An energetic, helpful, and thought-provoking coaching manual for improving job-applying skills.
A guide offers a methodical strategy for improving success in applying for jobs.
“Before you start to compete for your ideal job, you should know where you stand relative to the marketplace,” writes Parker in this extended game plan for understanding and improving the process of job seeking. “You should know what you want to offer, but you also must know how well you match up with what the market demands.” The author goes on to explore how readers can assess and improve their own marketability. He takes this same 360-degree view of the other elements of the job search process, seeking to instill in his readers the “limitless mindset” that will be the key to getting the positions of their dreams. Parker steers readers through every aspect of the process, from the nitty-gritty of how to arrange items on the printed pages of their resumes to the crucial elements to study in the companies they’re hoping to join. He understandably devotes a good deal of space to what’s typically seen as the most important aspect of the job search: the interview. When discussing interviews, for instance, he has a good deal of advice for readers, all based on remembering that they’re selling themselves and their credentials the whole time. The potential employer, he stresses, is quite literally your customer—and he warns of potential bad signs an applicant could be giving off: not being very accommodating when scheduling an interview, asking irrelevant questions (or questions that your own research could easily have answered), and talking too much and thus displaying an unwillingness to listen. He fleshes out all of his points with anecdotal examples designed to make them more identifiable.
Parker’s greatest strength is the sharp, forceful tone he employs throughout. Job seekers are bombarded on all sides by advice on how to improve their resumes, increase their charisma in interviews, and enhance their skill at reading the personalities of their possible future employers. The last thing such readers need is a wishy-washy approach, and the author avoids the equivocal completely. He provides his readers with graphics, bullet points, pull quotes, and the like, all geared, as his prose is, to convey the maximum amount of useful information in the clearest possible way. The author sympathizes with job seekers, presenting them the fruits of his research and experience on such points as reaching out and making personal contact with potential employers when possible (“Don’t merely rely on your credentials to land you a job”). But he’s also firm with readers, warning them against some of their own possible shortcomings, things job seekers tend to do without thinking about the images they project. “Inconsistency will put doubts in the hiring manager’s mind,” he writes. “It can be the one piece of information the employer uses to decide between top candidates, especially when employers are hypersensitive to anything that will allow them to make a quick decision with limited information.” At every turn, he’s trying to arm his readers with ways to avoid giving hiring managers “easy ways out.”
An energetic, helpful, and thought-provoking coaching manual for improving job-applying skills.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2024
ISBN: 979-8-9865451-0-3
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Beyond Competitive LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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