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Friday Fab Five: Resumes 101, World of Gov-craft, and Random Hacks of Kindness

Congratulations! You made it through another week, which means it’s time for the…

Friday Fab 5!

Don’t power down that laptop or blackberry quite yet. We had a lot of great content this past week on GovLoop, and it’s now time to highlight some of the top contributions.

Today’s Blog of the Week is actually more of a topic of the week. A clear theme began emerging early on this week among a particular group of blogs, each generating a slew of comments, and each worthy in and of itself of the “blog of the week” title. That theme was the do’s and don’ts of landing a job. From the perspective of a hiring manager, how do you know who is truly the best candidate, and as a job-seeker, how do you make yourself stand out and not come across as cheesy or pretentious? Is having an impressive resume really enough in today’s job market? Well according to Josh Nankivel and Jeffrey Levy there’s definitely more to the equation. In Josh and Jeffrey’s posts “Hiring Managers are Shopping” and “How to Help a Hiring Manger Pick You from a Stack of Resumes” respectively, both discuss the importance of standing out from the crowd long before that simple piece of paper even hits the hiring manager’s hands. Referrals, online presence, portfolios, etc. are increasingly becoming a necessary part of the job-hunting process. Whether you like it or not, if you are serious about landing an awesome gig, it’s time to step up your game!

Hiring Managers Are Shopping -Josh Nankivel

How to Help a Hiring Manager Pick You From a Stack of Resumes Jeffrey Levy


The Top Forum of the Week goes hands-down to Mark Hammer and his discussion, “Getting people into jobs they love and that make them happy.” While there were many great discussions happening in our forums section this week, Mark’s piece ended up being quite the serendipitous companion piece to both Josh and Jeffrey’s blog posts, not to mention the nearly 20 comments it drew from the community. Mark makes the point that try as you might to land a job, you should try to be more conscious about asking yourself if it is the right fit? Will you enjoy the work? Everyone wants to have a job that they actually enjoy, right? I doubt there is anyone out there who actively seeks a poisiton they know they’ll hate, yet it seems like many of us have “been there, done that.” So where do we draw the line? Is it up to the job-seeker or the hiring manager to say whether or not you will enjoy the job? Mark gives his input and then the GovLoop community comes out in full force to add their opinions to the conversation.

It occurred to me that, in the world of staffing, we have these two separate universes of what we call vocational guidance, and selection and assessment. The former tries to identify what general kind of work would make an individual happy and be aptly suited for them, but is not specific to any particular position. The latter attempts to identify who would be competent and qualified for a specific position, but makes no attempt to determine if they would be happy in it, and love it.

So the challenge arises: how do we reshape assessment and selection systems, procedures, and tools, such that the result is the placement of people into jobs that deliver for the organization, but ALSO deliver for the person in the job. How do we begin the re-engineering of selection systems with the goal of allowing people to be happy and fulfilled in their work?

The Most Active Group award goes to the Gaming in Government group. What? Gaming in government? How can such a thing be allowed! From the group’s description:
How can government use gaming or gaming mechanics to get citizens more involved to create a more robust democracy? What’s happening already? What’s in the works?
Believe it or not, gaming and using virtual worlds is becoming increasingly popular (yes, even in government) for training and simulation purposes. And we’re not just talking DoD here. There are a variety of opportunities to tap into these tools even in places like the business and medical fields, among many others. Still don’t believe me? Just ask Andrew Hughes with his blog post from earlier in the week, “What is a Serious Game?” In any case, if you’ve ever had any questions about how or why to bring serious games into your organization or even simply wondered what in the world the are, this is the group for you!

Our Quote of the Week comes to us from Abhi Nemani from Code for America. Abhi was actually featured as out Rockstar of the Week in our previous Friday Fab 5 for all-around awesomeness, and consistently produces great content. This week we’re featuring one of his blogs as our Quote of the Week. Abhi did a great write up of an event who’s title alone is worthy of quote of the week, “Random Hacks of Kindness.” So check out an excerpt below, but be sure to read the entire review of the event and what it was all about over at his blog:

Went up to my Code for America city (Seattle) this weekend to participate in Random Hacks of Kindness, or #RHOK3. Random Hacks of Kindness is a movement of software developers, hackers, and humanitarian workers who get together for intensive weekends building tools to support emergency relief efforts.

In Seattle, we had about 80 people actively developing projects this weekend. I helped to facilitate the large group collaboration, helping people who don’t know each other to quickly find alliances in the group so as to have productive working teams. This was called a “Brain Collision” on CNN, and I was excited to know that this was the first time that some of movers & shakers at NASA were able to attend a participatory coding event like RHOK. I’m grateful to Willow Brugh (Jigsaw Renaissance & Johnny Diggz Tropo for bringing me up there to participate.

Microsoft had given us space on their campus in Redmond, and we had hundreds of feet of whiteboard plastered with wireframes, post-it notes as we created many working prototypes. It was awesome.

And finally, Rockstar of the Week goes to Melanie M. Keller, an Associate Director for Management for the Food & Drug Administration, Center for Drug Evaluation & Research. Melanie only recently joined the GovLoop community, but already she has taken off like a rocket, commenting and posting across the site. In fact, a discussion which she started on the topic or performance reviews (Talk to Me: Formats for Performance Reviews?) generated a number of responses and incredibly quickly to boot! So way to be a rockstar, Melanie! Keep up the amazing work over at the FDA and we look forward to your future contributions here on GovLoop!

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