“So, tell me about yourself.”

It seems like a lost opportunity for an interviewer to waste your time — and theirs — with this open-ended chestnut that could’ve been handled beforehand.

Well, we feel the same way, so that’s why we’ve made it easy for you to “tell us about yourself” in your profile right here on TheLadders…

Employers want to save you time

It’s true! They don’t actually want to waste your valuable time — or theirs — with opportunities that are not a fit for you. We listened to employers and recruiters and it turned out, again and again, that they simply don’t know enough about you (yet) to send only their most targeted jobs.

Only you can make employers smarter

What HR departments need to make your life easier is more insight into what you are looking for in your next career move… and what you’re not looking for.

So… tell us a little about yourself. Today.

It’s awfully easy to answer — we’ve asked the question and given you the choices:

How do you feel about going to work every day?
Does your next job have to be a promotion (in title)?
If you were offered a better job in another industry, would you take it?

Because it will help us get you twice as much interest

On average, professionals like you who give us a little more information in their profiles receive 2.5 times as many connection requests.

If you tell us a little bit more about yourself today, we’ll be able to educate employers and recruiters about which jobs best match your needs. For example, if your next job should be at a large company, with a promotion in title and the responsibility for managing people, then give us those answers with just one click each and we’ll let them know!

And the best thing about receiving a connection request from a Recruiter who understands your willingness to travel, your willingness to change function, your preferred company size, and more, is that they know what’s right for you — because you told them.

OK, Readers, I hope that makes your week… telling.

I’m rooting for you!

Top Talent Pros

It’s easy to “follow” these recruiters and get instant e-mail updates when they’re hiring. Just go to “Follow Recruiter“, search for the recruiters you’re interested in, and click “follow”.

Then, whenever they have a new job or update to broadcast, you’ll hear about it first. Direct to your inbox.

Can it really be that simple?

Yep.

Sometimes simple is the easiest solution!

So go check out “Follow Recruiter” for yourself right now and get a great jump on your week…

Accenture
ADP
Amazon
Arrow Electronics
AT&T
Bank of America
Chrysler
Citi Group
CSC
DISH Network
EarthLink
Ebay
Futurestep
Garmin
Honeywell
Hewlett Packard
The Home Depot
Intel
Johnson Controls, Inc.
Kforce, Inc.
Kronos
Level 3 Communications
LivingSocial
Lockheed Martin
Logix Healthcare
Lowe’s
Macy’s
The McGraw-Hill Companies
MetLife
Microsoft
NaviSite, Inc.
NetApp
Nokia
Oracle
Paychex, Inc.
PayPal
PepsiCo
Pitney Bowes
PRI Technology
PricewaterhouseCoopers
Smith & Nephew Inc.
Sprint
Staples
Starbucks Coffee Company
Thomson Reuters
U.S. Cellular
UnitedHealth Group
Vaco
Verisign
Verizon

You might ask how that can be? With the unemployment rate still well above eight percent, and the discouraged rate even higher, how can it be that so many companies are hiring so many people?

Well, it’s two things, Readers.

First off, you have to remember that most hiring is replacement hiring. It’s not companies saying that they’re going to grow their workforce by leaps and bounds, rather, it’s companies replacing routine attrition that occurs as employees flow in and out of any organization.

Think of it this way. Even though the level in your bank account probably doesn’t change too much in a particular year, and you may be more or less happy with where it is, a lot of new dollars come into your account each year from your current job (and then go out to expenses). So the vast majority of activity in your bank account is the addition of dollars to replace the ones you’ve already spent.

Same thing in the employment market.

We may be more or less happy with the overall rate of employment or unemployment, but the changeover from new employees coming in and old employees going out is far, far greater than the change in overall level.

Yep, most hiring is replacement hiring. Which means that most companies are hiring all the time.

Second, some companies are always expanding. There are always sectors of the economy that are growing while others shrink. As an example, if your company has anything to do with Apple Inc. right now, you’re growing. Man, are you growing!

And that’s whether or not your company has anything to do whatsoever with technology. If you sell cardboard boxes to Apple, you’re growing. If you sell real estate maintenance to Apple, you’re growing. If you sell the little plastic biodegradable forks that the geniuses who design iPads use to eat their arugula salads at their gorgeous headquarters… guess what?… you’re growing.

So part of the job search is figuring out where’s the growth and where’s the shrink, and allocating your time accordingly.

With that, I’ll wish you the best of luck in your search this week, Readers!

I’ll be rooting for you!

When it gets to that part of the interview with your future boss where they ask, “well, do you have any questions for me?”, say yes, and ask:

“How do I help you get a gold star on your review next year?”

This bit of advice has helped more people in more interviews than any other bit of advice I’ve shared over the years.

Why?

Well, the interview process lends itself to our becoming self-absorbed and talking only about ourselves.

Or conversely, we become “job analysis engineers” and ask all sorts of questions about the job and reporting structure and how it fits in with the company’s five year plan and so on. I love getting questions from candidates in interviews, but I do have to admit I feel that they’re not quite getting the point of an interview if they pull out six pages of typed, single-spaced questions.

We get so obsessed with the details of the job that we forget about the work.

Working together and being a good addition to the team mean being concerned with how you are making the team successful. And that means being concerned with how much you are helping to make your boss successful.

Asking this question shows that you have empathy. It shows that you have an interest in your boss’ career and future success. It shows that you are not just a self-absorbed “what’s in it for me” kind of person. And it shows that you know you are there to “give” as much as you are there to “get”.

Subscribers like you say the interviewer’s face lights up when they ask this question. I have heard time and time again from our four-and-a-half million subscribers how effective it’s been in interviews:

It’s an easy tip to implement in your job search: it’s easy to do, easy to understand and it’s easy to measure.

So thank you, Dear Readers, for all you’ve done for me over these past nine years, and I will continue to do all I can for you, now and in the future.

Have a great 2012!

We’ll learn more about you and match you up with over 100,000 jobs — delivering you only the ones that we think make the most sense for you.

Over 15,000 employers and recruiters use TheLadders to find employees, and you can sign up to hear from them directly when they have new jobs or new information.

How you present yourself to your new boss is important. We’ll have a CPRW (Certified Professional Resume Writer) re-write your resume for you.

We’ve written hundreds of articles on the job search on topics such as: working with recruiters, networking, interviewing, anxiety & depression in the job search, and personal branding. They’re all free and can be a big help in figuring out the sometimes dizzying world of a job search.

And if you’d like to get guaranteed results, sign up with Signature to get a 1-on-1 Career Advisor to help your through every step of your job search and land an offer.

Well, here’s to making 2012 a great year for you, your new boss, and all of us!

We’ve been developing our Twitter presence for a couple years now, and what we’ve discovered is that you love to be kept up-to-date, intrigued, and informed on the latest in careers and job search.

So a few times a day, every day, we’ll tweet the most interesting or compelling items we’ve found that day.

During the month of December, that’s included:
Our Thank-You Note Quiz
For Better or for Worse — How to Help Your Partner Through the Job Hunt
Did a co-worker friend you on Facebook? Read this before accepting
Meet our staff & find out why we say: Your career is our job™ [vid]
An Introvert’s Guide to Resume Self-Promotion

For these, and a lot, lot more, you should follow me and my colleagues on Twitter here.

So during this week of returning gifts, preparing for the future, and hauling a lighter load at the office, take some time to catch up on our tweets, and we’ll all be ready for a great new year!

Signature is TheLadders’ most effective job matching program because we guarantee you’ll get an offer when you work with your Career Advisor during our six-month program…

When you enroll you will be assigned a dedicated Career Advisor who is a Certified Professional Career Coach. This 1-on-1 approach allows your Advisor to get to know your background, preferences, needs and goals so they can prepare and coach you expressly for your situation.

We have a 10-step roadmap to guide you through the job search. It includes everything from defining your job goals and understanding your challenges, to crafting your elevator pitch, to having a CPRW (Certified Professional Resume Writer) re-write your resume, to preparing for interviews, and more.

We take a scientific approach to the job search. We conducted comprehensive research to develop “Signature” and the program went through over a year of testing before launching Signature publicly earlier this year.

One example: Many people waste time applying for jobs that are not consistent with their skill set. Your Career Advisor will work with you to assess every opportunity, ensuring you only invest your time on “well-fitted” jobs. Well-fitted jobs match your knowledge and previous experience in 3 to 5 of these criteria: location, industry, function, skill set, network contacts.

By advising you throughout the process on how to best target your time, we can dramatically reduce the 15 to 30 hours per week that an independent job search can take.

And the most compelling part of Signature is that we guarantee you’ll get a job offer that’s right for you.

Sign up for Signature here and get yourself on the path to a new job in 2012!

Have a great, and restful, week, Readers.

Or should I say guten Morgen? Buenos días? Or nín hǎo?

I had a great interview with Elcio Barcelos, VP, Global Staffing at HP, this past week about hiring, what they’re looking for in new employees, and the global possibilities that Hewlett-Packard offers to professionals.

If you’re looking to be a global professional in technology, then HP is the place for you. What does that mean? I’ll let Elcio spell it out:

Marc Cenedella: Why HP?

Elcio Barcelos: We do business in over 100 countries across the globe and recruited in 90 of them last year. We made thousands of hires across the globe and this is truly a global organization.

That creates a breadth — a broad base of career opportunities across the globe in consumer, enterprise, government, etc. Multiple businesses, multiple units, multiple geographies. You can spend decades of your career here and rotate through so many different functions and areas.

It’s almost like going from start-up to start-up to start-up but with the security blanket, if you will, of being part of the leading IT organization.

MC: You know, fifty years ago, it used to be that you joined a company out of college and retired with the same company fifty years later. How has that changed for HP?

EB: Even as recently as the late 80s / early 90s you could expect that you might be getting out of college, joining a company and retiring with a gold watch. We’re not there anymore. Not as an economy, not as a country, not as a company.

And I think that’s a good thing.

It’s not about “retaining” employees at HP, it’s “how do we re-recruit you?” We all get that itch; we all feel “it’s time for me to grow”; and you can’t just put handcuffs on people.

So we have to ask ourselves, how do we make sure we’re your number one pick each and every time you’re making a career decision? How do we provide that opportunity for growth?

The aspirational view is that we have to create an environment to enable the HP employee to look and find opportunities within.

We’ve given access to our recruiters to reach out internally in the same way we reach out externally. We’ve enabled them to say, “I placed you two years ago, now what can you do next?”

We’ve recently started hosting virtual career fairs — and by leveraging technology, we’ve successfully made new hires from our existing staff in different areas.

MC: That is really fantastic. A lot of companies have tried that and it’s interesting that you’ve had success with the virtual career fairs. Congratulations! So… when did you join HP?

EB: About 2½ years ago.

MC: Why did you choose HP?

EB: When I got tapped on the shoulder, it was about the global footprint and the opportunity that comes with that.

I also liked that we’re a culture of working managers. At HP, if you’re a leader, your sleeves are rolled up, and you’re working.

While the technology industry in general is very much focused on the engineer and the collaborative work that comes with it, we make sure that’s part of our management culture as well.

Where HP is really different is that we’re stable, we’re broad, and we’re global. We’re not very hierarchical — we listen from the bottom up. We’ve built the successful blogs and forums and mailboxes that provide feedback from the bottom up.

MC: What’s different about HP? If I worked at another global IT firm and came to HP, what would I tell my family and friends is different about the day-to-day experience?

EB: We’re a collaborative environment that doesn’t get stuck on excessive consensus.

Considering the complexity of the business, we can’t operate without being collaborative, and you’ll feel that from Day One. But we don’t get stuck on consensus.

It’s not a democracy. When decisions get made, teams buy in and we move forward. We don’t get stuck here, and things need to move at a fast pace.

So I’d say the culture is very fast and collaborative.

MC: There have been changes at the top at HP. How should people think about that when considering HP?

EB: We’ve had changes, no doubt. Part of that is the economic environment, but the important thing to remember is that this is not a one-person show, this is a 320,000-person team.

We work tightly together: The front-line team, the engineers behind the teams, all of us are focused more and more each day on the client experience. And the experience with HP is quite positive.

While there’s a perception at times that all our activity is overseas — and we are hiring all over the globe — the U.S. is a cornerstone. Our headquarters are in Silicon Valley, we matter to Silicon Valley, we matter to California, we matter to the U.S. And the U.S. represents so much for us.

And this is a great place if you want to come and expand beyond the U.S.

MC: What positions are you hiring?

EB: Across the board, but over the past 12 months we’ve invested significantly in sales engineers, software engineers, and sales overall. Security [as a business line] has also seen tremendous growth.

MC: Well, thanks so much for joining us and sharing your thoughts with our five million members!

EB: Thank you for having me.

——

You know, Readers, I think Elcio, and HP, are really right. This old world is only getting smaller, and if you’re looking to build a career these days, you need to know how to do business not just in Scranton and San Antonio, but also in Singapore and St. Petersburg.

And making your home in a global company like HP is a great way to get that experience with developing overseas markets and overseas businesses.

To get connected with HP, you can:

See HP jobs on TheLadders here.

And connect with some of their HR people here to get updates on jobs that might be relevant for you: Esmeralda Zarate, Antoinette Tap and Mary Fuller.

I hope you have your own HP week of “High Possibilities”, Readers!

If you’re looking for success in 2012, it’s important that you get your resume in order, and I’d like for TheLadders to help you with your success.

Sign up now to get your free resume critique, or your full resume re-written for $395.

You see, shortly after I started writing this newsletter eight years ago, readers like you started writing in and asking for help with their resumes. So we’ve been re-writing resumes for almost a decade.

Nowadays, we re-write over 10,000 resumes each year. That expertise helps us understand what’s important and what’s not. It’s helped us learn over time what’s more effective with employers and recruiters.

And it’s helped us figure out what not to do.

Because, actually, the art of writing a resume is figuring out what not to put in, so the most important parts can stand out.

Because of our expertise, we’re able to offer the very attractive price of $395 for a resume written by a CPRW (Certified Professional Resume Writer) selected and screened by TheLadders. What’s more, we assign you a writer for you based on your industry and background.

So if you’d like to get a new resume ready for the new year, click here to get started on putting your best foot forward in 2012.

You don’t make your own clothes, do your own taxes, write your own will, or film your own daughter’s wedding yourself. Why? Because these are special situations where making sure you get it right is very important and you want everything to be done by a professional who’s done it before.

A resume matters. I know, I know, particularly my friends in technology and law and engineering and the sciences will tell me how much more important experience and accomplishments and results matter than how something looks on a page. And that’s true.

But if you’ve buried your success under all that nonsense about titles and promotions and teeny tiny details so that the communication of what you’re really about gets buried, it doesn’t matter that you’re a fantastic professional. Nobody will ever get a chance to find out.

When you drone on and on in your resume about “hired to be…” or “managed…” or “promoted to…” or “responsible for…” you’re boring the audience and losing their attention. I know your background and success are very important and impressive to you.

They’re also very important and impressive to me.

But if you’re not advertising yourself correctly, the HR person who is not an expert in your field, or the general manager who isn’t as familiar with the details of your area of expertise, isn’t going to know what to use you for, and so isn’t going to pick up the phone and call you.

Hey, if everybody out there understood everything about everything, we wouldn’t need advertising and we wouldn’t need resumes.

But the plain fact is, we do. And it’s important that you get it right.

So if you’re looking for somebody to help you avoid mistakes, sidestep embarrassment, and help you figure out what not to do with your resume, please visit our resume services page here to get your free critique or your resume re-written.

Have a great week!

“I can’t get candidates on the phone. I can’t get candidates in for interviews. I can’t even get a response.”

We hear it from Fortune 1000 recruiters, HR departments, executive search firms and agencies. We even hear it from our own recruiters at TheLadders!

And I suppose it’s a very good explanation that, of course, at the end of the year, with all the holiday parties, end-of-the-year budgeting exercises, and vacation planning going on, professionals can find themselves with too much to do and not enough time on their hands to be responsive to the companies looking to hire them.

But my advice is…

Don’t let this happen to you.

Candidates, i.e., your competition, get very distracted during the holidays with all the family and friends and festivities to enjoy.

Turn this to your advantage.

Rather than allowing your holiday schedule to get in the way of your search, double down and make an extra effort to be proactive this December.

You see, for every candidate who misses a phone call, an interview, a job opportunity, there’s a frustrated recruiter on the other side. And if you can be that golden ticket — the responsive candidate who makes life easier for the recruiter or HR department — you’ll be that much more likely to land a gig before the end of the year.

Companies’ needs for professionals don’t slow down during the holidays. Recruiting budgets don’t shrink in December — if anything, there’s actually a push to get headcount in before the annual budget expires. And HR people and recruiters are still coming to work full-time every day and need to keep performing for their clients and hiring managers.

Make their lives easy and they’ll make your job search come to an end more quickly. Return their call the same day. Work hard to juggle your schedule to make it convenient for them to interview you. Follow up with your thank you notes the same day.

If your competition is half as responsive, and you’re doubly as active as normal, you’ll be four times more likely to get the interview, get the offer, get the job!

I know it’s a challenge during the holiday season, but the best gift you can give yourself and your family is a new position that sees you happy, productive, and content in the New Year.

Good luck with your search this December, Readers!

I’ll be doubling my rooting for you!