with analytics at a PR firm. She’s up and out the door at 6am and doesn’t return home until 9pm. On weekends, you’ll find her nose stuck in her laptop doing more work.

A man holds a senior-level communications position at a Fortune 500 company. He comes in at 5am and often doesn’t leave his office until well into the evening. Every other week he’s traveling out of the country on business.

Both of these people are married with children and have brought another addition to their “home life” —workaholism.

Read the rest on recruiter.com!

“Every business should be creative”

I talk to so many people about the lack of creativity in companies in America. Part of creativity is contrarianism. Creativity battles common wisdom. Because if there’s common wisdom, there’s an opportunity. In my own experience, whatever was a good idea was a bad idea to most people.

“Companies are in the stone age organizationally”

You can tell by the offices. “I’m going to see the king!” The king is on the top floor and there are 17 people in front of the king’s office. There are layers of bureaucracy. It shouldn’t be like that.

Read the rest on fastcompany.com!

You have a nice big project you’re about to get started on. Delivery is in a few months, so you have time to plan, sketch out some initial ideas, to let it germinate in your head.

Right?

No. Start now.

Here’s the problem. For any non-trivial project, there are problems to be solved, ideas to be thought through, discoveries to be made. You want to encounter those challenges early on, so you have time to reassess, to change course. That last 20% of the project, the part that takes actually take half of the total time? You want to get to that earlier, not later.

Read the rest here!

We can’t get enough about the art of interviewing in these times. We all fret job interviews and prepare as much as possible but there is little way of predicting their outcomes. Well at least we have some cool stats in this infographic complied by our friends at Come Recommended:

• 33% of bosses know within the first 90 seconds of an interview whether they will hire someone
• Having little to no knowledge of the company is the most common mistake made during interviews (see: How To Plan Ahead for the Interview)
• 67% of bosses say that failure to make eye contact is a common nonverbal mistake
• When meeting new people, 55% of the impact comes from the way the person dresses, acts and walks through the door

Read the rest and view the infographic on http://theundercoverrecruiter.com!

Any employer will want to understand how you meet his or her needs before taking yours into consideration. When you keep this in mind, you will understand that the fastest way to find a job is to find the employer who thinks you represent the answer to his or her problem. To paraphrase President Kennedy’s famous inaugural dictum: Ask not what an employer can do for you … ask what you can do for an employer.

When you winnow down all the possible jobs that you might apply for into the jobs for which you’re most suited for to attain success, you will have the time and energy necessary to make each application, interaction and interview count. Rather than taking an unfocused shotgun approach, you will be able to psych out what employers are looking for … and give it to them with a customized cover letter, resume and phone-screening interview all leading up to the main event: the in-person job interview.

Read the rest on http://money.usnews.com!

(via nytimes.com) – How do you respond to colleagues who complain about your helpfulness or criticize you for being helpful?

You might approach a colleague and say: “When I did X, I was trying to be helpful. Can you help me understand why you interpreted it differently?” From there, the goal is to make sure that you’re using the same data, and exchange advice on how to approach these situations differently in the future. For more details, read about the ladder of inference and check out “The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook,” by Senge and colleagues.

Any advice on dealing w an extremely loud phone talker in an open office?

Read the rest here!

The premise of a new book by Chicago career coach and management training consultant Roger Wright: there is plenty of work out there, but not necessarily a lot of jobs with benefits and a steady paycheck. The book, released in Feb., is called Finding Work When There are No Jobs. Wright, 58, believes that job seekers should try to match their personal story with the needs of communities and employers. Do that and you stand the best chance of finding work, and possibly a permanent job.

Wright’s own struggles motivated him to lay out what he claims is a new way to look for work. His career, in brief: teaching special ed in Chicago high schools, then doing in-house corporate management training at companies like Walgreen’s, MCI and Gallup. After losing his job in 2008, he started a search using the standard techniques, including polishing his résumé, networking and doing interviews on the phone and in person.

Read the rest on forbes.com!

So you’ve cleaned your closet, maybe your inbox, and you’re feeling pretty good about your spring cleaning. But before you wash your hands and congratulate yourself — pull out your resume, and take a look at it (whether or not you’re looking for a job right now).

You see, your resume is a lot like a closet. At least once a year, it needs a good cleaning. That includes taking a look at what you’ve got and determining what to keep, what to get rid of, and what to emphasize. Then, after all the unwanted items are cleaned out, you can add in new information to create a resume that’s current, relevant, and appealing. Just like your closet, if you don’t clean and update it regularly, it’s only going to be worse later.

And just like the rest of your spring cleaning, taking the project step-by-step makes it so much easier. Follow these three simple guidelines, and you’ll have a resume that’s refreshed and ready to go for spring.

Read the rest on mashable.com!

Although it would be ideal to have a job before you relocate to a new location, sometimes time isn’t on your side. Whether you’re relocating with your significant other, looking to start fresh, or moving for different reasons, you need a job stat. Whatever your situation might be, here are some tips on how to find an out-of-state job:

Network Early

Not knowing anyone in your field in your new location can be pretty scary. Who do you talk to and how do you start?

Fortunately, we live in a digital world where we can virtually contact almost anyone, any time. If you have questions about a certain position in your soon-to-be new location, dig around the company’s website. See if you can talk to the HR person and start building relationships by sending out an e-mail, scheduling a phone call or even a Skype session. According to this article, “finding an insider at a company to help open doors for you is always useful in a job search.” Using your professional social networks like LinkedIn is a good way to start.

Remember, the more connections you build with employers, the better chances you’ll have at landing your own job in a place you barely know.

Read the rest on careerealism.com!

It is a long-held belief that the dumb jocks and the smart nerds must occupy separate spheres, or the delicate balance of the universe will be thrown off. However, if employees want to reach their full potential, the smart nerds have something to learn from the dumb jocks. Study after study suggests that athletes make excellent employees and even better leaders. In fact, athletes who have the brains and the brawn may have an edge over non-athletes from the moment they submit their resume.

Susie Hall, president of Vitamin T talent agency, states that: “Many hiring managers proactively search for and prioritize candidates who have played college sports, particularly as part of a team sport.” She explains that former athletes understand how to function as part of a team and tend to have a competitive drive.

Read the rest on huffingtonpost.com!

Check out this helpful list of common LinkedIn mistakes! Via businessinsider.com.

(via nextavenue.org)

Employment sites can be a terrible waste of time for job seekers — unless you know how to get the most out of them. Things are looking up for anyone searching for work: Job growth hasn’t been this strong since 2006 and economists expect the unemployment rate to drop in 2013, The Wall Street Journal reports. But if you’re hunting for a job, odds are you’re making one giant mistake: Relying too much on online job boards to find and apply for openings.

A striking 87 percent of boomers choose job boards as their first resource, according to a recent study by Millennial Branding, a Gen Y consulting firm, and Beyond.com, a career resources site. From my experience coaching job seekers over 50, I’ve found that many of them use job boards exclusively when foraging for a new position. Not smart.

Read the rest here!

I’ve noticed recently that the Millennial generation’s trend of phone avoidance is quickly spreading to people of all ages. It started with smartphones. Texting replaced leaving voicemails and whole conversations now take place with our thumbs. Calling someone has now become low on the communication priority list and even frequently disparaged.

Certainly written communication has its advantages.

• You can get your message out whether or not the other person is available.

• You can respond without concern for time zones or sleep patterns.

• You don’t have to waste time with unwanted chatty gossip.

But the phone has benefits that text and e-mail will never overcome. It’s still an important tool for business etiquette and should be considered equally in today’s communication environment. Here are 10 scenarios where a phone call does the job best.

Check out the rest on inc.com!

When I speak to audiences of marketers and brand managers someone inevitably raises their hand and says to me, “You’re a Millennial… How do I market to your generation?” I think the answer to this question seems very simple: You have to place Millennials within positions of power in your company. Every major company needs to understand the Millennials — the biggest and most dynamic generation in American history — and will need to work hard to gain Millennials’ trust and loyalty. In order to get your consumer base to find your brand appealing, you have to exude the spirit of your consumer. It’s almost impossible to exude that spirit without placing the actual target consumer at the heart of what you do. At General Motors, Millennials account for less than 15 percent of the company’s employees. At Viacom, Millennials make up over half of the company. So it shouldn’t be surprising that very few Millennials are buying cars and lots of Millennials are watching Viacom content. In fact, General Motors hired a unit of Viacom to help them figure out how to attract more Millennial consumers and employees.

Read the rest on huffingtonpost.com!