by Penelope Trunk

A good way to think about the process of getting a job is that a resume gets you in the door, and an interview is where you close the deal.

Here are nine ways to ace an interview and get the job:

1. Tell good stories.

When someone says, “Tell me about yourself,” they don’t want to hear you rattle off a list of what you’ve done or what you’ve accomplished. People want stories. Stories are what make you stick in people’s minds.

The problem is, most people can’t figure out a story to tell about themselves, so they start listing facts. This is boring, and research shows that listing facts about ourselves instead of telling stories actually makes us feel disjointed — which is, of course, no good in an interview. Compelling stories make us believe in ourselves. So find a story arc to your career, and tell it during every interview.

2. Understand the behavioral interview.

When someone asks you a question that begins, “Tell me about a time when…” it’s a cue that you’re in a behavioral interview. There are established ways to answer this type of question.

The interviewer is trying to see how you acted in the past, which is a good predictor of how you’ll act in the future. You need to tell the interviewer about a situation you encountered, the action you took to solve the problem, and quantify the results. This is called the STAR response — Situation or Task, Action, Results.

3. Ask questions at the beginning, not the end.

Don’t wait until the end to ask good questions. What’s the point? You just spent the whole interview telling the person you’re right for the job — it’s a little late to be asking questions about the job, right? So ask your questions at the beginning. And then use the answers to better position yourself for the job during the interview.

At the end, when the interviewer says, Do you have any questions?” you can say, “No, I think I asked everything I needed to ask at the beginning of the interview. But thank you” instead of thinking of a pile of pseudo-questions

4. Stop stressing about your MySpace page.

Look, there’s nothing we can do about the fact that nearly every college kid is writing stupid things to his friend and posting it on MySpace or Facebook.

Hiring managers care less and less about these pages; it’s not earth-shattering news to human resources that college kids do stupid things. Which is lucky, because often, trying to clean up an online footprint is a lost cause.

So instead of worrying about what you did in the past, focus on what you’re doing now. Write articles online, or write a blog — do anything that will come up higher on Google than your prom date photo. Getting your ideas at the top of a search is the way to impress an interviewer. You want to get hired for your ideas, not your clean record on MySpace.

5. Explain away job hopping and long gaps.

It doesn’t matter what you do with your time as long as you’re doing productive, interesting things. So a gap is fine, as long as you can talk about what you learned, and how you grew during the gap. And job hopping is fine as long as you can show you made a significant, quantifiable contribution everywhere you went.

6. Present a plan.

Show the interviewer that you’ve done a bit of thinking about the company and the job. Brendon Connelly at Slacker Manager suggests that you go to the interview with a plan for the first three months you’re in the job.

Show some humility — say, “This is just something I came up with that we might use to get the interview started.” Of course, you can only do this if you know a lot about the job. But the best way to get the job is to know a lot about it.

7. Manage your parents.

It’s common today for parents to be involved in their twentysomething child’s job hunt. Parental involvement is so ubiquitous during interviews for summer internship programs that companies like Merrill Lynch will actually send an acceptance letter to a parent if the candidate requests one.

But some parents hover so close by that they make their kid look incompetent. Get help from your parents, but don’t get too much. Check out CollegeRecrutier.com to find out where your parents fall on the spectrum.

8. Play to stereotypes.

You’ll probably interview with more than one person. And each person you talk with will have some sort of personal agenda that will infiltrate your interview. Your job is to identify the type of person you’re talking to so that you can give the type of answer they’re looking for.

Understanding Myers-Briggs personality types will be helpful. But also take a look at Guy Kawasaki’s hilarious list of interviewer stereotypes and how to wow each type with your answers.

9. Practice. A lot.

An interview isn’t an improvisation — it’s a rehearsed performance. And it’s no mystery what the most common interview questions are, so prepare you answers. Even if you end up fielding a question you didn’t anticipate, surely a version of one the 50 answers you did prepare will work with the surprise question.

You can practice with a friend, or you can go back to your college counseling office, which will probably help you out no matter where you are in your career. But Alexandra Levit at Water Cooler Wisdom recommends using InterviewTrue to practice on video.

by Penelope Trunk

Barack Obama is dissing the baby boomers. But he’s doing it tactfully.

So he’s got a wide range of people talking about generational issues in politics, and I’m eagerly anticipating spillover into the workplace, which also needs this frank discussion.

The Kid Stays in the Picture

One of the companies I founded was an online marketplace for city governments. My business partner was a 50-something guy who had been dealing with city governments forever.

Our investors in the first round were all his friends, most were over 50, and some assumed I was dating my partner because why else would he start a company with someone so young.

Investors treated me like it was an impossibility that I could have learned things fast enough to get into a room with them. And one investor asked me to leave a meeting at such an inappropriate moment that even my partner was shocked.

Then, about a year later, when I was looking for a job, the guy I interviewed with said, “Kids now think they can learn on the job and they don’t need an MBA. What do you think of that?”

I couldn’t believe it: He was calling me a kid in a job interview, even though I’d already launched two companies. He did this because he thinks it’s culturally acceptable to treat someone like they don’t know anything just because they’re young.

Fight This Generation

I’ve been holding off writing about Obama because the first (and last) time I took a leap into politics with a column was when I campaigned for Howard Dean, the week before he imploded. I told myself I learned my lesson: Politics is too volatile for a workplace writer to forge a path through.

But here I am again, writing about politics — and hoping Obama doesn’t implode next week. I have to write about him because while this is not an official endorsement, when he talks about leading a new generation I get giddy over the idea that we could be wrestling ourselves out from under the clutch of the baby boomers.

Obama talks about teamwork and community and the end of the me-me-me in-fighting that’s characterized the recent history of baby boomer politics. A report in Newsday says:

“Obama represents the transition from the Baby Boom to Generation X. … He spoke of a post-boomer sensibility, of moving beyond the divisions exacerbated by undue self-focus.”

I have this conversation with my (baby boomer) agent, and she says, “Everything to you is about generations.” And, OK, there’s truth to that, but there’s also some hot air, because the baby-boom generation is so huge that everything has been about them by default.

Y Try

I’m from a generation that had very limited power to do anything, anywhere, except live in the wake of the boomers. Even when it came to the Internet revolution in the ’90s, most of the people who got rich were the baby boomers who invested in companies that Gen-Xers operated.

This is why I get excited about Generation Y. It’s amazing to see this group, with all their demographic power, open up the world to change.

For the most part, I focus on change in the workplace. There were a lot of things that my generation wanted at work — for example, flexible hours, personal growth, and the abandonment of a competitive, ego-focused hierarchy in favor of teamwork. But we had trouble pushing through these workplace values because there were too few of us. The baby boomers could always just say no.

But Generation Y wants so many of those Gen-X things, and Generation Y has the demographic power to make it real. It excites me to see this happen at work.

Mind the Gap

Obama is the political corollary. Finally, there are enough voters, maybe, to vote for someone who isn’t a baby boomer.

I don’t know if it will happen, but just that we’re talking about it is exciting. Because once we talk about baby boomers giving up control of politics, the talk of baby boomers giving up control of corporate life can’t be far behind.

But there’s a workplace lesson from Obama as well. He’s very tactful as he disses the boomers. He makes it clear that he’s a bridge builder, and that he’s respectful of the fact that everyone has a place in history. And he is, above all, someone who has empathy for diverse backgrounds. These are all the same kinds of skills we need in the workplace today.

We’re all engaging in a generational discussion at work, even if it’s not as overt as an interviewer calling you a kid. We all come to the table with preconceptions and biases, but we all have to work together.

So, in the near future, at least, it’s the people who are best at building generational bridges who will succeed. This is something I personally work on every day, and Obama is a great role model.

by Penelope Trunk

When you look for a job or change careers, what you’re really looking for is a way to improve things in your life. But it’s hard to figure out what will really make things better and what will only make things worse.

There are some things we all know: People who are in love are happier, and people who are chronically unemployed are less happy. But most of us aren’t dealing with such clear-cut extremes.

Most of us ask ourselves on a regular basis, “What’s the best kind of work situation for me?” Yes, we’re all unique, but in truth we aren’t as unique as we think we are. So there are some rules we can all live by when looking for work we’ll love.

Liking What You Have

Forget the deep analysis. Our brains are simply not optimized to figure out what we’ll like. Instead, they’re optimized to figure out how to like what we have.

This helps us on an evolutionary basis: We eat what’s available, we take care of whatever kids we get, and so on. It doesn’t help us in a job hunt, where we have to guess what we would like if we had it.

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, spent his whole career studying this sort of problem and published his findings in “Stumbling on Happiness.” Gilbert concludes that we’re basically unable to know if we’ll like a job until we try it, so self-analysis and market analysis aren’t going to get you very far. Start trying stuff.

You don’t have to quit your job to try things. Try new stuff on the weekend, volunteer for a project part-time, or ask for a temporary appointment to another department, for example. Be creative in how you learn about yourself. A job change doesn’t have to be now or never — it can be a process.

That said, here are some guidelines you can use for deciding what you’re going to try:

• Don’t go to grad school for humanities.

You would have had a better chance surviving on the Titanic than getting a tenure-track professorship in the humanities. The competition for these jobs is fierce, and very few corporate jobs give preference to someone who has a master’s in, say, early American history.

• Don’t be a lawyer.

Suicide is among the leading causes of premature death among lawyers. You can tell yourself you’ll be different, but statistically speaking, you probably won’t be. And while most lawyers don’t kill themselves, this doesn’t bode well for law being your dream career.

• Look for control over your work.

You might think that a manageable workload makes for a good job. But stress doesn’t actually make for a bad job. In fact, some people do very well in high-stress situations. Some even do their best work that way.

What drives people to burn out is when they work very hard but can’t meet their goals. The people most likely to burn out from their jobs, then, are those who are supposed to help children in helpless situations (at hospitals, for example) but can’t stop the pain.

Entrepreneurs, however, are known for working 18-hour days, and frequently love their work because they’re accomplishing something that excites them.

So the most important thing about enjoying your work, according to Alan Krueger, a professor of psychology at Princeton University, is having control over it — when you do it, how you do it, and what you accomplish. “People really like to be able to control the thermostat themselves,” Krueger says.

• Work where you can find a friend.

If you have one good friend at work, it’s a really good bet that you’ll like your job, according to a Gallup study published in the book “Vital Friends” by Tim Rath.

Take a look at the place you’re thinking of working. Do the people there look happy? Workplaces that promote friendship are more productive, and more fulfilling.

There are a lot of ways to judge whether or not you’ll be likely to make a friend at a new job. But one factor we often forget is architecture. Office space that promotes collaboration and taking a moment to say hi is space that is good for making friends.

• Don’t work with jerks.

Conversations that are insulting have five times the impact on your day than positive conversations. Unfortunately, we have a great memory for the unpleasant. Daniel Gilbert’s research supports this, but Bob Sutton, a professor at Stanford University, specializes in the jerk at work.

Sutton warns that if you work with jerks, you become one. His book gives advice on how to make sure you don’t end up working with these toxic people, and his web site gives you a way to test yourself to see if you’re a jerk yourself. After all, if you’re the jerk, you’re going to have a pretty hard time finding an office without one.

Work Life vs. Life Life

As you search for your new career, collecting advice as you go, remember that the stakes aren’t as high as you might think. A job is not your life.

Your personal life is your life, and your job supports that. The people who are most overwhelmed with career choices are the ones who think a career makes a life. So don’t be afraid to try a lot of options, and don’t be afraid to relax a little.

by Penelope Trunk

At a point when I didn’t have the money to hire an assistant, I ran an ad for an unpaid intern. I ran it on a lark, thinking I’d be lucky if anyone in the world would want to work for free.

The number of responses I received was incredible, not just in quantity, but also in quality.

Losing the Management Crutches

The intern I chose was smart, talented, and fun — all the things I want in a coworker. And I was nervous she would leave. So every day, I thought to myself, “Am I doing everything I can to keep her? Am I teaching her enough? Is she getting enough out of this job?”

People aren’t managers because they have the title. They’re managers because they make the people they lead feel good about themselves and what they’re doing. I knew this before, from books, but I really learned it with my unpaid intern.

Most managers have a title and pay their employees. These are management crutches. If you want to be a really good manager, ignore those formalities and make people believe that they’re getting something even more important out of the manager/employee deal; that way, you’ll help them to grow personally.

Six Ways for Everyone to Win

Each person is at your company for a reason, and believe me, it’s not for the gold watch at the end of 40 years of service. They want to get something from your company so that they can grow personally and professionally.

Find out what they want to get, because if you’re helping them to get it, they’ll want to do the work you need them to do. People like to help each other.

Otherwise, they’ll do the work to get paid, but they won’t do it well. And managers who have people underperforming are not really managers — they’re figureheads, and people aren’t doing work for them.

A real manager gives employees what they need so that the employees deliver what the manager needs. Here are six ways to make that happen.

Manage people first, do your own work second.

Your job is to make sure the people on your team perform well. They can’t do that if you’re not managing them, so most of your day will be spent helping them to develop their skills.

Your own work is something that comes after you’ve taken care of everyone else. This means you have to get very fast at doing your own work so that you can be available when direct reports need you.

Delegate your best work.

A great way to make more time to help people grow is to delegate your own work. But don’t delegate your grunt work — who wants to do that? Delegate your best stuff and the person you give it to will feel really lucky to be getting more work to do. You get more time no matter which kind of work you delegate, so you might as well be popular.

Help people get recognized.

You have more access to the world outside your team than the people reporting to you do. Use that access to make sure people know the strengths of your various team members.

If you help people get recognition, they’ll be more likely to pick up a mentor. And while a boss is not always the best mentor, they can certainly help locate a mentor, and someone with mentor will stay longer and care more about work.

Make projects relevant to people, not companies.

If you’re giving a new assignment to a team member, don’t focus on what it will do for you, or the company. Focus on how it will help that person to grow in ways she’s hoping to grow. Show her the skills she’ll develop on this project and how they’ll change her.

If you can’t do this, the only way to get her to care about the project is to offer other means for personal growth in exchange for her effort on the project. It’s not enough to say how something helps the company — it has to help the employee as well.

Align yourself with your boss.

People are much more likely to follow someone who seems to have support from the rest of the organization. You look like you can do more for your team if you have good relationships with people higher up.

If you don’t look well-connected in the organization, people won’t work as hard for you because they don’t think you’ll be able to meet their needs.

Work reasonable hours.

If you work all the time, you look like you don’t have a grip on your workload and maybe even a little imbalanced. This doesn’t inspire confidence.

It’s fine for high-profile people who have built up trust. But in general, the hardest worker looks the most scared. Otherwise, why would that person have to work so much harder than everyone else? Why wouldn’t they want to go home and be with family and friends?

Getting the Right Answer

The best way to think about management is to treat everyone like an unpaid intern.

Each day, your employees ask themselves, “Am I getting enough out of this job to keep doing it?” And each day, you need to give them a reason to say, “Yes.”

by Penelope Trunk

Here’s what a bad boss is:
Someone who lies, cheats, steals, or touches you after you’ve told him, in writing, not to. If you have one of these bosses, quit complaining and start applying for other jobs.

All other bosses aren’t truly bad — you’re just bad at managing them.

A Boss-Management Decalogue

One of the most important parts of being competent at work is managing up: Making sure you give your boss what he or she needs, and then getting what you need in return. That’s no one’s responsibility but your own.

Here are 10 ways to manage your boss:

1. Understand the person you’re dealing with.

Is she detail-oriented? Give her detailed reports. Is she a big-picture thinker? Tell her your big ideas. Does he like voicemail? Then leave some, even if you hate using it.

Understand her personality strengths and weaknesses, because this is usually the path toward forging a relationship. If you know her weaknesses, you can have empathy for her shortcomings instead of impatience. And whatever you feel will show, so figure out how to feel compassion for your boss, or you’ll get nowhere with her.

2. Ask for your quarterly goals, in writing.

If you don’t have goals, how can you even know what your job is? And if you don’t know what your job is, you can be sure you won’t make your boss happy.

If your boss does not know your goals either, write your own. Create a fun job for yourself that will be an integral part of the company’s strategy. If your boss doesn’t like the goals you create, she’ll suddenly be able to come up with them herself.

3. Know your boss’s biggest worries, and help him address them.

Why are you working on projects your boss doesn’t care about? Your job is to make your boss love you so he helps you get the skills you need to grow in your career.

If you have stuff on your plate that doesn’t matter, do it fast, and don’t worry about being judged on the quality of this work because your boss doesn’t care. Focus on the stuff that matters to your boss, because that’s what will make your boss love you.

4. Look at your boss’s weaknesses as opportunities.

If your boss is great at project management, then surely she doesn’t need you to do that. Be great at the stuff your boss is terrible at — like people management, maybe — and help your boss rally her troops. If she’s great at sales but hates the detailed reporting, get great at the reporting and offer to do all the stuff she hates to do.

If your boss is terrible at managing meetings, instead of complaining about it, volunteer to do the brunt of the organizing for him. He’ll appreciate that way more than you helping with stuff he doesn’t worry about.

5. Focus on your own needs by focusing on your boss’s needs.

You and your boss are a team.
You make your boss look great in the organization and in the world, and your boss will help you grow and meet your own goals.

To do this, you need to focus more on helping your boss and less on doing work you love. The first act begets the second: A boss who feels indebted to you will give you what you want.

6. See the good in people.

Don’t tell me your boss doesn’t care about you, or that he’s only concerned with the bottom line. It’s not humanly possible for your boss to not care about you if you understand him, are there for him, support him, and genuinely care.

You have to be authentic with your boss to develop a real relationship. Figure out how to care about him deeply — as a person whom you can help. If you can’t do this for your boss, how can you expect it from him?

7. Get a list of your boss’s priorities.

When you have too much work, this allows you to tell your boss that you can’t do x, y, and z because they’re not high enough priorities to him. In other words, you can say, “I could do x, but you said a, b, and c are very important to you, and I don’t want to compromise those.”

This is a great way of saying “no” to work in a way that makes your boss feel very respected, understood, and taken care of.

8. Prioritize your own work in terms of what matters to your boss.

Fit your high-priority items into a reasonable schedule, and don’t do low-priority items until the important stuff is done. This allows you to always deliver on what matters to your boss.

Keeping your boss happy means being a high performer. People don’t care if you perform well on stuff that doesn’t matter to them, so don’t.

9. Give weekly updates.

It doesn’t matter if your boss asks for them or not. This is a team report, for you and your boss; you’re the team, working on your boss’s priorities.

This is when you tell your boss how much you’ve accomplished that will help her. Tell her things you see that might be roadblocks for her, and how you can help her fix them in the next week. Also tell her what you’re planning to do that’s extremely important to her so she’s sure not to ask you to do unimportant work over the next week.

10. Don’t get stuck on personality types.

We each have preferences for the people we hang out with. But the most successful people can get along with anyone. If you can’t get along with the type of person your boss is, it’s your shortcoming, not his.

Read some psychology books about social monitors, and how we can teach ourselves to authentically connect with anyone by practicing empathy. And then do it. After all, why is it your boss’s job to adjust to you? You’re the one with the problem.

The Choice Is Yours

The bottom line: Take responsibility for yourself. No one forces you to have the job you have. You could leave anytime

If you’re not going to leave, then you’re choosing the boss you have. And since you chose your boss, start making her into a good one. Otherwise, why did you choose her?

by Penelope Trunk

Among the most common types of career advice that people toss around are tips for job hunting. But be careful who you take advice from, because the workplace is changing very fast right now. As the new generation makes its voice heard at work, a lot of the old rules no longer apply.

Here are eight job-hunting rules that will hold you back if you’re not careful:

Bad Rule No.
1: Draw a clear picture of yourself

A résumé is not an autobiography, it’s a marketing document. So the goal is not to tell every single thing about yourself, but rather to get an interview. And the best way to land an interview is to make the employer want to find out more about you.

This is why a résumé should be a tease, not treatise. (This is a great example of why that old rule about keeping your résumé to one page is still a very good one.)

Bad Rule No.
2: Don’t be too narrow

If you’re not narrow, then what are you selling? Think about cars. Is a BMW the car that meets every need for every person? Is a Saturn the car for high-end and low-end markets? You’re no different from a car. You can’t be everything to everyone.

If you want to stand out, you have to stand for something. This is your unique selling proposition, and once
you have one, you’ll naturally focus your résumé a little more sharply than, say, a generalist who, in trying to get every job, isn’t a fit for any job.

Sure, this means you have to decrease the pool of jobs you’ll take. But when it comes to getting flexibility
from employers, it’s the specialists, not the generalists, who get what they want. That’s because the specialists are the hardest to replace.

Bad Rule No.
3: Don’t job-hop

The Bureau of Labor reports that people under 30 switch jobs every 18 months. Most people who cite these
statistics are aghast at the lack of loyalty in the workforce. But I say, who cares about loyalty? You know what it got the baby boomers? Layoffs.

Job-hoppers are generally happier in their work. They have more passion for their career because their work changes before it gets boring, and they have better vacations because they can really relax between jobs.

Bad Rule No.
4: Don’t have gaps in your résumé

This is a good piece of advice if you’re going to make work the only thing in your life. Because if you have nothing else in your life, a gap in your résumé means you’re staring off into space.

But if work is a means to do other fun things, a gap is a way to grow, and you can say that in an interview.

When someone asks me about the gap in my résumé, I explain how I lived on a French farm and learned a lot about business and life while I plucked the chickens I ate for dinner.

Bad Rule No.
5: Don’t have typos in your résumé

I’m not recommending that you misspell words on purpose, but I am recommending that you chill out about the typos. How can you possibly send out perfect résumés every time? Especially if you’re customizing each résumé for each job, which is what you should be doing.

Look, if proofreading were such an easy job then publishing companies wouldn’t have to hire proofreaders. So don’t make yourself crazy about the typos, because while 10 typos is a sign of incompetence, one typo might be a sign that you have a moderate and healthy standard of perfectionism.

Bad Rule No.
6: Honesty is most important

Résumés are marketing documents, so write yours that way. Give an employer exactly what they want without saying something false.

If you’re marketing Pop-Tarts, do you start by saying they have a lot of sugar? Not if you want parents to buy them. You say Pop-Tarts have fiber, maybe. Of course, they don’t have a lot. But saying it has some fiber isn’t false.

My own résumé says, “Boston University, graduate program in English, wrote master’s thesis about hypertext.” I never graduated from my program (because I got an amazing job offer based on that thesis). But I did write my master’s thesis. It’s not a lie. Anyway, it would be insane to say, “English graduate program, cut out early.”

The bottom line about honesty:
Don’t be more forthcoming in your own marketing materials than the marketing manager for Pop-Tarts would be in hers.

Bad Rule No.
7: Clean up your online identity

Stop stressing about the stupid stuff you posted when you were drunk (or worse, not drunk). It’s out of your control.

Instead, build a more current online identity that will pop up highest when an employer or recruiter does an online background check (which about 70 percent do). One way to get your new identity to the top of the search engines is to use Naymz, a service that helps control what people find out about you online.

Another way to control what people see about you is to blog. A blog can represent you effectively to the online world, and a good blog will show up higher in searches than almost any kind of page that could damage you.

Bad Rule No.
8: Treat a job hunt like a project and be a project manager

That’s great advice if you look for a job four times in your whole life. But today, job hunting is so frequent that often there’s no downtime — not even while you start a new job.

Also, job hunting is continuous today because it’s mostly about networking, and you can’t build your network if you’re taking breaks, because being good at networking means being a good friend. And who takes breaks from that?

So treat your job hunt like a personal development project. And question all the advice people give you. Ask yourself, is this the advice someone was giving 20 years ago? Because if the answer is yes, then you probably need some new advice for today.

by Penelope Trunk

Today’s job hunt is more like a marathon than a sprint, because a job hunt never really ends — it just pauses when you find a job you want to stay at for a few years.

I’ve compiled some tips that work for the sprint, when you’re desperate to find something ASAP, as well as
for the passive hunt, where you’re keeping your eyes open in case something great turns up.

The important thing to remember is that you’ll always have to hunt again, so part of each job hunt is laying
ground for the next one. And part of each job you get is providing a bridge for relationships to continue between the hunts.

Here are my tips:

1. Send paper resumes.

That’s right, in the good old U.S. mail. It’s true that no one does this any more. That’s why it’ll be
effective for you. Even if the hiring manager gives it to his assistant to deliver to the black hole of human resources, it’ll go into the special black hole reserved for hand-delivered resumes. And trust me, it’s not as deep down there.

2. Stop the delusions about online job boards.

The specialized ones work. Joel on Software – that’s a great one if you are a programmer. And craigslist
is great if you want to clean houses while naked. But if you’re a generalist, don’t think a generalist job board will help. Fewer than 10 percent of all jobs are filled via those big boards.

3. Get to people via their friends.

Use social networking sites to see who knows someone you’d like to work for and get an introduction. You could spend hours reading peoples’ friends lists, or LinkedIn lists. It’s worth the time. You never know who your friends know.

4. Use software to manage your hunt.

A job hunt is complicated, with lots of pieced of unrelated information to keep track of. Excel is OK if you
have quick-and-easy hunts. But for people who see job hunting as a lifestyle, JibberJobber is an example of software that can keep you from getting lost in a pile of your contacts and saved job postings.

5. Write about achievements, not job duties.

I say this 10 times a year, and still, everyone thinks they’re the exception to this rule. You aren’t the exception — you shouldn’t list your job duties on your resume. No one cares. You should list your achievements. People want to hire people who do things well, not people who just show up. List what you did well, and quantify it.

6. Limit your resume to one page.

You get one page to tell people why they should hire you. If you need more than that, ask yourself why. Did you not put the great stuff on page one? If you have one page full of grand achievements, that’s enough to get you an interview. If you have two pages, you announce immediately that page one has nothing on it so you’re trying again.

7. Practice for the interview.

An interview is not some random bunch of unpredictable questions. An interview is more like a press conference. You take every question and figure out how to use it to spew your talking points.

But how can you do this if you don’t know your talking points? Know why someone should hire you, know the most important things you need to say in an interview. These are the basis for answers to the questions you get asked.

8. Tell good stories.

People remember you if you tell good stories about yourself. Stories should entertain people while telling them what you are good at. If you don’t know how to do this, buy Brag!: The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn without Blowing It by Peggy Klaus. If you tell good stories at cocktail parties, people will remember you and refer other people to you. If you tell good stories in an interview, people will find you likable. And that is, after all, the trait people hire for.

9. Be helpful.

Not when you’re job hunting, but when you’re not. When you don’t need anything from anyone else, give a lot. This is when you look the most selfless. It’ll come back to you when you do need help. People will want to do you a favor.

10. Ask for help.

The most effective job hunts are team efforts. Ask people about the companies they know and where you’d fit. Ask people to recommend managers who will teach you a lot. Ask people for advice on positioning yourself in your resume. Ask people to introduce you to their friends. Most people will help you if you ask — we all want to feel useful.

by Penelope Trunk

One of the best parts of a good job is learning new things and sharing ideas with other people. But most of the time we’re not doing this. Most of the time we’re buried under a to-do list.

I’ve developed some tips for adjusting how you get your work done each day, so you can make space for the learning and collaborating and big-picture thinking that makes us excited about our jobs.

Here are my tips:

1. Delegate stuff you like.

You can’t delegate your unappealing projects because no one will want to do them. So find someone who
wants to learn new skills, and teach him how to do your appealing projects.

Then you can get them off your plate, do your worst projects quickly, and line up to get something that will
teach you new skills.

2. Don’t use voicemail.

It’s slow, you can’t file it, people leave inaudible phone numbers on it, and reception is bad everywhere you
need it to be good. Train people to not expect you to answer your phone and they’ll stop calling.

Answer emails fast and answer voicemails after someone calls twice. It’s rude, but you can be extra nice in
email to make up for it.

3. Prioritize.

Not your to-do list, but your life. If you really know what’s important to you, then it’ll become clear to you what’s important to spend time on and what isn’t.

People who have too much to do are people who refuse to make tough choices. Knowing yourself better will help you make those decisions.

4. Go to the gym.

People who work out regularly accomplish more of the important things in their life than people who don’t go to the gym. All the couch potatoes who read this statistic are going to sit on their couch and philosophize about what makes it true.

Why bother? Who cares why it’s true. Just go to the gym. In fact, maybe people who go to the gym get more done because they don’t procrastinate by philosophizing on the couch.

5. Don’t use your in-box as a filing cabinet.

People who scroll through their email in-box all day looking for the next thing to do are people without a to-do list. Read your email, respond, file, or put it on a to-do list. You should never scroll through
your in-box because there should never be anything in there that you’ve already read.

6. Use software for complicated processes.

Things that fall into this category are maintaining a to-do list (try Ta-da or tasktoy for starters). Also, for all those links you’ve been saving, use one of the 10 billion bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or Searchles.

Do your banking online, too.
This is so obvious that I almost forgot it, but it’s a good way to gauge how on top of things you are. If you’re not banking online, you’re in trouble.

7. Do your top thing first.

The best way to work is to get your most important task done first thing in the day. To do so, block out the
first hour of the day.

You’ll be relieved for the rest of the day that you finished something that matters, and you won’t have to stay late because all the really important stuff will be done.

8. Know what your boss cares about.

Get rid of everything else. If your boss doesn’t think it’s a priority then why should you? Your job is to make your boss look great. If your boss loves you she will help you meet your goals.

You can’t make your boss look great if you spend your time doing stuff she doesn’t care about. You’ll find
that you not only look better to your boss, but you streamline your workload as well.

9. Get a life.

If you have things you care about outside of work, you’ll leave work to do them. Parkinson’s law says that
work expands to fill the amount of time available. In other words, if you know you’ll be staying in the office until 10 at night, you’ll have work to do until then.

Force yourself to leave before dinner. You’ll figure out how to get your work done after a few weeks of being
anxious and behind.

10. Use IM to be friendly, not efficient.

The reason Generation Y is so great at making friends is because they leverage technology to forge relationships. Instant messaging is great for this because it provides immediate satisfaction; who doesn’t like that in a friendship?

However, adults are too busy to multitask all day. When the stakes are not a term paper in history but the family’s mortgage, interruptions are more serious. So turn on IM when you’re networking and turn it off when you are solving problems.

11. Send flowers.

This is such a quick way to say you appreciate someone, or that you remember it’s a tough time, or that you
noticed their accomplishments. You could take people out to lunch for all of these reasons, but flowers are no more expensive than lunch, and sending them requires a fraction of the time.

Of course, you still need to do lunch sometimes, but maybe on a busy day you could IM instead.

Tips To Manage Time Efficiently

1. Set aside time each day to review and prioritise demand on your time.

2. Take a small chunk of a difficult task, and deal with it straight away.

3. Think through your day while making your way to work

4. Always delegate your tasks that are not time-effective for you to do.

“Manajemen mengusahakan agar orang melakukan apa yang perlu dilakukan. Kepemimpinan mengusahakan agar orang memiliki keinginan untuk melakukan apa yang perlu dilakukan. Manajer mendorong. Pemimpin menarik. Manajer memberi perintah. Pemimpin berkomunikasi.

Bennis, W.G. (1993)