Congratulations! You made it through another week, which means it’s time for the…
Friday Fab 5!
Don’t power down that laptop or blackberry quite yet. We had a lot of great content this past week on GovLoop, and it’s now time to highlight some of the top contributions.
Today’s Blog of the Week is actually more of a topic of the week. A clear theme began emerging early on this week among a particular group of blogs, each generating a slew of comments, and each worthy in and of itself of the “blog of the week” title. That theme was the do’s and don’ts of landing a job. From the perspective of a hiring manager, how do you know who is truly the best candidate, and as a job-seeker, how do you make yourself stand out and not come across as cheesy or pretentious? Is having an impressive resume really enough in today’s job market? Well according to Josh Nankivel and Jeffrey Levy there’s definitely more to the equation. In Josh and Jeffrey’s posts “Hiring Managers are Shopping” and “How to Help a Hiring Manger Pick You from a Stack of Resumes” respectively, both discuss the importance of standing out from the crowd long before that simple piece of paper even hits the hiring manager’s hands. Referrals, online presence, portfolios, etc. are increasingly becoming a necessary part of the job-hunting process. Whether you like it or not, if you are serious about landing an awesome gig, it’s time to step up your game!
Hiring Managers Are Shopping -Josh Nankivel
How to Help a Hiring Manager Pick You From a Stack of Resumes –Jeffrey Levy
It occurred to me that, in the world of staffing, we have these two separate universes of what we call vocational guidance, and selection and assessment. The former tries to identify what general kind of work would make an individual happy and be aptly suited for them, but is not specific to any particular position. The latter attempts to identify who would be competent and qualified for a specific position, but makes no attempt to determine if they would be happy in it, and love it.
So the challenge arises: how do we reshape assessment and selection systems, procedures, and tools, such that the result is the placement of people into jobs that deliver for the organization, but ALSO deliver for the person in the job. How do we begin the re-engineering of selection systems with the goal of allowing people to be happy and fulfilled in their work?
How can government use gaming or gaming mechanics to get citizens more involved to create a more robust democracy? What’s happening already? What’s in the works?
Went up to my Code for America city (Seattle) this weekend to participate in Random Hacks of Kindness, or #RHOK3. Random Hacks of Kindness is a movement of software developers, hackers, and humanitarian workers who get together for intensive weekends building tools to support emergency relief efforts.
In Seattle, we had about 80 people actively developing projects this weekend. I helped to facilitate the large group collaboration, helping people who don’t know each other to quickly find alliances in the group so as to have productive working teams. This was called a “Brain Collision” on CNN, and I was excited to know that this was the first time that some of movers & shakers at NASA were able to attend a participatory coding event like RHOK. I’m grateful to Willow Brugh (Jigsaw Renaissance & Johnny Diggz Tropo for bringing me up there to participate.
Microsoft had given us space on their campus in Redmond, and we had hundreds of feet of whiteboard plastered with wireframes, post-it notes as we created many working prototypes. It was awesome.