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Did you receive effective career or job hunting guidance in high school? Any in college? Sure, we had to complete a resume for a course or two, and teachers often repeated the mantra to get good grades and go to college so you could get a good job. But anything I learned back then (not much) doesn't apply to today's job market and economy. Do you still look through classified ads in newspapers for open positions? How many hours have you spent on job boards like monster.com, careerbuilder.com or even indeed.com - the site that can search all the job sites at once? The rules have changed and you need to know what they are. While I was unemployed immediately after completing college, someone referred me to a book that effectively demystified the new job market and got me on track to getting great job offers.

The book recommended to me, and that I recommend to you is Richard Bolles "What Color is Your Parachute?" - now available in an updated 2009 edition. I'm not going to summarize the entire book here, just discuss some of the points that impressed me. If you or someone you know is out-of-work or desperately seeking a career change, buy the book. Really. I don't recommend things on this site that I don't really believe in.

Buy What Color is Your Parachute on Amazon.com

Some of the (many) things that Bolles writes about that really helped in my job hunt include:

1. Traditional job hunts (preparing resume, submitting resume, and waiting for someone to call you) do not work
2. The routes that job hunters take to find jobs don't correspond to the routes recruiters take to fill jobs
3. 96% of all people who land jobs find those positions from some source other than the Internet
4. America's Largest companies only employ a small percentage of the total workforce; most people work for small to mid-sized companies

I believed most of what he wrote when I first read it, and experiences since then have further proven what he said. For example, a Fortune-300 company had just hired me to develop print and computer-based training for thousands of their employees. My immediate manager came to my team's work area a few months after I started and asked us, "Hey, we've got an open position on our team that I've been approved to hire somebody for. Do you guys know of anyone we can hire?" My jaw dropped to the floor (barely an exaggeration). I spent so much time putting in online applications, and the company paid such a large staff of recruiters, but the route that this manager took to find someone was to come and ask if we knew anyone! I found out from our Human Resources people that the company received 3000 online applications per day! Bolles said that our first resort for finding jobs is usually the last resort for people who have the power to actually hire someone.

I spoke with one of our company's executive recruiters just a few weeks ago and he said he has received 500 online applications per week for one - just one - open information technology position. He has no way to look at even a fraction of those applications although many are probably qualified for the job. The recruiting team has taken to searching people out on their own (especially using linkedin.com) for the few open positions we have. They're simply too inundated with online applications while unemployment is high to even use the screening software to select candidates.

So learn the new rules of job hunting by reading What Color is Your Parachute, by Richard Bolles.

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