Blog Posts by Marci Alboher, Working the New Economy

How's this for a new economy hiring twist? A group of Fortune 500 companies including Starbucks, 7-Eleven and Hyatt Hotels, have invited job seekers to join a free resume-sharing service that allows companies to save on recruiter fees and job-seekers to reach a wider audience of employers.

In order to join, go to UnitedWeWork.org, click on "job seeker," and you'll be taken to a page powered by QuietAgent, a job search site that allows you to input your resume and be alerted to job postings that fit your goals. Actually, you can bypass United We Work entirely and go directly to QuietAgent and it seems like you'll get the same opportunities.

I've been playing around on QuietAgent for a while and like the concept. Once you successfully create your resume, the site matches you with opportunities that fit your profile, much like the dating site eHarmony. The difficulty I had was that I couldn't easily build my resume because there wasn't a job function for many of the things I do -- no

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Getty ImagesHave you ever been in this situation? You meet someone new, have an instant rapport and a feeling that the two of you would be able to help each other. You know you want to stay in touch or at least stay on the other person's radar. But you have no idea when you'll run into the person again and don't want to rely on chance.

This issue comes up all the time. It happens when you want to keep up with people who might be helpful in a job search or when you want to let prior clients know that you're around and available for work.

So how do you stay in touch without looking like a stalker or someone who is just lurking around waiting for something to happen?

Here are a few ideas:

Write a newsletter. This idea works for anyone who wants to reach out to their contacts on a regular or irregular basis without picking up the phone. I send an email newsletter to my mailing list roughly four times a year. And each time I do, I get several inquiries and bookings within a few days of sending it

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Getty ImagesWhenever someone refers to "my mentor," rather than "one of my mentors," I'm a little baffled. These people talk with reverence about the one person they turn to for counsel, that sage veteran in their field who gives advice and imparts wisdom. I don't get it because it's different from my experience with mentors. My career has been filled with mentors, and yes, in the early parts of it those mentors were older and wiser. But lately, I'm collecting a new kind of mentor who looks more like a peer, where there is mutual support and coaching going on. Often, my mentors are younger than I, since it's the veterans who are looking to younger folks to demystify the new ways of work.

And rather than the idea of one exalted mentor, I have oodles of them. I have mentors in my writing life, mentors I turn to when I'm negotiating a new work situation, mentors who keep me up to speed on technology, and mentors I confer with when making big life decisions. There are also mentors for a time -- like

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Getty ImagesOn Monday morning I met Deborah DiRago because we were both guests on the public radio show, "The Takeaway." We were there to talk about DiRago's efforts to find a "job search buddy" -- someone who would help her stay motivated and accountable in her job search. DiRago has been unemployed since May, when her job in international event planning suddenly disappeared and her company announced it was shutting its doors.

After a while of navigating the job market on her own, DiRago decided that it would help if she found someone to meet with regularly to move along her job search. She says she is looking for the kind of person who'd hold her to task if she said she was going to make 5 career-related contacts in a given week.

So far, the job buddy search has been almost as challenging as the job search. While she does have a few friends who are out of work, none of them seem interested in creating this kind of group. But she thinks it's depressing to do the job search completely on

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A few years ago, video resumes got a bad name when aspiring investment banker Aleksey Vayner made the now infamous video showing off his many talents (including images of himself bench-pressing 495 pounds, karate-chopping a pile of bricks, and serving a tennis ball at 140mph). Vayner's video went viral, but not in the way he wanted. Rather than causing a stir around his creative efforts to find a job, Vayner's name became shorthand for "video resume disaster."

But when video resumes are good, they can be very good. As is the case with "Hire Me," a new video created by recent Bentley University graduate Alec Biedrzycki, which was released on Tuesday.

This video resume succeeds for several reasons. It lays out Biedrzycki's talents and experience: he graduated summa cum laude with a major in marketing; he had several unpaid internships; he worked on projects with Bentley's faculty; he has studied Japanese. By using his skills as a songwriter and musician, Biedrzycki also demonstrates

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For a long time, I had difficulty asking for help. I felt more comfortable on the giving side of things and feared that if I regularly asked others for help I'd take advantage of their kindness. Then I realized that most successful people know how and when to ask for help. And that most people are inclined to offer help when asked (research backs this up.)

So I started asking, and good things happened as a result of it. I got smart advice. I got support from others. And I probably made a lot of people feel good that I respected them enough to seek their counsel.

Every day I get at least one email or call asking for help with something -- a request for an introduction, a recommendation, advice on how to find a job. Some of these requests are easy to answer, and in those cases, I respond quickly, either by doing the thing requested of me or explaining why I can't. Others leave me frustrated with the questioner. And when I'm frustrated it's usually for a variation of the

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When I wrote about searching for salary information online, I missed a new player in that market, Jobnob, which says it has collected and posted salary information on close to three million jobs.

But that's not what caught my eye about Jobnob. For a site all about making salary information more transparent, the founders are doing something surprising -- encouraging people to work for free. Just as I've been plugging adult internships as a way to build skills, connections and experience, Jobnob has organized happy hours in San Francisco to bring together jobseekers with cash-strapped startups looking for part-time help. The pitch on Jobnob's website targets both the jobseekers and startups.

To the jobseeker it asks: "Are you willing to work at least 5 hours a week for free or minimal pay?

To the startup, it asks: "Are you willing to buy a smart, talented, unemployed person a drink."

Jobnob co-founder Julie Greenberg thinks it's a winning recipe, and I agree. She says she started the

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A recent article from Psychology Today contends that Millennials (individuals born roughly from the early 1980s through the late 1990s, also known as Generation Y) are poised to take over the workplace.

The article declares that these newest entrants to the workforce were "raised by parents who often acted more like friends and mentors. So Gen Y comes to the negotiating table with unprecedented confidence about what kind of workplace they want."

When I read articles like this, I'm of two minds. On one hand, I'm endlessly fascinated with the different generational characteristics that researchers have discovered between Generation X, Generation Y and Baby Boomers. On the other hand, descriptions about the characteristics of these generations often sound like they've come out of a fortune cookie or horoscope. Take this quote from that Psychology Today article:

Gen Y prefers to work in teams not by themselves and they hate conflict. Gen Y are not complainers, nor act like victims. They

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