Anyone who reads my blog regularly knows that I’m a big fan of blending the personal and professional on Facebook and Twitter  to create engagement and conversation. But Francesca Holdings CFO, Gene Morphis, recently went a bit too far with his blended approach on his public pages and he was fired because of it. Morphis posted several status updates where he shared proprietary company information such as “Board meeting. Good numbers=Happy Board” and “Roadshow completed. Sold $275 million of secondary shares. Earned my pay this week.”

Top brass at Francesca Holdings certainly isn’t happy about Morphis’ social media blunder, but at least they can take comfort in the fact that their stock jumped 5% since Morphis’ departure.

Social media

Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson resigned yesterday after it was discovered that he misrepresented his academic credentials. Thompson claimed to have a degree in computer science but he only holds a degree in accounting.

Thompson’s certainly not the first person to lie on a resume. Many other high-profile executives, politicians, and sports and entertainment figures have bent the truth on their resumes only to have the situation backfire, yet the practice continues.

While no one ever has a good reason to lie on a resume, Thompson’s case strikes me as a great example of a bad reason to lie on your resume. He is obviously an accomplished executive who held significant technology roles at PayPal, Visa, Barclay’s and other well-know companies prior to coming to Yahoo. His achievements were many. What was the point of pretending to have a technology-specific degree from 25+ years back? Can you imagine rejecting a candidate with so much relevant experience because he earned his degree in a different field over 3 decades ago?

Thompson’s situation is unfortunate, but maybe it is a good reminder to all that a resume is an opportunity to prove your value and relevance to a prospective organization. Employers are most interested in what you have done lately that can help their organization move forward. If you are a job seeker with several years of experience under your belt, where you went to school and what you studied are rarely deal breakers.

Every spring a new article about office romances seems to come out. I just read one from Fox Business that claims office romances are on the rise among young professionals. The article suggests that workers of previous generations were less likely to engage in an office romance. Really? I think that just about everyone I know from my generation had a relationship with someone at work at least once. I don’t think office romance is a generational issue at its core but I do think that it makes perfect sense that millenials would be likely to be in an office romance and here’s why.

1. The concept of a 9-to-5 job is gone. It used to be that when you left work you were pretty much done. It was rare that someone from the office would contact you after hours, on a weekend, or during a scheduled vacation. But email and texting changed all that. So people are in contact with their co-workers with greater frequency which means there is a greater opportunity to get to know them better.
2. Social media fuels engagement. Decades ago it was harder to get to know colleagues on a personal level. We relied on lunch hours and trips to the water cooler or the line at the copy machine to strike up a personal conversation. Opportunities were scarcer. But now it’s not that unusual to friend a colleague on Facebook or IM them throughout the day. Consistent engagement builds a relationship and makes it easier to feel connected.
3. Work spaces are more informal and collaborative. Newer companies like Google that attract young professionals have created more open work spaces to encourage collaboration. And some even design their spaces to feel more like a college dorm with recreational areas, etc. When the formalities of a traditional office are stripped away, it makes it easier to interact with people and get to know them better.

I think that if an office romance is going to happen it is going to happen…regardless of age, technology, or work environment. But no one should be surprised by the fact that millenials are engaging in office romances. They have grown up in a world where they are in contact with people with exceptional consistency and immediacy. The office romance is just one outcome of their cultural experience.

I recently caught up with BrandYourself’s CEO, Patrick Ambron, to learn more about the BrandYourself platform and its implications for helping job seekers take control of their online identity.

What is BrandYourself?
BrandYourself is the only “do-it-yourself” platform that makes it easy for anyone to take control of their own search results. It started when our co-founder, Pete Kistler, couldn’t get an internship in college because he was being mistaken for a drug dealer when prospective employers searched his name on  Google. We realized Google is an incredibly important part of your reputation, but unless you know how SEO works–most people don’t–or have thousands to spend on a reputation company to do it for you, there’s nothing you can do. We wanted to put that power in everybody’s hands and create a free product that made it easy for anyone to manage their online identity themselves.

How does BrandYourself work?
The only way to improve your search results is to push positive links to to the top of Google and bury unwanted results. This process is known as SEO and it’s what reputation companies charge thousands of dollars for. With Brand Yourself, you simply submit any positive links you WANT to show up at the top of Google. This could be your personal website, an article written about you, or anything else.

Our software immediately analyzes that link and gives you specific boost steps you can take to help it rank higher. For example, if you submit your LinkedIn profile, you might learn it currently ranks 25 for your name, but there are 12 boost steps you can take to make it show up higher.

Once you submit a link and take your boost steps, we’ll track it and send you alerts whenever something important happens: something weird pop ups on your first page, one of your links rises or falls, or even if someone ends up Googling your name, say , after a job interview.

One of our most VALUABLE features is your BY profile which is the only profile on the web automatically optimized to show up high in Google for your name.

What is your favorite site feature?
My favorite site feature is the Boost section, where you track where all of your positive links currently rank in Google, and can take all the steps you need to help them rank higher. This is where we literally took the SEO process that costs thousands of dollars and automated it so you can do it yourself. There is NOTHING a reputation company could or would do, that you can’t easily do yourself to push your best links higher.

Can you share a BrandYourself success story
There are so many. One example is an ivy league professor who was wrongfully accused of shoplifting (in a very weird circumstance). Though it was all a big mistake, it got some press and whenever a student or colleague Googled him, they found this negative information. He originally turned to a reputation company who charged him a total of $17K to help bury it off the first page. The problem was, every time the algorithm changed, the digital dirt crept back up, and the reputation management company would charge him more.

With BrandYourself, he’s been able to push it down to the third page himself.  He pays a nominal fee and every time something changes he gets an alert and he can handle it himself. He couldn’t be happier.

What’s on the horizon for BrandYourself?
We’ve worked hard over the last year building this product. We’re getting great feedback and there are so many ways to make the product simpler, and so many features to make it more powerful, so we will continue to focus on product development. However, now that we’re live, our goal is to get this in as many hands as possible. Everybody should be actively improving their search results, and now by creating a free account with BrandYourself, everybody can!

Creating a resume where all the content lays out on the page in a way that is easy to read and visually appealing can be challenging. Sometimes in their quest to get all the content on one or two pages, the writer resorts to using design strategies such as a smaller font, tighter margins, or compressed spacing to trim the document. But these strategies are flawed and can make the resume harder to read. Others allow the content to spill over to a second or third page with just a few lines of text on that page. This looks unprofessional and on some level may suggest that you ran out of things to say which is certainly not the message you want to convey. Here are some tips for pruning content to create a tight but easy to read, visually appealing resume.

1. Streamline contact information. Many resumes I see lay out the contact information on 5 or more lines. There is no rule that says the information must be communicated in this way. You can list your name on one line and your address, phone numbers, and email on a second line and save precious space for other valuable content. You don’t need to write out the words address, phone, or email, as this will be obvious to your reader. However, you should reference whether a phone number is a home number or cell number like this: H: 212-555-1111 C: 917-444-5555.
2. Modify margins. You can recoup a great deal of valuable space by readjusting your margins. Microsoft Word often defaults to margins of one inch or more, but you can manually change your margin settings to something smaller. I don’t recommend anything lower than .6 for top, bottom, and side margins, but making this adjustment can make a significant difference.
3. Update your punctuation. Many resumes I see still use 2 spaces following the period at the end of the sentence. If you took a typing class decades ago, this is how you were taught to do this. But this rule has been modified due to the flexibility computers offer us in regards to character spacing and the new norm is to use one space following the period. Sometimes making these minor adjustments determine if a sentence falls on one line or two.
4. Use numbers instead of words. Generally, when writing a number that is less than ten, the protocol is to write out the number. But in resume writing (and blog posts), the numbers are often very important indicators of impact and it is best to use the numerical representation of the number. Rather than writing “propelled sales to ten million dollars in just three years” try “propelled sales to $10M in just 3 years”.  And a side benefit is that by using the numerical representation you will save valuable space.
5. Eliminate articles. In resume writing, the articles the, a, and an are understood. You can write “managed $3M account” rather than “managed a $3M account” and you can write “led team tasked with creating first help desk” rather than “led the team tasked with creating the first help desk’.  By eliminating these words you save room for something else you need to say.
6. Get rid of orphans. Orphans represent single words that fall on a separate line in the resume. Review any sentences where this occurs to see if you can rephrase a sentence to eliminate the orphan and use space more constructively.

I meet some of my clients after they have completed an MBA program. Some of them have previous work experience in totally unrelated fields and assume that the MBA is an automatic ticket to a new job, a management role, and a higher salary. And often they are very disappointed when they realize that the MBA is not the golden ticket they thought it would be. Before returning to school for an MBA, ask yourself these questions.

Why you are considering the MBA? If it is to learn the curriculum that is taught, great. If you are doing it because you think you will earn more money, tread carefully. Earning an MBA does not guarantee you will be paid better than your non MBA counterparts. And they may have gained valuable practical work experience while you were spending your time learning the theories behind management in school.

Does the MBA support the career you have already started or take you in a totally new direction? If the MBA builds on experience you already have in a particular area, gaining the degree may help add an additional level of expertise and relevance. But if the MBA focus is unrelated to your past experience, just having the MBA won’t necessarily open the right doors for you.

Can you get a third party to help pay the tuition costs? If your company offers some tuition reimbursement or if you were previously part of the military this might be the case. Better to have someone else help defer the costs than end up in debt later on.

How old are you? If you have been working for less than 5 years, getting the MBA may be a logical career move. If you are going back to school after 15+ years, chances are it won’t get you as far. The one
exception may be an EMBA program that your employer is sponsoring.

Are you considering an MBA because you see job postings that say  an MBA is preferred ? Take this with a grain of salt. The employer may be using this preferred qualification as a screening tool. Networking is still the best way to find a job. Having a relationship and no MBA is generally better than having an MBA and no relationship.

Deciding whether or not to go back to school is a big decision that requires significant time and money. Regardless of the degree program you are considering, assess how an advanced degree will help position you for future opportunities and be honest with yourself about what a degree can and cannot do. Talk to people who have completed the degree program you are interested in and learn what their outcomes have been. Make an appointment with the school’s admissions office to learn about their career resources and support systems, and if possible, their placement rate.

Keywords for resumes refer to the buzzwords or search terms that recruiters and hiring managers are using to source candidates for their open positions. Keywords generally relate to skills that are specific to the job function, industry, or business environment.  Keywords have become increasing important in the past few years as more companies are relying on ATS or Applicant Tracking Systems to source candidates. ATS systems parse information on resumes that are uploaded to job boards and company websites and resumes are viewed (or not viewed) based on how closely the words in the resume match the job requirements or keywords that the hiring authority has chosen to search on. If a resume lacks the keywords that are part of this vetting process, the resume may never be seen by a hiring manager. The same may be true for Linked in profiles. Most recruiters and hiring managers search profiles based on keywords and will only view the profiles that match the keywords they have selected.

One strategy for creating a keyword-rich resume is to create a section on the resume (preferably following the summary or introductory section) that lists the appropriate keywords. The section can be labeled Areas of Expertise, Core Strengths & Capabilities, or Core Competencies. This writing strategy makes it easy for the human reader to understand your skills and allows the ATS systems to find relevant keywords in your resume. You can click on this link to view samples of keyword-rich resumes.

So how should you go about finding the right keywords for your resumes? Here are four recommendations.

1. Review job postings – Look at job postings for positions you would consider applying for. What skills are repeated across job descriptions in the requirements section? Use those words in your resume to build out your keyword section.
2. Review keyword lists. Wendy Enelow is the author of four books on keywords. She has sourced 25,000 keywords and keyword phrases across 5,400 job positions and titles in 28 industries and professions. You can click on the link to learn more about her books.
3. Use LinkedIn’s skills section. Go to your LinkedIn profile and click on the more tab to locate the skills section. Type a skill into the search box and a pull-down menu will appear with alternative skills that are similar to the one you typed in the search box. This can help you source additional keywords for your resume as well as your LinkedIn skills section.
4. Use a resume optimization service. See just how optimized your resume is for keywords by putting it through the same type of applicant tracking software tools used by employers to source candidates based on keyword searches. Preptel is an example of a service that allows you to customize your resume and keywords for each position you are applying to by leveraging their tools that mirror the applicant tracking systems.

Usually the tone of this blog is pretty positive but every once in awhile I feel the need to rant about something that is just plain stupid. And I’ve had my share of stupid recently. I’ve been reading about and talking to people who have had bad job search experiences. Here are my top five.

1. Requesting social media passwords. This one is at the top of the list because of the recent Associated Press article about a job seeker who was asked to share his Facebook user name and password during an interview. It remains to be seen how widespread this practice is, but my guess is that in some companies without formal social media policies or strong HR leadership, it may be happening. Before sharing your social media passwords with an employer, think twice about their request and ask yourself if you really want to work for a company that thinks nothing of invading your privacy.
2. Asking for a social security number on a job application. If you are hiring me for a job, I will give you my social security number so you can put me on your payroll. If you are about to hire me and first need to do a credit check, the same rule might apply. But before then, there is absolutely no reason to ask for an applicant’s social security number and absolutely no reason for you to reveal it.
3. Requiring candidates to go through a lengthy job posting process. Many of my clients have told me about the lengthy applications some employers require them to complete in order to post for a position online. Some applications take over an hour.  And I’ve seen some of the pre-screening questionnaires some employers ask applicants to fill out before they will even consider scheduling a phone screening. No one with a current job will bother filling these applications out. And even many of the unemployed will not. If you find yourself going through a lengthy job posting process (that often leads nowhere) create an alternative plan to make inroads at that company. Leverage your network, do a Google search on key contacts at the company, or use LinkedIn or some of Facebook’s third party job search applications to find a contact at the company.
4. Requiring new hires to sign unrealistic non-compete agreements. I’ve reviewed some of the non-competes my clients are asked to sign. Some of the terms are so broad that it could prevent someone from finding employment for years. If you need to sign a non-compete, make sure it is very specific and narrow in focus. Have a lawyer review your non-compete and make the necessary amendments to protect you if you find yourself in a future job search.
5. Creating really bad job postings. I keep reading about the perceived lack of talent and the applicant skills gap that has made it challenging for recruiters and hiring managers to fill open positions. They often complain that the applicants don’t mirror the skills they need to do the job. Maybe that’s because most job specs say little to nothing about who would make the best applicant and instead rely on unmeasurable personal attributes to describe the ideal hire. Here are a few examples of  some really bad job postings. If you are applying for a position online, do some additional research to better understand the requirements of the position and use tools such as LinkedIn and Glassdoor to learn more about the companies and jobs you are posting for.

Most people I talk to really enjoy Facebook’s interface and spend at least a little bit of time there each day. Most acknowledge its benefits for keeping in touch with friends and family, but few recognize Facebook’s implications for job search and its growing relevance as a job search and career management tool. With over 850 million users (a network that is approximately eight times larger than LinkedIn) and a robust demographic of professionals with 10+ years of work experience, the potential to connect with a key business contact via Facebook is enormous. Here are 5 tips for optimizing your job search strategy on Facebook.

1. Like Pages – Most major employers have company pages and many even have separate pages with information about careers at the company. By viewing these pages you can learn a great deal about a company’s culture and products and their open positions. Just use the search box on Facebook to find some the companies you are targeting in your search. By “liking” the page you can start engaging in the conversations by commenting on the company page and you can also learn more about potential opportunities.
2. Use Job Search Applications – BranchOut, BeKnown, and Glassdoor Inside Connections are third party applications that run on the Facebook platform and allow you to connect with recruiters and people from companies you are interested in without sharing all your personal information on Facebook. These applications leverage Facebook’s huge network to help you connect with people who may be able to make important introductions for you.
3. Subscribe – What if you found someone who was a thought leader in your industry or someone who you wanted to get regular updates from but you don’t really know them? By subscribing to their Facebook updates you can receive their updates in your feed without friending them and they will be notified that you are a subscriber. Just key in their name in the search box, go to their profile, and click on subscribe if they have enabled this feature on their page. This is a great way to get on their radar and possibly turn a cold lead into a warm one.
4. Use Timeline – The new timeline profile is great for customizing your Facebook page and building your professional and personal brand. Important events and pictures can be highlighted, the pages you like can be prominently displayed, and you can show other interests such as the books you read or the music you like. Timeline is like your visual resume and it gives you many opportunities for building a compelling and engaging message of value.
5. Create Engaging Status Updates – Use your status updates to let your network know about professional events you are attending, interesting articles and books you are reading, and volunteer work you are doing to support your professional community. Write about companies and leaders you admire, share industry best practices, and give shout-outs to colleagues when they experience success. If you have a blog or videos to promote your professional brand, be sure to re-purpose this information on your Facebook page. These activities keep you and your professional areas of expertise top of mind with your friends and colleagues and this could lead to important career introductions.

Adding the professional slant on your Facebook page doesn’t mean compromising who you are. Part of the beauty of Facebook is that it gives you a platform for blending personal and professional messaging to show your authentic self and be memorable to friends, family, colleagues, recruiters, and employers.

Glassdoor recently launched Inside Connections, a Facebook application that allows users to find information on who their friends know at various companies. This information can be leveraged to build relationships and gain valuable introductions that could lead to job opportunities. At first glance, the platform appears very similar to two other Facebook applications, BranchOut and BeKnown, but Glassdoor offers something that is very unique and is not available on any of the top networking sites, including LinkedIn.

I have been recommending Glassdoor to my clients for several years because it offers a treasure trove of information on companies including self-reported salary information, reviews of companies from insiders, and information on the type of interview questions people have been asked at specific companies. But now, users can supplement this information with a new network of contacts that may be able to get them one step closer to the decision maker at a company they are interested in working for.

As a job seeker, you need every competitive edge you can find. Glassdoor has always been a great tool for career-related research. With the new networking features, I think it is a “must have” for anyone conducting a serious job search. You can watch a quick video on Glassdoor Inside Connections  here.