Welcome to the holiday season! Who is ready? Yeah I’m not exactly prepared myself. I did manage to get out a post this week on how to decorate your cubicle for the holiday season though, so hopefully you can snag some great ideas to help get you in the mood. In the meantime, the job search news recaps must go on. Lots of big news rolled out this week, so lets get started!

National News Stories Worth Noting

Well it happened—the inevitable “double digit” unemployment rate occurred. Wall Street Journal reported the unemployment rate has officially passed the 10% rate and is now tipped over to 10.2%, the highest it has been in 26 years. That is 1 in every 10 people! In fact they noted, “Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of unemployed has increased by 8.2 million and the unemployment rate has grown by 5.3 percentage points.” As far as recessions go, those stats are even more staggering than anticipated. We will keep you posted on how things roll out as we enter the New Year. Fingers crossed all of this recession stuff starts seeing some light at the end of this (now) double digit tunnel.  

On the Social Media Side of Things:

LinkedIn is getting a facelift according to Mashable, and these changes will be making all sorts of moves toward a more social and engaged experience. [Insert happy face here!] Some of the changes that will be rolled out include: a cleaner layout, an exclusion of the left bar navigation, a move up of primary content of profiles, and get this—you can now follow people! Wonder where they got this? Either way we are excited to see the changes, LinkedIn will be rolling them out over the next few weeks.

For the Feel Good Moment this Week:

You ready for a fun little break this morning? I came across this hilarious video and shared it on my Twitterstream. So many people loved it that I thought I would shoot it out to all of you as well. It’s supposed to be “a way to beat boredom at the office,” but I see it more as the best team building exercise of all time. Grab a coffee, sit back, and take a few minutes for some laughter and awesomeness this Friday!

Blogs, blogs, and more blogs…

I have been rocking out in my Los Angeles office this week (which for those of you who don’t know means I have been enjoying the loveliness of every Coffee Bean, Starbucks, and boutique coffee shop in the City of Angels) and I spent a great deal of time catching up on some reading. I finally feel like my feet are back under me and I thought I would share some of the best posts I came across this week to do with job searching and social fun. Here we go…

I loved this post on whether we should be friend-ing our entire offices on Facebook. Great writing by Jessica Lee, and some really good points as to why it might be best to let those friend requests happen naturally rather than force the issue. Definitely worth a read!

I also really enjoyed Jason Alba’s reminder that if you aren’t using Twitter during your job search you are really missing out. He reminds us that you don’t even necessarily need a Twitter account to reap the benefits (although I would suggest getting one if you are on the job hunt) but that you can actually use Twitter more like a search engine of real-time job postings and company information. So true Jason, so true.

Lastly, I was psyched to see the always popular Penelope Trunk demyth common social media misconceptions in her article, 4 Lies About Social Media. Penelope tackles our misguided thoughts regarding LinkedIn, networking, Twitter, blogs, and more. Awesome read for anyone trying to understand just how social media fits into your job search.  

Okay that does it for me this week. I hope you all had a productive week and that your first weekend in November is a fantastic one. Happy Job Hunting Friends!