What Color Is Your Parachute? 2016: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers

by Richard N. Bolles

Overview

What Color Is Your Parachute? is the world’s most popular job-hunting guide, revised and updated annually, with more than ten million copies sold.

This 2016 edition features the latest studies and perspectives on today’s job-market, including proven strategies for finding jobs even when everyone tells you there are none. Career expert Richard N. Bolles reveals surprising advice on what works—and what doesn’t—so you can focus your efforts on tactics that yield results.

This helpful manual shares proven tips for writing impressive resumes and cover letters, as well as guidance for effective networking, confident interviewing, and the best salary negotiating possible. But it goes beyond that by helping you to zero in on your ideal job—and life—with its classic Flower Exercise. Whether you’re searching for your first job, were recently laid off, or are dreaming of a career change, What Color Is Your Parachute? will guide you toward fulfilling and prosperous work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781607746621
Publisher:	Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony
Publication date:	08/11/2015
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

RICHARD N. BOLLES has led the career development field for more than forty years and has helped millions identify their unique gifts and find their dream jobs. Visit JobHuntersBible.com and eParachute.com.

Read an Excerpt

Where You Post Your Resume Makes a Difference

Let’s say that again: where you post your resume makes all the difference in the world. Research has discovered that the number of face-to-face interviews that employers need to conduct before they find someone they want to hire, stays pretty constant—around 5.4—once they’ve sifted through all the resumes or applications. So, to conserve their energy, they instinctively ask themselves, “Where would I have to sift through the least number of resumes, before I decide who to do those 5.4 interviews with?” Fortunately, we know the answer. Somebody did a study. 

If employers post their vacancy on a job-board such as Monster.com or CareerBuilder.com, they typically have to look through 219 resumes from job-hunters who respond, before they find someone to interview and hire.

If employers consider resumes from job-hunters who come through social media sites, such as LinkedIn or Facebook, they typically have to look through 116 resumes, before they find someone to interview and hire.

If employers post their vacancy on their own website, they typically have to look through 33 resumes from job-hunters who respond, before they find someone to interview and hire.

And if the job-hunter takes the initiative to find a very specific job, rather than waiting to find a vacancy, and does this, say, by typing the name of that kind of job into a search engine, then sending resumes to any companies whose name turns up, employers only have to look through 32 applications, before they find someone to interview and hire.

And if the job-hunter takes even more initiative, chooses a company where they’d like to work, and gets a referral (i.e., gets some employee within that company to recommend them), employers have to look through only 10 such candidates, before they find someone to interview and hire.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 It’s a Whole New World for Job-Hunters 1
Chapter 2 Google Is Your New Resume 21
Chapter 3 There Are Over Eight Million Vacancies
Available Each Month 45
Chapter 4 Sixteen Tips About Interviewing for a Job 53
Chapter 5 The Six Secrets of Salary Negotiation 83
Chapter 6 What to Do When Your Job-Hunt Just Isn’t Working 99
Chapter 7 You Need to Understand More Fully Who You Are 111
Chapter 8 You Get to Choose Where You Work 191
Chapter 9 How to Deal with Any Handicaps You Have 211
Chapter 10 The Five Ways to Choose/Change Careers 233
Chapter 11 How to Start Your Own Business 249

The Blue Pages
Appendix A Finding Your Mission in Life 266
Appendix B A Guide to Dealing with Your Feelings
While Out of Work 289
Appendix C A Guide to Choosing a Career Coach or Counselor 298
Appendix D Sampler List of Coaches 312
Appendix E Recent Foreign Editions of What Color Is
Your Parachute? 333
The Final Word: Notes from the Author for This Edition 334
About the Author 340
Update 2017 341
Index 342
Additional Helpful Resources from the Author 354

Editorial Reviews

What Color Is Your Parachute? is about job-hunting and career-changing, but it’s also about figuring out who you are as a person and what you want out of life.”
—Time

“[One of the] Books that Shaped Work in America. How could I not put this on the list? . . . In print since 1970 and revised every year since 1975, it has not only informed and educated job seekers and job changers in the United States, but also had a global impact through publication in more than 20 languages. It’s basically the bible of career advice.”
—United States Department of Labor

“Richard is a giant both in my life and certainly in the field. When you think about his contributions to . . . understanding the whole notion of three boxes of life, creating the flower exercise, and the three questions that really help drive our job-finding activity it is quite remarkable because it certainly changed my life personally, and it changed most of the work that career counselors and specialists and coaches perform. And I would expect it changed all of our work as we think about how we grow talent in organizations.”
—Rich Feller, 2012–2013 president of the National Career Development Association (NCDA)

“The new edition of the best-selling job-hunting book What Color Is Your Parachute?, in addition to the tried-and-true advice for job seekers Dick Bolles has provided for close to forty years, has new information on job-search productivity, job clubs, and how to organize and manage your job-search. What Color Is Your Parachute? is deservedly the world’s most popular job-hunting book, with over eleven million copies sold in twenty-six languages. This . . . edition is as relevant today as when it was first published. Dick Bolles insightfully stays on the cutting edge of job-searching, and the book is full of new and updated suggestions, along with the classic advice that continues to hold true today.”
—Alison Doyle, About.com Guide

“The people who can educate employees and job seekers on how to really find jobs (and careers) are career counselors and career coaches. Ideally, a good coach should buy copies of Parachute at wholesale and give a copy to every one of their paying clients.”
—Richard Knowdell, trainer of career counselors and coaches

“. . . one of the first job-hunting books on the market. It is still arguably the best. And it is indisputably the most popular.”
—Fast Company

“This is a fantastic tool useful to almost everyone. . . . It’s so darn useful because it is about more than just ‘finding a job.’”
—Kevin Kelly, Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities

“Ideally, everyone should read What Color Is Your Parachute? in the tenth grade and again every year thereafter.”  
—Fortune

From the Publisher