This is what happened: I put a knife in my head. It’s a weird thing about the knife. A knife can’t get very far in one’s head. The head is protected. But there was enough blood that my husband and I decided I needed to go to the emergency room.

I took the baby with me. That’s what I called him: The baby. He was very new, and I was having trouble bonding. So I never let him out of my sight in the hope that physical proximity would promote emotional closeness.

The hospital in Brooklyn was well versed in post-partum depression. There was no wait to get into the emergency room. There was a social worker waiting for me next to a bed in a little room formed by large curtains on three sides.

We talked about the possibility of going to the mental ward. “You need a break,“ she said. “You need some support.”

“Okay,” I said. Because I realized, when she said that, that I did want a break. Then I said, “I’ll take the baby with me.”

“You can’t. Can you leave him with a family member?”

“I have to breastfeed or I’ll lose my milk.”

She said, “You can pump.”

“No. I need to keep the baby. I need to bond. Look at his face. He’s deformed.”

She looked.

Then the social worker left. She came back with another social worker.

The new social worker asked me how I am feeling.

I took this to mean that she was going to tell me something bad. People do not ask you how you’re feeling if you are feeling bad unless they are about to make you feel worse.

She said, “We can’t have a baby in the mental ward. It’s not safe. It’s not set up for babies.”

I didn’t just cry. I started convulsing. I think it was the fact that I thought I was about to get help and rest and now it seemed like I could have nothing.

The first social worker stayed. The second social worker left. The first social worker said things to me to reassure me that the second social worker was negotiating.

The baby was asleep in my lap. I sat cross-legged on the bed, starring at the wall for maybe an hour. Or ten minutes. Time was irrelevant at that point in my life because I had no idea where I was or where I was going or what I was doing. I was just trying to keep my kids safe, minute to minute.

The social worker came back and told me that they decided they would not admit me to the hospital, because then they would have to give me a room in the mental ward. Instead they would keep me in the emergency room. Right here. For as long as they thought I needed help to be safe.

I laid back and went to sleep.

I woke up to the baby crying and the social worker right there, next to me.

Days passed.

The hospital helped me make a plan. They told me I was probably not safe to be alone with the baby for at least a month.

I used a credit card to pay a nanny agency to be in the house all the time while my husband took my other son to 40 hours of therapy a week. This was not a good time in our lives. Our credit never recovered.

Here’s how this matters for your resume:

Ask me if I went to the mental ward. Is the answer yes or no?

I could say no. That would be, technically true. But the answer you are looking for really would be the answer to the question: did you ever have a breakdown that required serious help at the hospital level? And the answer to that would be yes.  So I could answer yes or no to that question, and both answers would be true. It would be hard to call me a liar either way.

So it’s fair that I give the answer that is best for me in the situation I’m in. Life is messy and it is not black and white. There is no single, correct story about your life. Because each moment, in each person’s life, has multiple versions, all true.

The biggest problem people have when they are changing careers, or moving up the ladder, or re-entering the workforce, is that they cannot imagine telling a completely different story about themselves than they have been telling for the last ten years.

Did you know that my resume can tell the story of me as a writer or me as an operations genius? I don’t like operations, but if I had to get a job in operations, I could write my resume to indicate that operations has been my focus for the last fifteen years. And I wouldn’t have any lies on my resume. I’d just frame the truth in a different way.

The Farmer learned this quickly, when I started writing about him. He was engaged to a mail-order bride, he was basically living at his parents, he was lost and sad and anxious.

When I wrote the first few stories about  him, he got nervous. He told me, "I don't want people to get the wrong idea.” And then he dumped me.

But the truth is that all stories are the wrong idea. Because every summary of every part of your life could be a totally different summary as well. And be equally true.

We got back together, of course. And people ask me how the Farmer can cope with me writing everything about our life. They ask how he can cope with no privacy. But he has tons of privacy. He has his own story of our life that is true for him, and that is private for him. He doesn’t ever think I lie on my blog. He thinks I tell my story — in the words and the pictures.

So here is a five-step resume plan for you to take control of your story:

1.     Figure out where you want to be in your career right now, this moment.

2.     Look back on all of your life and pull out the tidbits of your life that somehow relate to what you want to be doing now.

3.     Get rid of everything on your resume that does not relate to what you want to do now.

4.     Make a story that explains the way you got from one moment to the next moment in your life where you were doing what you want to be doing now.

5.     Once you can tell the story verbally, have a resume writer help you build a resume that tells that story in resume format in a compelling way.

The most important thing about a career is that it is a tool to create a vibrant future. Your career is a mutable, dynamic story that you control. If you cannot tell stories about yourself from multiple angles, then the single story you have on that paper controls the rest of your life. You deserve more than that.

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 I really admire about her is that she quits a job as soon as she knows it’s not the right fit for her long term.

1. Keep rewriting your story so that it makes sense.
I don’t think I’ve ever told you that Melissa worked at Ogilvy in NYC. Her stint was less than a year, but long enough for her to become an search marketing genius. Not that she’s doing anything with that knowledge.

“It’s interesting to know,” she told me. “And everyone should live in NYC once in their life. For as long as they can stand it.”

She took a finance job in Hong Kong and retooled her resume to tell a new story: Her developer resume showed a child prodigy programmer becoming an Ogilvy SEO queen. But she changed it to a sales resume where she is an Ogilvy account management and moves seamlessly into hedge fund sales. It’s all true. But good storytelling on a resume requires selective shifts in focus for each job description.

2. Do two jobs at once to hide a job that is death to a resume.
Then Melissa quit her private equity job in Hong Kong with tons of tax-free money in her bank account and fled the finance industry to become a nanny in Milan.

It seemed like a great job. There’s one kid in the family. He’s nine years old and he’s in school (the British school) until 3pm. For this, Melissa was earning the equivalent of US$100,000 per year. Here’s the area where she was living:

The idea was that she’d hang out in Milan for a year, but she’d also do some sort of official launch of a career coaching business where she helps me put a lot of my individual career coaching online so that I can do more coaching over the phone. And then, I told her, she could drop the nanny job from her resume and say she spent the year building a coaching business. Her resume will look fine.

3. Leave when things get bad. A good resume is not worth a bad year of work.
You’ll notice, though, that we never got to the career coaching part.

It turns out that the family is one of the most wealthy in all of Europe. The boy’s father inherited a luxury brand that I am not going to name because I’m going to tell you that his kid is a monster.

But first, here’s what the job was like. The house has a live-in staff of 35 people, plus security, which was important because the dad has the only complete record of a famous recipe. In his head.

At first Melissa thought her job was to take care of the kid. Then it seemed like maybe Melissa’s job was to speak English at dinner so everyone’s English stayed good. But really, only the dad talked with Melissa. About business. And she found herself researching topics in the day to talk to him about at night.

When the dad was gone on a business trip, it seemed like Melissa’s job was to take care of the mom, who has never worked outside the home and does not appear to have any duties inside the home. So, for example, when the family went to the weekend house in Switzerland, the dad and the boy rode together in one limo and the mom and Melissa rode together in a second limo.

The first problem was that the job was insanely boring. Dinner discussions with the dad were interesting. But in general, the assumption at this house is that the life of the super rich is so interesting that it makes intellectual stimulation unnecessary. People spend their lives on the compound, raising their children there, exchanging their own lives for the glow of the household-palace they serve.

Melissa said, “I had too privileged a childhood to think this life is interesting enough to stay.”

Melissa quit.

The father was horrified. The father told the agency Melissa is the perfect candidate.

I told her forget it. Just leave. But Melissa felt bad quitting. She wants to be someone who sticks with something. So she agreed to stay on.

4. Once your instincts tell you to quit, don’t second-guess yourself.
Melissa’s job was to be on call for the boy, but he had no rules. He has been raised by nannies. His English was impeccable, including a wide range of swear words and personal insults he used on Melissa in front of the parents. Melissa told the nanny agency there were problems. The nanny agency said they had already recommended to the mom that she take a break from nannies and try parenting.

Melissa negotiated a month of extra vacation, which she had to fit in between accompanying the family on vacations to Bermuda, Capri, and the French Alps.

Then the boy, who maybe sensed the idea of a nanny quitting after only three weeks, went on full attack. He clubbed her with a croquet mallet, swore at her in impeccable English, and stole her iPad when his ran out of power.

Melissa told the mom, “He just told me to fuck off.”

The mom said, “Alors!” and shuffled into the boy's bedroom. “Honey," she said, "please don’t use that language. It’s not nice.”

The boy growled at Melissa.

The mom walked away.

Melissa quit again. Probably ten minutes before she was going to fall in love with the dad.

Which would have made for a great story. But fortunately, the story gets good because she had nowhere to go. She called me from the café down the street from the house because she gets no cell phone reception at the palace.

5. Cover up periods in your resume when you are flailing.
I tell her she could come to my house. I loved when she was here last time.

She said it would look bad on her resume.

I told her she could say that she was working for me. She could make it look like she was looking for a job instead of failing at a job in Italy, and I am the job she found.

I told her I was starting a company. She could put it on her resume.

She was concerned. “Goats? You want me to put goats on my resume?”

“Say agri-business. That’s a good city-girl word.”

She’s wasn’t convinced at first. “I don’t know anything about goats.”

“It’s just like any other startup. Startups are formulas. Whatever the product arena is, you go through the same stages of being lost and running out of money and having a marketing plan that doesn’t work.”

6. You have to take so many risks to find out where you fit. Mitigate other risks wherever you can.
Melissa says she can’t work at a company that’s not funded. She can’t run out of money.

I tell her I’m funded.

She says okay.

I tell her I’m not funded enough to pay her a salary. But anyway, there’s nothing to buy on the farm. You don’t need money.

She says, “How about if I fund the company? I can invest the $15,000 I saved in Hong Kong. Then it’s okay if I don’t know that much about goats. I’ll still own a portion of the company.”

So great. I have two investors and a company and a good friend living with me.

We decide this on Tuesday. On Wednesday she flies to Madison. It takes her almost 24 hours to get here, which gives me time to ask the Farmer if Melissa can live with us again.

“How is she going to earn money?” he asks.

“She’s working at my new company.”

“What’s she going to do?”

My kids overhear; they scream in glee. “Melissa’s coming. Melissa’s coming!—I get her iPad first—No, it was my turn last time she was here!—Let’s decorate her room—How long will she stay with us?”

“Yeah,” the Farmer says, “How long will she stay?”

1. Make up a project for yourself
You don’t need to be paid in order to put something on your resume. A resume is about experience, not income. So invent projects for yourself, and do them, and make sure you execute exactly what you need in order to put a bullet on your resume. For example, if you need to be able to say you executed national campaigns, then do one.

Jessica Goodman is a great example of this. She just graduated from the University of Denver and she’s looking for a job in public relations or marketing. Inevitably, the job she lands will involve social media. Because that’s where both industries are headed.

In the meantime, Jessica created a project for herself that showed her college counseling office why they should be teaching students how to job hunt with social media. (And she wrote a blog post about it.) This is a great project because whether or not the college does anything with it, Jessica conceived and executed a project to promote an organization-wide adoption of social media tools.

2. Work for free
You don’t need permission to get the experience you need to get the job you want. And you don’t need to be paid to do every piece of work. It’s true that if you work for free all the time, people will not value your work. And you’ll have to marry very rich, or starve. But work for free sometimes, when you can gain important experience that you can leverage to get high paying work.

The way I got a nationally syndicated column was to write my column for free for two years. That’s right. Every week for two years. And the way I got my first online marketing job was to nag my boyfriend for weeks and weeks until he let me do a marketing project for his company for free. (I did it for a project that involved U2, and I swear, that was my golden bullet for five years of interviews. Who doesn’t like to talk about U2?)

3. Use other peoples’ resumes to build yours
If you aim high – to jump a few levels in your field, or to switch fields but skip the entry level – then it’s sometimes hard to conceive of what a resume should look like for those jobs. The best way to make sure you have the right resume is to find people online who have already had the job you want. Look at their resume. Look at the bullet points they’ve collected.

Then transfer those bullets to your resume and start figuring out how to make them true for you. It’s focused skill-building and it’s very smart – you gain the exact experience you need to get the job you want. So much of what we accomplish at work is not relevant to the next job we want. It’s hard to control what you do in your job (but you should try). However, you can control the work you do for free. So start with the bullet you want to write for that work, and then maneuver yourself backwards into the work.

4. You don’t have to do everything perfectly, just try
It’s very hard to do something outside of what you know you're good at. Usually, the first time is extremely difficult, which is why I suggest you do it for free. Give yourself freedom to execute on a plan to get that special bullet on your resume even if the execution is not great. Perfection is totally overrated, and just having the guts to make an effort is totally underrated.

The first speech I ever gave was at a business school. It was a disaster. I thought it was supposed to be ten minutes and it was slated for fifty minutes. The speech sucked. But when it came time to write the bullet, I could say that I “give speeches at business schools.” This opened the door for me to give speeches at lots of schools. (And, good news, they have all gone really well since then. Here’s one.)

5. Have patience
You will need at least a few months to envision the resume that will land you the job you want, and then gather the bullets you need for that. It requires planning, and commitment, and a leap of faith – in yourself.

But really, all three of those characteristics make a great employee, so maybe that will be a bullet for your resume, too.

But some of you will be able to do a decent job rewriting your resume on your own. The first thing you'll have to do is make some mental shifts. You need to rethink the goals of a resume, and rethink the rules of a resume in order to approach the project like the best of the resume professionals.

Here are three ideas that guide professional resume writers and should guide you as well:

1. Don't focus on your responsibilities, focus on what you achieved.
A resume is not your life story. No one cares. If your life story were so interesting, you'd have a book deal. The only things that should be on your resume are achievements. Anyone can do their job, but only a small percentage of the population can do their job well, wherever they go.

The best way to show that you did your job well is from achievements. The best achievement is a promotion.It is an objective way to show that you impressed the people you work for. The next best way to show objective measures is to present quantified achievements.

Most people do not think in terms of quantified achievements when they are in the job, but on the resume, that's the only part of the job that matters. No one can see that you were a "good team player" on your resume unless you can say "established a team to solve problem x and increased sales x%" or "joined under-performing team and helped that team beat production delivery dates by three weeks."

If you are only putting achievements on your resume, you are going to be hard-pressed to fill a whole page. That's okay. Anything on your resume that is not an achievement is wasting space. Because you don't know what a hiring manager will look at first—and if you have ten good achievements and three mediocre lines about your life story, the hiring manager may only read those three lines—so remove them.

2. Don't make your resume a moral statement; it's a marketing document.
Think about when a company announced the launch of their product. First of all, the product is not done. Second of all, it has bugs. And third, the company is probably showing photos of prototypes and the real thing will look different.

All this stuff is fine. It's accepted practice for marketing. The company will tell you that they are doing their best to get you the information you want in the way they think is best for letting you know what your consumer options are.

You need to take the same approach with your resume, because a resume is a marketing document. The best marketing documents show the product in the very best light, which means using whatever most outrageous tactics possible to make you look good. As long as you are not lying, you will be fine.

Here's an example: You join a software company that just launched a product and the product had so many problems that they had to hire someone to handle the calls. You start doing the tech support, and you work tons of overtime because the calls are so backed up. You clean up the phone queue and then you start taking long lunches because there's not a lot to do, and then you start job hunting because the job is boring.

Here's how you summarize this job on your resume: Assumed management responsibility for tech support and decreased call volume 20%.

How do you know 20%? Who knows? It was probably more. But you can't quantify exactly, so err on the safe side. But if you just say "Did tech support for a software company" no one knows you did a good job.

There is a fine art of almost-lying-but-not-lying on a resume. You need to talk about it a lot in order to know where you fall on the spectrum. Here is a sample of my own family discussions about what is lying and what isn't.

3. Don't give everything away in the resume.
The idea of a resume is to get someone to call you. Talk with you on the phone. Offer you an interview. So a resume is like a first date. You only show your best stuff and you don't show it all.

Some people dump everything they can think of onto their resume, but a resume is not the only chance you'll have to sell yourself. In fact the interview is where the hard-core selling takes place. So you only put your very best achievements on the resume. Sure, there will be other questions people will want answers to, but that will make them call you. And that's good, right?

For those of you who can't bear to take off the twenty extra lines on your resume because you think the interviewer has to see every single thing about you right away, consider that we have statistics to show that people don't want to know everything up front. It does not make for a good match. Of people who got married, only 3% had sex on the first date.

Need help with your resume? Want to talk to Penelope directly? Penelope now offers 1 on 1 career coaching and can help you take the right path.

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 rather, a story. And the way we tell stories about ourselves really reveals who we are, but it's very hard to craft a story about our work when we are so close to the details day in and day out.  

Stories are powerful. If you have a coherent story of yourself, then your resume reads like an organized plan. If you have no idea what your story is, your resume reads like a disjointed list. The most effective resumes show a timeline of progression in your life in a way that creates a story that will stick in the reader's mind.

It's hard to sift through all the resume writers and figure out who is good. So people ask me all the time for the name of the company I used. The problem is, that company is no longer in business.

However a bunch of the people from that company continue to do the resume work as freelancers. And one of them, Elaine Basham will rewrite two peoples' resumes for free this week.

If you want to have Elaine take a crack at your resume, send a three-sentence email to me by March 25 that says what is wrong with your resume now, and what you want to accomplish with a new resume. Elaine will pick the two people who are most able to benefit from her service.

For those of you who don't end up working with Elaine, you might end up having to write your resume yourself, so here are some of the most common mistakes.

If you think you can write your own resume, you're in sixth grade. A resume is a complicated sales document and also a piece of direct mail. You know who runs to the resume writers the fastest? The people who write direct mail, becuase they understand the intricacies of resumes, just like a fashionista understands the intricacies of bangs – enough to know they can't do it themselves. Other big customers of resume writers are career coaches — because they see so many terrible resumes from otherwise very impressive people and the coaches don't want to fall into that category themselves.

Please stop telling me that resume writers are too expensive. Sometimes I hear prices from resume writers and I think, who would trust their resume in the hands of someone who is so cheap? You should be looking for an expensive resume writer. Your resume, more than most things you buy, can earn it's costs back ten times over.

Think of it this way: An effective resume doesn't just get you a job. It gets you the job you want. A good resume writer can help you reposition yourself to shift careers, or make you look more high level than you have been in the past. Many good resume writers can also help you to talk about your resume in a way that will allow you to turn an interview into a job.

How can you deny this to yourself? And, by the way, don't use your haircut money to pay for the resume. You need both.

Need help writing a great resume? Want to talk to Penelope directly? Penelope now offers 1 on 1 career coaching and can help you take the right path.

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 a secret. But the White House sent the letter back because it had a typo. I wish the lesson here were that you always get a second chance. But no one will give your resume back to you to fix. So instead the lesson is that everyone makes typos. It's human.

It is near impossible to not have a typo in a resume at some point because we've all read our resume five hundred times, and it's ineffective to proofread something you've reread so much. On top of that, job hunting is often a repetitive, boring task, so it's no surprise that people copy and paste and put the wrong employer name in the salutation all the time.

So there's nothing you can do to fix a typo if the resume is sent. You look bad resending a resume to a hiring manager and saying "I had a typo in my resume." Most likely the person won't notice the typo anyway unless it is in his name. Even if you are applying for a proofreader job, it's not going to help to resend the resume. The job of a proofreader is to catch the error before he hits send.

A lot of polls say recruiters will dump a resume in the garbage if there's one typo. I don't believe it. First, all typos are not equal. But also, a sales person with a typo is different than a technical writer with a typo. While a technical writer should be detail-oriented, the skills that make a good sales person don't necessarily make a good proofreader.

So if you send a resume with a typo, hope the recruiter doesn't notice, and try not to do it again. Move on.

But you should consider hiring a resume writing service to write your resume. You can trust a top company to not have a typo. There are a million reasons to hire someone to help you with your resume. It's a very important document and it's very hard to write yourself because you're too close to the information on many levels, not just in terms of spelling.

That said, I hired a top resume writing company and then later made some changes in my resume and, of course, sent it out a couple of times with typos. Maybe it was a good thing, though. Because to be honest, if anyone ever hired me for being detail-oriented, they would be disappointed. It's important to know your strengths. I know who to hire to compensate for my shortcomings. And now, years later, I know not to mess with what those experts come up with.

The best way to encourage recruiters to call you is to understand how they do their job. So I talked to a few recruiters and came up with five things you can do to look attractive to recruiters.

1. Post to sites with good search tools.
Recruiters like to visit sites that aggregate resumes and offer specific search criteria, says recruiter Matt Millunchick. Blogs are difficult to search but social networking sites like MySpace and LinkedIn facilitate keyword searches. Be sure to fill in profiles thoroughly on these sites so that your resume matches more searches.

2. Choose your friends carefully, and then monitor them.
Recruiters will put up with a little quirkiness in an online profile but don't worry only about what you post yourself: "Be careful about what photos of you are available and what and your friends post about you," warns Millunchick. Recruiters will find everything. Recruiter Mark Jaffe told me he has a full-time employee with a master's degree who researches candidates. "The two of us work like the FBI looking at persons on interest.

3. Be a thought leader.
Recruiters use Google to find the articles you've published, says Millunchick. So write some. Many sites are eager to get well-written content for free. If you feel totally lost in the article-writing world, Article Marketing Niche Blog can show you how to do it.

4. Use the scientific method.
The importance of keywords on your resume cannot be overestimated. John Sullivan, recruiting advisor and professor of management at San Francisco State University, told me that he advises his students to post three different resumes in an online database and see which receives the most responses. This is a way to continually hone the keyword effectiveness of your resume.

5. Do great work at the job you have.
The higher up you get, the less likely it is that a recruiter will troll the Internet. Jaffe told me he relies on word of mouth to find senior executives. "We follow candidates like my sixteen-year-old son follows all the details of baseball players. We look at minor leaguers, we look at who's coming up, and we track people who we see as nascent superstars."

He adds, "If you're doing a really, really good job at work, we'll find you. Once you try to get our attention you are turning that dangerous corner where you start looking like a used car salesman in gold chains."

1. Big job sites cater to keyword-focused applicants.
Only three to five percent of job seekers find employment through online job sites. In order to be one of this small percent, you need to tailor your resume to keyword searches. "Sending a resume to a big company's web site is like sending your resume into a black hole," says John Sullivan, human resources consultant and professor of management at San Francisco State University. "In a big company, your resume is sorted by an applicant tracking system."

These companies receive thousands of resumes a month and the tracking system sorts them by skill. Sullivan tells of a study where researchers took a job opening and wrote 100 perfect resumes for that opening. Then the researchers added 10% more information to the resumes. Of those resumes, only 12% were picked up by the tracking system as qualified. This means that even if you are the perfect candidate, if you submit your resume blindly to a large company, there is almost a 90% chance that no human will ever see your resume.

But you can increase your chances by knowing how to use keywords in your resume. "Recruiters locate individuals based on a certain skill set of the job they are looking to fill," says recruiting advisor Matt Millunchick. So try to imagine how someone else would use a search box to find you, and be very specific about your skills.

These rules remain true if you post your resume to an online database also. The mass of resumes on job sites is so unruly that human resource staffs are paying people in India $20 an hour to sort through resumes to find the good ones, according to David Hanley, owner of recruitn.com. So, even in this case, keywords are your best friend.

2. Don't depend on your resume.
The typical resume is linear which makes people without linear careers look like a mess. The resume highlights work gaps in a negative way and leaves little space for achievements and experiences that did not somehow contribute to corporate life.

"The marketplace is changing and the life experience that informs the work that people do is changing," says Anne Burdick, information designer and professor at Art Center College of Design. The static, linear resume is not an effective way to convey this new experience, so don't lead with it.

Dana Zemack, a publicist, got an agency job by abandoning the conventional resume: She wrote a letter to the agency about how she had been throwing large, elaborate chocolate tasting parties and charging admission. Zemack explained that at first, she publicized the parties to make sure she'd make enough money to pay for the party. But then she realized that she had talent as both a party planner and a publicist, so she started planning bigger and bigger parties. "I used my own endeavors as an experiment to see how far I could go as a publicist," she wrote. On a second page, she listed the publicity she was able to generate for the parties.

It worked. She got the job. Which leads to tip number three:

3. Go local. Smaller companies posting on smaller job sites look for employees who may not have a resume optimized for a computer screening. This is how Zemack found her job.

Another way to go small is to join professional groups on MySpace. These are people who will know where jobs are. Also, Millunchick says recruiters search through these groups for marketing and technical people.

4. Focus on the referral.
Eighty percent of available jobs are not posted on job boards. But people who work at companies know what positions are available. And employers love referrals, because referral employees have such low turnover.

In fact, many companies pay employees tens of thousands of dollars for a successful referral. Pander to that carrot system by offering yourself up to an employee at one of those companies.

Find people to refer you by looking on sites such as MySpace, Friendster and LinkedIn. Do keyword searches to see if your friends of friends have jobs at companies that interest you.

Offline networking works, too. It's just slower. There is no keyword search when you walk into a party. But once you've made the acquaintance, you can Google the person to find their connections.

5. Stalk your dream job. If you know your dream job but you have no connections, identify someone you want to talk to within a company and use the Internet to get in touch with them: Find an email address, phone number, a conference your target is speaking at. Then ask for an informational interview.

You are far more likely to get a job from an informational interview than from blindly sending resumes. Most people will be flattered by your request and will give you some of their time. Remember an informational interview is not when you ask for a job. But often, if you make a good impression, the person will help you get a job.

6. Make your own job.
Zemack's career really took off when she created a job for herself: throwing chocolate tasting parties. She is still genuinely touched by each person who turned out for those early parties where she bet her credit rating on herself. And in the end, she discovered something that is not a new rule at all: That believing in yourself and creating avenues for your own success attracts a magnificent network of supporters.

On top of that, most people aspire to the kinds of jobs where you are thinking about the job in the back of your mind all the time because it's interesting to you and you're passionate about it. So the only way to get a real vacation at most companies is to quit.

The New York Times ran a piece yesterday called A Life Between Jobs, which describes this trend as pretty much mainstream among Gen X and Gen Y: "Generations before them, studies have shown, valued tenure and career advancement. But this group sees the chutes in the world as interesting as the ladders."

The best scenario, of course, is to quit and have another job lined up, because the stress of having to find another job puts a damper on the in-between-job vacation. But still, as long as you're not in financial trouble, you can enjoy the time even without another job lined up as long as you trust yourself to get a job eventually. Which you should, because we are in a good economy for job-hunting right now.

Question the authority of anyone who tells you that this is a bad idea. There was a quote in the New York Times piece from a career advisor type about how, "Gaps in the resume are still a red flag." But they are only a red flag if you spend your time sitting at home doing nothing.

No one wants to work with a person who does nothing with their time. That's the sign of an uninterested person. But if you have gaps in your resume that you filled with fun adventures and rewarding projects then a gap in your resume is a red flag that you are balanced, interesting, and in control of your life. In this case, as long as you can explain the gaps in your cover letter, you'll probably be fine.