A little while back, NFL running back Larry Johnson got in trouble for his comments on Twitter. Apparently, he used some homophobic language during an exchange with a fan and got himself suspended by the team (pending an investigation).

Now that the investigation is over, the results are in and Larry Johnson got released. Even though he is a Pro-Bowl caliber player, the Kansas City Chiefs let him go. This says a lot about how your activity online can negatively impact your career.

Eventually, Larry Johnson will land on his feet. Everybody does. But if you can take anything away from this, know that no matter how talented you are, no one is immune from issues stemming from online stupidity. Be careful about what you say on social networks lest it come back to haunt you!

The following is a guest post from Vaughan Evans courtesy of Recruiting Blogswap.

One-half of US employees are dissatisfied with their jobs, up from two-fifths 10 years ago. Are you one of them?

If you are seriously dissatisfied, it’s going to affect your attitude. And that may show up in your performance. It could also put you at risk of losing out to others who are more satisfied with what they do.

But are you really in the wrong job or business? Or is it just a case of the grass being greener on the other side of the fence? Are you dissatisfied or unfulfilled for little or no reason? How can you tell?

Here are some steps to help you figure out if you’re in the right job.

Think of yourself as a business. Would you back yourself? Would you invest in You, Inc? If the answer is no, you’re in the wrong job. To invest in a business, or in this case, in yourself, you need to be comfortable on three main fronts: that market demand for your services is buoyant, that competition is not too tough, and that you are reasonably well placed to succeed.

Consider market demand for You, Inc. You need to be sure that demand for you is not about to fall off a cliff. If you worked as a travel agent before the dot-com era, long-term demand for your services would not have looked promising, given the looming threat from e-booking and e-ticketing. Is there something happening in your industry that could affect future demand for your services?

See who’s competing. You need reassurance that there are not too many people competing for jobs the same or similar to yours. For example, if you work in the printing industry, you may find that jobs like yours are being outsourced to Asia. Some manufacturing companies have moved their entire operations overseas. Who’s lined up to replace you?

Check how you measure up. How well placed are you in your marketplace? How well do you meet the capabilities needed to succeed in your job? Do you have the right skills, knowledge, and experience? Are you efficient enough? Is your attitude right? Is your heart in what you do? If not, you’re in danger of becoming unbackable.

Become more backable. If you find you are in the right job, how can you become more backable? You need a strategy. Which of your strengths can you build on? Which of your weaknesses can you improve in? What study, training, or related work experience can you undertake to reinforce that strength, or negate that weakness?

Consider moving on. If you find you’re unbackable in your current job, it may be time to move on, to a job where you would be backable—preferably in a field that brings out the hwyl in you, the Celtic concept of passion, fervor, and spirit that can lift you to extremes of success. But how to find such a job, and how would you know whether you would be backable there?

List and screen jobs that ignite your passion. Make a long list of all those jobs and businesses done by friends, family, colleagues, people in newspapers or on TV, fictional people in books, movies, etc. that you find exciting, and rate them on a scale of 1 to 5 by the amount of hwyl you would feel if you were doing them. Take the top dozen and screen them for gut-feel backability. How promising are the market conditions, and how well placed would you be in such a job? If none look promising, move on to the next dozen, always moving in descending order of hwyl.

Do a reality check. Take the two or three most promising jobs that emerge from your screen and subject them to the same rigor of analysis that you did on your current job earlier on (market demand, competition, your position). Of course, you won’t know as much about these target jobs as you do your current job, so you will have to do some research. Talk to practitioners, talk to their customers. How could you slot in? What entry strategy should you deploy?

Take Raquel, a Los Angeles bus driver. She was in a job where demand outstripped supply, with vacancies cropping up regularly. She was an excellent driver and had 18 years of experience. Raquel should have been highly backable—well placed in a buoyant job market. There was only one problem: Her heart wasn’t in the job. On the contrary, she was becoming ever more stressed by both the LA traffic and the rude drivers—and passengers. Raquel found she was becoming irritable and oversensitive. She was in danger of becoming unbackable. So she went through the process as set out above. It revealed that gardening was her passion, even though she had never considered it as a possible source of income. Raquel went to evening classes for two years before quitting her driving job and setting up her own garden design and maintenance business. She hasn’t looked back since.

That could be you, too! One of the problems with feeling discontent in a job is we don’t know what to do or where to start. Raquel’s example shows that these basic steps will get you moving on the right track to finding the right job, or feeling good about your chances of success in your current job.

* * * * *
Vaughan Evans is a renowned economist, business strategist, sought-after speaker, and the author of Backing U! A Business-Oriented Guide to Backing Your Passion and Achieving Career Success (Business and Careers Press, 2009, www.backingu.com).

Article courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.

Interesting piece from Michael Wade (On Careers) posted on USNews. It’s called 10 Career Mistakes I’ve Made, but it contains some great “don’t make the same mistake I did” advice.

Among his “mistakes”:

Expecting a career to be a direct path. This isn’t a rocket launch. You’re steering your ship past reefs and through storms. You may even encounter pirates and shipwrecks. Life is sloppy.

Truer words were never spoken.

Check it out here.

I have written a number of posts in the past on managing your online identity, but when I discovered Pipl last week, I was intrigued. Pipl is a search engine for online identities. You type in a name and a city, and it tries to find references to that person online.

I can see how this would be extremely useful for an employer or HR department as a poor-man’s background check. But what’s most concerning about this this site is that it displays information about every person who shares your name (and who may or may not live in your area).

For instance, I live in Toronto, Canada. Here are some of the results that I get back when I search for myself:

I could be…

…an Emeritus Professor and Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide

…an author and consultant who works with new graduates preparing to enter the work force

…an award-winning wedding photojournalist based out of Renfrewshire, Scotland

…the Australian ambassador to Burma between 2000 and 2003

…the President and CEO of TWI Inc.

See the problem? While none of these are particularly offensive, it’s just a sampling of what might be out there. You never know what you will find.

For instance, if someone was trying to determine what I look like, they might be tricked into believing that this is me:

This is not me. (Though I will say that we Trevor Wilson’s really know how to have a good time )

What I am trying to say is that while it can be difficult to control your online image, you need to be aware of what is out there. Take some time to Google (or Bing) yourself. The more you know, the more prepared you will be to answer any awkward interview questions.

I have been traveling for work over the last few days and Mrs. Gradversity and I had planned to go out for a nice dinner when I got back. Everything was going according to plan until we sat down at our table and were hit with a wall of perfume.

The woman at the table next to us was covered in the stuff. She must have been wearing half a bottle. And even though she was just about to leave when we arrived, the scent lingered through most of our meal.

Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. The trouble is that last night, I had a massive allergy attack (brought on by the perfume) and spent the entire dinner sneezing my head off.

The lesson here is that you shouldn’t wear perfume or cologne to an interview (or any other time when you will be meeting a potential employer). You never know how an interviewer is going to react, either from a personal taste perspective (liking or disliking the scent), or from an allergy perspective (sneezing like mad).

Don’t take the risk. Leave the perfume/cologne behind!

I was reading TechCrunch today when news broke that Don Dodge was laid-off from Microsoft. Normally, this wouldn’t make many waves, but what caught my eye was how he handled the situation.

In a post on his blog, Don refused to say anything negative about Microsoft, or burn any bridges with his former employer. In fact, he even went so far as to praise certain coworkers:

Thanks to all the fine people at Microsoft. You know who you are. There are thousands of talented people there and I enjoyed working with all of them. I’m sure we will see each other again at conferences and industry events. Its a small world…and getting more connected every day.

The lesson here is that if you are faced with this type of situation, don’t overreact. No matter how bitter or jaded you feel, bow out with grace. You never know who you may encounter again in the future.

When applying for a job that you really want, make sure to pay attention to both the style AND the substance of your application package.

People with well formatted “fluff” resumes have difficulty landing jobs. The same goes for resumes that show great accomplishments in a messy, displeasing format.

Ensure that you strike a balance between style and substance relative to the posting to improve your job search odds.

The following is a guest post from Kevin Donlin courtesy of Recruiting Blogswap.

Following seven months of struggle, one Minnesota man made a simple change in his job search in August, and was hired for a new position only 30 days later.

What did he do?

Read on …

Scott Bornstein, from suburban Minneapolis, was using what he thought was a well written resume, but without results. “Every time I sent it out, people would suggest changes to make. When I handed it out at a job fair, they’d say, ‘Thank you’ and file it away immediately.” He wasn’t getting called by employers.

Sound familiar?

But Bornstein found a way to improve his resume, which boosted his self-confidence, which, in turn, led to more interviews, in a virtuous circle that led to a job offer within 30 days.

It all started with a new, improved resume.

“I went to using a Guerrilla Resume. It was easy to write and it gave me confidence, with a resume that I felt positive to hand out to anybody,” says Bornstein.

The Guerrilla Resume is a format I co-developed with David E. Perry, author of Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters 2.0 (full disclosure: I’m a contributing author to that book).

This new style of resume is usually one page long and has two essential components:

1. Logos or graphics from past employers, colleges, or organizations;
2. Quotes from people familiar with your work, such as managers or clients.

Why are these elements so powerful?

Logos and graphics can improve your resume because the human brain would rather look at pictures than read. (What’s worth a thousand words?) So the right logo or graphic on your resume can make a favorable impact before an employer reads one word of your resume.

Can you get in trouble for using a logo? If you print it on a T-shirt and sell it on Ebay, sure. But is it verboten to use a logo in your resume to convey a relationship with an employer, client, school, or organization? Not in my experience since 1996. Of course, I’m not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. When in doubt, ask permission before using a corporate graphic or logo.

Quotes from past managers or clients are the second element of every Guerrilla Resume.

Bornstein used three quotes on his resume. Quotes get attention because they are third-party endorsements of you, just like testimonials in an infomercial.

Where can you get them? Start with the recommendations on your Linkedin profile. They’re already in the public domain — why not use those quotes in your resume?

Now, here’s what happened after Bornstein revamped his resume.

“The next day I went to a job fair in Minneapolis. I walked up to a recruiter and handed my resume to her. She actually grabbed my hand, leaned in, and said, ‘This is an amazing resume.’ And I knew at that moment that I had something,” says Bornstein.

What he had was confidence, which improved every part of his job search. Think about how easy it is to do something when you know you can, versus when you’re unsure. It’s the difference that can make all the difference.

“With the new resume, I had complete confidence in what I was doing. As soon as I started handing it to other people –hiring managers, recruiters, whoever – nobody wanted to change it. I felt they all wanted to give me a chance, and that was different,” says Bornstein.

The job Bornstein eventually took came from a contact he made at the Wooddale Transition Group. (If you’re not a member of a high-quality job club, consider joining one. In addition to producing employment leads, it gets you out of the house to meet and help other people.)

“An email went to the group members on a Wednesday and I applied, along with 32 other people. The new resume immediately popped up for the hiring manager,” says Bornstein, who was called on Friday and interviewed on Monday. A second interview followed on Thursday and he was offered a job the next day — nine days after applying.

What did Bornstein do to seal the deal in his second job interview?

He brought a portfolio of achievements, work samples, and comments from others, organized in a three-ring binder. The portfolio, which took Bornstein two hours to assemble, supported his resume and helped him edge out two other candidates for the position.

Bornstein described the difference his new made this way: “The confidence was huge for me.”

An eye-grabbing resume can provide the same kind of ego boost you might enjoy after getting a nice haircut or a $1,000 suit. If clothes can make the man, can a resume make the job search?

Apparently, yes.

Kevin Donlin is co-author of Guerrilla Resumes. Since 1996, he has provided job-search help to more than 20,000 people. Author of 3 books, Kevin has been interviewed by The New York Times, USA Today, Fox News, CBS Radio and others.

Article courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.

Happy November Everyone!

It’s time for the monthly roundup where I provide a look back at some of the best posts that October 2009 had to offer:

Enjoy!

Happy Halloween everyone!

Hope you have a great night, whether you are Trick-or-Treating, giving out candy, or heading out to a party.

Have a Safe and Happy Halloween!