Tips for filling out a job application
- 1. Write neatly. A hiring manager is going to disregard your application if he/she cannot read it. They won't want to take the time to decode your scribbles.
- 2. Attach a resume. Even if it's the first job you're applying for, create a resume and include all of your extracurricular activities, volunteer work, experience in benefiting society in SOME kind of way, include your education, and info to contact you the easiest way. Attaching a resume with your application shows that you're serious about the job.
- 3. Don't staple your resume to the application, paperclip it. It's just more professional.
- 4. Don't fill out the section asking for your desired pay rate. Write "negotiable" instead.
- 5. If it asks why you want to work for the company, make it clear that you are eager to work and learn the routine of the position applied for. Say that you believe the company is opportunity-leading and you want to contribute to its success. To show that you know a good amount of information about the company, mention something about its history or opening date or early sales.
- 6. For references, use former teachers, co-workers, managers, coaches, people you have gotten to interact with enough so they know your personality and work habits. People that have seen you work, people who have seen your attitude and people you can trust.
- Don't ever give up on finding a job that you love. Life is too short to spend it doing something boring or dissatisfying. Degrees really help with high positions and good pay. Keep your head up.
- : ) ~Lindsay
“Two employees at a Whole Foods Market store in Albuquerque say they were suspended last month after complaining about being told they couldn’t speak Spanish to each other while on the job. Bryan Baldizan told The Associated Press he and a female employee were suspended for a day after they wrote a letter following a meeting with a manager who told them Spanish was not allowed during work hours. “I couldn’t believe it,” said Baldizan, who works in the store’s food preparation department. “All we did was say we didn’t believe the policy was fair. We only talk Spanish to each other about personal stuff, not work.” He said Whole Foods officials told them about company policy and issued the suspensions. Ben Friedland, Whole Foods Market Rocky Mountain Region Executive Marketing Coordinator, said the Austin, Texas-based company believes in “having a uniform form of communication” for a safe working environment. “Therefore, our policy states that all English speaking Team Members must speak English to customers and other Team Members while on the clock,” Friedland said in a statement. “Team Members are free to speak any language they would like during their breaks, meal periods and before and after work.” Friedland said the policy doesn’t prevent employees from speaking Spanish to customers who don’t speaking English nor does it prevent them from speaking Spanish if all “parties present agree that a different language is their preferred form of communication.” Whole Foods Market spokeswoman Libba Letton told the AP that in addition to safety reasons, the policy is in place so employees who don’t speak Spanish don’t feel uncomfortable.”
—Russell Contreras, “Whole Food Workers Say They Were Suspended For Speaking Spanish,” NBC Latino 6/6/13
Using Your Tumblr to Land a Job
When I first started blogging, I never imagined that it would be something that I would use to launch my career. Although it quickly become a big hobby of mine, I always thought of it as just something I would do on the side, and certainly not something I would tell many people about. Now that I am more or less a professional blogger, (no really, I am in content marketing), I figured I would share some of the knowledge I have gained to get where I am today.
So, can your Tumblr page help you get a job? Absolutely. What many consider wasted time, and in the case of social justice “slacktivism,” really can make a difference, especially when it comes to job hunting. People with writing, blogging and social media skills really are in demand. When leveraged correctly and combined with the right experience, you can use your Tumblr page to help find a job.
Try these tips to leverage your Tumblr page and get you into a real job.
1) Make sure you use your blog appropriately for your career goals
It doesn’t matter what you are blogging about as long as the topic or skills your blog is giving you are on-target with the jobs you are applying for. Now there are two ways you can go for this one.
First, if you are interested in marketing, advertising, or writing make sure to use the appropriate tools for your blog that would be applicable to the workplace. I’d recommend enabling the connection to Twitter and using it, using the queue and tagging functions, learning a bit of HTML and photoshop for general upkeep, and hooking up your page to Google Analytics. This will give you a well-rounded set of experience in blogging platforms and the ins-and-outs of using them professionally. Many of these skills will also translate easily to Wordpress, which is something you will likely find yourself needing to know a bit about if you end up blogging in the workplace.
If you aren’t interested in getting into marketing, advertising, or writing your blog can still do a lot to help establish yourself….if you are running a blog on a topic relevant to your professional experience. That means you should not list your fan fiction blog on your resume, even if you have 20,000 followers. Instead, create a side blog on the topic you work in professionally. Write thoughtful posts about the topics that matter to your field and tag them appropriately Even if you do not end up with a ton of followers, a well curated blog that establishes your knowledge on a topic can go a long way in a job interview.
2) Create a focused and dynamic resume descriptor for your blog
The way you describe your blog on your resume is usually just as important as the blog itself. To start, make sure to highlight the skills it has given you. Refer to the last point to pinpoint what those skills might be based upon your target profession.
You should also be sure to list any “deliverables” you have accomplished on your blog. Now if you have a social justice blog and you are looking to get into a similar line of work, this is something that can make an especially big difference. If you were able to leverage your blog to fundraise $500, have 800 engaged followers, started a campaign that went viral or something else of that nature make sure to highlight it!
Need an example? Check out my resume entry for this blog:
Founder, Because I am a Woman May 2010 – Present (3 years 2 months) www.becauseiamawoman.tumblr.com• Founded Because I am a Woman as a safe space to provide information on feminism, sexual health, and activism to the online community. It now serves more than 5,500 regular readers.
• Worked with Google Analytics, Adobe Creative Suite, and HTML/CSS to update, maintain, and analyze content.
3) Use your blog to network
This one might be obvious since essentially Tumblr is one big social network, but if you are job hunting and want to use your blog to help find a job, you need to use it to network. There are countless companies and organizations on the site (especially non-profits), and building relationships with them is a great step. There are also a lot of people-who-know-other-people. Put out your feelers to your followers and the people you engage with on the site regularly and see where it gets you!
To summarize, your blog can be a powerful tool when looking for jobs, but only if you are using it in the right way. I hope these tips help a bit in your search! For more specific advice on finding a job in social justice, check out my post Working in the Movement: Finding Employment as a Social Justice Warrior.
As always, if you have any questions feel free to ask or to send me an email at becauseiamawoman.tumblr@gmail.com
What We Need Now: A National Economic Strategy For Better Jobs
Jobs are returning with depressing slowness, and most of the new jobs pay less than the jobs that were lost in the Great Recession.
Economic determinists — fatalists, really — assume that globalization and technological change must now condemn a large portion of the American workforce to under-unemployment and stagnant wages, while rewarding those with the best eductions and connections with ever higher wages and wealth. And therefore that the only way to get good jobs back and avoid widening inequality is to withdraw from the global economy and become neo-Luddites, destroying the new labor-saving technologies.
That’s dead wrong. Economic isolationism and neo-Ludditism would reduce everyone’s living standards. Most importantly, there are many ways to create good jobs and reduce inequality.
Other nations are doing it. Germany was generating higher real median wages until recently, before it was dragged down by austerity it imposed the European Union. Singapore and South Korea continue to do so. Chinese workers have been on a rapidly-rising tide of higher real wages for several decades. These nations are implementing national economic strategies to build good jobs and widespread prosperity. The United States is not.
Any why not? Both because we don’t have the political will to implement them, and we’re trapped in an ideological straightjacket that refuses to acknowledge the importance of such a strategy. The irony is we already have a national economic strategy but it’s been dictated largely by powerful global corporations and Wall Street. And, not surprisingly, rather than increase the jobs and wages of most Americans, that strategy has been increasing the global profits and stock prices of these giant corporations and Wall Street banks.
If we had a strategy designed to increase jobs and wages, what would it look like? For starters, it would focus on raising the productivity of all Americans through better education — including early-childhood education and near-free higher education. That would require a revolution in how we finance public education. It’s insane that half of K-12 budgets still come from local property taxes, for example, especially given that we’re segregating geographically by income. And it makes no sense to pay for the higher education of young people from middle and lower-income families through student debt; that’s resulted in a mountain of debt that can’t or won’t be paid off, and it assumes that higher education is a private investment rather than a public good.
It would also require greater accountability by all schools and universities for better outcomes — but not just better test results. The only sure thing standardized tests measure is the ability to take standardized tests. Yet the new economy demands problem-solving and original thinking, not standardized answers.
Better education would just be a start. We would also unionize low-wage service workers in order to give them bargaining power to get better wages. Such workers — mostly in big-box retailers, fast-food chains, hospitals, and hotel chains — aren’t exposed to global competition or endangered by labor-substituting technologies, yet their wages and working conditions are among the worst in the nation. And they represent among the fastest-growing of all job categories.
We would raise the minimum wage to half the median wage and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit. We’d also eliminate payroll taxes on the first $15,000 of income, making up the shortfall in Social Security by raising the cap on income subject to the payroll tax.
We’d also restructure the relationships between management and labor. We would require, for example, that companies give their workers shares of stock, and more voice in corporate decision making. And that companies spend at least 2% of their earnings upgrading the skills of their lower-wage workers.
We’d also condition government largesse to corporations on their agreement to help create more and better jobs. For example, we’d require that companies receiving government R&D funding do their R&D in the U.S.
We would prohibit companies from deducting the cost of executive compensation in excess of more than 100 times the median compensation of their employees or the employees of their contractors. And bar them from providing tax-free benefits to executives without providing such benefits to all their employees.
And we would turn the financial system back into a means for investing the nation’s savings rather than a casino for placing huge and risky bets that, when they go wrong, impose huge costs on everyone else.
There’s no magic bullet for regaining good jobs and no precise contours to what such a national economic strategy might be, but at the very least we should be having a robust discussion about it. Instead, economic determinists seem to have joined up with the free-market ideologues in preventing such a conversation from even beginning.
“Amy Adams is the one who surprised me. I LOVED her Lois Lane. I loved that Lois loves her job. That she is serious about her job. That she is good at her job. It seems so obvious. But how often do you see this in the movies? Not enough. ”
——Lainey’s Man of Steel Review
Yup. This is something so many of us have been saying for years about Lois.
Yes, it really does matter to have a woman be serious about her job and be good at her job and have that devotion to her job be potrayed as a heroic, admirable trait in a woman.
Then, as icing on the cake, when she’s established as being romantically desirable not in spite of being good at her job but, in part, because she IS good at her job you present an acute challenge to this ridiculous idea that still lingers in our culture that determined, ambitious American career women are cold, sexless and not romantically viable. When you show Superman (of ALL men) as being the kind of man that falls in love with a woman who is really, really damn good at her JOB….yes, that does send a message and it’s not actually one you see alot.
This is why people harp on why it’s important to have some heroines in superhero movies that aren’t just beating the shit out of people. We need that too. We need more female superheroines in films. No doubt about that. And we need them NOT to be sexualized or male gaze. That’s a different conversation. But we also need female figures who aren’t physically beating someone’s ass but just really, really good at their jobs and yet still allowed to be feminine. We need women who wear a business suit as their “costume.” Yes, it is powerful to present a male figure—the ultimately male figure— like Superman and then go on to tell a story where this man—of all men—-basically operates like, “You know what I really find attractive? A woman who is really serious about her job. God, that turns me on.”
Throw in the fact on top of this that Lois is almost always OLDER and more experienced than Clark and the fact that she’s older not only isn’t a joke nor even a plot point nor even something that crosses Clark Kent’s mind in an era where we turn older women into jokes and erase them after the age of 35…and well…you get the picture.
Yeah, it’s really, really important that Lois Lane is serious about her job and good at her job.
