When I had my second son, I had a nervous breakdown. I’m not sure exactly what the cause was. But things were bad. I had a three-year-old with autism, a baby with a facial deformity that required a team of ten different types of doctors, and no family helping me, and I didn’t take maternity [...]

Melissa is back. She stayed with us on the farm a little while over the winter, telling me to shut up, and playing with me in the snow.
I think by now you get the picture that Melissa is one of those people who breaks every rule and lands on her feet. One of the things [...]

When you want to get a new job, don’t look at your resume to see what you could get. Instead, take time to build a resume that meets the requirements of the jobs you want. This doesn’t mean using keywords that are in the job description. That is not going to work. Instead, look at [...]

It's very hard to write your own resume because a resume is a macro view of your life, but you live your life at the micro level, obsessing about daily details that have no bearing on your resume. So I recommend to a lot of people that they hire someone to help them. After all, [...]

The reason I spend so much time telling you to have someone else write your resume is that I have done it before, and it worked out really well for me.
I thought of myself differently after getting help with the resume. This is because a good resume is not a list or a work history, but [...]

Look, you have to hire someone to help you with your resume. This should not even be a conversation any more. Would you cut your own bangs? If you were in sixth grade, yes, because the only thing you know about bangs in sixth grade is that they hang on your forehead. Once you learn [...]

Here's some career advice I'm sick of reading: "Don't have typos in your resume."
If you need to read that advice to know you shouldn't have typos in your resume then you are unemployable.
My friend Ben pointed out that when Colin Powell resigned, he typed his own letter at his home computer to keep the resignation [...]

Getting a call from a recruiter is like getting asked to the prom. It doesn't matter if the offer is sub-par; it's always flattering to be asked. But there's a lot of advice about how to get a prom date and not very much on how to attract recruiters.
The best way to encourage recruiters to [...]

The job market is good, the Internet is buzzing, and optimism is high. Still, the best jobs require talent before you walk in the door – you need to know how to search. Here are seven tips to help you:
1. Big job sites cater to keyword-focused applicants.
Only three to five percent of job seekers find [...]

The best thing about changing jobs is the vacation in between jobs. Most companies give two weeks vacation, which is about the amount of time you need to take off from work in order to keep your life running, e.g. flooded kitchen, dental appointment, weekday baseball games.
On top of that, most people aspire to the [...]

Here's an email I got from my mom, who is an information technology manager at a Fortune 100 company:
Sweetie,
I was reading through a pile of resumes that human resources gave me, and there was one resume that was so good, but the guy was too high level for what I needed.
Then I though to myself, [...]

Unemployment is traumatic, and people who have been there never shake the fear of going back. If you’ve spent five months job-hunting (an average amount of time) you have probably faced worry, uncertainty and financial desperation.
Here are some things you can do while you are employed so that next time you’re looking for work, the [...]

Five most violated resume-writing rules
This is the problem with the resume-writing world: Everyone thinks they’re an exception to the rules. Everyone thinks they can pick and choose which rules are important. Do not do this. Until you work in human resources and personally scan 300 resumes a day, you are in no position to discard [...]

Some recruiters say that as many as one in five job hunters lies on their resume.
Why isn't this news plastered on the front page of The Wall Street Journal? Quite frankly, it's because we all know businesspeople lie – the issue is how bad are the lies?
Some people make a distinction between the falsehoods that [...]

1. Don’t be the hardest worker.
No one can work 70-hour weeks forever without losing their mind – or at least their perspective. You need to pace yourself. Besides, at this kind of pace, you may not always the best worker, but you'll surely look like the most desperate.
2. Hire people you wouldn’t want as friends.
Diverse [...]

Hey, all you college kids! It's time to get off your butts and start applying for jobs. Do not delude yourself into thinking you can wait until May. Spring is the time to be buying clothes for the job you already have. Top internships, management training programs, entry-level investment banking jobs and the other good [...]

My ex boyfriend emailed his online personals profile to me and asked me what I thought. I thought it made him look needy and told him so. I said that if he wanted to attract someone with an independent personality he should change the profile. I wrote a few paragraphs that he ended up submitting [...]

Here is my current list of things I hate. It’s an on-going project that simmers week after week until it reaches boiling point and I have to spend a column venting.
1. People who are not coachable. They get good advice and don’t take it because they think they know better. Everyone has blind spots that [...]

You need to make sure your resume shows you in your best light; give shape to the truth so that it works for you. But be careful, because a well-written resume to one person is a pack of lies to another. Make sure yours falls somewhere in between, which is no small feat. We all [...]

When someone asks “What do you do?" a one-word answer will put your career on ice. You need to have a story. When you want to establish a connection with someone, a story provides social glue. When you want to impress someone, a story is more memorable and than a list of achievements.
Early in my [...]