Bolles - The Job-Hunters Survival Guide: How to Find a Rewarding Job Even When There Are No Jobs

What Color Is Your Parachute? 2010 edition (9/1/09) revised annually

What Color Is Your Parachute? Job-Hunters Workbook

How to Find Your Mission in Life

The Three Boxes of Life, and How to Get Out of Them

Books by Richard N. Bolles with Co-authors

Job-Hunting Online (5th Edition)
(Mark E. Bolles as co-author)

The Career Counselors Handbook (2nd Edition)
(Howard Figler as co-author)

Job-Hunting for the So-Called Handicapped
(Dale Brown as co-author)

What Color Is Your Parachute? for Teens
(Carol Christen, with Jean M. Blomquist, as co-authors)

What Color Is Your Parachute? for Retirement
(John E. Nelson as co-author)

PUBLISHERS NOTE This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional career services. If expert assistance is required, the service of the appropriate professional should be sought.

Copyright 2009 by Richard N. Bolles

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except brief excerpts for the purpose of review, without written permission of the publisher.

Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com

www.tenspeed.com

Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bolles, Richard Nelson.
The job-hunters survival guide : how to find hope and rewarding work even when there are no jobs / by Richard N. Bolles. 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: An emergency, essentials-only guide to finding a jobeven your dream jobin a challenging economic climate, from the author of classic career guide What Color Is Your Parachute?Provided by publisher.
1. Job hunting. 2. Job huntingUnited States. I. Title.
HF5382.7.B628 2010
650.14dc22

2009019820

eISBN: 978-0-307-75942-9

v3.1

I FIRST CONCEIVED THE IDEA of this book in February, three months ago. The annual editions of my perennial best-seller, What Color Is Your Parachute?, continue to hit the bookstores every September, but I felt there was also a need for a much shorter, less expensive book to help job-hunters who were hanging on the ropes during this brutal Recession. So I proposed a 100-page book at a meeting with my publisher back in February, and they said they could get it out by mid-July.

I quickly discarded the notion of simply copying portions from the big book, and decided to write this from scratch. If I were job-hunting tomorrow, I asked myself, what would be the most important things for me to know? I wrote the book accordingly. In this, I had help. Every three months I conduct a workshop for five days in my home, to which come people from all over the world; I listen a lot. I learn a lot from them.

The most essential stuff is in here. Lots of other things arent. No detailed treatment of shyness, or other handicaps, no lengthy discussion of interviewing or salary negotiation; theyre all still in the main book. Here, we have to travel more swiftly.

A word of thanks to the folks over at the editorial department of Ten Speed Press in Berkeley, California: Aaron Wehner, Lisa Westmoreland, and Betsy Stromberg, who labored mightily to bring this book out so quickly. Also much gratitude to Jenny Frost, head of the Crown Publishing division of Random House, who are the new owners of Ten Speed Press; she has been immensely encouraging. And a word of great, great gratitude to Phil Wood, founder and former owner of Ten Speed, my friend and publisher since the annual revisions of Parachute first began, some forty years ago. And 10,000,000 copies ago. I owe him a debt I can never repay. It was he who first proposed a little book. I think that was ten years ago. (Im slow.)

Now, a word or two about this book. I wrote it in the same style I always have written Parachute, namely, I write as I speak. I use italics, pauses, numbers, words, and spaces between paragraphs in inconsistent ways throughout, to convey the weight I intend for sentences, or the speed with which a particular sentence is read. In other words, I break rules, in order to serve a higher purpose: easy reading.

The Internet dominates this little book. Four of out five adults in the U.S. have access to the Internet, now, making old ways of job-hunting obsolete. If youre on the Internet, and if youre up to date on browsers, you know you often dont need the old http://www prefix before a url. So, I give you the bare citing necessary for a browser (in most cases) to know immediately where to take you. If that doesnt work, call up Google on your screen, and put the citing I give you into the search box on your browser, and Im sure it will turn up the correct url for the site you are looking for.

Full Disclosure: I have my own website, . I am on LinkedIn, and Plaxo, but not Facebook nor MySpace. My call. I have enough to do, as it is. I twitter once or twice a week (ParachuteGuy). I spend about two hours a day online. No more than that. I like to write, plus I have a lovely wife, Marci, and a useful life, and I like to get out in the sun. After all, I live in California.

Dick Bolles

May 12, 2009

A P ARABLE ABOUT S TUPIDITY . A bunch of people were in a rowboat, after their ship had to be abandoned. Suddenly, they noticed, with quiet alarm, that one man was using a drill to make a hole in the bottom of the boat beneath his seat. As the water was beginning to come in, he looked up and said, Dont be alarmed. Im only drilling under my own seat.

How did this world get into the economic mess its currently in? Well, to speak in glittering generalities, far too many of us (both individuals and nations) spent too much, borrowed too much, lived too high, saved too little, invested with too much risk, and played a Ponzi scheme with Nature. And when all this came crashing down, the consequences affected not just ourselves, but others around the world. And thus we learned that if you create a global economy, as we have in this Age of the Internet, you end up with all of us being in the same boat. And now what any of us decides to do, has consequences for others and not just ourselves. We see it even in metaphor: if I default on my mortgage, it lowers the value of all my neighbors homes.

Currently the world is going through a dreadful shudder, as it sobers up to what it has done, and sees the need to reform its economic ways. We may call the shudder hard times, or recession or even the big D word. The name doesnt matter. It amounts to a gigantic economic hangover that is worldwide.