Trying to hide your scandalous past

Dear Employment Hub Editor, A couple of years ago I was falsely accused of something that erupted into a huge scandal. (Well, huge in our area.) My name was in all the papers and if you search on my name lots of bad things pop up. I didn’t actually commit the crime of which I was accused and the prosecutor ended up dropping charges, but nevertheless, my reputation was destroyed.

 I was fired from my job as part of this mess and I’ve been at home with the kids ever since. I want to go back to the workforce, but honestly I’m scared to death to apply under my legal name. Can I apply under my maiden name instead? What will happen if I get hired and then say, “Oh by the way, I’m not Jane Doe, I’m Jane Jones?”

ANSWER:

 If you want to go the hiding route, there are some pitfalls there. You are fortunate to be a married woman (or divorced but kept your married name) with a whole unused maiden name just sitting out there.

There are plenty of women who change their name legally when they marry, but are known professionally by their maiden name.

This is especially popular for women who had already established themselves professionally prior to marriage, but still wanted to change their name. But, it's not just as simple as going by another name.

Most applications will ask if you are known by any other names and you would have to list your legal last name (and, in fact, any names you've been known by, in case you've been married four times and changed your name each time).

This is for the background check and is necessary to track down transcripts and the like. Additionally, your Social Security number will be run through a check to make sure you haven't stolen the card. The number will need to match your legal name.

 Hiding behind your maiden name may or may not hide results about your scandal. And any company that asks you for information for a background check will find out anyway.

So it may well not be worth your time. But, if you'd like to be known professionally by your maiden name, that's fine. But make sure you tell your for references so they don't act confused when someone calls about you.

 But I strongly recommend being upfront and honest about the whole mess. It may make it more difficult in the beginning, but you won't spend your life afraid that someone will find out.

5 Steps to Landing a Job by Thanksgiving

According to employment experts, our economy is enjoying “modest improvement.” The BLS has the unemployment number hovering at 8.1 percent, which is better than this time last year, when it was at 9.1 percent, and significantly better than in October 2009, when it hit a record 10 percent.

If you’re unemployed or underemployed, it’s time to snap out of your summer state of mind and embrace a new season of action and opportunity. Fall is the time for change and transformation, and if you want a job by Thanksgiving, you need to get energized. The way to counteract “modest job improvement” in the jobs market is by making a major improvement in yourself and your tactics.

Here are five ways to change your job prospects before the holidays are upon us.

Polish your image.

Grab your college yearbook and find your photo. If you still have the same hairstyle, it’s time to dump it for a newer model. Frumpiness is not the image you want to portray when every job has ten competitors clamoring to wow an interviewer. While you’re at it, remember everything your friends ever told you about your most flattering colors. Now pair a killer jacket with some well-cut pants or a skirt using your power colors, accessories, and one interesting detail, such as a piece of jewelry or an edgy tie that makes your look different and memorable.

Leave home.

You’ve spent enough time at home, online, moping and surfing the job sites for leads. It’s time for a new tactic. Devote at least one meal a day–breakfast, lunch, or dinner–to dining out with someone who has professional connections or advice for you. If you’re broke, make it breakfast, the cheapest meal for treating. Visit the watering hole of your desired industry at happy hour, and sip a seltzer while you schmooze. Bring your business cards with you to the gym and everywhere else you frequent. Jobs, and the people who know about them, aren’t in your apartment. They’re out there waiting to find you.

“Power up” your resume.

Revamp your resume by replacing “so what” copy with power words and phrases. Here are a few that employers love: achievements, awards, coached, detail-oriented, experience, fostered excellent working relationships, hard worker, high energy, innovative, organized, outperformed, people skills, quick study, results, team player. Have three people whom you look up to read and react to your resume. Make it superior, snappy, and powerful.

Play the grad game.

You know all those alumni events your alma mater throws in your area (lectures, mixers, conferences, fund-raisers)? These people are in YOUR tribe. They’re well connected, and you already have an “in” with them. Make it a point to hobnob with fellow alumni. Get and give lots of business cards, talk about your career aspirations, and don’t forget to follow up. This is one of the best and easiest ways to generate solid job leads. By the way, old professors and advisers are also great people to get back in touch with. They’re on your side and want you to succeed.

Master the interview.

Let’s face it. Even if you’re the most talented, experienced, charming, attractive person you know, in this job market there are probably ten others like you vying for the same position. So you have to kill it in the interview. Do your homework and know everything about the company you can find from their website, articles, annual report, and any contacts you may have at the company. Make a master list of questions they might ask you, and practice answering them in the most dynamic way possible. Figure out what you have to offer them, and make this the focus of your preparation and delivery. Be well rested, arrive early, and look sharp for the interview.

How Non-Communicators Can Showcase Communication Skills

Unless you work in a communications field (i.e., journalism, public relations, marketing), it can be hard to showcase the oh-so-important communication skills employers look for. You might not have links to hundreds of blog posts you’ve written. For example, graphic designers often have little cause to demonstrate their superior writing skills, yet employers still want to know their designers are effective communicators.

Here are some tips to help showcase your communication skills through your personal brand:

Write an intro. Take any chance to demonstrate your writing skills. Write an intro blurb about yourself on your online portfolio. Give a little background information, explain your credentials in the industry, and say a little something about what work you’ve included in your portfolio. Make sure your blurbs on each profile are similar — don’t leave out crucial information on some and include it in others. Demonstrate that, although you work outside of a writing industry, you still possess writing skills.

Highlight your expertise. Add any public speaking classes you might have taken in college to your resume and under the skills section of LinkedIn. If given the opportunity, speak at a convention or in a public setting. It could be for the volunteer organization you work with or at a meeting for work. Wrack up public speaking experience and publicize it. Update each profile to note where and when you’ll be speaking and whether it’s an open-entry event. Afterwards, transcribe your speech and add it to your portfolio, or upload any videos. This demonstrates to potential employers that you have public speaking experience and shows them how well you know the topic on which you spoke.

Add a bullet point. Update your resume to reflect your communication skills. Especially if you’ve held a management position, make sure a point under your job duties reads something like “facilitated communication between X members of the team.” Employers not only want to know you have communication skills, but also that you can effectively utilize them in a team setting. If you haven’t held a management position, highlight your participation in team communication. Mention “attended weekly meetings to facilitate communication and transparency” or “communicated daily with my supervisor to maintain clarity and transparency.”

Reference your references. Have your former boss or supervisor write you a recommendation on LinkedIn. Ask them to mention inter-office communication or any special communication skills you might have utilized for them. For example, if you worked as a data analyst and were in charge of on-boarding new interns, ask your boss to highlight that. Then, refer to your references. Make sure to include your LinkedIn profile on your electronic resume and portfolio. Link additional social profiles back to LinkedIn so that prospective employers can see that you have practical communication skills.

The more you highlight your communication skills, even in unusual ways, the more employers will take note.

How do you highlight your communication skills? Are you demonstrating to employers how well you communicate?

Become Your Own Job Creator in 10 Simple Steps

You may have noticed that the job landscape today is very different than the one we were looking at just five years ago. And although there is a lot of talk about jobs returning, the job search market is likely to remain daunting for many people.

More and more, companies and individuals are shifting away from full-time salaried jobs to hiring freelance or contract workers. Individuals have to adapt to this ongoing trend.

Let’s face it:

Making a living today is just not how it used to be. Landing a full-time job takes more time and effort, and there is no guarantee that there will be a job with your name on it. So we had better start figuring out how to make a living!

Freelancing is no longer reserved for writers or graphic designers. In a world where every job is temporary, micro-jobs may be the new norm for people in many fields. Whether you are an accountant or a teacher, every professional can create their own opportunity.

Navigating this new environment is very challenging and intimidating for those of us who are used to the old way of doing things. However, there are 10 simple steps you can take to reboot your career for the new era:

1. Know what you are good at or what you want to do

The foundation of career success is knowing what you are good at and what you want to do. Without a specific target, your ability to successfully articulate what you are looking for is diminished.

What to do: Conduct a thorough self-assessment, ideally with the help of a career counselor or even a friend (family members are not very objective when it comes to helping you with this).

If you have a particular skill or interest that stands out from the rest, this is the place to start. One mom I know had spent so much time learning how to deal with her son’s severe allergies that she is now working on developing a small business helping other parents understand allergies after becoming a certified coach. Children with severe life threatening allergies are becoming more and more common.

2. Look around you and see what people need

Start with people in your community.

Conduct a survey of your family and friends via Facebook to see where there might be a need. Surveymonkey.com provides a free service for their basic offerings- all you need. If your community has a Yahoo group or something similar, put your questions out there. If you recognize the need, offer your services to a school, church or synagogue auctions.

That is a great way to test the waters, while also getting word out to a large group of people about your services. And if you do a decent job, the least you’ll come away with is a testimonial. The most, a new ongoing client and referral source.

Where to go: Craigslist.org, TaskRabbit.com, Facebook’s Marketplace APP, Care.com, Surveymonkey.com, Yahoo Groups, Community silent auctions, LinkedIn.com

3. Find the right job boards for you

Today, there are an enormous number of websites that are seeking people to complete projects of every size and dollar amount. On a site like Elance.com, you can bid for projects ranging from $100 to create a custom itinerary (which is what one creative professional did out of her passion for exotic travel) to $10,000 for website design.

According to their website, Freelancer.com helps professionals in “software, writing, data entry and design right through to engineering and the sciences, sales and marketing, and accounting and legal services.” As the captain of your career, your job is to establish a broad and diverse pipeline of work.

Don’t get turned off by the initial low rates. While you may not get paid the rate you want (or need) for your first assignment, clients are getting to know your work and will pay you more the second time around. It’s an investment in future work. You are building your portfolio of work, and you are building up your confidence to ask for more money the next time you prospect a consulting opportunity. You’re also gaining potential testimonials and referrals for more work down the line.

Where to go: TaskRabbit.com, Elance.com, Fiverr.com, 99designs.com, 3to30.com, Care.com, Freelancer.com, Solvate.com, icrunchdata.com, sologig.com, Flexibleresources.com, and other freelance marketplaces

4. Give yourself a real title

Just because you are not “employed” in the traditional sense doesn’t mean your new title is “unemployed.”

Whether you want to call yourself a freelancer or a consultant or an imagination engineer, the bottom line is that you don’t need an old-school job to give yourself a professional identity. You have a wide range of skills, and it’s up to you to determine by what skill set (or sets) you want to be known. Whether your have developed your skills through education or just good old experience, if you give yourself a title and believe in what you do, people will believe in you.

5. Find out what others are willing to pay for your skills

Shop around and find out what others are charging for their expertise.

People who work for themselves are often more candid about what they charge than employed professionals making a salary. Use freelance sites as a starting point, or check with the freelance association for your industry. Remember, you may charge a lower rate to get your business going, but as you get your name out there and your confidence and freelance experience grows, you will gradually be able to increase your rate.

6. Become social media savvy

Social media is the launch pad to establishing your visibility and credibility.

No matter where you are in your career today, everyone needs to jump on this bandwagon. Successful job search strategy relies more on self-promotion than on a passive search approach. Whether it’s The Gap or Coach, every product and business needs to market itself; the same goes for us as individuals. Establish our own personal brand and market it, boldly.

Where to go: The most popular contenders are Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, WordPress.

7. Cultivate new skills

No matter what field you are in, expanding your skill set can only enhance your services and ability to increase your income. Do the research first. Study job descriptions for your ideal job, and see what are the skill sets that you don’t possess yet. Social media may be one of those skills, or maybe it’s HTML. Identify which services are in demand on the various freelancing sites mentioned above. Retooling and keeping up with technological advances is critical if you want to be of value in the marketplace.

8. Learn the art of shameless self-promotion

When you are looking for a job, many people ask their friends to see if there are positions at their companies. While this is great, and I highly encourage you to reach out to everyone you know, it is also somewhat limiting in the case that there are no jobs available immediately.

After you have put the word out there about looking for a traditional job, you can then follow up and let everyone you know that while you are looking for full-time opportunities, you are also setting up shop as a consultant and you are available to provide XYZ services. Use good ol’ email, Facebook, and LinkedIn to market your services, initially, to your family and friends. Add in the websites mentioned earlier and you will soon start to cultivate a clientele.

9. Create your own business card

You don’t have to be “employed” by a company to have a business card. You are the business, and you should get in the mood to market yourself! Figure out your value proposition: what are the key skills you offer? Voila! You have the content for creating your own business card.

Don’t forget to create a strong LinkedIn profile and add that to your card. I recommend that you create a business profile on LinkedIn too, but you need to have a business URL for that. Trade in your Gmail account for an inexpensive domain name (www.YourName.com) at sites like namecheap.com. If you have set up a business page on Facebook (free), add that too, in addition to any other social media links that people can use to learn about you and your work.

Where to go: Design your own cards at sites such as Vistaprint.com and Moo.com.

10. Build your confidence with a group

At the core of a successful job search, whether it’s for traditional employment or for contract freelance work, is a confident and thoughtful person. No doubt, marketing yourself can result in lots of rejection, but what is a job search, after all?

This approach of marketing yourself does indeed require a thick skin, but, hey, what have you got to lose?

Find a group of cheerleaders who can support you when you’re feeling down. Better yet, create your own support group to get your new consulting or freelancing business off the ground. This is called a “Business Mastermind” group, and it’s the brainchild of Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich.

Not only are there a lot of people in the same place as you who could benefit from mutual support, but by pulling together you will gain ideas and a network of a small group of people as well as a group to be accountable to. The group can help you stay focused and confident as you work toward your goal.

They say “luck favors the prepared,” so give some of these steps a try and prepare yourself to be hired. You just never know who might need your skills. But if they don’t know you exist, they can’t hire you.