Author: admin

  If you ask most job seekers when they are least likely to look for a job, it’s now.  It’s that time of year between Thanksgiving and New Year’s when our lives go in overdrive. It’s a joyous time but it’s also frenzied and stressful. Family obligations, holiday preparations, and social events fill our calendar. Each day our in-box explodes with additional requests for our time, money or both.  Add to that a job search, and it is all enough to make you want to crawl into a hole and hide.  The prospect is tempting. But while you can’t rightly put on hold…

by Karen Adamedes It’s not always easy to avoid distractions when you are trying to work. There are plenty of them about. Regardless of where you are working. They eat into your productivity and often result in needing to work longer hours. Ever get to the end of the day and wonder where the hours have gone? The phone, whether it rings or not, can be a major distraction. A 2018 Deloitte survey found that Americans check their phone on average 52 times a day. A study in Britain showed that they check their phones every 12 minutes, every day.…

Had three great conversations this week with some really sharp people. And a few of them got hit with a “Wait, what’s that tool called?” moment. The kind where halfway through a sentence they pull out their phone or crack open their notes app to jot it down. That’s when I know I’ve got something worth sharing. Seems to happen to me a lot. I’ll mention some random AI tool and boom — it stops the conversation. Probably because I spend way too much time nerding out on this stuff (some call it shiny object syndrome, I call it R&D).…

If you wonder, “What is LinkedIn Career Explorer?” you wouldn’t be alone. What Is LinkedIn Career Explorer? Given a soft launch in 2020, Career Explorer is a LinkedIn product. It sits on Microsoft’s GitHub platform. LinkedIn’s Chief Product Officer, Tomer Cohen, says it’s a tool to help you “…uncover careers you could transition into and might not have considered by mapping the skills you have to thousands of job titles.” Career Explorer lists 6,000 job titles and 36,000 skills common to those titles. Before we get going, we need to recognize a few limitations of the data: LinkedIn members often…

Why did you leave your last job is a common question job seekers get during interviews. There are a multitude of reasons as to why. Some of them are good (“I was recruited!”). And others, well, not so good. (“I got fired.”) Why did you leave your last job? Spin your answer to this routine question because it can make or break your candidacy. Why did you leave your job, when it appears on paper that things were going great and you were being successful? How do you communicate that in your answer? Ways to answer the question What’s the…

Welcome back to another monthly update from Root of Good! We spent most of April at home enjoying the springtime flora and fauna. But we also managed to squeeze in a week in the Caribbean on board the Holland America Rotterdam cruise ship.  Right now we are just a few days away from commencing a six week period of busy travel that brings us to the west coast of the USA, then Alaska, Europe, and at the end of June, back to the Caribbean. We’ll be back home for a few days here and there but mostly on the road…

  A job search is always stressful. Add to that the practical challenges of staying on top of multiple job listings, resume versions, interview dates and contacts, and you can easily get overwhelmed.  Organizing your search will keep your head above water and increase your chances of success. After all, wouldn’t you feel more confident and prepared having all of your ducks in a row? Unsure of how to get started? Here are some tips on getting and staying organized.  1. Get Clear on What You Are Looking For With seemingly endless listings posted on-line, it’s easy to spend hours just sifting through. And with…

  A resume is the most important document in your job search toolbox. Whether you are networking or applying on-line, sharing your resume is a way to introduce yourself and your story. When a resume lands in a hiring manager’s inbox, it is often the first impression they will have of the prospective applicant.  And we have all heard the saying “first impressions are the most lasting.” Unfortunately, job seekers frequently fail to spend the time making sure their resumes are optimized for best results.  Even more than that, they make regrettable mistakes that cost them the opportunity to progress in the job search…

There are all sorts of background noises to contend with when you work at home Whether you are on a video call, a teleconference, or just a plain old telephone call you want to minimize background noise. If you’ve got something to say you want to be heard, and you don’t want to have to ask people to repeat themselves. Likewise, you don’t want any unexpected or irritating distractions interfering with your call. You may not be able to plan for every contingency, such as the neighbor starting up their lawn mower or leaf blower when you are in the…

Warning: this is a contrarian post and as such it may question some deeply held beliefs. If you keep going you might not like what you read. The education industry has successfully installed the meme that not going to college (buying their product) putatively leads to a life in poverty. A common selling point is a piece of shoddy statistics that demonstrates the correlation between average income and level of education. For whatever reason education takes longer and longer while getting more and more expensive at rates way above inflation level. This has promoted counter studies questioning the monetary value…