He was in his early 50s, and he looked every bit of it.

The questions on the job application went right to his age.

After stewing over the form and discarding his first draft, he filled out a second copy. Then, he sat and waited for his interview. As he waited, an attractive, young woman entered the room for a job interview.

She was called in before him. She wound up getting the job.

He didn’t. He did, however, receive $50,000 after filing age-discrimination claims with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

The reason interviewers ask inappropriate questions varies. Sometimes they discriminate, as they did in the scenario above. Sometimes they need the information for internal statistics.

Most job seekers don’t want to sue over these practices. They just want to know how to deal with them diplomatically. Job seekers want to avoid appearing combative and thus jeopardizing their chances of being hired and want to avoid handing over information that can be used against them in discriminatory situations. Knowing what questions to shy away from is the starting point, and knowing how to skirt them is the next step.

To more on which questions to avoid answering and how to do so diplomatically, click here to read the full story.

You’re highly qualified. You’re results-focused.

You’re also energetic, confident and professional — and if you put those words in your resume, you’ve just caused a hiring professional’s eyes to glaze over.

Check out the full story for other flimsy, fluffy, weak words that shouldn’t appear on your resume.

So your PowerPoint presentation holds the secret to the origins of the universe and would really, really improve your chances of being hired, you say? Doesn’t matter. Refrain from sending unsolicited attachments, unless you want to alienate recruiting professionals and risk your chances of nailing an interview. Click here for the full story.

Good lord, the lies people tell on their resumes will blow your mind! A slew of hiring professionals were kind enough to share some hair-raising stories for the latest feature package I did for TheLadders.

One of my favorites: The people who claim fluency in a language and then don’t get past “Hola” when the recruiter commences the interview in that language. Hahaha! NAILED!!

That’s just one of many stories I collected for this great package. If you’re thinking of fudging something on your resume, if your current resume claims you got that M.A. when you’re actually 8 credits short, if you’re trying to cover up a gap in your work history when you were out of work or back in school or incarcerated or whatever, you’ll want to read this article to learn the facts regarding what potential employers do to check you out.

Below are the first few paragraphs; click here for the full article, and please, let me know how your job hunts are going!

To Tell the Truth: Resume Rules
Recruiters and resume experts draw a firm line between putting your best foot forward and lying on your resume.
By Lisa Vaas

The woman was mousy and small — just 5 feet tall and 105 pounds. She wanted to be hired full time at the Ohio-based manufacturing facility where she was temping, and asked what she had to do to make that happen.

Well, you have to fill out an application and go through an interview, and then we’ll do a background check, the vice president of human resources, Matthew Rosen, told her.

I’ll have a tough time with the background check, said the woman.

That was an understatement. The background check revealed a criminal record and hard time in a penitentiary. When Rosen asked the woman about it, she said her husband had beaten her, repeatedly. So she shot him — a crime for which she spent seven years behind bars.

Rosen’s jaw hit the floor. And yet, Rosen recommended hiring her.

It “turned out beautifully,” Rosen said. The woman is still working at the plant today. She’s one of the organization’s best workers, grateful just to have been given a chance.

It’s an extreme case. Many people have issues they’d rather sweep under the carpet than reveal on a resume — from work-history gaps to degrees not received to an age that’s either too ripe or too raw to admit. But all resume issues have one thing in common: Getting caught in a lie about them can obliterate your chances of getting hired.

“It’s going to be discovered. If it gets discovered, or when, there will be no chance you’ll get that job,” said Rosen, who is now human resources director for Schiller International University in Largo, Fla. “You have a better chance explaining it — much better. If they run a background check, then it will get discovered, and then you’ve lied to these people. Who’ll hire someone who’s lied to them? I’m going to hire someone who did something and went to a penitentiary. I’ll never hire someone who’s lied to me.”

But while it’s easy to preach truthfulness, resumes are marketing documents that present candidates in the best light. It begs the question: What can you successfully gloss over, and how do you do it without turning yourself into a liar? When is it OK to polish, and when does an embellishment become a forgery?

In this package, TheLadders draws the line. Certified professional resume writers, job seekers, corporate recruiters and career coaches speak out to delineate the difference between an appropriate omission and a deliberate disguise. They break down the resume into sections and define what shows what and how you can tweak your resume to make it shine and still stay within the bounds of honesty. The result is a clear topography of this slippery slope for all those job seekers who’ve found themselves questioning the distinction between exaggeration and fabrication.

Click here to read the full story.

Competition in the job market is nasty nowadays. Don’t screw up by making easy-to-avoid formatting mistakes or other goofups that will get your resume yanked by a machine.

Anybody fixing up their resume and applying online (the latter of which would be anybody, of course, who’s applying for jobs nowadays) should read the feature article I just wrote for TheLadders (an online recruitment site) about the technology that runs electronic resume processing.

Here’s the first few grafs, and you can read the full article here.

Resume, Meet Technology: How Your Story Gets Read by Machines

Detailing the steps applicant tracking systems take in order to decide whether to rubber- stamp your resume or chew it up and spit it out.

You’ve probably heard this advice for making
your resume stand out: Sprinkle in plenty of juicy key-
words so recruiters will pluck your document out of the pile.
But these days, the first review of your resume is more likely
to be a software program, known as an applicant tracking sys-
tem (ATS), than a human being interested in the quality of
your paper stock and the power of your prose. While those
qualities will be important in subsequent rounds, your first
challenge will be to win over a very sophisticated machine that
plays by its own complex rules.

In these competitive times, is a grab-bag of keywords re-
ally enough to ensure your resume rises out of that mysteri-
ous electronic swamp? If not, what else do you need to know
about the processes that happen inside these ATSes — sys-
tems that are, in fact, fueled by sophisticated data-warehousing
technologies — to stand the best chance of getting your re-
sume in front of human eyeballs?

To answer this question, TheLadders talked to ATS vendors
to find out what makes the technology tick, and to the recruit-
ers who use these systems to separate resume wheat from chaff.

Get the full article here.

If you’re a free agent–such as a tech journalist who’s recently gone solo to freelance or a small business just getting its feet wet with online presence–you may well be baffled by the endless means of representing yourself online. Lord knows I was.

What I’ve found since launching the make-me-a-brand quest -lo- these 48 hours ago is that baby, you’re a fool if you pay for any of this stuff. At least, don’t pay a lot. You can get free branded e-mail from Google Apps (my new e-mail: lisavaas@lisavaas.com); tied into a blog and web page courtesy of WordPress‘ free blogging platform, tools and hosting.

To do the branding thing right, you should of course have your own domain name, and that’s where you’ll start spending money. A teensy bit of money, that is: Registering lisavaas.com cost $9.99 per year through GoDaddy. To have that lisavaas.com domain redirect to my site and blog, WordPress charges me $10.

These aren’t the only options, but they’re good ones, and they’re dead simple to set up once you get the hang of it.

Getting the hang of it wasn’t so easy, though. Setting up name servers and plugging in Google’s codes to enable branded e-mail to work with WordPress was not an intuititve process at first blush.

Luckily, through a stellar community for online journalists called the Internet Press Guild, I was fortunate enough to be showered with good advice that lead me to choosing this holy trinity of GoogleApps mail/GoDaddy domain/WordPress site and blogging platform.

One IPG member in particular, David Strom–who runs the incredibly helpful Your Personal Geek site–has put together  a 4-minute webcast that walks viewers through getting all the moving pieces in sync. I can’t recommend the webcast highly enough. Strom’s instructions take you step by step through what can be a baffling process. You can make it all work without watching the webcast, but with Strom’s help you’ll speed through what can be a slow and arduous search to figure out how to sync up all these moving pieces.

When it comes to branding yourself, don’t forget about social networking sites such as FaceBook or LinkedIn.  I tend to shy away from FaceBook given that I’m not entirely sure I want to see business colleagues in tutus, but then, I am a baby boomer. LinkedIn feels more grown-up, and it doesn’t have as much temptation to make a fool of myself–at least, not that I’ve discovered so far.

To maximize your social networking profile, beef up your network as much as possible. While importing your contacts is one good way to do this, *don’t* make the mistake of spamming your entire address book like I did. I wound up apologizing to:

• People interviewed for stories long ago
• People with whom I’d bartered for goods on Craig’s List
• Personal contacts
• Friends of friends
• Anybody else who wound up in my address book for reasons other than having long-term professional relationships (the only people I shoud have e-mailed in the first place).

In fact, I spammed so many inappropriate contacts that LinkedIn turned off my ability to invite new connections. I don’t blame them. It was obnoxoius–don’t make my mistake.

Here’s what you should do, though, to maximize LinkedIn:

• Edit your public profile URL to direct to your name (i.e., http://www.linkedin.com/in/lisavaas instead of a randomly assigned number)
• Copy LinkedIn’s HTML to get a personalized graphic button that you can paste into your blog and Web site to direct visitors to view your LinkedIn profile. You can see how this looks in the version I’ve posted on my About page
• Publish your profile to Google and other search engines.

I’m still learning how to brand myself, so please feel free to share with me your own strategies, feel free to give me feedback on this first site/blog, and good luck with turning yourself or your business into a brand.

Welcome to my new blog! After 12.5 years at eWEEK, I’m now free to help out with your tech writing needs. If you need a top-notch writer and editor who thoroughly understands the industry, from security to open source to virtualization to the meaning of deadlines, I’d be happy to chat. I’m available for freelance assignments or long-term work.

A huge shout-out to the good people at IPG (Internet Press Guild) for their help in getting this site together.