Sunday Open Thread

[lannamichaels]

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Sunday Open Thread! This is a weekly place for open discussion about how things are going right now.

And if you don't have anything going on right now you'd care to talk about, our alternate discussion topic is: What resources have really helped you during your job hunt?

Have any suggestions for future open threads or ways to make this comm better? Leave them in comments! :)

Comments

[jenett]

I am not currently job hunting (but hanging out in here in case I can help people with stuff that helped me) - this gives me a great opportunity to plut something that was *amazingly* helpful.

http://askamanager.com is an awesome blog from someone who's worked in hiring for a long time (both corporate and non-profits). She's funny and thoughtful, and there's a lot of really really solid advice.

I found her ebook to be the best money, bar none, I spent while doing a year-long job hunt that ended 18 months ago, but most of the content is available (just a lot more fragmented) on her blog. Her "If you're not getting interviews" roundup from December is a good starting place - I started getting a lot more interviews once I followed her cover-letter advice. (I'm a librarian, so standards in my field are also a bit off from corporate: http://www.askamanager.org/2012/12/if-youre-not-getting-interviews-read-this.html )

Her blog is one of the rare spaces where reading the comments is a serious bonus - she's got a lot of smart and thoughtful commenters, and while she moderates with a fairly light hand, people call out -isms and related issues reliably in the comments.

[lannamichaels]

Thank you so much for that link, it looks really useful!

[jenett]

She is really awesome. (And if you have a weird situation, she does take questions.)

[msilverstar]

that really is great!

[firefly99]

Thanks for the links.

[rymenhild]

I love the Academic Jobs Wiki, where jobseekers in various academic subfields continually update the site with jobs they find and news about the jobs.

You have to stop yourself from obsessing too much about the updates in the listings. If someone else says anonymously that they have an interview at school X, it doesn't mean that school X isn't going to call you too. On the other hand, if nobody says that School X has scheduled its second-round interviews, it's quite possible that School X is all finished its search but no one on the short list is willing to update the wiki. (The latter situation is very likely to have happened at the school where I was a second-round interviewee.)

But people, at least in my subfield, are generally pretty good about updating the wiki when new job opportunities pop up, so it's an excellent one-stop spot for job listings.