This is a hard confession to make. Since my time as a young lad in Alaska, I’ve always been pretty good with language and had a pretty good eye for writing, editing, and proofreading. With the rise of modern AI tools, however, these skill sets are becoming largely commoditized — especially when it comes to proofreading, where ChatGPT or its ilk can run rings around virtually any human screener. For example, as meticulous as I [...]
As you can likely imagine, one of the most common questions I receive from clients is in regard to the prevalence of age bias in the job market — and how an older worker can best position themselves to land a new job despite this pervasive issue. My answer to the first part of the question? Sadly, it’s a resounding “yes, it’s very common” since any way you slice it, and despite the legalities trying [...]
While job titles are useful shorthand in the world of work, and can give you a general sense of what people do for a living, there’s no question that the number of titles out there has exploded in recent decades. Back in the pre-2000 days, for those who might recall, most people would simply say they were a salesperson or marketing professional or IT manager and the like and you’d get the gist of it. [...]
While younger professionals might not realize it, a common element of job hunting in decades past involved joining dedicated “networking groups” where people would band together to share job hunting ideas, review progress, access moral support, and get direct feedback from their peers around their job hunting approach. Back in the eighties and nineties, for example, there was a very popular group called “Forty Plus” that had chapters all over the country and that was [...]
Ah, LinkedIn. For all of the amazing networking and research capabilities the site offers, there have always been an equal amount of frustrations involved in using the site — and numerous changes have been made to the platform that are downright head-scratchers. As an example of this, many users may have noticed that LinkedIn recently decided to adopt an AI-only search approach that replaces the conventional job search filters that worked like a champ for [...]
Almost without fail, every job hunter who applies to a job of interest today and doesn't hear back ends up wondering: "did I not hear back because my resume isn't 'scannable' by the tools that HR departments are using to screen candidates?" These tools, known as Applicant Tracking Systems, have become a huge topic of discussion in the field of resume effectiveness and (sadly) thousands of fear-mongering companies have sprung up to browbeat people into [...]
As discussed extensively in many of my networking-related posts over the years, one of the hardest things to do for many job hunters is stretch beyond the "reactive" world of responding to published job ads and add in the more "proactive" component of working through personal connections to uncover unpublished and newly-created opportunities. Sure, millions of job hunters land new roles each year by responding to published leads, but at the same time -- and [...]
Greetings all -- I've been on the mend from shoulder surgery this past week, so took the opportunity to catch up on my reading regimen and flag a few articles I thought had good points to make regarding career issues and the modern job hunting process. Here's a quick list of interesting posts that caught my eye! -- AI Has Made Hiring Worse - But It Can Still Help | Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, HBR -- Is [...]
When it comes to AI, I think it's safe to say that we're all drinking from the firehouse and learning this new paradigm-shattering technology together, best we can. Most recently, I've been experimenting with a new angle in AI prompting called "Verbalized Sampling" where you ask AI to show you a multitude of different ideas, and their probabilities, versus having it default to trying to give you the single "best" answer right off the bat. [...]
With the new year upon us, and a great many changes afoot in terms of how the job market operates, I thought it might be wise to kick off my first post of the year by providing some clarity in terms of the many ways in which career coaches can typically enhance one's success. I feel these points are especially important to clarify given that most people I come across haven't worked with a career [...]