Interview Expenses: Should You Be Reimbursed ForThem?
Should you get reimbursed for interview travel expenses? I've helped a number of job searchers who had to travel a fair distance to get to an interview.In most cases the hiring manager I was dealing with would cover reasonable interview expenses.In some cases it was a fairly easy answer especially when it involved flying a person in. In this case, I have never had an experience where a company required someone to fly in for an interview and didn't pick up the costs ie. I have never had a job searcher have to pay out of their own pocket to be flown in an interview.A reasonable company would cover the costs for flying someone in for an interview, I believe, if they were really interested in the person and were interested in gaining a reputation as a reasonable company.It doesn't

How to Leverage Your Fund Raising Ideas
Learn how to easily optimize your fund raising ideas -- whether for school fund raising, church fund raising, charity work, non profit organizations, or business – that require minimal effort but produce maximum monetary rewards.Leverage is a fairly simple concept. According to Webster, leverage “…provides an increased means to accomplish some purpose…” Applied to fund raising ideas, leverage provides an increased resource that optimally maximizes fund raising efforts, consequently optimally maximizing the desired financial revenue.Let’s use a typical school fund raising idea as an example.The school decides to use a company to provide candy bars for their annual fund raising event. The company then provides the school, who, in turn, provides the students with candy bars to sell. Students lug their boxes

Advertising - Should You Be Advertising Your Services?
You offer a reliable, quality service. You know that if more people knew what you can do, you'd increase sales. So you advertise in the most likely media for potential clients to read about you. But there's no response. Why?If this scenario is familiar to you there's a few likely causes.1. Maybe your ad's aren't designed well - poor layout, inappropriate offer, etc.2. Maybe you have selected the wrong media, placement or timing.3. Maybe you shouldn't be advertising your services.Now I know there's a lot to consider when writing advertisements - creating "killer headlines", long copy versus short copy arguments, using white space, etc - and I could give you some tips on how to buy media. But I'm not getting into that today. I'm going to talk about the third point - maybe you shouldn't advertise./p>

It is like the first few days of unemployment, that honeymoon period when we find ourselves with extra time on our hands and no reason to get up early or fight the rush hour traffic. But honeymoons are not designed to last forever and it is only when they are over, that reality and the hard work of building a marriage starts.

The obvious stressors of unemployment are widely recognized: financial strains, the drudgery and frequent humiliation of job search, the family disruption, the loss of self-confidence and self-esteem. While none of these can be lightly dismissed, we are going to concentrate for a moment on an area that is often overlooked. It can cause inner turmoil, pain, significantly increase the emotional fallout of layoff, and exacerbate the depression, anxiety, and negative self-view that so often follow.

To feel productive seems to be an inherent human need. We feel good about ourselves when we are contributing -- to our own independence, to our family, to our community. Many of the great discoveries, inventions, and explorations of history were made by individuals born to family wealth who had no need to ever lift a finger to ensure adequate self-support. Yet these individuals wanted to contribute to the world in some way and left their homes, worked through the night, and even died trying to be part of some enterprise.

Those who sat back on their laurels, and never found any venture to engage them, lead empty lives, drifting through their days without personal value or commitment. Today we see their empty faces in the society pages and read the tabloids to hear about their drug problems and their tawdry efforts to find excitement and meaning.

Those of us - most of us - who have no choice but to work, dream of having enough money to have a choice. Few of us really want to drift around the world without goals or ambition. We simply want to do something meaningful to us rather than the career we fell into which has long since lost its charm and excitement.

It is when that career, boring and humdrum though it may be, is suddenly taken away, that we realize how much of ourselves is invested in the role we have worn for so long. Our belief in our own value is tied up and interdependent with our productivity. We feel a vi

dismissed, we are going to concentrate for a moment on an area that is often overlooked. It can cause inner turmoil, pain, significantly increase the emotional fallout of layoff, and exacerbate the depression, anxiety, and negative self-view that so often follow.

To feel productive seems to be an inherent human need. We feel good about ourselves when we are contributing -- to our own independence, to our family, to our community. Many of the great discoveries, inventions, and explorations of history were made by individuals born to family wealth who had no need to ever lift a finger to ensure adequate self-support. Yet these individuals wanted to contribute to the world in some way and left their homes, worked through the night, and even died trying to be part of some enterprise.

Those who sat back on their laurels, and never found any venture to engage them, lead empty lives, drifting through their days without personal value or commitment. Today we see their empty faces in the society pages and read the tabloids to hear about their drug problems and their tawdry efforts to find excitement and meaning.

Those of us - most of us - who have no choice but to work, dream of having enough money to have a choice. Few of us really want to drift around the world without goals or ambition. We simply want to do something meaningful to us rather than the career we fell into which has long since lost its charm and excitement.

It is when that career, boring and humdrum though it may be, is suddenly taken away, that we realize how much of ourselves is invested in the role we have worn for so long. Our belief in our own value is tied up and interdependent with our productivity. We feel a vi

ever lift a finger to ensure adequate self-support. Yet these individuals wanted to contribute to the world in some way and left their homes, worked through the night, and even died trying to be part of some enterprise.

Those who sat back on their laurels, and never found any venture to engage them, lead empty lives, drifting through their days without personal value or commitment. Today we see their empty faces in the society pages and read the tabloids to hear about their drug problems and their tawdry efforts to find excitement and meaning.

Those of us - most of us - who have no choice but to work, dream of having enough money to have a choice. Few of us really want to drift around the world without goals or ambition. We simply want to do something meaningful to us rather than the career we fell into which has long since lost its charm and excitement.

It is when that career, boring and humdrum though it may be, is suddenly taken away, that we realize how much of ourselves is invested in the role we have worn for so long. Our belief in our own value is tied up and interdependent with our productivity. We feel a vi

most of us - who have no choice but to work, dream of having enough money to have a choice. Few of us really want to drift around the world without goals or ambition. We simply want to do something meaningful to us rather than the career we fell into which has long since lost its charm and excitement.

It is when that career, boring and humdrum though it may be, is suddenly taken away, that we realize how much of ourselves is invested in the role we have worn for so long. Our belief in our own value is tied up and interdependent with our productivity. We feel a vital part of our marital partnership, someone our children respect and follow, an important person in our community who has earned the right to voice an opinion or vote for a principle. We bear ourselves with a certain pride in that we are bonafide members of the working class and clearly differentiate ourselves from those who fail to contribute: the welfare class, the criminals, the idle rich, the various parasites who dot the fringes of our society.

When we lose our job, the lines start to blur. Our sense of personal importance starts slowly to fracture. We see the reflection of ourselves in the eyes of our friends and family start to change. While we concentrate on finding other work and jumping through the multiple hoops required by any job search campaign, we also withdraw more and more into ourselves, seeking to escape the new image of ourselves emerging in the minds of those around us.

As a vocational counselor, I heard a repeated litany of concerns from spouses and family: "Since this happened, she's totally changed . . . He's not the man I knew . . . I don't know who she is anymore . . . he won't talk to me about what's bothering him . . . I want my husband back. I don't care if he's working or not . . ."

Have you, or someone you love, fallen into this trap?

Address the problem now, before a situation not of your choice and for which you bear no blame, mushrooms into the too frequent personal devastation of the unemployed - broken marriages, family dispersion, substance abuse, shattered lives.

The discomfort and emotional pain of losing your job also provides an opportunity to cement bonds and build strength if you take action to address problems head on. Above all, communication must not lapse. In fact, it needs to be expanded and enriched. Reach out to family and friends, those who love you as you are, "warts and all" as the saying goes.

Express your fears and your worries. Let them know how uncomfortable you are and how disappointed you feel that you cannot contribute to the family in the way you always managed in the past. Seek out ways to be a productive, even if non-working, member of the team. Take on new chores and responsibilities around the house and with the kids. Pay extra attention to your spouse. You may no