How could I have forgotten about this post?  It is an amazing concept.  In a nutshell, my sense of urgency as a job seeker is very different than yours as a hiring manager or recruiter.

To me, NOW means YESTERDAY!  As in, “I want a job YESTERDAY!”

In a corporate setting, NOW might mean next quarter.  As in, “I need to hire someone by the end of next quarter.”

Definitely a mismatch!

I blogged about this on July 27, 2006, after a job I had applied to wrote back (2 months later) and asked if I was still interested.  Read the entire post here: Sense of Urgency.

If you’ve ever seen me speak then you know that I’m… well… opinionated :p  My opinion is that most people throw together a sketchy LinkedIn Profile, and hardly give any thought to the Professional Headline.  Thus, most LinkedIn Professional Headlines simply stink.  That’s why I wrote:

July 14, 2010: LinkedIn Professional Headline: Yours Probably Sucks. (92 comments… this is on my LinkedIn blog: Im On LinkedIn – Now What???)

One of the amazing things from this post is that a reader and friend (whom I’ve never met in person) jumped in to do the critiques.  And he was brilliant.  I was so comfortable with is critiques that I let him run with it.  And he did… tirelessly!

Read my short post about why I think your LinkedIn Professional Headline stinks, and then sift through the comments to see what others have put, and how Peter Osborne helps them become better.

NOTE: I have since closed comments on there because I continue to get people who want help with it, and I don’t have the time to keep up with it.  However, I do LinkedIn Profile Critiques (which includes the Professional Headline) for only $99.  Here’s an example of what the critique looks like.  If you want me to critique your LinkedIn Profile,  let me know.

July 17th, 2008. LinkedIn Maintenance: Do This Right Now (or else?) (61 comments – once you do this, leave a comment to report back )

Make today the day you spend a few minutes to back up your LinkedIn stuff… this post tells you how to backup CONTACTS and your PROFILE (including Recommendations).

It might be the most critical thing you do today… I’ve heard of many, many people who have lost access to their LinkedIn account.  How would you like everything you’ve done on LinkedIn to go away?  I wouldn’t like that either.

So go read the post, and backup both your Contacts (by exporting your LinkedIn Contacts) and your Profile (by saving your Profile as a PDF).   Do this at least once a year.

BONUS IDEA: Once you have your Contacts exported, do something with them!  Many people import them into a CRM system (like JibberJobber).

If you don’t do that, at least go through the spreadsheet and look for people you should reconnect with.  The spreadsheet will have their email address, so it will be really easy to write an email and reconnect.

A big part of networking is NURTURING the relationship, and you do that with communication… like an email.

I dare you to nurture relationships!

I recently got a comment on this post and it reminded me how good the post (and over 20 comments) was.

November 20, 2009: LinkedIn Recommendation and Other Recommendations: SO WHAT???

The question I address in this post is:

When you get a Recommendation on LinkedIn, what do you do with it?

I think most people hardly do anything with it.

And that should change.

Click here to read what to do with your LinkedIn Recommendations… don’t skip the comments

January 8, 2008.  The Other Hardest Question: How Can I Help You? I was about 18 months into my business and networking like crazy.  Meeting lots of people, becoming a “power connector,” and having fun.

But people would ask: how can I help you?

And my response was usually something like “nothing for now, I’ll let you know.”

It was a bad answer, because people wanted to help me, but I wasn’t letting them help me!  Crazy, I know.

Here’s my post about it, where I actually answered in a much better way: How Can I Help You?

My advice to you: figure out how to best answer that question (and it’s variations).  And maybe you, too, can find out how close you are to Mr. T (read the post for more :p)!

January 18, 2008. Showing Compassion to a Job Seeker.  This was a good one, for sure.  Here are seven specific things I suggest to help that special job seeker in your life…. and with a supporting story for each point.

Read it here

WOW.  Wow. The year is gone.  Amazing.  Here’s to 2012, which might be the year the world ends (I’m not in that camp :p).

August 2nd, 2007 I wrote a post titled How Job Seekers *Should* Blog.  It shows how passionate I was about blogging over four years ago.  After this post I saw much of the traffic go to Twitter, Facebook and other places, but I have recently seen some shifts back to blogs, with very good reason.

Check out the post – there’s some good meat in there!

How Job Seekers *Should* Blog is part of a 3 part series… you can see the other two parts in the intro of that post.

Last week in Minneapolis I was reminded of how descending speakers can be at job clubs.  I remembered an experience back in 2006 when I went to hear a speaker who was horrific!  I took 2 pages of notes and shared some of his crap on my blog.

After that happened, the people at the job club decided I was not allowed to come… because I slammed their degrading speaker.  They said “if Jason Alba comes back, you are to physically escort him out.”  LOL

Irony of ironies: a few years later, they enthusiastically welcomed me to speak there :p  They had apparently forgotten my miss-step.

Here’s the fun post… enjoy! This should make you laugh, maybe tear up, and shake your head, all that the same time

Oct 10, 2006: I’ve Never Heard Worse! (aka, Worst Job Search Advice)

Every once in a while I get an email saying “does JibberJobber help a blue collar job seeker?”

My thoughts are:

1. Does a blue collar job seeker get value out of networking?  YES
2. Does/should a blue collar job seeker have Target Companies they should track? YES
3. Does a blue collar job seeker apply to jobs, and should he/she track the status of those jobs? YES

Well then, YES, a blue collar job seeker would get value out of JibberJobber!

I have a friend who was in transition, and very blue collar.  I sat down with him a few times to give him advice in his job search and realized that most of what I tell anyone else (whether you are an attorney, doctor, MBA, PhD, Project Manager, CEO, board member, freelancer, temp worker, etc… these are all titles of people who use JibberJobber, and have gotten my advice) applies to the blue collar job seeker!

I wrote a series of blog posts for the blue collar job seeker.  You can see a summary here, as well as the list of posts in the series here:

• Blue Collar Job Search – How To Find A Blue Collar Job (5/17/10)
• Blue Collar Job Search – What Do You Want in a Job (5/18/10)
• Blue Collar Job Search – Identify Target Companies (5/19/10)
• Blue Collar Job Search – What Job Titles Do You Want? (5/20/10)
• Shame (5/24/10)
• Blue Collar Job Search: Your Elevator Pitch (5/27/10)
• Blue Collar Job Search – Personal Values Propositions (5/28/10)
• Blue Collar Job Search – Job Seeker Newsletter (6/3/10)

This was a fun series to write, since I recognized many elements of my stuff that are so principle-based that they have broad application.

After I do the user webinar (about twice a month) I have people who say “I uploaded 3k contacts, but now I know I want to do it differently… how do I delete what I have put in?”

Here’s how… it’s fairly easy, and deleting the 3k will take just a few minutes once you get this down:

From August 13, 2009: How to Delete All of Your (JibberJobber) Contacts