Do hiring professionals even read cover letters for senior candidates anymore? Some say yes; some say no, they don’t bother unless the resume in question has grabbed their attention.

The simple answer is that you should assume your resume will merit a look at your cover letter; always include one (either as a separate document or an e-mail that acts as one); and make it exceptional, so you stand out from the crowd. TheLadders talked to hiring and career management professionals to find out exactly how a good cover letter is laid out and what it contains.

Dear who?

The salutation is your first chance to make contact with a hiring professional, but it’s one spot where laziness often wins out over due diligence. We’re talking about the “Dear Sir or Madam” approach. What this generic salutation says isn’t positive: Namely, that the author couldn’t be bothered to find out the hiring manager’s name.

Read the full aricle here! (via theladders.com)

I’ve traveled to many art schools, being asked to review senior student portfolios and speak on professional practices in the design business and the one thing I always notice is the lack of direction in student portfolios. Even with professionals, there is often no idea what or even how to present work to a client. Without senior level courses on portfolio preparation or classes taught by those who have been out of the field too long to know current trends, it is confusing and students are left with their own thoughts on what a client wants to see.

The biggest misconception is you need printed or live web pieces to show a client. To this end, as many professionals complain, students will do free or lower paying work just to garner a few “professional” samples to say, “SEE! Someone has actually hired me.”

If you think about this practice, what students are actually doing is chipping away at their own future and the industry itself. By doing this underpaying work, they are just teaching clients that they can get work for little or nothing. Contests and crowdsourcing are the equivalent to slave labor. You are doing free work, which the source will own all rights, in the hope for an iPod or pat on the back but, in the long run, it just negates your professional standing.

Read the full article here! (via instantshift.com)

The job market still isn’t good, but at least it’s on its way back.

There were just 4.3 unemployed workers for every available job in March, the best ratio in over two years, according to a new Labor Department report. When conditions were worst, there were nearly seven workers per opening.

March’s jobless-to-jobs figure was still well below its level before the recession, however.

On the other side of the ledger, the raw number of layoffs and discharges continue to be near lows:

Read the full article here! (via nytimes.com)

For many job seekers, the Internet presents two very different worlds. One consists of hanging out with friends via social networking, and the other focuses on the seriousness of a job search.

Having the worlds collide could result in the playful social media environment posing problems for a job search since many employers conduct online research to determine candidate eligibility. This is why, if you’re looking for work, it’s best to avoid the following mistakes that could hinder your job-seeking process:

Read the full article here! (via careerealism.com)

Many people feel like their workdays are disjointed. It’s easy to get started on a serious project, then glance at your calendar and realize you have a phone call in another 20 minutes. Even if it’s not a very important phone call, you decide not to delve too deeply into your project, because you’ll just have to pull yourself away soon.

The problem, if you’re not careful, is that then you never get long stretches of time to devote to serious thought. Strategic thinking time is incredibly important for productivity.

One solution? The Friday morning shuffle.

Read the full article here! (via bnet.com)

Job searching can be a long and tedious process. It can be frustrating, emotional and exciting all at once. Some days are up, others are down – but when push comes to shove, you need to keep moving forward to find that next great job as soon as possible. I’d like to help you get there. Well, at the very least, I’d like to help get you past that first hurdle – the cover letter.

Fact is, your introductory statement or cover letter will only get you so far. You can write a hugely clever and brilliant introduction, but if you’re not right for the position, you’re not going to get an interview. That said, if you do want to make it past the very first step in the application process, I would advise that you not say anything incredibly stupid in your cover letter. You don’t have to be the most brilliant, original, or funny – but you do need to come off as a competent individual who is genuine and enthusiastic about the position at hand.

Read the full article here! (via antleragency.com)

You might dream of packing your bags and running off to make it big in New York City, but the fact of the matter is, it’s extremely hard to get a call back from an employer if you don’t live the same city. To raise your chances of succeeding, here are some things you should do:

Read the full article here! (via shine.yahoo.com)

Many of us have given up on the possibility of being happy at the office; we’re too jaded. But trying to maintain a more positive outlook about your work, even if you dislike it, can make a world of difference in whether you walk out at the end of the day with a smile or scowl on your face.

We’ve discussed ways to find work that you’ll love, and we’ve discussed why sometimes you shouldn’t make what you love your career, but what do you do if you’re in a job now that you don’t love, you don’t hate, but you still have no desire to go to every morning?

Read the full article here! (via lifehacker.com)

In this tight job market the best way to stand out for your next interview is found in perhaps the first step you take.  Whether you are a designer or not, a creative and well thought out resume can help give you that needed edge.  Today, you need to think out of the box, and not treat your resume as just a series of jobs listed in a word document.  You need  to do something that will cause people to take notice of you over your competition.

Today, lets take a look at 25 of the best and most creative resumes that will help you get noticed much faster.

Read the rest here! (via designtutorials4u.com)

(npr.org) – Sometime last year, I started seeing videos from a site called Xtranormal pop up on blogs and YouTube. They contained talking robots, animals and even historical figures carrying on monotonous-sounding conversations about anything the (amateur or professional) filmmaker desired.

While a majority of the content illustrated a bunch of real-life scenarios of all sorts, lots of job venting videos started getting attention. Check out this one called “So You Want to Be a Journalist?” — I think fellow workers in the news world can relate to it.

Read the rest here!

(www.theladders.com) – When I was a human resources executive doing hiring interviews, I almost always began my interviews with candidates by requesting, “Tell me about yourself.” I did that for a number of reasons, the most important of which was to see how the candidates handled themselves in an unstructured situation.

I wanted to see how articulate they were, how confident they were and generally what type of impression they would make on the people with whom they came into contact on the job.

I also wanted to get a sense of what they thought was important.

Most candidates find this question to be a particularly difficult one to answer. That is a misplaced view. This question offers an opportunity to describe yourself positively and focus the interview on your strengths. Be prepared to deal with it. These days, it’s unavoidable. Like me, most interviewers start off their interviews with this question. A lot of interviewers open with it as an icebreaker or because they’re still getting organized, but they all use it to get a sense of whom you are.

Read the full article here!

Arianna Huffington managed to sell The Huffington Post to AOL for $315 Million.  Not a bad deal for Ms. Huffington, especially since she hasn’t even had to pay many of the people who provide content for her site.

Some of the bloggers, led by Jonathan Tasini are now suing, saying they should be paid for all the work they did.  Forbes quotes Tasini as follows:

In my view, the Huffington Post’s bloggers have essentially been turned into modern-day slaves on Arianna Huffington’s plantation. She wants to pocket the tens of millions of dollars she reaped from the hard work of those bloggers….This all could have been avoided had Arianna Huffington not acted like the Wal-Marts, the Waltons, Lloyd Blankfein, which is basically to say, ‘Go screw yourselves, this is my money.’

Modern day slaves?  Now, I know voluntarily entering into an agreement to provide content for free with the absolute ability to quit at any time is almost like slavery, except for the part where it is nothing like slavery.  You don’t gain sympathy with hyperbole.  At least you don’t from me.

Read the full article here! (via bnet.com)

You’ve been reading all of the stuff online. Apparently, we’re supposed to feel badly if our job doesn’t immediately match our expectations. The key to happy work, we are told repeatedly, is to have workers who are passionate. A job is not worth having if your passion does not precede your position.

It is not useful to share these notions with the landlord or other creditors.

For most of us, the idea of having a job that finely integrates our skills, talents, curiosities and self-concept is just that, an idea. We go to work and try to move things in the direction of our dreams. It’s our job to make the work meaningful.

Read the full article here! (via glassdoor.com)

(Kevin Purdy at Lifehacker.com) – Know how when you’re looking for someone’s email address at their firm, you find it and it seems so obvious? “Bob Smith, bsmith@somethingcorp.com, of course!” Peepmail checks out domains to find the address of people whose names you know, and saves you the random Googling.

Read more here!

The jobless rate across the U.S. fell to 8.8% in March, and a Tuesday report from the Labor Department shows improvement has become more widespread.

Some 34 states reported an unemployment rate drop last month from February. The unemployment rate fell to 8.2% from 8.3% in the northeast; to 8.3% from 8.4% in the midwest; to 9.0% from 9.1% in the south; and to 10.7% from 10.8% in the west.

States that have suffered the worst of the housing bust continue to lag behind the nation in job growth, with Nevada, California and Florida still leading the nation with unemployment rates well over 10%, according to the Labor Department’s release of state unemployment. Nevada retained the highest unemployment rate in the nation at 13.2% in March. California and Florida both have unemployment rates above 11%.

Read the full article here! (via wsj.com)

Send a thank you note. Banish that ‘objective’ line from the top of your resume. That’s some of the advice from a recent survey by CareerBuilder and Harris Interactive, which queried more than 2,800 employers between February 21 and March 10.

With the number of employers saying they plan to hire soon at a three-year high, the odds are finally shifting a bit in favor of job seekers. Here’s what you can do to make sure your resume gets to the top of the pile:

Read the full article here! (via bnet.com)

According to Wikipedia, a job board is a website recommended for job hunting, the choices presented varying from very general tasks to precise niches. In the past few years, this kind of activities practically exploded; this trend was on constant rise, before the economic crisis, things changing quite fast afterwards. Recent statistics have shown that each year the sums transacted in outsourcing are growing more and more.

When trying to demonstrate the importance of the job boards in the global economy, there is some serious evidence that we can present, meaning a very relevant number: at the moment of writing this article, freelancer.com stated that $87,732,495 USD were transacted since February 2004. This amount of money is enough to buy more than 30 of the most expensive cars in the world, or 2 of the most expensive yachts or maybe to produce the “Avatar” movie again, so we are speaking about a lot of money.

Read the full article here! (via instantshift.com)

The job market is showing signs of life, though its slow recovery suggests unemployment will remain high for years to come.

Employers added 162,000 jobs in March, the biggest monthly gain in three years, with one-third of the growth coming from the government’s hiring of 48,000 temporary workers for the 2010 Census. Despite those gains, the jobless rate held steady at 9.7% as new workers entered the job market and people who had previously quit the labor force returned.

The average length of unemployment rose last month to the highest point since record keeping began in 1948: more than 31 weeks. The number of workers out of work for six months or more rose sharply.

Read the full article here! (via online.wsj.com)

FORTUNE — The employee gardens at Timberland’s Stratham, N.H., headquarters are eating up the lawns and sprouting new sections. Fruit trees were planted in a roundabout in front last fall, and a big arbor for native grape varieties will go in sometime this year. Next year, the shady patch behind Timberland’s leased offices could become a blueberry patch.

Space may be sparse, but enthusiasm runs high for Timberland’s Victory Garden, and for the overall concept. Corporate-backed employee gardens are growing like weeds, experts say, with small firms and Fortune 500 companies both buying topsoil and seeds.

Read the full article here!