Pretty soon we will be ready to say goodbye to 2009. This year has been nothing short of a perfect storm. Financial institutions came tumbling down, economy got worse as days went by and with that the job market took a hard hit. However, tough times call for tough measures and that means some awesome content came our way through different blogs and sites.
These post highlights some of the best career and job search articles of 2009. These aren’t the most linked to articles or anything of that sort, however, they are some of the most notable articles that contain some of the best and practical advice for job seekers and the career minded. We’ve also included a brief excerpt from each article to give you an idea. If you are unemployed, take a day off searching for jobs and go through these links. If you are busy, save it and go through them before 2009 ends, after all these are the best links of 2009 
. Enjoy!
1. Seven Great Questions To Ask at a Job Interview
If you are going for an interview as a prospective employee then you should do some research. Read the job description and requirements carefully. Browse the web site to see how the organization presents itself. Search for news items and comments about the company on news sites and blogs.
2. 10 Ways To Use LinkedIn To Find a Job
Searching for a job can suck if you constrain yourself to the typical tools such as online jobs boards, trade publications, CraigsList, and networking with only your close friends. In these kinds of times, you need to use all the weapons that you can, and one that many people don’t—or at least don’t use to the fullest extent, is LinkedIn.
3. 6 Words That Make Your Resume Suck
So how do you write a wicked resume without the suck? How do you turn the wrong words into right? To help you land the job interview, here’s how to spin the 6 sucky resume words into skills that sizzle.
4. The Monster List Of Freelance Job Sites
Every freelancer needs clients. We rely on them, nurture our relationships with them, and provide a quality of service that keeps then coming back. And we can never have enough of them! The Monster List of Freelance Job Sites has one purpose: to massively increase your source of potential clients and potential jobs.
5. How To Write Great Cover Letters For Your Resume
Effective cover letters are tailored to an individual job or company. If you email a generic cover letter, you lose the chance to connect the dots for a potential employer. With a customized cover letter, you can highlight specific skills and attributes. You can draw parallels between what you have and what the employer wants.
6. Negotiating a Salary : How To Make $1,000 a Minute
Most personal-finance blogs write about cutting expenses. But you can obtain powerful results by looking beyond frugality, by boosting your earning power. One of the best ways to increase your income is at the source: during salary negotiations, either when you land a job or during a performance review. This can be scary. For many people, salary negotiations are an awkward thing.
7. 45% Employers Use Facebook-Twitter To Screen Job Candidates
As social networking grows increasingly pervasive, more employers are utilizing these sites to screen potential employees. Forty-five percent of employers reported in a recent CareerBuilder survey that they use social networking sites to research job candidates, a big jump from 22 percent last year.
8. How To Answer The 10 Most Common Interview Questions
When it comes to interviews, there are two types – the soft qualitative interview and the hard quantitative interview. The soft qualitative interview is one where the interviewer is trying to get a feel for how you’d fit in the team and the organization.
9. 10 Job Listing Sites With Unique Job Opportunities
The right job listings can be hard to find. There are thousands of sites offering job listings online, from Craigslist to Monster, but most of them wind up listing very similar (if not identical) opportunities. The sites listed here are a little more out of the way — but still worth spending some time on.
10. Create a Grid Based Resume/CV Layout in InDesign
Use the power of grid based designs to create a structured and professional page layout in InDesign, which can then be populated with a range of information to produce a polished CV or Resume.
11. 10 Jobs For The Recession and Beyond
When it comes to what makes us happy at work, job-satisfaction surveys have been showing for years that the size of our paycheck is losing ground to intangibles like autonomy, mobility, low stress, flexible hours, job security, health coverage, paid time off and other benefits. Does pay matter? Of course it does.
12. Unemployed (or preparing to be)? These Sites Could Be Your Best Friend
As the economy continues to suffer, many people are cutting their budgets, looking for work, or preparing a plan of action in case a layoff comes. Fortunately, the Web offers some powerful new tools to help with those tasks. After asking some experts and a number of unemployed friends for recommendations, I put together a list of sites that can truly make a difference, whether you’re conducting or anticipating a job search, or just trying to tighten the purse strings during these bad economic times.
13. Top 10 Tools For Landing a Better Job
From the first Google search to the last interview, you can boost your odds at landing a better job with the right preparation. Here are our ten best tools and tips for job-seekers and career climbers.
14. How To : Build The Ultimate Social Media Resume
Social media resumes are important for attracting hiring managers directly to you, without you having to submit your resume, blindly, to them. The problem with submitting your resume online to job postings is that most job postings aren’t even vacant, might not exist, and 80% of jobs offers are received through networking.
15. 10 Answers You Should Know Before Your Job Interview
Although no one can predict the questions your potential employer will ask, you can think about how you’d answer some of the commonly asked ones. Here are ten questions for you to consider and a few hints about how to answer them.
16. Top 5 Free Resume Hosting Websites
There are dozens of resume building websites offering a combination of free and paid services. Many sites have excellent resume building tools, a wide variety of templates and formatting options, but do not allow you to host your resume with a personalized URL for free.
17. How To Build The Ultimate Job Finding Dashboard with iGoogle
In this article we’re going to show you how to take that entire job search process and replace it with a single customized job finding page on iGoogle. We’ll aggregate all of the various job boards, grab feeds for different twitter searches, and create a single dashboard where you can look for jobs at a glance.
18. Ten Best Green Jobs For The Next Decade
‘It’s time to bail out the people and the planet,’ says Van Jones, author of The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems. We agree, and this guide to to sustainability-focused career paths will help retrofit and solar-charge your work life.
19. Five Signs Your Resume Is Passe
The workplace is not what it was five years ago. Neither is the job hunt. The most successful candidates are those who are ready and willing to adapt to a changing landscape. But it doesn’t matter how ready you are for the modern workplace if your resume ’s straight out of 1994.
20. 30+ Websites To Visit When You Are Laid Off
The worst time to panic is when you are laid off and lose your main source of income. We live in a new and powerful era of communication, one where we can find support, gather news, and network without ever leaving our computers. The following collection of websites has been put together as a comprehensive resource for anybody who has lost their job and is looking to get back on their feet again.
21. How To Write a Killer Bio
With the bio in full bloom right now, it pays to take some time to write yours in a way that that reflects how you want to be perceived. Perhaps you want to show a sense of humor or wit. Maybe you want to show your technical prowess by delivering your bio in a video format.
22. 30 Plus Brilliant and Creative Resumes
Times have changed. What worked in the past still works but if you want to stand out from the crowd sometimes the only thing that is needed is a little creativity. We all have the creative juice in us but only some of us dare to squeeze it out.
23. If You Are Laid Off, Here’s How To Socially Network
I’m getting a LOT of chats from people who have been laid off. Most of the time I find that they just aren’t presenting a good face to me for me to help them find a new job. If you are laid off, here’s what you need to do.
24. 10 Jobs That Are (Much) Better or Worse Than You Thought
If you’re looking for a career change or are just interested in what other kinds of jobs are out there, start investigating the job market by taking a look at this list of 20 jobs that are either much better or much worse than you might have thought.
25. The Get Started Now Guide To Self Employment
While being your own boss can be scary and a little risky, it’s not as difficult as people think. You do have to be someone who loves his freedom, likes to be able to set his own schedule, likes to work on things he’s excited about. I know, that’s a tall order.
26. 7 Resume Lies Employers Will Never Check
Many Human Resources staffers preach the dangers of lying on your resume, and they’re right—to an extent. Inventing companies and inflating employment lengths can get you fired or at the very least embarrassed during the hiring process. But employers don’t want complete honesty, do they?
27. 10 Careers That Top $30 per Hour
In just 60 minutes, you could earn enough to pay for a tank of gas, the cable bill, gym membership, or dinner out. Thirty dollars still covers some of life’s essential costs. Earn that much in just one hour on the job, and you have enough to build a comfortable life.
28. 9 Recession Proof Careers
These industries project promise—and jobs—for the future, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Occupational Information Network database.
29. Did Positive Thinking Kill Your Career
If American business executives, middle managers, and worker bees had been a bit more cynical, the country might not have plummeted into its current economic mess. Big banks such as Lehman Brothers would have heeded employees’ concerns about the firm’s deep investment in the growing real-estate bubble.
30. Boost Your Career With Social Media
While yet another mention of the words ‘credit crunch’ might make you want to run screaming, the truth is that times are uncertain for freelancers and the employed alike.
If you would like to add to this list, please feel free to drop links in the comments section. Also if you are one of those who likes to predict the future, we have a question for you : What do you think 2010 will look like as far as the job market goes?
Related posts:
- 5 ‘Social Media Don’ts ’ For The Career Minded
- 30 Sites To Help You Open Doors To a New Career
- 5 Simple Yet Extremely Useful Online Job Search Tips
For related articles about personal branding and job search, review these articles:
Personal Branding Interview: How Mark Cummata Got a Job Through Twitter
What Should You NOT Do At a Networking Event
Your Professional Brand Pre-During-Post Interview
The internet, being an extremely popular source, makes competition for getting that job highly competitive. Get started with your My Online Career Space and let that prospective employer know you are the primary candidate for them. With your own personalized career space you will rise above the rest of the job seekers on the internet.
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I just rocked the boat on that one a little, didn’t I? Seriously, a list of your past duties and responsibilities is so boring. I can get that from a job description. What I can’t get from a job description is how you addressed those responsibilities. SHOW me how successful you are by using C.A.R. (challenge, action, results) statements to showcase your achievements and contributions.
You’ve been between jobs for months, struggling from unemployment check to unemployment check. Your credit cards are maxed out, and your payments are tiptoeing against the deadline every single time. But 
According to a recent report, 
An employer who intends to conduct a background check (which may or may not include your credit history) is required to get your signed permission before doing so. They are legally required to obtain this permission on a form completely separate from any other questions—it can’t be on a job application, for instance. But once you’ve signed away that right, they don’t need to ask again. You can 
A bill currently in congressional committee, H.R. 3149, would prohibit employers from using applicants’ bad credit checks against them. You can 
