GSETA

100+ Sites for Job Hunters

Here's a listing of over 100 sites for job seekers of all stripes and types. Definitely something to share with customers.

PowerPoint for a Resume?

Anthony's PowerPoint Resume

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: vitae curriculum)

As people struggle to make themselves stand out from the crowd, many are turning to strategies like creating PowerPoint resumes. What do you think about this idea? Do you think it would work with employers? If so, how do you see people incorporating a PowerPoint resume into their job search strategy?

Career Advice 2008

Career Advice '08

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: presentation pink)

Garr Reynolds has produced an excellent PowerPoint highlighting key messages from Dan Pink's recent career book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko.This is also an excellent example of how you can use PowerPoint effectively.

Layoffs Flooding a Weakened System

Not that this is news to most of us, but this BusinessWeek article lays things out pretty clearly:

As the ranks of the unemployed surge, worker advocates and some economists are worried that the safety net for those cast into joblessness may be ill-equipped to handle the toll rising in the current recession. That system has not kept pace with demographic shifts in the work force, they argue, and leaves too large a percentage of workers ineligible for benefits. Just 37% of jobless U.S. workers are covered by unemployment insurance, down from 42% during the 1981-1982 recession and 50% during the 1974-75 downturn.

Why Unemployment Could Be Worse This Time

According to a recent article in Time Magazine, unemployment could be even worse this time around:

This doesn't seem like a simple cyclical shift in unemployment," says Thomas Lam, an economist who tracks the U.S. economy at the Singapore-based United Overseas Bank. "What we are seeing is a structural problem in the U.S. economy, and that means it will take a lot longer for the unemployed to find jobs." (See pictures of the global financial crisis.)

Unlike other economists, Lam looks beyond the total jobless number to something called employment flow, which tracks the numbers of people moving from the ranks of those receiving a regular paycheck to those who aren't and vice versa. What Lam has found is disturbing. Currently, people out of work have just a 22% chance of landing a new job within the next month. That already makes this a worse market for job seekers than at any time during the downturns of the early 2000s or 1990s, which is as far back as Lam's data goes. And remember, we haven't got to 8% yet.

The underlying problem is something called misallocation of human capital. It's a fancy term for the idea that in the past few decades the U.S. may have been producing too many M.B.A.s and not enough R.N.s. Economists used to talk about it as one of those long-term risks that most people shouldn't worry too much about. Now, the problem — like the dangers of subprime lending, obscure financial instruments and so many other things we didn't worry about — seems to actually be a problem.

And BusinessWeek is reporting that unemployment figures are probably understated:

As U.S. jobs disappear at a rapid clip, the official unemployment figure seems understated. While November's 6.7% rate is a full 2% higher than the same time last year, the rate remains well below the 10.8% postwar peak, reached in November 1982. One issue is that the official unemployment number captures only a slice of the total joblessness in the U.S. To be counted as unemployed in this statistic, a worker must not have a job, be currently available for work, and have actively sought employment within the last four weeks. In other words, a lot of the jobless are left out of the government's tally.