None of this is news, but CareerBuilder has a great little article by Joe Turner, Career Coach today, called  5  Job Search Tips to Survive a Recession.

If you haven't been employing this techniques, recession or not, you're only making it harder for yourself.  The most important one is the motivated self interest factor of "what's in for them" as opposed to you.  Employers aren't there to give you a job out of the goodness of their hearts. The corporate heart beats green, and bleeds money.  So what are you doing to save or make money?  I've been stressing that for a while now in this blog, and it's only getting more and more important.  You need to show that you're a good investment, that you will help positively effect the bottom line and those ever present P&Ls.

What Turner doesn't go on to explain in detail, but touches on, is the story telling aspect to landing a job. If you're read this blog before, you're familiar with CAR stories (Challenge > Action  > Result), which are sometime referred to as STAR stories (Situation, Task, Action, Result).  I prefer CAR because it's more concise.

Your resume, your networking, your interviews need to tell stories highlighting your achievements... and those acheivements aren't that you are great at tying bows on the work packages you complete.  It's about how you saved an account, which saves the company money, and hopefully brings in more.  It's about how your innovation cut costs by 5,10,20%. 

I'm going to be running a workshop on resumes for the local PMI chapter this summer, and one of the home assignments prior to the event is to come up with CAR stories for each position, that outlines cost savings through schedule adherence, risk avoidance and mitigation, and good planning. 

Have you looked at your resume recently and thought about how it proves that you're a cost effective employee?