Interview adage: If you can’t get hired being your true self, you don’t want to work there.
Life adage: If you’re not comfortable showing your true self then you probably have a disconnect between who you are and who you want to be. You really need to address that before it derails not only your career [...]

This is what the farm looks like when you drive up to it.

For a while, I thought that the farm is really what I fell in love with. I felt an overwhelming sense that I belonged on this farm from the moment I got out of my car.
But also, the moment I got out of [...]

It is not lost on me that my blog is slowly becoming a platform to announce video chats. So I think I'm going to have to do some fast confessing so that you guys don't all unsubscribe.
I'm getting married to the farmer. Yep. April 17. Well, not really. I mean, I can't totally get married because [...]

How far you get, in almost anything, is limited mainly by your ability to ask good questions.
The problem is that we are not taught to ask good questions. We’re trained to answer questions. But only answering questions doesn’t make an interesting life. After all, if you have all the answers, and you’re spewing them all [...]

One of the biggest mistakes you can make going into an interview is thinking you’ll do well because you’re perfect for the job.
Everyone who got an interview is a potential perfect fit for the job. That’s how they got through the resume screen. The interview is about something else: how you think, how you solve [...]

Reference checks used to matter a lot. Fifty years ago. When people only changed jobs twice in their life, and they didn’t know anyone outside of their company, it made sense that the second company called the first company.
Then, when it became clear that the first company could say one, tiny bad thing and then [...]

I do a lot of interviews. At least two or three a week — ranging from CNN to local newspapers. And no matter where the interview is running, there are some things you need to know about doing a good one:
1. Be interesting. The questions people ask you are not really what they want [...]

A lot of times we think we know what we're doing in the job hunt, and then someone surprises us with information we didn't think of. My latest bunch of surprises came from the book, What Does Somebody Have to Do to Get a Job Around Here? by Cynthia Shapiro, who I have interviewed before, [...]

There's a lot of advice on this blog about how to interview: Tell good stories, ask good questions, be a closer. But here's only one most important thing to remember: when it comes to discussing your potential salary, never give the number first.
The right answer to the question, "What's your salary range?" is almost [...]

We spend so much of our careers doing good work, meeting interesting people, and learning new skills. But it really all starts with one moment: the interview.
Once you get there, you need to be able to package everything together for a nice, neat presentation that's memorable in exactly the right way.
Here are two mistakes a lot of [...]

Every once in a while I'll publish job-hunt questions people ask me a lot. And it's that time again. But today I'm publishing a question that stumped me:
"Why don't interviewers get back to me after the interview? I go to the interview, I feel like we click, and the hiring manager or human resource representative [...]

Is it okay to look for a new job while I'm at my current job?
Yes. You have to be able to look for a job while you have a job or it's indentured servitude. Most people in their twenties change jobs every two years. At any given moment 70% of the workforce is job hunting, [...]

As part of my book promotion tour, my publisher sent me to media training with Clarity Media Group. I thought the media trainer would talk with me about being on television – how to sit, where to put my hands, what to wear. Instead, he focused on how to not be a loose cannon.
I know this about [...]

I am always coming across new ideas for being more effective when you look for a job. Here are some I've collected:
1. Don't answer the phone when it wakes you up.
I know people get giddy for interview call backs like they get giddy for good-date callbacks. But the combination of giddy for phone calls, and [...]

The last phone interview I did was for my job at the Boston Globe. And let me just confess that I wasn't that great in the interview, and I stressed a lot afterwards about not getting the job. But, of course, I did get the job, which I think might be evidence that I write [...]

Yep, that's right. Our very own Google Guy Jason Warner is doing Coachology this week. For those of you who don't know, Jason has interviewed a bazillion candidates as an in-house recruiter at Microsoft, Starbucks and now, at Google. And he has strong opinions about what works.
This week Jason is offering to coach one of [...]

Here are steps 7 and 8. Read the whole column on Yahoo Finance.
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 [...]

By Jason Warner — I've been interviewing people for a very long time. Sometimes I think maybe too long. You have to go back to my very first recruiting job at Microsoft to understand. This was when Microsoft was The Place to Work in the Technology World, circa the mid 1990s.
In this [...]

When someone says, "So tell me about yourself," a lot of people stumble. When you craft your answer, you have 10 million hours of information to choose from. Many people actually hate getting this question because it's so hard to zero-in on an answer.
This is an honest question. Someone wants to know about you. You [...]

Here's the structure of an interview: The interviewer asks you a lot of questions about you, figures out what you like, what you're good at, and customizes as he pitches the company and the job to you.
This structure works fine if you are not all that interested in the job. But if you go into [...]