Tag Archive for 'Tip of the Week'

Danny McBride’s Advice on Workplace Hookups

Published on October 26, 2010 in Quotes. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Danny McBride, aka Kenny Powers on Eastbound and Down (the show every dude in my life is obsessed with) talked to Nerve.com to give sex advice to some of their erstwhile readers. Among his deep thoughts:

I hooked up with my coworker while drunk at an office party, but I’m not interested in dating her. What should I do now?

Kind of too late. You already took a shit where you eat, homeboy. That’s not a good thing. Just ride out the awkwardness. See how weird it’ll get, and maybe she’ll quit. Make things weirder. Push it a little. Maybe send flowers to her from an anonymous person. Just start coming off like a stalker.

It’s nice to know that he and I agree on something.

How Not to Get Promoted

Published on September 24, 2010 in Tip of the Week. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Want to get promoted? Can’t while there’s another coworker standing in your way? I’d advise you to ignore advice from Neil Weiner. Weiner, a school handyman, wanted to get promoted to custodian. But he couldn’t as long as there was currently a custodian, Eddie Thompson, doing the job. So what was Weiner’s brilliant plan? To put a bunch of kiddie porn on Thompson’s computer and try to get him fired. Luckily, it didn’t work, but Thompson had to endure several weeks of suspicion and abuse from concerned citizens before his name was finally cleared.

In other news, I bet Gary Glitter is already figuring out how to use this defense in the future.

Tip of the Week: Don’t Shoplift From Your Potential Future Employer

Published on July 28, 2010 in Tip of the Week. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Here’s a hint for erstwhile job applicants: if you’re going to submit a resume somewhere, try not to submit a resume to a store you regularly shoplift from. A woman in Barrie, Ontario, applied to work at a clothing store. However, when she came in to interview, employees recognized her as the woman they’d seen on a security video of a shoplifter. Because her resume contained her full name, address, and phone number, it was pretty easy to find her and arrest her.

[Cross-posted at TheGloss]

Saving Assistants on Crushable.com

Published on July 20, 2010 in Survival Guide. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Today I fielded some reader questions over on Crushable.com, which is the sister site to the place where I work, TheGloss.com. Here’s some of what I had to say:

Q. I feel hopeless about finding a job, especially in this economy. Should I take whatever job I can get that pays the bills or wait until I find something emotionally satisfying (while living under my parents’ roof)?

A. I’d love to tell you that you should hold out for your dream job, but you know what? For many people, me included, that wasn’t an option. My suggestion would be to find a gig that pays the bills and in the meantime while your basic needs are being met start looking for a job that you find more fulfilling. One thing I really stress on my site and in the book is that there’s a huge difference between “job” and “career.” Just because you take a short-term job to pay the bills doesn’t mean you’re destined to be at that job forever. So, unless you’re planning to live off of your savings or have some other way of supporting yourself, you can’t be snobby about what kind of job you take when you’re broke. Just remember never to lose sight of what you really want to do, and don’t stop sending out resumes and checking job boards. It’s way easier to land your dream job when you already have a job somewhere else – that gives you the ability to play coy and negotiate a better salary for yourself.

You can check out the rest of the Q&A on Crushable.

Tip of the Week: Don’t Steal from Your Potential Workplace

Published on July 19, 2010 in Tip of the Week. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Say there’s a place where you want to work. Say that you go and submit an application to work there. What should you do immediately afterward? Here’s a quiz:

a) Leave.

b) Politely say goodbye and thank the person to whom you gave your application.

c) Steal from the tip jar.

If you chose C, then you’re one of the two boys who applied to work at an ice cream shop in Indiana and then got arrested for stealing a dollar each from the tip jar. Hey guys, here’s a tip for next time: you would probably earn more than a dollar each if you got the job.

How Not to Get a Job: Annoying Celebrities On Twitter

Published on July 19, 2010 in Survival Guide and Tip of the Week. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

I have a search box set up for “personal assistant” on the Twitter application I use. Sometimes, that search box turns up good, usable stuff, like this post. But about 99 percent of the tweets can be divided up into one of two categories:

  • People complaining that they have too much work to do and asking if anyone wants to be their unpaid personal assistant/driver/cook/nanny/some combination thereof; and
  • People tweeting at a particular celebrity and volunteering to be his or her personal assistant.

This post concerns the latter category. I won’t get into the fact that being a celebrity personal assistant is not really a glamorous job the way that people seem to think it is, because that’s a topic for another post or five. This is a post about how completely stupid it is to think that a celebrity will hire you as their personal assistant because you asked them to via Twitter. So here’s why:

  • You are not the first person who has ever thought of this. Some celebrities get dozens of tweets a day from people who seriously or half-seriously would like to be their PA.
  • If a celebrity needs an assistant, they will probably obtain one via some more reasonable way than responding to random tweets. Most celebrity assistants are hired through private staffing agencies or by referral. If you actually want to be a celebrity assistant, you should probably move to New York or LA and reach out to one of these agencies. If you really think contacting someone via Twitter is a good idea, then maybe you should at least tweet about your credentials and experience.
  • Many celebrities aren’t the ones updating their own Twitter accounts. There are definitely some celebrities, like Ashton Kutcher, who love Twitter and compose their own tweets. But there are plenty more who just use Twitter for publicity purposes or to promote whatever they’re working on, and often Twitter accounts for celebrities are run by publicists – or, wait for it – assistants. Here’s a hint: a celebrity’s assistant will probably not need to hire an assistant or appreciate your offer to replace them.
  • The internet is unreliable. Even if someone decided they were going to hire a person who tweeted at them, who would know if said person really existed or wasn’t crazy? No celebrity with any sense would hire a personal assistant without meeting them in person or having them go through various rounds of interviews.

That said, Twitter is not the only way that people try to get jobs as celebrities’ assistants. Any time I do a post relating to a celebrity looking for an assistant, I get several emails or comments from people who seem to think that I am personally hiring for the position. Some people even send me resumes with their private phone number and home address on them. So far, I haven’t published any of them, because I feel sorry for people who can’t tell the difference between an actual job ad and a website that regularly snarks on celebrities who abuse their assistants. But let this serve as a warning – if, for some reason, you are desperate to be slave labor for a famous person, please just call an agency, and leave me – and Twitter – out of it.

Tip Of the Week: Do Not Take It Out On The Assistant

Published on July 14, 2010 in Celebrity Assistant Soapbox and Tip of the Week. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

In case you live in Antarctica and hadn’t heard, Mel Gibson is back in the news for leaving a series of expletive, threat, and racial slur-laden emails on the voicemail of his now ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva. This week on The View, cohost Whoopi Goldberg rose to Gibson’s defense, saying that he isn’t racist and his real problem is that he is an alcoholic who says crazy things when he has been drinking. The comments raised so much fury that Goldberg reportedly got tons of phone calls and emails from angry viewers. On today’s show, she claimed that some people had called her home and yelled at her assistant, who was the one answering the phone.

I don’t know if this actually happened or if she’s exaggerating for effect, but let’s all take a moment to remember one of the rules of assistant karma: even if you are really mad, do not take it out on the assistant. Goldberg is the one who made the comments. Her assistant is probably overworked and underpaid, and in addition to dealing with all of his boss’ shit he now has to get yelled at by strangers because his boss said something on television and people are mad about it. I can’t tell you how many times I got yelled at by people my boss had offended, and you know what? It made me vow never to do it to someone else. Do not continue the cycle of assistant abuse. Just yell at Whoopi instead. Or stop caring about what celebrities say on TV.

Tip Of the Week: Walking on Fire Is a Bad Way to Bond

Published on July 6, 2010 in Tip of the Week. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Trust falls? Nah. Singing “kumbaya”? Passe. Having a talking stick? Outdated.

One boss in Italy decided that the best way to build office camaraderie and get his employees to bond was to make them walk over hot coals. Alessandro Di Priamo, who is a “motivational trainer for companies” (that’s Italian for “guy who gets paid a bunch of money to make people do stupid bonding exercises and use buzzwords”) had employees at a large Italian real estate agency walk across fire, only to – surprise! – wind up in the hospital with burned feet.

Di Priamo claims he has done this exercise with other companies dozens of times and no one’s ever been hurt before. I would like to offer this up as evidence that forced corporate bonding retreats are, in fact, painful.

what we can learn from NBC

Published on February 3, 2010 in Survival Guide. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

As the entire universe apparently now knows, NBC bungled it big time when it came to letting Jay Leno retire and hand the reins of The Tonight Show over to Conan O’Brien. In addition to the obvious lessons we can learn from this disaster, such as “Jay Leno sucks” and “Conan O’Brien is hilarious,” FedLine (aka the Federal Times’ blog) points out some management lessons that we can learn from the mishandling of the whole situation. Let’s hope some TV executives take these tips to heart.

Lesson #1: Career progression is crucial to retaining top talent.

In other words, if your most talented people know they’ll be stuck in their jobs a long time because there’s nowhere for them to go internally, they will leave. And it will be your fault for not providing enough incentives.

Lesson #3: If you’re going to fire someone, just do it already.

One of the most embarrassing parts of the whole late night fiasco was the way that it was handled so publicly and that it took seemingly forever to resolve. That worked out nicely for Conan’s audience, who got to enjoy weeks’ worth of him taking potshots at NBC and putting together hilarious skits about wasting the network’s money, but it only protracted the whole situation. Good for viewers, not so good for NBC.

And while we’re on the subject of the lovely Mr. O’Brien, let’s all take his incredibly classy goodbye speech advice to heart:

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advice from the person interviewing you

Published on December 29, 2009 in Survival Guide and Tip of the Week. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

In the semi-regular feature here at STA, “The Other Side of the Aisle,” bosses get a chance to talk about work from their perspective. Here, one boss (we’ll call her “Cheryl”) talks about her experiences interviewing potential assistants and gives helpful pointers about what bosses want people to say or do in interviews.

__________________

As someone who interviews 15-20 people a year, mostly for part time admin positions, I see a variety of folks come through my office: some who think they have found the perfect job, others who are just simply in need of anything that will keep them busy or pay the bills. The following are a variety of patterns I have seen over and over again – they are truly meant to help people like you who are on the search. It may sound strict, but when you get over 200 applicants for one position, it’s the little things that stick out. Here are some simple tips that anyone can use to set themselves apart.

If you read this and these things sounds super crazy obvious, all the power to you- you’re probably already getting to the top of the resume piles!

DO: Follow the instructions on the job posting.

AND: If it says no calls, please don’t call. Even if you are super-qualified and experienced, it will likely get your name on a list of people who won’t get interviews because why bother interviewing someone who can’t follow directions?

DO: Show up on time for the interview.

AND: If you get to the area early, grab a coffee nearby or take some time for yourself to transition into “interview mode.” More than 15 minutes early is overdoing it – it’s tacky and if you’re interviewing at a small office, your presence can actually be awkward for those who are about to meet with you. If the folks interviewing you don’t jump to take you early, especially if they are just finishing with someone else, don’t act disappointed. I suggest waiting patiently with a magazine in the lobby or simply reviewing your resume. Yes, excessive text messaging will give the impression that this is what you will do with all of your in between time, or when the boss isn’t looking.

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