Review: Job Search & Career Workbook by Jason MacDonald
This book is about more than getting a job, it’s about personal branding online and attracting the right ‘customers’ or hiring agents in the current market.
As you may know, the Everyday Spacer motto is: It’s All About Action!
Doing this work is certainly Action. Knowing how to promote yourself online in this day and age can do many things for you. Not knowing, can get you in trouble!
I’ve landed a lot of jobs in my career (almost 50!) and interviewed for many more – all before the internet. Without this book, you’d be hard-pressed to plot out how best to leverage all the great new tech we now have in our hands, without investing a great deal of time and experience doing it.
Jason shows you the way with his book and the interactive pages online he created, with examples from others as a warning.
The beauty of this installment by Jason is that you can use it for other ‘branding’ endeavors as well, not just job hunting.
One of the best things about this book – it’s current!
One of the worst things about this book – it’s a lot of information to go through.
In my first pass through, I noted some things I really appreciate…
- p.6 Jason spells it out: Who this book is for – someone looking for ‘inbound’ online exposure for personal branding.
- p.7 His approach is imminently practical: Find the intersection between your dream and the needs in the market
- p.9 He also covers Who it’s not for – this book won’t help you ‘find yourself’ you must have a pretty good idea about what you would like to do in your job or business already.
Jason recommends you ‘Google’ and ‘Twitter’ and ‘Facebook’ and so on… yourself to learn what is found in a search about you. Is that what you want a customer/hiring manager to see?
He delves into the ways to change your online image.
As with his other books, he offers ‘To Dos’ and links to pages online in this book where you can find the content to help you take charge of your personal brand online.
I recommend you go through the book once then delve into areas you want to work on the most then next most, etc.
Remember, it’s always changing and new sites are popping up all the time.
Jason lists lots of great tools and offers a systematic way to work through cyberspace. He tells you what to watch for & how to leverage in many different ways, for example…
- p.229 Jason describes a trick on twitter – use a period “.” before the @ symbol
- He recommends finding others doing what you’d like to do and ‘reverse engineering’ their actions. I reckon once you learn some things, you might even do better!
- Chapter 10 Moving forward cool basics
- Chapter 11 The Plan!
- p.294 create your PBS (Personal Branding Statement)
Overall, if you are looking for a job or clients, and you have a pretty good idea what that means to you, this book can help you get inbound traffic and helps you mitigate anything you don’t want these important people to see online about you!
It’s a great investment in yourself so check it out today!
