Years ago, one of my job functions was to go to my alma mater’s career fair and collect resumes from prospective future employees. I had a great time because I was only a year or so out of school, I could hang out with my friends, and I enjoyed seeing all different the resumes. In that time, I saw some great resumes and I saw some not so great resumes.

As you read the list below, you might be surprised at some of the mistakes but you couldn’t imagine committing them. With the exception of the “make it readable” rule, I’ve seen them all. Most of the time, I think it’s because the candidate just didn’t notice it or wasn’t aware it was a bad idea. However, if you’re taking a look at your resume, I recommend you review these ten mistakes and make sure you aren’t committing them.

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There are two big pieces to the resume puzzle – the resume itself and the well-crafted cover letter. If your resume is the car, then your cover letter are the tires. Most people don’t think about the tires on their car but your tires are the only thing on your car that touches the road. Most people don’t think much about their cover letters, especially with so much job hunting online, but it’s important because it gives you the opportunity to relate your resume to the job. A listing of accomplishments is nice, especially if your accomplishments are many, but sometimes hiring managers need help figuring out why you might be the best fit for a job opening.

After you’ve figured out the template and written a few cover letters, the process will be very easy and you’ll be able to produce a good cover letter in just a few minutes. If the hiring manager never sees it, it’s only a few minutes lost. If the hiring manager does, it’s a great opportunity to present your skills and accomplishments in a way that matches the job opening.

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It’s Monday and that means we have another episode of the Personal Finance Hour where JD of Get Rich Slowly and I will discuss banks! We’ll go over credit unions, commercial banks, and online banks – and everything else in between.

The show will be on live at 6PM Eastern, 3PM Pacific and will be broadcast at this page, if you want to listen to it (it’s also recorded, so you can go to that page to listen in after it airs). As always, you can call in and listen live at 347-327-9144 to chat with us or just listen in the background.

Or click play on this widget (after 6PM on Mondays it will be that week’s show, before then and you’ll get last week’s show):

We are also on iTunes and you can subscribe by clicking on this link, which will open up iTunes.

We hope you get the chance to listen, perhaps call in and chat, or just pop on into the chat room to hang out. It can get a little rowdy in there but it’s good times I promise!

One of the hardest things about unemployment is filling up the hours of the day. It doesn’t matter how focused or industrious you are about finding a job, you can only send so many tailored resumes, so many masterfully crafted cover letters, and call so many offices before you get emotionally and physically drained. That’s why I recommend filling up the other hours of the day by volunteering with an organization you believe in.

This article is part of Bargaineering Career Week 2009, a week-long series focused on your career – how to find a job, how to tailor your resume, how to find the job opportunities and how to nail the interview. This article is the third article of day one – career planning.

You don’t have volunteer every single day, just pick one day and donate a few of your hours to a cause you believe in. It only takes a few minutes to enter your your zip code and some causes you want to support into the search box at Serve.gov (which takes you to Allforgood.org). Within minutes you’ll be able to find a volunteer opportunity that fits your schedule.

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All this nice fuzzy “wait for the right opportunity,” or “you want a career, not just another job” sounds good until your feet are held to the fire. I think a lot of career advice tries to be overly rosy and positive, without a keen eye towards reality. The reality is that when you’re unemployed, your are constantly running into failure on a daily basis. You send out resumes that seem to disappear into the ether, you call companies that tell you they will call you back if there is an opportunity, and you talk to friends who, as well intentioned as they are, say they will try to help but usually aren’t in a position to do so. It sucks. While there are steps you can take to boost your confidence, the grim reality is that it sucks.

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Losing your job can be a blessing and a curse. Most people understand the curse part, but few look for the silver lining in the otherwise stormy cloud. When you don’t have the encumbrance of a full time job, a well-charted path, you have the opportunity to do whatever you want. If you have an emergency fund saved up, now is the time to rethink your career and put yourself on a path that will help ensure you’re happy tomorrow, in ten years, and in forty years.

This article is part of Bargaineering Career Week 2009, a week-long series focused on your career – how to find a job, how to tailor your resume, how to find the job opportunities and how to nail the interview. This article is the first article of day one – career planning.

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With unemployment over 10%, the pool of willing workers has never been bigger or more qualified. If you’re in that group, you’re probably wondering whether you’ll ever find a job. While I’m self employed now, I have been fired before and I know how much it sucks to have someone else tell you that you’re no longer needed. Over the next week, we’re going to cover four major areas of job hunting: career planning, resumes, finding opportunities, and nailing the interview.

If you look below, you’ll see a list of the posts that will make up Career Week. When the posts are published, I’ll make them active links, but I wanted to give you a sneak peek at what’s to come…

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As I explained in my Netflix review, one of the reasons why I became a Netflix convert was the streaming content they had available to XBox 360 owners. For $8.99 a month, you had access to their entire library of online streaming content at your fingertips. From my point of view, I saw that as the real reason to subscribe to Netflix and getting one-DVD out at a time was just a nice side benefit.

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As I mentioned last week, my lovely wife and I have started cooking more because it’s fun, healthier, and easier on the wallet. We’ve documented some of our creations on Bargaineering, from pork and shrimp dumplings to pizza to to homemade apple pie. We’ve even gone super high class and cooked up a Provençal rack of lamb earlier this year.

How do we pick what we want to cook? It’s a mixture of what’s on sale that week at our local grocery store and the meals we absolutely love. We both loved dumplings so we thought it would be fun to make our own filling and “make” dumplings. My wife always had homemade apple pie on the first day of school and so I made her a pie when she started her new graduate program.

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A few weekends ago, I was listening to Marketplace Money when they ran an interview of Scrubs star Donald Faison. Faison got his big break with the movie Clueless and then followed that up with Scrubs. The entire piece was about him making bad money decisions and then turning it around. He bought a $20,000 car with the $12,000 from Clueless, then had trouble when the third car payment came around.

So he hired a business manager.
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