[Career Tips] 3 Ways to Better Yourself at the Job Waiting Game

As my 7 year-old son Traylor periodically reminds me, it’s tough to wait.

This morning’s challenge was one under-ripe mango: serving it for breakfast when he was ready but it wasn’t still meant it didn’t taste so hot.

It can be just as tough to wait in the employment constellation we call jobs and careers. Sometimes you’re ready, but the job is not – and sometimes you’re not ready, but the job is.… Read the rest

[ I’ll Take Sherla ] Who Do You Hire: Generalists or Specialists?

The Twitter stream  has carried a great dialogue regarding the merits of hiring “generalists” versus “specialists” the last few days.

As someone whose “Quick Start” work with start-ups has enabled  companies to get fast, effective out of the gate performance, I have a point of view, and the experience of 25+ years in business, about when to hire – and when to avoid – either type.… Read the rest

[The Hiring Hunt] What’s The One Sure Quality Employers Want?

A recent post for would-be Chief Financial Officers on this site gives a great overview of what sort of attributes financial types who aspire to be CFOs should have.

But what about the rest of us non-CFO types? What’s the one sure thing employers want from employees and candidates?

First a caveat – the “take this with a grain of salt” advice: if you ask 100 career coaches you’ll get 100 different answers about THE skill to have.… Read the rest

[Dept. of Bad Advice] Your Brand is Not – Repeat Not – Your Elevator Pitch

I could blame my grumpy reaction to this last set of rainy days in San Francisco, but I won’t. Instead I’ll attribute to the type of “nice graphics first, let’s think about what it means later” approach that pops up every once and a while. And a case of bad career advice.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers is running something called Personal Brand Week. Their web page has a cute set of five name tags, conveniently corresponding to the five days of a traditional workweek and arranged in ascending order, foundations first.Read the rest

[Reading Tea Leaves] Candidate Job Fair Suggests Job Market Uptick

As someone who worked with a quantitative asset management firm – Barclays Global Investors –  I know the value of seeing data in terms of broad patterns. But as someone who has worked extensively with the research and development side of biotech, I’ve also learned to note signs and signals by the ones and twos. This is the latter.

BioSpace.com, the country’s leading news and jobs/career web portal for biotech / pharma is hosting a job fair on March 9th, 2010 in South San Francisco from 2-7 PM.… Read the rest