This excellent book has been in multiple reprints since about 1970 and is extremely helpful in many ways.
Some of the areas I found most helpful included:
1. How Employers Hunt for Job-Hunters. In this chapter, Bolles clearly lays out the harsh realities of the differences between people looking for work and those seeking jobs. The power lies with the employer, and the sooner I realized that truth, the better off I was. This chapter also pointed out that different types of resumes work better for different types of employers, so it's important to tailor your resume to your audience. This was a great lesson for me.
2. Tips. What I loved about this chapter was the reinforcement that job hunting is hard work and takes effort, there is no getting around it. I also thought it was great advice to be open to changing my tactics if what I was doing wasn't working. Too often I get caught up in the thinking that just doing more of the same will change my result. I now realize that sometimes I am just doing the wrong things, so need to try something different.
3. Interviewing Tip For Smarties: Another great chapter that reset how I think about interviews. One of the best tips for me was sticking to the time I asked for from the interviewer. Too often in the past if I thought the interview was going well, I would keep talking. Now I realize that one of the best ways to impress a potential boss is to stick to the time (e.g., 20 minutes) that I originally asked for. The other very helpful tip was to let the interviewer do 50% of the talking. This balance of time lets the interviewer know that you know how to listen as well as speak. Too much talking by me tells them I might ignore the needs of the company: too little speaking by me might tell them I am trying to hide something. Good input!
Overall, I thought this book could be extremely helpful to a lot of job seekers, since it provides a wealth of insight into what the employers are looking for and how they are approaching the hiring process. After all, it involves two parties trying to see if there is a match, so it's very important to know what the hiring manager is thinking and how they are approaching this process.
Another book that I thought was extremely helpful in terms of applying to my job search was "GOAL! Your 30 Day Game Plan" Goal!: Your 30-Day Game Plan for Business and Career Successwhich helped organize my efforts and kept me motivated along the way towards my new job.
