The Towing Path

Standing out at a Job Faire can make a difference in your career search. Career Faires are starting to pick up, and a major job search company is running some nice ones, called Targeted Job Fairs. At a Silicon Valley Career Fair in January, 10 companies as showing up, and a major job search company has 82 career faires scheduled for this year across the States.

How do you stand out at a Job Fair? The contention can be substantial, but you can help yourself surpass from the crowd with advance homework. At AA-Careers, we have a simple 6-step process to get ready. Plan to go? Here’s how to prepare:

First, research the organizations that are going and pick your targets. Use the internet to research the companies that are there beforehand. Go to their websites and see if they have their jobs posted. Pick a sensible number to go after, and get ready to spend about an hour researching each one. It’s hard to do more than 8 in a day, and three or four is a much more reasonable target. For each hiring organization, you want to know: key product lines, recent news, and executive names. Try to see if you know anyone at the target companies. You will end up with with a page or two of research for each company/job.

Second, if there are job postings on the web, read them to see what the hiring department is looking for. Create a mapping of your achievements and skills to the demands of the job. Make the language match. If the hiring company calls customers "clients", your resume should do the same thing. The accomplishments should be written in the style of the hiring organization.

Third, create a ‘short sales pitch’ for each likely company/job combination. Write down a 60 second ‘thumbnail’ that you can repeat verbally showing why you are a great prospect for that job. You’ll use this in your resume and when you meet the company at the job stall.

Fourth, modify your resume for each position. The objective on your resume should exactly match the job you’re want. The executive summary should be a written form of your “mini sales pitch” for the job. Then choose the achievements and skills that most clearly match the job requirements. Especially at a Career Fair, the purpose of your resume is a sales tool for you – to get you on-site job interviews. It should be quick to see that you’re a fit based on your resume.

Fifth, practice your ‘mini-sales-pitch’. Collect your research and the resume for each opportunity - bring a couple of copies for each – and put each in a understandably marked folder. Keep them in a lightweight briefcase or folio.

Finally, dress and prepare as if you’re doing on-site interviews. Dress well and be well groomed. Avoid strong cologne or perfume…use any cologne or fragrance sparingly, if at all.

Remember to smile, and good hunting!

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A modern job search campaign is by nature fairly complex. While the net has offered a variety of new channels, it also creates increased competition for choice jobs and possible challenges for job hunters.

Job search needs to be thought of as a highly personal, extremely directed marketing process where you are the product. Your resume is an ad. Your extended network of colleagues is your lead generating machine.

So where does the internet fit in? At AA-Careers, we recently posted a job on a popular job board and got 650 applications in a calendar week. For a single position. That’s increased job hunting competition.

Had a great candidiate called us before we ran the posting, they could have secured the position before getting all that competition. How? By finding an employee at our office who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone knew of the job for at least 9 days before it was posted. Who in your network might know of a job that’s coming available soon?

Be sure to check your cover letter and resume carefully! When we did an analysis of the 650 resumes, we found a large number of errors. 63% of the applicants were easily eliminated with a quick triage process. How? The same way any hiring manager would. By eliminating resumes where the objective didn’t match our position description. By eliminating prospects whose cover letters gave us causes not to engage them, like "I know I’m overqualified but I really need a job". By eliminating prospects whose documents that didn’t open properly. And by passing over candidates who didn’t bother to spell check their cover letter and/or resume.

So the great news is that job boards give you a feel of who is hiring, and for what kinds of jobs. But once those positions are posted, the competition is intense. You can still compete, if you have a well written resume, designed to appeal directly and clearly to the recruiter. And if you have practiced interviewing – so you don’t stumble at a critical point.

Another downside to be aware of is how easily you can be investigated on the web. As we Googled several candidates, we ran into some pictures and comments that were in questionable taste. Nothing crazy, but enough to sway our thinking about who to choose.

AA-Careers provides a extensive set of services for Bay Area job seekers, providing our clients a personal career consultant, a managed job hunting campaign, modern tools like a personal website, video, highly targeted resume, and much more. Let us know if we can help you.

Be careful out there, and good hunting!

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It was not too long ago that email mailboxes were so full of junk mail and spam that they threatened to render electronic communication useless. When you opened up your email you were bombarded with poorly written advertisements for $ex, V!agra, and tons of other intentionally misspelled products, designed to evade any spam blocking devices. Those interested in consumer protection knew the ultimate goal, to eliminate and block spam, but as soon as they created a product designed to do just that, the spammers evaded their efforts by getting more creative. That is, until modern anti spam software was developed. Antispam software comes in a variety of forms, with the obvious ultimate intent of stopping unwanted emails from reaching you.

Blacklist

One of the primary anti spam methods is known as blacklisting. This software identifies the IP address of the spam sender, and then communicates with the Internet Service Provider of the sender and instructs the ISP to block mail from that IP address to your email account. In theory this is a fool proof solution. The reality, however, is that there is a lot of money to be made in spamming, so forcing a spammer to switch his IP address frequently is not too high a price to pay to evade blocking. That said, this practice does, over time, start to close down doors to spammers and all but eliminates amateur spammers who do not have the capability to frequently switch IPs.

Spam Votes

Many individuals who frequently use their email accounts will be familiar with this device. Spam voting software works through the participation of users. When you receive email you have the option of classifying it as spam, usually by pushing a button which says, unsurprisingly, ’spam’. Once enough people classify a piece of mail or an IP as spam it falls in trust until ultimately it becomes completely blocked from addresses.

Profiling

Profiling involves learning the common characteristics of spammers and spam mail. It is software that looks for things like bugs, invalid message ID’s and other traits and uses these characteristics to evaluate incoming pieces of mail. Each piece of mail is then given a score depending upon how it fares against these criteria. The user is then given the option of how high or how low to set the bar with regard to which emails are let in. This method has been shown to be immensely effective against amateur spammers and many professional spammers. However, it relies upon a ready team of professionals to identify new traits used by spammers and to incorporate those traits into the profiling algorithms.

Bayesian Filtering

The most promising spam blocking software follows no rules. Rather, it constantly learns new techniques to fight spam by scanning the mail you’ve read and comparing it to the mail that you have rejected. This highly sophisticated software uses the data that it gleans from thousands of users to identify which items are spam and which are not. It then has the capability to adjust its standards to your particular preferences. Over time, it becomes adept at sending you only the emails that you want, and blocking the emails that you do not.

Sara Anderwahl recommends that you visit www.barracudanetworks.com for more information on anti spam software.

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Are you a James Bond movies fan? If not I need to add some a few more words. “From Russia with Love ” is one of the popular Bond movies starring Sean Connery. His has been sent to a secret mission in Turkey in this episode.

But this article is not about James Bond and spy movies. It is about spamming.

Russian SPAM has become one of the most dangerous ones flooding your e-mail box. From ordinary advertising to different virus definitions it harms everyones mailbox and takes a lot of your time and ISP’s resources.

“Our business email address is being flooded by Russian spam, despite being filtered through SpamCop.net first. I can’t report the spam using WebMail as the messages are forwarded to our mail server, so the offending messages do not stay on the server. I have now started reporting the spam through my own “attachment forwarding” SpamCop account, but it still keeps coming”, posts Martin in a popular web forum.

A question to follow is “Why does this Russian spam keep coming?”. One of the possible answers is to do DNS blacklists and to adjust your SpamAssassin (if you have one installed) threshold downwards. You can change these settings in Options -> SpamCop Tools -> Select your email filtering blacklists.

I can read and understand Russian even I have nothing to do with this country. But Martin can’t. So he asks a good question “Can’t I just say I want no Russian language mail? I can’t read it anyway”.

The answer is “You can say it, but right now there is no way to implement it from within SpamCop.”

Another forum user writes “I also get a lot of Russian spam and have all of the BL’s selected. The problem is that it comes for too many different IP’s”. I can only add here that even if you blacklist all russian IP’s you will still continue receiving Russian SPAM. The simple reason is that most spamming messages come from United States IP addresses. American ISP’s have very strict TOS about spamming but hey can not block all IP’s.

Four years ago in 2002, a US researchers from Center for Democracy and Technology found that e-mail addresses posted on websites or in newsgroups attract the most spam. They estimated that up to 40% of global e-mail traffic is caused by spamming messages bringing headache for businesses, which are losing billions in productivity.

eWeek says that 86 % of spam sent to enterprises between May and July 2004 came from U.S. spammers, according to a survey by CipherTrust Inc. It sampled about 5 million pieces of spam sent to 1,000 e-mail boxes. Just 3 % of spam came from China and Hong Kong!

According to InternetWeek.com, “most of the spam sent across the Internet originated on zombie machines, hijacked computers remotely controlled by spammers.” Zombies, people! The Walking Undead! It sounds like a horror movie isn’t it?

But let’s get back to Russians. Here’s another post about Russian spam

“What’s the story with all the Russian spam of late? What is it that the Russians are trying to sell me? Do Russians worry about tiny penises? Do they play Texas Hold-Em online? Do they buy fake Rolexes? Do they like “dirty barnyard girls in all animal sex videos”?

I sure hope not. I’ve been using gmail for almost a year now and I love it. It’s spam filter is fantastic. You’d think they’d figure out by now that any email I receive in Russian belongs in the spam bin instead of my inbox.”

Someone who pissed off of “Russians with fake Rolexes” posted some advices of fighting Russian spam. Here they are:

For a quicker way of reporting a lot of foreign language spam (or any spam for that matter) that has been forwarded to your local inbox try the following:

- Set up IMAP as a separate link to your held mail.

- Clear out (delete) all mail in the held mail folder (you can skip this step if you want)

- Move all the foreign language spam from your local inbox to your IMAP SpamCop Held mail folder (click and drag). It takes it off your local machine and moves it back to the SpamCop server. No need to forward as attachment.

- Then log into either the VER interface Held Mail or log into Web Mail and select the Held Mail folder

- Select all or only those specific messages you want to report.

- VER gives you the option of quick reporting or full reporting

- WebMail only allows for quick reporting.

Hope this story will help to fight against Russian SPAM. If not you have at least 2 more choices - to start learning Russian language or to close your e-mail account.

About the author and the Blog

DawHB.com was launched on March 14th. The blog covers the web hosting industry, starting with newbie advise and extending to high-end issues. The blog publisher Dimitar Avramov has been in the web hosting industry since 1999, working as a CEO of a web hosting company and then moving to the website marketing and advertising business. He manages a network of web hosting, web design and web master related service directories that cover US, European and other regional markets.

More articles at dawhb.com web hosting blog (http://www.dawhb.com/)

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