John Sumser

San Francisco, CA

Guest Blogger John Sumser, a member of the Glassdoor Clearview Collection, is founder and CEO of Two Color Hat, a company that helps the vendors who serve HR and professional recruiters. In addition, John is currently a board director at Salary.com. Sumser believes the employment marketplace should be easy to understand. His experience includes 15 years of Electronics R&D, 15 years of online publishing, including work as an executive editor for Recruiting.com, non-profit management and start-up consulting.

Other ways to follow John: http://www.JohnSumser.com |

Recent Posts by John

Dealing With Unemployment Depression

Posted by John Sumser • February 4th, 2010 • Comments

In our culture, personal identity and employment are tightly coupled. More often than not, the first question you get asked at a party is “What do you do?” Without a job, the pressure of personal circumstances is relentless. Options seem to evaporate while awful consequences loom closely. Feelings of anxiety, panic, depression, bewilderment and terror are commonplace. The combination of loss of identity and loss of respite make the strongest of characters wobbly.

Glassdoor career expert John Sumser points out the signs for joblessness depression and offers some things you might try to reduce the suffering.

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How To Interpret A Job Rejection Letter

Posted by John Sumser • January 28th, 2010 • Comments

Currently, there are six applicants for every open job in the American economy. The jobs we’ve lost are going to take a while to come back. The most important implication is that you are going to get six times as many rejection letters in your search for work. Rejection letters make a banal attempt to appear sincere. They always fail.

Let’s take a look at a sample rejection letter and what an authentic rejection letter might look like…

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Dream Your Job: Choosing Your Passion in Four Simple Steps

Posted by John Sumser • January 21st, 2010 • Comments

“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” ~ Martin Luther King

Passion is a choice. If you’re wandering around trying to figure out how to find your real true passion, take a break. Sit down. Your passion is not out in the world, it’s somewhere inside of you. Look all you want. When you are finally ready to feel the fires of passion burning in your heart, follow these simple guidelines.

Passion is a decision for most of us. While it would be wonderful and miraculous to wake up one day and know exactly what you want and where you are going, it’s probably not going to happen. Your passion is a fire that you have to build for yourself, in yourself.

Personality tests, self assessment, vocational aptitude instruments and a good conversation with your local minister or bartender are all good ways to collect insight into what you might do. But, when all of the data is in, all the advice received and all of the insight understood, you remain faced with the choice.

Build your passion just as you’d build a fire.

1. ...

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Is Unemployment Fear Getting The Best of You? 10 Tips To Get Over It

Posted by John Sumser • January 14th, 2010 • Comments

In this slump, more jobs have been lost from the economy than at any other time on record. Broad chunks of once stable industries including automotive and publishing have simply vanished. Some estimates of the ‘real’ unemployment rate run between 18% and 20%.

The numbers mean that one in five people have been disrupted. The old way of making a living is gone and it’s time to find a new thing. While it may be that the big picture involves seismic economic shifts, when they happen in your backyard, it’s demoralizing and debilitating.

What does it mean that another 500,000 people gave up on the prospect of looking for work?

Mostly, it means that not having a job is frightening. The economic consequences of job loss include credit, relationship and self-esteem damage. The job is the primary source of personal identity in our culture. Having to figure out who you are each day is really hard work. Changing jobs makes it harder still.

Any job change involves facing your fears.

Last week, we talked about making a list of your worst career mistakes as a way of coming to terms with one kind of fear: that your job hunt will end up as a failure ...

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Steps To Getting A Dream Job: Face Your Worst Career Mistakes

Posted by John Sumser • January 7th, 2010 • Comments

Most career advice is written as if all job hunters were Ivy League graduates with MBAs and a perfect track record. The truth for most of us is that we’re average, have screwed up once or twice and are anxious about being exposed in the job hunting process. We’re not quite sure what we want but have a clearer picture of what we don’t want.

Getting fired, laid off, demoted, passed over, screwed and tattooed is what happens to most people with jobs. We live in and around the Peter Principle, painfully aware of our shortcomings. The result is that creepy feeling that the reference check is going to turn up something noxious.

While the advice givers always recommend a frontal assault, we often hope to skate past the checks. They routinely describe a type of bullshitting that works well for the elite and terribly for the rest of us. If you get the sense that the job advice you’ve gotten must be for someone else, you’re not alone. The standard counsel is to put lipstick on the pig.

There’s something really weird about job hunting advice that doesn’t work.

So, how do you get over the fear that your job hunt will implode ...

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Tips For Making & Keeping New Year’s Resolutions

Posted by John Sumser • December 31st, 2009 • Comments

Something about the solstice, the holidays and the changing season makes New Year’s Eve a good time for reflection and introspection. We all want to move into the New Year on  new footing. This is a time for looking at yourself and making decisions.

Have you noticed, however, that most New Year’s resolutions turn to dust short moments after the year turns? Can you even remember the promises you made yourself last year at this time? It’s important and interesting to consider the ways in which you want to change yourself. It’s important to understand the limitations.

Your life’s work (the job you dream into existence) is waiting for you to do it. Somewhere between where you are right now and where you could be is a set of changes to your life. Figuring out the right moves is how you live your dream into existence.

Here are eight tips for making and keeping your New Year’s resolutions:

Don’t bite off more than you can chew. The most successful transformations happen one step at a time. You can’t wish your way from New York to San Francisco. You can, however, buy a map, prepare ...

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Dream Your Job: Don’t Look For A Goldilocks Solution (Part 7)

Posted by John Sumser • December 17th, 2009 • Comments

This story found its way into my in basket. It’s the sort of thing that you read and dismiss as an urban legend.

Washington, DC Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007. The man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes.

During that time approx. 2 thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After 3 minutes a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule.

4 minutes later: The violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.

6 minutes: A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

10 minutes: A 3-year old boy stopped but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. Every parent, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly.

45 minutes: The musician played ...

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Dream Your Job: Part 6 – Test Your Personality

Posted by John Sumser • December 10th, 2009 • Comments

An important part of dreaming your job into existence is  knowing who you are, what you like and what you want. Self-assessment takes a variety of forms. One thing that we know for sure is that self-appraisal can be very biased. It’s important to verify your views about yourself with outside sources.

The two forms of outside verification are mentoring and independent assessment. We’ll discuss mentoring in an upcoming column — It’s important to have a mentor.

In this article, we’re going to start taking a look at the various kinds of independent appraisals that are available online. The more information you can gather about yourself, your aptitudes, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, goals and ambitions

The Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is the most widely used personality test. Over 2 million people take the test each year. You may have heard of it. Taking the MBTI is a good way to get started in the process of understanding yourself.

In the Myers-Briggs world view, all people can be classified using four dimensions:

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Dream Your Job: Part – 5: What Kind of Leader Do You Want To Be?

Posted by John Sumser • December 3rd, 2009 • Comments

Career advancement has two elements: technical and political. You have to master the technical aspects of the job before you can engage in the political. While both are important, political skill is ‘how you get things done’. The technical content is more like ‘what you do’.

The technical aspects of a job are the specifics subjects that are the essence of the work. For marketers, it’s the execution of the marketing stuff. For engineers, it’s the engineering. The technical component of a job is the information involved in the job and the techniques used to manipulate it.

The political parts of work involve the things required to achieve organizational results. Persuasion, resource allocation, supervision, lobbying, communication and presentation are the major elements of the political. The competition for attention, priority, promotion and advancement all happen on the political front.

As you advance in your profession, there are a number of choices and options involving the technical and political aspects of the work. Historically, organizations have assumed that most workers want to work their way into a series of jobs with increasing responsibility. In other words, once the technical stuff is mastered, your employer probably assumes that you want to move into management.

Not everybody ...

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Dream Your Job: Part 4 – Start With What You Hate

Posted by John Sumser • November 12th, 2009 • Comments

If you were happy in your current job, completely and totally satisfied, you wouldn’t be reading this in the first place. The fact that you want to improve your current circumstances is the only reason that anyone considers a new gig.

In spite of the crap you might read about active and passive candidates that’s just the way employers look at the problem. From the candidate (prospective employee) view, it’s two simple questions: “Do I want more than I have?” and “Does this opportunity deliver the ‘more’ that I want?”

The ‘dream your job’ part of the equation involves understanding the difference between what you have and what you want. More likely than not, this involves the things you really hate about your current engagement. Few things sharpen your desire like the things you hate. The more you dislike them, the clearer your view of the alternative.

When it’s fresh in your mind, make a long list of the things you hate about your job.

Do you want your next boss to have better oral hygiene?
Do you expect your next employer to have a bathroom cleaning service?
Fed up with the bureaucracy?
Tired of kissing the owner’s son-in-law’s bottom?
Filled out your ...

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