LinkedIn API

This comes via the SimplyHired blog, a video from LinkedIn about how developers can use the LinkedIn API to create job searching tools on the web.

Liar. liar

Last week, a story ran on ABC News about companies that were providing fake references for job seekers, for a fee. HRGuru has picked up the thread and tried to interview one of the companies that would provide you with fake job details and they also provided a good analysis of whether lying on your resume was legal or not. According to an article from the Association for Business Communication, quoted in the HRGuru post, lying on your resume is not illegal--unless you are using a degree from a diploma mill on your resume and if there are laws in place in the state that you work in about falsifying information on a resume.

But why would people lie on a resume?

1. They don't have the education that the position requires. Please don't lie about being a surgeon just because the salary looks enticing. I also do want to have sympathy for people who can't get into certain fields where the position is not protected or professionalized, but the excuse that I have a family, I have a house, I can't go back to school is a false one for me. I see many people who are in that situation--family, kids, dog, even single and struggling--and they make the sacrifice to go to school. Need the education: go get it.
2. They don't feel that a previous employer, if contacted, will treat them fairly. If Kreskin retires, you should have his job. You have no idea what a person will say as a reference, unless they come out and say, I won't recommend you. In that case, there are other reasonable ways around that problem: ask a colleague to act as a reference, get some personal references, ask another supervisor. All of these will work. If you were really treated unfairly, get an advocate or a lawyer and get an appropriate written letter of recommendation that you can give to potential employers. Use the legal, appropriate options available to you, first. Don't lie.
   
   These options are open provided that you didn't screw up and deserve the bad reference. In that case, you need to do some penance, look for people who will assist you, and actually work to deserve some forgiveness.
   

And if you are actually in the position where you need the education to get to where you want to be, or you have truly screwed up and need to get right, there are many community resources available to you that will help you get back together. You can plead fear, overwork or laziness, but many other people have overcome those obstacles.

If you're a librarian teaching a resume skills class and get asked about "fudging" on a resume, be clear that it is not appropriate, and provide some local community resource referrals for career and education counseling. Especially if the obstacle is only in their minds like the poor, fired bank worker in the HRGuru article.

Who's on Twitter?

Susan Strayer, the author of The Right Job, Right Now, is keeping a list of the companies that are posting jobs to Twitter. Handy.

Stalked off

Now, I know the article [Stalk your way to a new job] was tongue-in-cheek, but I don't recommend stalking individual people at an organization--you should follow news stories and items about an organization. If the people that work there happen to publish and you might end up working in their department, you should read their publicly available work. But staking out their Facebook page?

According to the article,

Within minutes, you can find out where he’s from, how to reach him, where he’s worked in the past, and – perhaps most importantly – what his favorite movie is. The more you know about him, the better your ability to sell yourself.

Not so fast. This depends on a few factors.

1. The person is online and is accessible. This mean that they keep their blog or their Facebook profile out in the public sphere on their own name. Lots of people don't.
2. Even if you think you have the right person, how do you know that you do? Plenty of celebrities have people who name-jack them (would that be Twitter jack?) but I know quite a few people who have misspelled potential colleagues names.
3. For librarians, many of us know where the privacy settings are. And we teach others where to find them.

A far more helpful post would have been how to find out information about a company and their prospects, especially for privately-owned or small firms not listed on the 500 that Fortune slavers over each year.

Use Social Media

This is a link to an article posted on Inside Higher Ed about the benefits of using social media for PhDs. A lot of what the article says can be applied to librarians. I do think that a lot of librarians are blogging, but I don't see very many of us on LinkedIn, so pay attention to what the author has to say about the benefits of LinkedIn.

I would like to add that it is relatively easy to import a badge from LinkedIn and place it on your blog, so that if someone reads your blog and wants to find out more about you, they can find your profile on LinkedIn. Which can also lead to your resume, should they decide to find out if you are a librarian-for-hire.

You can also get a LinkedIn Companion for Firefox (which has gotten mixed reviews on the source page, but I think it can be handy). When I used it and scanned job postings, I could also see if anyone on my LinkedIn network was connected to the company. I would feel more comfortable using my first degree connections if I was looking for info on a prospective company, but you can use this tool to see who you might know, weak or strong-tied to you, at the company.

Craigslist, jobs scams, and don't shoot the messenger

If you haven't used it, Craigslist is a classified service, geographic specific, that you can use to look for an apartment, appliances, and yes, a job. Though Craigslist has taking a beating lately over the erotic service ads that appear on the site, Craigslist can be a great resource for a variety of microjobs.

Craigslist has also, in my opinion, been unfairly criticized for allowing scammers to post ads, including job ads. Scams occurred in newspaper advertising, could appear on bulletin boards at grocery stores and on television (yes, you can make millions on real estate--not). And if you don't want to get naked for money, don't get naked for money.

Instead of shooting the messenger, learn about the hallmarks of a scam or a waste of time job. WebWorkerDaily has an article on 4 Online Freelancing Jobs you Should Approach with Caution; you can find out about job scams in the US on the FTC website, or you can get information from your local consumer protection agency. In Canada, the Canadian Consumer Information Gateway has information; the Competition Bureau (not the easiest site to navigate) posts information about job scams that they have investigated, and the RCMP has a short list of Frauds and Scams.

Microjobs

Microjobs are small jobs that you do for a fee. They can be "odd jobs", as in yard word, handyman type jobs, small household projects or assisting with a move and getting paid for it. They can include little side entrepreneurial jobs like dogwalking or transcription. Microjobs can also include graphic design tasks, like create a poster for an upcoming gig, or write a book review for a free book or ten dollars. Websites like Elance and Virtual Vocations, though they have contract and telework positions will also advertise microjobs.

The truth is, workers have been performing microjobs for years--centuries if you also want to count the piece work that laborers took home to complete at night, and all the washing and extra cooking that women would perform for bachelors for a fee. These jobs made it possible to save up for books, to send a child to school, or to keep food on the table and a roof over your head, especially when prospects were lean and before established social welfare programs.

But some people don't know about these microjobs, or they have just thought of them as "odd jobs", or they just didn't know that they should get paid for them since they were doing them for a friend or as a favor. Many people also don't consider them to be "real" work, but they can help provide extra income while not requiring a lot of extra exertion. And best of all, you can usually work them out in your schedule.

I have had several microjobs: I write blog posts, reviews and articles; I tutor and proofread; I dogwalk; I read Tarot cards at parties; I make little crafty items for sale (like scarves and soaps). And I will, occasionally, do labor jobs if I know that I won't ache for three days, no scaffolding, and that I am not working with a power tool cowboy. The benefit: I do them when I have time and get paid as soon as it is completed. Most of the work is for personal satisfaction, not the money.

Microjobs can help you out of a jam with cash. They are a better financial option than selling off your textbooks, or scrambling to pick up an extra shift at your regular job. The next few posts will explore some sources for microjobs if you want to find some work for yourself or if you have clients coming into the library who need money immediately. Suggesting a microjob is a socially responsible referral, unlike giving a client the address of a payday loan office, IMHO.

Once you know where to find microjobs you will never have to worry about the employer who rarely, if ever, pays on time, pick up shifts at a job that you dislike but can tolerate, or multitask by watching Supernatural or listening to a novel. Try to do that at work.

You can find out more about microjobs in this post from 800 CEO Read that features Chris Guillebeau's Unconventional Guide to Working for Yourself.

Paul Forster, Indeed's CEO, talks about Indeed

Total Picture Radio interviewed Paul Forster, the CEO of Indeed, about how Indeed works. Indeed, if you haven't used it, is a vertical search engine which "scrapes" jobs from major boards and allows you to search those boards from their interface. If you find something you like, you select the job and Indeed takes you to where the original placement of the job--like on Monster--and you follow the posting steps from their to apply.

The interview gives a good overview of Indeed and some of its features, like the Job Trends, setting up alerts, how the search engine lets you search by salary even if not every job posting includes salary information. I also learned about how sponsored jobs works--sounds a bit like Facebook's ads within the social network. They also talked a bit about job scams and phishers on the site and the steps that Indeed is taking to lessen the posts from scammers.

Which is how I found out about the interview, through a post on the Diggings blog which is powered by JobDig. The writer does make a good point that if Indeed didn't deal with places that harbor scammers, like major job boards that do no checks on job authenticity, scamming would be lessened, but that's like saying Google shouldn't return results that would include misleading information.

As a researcher, you should be aware that there are some vertical search engines that aggregate employer job feeds only, like Eluta and vertical search engines that scrape, like Indeed, SimplyHired and WowJobs. Taking employer feeds directly can indicate that these are real jobs--though you also get fewer results. (Researchers know less is more, desperate job seekers just get frustrated.) A submitted feed may also be inauthentic, since it is hard to tell if the search engine has someone who is investigating the authenticity of the the job feeds beyond the initial email of please add our feed to your results.

I think that including tools like map mashups or letting you discover how many times an employer has posted the job and for how long are other tools that will help you discover the authenticity of a job. If there is no mapped location, or the location seems suspect, it's probably not real--as in, using a post office box and not a company address to submit your resume, a tactic that was used by old school scammers that used print classifieds. If a job is frequently posted or runs forever, these are also tip offs that something is wrong, though it could just mean that the job has a high turnover rate, such as car washers.

The interview, however, is good and offers some insights to searchers using Indeed.

Federal Jobs (US)

There is a website for federal service jobs in the US, Making the Difference, which includes advice on writing a resume, the infamous KSAs, as well as a housing guide for the DC area.

There's more about finding a federal job on the NACE Bulletin for August 4th, 2009pt. 2.

I want to be a librarian

And now, don't you want to be one, too?

Library Day in the Life Project

The Library Day in the Life Project is a great way to find out what certain types of librarians do all day in their libraries, to research career options and to prep for interviews, so you can ask more sophisticated questions about duties and expectations.

A plea for subject lines

This post on BNET about how to annoy your colleagues with email put me in mind of some email problems that I have experienced lately. Well, not my problem really: other people's problems.

• Sending email with no subject header or a re: subject header. It screams: I'm a virus, I'm a virus. I have set my email to kick these suckers out of the queue, straight to delete. If you send your job applications like that you have just sent them to the electrical shredder. Ditto, if you did this to follow up on a request from someone you met at a networking event, or to ask your former bosses to give you a reference. It doesn't matter if they recognize the email address. Prudence says, turf it. If you think your bosses will remember your name and email from when you worked there, that was your corporate email. They aren't going to know gobbledygook at google.com
  
• Vague subject lines are just as bad, since those have been hijacked by spammers. About our conversation last week is terrible, and I might delete it since I think that one has been used by people trying to sell me Viagra. About our conversation at CLA is a bit better, until bots start using acronyms and abbreviations, hoping for a bite. Use a specific subject line, such as a short paraphrase of the topic discussed, and then use We discussed this at CLA, in the body of the message so I remember who you are. 
• If you are applying on a job posting with a reference number and job title, use both. Some jobs titles have multiple competitions with different numbers, so use both to help with filtering.
  

What if I sent the email message out with no subject line by mistake and it is due right away: do I resend? Oh, no, multiple copies of items with attachments from the same address doesn't look like spam at all. If they're going to open it, sending it once to the appropriate person (assuming you got that right) will take care of the problem.

Fill out subject lines first, job title and number, and then cut, paste and attach your messages and documents into the email. Don't leave a subject line blank, but if you got everything else right, don't punish yourself for that small mistake, but make it easier on the HR person to sort you out.