Liz Ryan

Denver, CO

Guest Blogger Liz Ryan is a member of the Glassdoor Clearview Collection and a former Fortune 500 HR executive; she is the Workplace Expert for Business Week Online and the Networking Expert for Hot Jobs. Liz’s advice columns reach 50 million readers per month. Ryan leads the 25,000-member Ask Liz Ryan online community, where she shares business, career and life advice with members every day. She authored the book: "Happy About Online Networking: the virtual-ly simple way to build professional relationships" and is a sought-after keynote speaker. She has addressed a wide range of audiences including the United Nations, CEOs, HR leaders, and entrepreneurs.

Other ways to follow Liz: http://www.asklizryan.com |

Recent Posts by Liz

Are Transferable Job Skills the Booby Prize?

Posted by • December 16th, 2009 • more

A man came to see me, and he told me his story. He’d just sold a business that he’d launched with a partner nearly twenty years ago. When his partner retired, my client had stuck around to grow the business, and he’d done a great job of it – so much so that the proceeds from the sale of the business made it possible for him to retire on the spot. “But I don’t want to retire,” he said. “I want to work for at least one more company, and I don’t want to have to start it from the ground up. Too much work.”

The gentleman wanted to job-hunt, and he wanted some advice. “Do you have a resume?” I asked. “I have one,” he said, “but I’m not crazy about it. A resume-writer put it together for me, according to what I hear is the latest resume-writing fad.”

“A new resume fad?” I asked. “I can’t wait to hear about that.”

“Skills!” said the CEO. “Transferable skills. My resume is loaded up with ‘em.”

“Oh dear,” I said. Resume fads take ages to die, and the skill-based-resume fad is going strong. The poor gentleman’s resume was crammed with skills from one end to the other, from Leadership Communication ...

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Stop! Don’t Send That Resume

Posted by • December 9th, 2009 • more

When you spot a job that looks interesting on Monster or CareerBuilder or anywhere, it’s logical and tempting to apply for it. The job ad says “Apply Now!” and you think: I’ll do it!

It’s not a good idea to apply for the jobs we spot online – at least, not in the moment. It’s better to stop, reflect, and draw up an action plan to make your resume send-off count.

For one thing, the black hole is the last place we want our resume to be. When we spot a job that looks great for us, we’ve gained some valuable information – e.g., the knowledge that Vandalay Industries is hiring a Market Research Analyst. We may decide to apply for the job. If we do, we can almost always find a way to avoid pitching our resume into the black hole (i.e. the Receptacle Most Likely to Chew it Up and Spit it Out).

If we think the Vandalay Industries job is a good fit for us, it’s worth our time to do some research and learn more about the company than the skimpy bit of intelligence the job ad itself provides. If we think we’re a fit, we owe it to ...

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Seven Holiday Tips For Job Seekers

Posted by • December 2nd, 2009 • more

It’s no fun being on a job search at this time of year. For one thing, your ability to enjoy the holiday season might be dampened – or even drowned entirely – by the overwhelming reality that you’re not working although you’d like to be. Your holiday spending may be curtailed a little or a lot, adding to the discouragement load (“If I were working, I could buy my wife/kids/boyfriend a really great gift.”) It’s easy to feel stressed about what the New Year holds in store, job-search-wise; and on top of all that, you’ve heard the rumor that employers shut down their hiring engines during December. So what’s an end-of-the-year job-seeker to do?

Here are seven tips to make your December job-search time profitable and to pump up your emotional-energy fuel tank this month. Take a look!

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In A Job Search? Follow The Pain

Posted by • November 25th, 2009 • more

Last week we talked about why the black hole is your worst-odds job-search channel. We won’t get a job by pitching resumes into the Black Hole. We’ve got to find ‘our’ hiring manager, and reach out to him or her directly.

If the employer you’re targeting is on the small side, with a few hundred employees or fewer, your target decision-maker may be the head of your function. If the employer is larger, your decision-maker may be a few layers down from that functional VP.

How to Find A Decision-Maker’s Name:

If you’re targeting the VP of your function, the odds are good that you’ll find that person on the company’s website. Piece of cake! If you’re looking for someone a bit further down in the organization, here are four ways to find the name of your very-possibly next boss:

Conduct a LinkedIn search on the company’s name and your target person’s most likely title.
Use ZoomInfo.com to find the manager you’re looking for.
Google the company name plus the title — ‘your’ manager’s name may pop up in a search result.

It’s easy to find ...

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How To Circumvent The Resume Black Hole

Posted by • November 18th, 2009 • more

Forget the black hole — that’s a terrible way to get a job. People say “But I called the HR department, and they told me that I have to put my resume into the company’s ‘careers’ website in order for it to be considered.”

Of course they told you that! They are amoebae – it’s their job to make that speech. They have their priorities, and those priorities have everything to do with bureaucratic practices designed to keep job-seekers coloring inside the lines. Luckily, the hiring manager has other concerns. The hiring manager is the person we need to reach. The black hole and its amoeba tenders are not our friends.

The hiring manager has pain. If he or she did not have some kind of pain, there would be no job. Our job is to spot the pain, and address it in a pithy Pain Letter that will go with our resume directly to the hiring manager’s desk. If we can spot the pain and speak to it, we can get that hiring manager’s attention. Not every hiring manager has the budget to hire us, either as a W-2 employee or a consultant. Those opportunities, unfortunately, may be unavailable to us ...

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Who’s Got Your Resume — A Decision-Maker Or An Amoeba?

Posted by • November 11th, 2009 • more

I am no fan of the black hole, the resume-sucking repository of dangerous anti-matter and hundreds of resumes that were sent in reply to job ads and never heard from again.

I hate that black hole, because it doesn’t help candidates get jobs, and it doesn’t help employers hire good people either. The black hole chews up and swallows resumes, letting only a tiny number squeak through to a hiring manager. The resumes that get through the black hole aren’t necessarily attached to the smartest or most capable job-seekers, sad to say. They’re just the resumes of people whose backgrounds happen to match the job spec the most closely.

Plenty of talented candidates will notice a gaping black hole at the front of a corporate recruiting process, and keep on walking.  Life is too short to spend it pitching resumes into the void. Job seekers with better options are going to find them, leaving the corporate black holes to less-sought-after candidates.

Screening resumes against keywords or a long list of requirements is a horrible way to hire good people. How much hubris does it take to imagine that the best-qualified person for an open position — the person who can help a business the most, by dint of passion, creativity, brains ...

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Try A Human Voice In Your Resume

Posted by • November 4th, 2009 • more

A job search is full of obstacles, from unresponsive HR departments to those annoying blind ads that don’t even tell you who the employer is. On top of the roadblocks that a job search imposes on us, here is one more that we create for ourselves: a dry-as-dust, boilerplate resume that sounds exactly like everyone else’s resume does.

It’s easy to see why we’d write a resume in the conventional way, following what I call the ‘Standard Model’. It’s a safe approach, because we’ve already seen a million resumes that read the same way. Here’s an example of a Standard Model resume summary used by one imaginary fellow applying for HR jobs:

Results-oriented HR professional with a bottom-line orientation and strong attention to detail. Team player with excellent communication and organizational skills and experience leading cross-functional teams.

We have read these words ten million times before. When we read them, we get no sense of the person behind the boilerplate language. Is this person creative? Is he smart? We have no idea. The words present a brick wall to the reader. They’re robot words, churned out of the resume-language machine in the sky. We can’t tell whether the resume’s owner is someone who can ...

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Ten Reasons To Run From A Job Opportunity

Posted by • October 28th, 2009 • more

One of the worst things that can happen to a talented job seeker is to get caught in the Vortex — that swirling, chaotic place where the hiring-process movement gets to be so fast and furious that it’s hard to keep up with it.

“They want me in New York next week to see the CEO!” you say breathlessly to your roommate.

“Have they told you the title or the salary yet?” your roommate wants to know.

“No, but isn’t it exciting?!” you exclaim.

That’s the Vortex. In the midst of all the phone calls and interviews and paperwork flying around, it’s easy to lose your bearings. You’re so excited and so flattered to be complimented and sought after that you can become disoriented. Then, you might forget that you have a stake in this deal greater than just a job offer.

Accepting the wrong job may be worse than another month or two of unemployment. Taking the wrong job can trash your resume and your emotional health in one fell swoop. If you take a job you hate, will you have energy to work all day in the pit of hell and conduct another stealth job search at night? And how will you explain another job search after only a ...

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Why Talented People Don’t Get Hired

Posted by • October 21st, 2009 • more

Employers call me and wail, “So many job candidates, and no one to fill my job.” They say that the recent economic woes haven’t made it much easier for them to hire talent. “We get flooded with applications,” they tell me, “and most of them are dreck.”

Your applications are dreck? That’s a shock. Gee, all you’re doing is asking every single person who would throw his hat in the ring for a job in your company to:

Waste 45 minutes filling out a cumbersome, 1999-vintage online application form;
Recall and convey every hiring date (year AND month) and departure date (ditto) for every job a job-seeker has ever held; AND remember every salary and every supervisor’s name;
Agree to an upfront background check, credit check, and reference check before the applicant has received so much as the courtesy of a return email message; and
Send all this personal information into the void, on the off chance that the employer might stoop to respond with a phone call, an email message or an off-handed auto-responder that says “Don’t call us; we’ll call you – or else we won’t.”

Job application processes are insulting. And employers wonder why they can’t fill jobs?

What self-respecting person is willing ...

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Resume Writing? Think Cathedral, Not Bricks

Posted by • October 14th, 2009 • more

My friend Julie was job-seeking, and she had a big asset: she’d just completed her Masters in teen counseling. Julie was looking for a job working with at-risk teenagers. She’d already spent years, even prior to her collegiate education, working with teens at summer camps and in after-school programs.

Her resume showcased her new degree, of course, and it listed all of those low-paid after-school and summer-camp jobs as well. She described those summer-camp and after-school tasks in the usual way:

“Supervised arts & crafts activities.”
“Taught water safety.”
“Led hikes, organized campfire story-telling sessions.”

This is the conventional, ‘task-y’ approach to describe our past work experiences. Resume-advice books and seminars are full of this stuff.

But Julie is a different person now than the person who led those campfires and supervised those arts & crafts projects. She has a Masters degree now. She understands what is at the heart of all the teen-supervision-and-coaching roles she’s held in the past. She can look back on those years leading arts & crafts projects, and reframe her activities in a new way.

Julie rewrote her resume. In place of “led arts & crafts programs” her resume now says ”taught self-esteem and conflict-resolution skills to young adults.” She is talking about the greater purpose ...

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