Creating a resume is like riding a bicycle: Once you learn how, you never forget. But if you do it wrong, you'll still fall on your butt. So here are some tips for putting the pedal to your mettle:Try a little shortening. One page is plenty. Make it two only if you have a superstar background or the employer wants you to be long-winded. Make it longer than two pages only if you invented fire. To find good resume styles, go...

It’s hard to tell which is dumber: The fact that the CNBC cable television network hired a professional wrestling villain as a financial analyst, or the fact that CNBC decided to fire him a couple of weeks later because he had acted like a professional wrestling villain in the ring.CNBC had hired John “Bradshaw” Layfield because he gave decent analysis and was author of “Have More Money Now,” a personal finance book. But La...

Companies always want highly motivated team players — people with communication skills and organizational skills by the dozen who are self-motivated, results-oriented problem-solvers. And if that sentence doesn’t make your head spin and your stomach hurt, check your resume.ResumeDoctor.com recently surveyed more than 160,000 resumes and determined that almost half used one or more vague phrases to describe the job applicant...

Suppose someone approaches you with a question: “How do Americans behave?” You might be stumped to come up with an answer. Are they talking about the Americans at a hip-hop concert — or a group of farmers in Iowa?Yet many business books make it sound as if it’s as simple as pie (apple, of course) to figure out how people from other countries behave. The books have described how you can work with Japanese people, for example...

Two of the most amazing athletes in history — Lance Armstrong and Barry Bonds — have been the targets of all sorts of accusations about using steroids or other illegal performance-enhancing drugs. They haven’t ever been charged by police or disciplined by their sports’ governing bodies, but their reputations have been smeared repeatedly by “fans” and jealous rivals.This is one of the few competitions that Armstrong and Bond...

When applicants go through the job interview process at DiMassimo Brand Advertising in New York, Chief Executive Officer Mark DiMassimo makes them take an unorthodox approach to an otherwise routine question.DiMassimo asks, “What gives you satisfaction?” But he’s not looking for some cliched answered, so put away your boilerplate stuff about being a team player and pursuing your passion. Those answers won’t fly.The CEO want...

On a recent episode of “Last Comic Standing,” viewers got an extra dose of reality, as producers showed how angry celebrity “talent scouts” Drew Carey and Brett Butler were after their votes appeared to be ignored as the field of comedians narrowed to 10 finalists.Carey and Butler were both obviously upset that their favorites didn’t make it. It seemed clear in particular that comedian Dan Naturman was among the favorites w...

Michael Feiner recalls how one of his key employees insisted that he couldn’t attend a crucial meeting because he had to take his kids trick-or-treating. He also remembers the way one of his own bosses pressured him to give up Monday night softball games — not because the games interfered with getting his work done, but because the boss thought it looked bad for him to leave the office at 6 p.m. on Mondays.When the boss kep...

You can look back on Ray Charles’ career and draw an obvious lesson about work and life: So-called handicaps don’t have to stop you. But that would be cheating him — and yourself.If you really want to learn from Ray Charles, consider the two songs he might be most famous for: “Georgia on My Mind” and “America the Beautiful.”“Georgia on My Mind” was written by Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell in 1930 and had been recorded...

Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show got pulled off the air one recent night because he struck too many nerves with his jokes about what would happen if the Detroit Pistons won the National Basketball Association championship.During halftime of the Pistons’ second game against the Los Angeles Lakers, Kimmel joked that celebrants would burn down the city if Detroit won. His talk show taped the next night contained more disparaging remar...