101 Best Ways to Land a Job in Troubled Times

THE PROVEN FIVE-STEP STRATEGY FOR FINDING THE JOB OF YOUR DREAMS!
“If you are serious about landing a quality job quickly in today’s job market, this book will practically guarantee your success.”
–Bob Burg, bestselling author of Endless Referrals and The Go-Giver
“Jay Block has taken his place as one of the career coaching industry’s most innovative thinkers and contributors.”
—Frank X. Fox, Executive Director, Professional Association of Resume Writers & Career Coaches
“A must-read for all job seekers in today’s highly competitive job market.”
—Sherry Zylka, Associate Dean of Continuing Education and Workforce Development, Schoolcraft College (Michigan)
“Jay has written a unique and highly effective book combining motivational techniques with job search innovation.”
—Susan Leventhal, Manager, Professional Placement Network, Workforce One, Florida
About the Book:
In 101 Best Ways to Land a Job in Troubled Times, Jay Block helps you approach your job transition strategically—not as a one-time search, but as a campaign of discovery through which you’ll achieve your career objectives. Follow his easy five-step process to:
Manage fear and negative emotions that impede success
Carefully define clear job and career goals
Create effective and high-impact self- marketing tools that make job seekers STAND OUT professionally
Develop strategic, structured action plans that will become the job seeker’s GPS to their next job
Take action and “enjoy the process” of landing a job in troubled times quickly and effectively
Block’s proven method is the only way to truly seize control of your future, land the job you want, and earn the pay you deserve.

George, Rachel, Bill, Drew,

When I first heard that the mighty Metallica had been booked as a headliner for Bonnaroo 2008 I was immediately interested.

I am a musician, a writer, a media professional, and a HUGE Metallica fan. Metallica has something to do with each of those titles. Metallica is one of the bands who first inspired me to play music and to expand my horizons. It was 'A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica' (the documentary of the making of the Black Album) that inspired my career choice. When I saw how a record was made and witnessed the process behind studio recording, I knew that's what I wanted to do for a living some day. I went on to study Radio, TV, and Film as a result and have been working as a sound/media engineer for the majority of my professional career.

I’ve been on many road trips over the years and I’ve been to even more live shows/festivals. I have traveled great distances in the past to catch Metallica at venues like the Pontiac Silverdome in Detroit, The Retama Polo Fields in San Antonio, American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas Staduim, Starplex Ampatheatre, and a random corn field in Ferris, Texas for Lollapalooza '96. The trip to Bonnaroo was my 14th trek to see Metallica in concert and this journey would prove to be the most memorable to date.

I bought my tickets the very first day they were available and began planning my vacation around the epic voyage to Manchester, Tennessee. I had originally planned to take a co-worker who eventually pulled out and left me with an extra ticket and nobody to take the trip with. I was fully planning on going alone when I stumbled upon the Bonnaroo ride finder message board. Luckily I found four other people who needed to carpool to Bonnaroo. One of them even needed a ticket. We worked out the logistics in the weeks leading up to the festival and set out on our journey the Wednesday before Bonnaroo was to begin. Three of the car-poolers-Drew, Bill, and Brenden drove from Austin to my house in Fort Worth where the trip began. Our fourth rider-Rachel, lived on the way and was picked up in Dallas.


Fortunately, everyone who came on the trip was totally cool and very friendly. We drove my GMC Envoy and had it packed to the roof with camping gear and food. Normally the trip to Manchester takes about 12 hours from Dallas. Our trip was slightly shorter, as we engaged the warp-drive and drove about 90mph the entire way. Our first waypoint before hitting Bonnaroo was Nashville. We stayed in a slightly ghetto motel along with about a hundred other ‘Roo attendees. The suddenly increased traffic on a Wednesday night was almost too much to handle for the hotel staff. It seems that our fellow Bonnaroo comrades had emptied all of the ice machines in the hotel filling up their coolers, what a tragedy. We could hardly sleep that night because we were all so excited about the festival.

Thursday morning, after the free southern style breakfast at the ghetto-fab hotel, we set out to Manchester to witness what would be the longest line of cars I have ever seen going to the same place. Bonnaroo is held on a 700 acre farm in rural Tennessee. To say Manchester is a small town is an understatement. For a week each year Manchester’s population swells by up to 80k people. When we first approached Bonnaroo we witnessed a line of cars which stretched over ten miles. We had all read the horror stories of 8 hour waits in line just to get in at previous Bonnaroos. Fortune smiled upon our group as we were directed past the line and through the middle of Manchester to an alternate entrance. Our total wait time was about 2.5 hours. Along the road into Bonnaroo were lush pastures and beautiful wooded areas. The traffic moved so slowly at times, that we were able to get out and walk along the road, chat with other people in line, and play Frisbee. This is how I like to spend my vacation, nice and easy.

Once we made it though initial line, we had to get in line once again to have our vehicle searched. Once searched, we proceeded to our campsite in Pod # 9, one of the most distant areas from Centeroo-the main festival area. We set up camp, unloaded our gear and started planning our festival experience. There is literally something to do 24-7 at Bonnaroo. There are vendors, food, showers, music, booze, and ANYTHING else you can imagine. We sampled all of it. Before any music was taken in we had to shake off 12 hours in the car. First up was a trip to the silent disco for some dance moves Napoleon Dynamite would be proud of. The silent disco consists of a DJ, a dance floor and a hundred pairs of Koss wireless headphones. From the outside it is a strange sight indeed. Everyone in the silent disco had a great time and got their dance on most fervently.

Next up was a rousing game of Frisbee. Xbox was handing out glow-in-the-dark Frisbees and we grabbed two. It was a great feeling to run and jump in the fresh, Tennessee,

We made it!
Here’s the story behind the smile on our faces (besides the fact that we’re in Hawaii!)

Our flight was delayed 8 hours (but luckily Hawaiian Airlines had called us the day before and warned us) so we got to the airport 2 hours before boarding, which we NEVER do (we both usually like to be the last ones on the plane) and there was already a HUGE line at the Hawaiian ticket counter. A huge windstorm had blown into Seattle the Thursday night prior (and blew a tree into our friends Phil and Doris’s (whose timeshare we were sharing in Hawaii!) living room!) and Sea-Tac had lost power that Saturday (we were flying out Sunday). So anyway, it was totally crowded and the line was realllllly slow moving, so we chatted up the nice older gentleman in line next to us. Apparently he had been vacationing on Hawaii (the Big Island) for years and told us all about what there is to see and do, and then he and Tim started chatting about fly fishing and he told Tim all about where the best fly fishing is in the continental United States, and then we started talking about Hawaii again (we must have talked for an hour and a half) and I joked that I didn’t really care what we did in Hawaii as long as I got lei’d when I got off the plane. He chuckled and said, “You realize they only do that in the movies, right?” but then he took out his Blackberry and said, “But I’ll see what I can do… What’s your name?” So I told him and he pretended to type something into his phone and Tim and I both looked at each other and were like, “Riiiiiiiight.” So we FINALLY get up to the counter (part of the reason it was taking so long was because they were issuing everyone $200 vouchers for the inconvenience) and I realize they only booked us to HONOLULU, but we were flying to KONA. I asked the agent what was up and she told me she couldn’t check us into the next flight yet and that we’d have to wait until we got to Honolulu to check in for our next flight. Oh, and by the way, you’re now flying through Maui as well. Great. So we get on the plane, blah blah blah, land in Honolulu, and then. chaos. ensues. We have no idea where we’re going next. We have no idea what the flight number is, when it’s leaving, where it’s leaving from, and we have no ticket to get on the flight even if we did know how to get on. AND they’re having some kind of mechanical difficulties with the jetway and it takes the crew TWENTY MINUTES to fix it and almost HALF AN HOUR to deboard the plane. So everyone spills out of the plane and into the terminal (it’s now 10:00 at night) and tries to figure out where the hell they’re going. I decide to be all “The Amazing Race” about it and try to team up with another family, but with three kids, they’re just as lost as we are. So Tim tracks down a ticket agent who just tells us “GET ON THE WIKI WIKI!!! GET ON THE WIKI WIKI!!!” so we get on one car and the family gets on the other and I basically just figure we’ll get off when they get off. Luckily, there’s only one stop. So we hop off the Wiki Wiki and run into this other terminal and there are people waving us to the gate and there’s an announcement about “If you’re going to Kona on flight 57…. I mean 27….. go to Gate 57….” But I think she’s saying 67 and Tim thinks she’s saying 57 (and of course they’re in 2 totally different directions) so we don’t know which way to go, but then we get caught up in this rush of people and eventually get corralled over to gate 57, and there’s 2 ticket agents standing at the counter saying, “Flight to Kona! Flight to Kona!” so we get in line and realize that they’re just checking the ticket stubs from the previous flight, but Tim had left his in the seat pocket ahead of him on the last flight, so he has nothing to prove he was on that last night, but apparently, in Hawaii, that doesn’t matter. We get up to the counter and the agents just wave us through the line and tell us to pick any seat that isn’t first class (what is this, Southwest???). We’re one of the last people on the plane so I take a seat by the window by this older couple and Tim takes a seat across the aisle and we just look at each other like, “What the hell just happened there?” So I start chatting up the woman next to me about what a crazy mess that was and apparently 1) She never GOT THE CALL from Hawaiian Airlines delaying the flight, so she’d been at the airport since 6AM that morning, AND 2) She was never told to catch the Wiki Wiki so she and 40 other people RAN to the next terminal to catch the next flight. OMG. So at that point I realize our trip could have been a lot more messed up and just try to sit back and not freak out about the next 2 flights I’m taking over the ocean. Finally, though, it’s all over, and we land in Kona and our bags are the first ones off the belt, so we pick up all our crap and head over to the rental car counter when….. THE GUY THAT WE SAW AT SEA-TAC greets us with leis!!!!!!!! He had apparently seen us get on the 2nd flight and so he texted

The catastrophic collapse of companies such as Enron, WorldCom, ImClone, and Tyco left angry investors, employees, reporters, and government investigators demanding to know how the CEOs deceived everyone into believing their companies were spectacularly successful when in fact they were massively insolvent. Why did the nation's top accounting firms give such companies clean audit reports? Where were the regulators and whistleblowers who should expose fraudulent CEOs before they loot their companies for hundreds of millions of dollars? In this expert insider's account of the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s, William Black lays bare the strategies that corrupt CEOs and CFOs--in collusion with those who have regulatory oversight of their industries--use to defraud companies for their personal gain. Recounting the investigations he conducted as Director of Litigation for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, Black fully reveals how Charles Keating and hundreds of other S&L owners took advantage of a weak regulatory environment to perpetrate accounting fraud on a massive scale. He also authoritatively links the S&L crash to the business failures of the early 2000s, showing how CEOs then and now are using the same tactics to defeat regulatory restraints and commit the same types of destructive fraud. Black uses the latest advances in criminology and economics to develop a theory of why "control fraud"--looting a company for personal profit--tends to occur in waves that make financial markets deeply inefficient. He also explains how to prevent such waves. Throughout the book, Black drives home the larger point that control fraud is a major, ongoing threat in business that requires active, independent regulators to contain it. His book is a wake-up call for everyone who believes that market forces alone will keep companies and their owners honest. (200609)