The last 7 days have been pretty incredible. I feel very fortunate to have had so much coverage since I first launched, starting with a 5 question interview from CM Russell (author of Secrets of the Job Hunt). There have been 5 podcast interviews, and a write-up from legendary Rafe Needleman from WebWare (a CNET property). It just keeps rolling in… here’s two amazing things from the last week:

On Thursday there was an article by Penelope Trunk on the front page of Yahoo Finance. It is titled “Ten Ways to Improve Your Job Hunt,” and in my opinion, is right on target. Her 4th point is to use JibberJobber – yehaw! I mean, yahoo! It has been amazing to see the rankings and comments by the readers … I think many of them missed the point of the article and got hung-up on one or two points that that they totally disagreed with. If you have a Yahoo account, please go check it out, rank on it and comment on it This article was my first significant spike in traffic and signups – it has been amazing to watch the activity since it was posted! Thanks Penelope!!

Today there is a new blog post on About.com’s job search page posted by expert Alison Doyle. Alison has been the job search expert since 1998, which is really cool (almost 10 years!). She posted a very favorable review of JibberJobber, and comments on the relevence of this cool tool. Please go check it out, and if you are a user (or a JibberJobber lover) please leave a comment/testimonial on that post – it would be cool to let her readers know what YOU think about JibberJobber! Thanks Alison!

Ok, now this next one isn’t on a hugely trafficked website but it is pretty cool/fun for one reason – its in a language that I don’t know (I knew I should have taken Norwegian as a second language!!) – check this out: http://www.permorten.net/jobblogg/?p=143

Thanks to all for your continued support! Great things are coming in the near future!

I recently got a question from a new user that I thought was really good… a lot of people that I explain tags to usually aren’t using them, but I tag almost every single contact I put in! Here’s the question:

What confuses me is the fields categories and tags. If I understand it correctly you can only assign one category per person but multiple tags. Can you give me any example of categories?

The category/tag thing came about because of the two e-mail systems that I’m most familiar with. Let me explain the differences there, and how that transfers to your network contacts.

In Outlook you can create new sub-folders under your Inbox, and then file each e-mail message in a subfolder. My Outlook account right now has no less than 72 folders where I will file things. I’ve used this system for over 10 years in every job that I’ve had. I love some things about it, and hate other things. But its all I had known… until I started to use GMail.

In GMail I was completely confused by the lack of subfolders, which are replaced with what they call “labels.” I’m going to just call them tags, since they are the same thing. Anyway, when you want to file something in GMail you put as many tags on it as you want. My Gmail account right now has 49 different tags, and I can tag each e-mail with any combination that I want. What this means is that if I want to see all of the e-mails tagged “family” then it will show them all to me, no matter what else I have tagged them with (or how I have categorized them). Its like taking categories and making them 3-D.

I have worked in, and love, both systems. In JibberJobber you get the best of both systems.

The major benefit of using categories in JibberJobber is that you can include “Category” as a column on the List Panel, and group your contacts by category. The same is true for premium users, when they want to create a printable phone list – they can group the contacts by category. But just like Outlook, you can only assign one category per contact.

That’s where tags comes in. Create as many tags as you want, and put any number of tags on each contact you have. While you can’t really order or group the List Panel by tags, you can use the search function and search for all contacts with a certain tag. I just searched for “friend” and got all of the contacts that I had tagged as friend.

There is not magic in any of this, just two different ways to help you organize your contacts. Use one, or the other, or both. I use both, here are some examples (note that both categories and tags are user defined – that means that these are my categories and tags, you will have different categories and tags that you choose):

I met John at a networking function. I put him in the category Utah Networking and tagged him as Executive.

I met Thom Singer online. I put him in the category Blogger/Career Expert and tagged him as author, blogger and digg (because he has a digg account)

I met Drew through e-mail. I put him in the category Advisory Board and tagged him as internal recruiter.

I met Wendy through blogging. I put her in the category Blogger/Career Expert and tagged her as coach, blogger, personal branding.

I met Kent through the You Get It award of the month. I put him in the category Professional Contacts and the tags blogger, winner.

Notice that I’m not categorizing or tagging by location, area code, company or any other fields that are on that user’s profile. I’m also not categorizing or tagging by the strength of the relationship – that’s what the stars are for.

Some of the categories that I have are:

• Professional Contacts – these are people that I meet that are just regular folks like me, and I group them here for quick-reference.
• My Service Providers – I got tired of looking for phone numbers for my mechanic, my plumber, the garage door guy, etc. So I put them into JibberJobber!
• Networking (Local) – this is for people that I run into at local networking events
• Networking (Online) – this is for people that I came across online, and don’t fall into other categories
• Networking (LinkedIn) – this is for people that I came across in some kind of LinkedIn setting

Some of the tags that I have include:

• alumni
• author
• blogger
• personalBranding
• executive
• coach
• … and it goes on and on

One more thing, when you are importing from Outlook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, CardScanner or any other system, pay particular attention to this. You’ll want to add a new column on the spreadsheet for Category, and one for Tags – that way you won’t have to go into every single record and “fix” them.

I hope this is helpful – I have every single contact either categorized or tagged, and most of them have both categories and tags! Would love to hear feedback on how to to make this more effective for YOU!

Last week I got my tax papers from the company that laid me off. Yesterday Alison Doyle, the Job Search expert at About.com wrote Tax Tips for Job Seekers. Luckily she points to two great resources: job search tax deduction tips from her section of About.com and the tax planning section of About.com.

Ugh! Its time again! Well, get all your stuff together and get moving, better to do it now than wait until April 14th, right?

A premium feature in JibberJobber is the ability to track expenses and mileage, which will be e-mailed to you in a summary format around January 31. Here’s how it works:

1. Mouse over Tools and then click on Expense Tracker.
2. Enter your mileage or $ expense – categorize it if you want (food, travel, interview, whatever).

That’s it! Pretty easy, huh? (check out this little video tutorial for more) Why in the world did we decide to put this feature in JibberJobber?

Because last year I was talking to a small outplacement firm in Utah that said “it would be sooooooooooo cool if you included a place to track the tax deductible expenses of a job search!” And we did it because (a) it really is quite easy, and (b) I knew I should have been keeping track of my expenses but there was no way I was going to start because come tax time, I knew I’d have lost it all! (I would have used a notebook or Excel spreadsheet, which would have been lost or outdated by now). Look where I’m at now… I haven’t opened my Excel tracking sheet for months because JibberJobber is the tool I use for all of this stuff… and since its the tool I use, I have my expenses here and ready to go!

So go check out Alison’s resourceful post. The only advice I’ll pass along from my accountant (I’m not sure if this is right for you, so check with your accountant) is that the expenses had to be at least 2% of your income. If you had a job seeker’s income (like me), or a student’s income, and you had 1 plane ticket for an interview, its likely that all of your job search expenses are deductible (for example, 2% of $12,000 is $240).

Aren’t using JibberJobber yet? You should be. Haven’t upgraded to Premium yet? You should – there’s a lot more than just the expense tracker that you are missing out on!

It was about a year ago this week. I had been super active in the job search, had a couple of weeks under my belt sending e-mails to employers, applying directly on job boards and anything else I could think of doing. I found a target company that looked interesting and sent my resume to info@targetCompany.com hoping it would be passed along.

It was passed along! I was amazed, really, but the next morning I had a phone interview with one of the executive members. We had a great interview and I was invited to come in that afternoon. Amazing. This interview also went well, and I was asked to come in for a third interview to meet with two other executives in different departments.

Now, one thing you have to understand about me is that I am optimistic, and once I get this far along in the process I am thinking of all of the great things to do in the job. In fact, I’m already doing the job in my mind! I’m losing sleep over how I can add value to their organization and have specific projects already started (in my mind).

I was completely surprised, after the third interview, to get an e-mail that seemed to come out of some Communications 101 book saying that they already had someone else in mind, and thanks for coming in, and they’d keep my resume on file – you know, all that normal garbage that doesn’t sound true.

This was the lowest point of my job search – even after this rejection I didn’t have a bigger let-down. I had become too emotionally involved in this one, excited about the prospect, anxious to get started, and reading the signals inaccurately.

So, let’s talk about this thing called rejection, and coping.

Rejection, for me, came in various forms. The most frequent was not getting an e-mail or response back. I’ve covered this before and realize that everyone is busy, and they’d probably have to hire an extra person just to respond back to all of the applicants. I realize that now but it sure was a shocker at first. Other forms of rejection included a non-invite to the next interview, or asking someone if they knew anyone that knew anyone -and they’d say no, even though you knew they were super connected.

I remember a former boss that learned of JibberJobber, and when I asked him if he’d let his colleagues know, his response was “I’ll try.” Not a big deal, but if you knew this guy, you would know that “I’ll try” is absolutely unacceptable in his company – if I would have said that in a meeting I’d be in big trouble. What a rejection, hearing “I’ll try” from him, when I asked him a simple favor.

So what should we do when we are rejected? How can we react (and still be healthy :))?

I’m not sure there is one appropriate answer or strategy – it probably depends on you, where you are at, and what you need. One of my favorite philosophies on dealing with rejection comes from Carolyn Greco, of The Facet Group. One of her mantras is:

Some Will

Some Won’t

So What?

What’s Next?!?!

For me, this is somewhat hard to live by (although the more rejections I get the easier it is – isn’t that how we get wiser?), mostly because I get emotionally involved. But it is excellent advice. For an awesome read on something very closely related, go check out Kent Blumberg’s How to handle negative criticism.

How do you handle rejection?

During the last few months at my old job things were a little shaky. Nothing abnormal, just regular business challenges (its a very, very long story with lots of juicy details (sound familiar?)). Anyway, I remember some phone meetings I had with a board member and former mentor (and friend) where I would say “Do I need to get my resume ready?” His response was the typical corporate-speak that you would expect to hear, “I can’t answer that,” or “That’s not my decision,” or “you’ll have to talk to so-and-so about that.”

I’ve had a year to think about it and I dearly wish that this leader, who had been a very dear friend to me, would have had the wisdom to say “Jason, you should always have a resume ready.”

So please let me answer this for you – whether you have asked the question or not – you should always have your resume ready.

For now don’t worry about creating different resumes (for me it would be a general one, a product manager resume and a project manager resume) – just create one big master resume with everything on it. And go put it into the document manager in JibberJobber so that when you need it, you will have it ready. Having had a current resume ready to go would have saved me one full week in my job search.

Go now, get your resume put together.

Because of my winner of the month post from yesterday I didn’t point you to Wednesday’s interview question with Scot over at Pimp Your Work. So go check out yesterday’s question as well as today’s.

Why should networking be something that I do all the time in my career? Go check it out (from yesterday)

What are the critical factors in understanding and managing your personal network? Go check it out (from today)

As a bonus, go check out a post from master networker (and author) Thom Singer on 20 things to do to guarantee you’ll be a networking loser. I hope this isn’t you (hint: his post has to do with the crazy eagle picture)

Note: Lots to write here, not enough space. I was planning on giving this award to 60 people this month, which would be worth $3,600. Alas, it only goes to a fraction of that. Read on…

So I’ve been following the Jobster layoffs for a few weeks (sorry to bring it up again – it had pretty much died down), and found a most intriguing thread on Matt Martone’s blog. The big question boils down to “So these guys get terminated and we’re supposed to jump to action to help them? What about the billions of others that lose their jobs?” You can see my response in there, the 17th comment. I think its pretty brilliant :p

It doesn’t really matter what your position is, the bottom line is there are about 60 people that have been put out on the street (that’s what I heard, not sure what the final numbers were), and they have to find a new gig. It is interesting because Jobster is the company to watch, and it has been watched. The CEO gets criticized for his blog style (I think his style is great, and he makes no excuses for the transparency (although he does kind of apologize for calling Monster a crap product), and news like this layoff has lots of people talking (lots of recruiters that blog, that is).

I’m not taking a position. I think its a cool tool, and its definitely different. But back to the winner of the month… I have found a number of ex-Jobster professionals that I want to feature as winners this month. Note something different this month is the use of their LinkedIn profiles, which I need to blog about in another post. There would have been 60 awards this month, if all 60 of them “got it.” But read on, for the interesting outcome.

Dana Bos – Co-founder and Editor of ThreeImaginaryGirls.com. Freelance Content Guru. Dana’s LinkedIn profile and her ThreeImaginaryGirls are totally complementary and scream “I know my stuff! I know web content. I know podcasting. I know how to communicate online.” The fact that she had the role of “Website Producer/Content Manager at Jobster” tells me that she could cross industries easily. You need to check out her LinkedIn profile and constrast it with her Jobster profile – it is very interesting (and something to consider based on your target companies)! While she doesn’t have a blog or her own personal branding website, she’s posted these profiles on comments of at least one other blog.

Rob Humphrey – talent professional – if you want to see You Get It in action, go check out Rob’s profile. He blogs in multiple places (DigitalRecruiter, TriangleAtWork and CareerCowboy) and uses the SquareSpace.com very effectively to present himself and his achievements. You can’t spend 10 minutes on this guy’s sites and NOT get an appreciation for his breadth/depth. Terrific stuff, presented very, very well.

Sara Elkins – Strategic Account Manager – no website, no blog but she’s obviously spent some time on her LinkedIn profile – it looks very nice (read: its way more fleshed out than mine). This is a topic for another post but you can learn a lot by comparing your LinkedIn profile with hers, as she has all the right stuff. If you are in the mode of improving yours, check hers out and then read this post about improving your profile by Guy Kawasaki.

Heather Gray – Sales and Marketing VP – this took a little poking around – I got her resume from her Jobster profile page, and then found a blog address (it isn’t active). But she does have a LinkedIn profile – yahoo! Interestingly, her resume does a ton more for her personal brand than her LinkedIn profile – but at least she has one. I’ve just looked at 10 other Jobster profiles that don’t have a LinkedIn profile, or a blog, or a website, or… well, anything more than their Jobster profile. Heather can do some more work here, probably have an excellent blog a la Kent Blumberg style – and be the thought-leader in this area – her resume is super impressive and I’d love to learn more about her breadth and depth through a blog … hint hint!

Ariel Stallings – two writers in one – on her website there’s a section to go to see about being an author, and one about being a copywriter. And she advertises other services (like blog consultation — hm, I wonder what she’d do to change my blog!). Her website is great, has lots of information about her passions, skills etc. This is a good time to highlight the way Jobster has profiles – its kind of like an interview where she has questions, and she has responses. These are NOT dry questions, mind you. They are more like “casual conversation” or regular conversation that you would get into the first time you met.

Kalindi Kunis – Marketing Communications and Product Management – Kalindi had a resume on her jobster profile that had a link to her LinkedIn profile. Feel like I’m stretching here, as far as substantiating her personal brand? I do too… but that’s okay – it goes along with the theme this month. Her LinkedIn profile has interesting information, and I learned a lot about her from the resume+LinkedIn profile. At least she has two instances of using the web to help her brand…

and finally… that’s it. That’s all I found :(. Out of supposedly 60 reductions (love the term?), only 40 had their profiles on the Jobster site in this category. And out of these 40, this is all I found that had any substantiation of their personal brand.

I’m amazed to not see more blogs. Actually, I was amazed that so many (past) employees of a web 2.0 company that has a very active CEO blogger haven’t done much to substantiate their personal branding online. Before I went through the 40 profiles I thought I’d have a TON of reading to do, going over each of their blogs. But I guess the reality is that too many people are spending all of their time on their job and no time on their career management.

Sorry for the morbid note, I won’t end on that!

For all those mentioned here, you get the exceptional prizes of a cyber-high-five, a link on my blogroll (if you have a site – so far this is just Rob and Ariel), and six months of premium access to JibberJobber! Good luck to each of you (and those not mentioned here), and please continue to pay attention to your career management even after you land your next dream job!

Today is the the second question of Scot’s five questions on networking this week. The question is:

I’m starting at “ground zero” in terms of networking. What are the first action items I should do to start building a network?

Note in my reply I didn’t say “and start putting these names into JibberJobber” but perhaps I should have 😉

Go check out his blog for the dialogue (my answer, his response, and the wisdom in the comments). Don’t be shy to leave a comment – it was great to see some from yesterday from Liz, Carl and Darlene. Also, Thom Singer had an excellent post where he talks about Steve Harper’s (The Ripple Effect) advice on how to wreck a referral network – excellent.

I’d like to divert you from the JibberJobber blog and invite you to follow two great series about networking. And if you don’t feel like a power-connector, or a super networking, I encourage you to pick up Thom Singer’s Some Assembly Required book (which I’ve already flipped through but will start reading today and review soon).

First, Kent Blumberg had a great 3-post series last week on networking (each of these take about 90 seconds to read – I dare you to invest the time):

1. Giving = Network Success – have you ever heard this before? Very short read accumulating other’s information.

2. Giving to your network – face to face – need ideas on how to give? Here they are. Can you implement one of these?

3. Giving to your network virtually – I do this a lot since I cut down my face-to-face network meetings (I still get out but hey, its like zero degrees here in Utah!!). Terrific ideas which YOU can implement.

Next, hop on over to Scot Herrick’s Pimp Your Work blog, where he kicks of the first of a 5-post series about networking. Actually, I was honored to have this big blogger interview me about networking, and the results of the interview are broken up into different posts each day this week. Today’s question was:

In Jason Alba’s Best Networking Tip, you state that we should “Have a paradigm shift on what networking really is.” What are the 3-5 incorrect perceptions about networking that you’ve seen?

Go check out Scot’s post to see my response, and his thoughts to round it out.

A few weeks ago we blogged about the Skype integration with JibberJobber. This is an awesome addition that allows you to click on a Skype icon by someone’s phone number which will start a call with them.

Skype recently announced that they are now going to charge for outbound calles to land lines (I’m not sure how this works outside of the U.S.), but its only $14.95 for the entire year – that is, unlimited outbound long-distance for a year for about 2 bucks a month. Can’t beat that.

The catch is that price doubles after this month – so you have 12 days to plunk down a few bucks or else you’ll end up paying $30 for the year.

Either way its a screaming deal. Here’s why I like Skype so much:

1. As mentioned, the integration with JibberJobber.
2. Even though I have a land line phone right next to me (and my cell phone) I prefer to use Skype because I can use my headset (you can spend whatever you want on these, I just saw an e-mail where someone spent $5 at Radio Shack for a speaker/mic setup) – which means I have two hands free to type notes.
3. I work out of my home office, and I don’t have a separate business line. So if I’m on a call that will be a while, or want to make sure I’m on a call without having my 3 year old pick up and start jibberjabbering (I crack myself up ;)), I use Skype.
4. I have not had any problems with quality (well, about 6 months ago I did, but they went away. Darn gremlins!) – and I’ve used it for national and international calls.
5. You can record calls on Skype (I haven’t done it but I’ve done podcasts that have been recorded by the other party using Skype) – great for recording interviews with family, doing podcasts, etc.

I don’t get any kickback from them, but I’m giving you enough notice that you can hit it by the deadline. This is something that has enhanced my communication experience and I wanted to share it with you Go download the software for FREE (you always get free Skype-to-Skype calls), and think about upgrading. I did it last week