@Jayne That’s the way it goes, lol. The gems may not have been that good anyway, lol

That is why I don’t listen to talk radio – I find the yelling annoying!

I think you might be selling yourself short and in all honesty, probably haven’t done a complete enought assessment of your skills and talents. I spent 15 years in retail and then recruited there for 7 and have been career counseling for 2 more. I don’t know your background but I think you might be having a lot of the same difficulties that candidates I’ve worked with have experienced.

Retail people often are round pegs yet flourish in corporate environments. They also tend to have multiple and diverse experiences and skills. When they start a new job search, in their mind, they can do almost anything and their resume and the way they brand themselves usually attempts to demonstrate this great diversive “box of Stuff.”

Focus would be my suggestion. Don’t take the shotgun job hunting, take a sniper rifle. I don’t want to make this post any longer but I’d be willing to talk off line about how to do that and then maybe Jason will let us tell his readers how it worked.

Brad Attig
http://www.myretailcareer.net

End of the day, there are two things I know, know, know about hiring managers:

- They have NO attention span. You CAN NOT wind through the intricacies with them of how helping your cousin with his catering business for 6 months relates to their need for a rocket scientist (or enter any fascinatingly un-foodservice-ish job here)

- They want you to act/breathe/think/snort like you can do this in your sleep. No matter what the job ad says (I could rant about how useless THOSE are), or how “open” and “flexible” they say they are, when the wheels hit the road, they have ONE CHANCE to hire someone and 25 hungry applicants to blow it on. When they TOSS AND TURN at night stressing about who to hire, they will OVER AND OVER again pick the candidate who has had THIS JOB on their resume THREE TIMES already in various increasing capacities. Why? Because it’s SAFE. It’s RELIABLE. It’s not RISKY, and when it comes right down to it, HIRING someone is risky enough as it is to take a flying leap of faith compared to a textbook-classic “safe” bet.

How do you get OVER these two hurdles? There are MANY ways, but here are three–and this is easy because they all start with “R”:

- RELEVANCE. Ask any political candidate what they should talk about, and anybody still in the race this November will tell you it DOESN’T MATTER what YOU want to talk about, it *ONLY* matters what your AUDIENCE wants you to talk about.

- RELEVANCE. Being relevant means people KNOW and TALK ABOUT you well when you’re not around. You are an archetype. When YOUR NAME comes up as two executives meet in the hall outside a meeting and one asks who the other knows because they need a “magician”, then you can just cash your chips in at the cage, my friend, because it doesn’t matter what your resume says after that kind of referral.

- RELEVANCE. Read “Attention is GREATER than Money”. Or, “You have to make SENSE before you can make CENTS”. The new rules are that if you can gain someone’s ATTENTION (because you’re RELEVANT and you fit easily into their flow of thinking, and their style of communication,) you will get their MIND-SHARE. And, if our GOOGLE world has taught us anything, the power of channeling what people are THINKING ABOUT through your carefully defined, relevant, and skillfully presented filters of how you view the world, the MONEY and the OPPORTUNITY will start showing up at your door. Not because you are greater, necessarily, than anyone else–but because you have become a trusted guide for them in the safari of the unknown wilderness ahead.

Good luck!

I think it all boils down to job seekers not understanding what a recruiter’s role is, and recruiters getting unrealistic expectations places on them (as a middleman). My favorite recruiters are those who will point-blank tell you what their role is and what your role is.

Can you image if recruiters around the world said “look, here’s what I do for you. Here’s what you need to do for yourself (and by the way, you should use JibberJobber )… oh yeah, and can I give you a pointer about your resume?”

The Animal is certainly harsh, but it’s good to not sugar-coat it for some people. Plus, his audience is probably mostly other recruiters.

Just some thoughts

So while he rants about the jobseekers, there are jobseekers who rant about recruiters. Don’t believe me, just look on job sites forums and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

I was a bit blown away by the Animal, and especially his enthusiasm. What I was a bit floored by is that there are people out there looking for jobs that seem not to know how to put together a reasonably coherent discription of what they do, what they are looking for, or about themselves.

I am a job seeker, and having a rough time, but not because I’m unwilling to talk to another person. I thin my problem is that I’m not a square-peg type of person, and I’m trying to fit into a square-peg corporate world. My experience is not in the corporate world, but at least I know how to talk to people.

Hopefully there are some redeeming qualities of those who are job hunting. I want to believe that I am trying to promote some of them.

Greetings. Let’s see… interesting yet extreme perspective about what we job seekers are looking for… but as far as I’m concerned, I hope not to be too much dumb: I have two resumes (the short one – 1 page and the long one – 2 pages: Cover Letter and Resume).

I can’t resist making a comparison between Animal’s style as a reference for job seekers and a series of articles that careerjournal.com published three or four years ago about a guy named Tim Johnston’s testimony as a job seeker.

Animal’s is an “extreme” reminder but, on the other hand, those articles gave me a broader and more concise perspective about many things… particularly his statement “Reviewing a resume is a never ending job”.