Office Pranks

I don't think pranking is a good idea.

Whew, caution out of the way: here is an effective use of skills--drywallin' and video editin'--with the end result of a no-person harmed laugh.



I have a day off and I'm going to make dinner for my grandma and my aunt. Happy Friday. L8r.

Microloans

I made my first loan on Kiva today. I decided to do it because I read Banker to the Poor over a year ago and I was interested in the premise. However, after I did it, I wondered: can you get a microloan to pay for college?

Yes. And expect that more companies may be throwing their hat into the ring in this area of lending. Why? Because lenders can see who they are giving money to--a feeling that their money is helping a real known individual--and, if they do their research, the lender can feel that all of their money is going to the recipient, little or no money to administration.

Here's microloaning in a nutshell: a person who is unable to get a loan from a bank, gets a loan, which they have to repay--loan not gift--that suits their smaller needs. Some people like this model--personal, just feel so warm and squidgy after, and if the loan is repaid, the credit can be reapplied--and others wonder if it is really helping: banks turn these people down for a reason and/or the terms of the loan may make them difficult to repay. For more information, check out Microfinance on Wikipedia, or this article from The Tyee.

As it gets more difficult to get loans for education--or if you just need an "emergency loan" and you don't want to go through the scholarship office or get a line of credit that has exorbitant interest--more people may opt for the microfinance option for their studies. And grad studies--short period, usually for professional education with higher learning potential (=pay back loan) may be an answer for some students.

Is your minifeed blasting?

With Friendfeed, Twitter and the updates from the minifeed in Facebook, our friends and professional colleagues could get tired of us. And since Facebook has changed the setting so you can't close the minifeed in your profile, I have gotten a good look at how much information I am blasting out to my friends: tons. No wonder people think I'm on Facebook all the time: the constant blare from my apps is noise on their dashboards every check in.

You might want to tone down some of your apps. Each of these apps in Facebook has their own privacy settings, on the right hand side of the privacy dashboard.

Once you've selected from the apps menu, you can pick and choose the level of privacy. By default, most of my apps only let friends see what I am doing, but this means that I am constantly shouting out to my friends. For now, I'm going to switch off certain apps, knowing that I can go back in, turn on others, and tell them about other stuff that I am interested in (ie not always into the book learning, sometimes looking for new music).

One of my friends says she checks my profile for stuff to play with on Facebook (back atcha) but getting the habit of presence control is a good idea, especially if there are some days or some hobbies that you would like to go below the radar on. Reduce "spit".

Career Jet

Career Jet is a new vertical search engine for job postings. Since the vertical search engine market for job postings is a bit crowded, I'm not sure how successful it will be. It does have some strengths:

1. The search engine is international, with international and multilingual versions of the engine available from one main page. (A Big Number One.)
2. There's a directory on the main page. You can search occupation keyword, but you can also explore by industry, which a bonus for special librarians who may be looking for "information officer", "researcher" or "evangelist" positions, but don't know what the company will call the job.
   
3. Filters, such as job type, and alerts are available, but this is a pretty standard feature for these types of engines.

Drawbacks:

1. Need to work out wonky results. I searched in the Canadian version of the site and got back a library director position located in Pennsylvania that had the SK (Saskatchewan) identifier attached. This was an early problem with SimplyHired (which decided to just throttle outside US jobs instead) and may be worked out in coming weeks.
2. You can't toss out duplicates or remove postings from third-party recruiters. This inflates your job search results, making you think there are more postings, when you are really just seeing fifteen scrapes of the same post. Indeed has had a duplicate, as well as a recruiter, filter for over a year.

Despite the drawbacks, Career Jet is a good multilingual vertical search engine to add to your job search tools.

Managing Millenials

I actually hate the use of types to categorize people--I'm an individual, but I think that because I'm a Gen-X--but if you are interested in the beliefs people may hold about your generation, you might want to check out these videos:

The Infamous 60 Minutes expose on Millenials. I really liked the underwear advice--does butt floss count? Get the feeling the wise interviewers and Millenial-tamers are ignoring the signs and feeding the animals at the zoo? They're not patronizing at all.

Managing Millenials from BNET



Wall-to-wall flannel, uncombed hair and sneers.

Generation Y Shoots Back. Watch this video if you ever felt you were dismissed by an employer because of your age and their pre-conceived generational horns/halos.

Sexy Librarian

I initially saw this post on the Brazen Careerist (who I think is a cleavage career guider and I both nod at or loathe her opinions, so this is not a recommendation to follow her blog) about how people--as young as traditional college grads--are thinking about or financing plastic surgery to give themselves a career boost. Or a start, if looks really matter that much. Apparently, there is some science behind this, or a really catchy press release for the book Looks: Why they matter more than you imagined.

Of course, this has implications for people looking for work: if your teeth are yellowish or your boobs need some support or you are asymmetrical--somewhere--can it affect your employment prospects or earnings over time? According to some of the sections of the book, yep, appearance matters (available on the publisher's website; I would also recommend the podcast since it focuses on looks in the workplace from hiring to evaluation). Since I have not read the book--on my shelf right now--I have some additional questions that I hope the book covers:

• What if you are too dark for the culture's beauty standards?
• Eyes aren't round or big enough?
• How aware are some people of the interplay of beauty and what they think is attractive?
  
• And of course, the eternal question: boobs or butt?
  

While researching this post, I came across I really depressing article from Dateline NBC where they tested a variety of scenarios--lost, dropped papers, cut in line--with models of both genders and average looking people of both genders, and, well, you guessed it, cuteness got better service. The author of the Looks book was quoted at several points about their tests and his own research.

Sorry for the delay in posting: two conferences and two presentations in two weeks was just too much. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Why where you live is the most important decision

I don't know that where I live is the most important, but Richard Florida makes a compelling argument for how a community can give you more opportunities, despite the argument that interconnectivity is making "real" community an inessential consideration. For a brief sample of his argument, check out the Useful Commute Podcast from BNET
Why Where You Live Is More Important Than Ever.

Best Interview Book, Ever

One of my favourite interview books, one that I still use for prep all of the time is 101 Great Answers to the Toughest Interview Questions. They aren't the toughest questions--unless you don't know what BDI questions are. If you don't know what a BDI question is and since most interviews are made up of BDI questions, you might think about having this one on your bookshelf too.

Now in its fifth edition, this book has a formula that I think works really well for first time study of BDI interview questions. The book poses a question, gives you some rationale on how to answer the question and then gives you a "green light" (good) answer and a "red light" (bad) answer. This method gives you a good example to follow and can help you analyze a response that you gave that your interview partner thinks it "bad". Questions are grouped into chapters by the type of information or soft skill the question is trying to get information about.

There is also a substantial first chapter on general interview skills and prep that you might skip if you are pressed for time but you should go back and read it when you have time.

There are other interview books on the market, some even using a similar formula, but I think this one is the best for BDI beginners.

Welcome, conference season

The conference season, everywhere has now begun and we're hunting wabbits. I use wabbits as an obvious reference to the Fudd but also as a nice description of the elusive something that we are all looking for at conferences: ideas, jobs, connections, swag. We each have a different wabbit that we are on the lookout for.

A good conference should really have all of these things for librarians: you should go to sessions that stimulate your mind and make you take lots of meaningful notes; pass out your business card to become a book reviewer; land a coveted ARC or six; and get a job interview.

To get the last one, you have to actually go to the career fair. I know, I know, you just saw Fired and those career fairs look vile. They can be: they can be wickedly uncomfortable, filled with awkward people, stilted, slightly desperate conversation and filled swag hunters jiving from table to table snatching up bendy rulers and decals while bobble-heading to their iPod. But you can have your own little bubble of calm by having a plan (and only accepting a bendy ruler when offered):

• Look at who is going to be there and make a list of who you want to visit. According to ALA, job seekers should register on Job List and employers should provide postings to the list prior to the placement event. Not all career fairs are so well managed--usually it is just a room with a battered binder where you are welcome to leave your resume--but knowing who will be there and what you are looking for will help you with step two
• Is your resume ready to go? If not, it should be. If you have been sending it out for a few weeks or months and not gotten a bite, you need to have someone--preferably a career advisor--look over it and see if there are any errors in the text. I know, I know, you spell checked it. It isn't enough: look for confusables and awkward phrases or speech that you missed. A good editor and a good proofreader can help with these.
• Mock an interview. Prior to my first career fair interviews, I mock interviewed with two different friends and 101 Great Answers to the Toughest Job Interview Questions. The practice was hugely, enormously beneficial for my presentation skills and poise. If you have no one who feels confident enough to help you, go to your career services office and ask to have a mock interview. If you have no grad services officers, ask if you can have a general mock interview with BDI questions about teamwork and supervisory skills. This is good general preparation and you may get some cool handouts to keep practicing.
• No flip flops while on the career fair floor. I know: it's Anaheim. Carry them in your bag, but dress like a professional while you are looking for work. First, you stand out from all the flip flop wearers and you look like you took the job search seriously--and the time of the recruiters who are at the fair.
  
• Talk nicely to and about people no matter where you are. People can hear you and you may not know what library everyone belongs to. Knocking the efforts of human resource people at the breakfast table, slagging a library while in a conference room: you are busted. You'll be lucky if they don't twitter about your rude mouth and everyone in their stream can read about you later. No one wants to hire an indiscreet blabbermouth: all libraries are political and live in communities where shouting your mouth off can have unintended, disastrous consequences.
• Have fun. No, really, you can. And the more fun you are, the more people you will meet and who will talk with and about you. Try to have sober, dressed fun, not, Girls Gone Wild "fun".

I've just gotten back from a conference and I am about to plunge into another. I'm going to keep beefing up the collection of interview questions with the exception of this post.

I don't do nuthin' without authorization

Describe the level of responsibility you have in your current position.

Expect this question if you are interviewing for a position where you have to supervise anyone, make schedules, provide evaluations and, possibly, fire or hire. The interviewers also want to know if you can approve projects or release information that will directly impact the public and that you have the final say in when a project is finished. Not realistic for a student position, but you can explain the training wheels.

For example: As an intern, I was responsible for developing the instruction program that taught students how to use RefWorks. I created all of the class notes and exercises, as well as the evaluation form that was used to assess this new program. I did present the notes to my supervisor, and he accepted the program for presentation, indicating that unless the students felt it was too complex, that he would feel confident reusing the module that I had created. Additionally, I also spent half of my time, approximately 12 hours each week, answering questions in person at the Reference Desk or via chat, usually in the evening or weekends with little or no supervision. I also participated in two interviews to hire student library clerks and provided feedback, as all of the reference librarians did, about the punctuality, attention to detail and speed at completing assigned tasks of the student staff.

Project, evaluation, delivery, little supervision.

Every position has some level of responsibility, so try to explain how you delivered within organizational constraints.

The questions this week came from Interview like a Top MBA by Dr. Shel Leanne. Passages from the book are available from Google Books if you are interested.

Fun and games

What is your favourite extracurricular activity?

At the public library where I had my student job, my boss always moaned about the fact she never asked at an interview if someone sewed or fixed cars as a hobby. It was her first draft pick: someone with a hobby that would unwrap the mysteries of those sections to patrons who needed more help than a vague Dewey Decimal Number and bon voyage wave to the stacks.

When I served on a panel about interviewing, I mentioned this story to the attendees and the head of the local public library sitting next to me shook her head with an emphatic no. She cared nothing for the hobbies of the people who worked for her and was convinced that extracurriculars brought nothing to the reference desk. (Which explains why no one can give me a better book about fuel injection than Cars for Idiots or the Chilton's).

Anyway, if an interviewer asks this question, I don't think it's a probe for how much internet porn you surf, nor even an examination of your libertarian political affiliation. I think they are honestly trying to find out more about the whole person who may be an expert in a subject that their clients want more information about: buying stocks online, teaching seniors how to Facebook, or Korean blockbusters.

Think about the extracurricular activities you have that can inform your patrons. Yes, beyond I read a lot. Competitive swimming, Pilates, knitting, World of Warcraft, converting cars to biodiesel: what's your poison? If you are into them, so are our clients.

And by favourite, they mean, mostest, so stick to just one.

The questions this week came from Interview like a Top MBA by Dr. Shel Leanne. Passages from the book are available from Google Books if you are interested.

What did you do the day before yesterday?

Describe the last job you had before your present one.

This question wants career path information:

• What does your career path look like?
• Have you been progressing or promoted from job to job?
• Were your moves lateral ones, using new skills or are you just hopping to the next attractive contract?
• Did it relate to libraries?
• Can you recall what you did?

Obviously, for a person who moved from waiting tables to libraries, the match isn't obvious but you could describe your customer service, handling cash, dealing with difficult people, variable hours, punctuality and, if you were employed there for a long time, longevity in the position. It is a good idea to describe this position, even if it is not related to libraries, if the supervisor for that position is one of your references. You don't have to gloss: you had a student job to survive as a student and the position has given you some applicable skills and a good reference.

If your previous position was in libraries, it is a bit easier to explain its relation to the position you are interviewing for: you are moving up or laterally after attaining your degree. If you have had a series of contract positions, and--in this era of cutbacks--there should be no stigma attached to a contract that was not renewed. Try to show you made a good leap to the next position and believe you can do the same with this one.

The questions this week came from Interview like a Top MBA by Dr. Shel Leanne. Passages from the book are available from Google Books if you are interested.