An energetic, helpful, and thought-provoking coaching manual for improving job-applying skills.
A guide offers a methodical strategy for improving success in applying for jobs.
“Before you start to compete for your ideal job, you should know where you stand relative to the marketplace,” writes Parker in this extended game plan for understanding and improving the process of job seeking. “You should know what you want to offer, but you also must know how well you match up with what the market demands.” The author goes on to explore how readers can assess and improve their own marketability. He takes this same 360-degree view of the other elements of the job search process, seeking to instill in his readers the “limitless mindset” that will be the key to getting the positions of their dreams. Parker steers readers through every aspect of the process, from the nitty-gritty of how to arrange items on the printed pages of their resumes to the crucial elements to study in the companies they’re hoping to join. He understandably devotes a good deal of space to what’s typically seen as the most important aspect of the job search: the interview. When discussing interviews, for instance, he has a good deal of advice for readers, all based on remembering that they’re selling themselves and their credentials the whole time. The potential employer, he stresses, is quite literally your customer—and he warns of potential bad signs an applicant could be giving off: not being very accommodating when scheduling an interview, asking irrelevant questions (or questions that your own research could easily have answered), and talking too much and thus displaying an unwillingness to listen. He fleshes out all of his points with anecdotal examples designed to make them more identifiable.
Parker’s greatest strength is the sharp, forceful tone he employs throughout. Job seekers are bombarded on all sides by advice on how to improve their resumes, increase their charisma in interviews, and enhance their skill at reading the personalities of their possible future employers. The last thing such readers need is a wishy-washy approach, and the author avoids the equivocal completely. He provides his readers with graphics, bullet points, pull quotes, and the like, all geared, as his prose is, to convey the maximum amount of useful information in the clearest possible way. The author sympathizes with job seekers, presenting them the fruits of his research and experience on such points as reaching out and making personal contact with potential employers when possible (“Don’t merely rely on your credentials to land you a job”). But he’s also firm with readers, warning them against some of their own possible shortcomings, things job seekers tend to do without thinking about the images they project. “Inconsistency will put doubts in the hiring manager’s mind,” he writes. “It can be the one piece of information the employer uses to decide between top candidates, especially when employers are hypersensitive to anything that will allow them to make a quick decision with limited information.” At every turn, he’s trying to arm his readers with ways to avoid giving hiring managers “easy ways out.”
An energetic, helpful, and thought-provoking coaching manual for improving job-applying skills.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2024
ISBN: 979-8-9865451-0-3
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Beyond Competitive LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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