Top 10 Ways to Cope with Job Transition

Job transitions can be stressful—whether they’re due to layoff, a new job or working extra hours because others workers were laid off. If you’re facing one, consider the following.

1. Take an honest look at yourself. What are your strengths, weaknesses, skills? How did those influence—positively or negatively—your transition?

2. Step up your self-care. Major changes are physically and emotionally taxing. You need self-care now more than ever.

3. Engage your curiosity. What went wrong, or right? What could you have done better? What worked really well?

4. Focus on what you want, and less on what you don’t want. Keep your eye on the prize.

5. Find support. Since your transition affects your family as well, it may be better to seek the outside support of friends or professionals.

6. Work on your thoughts. Calm your fears and reinforce your sense of hope and happiness.

7. Reassure (or avoid) those who are threatened by, or jealous of, the change.

8. Create your own rite of passage. Ceremony and ritual help with all transitions.

9. Let go of how things were “supposed to be” and accept “how things are.” Find appreciation for what is.

10. Keep things in perspective. Or try on a new perspective. Don’t get stuck. Remember, the only constant is change.

A good site for job hunters

For all the job hunters out there, in Canada United States,  - I wanted to share a site that Lynne found and passed on to us http://www.glassdoor.com/

 If you type in your city, you can then look for a job from the exact location to a range of 100 miles. I did a search for my town, Port Coquitlam and the site showed 76 jobs. I did a search within 10 Kilometers and it showed a total of 168 jobs posted within the last seven days. Each employer can be viewed for details about what it is like to work there, salary, etc. 

There are reviews by employees rating companies (as what it's like to work for them). Just use common sense when reading them, just like any other reviews (for instance, someone posted a review of a MA based restaurant chain in MI - not even close to where the restaurants are located!) I wonder when they will branch out to countries. other than Canada and the US This is a good idea as any job search should require doing background on the company one is applying.

Social Media and job hunting

Two recent articles on this subject caught my eye. The first is from Forbes Magazine and was posted August 8th, the title of the blog is Employers Look to Facebook for Job Recruits by Joe Arico. In his post Mr. Arico claims: Companies are starting to view Facebook as a legitimate option to find new employees, as LinkedIn and more traditional job boards face unexpected competition from the mammoth social network.

According to analysts, companies now drift to Facebook because the social network boasts 750 million users, many of whom are potential employees. Employers are no longer looking to spend hundreds of dollars to put up job postings on paid websites or in newspapers when they can reach millions of people for free by advertising jobs on their Facebook pages.

LinkedIn is still the dominant form of social networking for professional businesses, but more employers have found Facebook’s larger user base and more personal profile system invaluable when looking for job candidates.This is good and bad news for job seekers. The good news is that they can check out a company using Facebook. The bad news is that the company can check them out, not only their recent history but the company can look back over the last seven years of a prospective employees social network posts. That according to the second post  Infographic: 5 Ways You Can Lose a Job on Facebook By Sara Yin published n Infograpics on August 8th.   Ms. Yin states in her post that: (The links n the part of the article shared here are interesting in that it shows how companies are using this information.)

"This June, the Federal Trade Commission approved the creation of a "Social Intelligence Report" that lets private companies archive your social media activities for up to seven years, for "compliance" reasons. A human resources manager can hire consultants, like those at the Social Intelligence Corporation, to compile a report of what you've posted across all your social networks (kind of like how a landlord checks your credit score). Social Intelligence Corporation's CEO Max Drucker told Social Media Today that they generally flag four types of posts in their reports: racially insensitive remarks, sexually explicit materials, flagrant displays of weaponry, and other demonstrations of clearly illegal activity. Getting fired over Facebook for trigger-happy posts can't be all that difficult, especially if you're one of the 250 million members who access Facebook through a cell phone app.

All this is confirmed in the infographic below, created by MindFlash and based on a 2009 survey from CareerBuilder. It's a bit old, but it does remind us that Facebook screening results in more people losing jobs (or opportunities for jobs) than getting them. It also shows how much more influential the Palo Alto-based network is over other social networks, like Twitter and LinkedIn, which are notably more open. We can't wait to see this infographic eventually updated with Google+.

If you use social media, keep your settings very private if you don't want prospective or current employers to know what you are doing online.